she knows she was not yet five that someone came to the door with a plan. i remember a woman coming over and knocking on the door. her name was shirley. a friend of her mother s she said. she said she brought renee with her. renee was 6. a little older then. it didn t matter. they dashed off to her bedroom to play. this is renee now. that room is stuck in her memory, too. her room was gorgeous. a nice-sized room for a little kid. she had a canopy bed. she ha tons of dresses, toys, galore. i was like wow, this is nice. an alien world to renee. the most wonderful thing she had ever seen. while the little girls played in the bedroom. shirley was with bobby in the living room talking and then she called renee. when it was time to leave, i didn t want to go. i said can we stay longer. but your new friend is coming with us. i said okay. she came and that s how
shirley pulled up to this motel in los angeles county and took a job at the motel s cleaning woman in exchange for a free room. and if it wasn t much, at least it gave them some measure of stability. and they signed up at a local school, junior high for pepper, high school for renee. much to shirley s disapproval. shirley would tell us, girls don t go to school. they get married. why do you want to go to school? i didn t like being late to school. i didn t like being absent all the time. so they got themselves up every morning and went to school and kept going. and then, pepper was 12. eight of those years with shirley when she saw her chance to escape and seized it. she made herself useful as a babysitter for the couple next door in room 109. and when the family moved out of the motel, pepper went with them. but it didn t last long. pepper s new household caught in its own spiral of alcoholism and
the little girl had no idea. but she did know that from now on, she had a new name. they called her pepper. you pepper smith. she was not yet 5 years old. we lived in cars and motels and going from state to state staying at salvation armies to get a meal here and there. just what s it like to live in a car? it s horrible. it s embarrassing. she was confused, of course, and terribly frightened at first. she begged, take me home. shirley ignored her. she imagined running away. i had nowhere to go. i was too scared. then as the weeks and months and then years went by, as her powers of reasoning grew, the question grew, too. did her mother, bobbi, actually give her away? shirley told pepper that renee was her sister. the two girls listened wide-eyed as shirley explained to strangers that she was their
confirmed. i can t believe this is actually happening. how soon could they meet geri, the sisters wanted to know. and what s she like? how did she know shirley? we arranged a reunion for the next day. geri arrived first and told us how she saw the long lost girls on the program. i saw the picture of shirley and went crazy. i knew who she was. and then when i saw the girls, i knew they were mine. after how all those years? 37 years. there they are. what did that feel like? it felt great. i had been hoping to find my children before i die because i was getting old and that was like a miracle. geri s story that shirley who took the girls had been her friend turned roommate turned babysitter. she said i ll babysit for you. i ll take care of her while you work.
family, her identity, it was a friday night in march 2011. and the following monday morning my office received a call, and then i received an e-mail. attorney gloria allred found herself looking at a remarkable message. allred had been helping the two sisters deal with their new identity issues, and there it was. the ping of a message on her blackberry. when i looked at the e-mail, i just couldn t even believe it. i looked at it about three times. am i really seeing this? it was a woman claiming to be the biological mother of both pepper and renee. claiming to be the woman who, according to shirley and barbara, was a child abandoning drug addled prostitute, probably dead. could this woman really be their mother? hardly a claim allred could take on simple faith. i asked her to come in and see me the very next day, which