by Kambri Crews
Dad was screeching in Mom’s face. I couldn’t get to the kitchen phone with them in my way, and there was no way I was going to leave my mother to fend for herself. I screamed through my clenched teeth to anyone who could hear me, “SOMEBODY HELP! CALL THE POLICE!”
I was certain our neighbors Tony and Sammy would hear me and call for help, even though they weren’t talking to me anymore. The cops would be at our door any minute, I told myself. I would still be able to get in a few hours’ sleep before my 10 A.M. shift at Malibu Grand Prix. Minutes ticked by like hours and Dad’s temper reached a boiling point. He yanked Mom’s hair, then twisted her arm behind her back and began squeezing her face with his free hand. Mom was crying hysterically. She screamed at me to call the police. I ran to my room and dialed 911.
“This is the 911 operator, do you have an emergency?”
“Yes, help!” I screamed. “My dad is hurting my mom!”
“Are you at 1608 Weyland Drive?”
“Yes! Number 1004! Send police fast, please hurry!” I recalled Dad’s complaints of discrimination by police and frequent stories of deaf people being injured or shot dead by officers due to miscommunication. Worried that the officers might hurt Dad if he didn’t immediately obey their commands, I added, “He’s deaf so he might not hear what they say.”
When I returned to the dining room, I saw that Dad had let go of Mom’s hair and now pounded around the room swinging punches, screeching and signing that he would kill her, and then himself.
I tried to defuse the situation, telling him and Mom that the police were on their way. He began to calm down while Mom sat solemnly at the dining room table. I was sitting in a sea of terror worrying that I had a head full of pink sponge rollers and was only wearing underwear. We already looked like an episode from Cops. There was no way I would be caught dead looking this way in front of officers. I turned toward my bedroom to find clothes, but Dad commanded me to stay where he could see me.
When the rap at the door came, Dad didn’t try to stop me from answering. Two policemen stood in the entryway, their hands resting on their holstered guns. I noticed the front porch light was shattered. Dad must have also done that while I was sleeping. I repeated to the police what I had told the 911 operator, that my father was deaf and might not obey them.
Dad looked unfazed at seeing the officers and threw in a bit of feigned innocence. His face said, “What’s the problem, officers?” That might have worked, if there hadn’t been a dozen fist holes in the walls behind him.
I told the officers the basics but they only wanted to know about the status of Mom and Dad’s relationship.
“Are they married?” one of them asked.
Domestic violence was treated differently back then. Laws would eventually change, but on this night, what happened behind a family’s closed doors was mostly off-limits to the infamous strong arm of Texas justice.
“Yeah, they’re still married but he doesn’t live here anymore.”
Somehow it came up that Dad still had some personal belongings in our apartment, namely some clothes of his in a closet. They hung next to Mom’s clothes, all of which now had slashes after Dad had angrily taken a knife to them during a rampage two nights earlier.
“His clothes are in the closet, he has a right to be here,” the officer said.
“But his name isn’t on the lease,” I argued.
“It doesn’t matter. All we can do is ask him to leave.”
Ask him? How about tell him.
The officers negotiated with Dad by interpreting through Mom. She relayed their messages of “Come on, just go home and sleep it off,” and “You don’t want to have your daughter see her parents fight like this, do you?” Lines like those must have worked when delivered by men in uniform carrying guns, but they didn’t have quite the same effect when signed by Mom, the very woman Dad was threatening to kill just moments earlier.
This went on for twenty minutes before the officers were able to lead Dad through the front door. They pledged to follow him home to make sure he stayed out of harm’s way. Our way. It all seemed so informal. Nothing signed, no photos taken, no report completed. Just a “he said, she said” and a quick dusting off of the hands. They even helped Dad get in his car, even though he was clearly in no condition to drive. His eyes were glassy and he reeked of alcohol.
Mom and I retired to our bedrooms without as much as a hug. We were in shock, and I had to be at work in a few hours. If I went back to sleep, I figured, maybe I would wake up to find that it had all been a bad dream.
I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a tremendous crash. I leapt out of bed and grabbed the rotary phone that was on the floor by my stereo. Dad came charging down the hallway and into my bedroom. I was in the middle of dialing 911. The 9 hadn’t even finished spinning back into its starting position when my father yanked the receiver out of my hand. As if cracking a bullwhip, he ripped the cord out of the wall.
In the age of rotary phones, 9 was a stupid number to have to dial in an emergency.
Throwing down the phone, Dad whipped out a folding knife from his back pocket and charged after Mom, who was standing in the hallway. I trailed behind and saw that our front door was knocked off its hinges and the wood splintered where the bolt should have been.
Dad grabbed Mom by the arm and forced her back to the dining room and into a chair. I stood paralyzed with fear as he planted himself at the head of the table. He pointed me to the empty chair across from Mom. “SIT!” His high pitch and ferocity was startling. I took a seat as ordered.
For hours, he interrogated my mother about her dating and sex life as I sat with my head down on the table. Occasionally he punctuated his sentence with a slam of his fist on the table or a quick jab to the wall. His balled-up hand crashed through the drywall with ease.
Each time I tried to get up, he bared his teeth and screamed, “SIT!” I tried to shrug him off with my best teenage hostility act, signing, “Going to bed.” He quickly jumped up, standing tall and puffing out his chest like a king cobra as he shrieked, “SIT! NOW!” I sat at the dining room table with my parents, something we had not done since Thanksgiving when I was nine.
Mom sat in silence as though she was in a trance. Frustrated by her lack of emotion, Dad turned his attention to me. He pointed at a photo of my mother with her co-workers proudly lined up in front of a helicopter they had just built. He grabbed it off the wall—the same wall that sported fresh holes the size of Dad’s fist—and ferociously signed, “Did you know your mother fucked him and him and him and HIM?!” He pointed so hard that his index finger cracked the glass. It didn’t cut him through his thick calluses, but it gave him an excuse to get even angrier. He broke the frame in two and hurled the shards and splintered mess against what was left of the wall.
Our eyes locked. He signed to me with forced emphasis on each sign, “Your mother S-L-U-T!”
I searched his livid face. Are you in there, Daddy?
“Did you know your mother gives good head?”
He searched my dazed face, as if he were asking if I was on his side.
I wasn’t.
He had just told me that my mother was a slut, that my mother gave blow jobs. Told me, the daughter he was trying to protect from the evils of men.
He snapped.
In one swift move Dad lifted Mom by her neck and slammed her back against the foyer wall. I looked down and saw that her feet were writhing desperately as she tried to dig her heels into the wall. Her polyester nightgown was bunched up around her waist as she held on to his wrists and strained to make her neck muscles tight. Her eyes bulged and the vein in her forehead grew fat.
I pried at one of Dad’s hands but it was firmly in place. So I concentrated on one finger; if I could bend one backward he’d have to let go from the pain.
Please, just one digit, Kambri. You can do it. Just get his index finger. Just one finger.
He was too strong.
I switched tactics. “Daddy, Da
ddy! Look at me, Daddy!” I signed in his face, breaking his focus. He turned his eyes my way but never lost his grip. “Daddy,” I continued. “Please, don’t do this. Why are you doing this? Why? Why? Why?”
He was cracking; I could see it. “Daddy, look at me. It’s me, Kambri, your baby girl, remember?”
His glassy eyes welled up with tears. I repeated it over and over again. “It’s me, Kambri. Daddy, it’s me. Remember? Your baby girl, Kambri.” Finally he let go. Mom choked and gasped for air. I raced to the kitchen phone, still connected to the outlet, and dialed 911. Dad caught me and yanked the receiver out of my hand just as I heard the operator answer, “911, what’s your emergency?” He slammed the phone back into its cradle, disconnecting the call.
I was now the enemy, too.
He whipped out a hunting knife from his pocket and held it to Mom’s throat. His top lip was tight and pinched and his bottom lip jutted out, exposing his bottom teeth; he looked like a salivating, growling bear on a rampage. He pulled Mom’s head back by her hair and made her throat long and tight, just begging to be slit open. She held on to his wrist with both hands as they stared into each other’s eyes.
The phone rang.
I had a choice: I could try the baby daughter route again, or make a break for the phone and hope that he was too caught up in his hypnotic rage to notice me. I ran to the kitchen phone.
I screamed to the 911 operator, “HE’S BACK! He’s trying to kill my mom! He’s got a knife to her throat! Please help!”
Dad saw me talking into the phone; he knew the police would soon return and he brought himself back under control. As the seconds ticked by, he tried to make things appear a bit more normal. He folded his knife and put it back in his pocket and made us resume our places around the table as we waited for the police.
This time the officers immediately handcuffed Dad, looking to me to interpret his Miranda rights to him. They didn’t see me as a victim, too. “You have the right to remain silent,” one of them began.
After a few sentences the other officer decided that the teenager might not be the best person to deliver Miranda rights. Legal matters could be taken care of at the police station and they all tromped out through our broken door.
While I was busy translating with one officer for Dad, the other cop dealt with Mom. Other than some bruising, she didn’t seem in need of medical attention, and she refused to go to the hospital for an examination. Mom wasn’t crying anymore; she seemed to be in a daze and anxious to put the whole event behind us.
Mom and I headed back to our respective bedrooms, again with no hug, no discussion, no comforting, even though this was by far the most traumatic incident I had ever experienced in my life. I had survived being uprooted to live in the wild on Boars Head, defending myself from my brother’s bullying; having our trailer repossessed; selling Charlie Brown; watching my beloved library burn to ash; moving to Fort Worth not knowing the fate of our dogs; seeing David’s scary descent into the world of drugs; and experiencing Dad’s long absences and alcohol-fueled exploits. But witnessing my father’s violent attack against my mother was catastrophic. I knew my life would never be the same.
Mom and I were both exhausted, and I just wanted to retreat to my bedroom and shut out the world. It was impossible to feel safe there. The front door was propped up against the frame, and my telephone was ripped out of the wall.
It was almost eight o’clock in the morning and I finally gave up the idea of going to work my morning shift at Malibu. I picked up where I had left off in my journal to Rob:
I wish I could get away from here, but I can’t leave my mom and I still have school to think about. I need you so much right now but you’re not here. So, if I die right away … I love you with all my heart. Kambri Crews.
COME SAIL AWAY
Dad was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and placed in Tarrant County Jail with a bond of $5,000. For just $1,000 he could be free. But even at that price, Dad didn’t have that kind of money. No one he knew was willing to pay for him, either, so he sat in jail for several days, one of which happened to coincide with my parent’s twenty-second wedding anniversary.
Mom refused to press charges. She wanted everything to go away quickly and quietly. Just like when Dad was arrested for public drunkenness at Pizza Inn, she acted as if nothing was wrong, as if Dad hadn’t held a knife to her throat. I was outraged. I wanted to see him punished but she still needed my father. He contributed to paying bills. She reasoned that out of jail, there was the potential for him to find work and he could help deal with David. Without her cooperation, the police had no case against my father. Eventually he received probation and was freed before Rob returned from duty.
Now that things had escalated to physical violence, Mom finally came clean with me. She told me that on August 12, the Friday before the attack, my father had stolen her gun. I was alarmed to learn she had one in the first place.
“A gun? Where’d you get that?”
“Your uncle Doug gave it to me for protection.” Why would her sister’s husband think she needed protection? And protection from whom? Dad?
“And now Daddy has it?”
“I don’t know, Kambri. He told me he threw it away. Maybe he’s lying. And he went into my closet and slashed all my clothes with a knife!”
I felt sick to my stomach. It was my fault. I had let Dad in the apartment that night. Dad was banging on the door and I had just wanted to sleep.
Mom’s trip to see my father’s sister Cathy, after which she had come home to smoke a joint with me, had been a visit to plead for help. After discovering her clothes destroyed and gun missing, Mom was truly frightened. She finally realized she was in over her head and needed help knocking sense into Dad, to get him to move on with his life and stop harassing her. She hoped Aunt Cathy could intervene somehow, and at the very least shame him to his family. When my mom got home from that visit with Cathy, she’d been emotionally spent. That’s why we’d gotten high together and gone to Six Flags. One of the best nights of my life had been her attempt to unwind from a stress so great, I couldn’t imagine.
Being arrested didn’t discourage my father. He continued to drop by the apartment in the early morning hours after a long night of drinking. Mom avoided him by staying at Aunt Cathy’s house, leaving me alone at the apartment to deal with him. Even though his beef wasn’t with me, I was still afraid. Sometimes Alexis stayed over so I had backup. Time and again, Dad hounded me for Mom’s whereabouts until I threatened to call the police. Then he’d slip away. After a few failed attempts at seeing my mother, Dad resorted to phoning at all hours. When I answered, he cooed into the receiver, “Ellooooo. Luh yoooo. Kipree, luh yooo.” I never turned on the TTY, so he was unable to hear whom he was talking to or if anyone had even answered.
Mom and I reacted by changing our number, but Dad knew where to find me. He came striding casually through the doors of Malibu Grand Prix as I cleaned the candy display case. He smiled and waved hello.
“I miss you,” he signed. “How are you doing?”
“Fine. Busy.”
“I tried calling but your number is changed.”
“It was shut off,” I lied.
“Is your mama dating?”
“I don’t know, Daddy. I’m busy. This is my work.”
“Okay, I understand.” He looked dejected and hopeless. Rather than alienate me entirely he left without incident, waving goodbye with the ASL sign for “I love you.”
When Rob returned from duty, I presented him with my journal that detailed everything that had happened since he left, including Mom and Dad’s situation. Rob was infuriated when he read what my father had done to Mom. He adored my mother and swore that if he had been there that night he would have killed my father.
Having Rob in my life provided me with a certain amount of stability, and I smothered him with so much love that he had no choice but to love me back. I was a damsel in distress, and I looked to him as my hero a
nd protector. What better scenario for a young man hundreds of miles from his own family to swoop in and sweep a girl off her feet, to save her?
Two weeks after my father attacked my mother, I began my senior year of high school.
The theater department buzzed as everyone swapped stories of their summer vacations. I chatted with Charity, a classmate whom I had gotten to know my junior year. When it was my turn to share, I didn’t mention anything traumatic. I bragged about a small independent movie I had been starring in over the last few weeks. I had snagged the lead role and I loved the long days and nights of filming, another distraction from the drama at home.
“The movie’s gonna be entered in festivals and stuff,” I crowed. “I worked a lot at Malibu, too, and I met this guy Rob. He’s almost twenty-three and works on Tomcats in the navy. He’s gonna pick me up from school in his Trans Am. I can introduce you to him.”
“Wow, that’s great, Kambri.” She smiled. I had gotten to know Charity during long hours of rehearsal and travel to and from competitions. She could see right through me, so I decided to confide in her. “But, then, umm …” I lowered my voice and said, “My dad tried to kill my mom.”
“Huh?” She gave me a mystified look. I delivered a short version of the night from just a few weeks before. She looked as though she didn’t believe me. She had interacted with Dad at various one-act play competitions and knew him as handsome, flirtatious, and a cutup, the deaf Elvis impersonator. It was obvious that she was straining to express concern and find the right words. “Oh, that’s sad, Kambri. I’m sorry.” She slid away as if my family’s problems were contagious.
I worried that I had shared too much with her. We weren’t that close, after all, and my explanation of Dad’s attack must have seemed pretty unbelievable. Her reaction taught me to keep my mouth shut. So, for the next fourteen years, she was the only one I told.