I took a deep, sharp, ragtag breath, willing myself to go on.
Well, I wouldn’t let him take the baby. I just couldn’t. He was already drunk, and I told him so. I didn’t want him to drive drunk with the baby. Lately when he gets mad at me and storms out drunk, he usually grabs one of the kids and takes them along. It’s terrible for me, worrying about him driving drunk with one of my babies in the car. I mean, I guess that’s part my fault, but I can’t stop him. But he told me the police are all his patients—he takes care of the whole Ocean Springs Police Department—so if I called them to arrest him for driving drunk with the kids, they’d just laugh at me and arrest me for making a false report. This time, I just couldn’t let him do it. I decided to fight. We fought with Aidan between us at the top of the stairs, with him trying to pull Aidan out of my arms. I had a real bad feeling, though, and I fought hard. Liam was screaming, and the kids were crying.
“What happened then, Mrs. Rivers?”
Well, I guess I won. I mean, I didn’t win, it wasn’t a fight really, but Dr. Rivers gave up on taking the baby. He screamed at me something awful, and I asked him to stop, and he was scaring the kids. I showed Dr. Rivers where Aidan Lake’s little thighs had gone red where Dr. Rivers had grabbed him. And he said I did that to the baby, not him. Aidan Lake was just flat-out howling by then. Grayson—that’s our middle child, who’s three—finally yelled, “Stop yelling at Mama!” and Dr. Rivers left, saying he was going to find his own dinner. When he was gone, I sat the kids down, and we all had the chicken dinner. It was really strange, sitting there without Dr. Rivers. It was a good dinner—the kids liked it and ate it right up.
“Mrs. Rivers, I’m going to have to ask you to get to the part where Dr. Rivers assaulted you,” Judge Taylor intoned. “Can you talk about that, or would you rather Ms. McClanahan address it?”
I could feel myself rambling and not getting the story out in the way you probably should in a court of law, but I was nervous, and telling the story felt surreal, standing in that little trailer with the artificial lighting and the dust rising outside the cracked open windows behind me.
I can tell you, Your Honor. I’m sorry. Okay, first, Dr. Rivers came home after a little while—he wasn’t gone that long—and cleaned his rims and his wheels like he always does but for a really long time. Grayson went outside to see what he was doing. I could see out the window that his daddy offered him some leftover pizza from the Magic Mushroom. I could see Grayson shake his head and start to talk about what looked like an explanation of everything he ate, as he was ticking off his fingers and smiling and holding his little tummy.
“Mrs. Rivers, don’t tell me what other people said, only what you know firsthand, you understand?”
I nodded.
“So what happened next?”
Well, Dr. Rivers came in. I didn’t talk to him. I was in the dining room, folding laundry on the table into piles and stacking it into a basket. He came in there and started yelling at me like he usually does. I didn’t say anything, just finished and took the laundry basket and started to go up the stairs. We have steep, hardwood stairs. We built the house about a year before the storm. I had the ceilings raised to ten feet, but the builder didn’t plan ahead well for how steep that would make our stairs. About halfway up, I felt something hit me in the back. He, I mean, Dr. Rivers, threw something at me—another laundry basket. I tripped but got back up and went into our bedroom. All of a sudden, he was behind me, shoving me real hard. I fell into our bedside table, which is how I got the big bruise and gash on my thigh.
“Did you fall on the ground, Mrs. Rivers?”
No, I kind of fell sideways and onto the bed. And then I started to get up, but Dr. Rivers shoved me, hard, so I fell back onto our bed. He was yelling at me the whole time—screaming, really—his face dark red, and shaking. The kids were all at the door watching, and I told them to go back downstairs and that everything was fine. I didn’t want them to see it.
“And then what?”
And then, sir, then he climbed on top of me and put his hands around my neck and choked me. I tried to get him off me, grabbing his hands and scratching at my neck to pry his hands off.
“Your Honor,” interjected Addison, “may I have my client show you her neck? She has hand-shaped bruises inflicted by Dr. Rivers as well as scratches from her own fingernails where she tried to pry his hands off.”
“No, Ms. McClanahan. That’s not necessary. I will take your word for it. Continue, Mrs. Rivers. What happened next? Did you pass out?” asked the judge.
Yes, I did. I remember everything starting to go dark and seeing stars, and the last thing I really saw was Grayson standing there, even though I’d told him to stay downstairs. He was just standing there, leaning on his daddy’s leg as he choked me. He had his thumb in his mouth and he was holding his little blue blankie. I don’t think Dr. Rivers even noticed he was there until he said something. He said, “What are you doing to Mama, Daddy?” The next thing I knew, Dr. Rivers was off me and was taking Grayson downstairs with him, telling him it was time for his bedtime snack. I was dizzy, kind of starry-eyed, if you know what I mean. I had blacked out, I suppose. I got up and went into the bathroom. In the mirror, I could see that my neck was very red, and it looked like I was getting black eyes.
“Did Dr. Rivers also strike you in the face?”
No, not yet. I think it was from his squeezing my neck so hard. I was in a panic now; I really didn’t know what to do. I was in a kind of trance, if you can imagine that. I could hear Dr. Rivers downstairs getting the grapes and cheese out of the refrigerator and asking the kids to sit down to eat their snacks before bed. That’s what they always have. He choked me and now he was acting like nothing happened.
The courtroom was silent a moment. I took a deep breath, continued.
Then Dr. Rivers came back up and started yelling at me again, telling me he was going to kill me. I was, I don’t know if this makes sense, but I was trying to defuse the situation by not really responding. I told him I was going to go help the kids finish up and put them to bed. I was just a few steps down the stairs when I felt a really rough push on my back, and I went flying down the stairs. Flying. In the air. Until I hit the landing in a hard thud on my knees and hit my head against the wall. At the landing, all the kids ran over to me to see if I was okay. I scrambled right up to my feet and acted like it didn’t happen and told them to just finish up and it’s time for bed. Liam came down and started screaming at me again.
“What was he saying?” asked Judge Taylor.
The usual stuff like that I’m fat and ugly and stupid and trashy and no one loves me, not even the kids. But he was also using very nasty language, and he kept saying, “I feel like I’m going to kill you.” He’s been saying that for the last year or so, Your Honor. I even went to a counselor and asked about it, if it was a normal part of OCD, because I read in a book that it could be. We took him over to Ochsner to get treatment for it. He has a serious sickness. Anyway, I told the kids to hurry up and go upstairs. My daughter, Avery, the oldest, started crying. She’s five. I bent down and hugged her, told her it was going to be okay, asked her to try to stay away from Daddy and to keep the boys with her, that that was the safest thing to do and that Mama would try to calm Daddy down. The kids went upstairs then. It seemed like all this had been going on for a long time. It seemed like the whole night was happening in slow motion. I remember noticing that the night had turned dark and there were stars out and it was past the kid’s bedtime. I tried to clean up after the kids’ snacks, but Dr. Rivers kept yelling at me and shoving me, hard, against the counters and the cabinets. He’d push me down, and I’d get up again.
“You didn’t try to run away?” asked Judge Taylor.
No, Your Honor, I didn’t. I probably should have. I didn’t know how I could get away and bring the three kids with me, and I didn’t really know what to do. I wasn’t going to leave them there with him. I was in shock, I think. Dr. Rivers kept hittin
g me, pushing me, yelling at me. Then the boys came back down.
“What did the boys do? Did they see their daddy hitting you?”
Yes, Your Honor. They did, and then they started screaming at him to stop, and screaming at me that they were going to save me. “We’ll save you, Mama!” I can still hear their voices in my head. I kept telling them, “No, no, no, go back upstairs.” They had these big plastic dinosaurs that they like to play with and they were poking their daddy with them.
“Poking him?”
Yes, they were poking the sharp tails of the dinosaurs in their daddy’s legs and backside, screaming, “Leave Mama alone! Leave Mama alone!” But Dr. Rivers was in such a rage I don’t think he even noticed them. It was like they weren’t even there. They were like little ghosts to him, invisible. He told me to get my fat you-know-what upstairs and he’d put the children to bed. Now, he never puts the children to bed. Never ever. That’s my job. But I listened to him. I would have done just about anything to get him to calm down and stop hurting me, especially in front of the kids. He led the kids upstairs, and I followed as quietly as I could. I was kinda trying to just be invisible at that point, hoping it was over. I’d have done anything to be a ghost at that moment. I went into my master closet and started hanging up the clothes out of that laundry basket from before.
“And was that the end of it?”
I thought so—I was in there for a while. Every bit of me was aching, but I was just going on like it was life as usual, until Dr. Rivers came up behind me in the closet. He seemed like he was calmed down. He wasn’t yelling anymore, and his face wasn’t as red.
I stopped then, overwhelmed with memories of what came next. It had only been a few days.
“Mrs. Rivers, do you want Mrs. McClanahan to continue?” Judge Taylor asked, noticing the tears rolling quietly down my face.
No, thank you, Your Honor, I can tell you. Dr. Rivers turned me around to face him. He had a big butcher knife in his hand from our kitchen. He said he was going to kill me. I didn’t say anything. He started to kind of swipe at me with it. He told me I was ugly and made me lift up my shirt and told me I was fat. He took the tip of the knife and scraped it back and forth across my belly skin, cutting me. I asked him not to kill me. “Please don’t kill me,” is what I said.
“Judge Taylor, I’d like to introduce into evidence the photographs of Mrs. Rivers’s stomach and chest,” interjected Addison.
“Mrs. McClanahan, I find your witness credible, and I don’t think she wants those photos introduced into the public record.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Addison agreed. “For the record, we also have the knife and the bloody shirts available to introduce as evidence.”
“Noted. Not needed at this time. I think the visible injuries I can see are sufficient to support your client’s account.” He asked me to continue.
After he cut my stomach, Your Honor—or scraped it, really, scored it like you would a steak, you know? I begged him not to kill me. He told me I was a waste of a human being and that I was a heartless you-know-what, and he held the knife up to my heart and started to stab me. I could feel the tip of the knife going into my chest.
“And then what happened, Mrs. Rivers?”
Then Grayson came back.
“Could you repeat that, please?”
Then Grayson came back.
I was sobbing at this point, the thought of little Grayson, just three years old, trying to protect his mama.
“Grayson came into the closet with y’all?”
Yes, Grayson came back—he just kept coming back that night, over and over again—and he asked again, “What are you doing to Mama, Daddy?”
And Dr. Rivers turned to look at Grayson, who seemed calm as can be, still holding his little blue blanket, one thumb in his mouth, and Dr. Rivers, he said to him, plain as day in the creepiest, nasty voice, “Mama is trying to kill me. Here, take the knife.”
“He gave the knife to your son who is … let’s see, three?”
Yes, Your Honor. He handed the knife to Grayson. And Grayson took the knife and he walked downstairs and he laid it in the sink. I was moving like in a dream now, following Grayson down to the kitchen, seeing the knife in the sink there with my blood on it. It was like a dream—a bad dream. The kids were standing so silent in the kitchen by then, but at least Dr. Rivers finally seemed kind of, I don’t know, out of steam. He gathered up all the kids, took them up the stairs and to the master bedroom, with me following real quiet-like behind, and he stood there in the door of our bedroom and told me, “I’m going to bed now, with my kids. If you even think of calling the police, my police, you won’t have any kids to worry about by the time they get here.” And then he shut the door and locked it.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Rivers. What did you do next?” asked Judge Taylor.
Addison put her hand on my arm now and stepped forward, sensing my exhaustion, taking over. “She stayed up all night, listening to Dr. Rivers snore through the locked door,” Addison announced. “She also called her mother in California, who had the good sense to tell her to call the women’s shelter to ask for advice, which she did. The night counselor at the Gulf Coast Women’s Center for Nonviolence advised her to refrain from any actions that would reescalate the situation and also that if she called police and Dr. Rivers pressed countercharges against her, the children would be removed to foster care until any criminal proceedings were resolved.”
I couldn’t let my children go to strangers! I said with a kind of wild panic, out of turn.
“Mrs. Rivers, please don’t speak unless I ask you to, okay?”
“Your Honor, Mrs. Rivers has put the welfare and safety of her children ahead of both her own safety and any sense of justice that should have been served. She prays that the court, by way of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, remove Dr. Rivers from the marital residence and extend the order of protection so that Mrs. Rivers may care for the children as she moves forward in this divorce, Your Honor.”
“Is that all, Ms. McClanahan?” Judge Taylor asked.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Mrs. Rivers, do you have anything else to add?”
Um, I wonder if the court could make Dr. Rivers get some kind of treatment for, you know, his problems? He wasn’t always like this, and I don’t want it to happen again and he used to be, you know, a good person.
“I don’t doubt that, Mrs. Rivers. But the court in this state can’t order that kind of treatment. We can make recommendations, of course. But let me give you a piece of advice. What you have been through has been terrible. You worry about taking care of your children and let the court worry about the rest.”
Yes, sir.
Addison made a few closing remarks, reminding Judge Taylor of my master’s degree from one of the most prestigious liberal art colleges in the country, my esteemed publishing record, my former illustrious career in the publishing industry, and how I’d willingly and in agreement left it all behind to be a wife and stay-at-home mama for my sweet three. She talked about how I had taken charge of working with the contractor to build the new house, choosing and approving every last detail, down to the metal color on the door hinges and the shelving in the nursery for the baby that I’d lost the spring before. She stressed that I had used my business savvy to start Dr. Rivers’s two medical clinics and to promote them and keep them going, how his new clinic was indeed built on land that I (not he) owned, and that I was every bit as deserving and equal a partner in our marriage as was he. I think she was trying to counteract the miserable little injured mouse I’d portrayed myself as.
“Mrs. Rivers, is everything you’ve said today true and honest to the best of your abilities?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I managed to shriek out in a small voice.
And then, just like that, the Honorable Hank “Bubba” Taylor granted the order.
“What happens next?” I asked Addison as we got back into her Mini Cooper to drive back over the Pascagoula Bridge and
back to the Sonic across the street from the Gautier mall, where Lana would meet us and pick me up.
“We wait,” she replied. “The sheriff gets to throw him out on his own sweet time. I guarantee you this won’t be at the top of their list of emergencies. Could be tomorrow, could be next week. Don’t call me every day,” she announced.
Addison McClanahan was a glamorous Mississippi mash-up between Nancy Grace and Reese Witherspoon. I wasn’t sure if she was smarty-pants zany or flat-out brilliant or a little bit of both, but she was all I had, and so far she’d done right by me. I thanked her, slipped into Lana’s minivan idling in the Waffle House parking lot, and went back to meet the sweet three back at the trailer.
After four more nights of deer steak cookouts and mud puddle pancake factories, I got the call.
The Jackson County Sheriff had removed Liam without incident. Addison reported that the sheriff found him “pleasant, cordial, and entirely compliant.”
What a relief.
The house was now empty, waiting for our return. We stayed one last night in the trailer. A part of me was terrified to go back to that house.
“Oh, and Alice?” Addison continued on the line. “It’s legal in Mississippi to carry a firearm when you have a temporary restraining order in effect to protect yourself. Just sayin’.”
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