I embraced the kids one after the other with my right arm around their necks and said the same thing to each: Don’t tell him.
With no other choice, I complied with this visitation schedule for several years, despite his cruelty, despite his drunken nights. Despite the frantic, sad texts the children sent. None of it was enough to stop visitation.
I kept working and working at it, learning how to walk and talk, how to read and especially write. For years. I kept taking the kids downtown to Liam’s, reluctantly, but knowing that failure to do so would mean losing custody altogether.
For years.
I took them, time after time and month after month.
For years.
Despite the times he was drunk.
For years.
Despite him taunting Avery with a saw, telling her he’d slice her pneumonia cough out of her.
For shame.
Despite his collection of real human skulls, scattered around his house.
For fear.
Despite the verbal abuse.
His habit.
You’re fat. You’re stupid. You’re ugly.
Without me to aim his insults at, he now divided them evenly among the kids: Aidan was fat, Grayson was stupid, Avery was ugly. She looked the most like me.
A neurologist had told me about six months after my injury, after I’d undergone some extensive testing: 1. You’ll never speak in sentences again 2. You’ll never teach again 3. You’ll never write again.
But year after year, despite being uninsured, I made up my own rehab. I’d watch Gabby Giffords on YouTube, and re-create my own rehab in my bedroom. Grayson would get up early before school and run through the paces with me, doing exercises we created with broom handles, pool balls from the dollar store, jumbo rubber bands, Silly Putty.
To speak again, I “echoed” stories on NPR for hours a day and memorized poems until my brain was rewired. To write again, I placed an “X” in every third or fourth place where a word, because of aphasia, should be. Then I’d go back later and Google “thing that goes over body of water that joins two pieces of land” and finally arrive at “bridge.”
Eventually, after years, I started to return to myself.
It seemed I was always fighting to return to myself. And I was always relinquishing my children. And over the years, Liam would have long stretches of unsupervised, and then supervised visitation. He had several CPS cases, followed by the immediate “reunification” process.
This went on and on, endlessly. Almost unbearably. Until one night in July, about four long years after my injury.
I was back teaching a composition class at a wretched as-seen-on-TV tech college, lecturing on the Socratic method of argumentation. The criminal justice room where the class was held had walls decorated with crude student-made collages of crime scenes. Above the instructor’s desk, a poster board monstrosity with red paint splatters splashed across candid photos of students awash in fake blood and fake gunshot wounds; and another where one student (perp) choked another student (victim), which kept coming loose, hanging slantwise before I pushed the corner of tape in once again.
My students had moved onto group labs, working quietly together at long, white, plastic tables. The room was freezing, and I took my blazer off the back of my chair and put it back on. Almost instantly, I felt my phone start to buzz in my pocket. I didn’t check it the first time—a student came up to my desk to ask a question, and I spent a few minutes showing him how to turn his sentences inside out so they would have varying music and form. After he returned to his group, my phone buzzed again.
I pulled out the phone: there was near a dozen texts from all three of the children.
Aidan: call the police daddy drunk
Grayson: daddy just beat me up. now i’m crying.
Grayson: call the police please
Grayson: please
Avery: daddy just basically beat up Grayson and we both started crying. Grayson said he was going 2 call the police but daddy was saying NO. help us!!!
Grayson: please answer
Grayson: please
Me: oh my god
Grayson: please call please
Me: okay I’m calling.
Grayson: are they coming?
By this time, I’d left my class, announcing an emergency. I was flying down the 50 in the moonlight with the Sacramento PD on speakerphone.
“Ma’am? What time did the first text message come in?”
I was driving ninety miles an hour and checking and sending text messages and trying to direct the police to Liam’s big craftsman house.
“Ma’am? You don’t remember the address, but it’s the second house in, right?”
Avery: are they coming?
Me: yes, i’m here too. i’m waiting. they told me not to come in.
Avery: i see you outside
Me: they’re coming
Avery: thank you for coming
Avery: we have everything packed
I stood partially hidden behind a palm in front of Liam’s house.
My heart was pounding double.
I could see the kids in the upstairs windows, their arms waving frantically at me like they were stuck in a burning house and couldn’t get out. I saw Liam cross the living room. I could hear his fancy boots stomp across the hardwood floor.
Me: i am here, waiting for police. we are on the phone. what did he do?
Grayson: we were hiding from him then he found us and just started screaming at us
Grayson: then he started getting mad and started to kick and choke me
Grayson: i started to hit him back
Grayson: i didn’t know what to do
I stood behind the fat palm, shaking. The night sky was full of stars, a galaxy of lost hope.
Avery: MAKE THEM SEE HOW DRUNK HE IS TOO
Avery: with the test thing
Finally, a Sac PD patrol car pulled up quietly behind me. I walked to the window.
“Are you the one who called, ma’am?”
“Yes, sir. Here are the texts.”
I handed my phone and watched, and he scrolled through the texts from all the kids, flipping between the three. He called for backup, got out of his car, and started toward the house, with me behind.
“Ma’am, I need you to stay out here. No matter what happens. I need you to stay out here. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
I saw him mount the steps, knock quietly on the door. Liam answered, and the officer went in.
Me: they’re in there with him now
Grayson: ok
I heard Liam raise his voice, saw the officer take him down. I heard voices—his, the officer, his girlfriend. I moved from behind the palm and to the bottom of his gracious stoop. A second later, he was back up and cuffed, being led down the front steps by the officer to a second Sac PD car I hadn’t even noticed pull up.
I heard Avery scream, “Finally!”
As I rushed up the stairs, I could hear the kids running down Liam’s dark wooden stairway. The minute they saw me, all three started wailing. A kind of keening I’d never heard from them before—panicked, animal, full of all the sorrow they’d been holding these long years.
In a matter of minutes, the house was filled with a dozen officers, interviewing everyone, a CSI photographer put Grayson up against a wall and had him remove his shirt, taking photos of his torso. Of his neck.
Flash.
Recent.
Flash.
Relevant.
Flash.
Recent.
Flash.
Relevant.
Liam sat glaring out the window from the back of the car in the street. He watched me pass from room to room helping the children. It was the first time I’d been in his house.
After a while, they drove off with Grayson in an ambulance, me and Avery and Aidan following behind in our car. It was almost midnight as we pulled away from Liam’s house. Avery sat in the passenger seat next to me. As we
passed by Liam, he turned his head and looked right at us.
“Finally, you got what you deserved, fucker! Everyone knows now, finally!” Avery screamed. She was fifteen, and it was ten years to the date from when he strangled me. It was the first time I’d ever heard her cuss.
From the back seat, Aidan said, “Well, Mama, now you only owe Grayson once.”
“What do you mean, sweetie?”
“He saved your life twice now, and you just paid him back.”
“This is the last time any of us are going to need to save each other, baby, I promise.”
There was a silence in the car. The stars passed overhead, closer than they’d seemed in years, like a blanket of truth, finally thrown down upon us.
Liam was booked, charged with felony child endangerment. We wouldn’t be seeing him again anytime soon.
And back into the carnival of court we went. This time, I knew how to perform more tricks.
FINALLY
We got out of the hospital around four in the morning, driving through the night with the sunroof open, stars passing silently above. I tried to convince myself what I’d always believed: that every pine tree pointed to a corresponding star. I needed to believe in some magic, some order in the world. I parked out front, and we all went in and piled on my bed, together, and fell fast asleep in dreams. Every hour or so, I’d wake up and look at Grayson’s neck, see the raised red marks there. The night was quiet and I could hear them all breathing and it sounded like stars scraping the sky.
In the morning, a woman from CPS came to visit.
It always felt like we were in trouble, even this time.
The DA called on day one.
The Victim’s Advocate Office called.
Liam’s parole officer called.
Liam spent less than twenty-four hours in jail.
We were notified by text when he was released.
I filed for a protective order with the family court on the second day.
At his first hearing in the Sacramento County Superior Court, the DA asked for a criminal protective order.
We had consecutive cases in the family court and the criminal court.
It took over my life entire.
Liam hired not one but two high-powered attorneys: one family attorney and one criminal attorney. Both were big, nasty sharks who were used to swimming in rough waters.
His family attorney had one goal: go after me, hard.
His criminal attorney sang one song: Grayson had no injuries.
If a stranger tackled a thirteen-year-old child and strangled him, he’d be in prison; if a father tackles a thirteen-year-old child and strangles him, he hires a high-powered attorney and starts negotiating.
Liam’s first motion in the family court was to ask for reunification therapy and supervised visitation. Without an attorney, it was me who had to go and fight his attorney.
Luckily, I won.
With all I’d learned, I knew how to fight. Several attorneys who were in court that day came up to me after and congratulated me for taking down Liam’s attorney. I had pointed out that there was a criminal court pending, and therefore Liam could not be honest in therapy if he could go. That my children had no interest in seeing him, that seeing them, even in a therapeutic setting, would be breaking the criminal protective order. I also pointed out the obvious: we’d done supervised visitation, reunification therapy, and court-ordered counseling before. It hadn’t worked.
I took a deep breath before I said the next thing. “Although I argued vigorously to this court that Liam Rivers was a danger to the minor children, this court ruled that the overwhelming evidence presented was neither recent nor relevant and ordered unsupervised visitation with the minor children.
“I delivered the children to Liam Rivers faithfully for years, despite my deep belief that something like this would someday happen.”
It had been my worst fear, and now my worst fear had come true.
The court declined Liam’s motions.
Even so, Liam continued to keep filing more. I think half his strategy was to break me down. I went to court nineteen times in the first three months after he assaulted Grayson. You’d think at some point he’d have the decency to give us some space to heal and have some peace, right?
Wrong.
At home, the kids rarely came out of their rooms. If someone came to the door, they dove to the floor like a bomb had detonated. One time the postman was trying to deliver a package to us and I saw Grayson, huddled on the bathroom floor, hiding, with his hands over his head.
This is the legacy their father left them.
Meanwhile, Liam kept trying to negotiate a better deal with the DA. He asked for a non-assault charge. He asked for the charges to be dropped if he took some parenting classes. Eventually, when presumably his attorneys convinced him his chances weren’t good, he agreed to a plea bargain. Almost one year after he assaulted Grayson, we showed up in court to hear him plea. Everyone was there but him. His attorney explained, “The good doctor is in another state, saving lives, and I am here to enter the plea on his behalf.”
The injustice of it all enraged me. Here I was sitting in court while he paid someone $50,000 to show up for him. The judge set a date for sentencing. Before I even left the courthouse, one of my girlfriends texted me: your ex is here at Rubicon.
Rubicon is a local brew pub.
I texted back: right now?
She texted me a photo of him standing at the bar, then proceeded to send more photos and told me all about how he bought the whole bar Girl Scout cookies, tried to pick up her friend, recognized her from our children’s school, asked about me, then proceeded to tell her how crazy I am and how I keep the children from him. All while he was supposed to be in court pleading guilty to child endangerment. I forwarded all of it to the DA, who forwarded all of it to Liam’s attorney and the judge.
Two weeks later, we all showed up, including the children, to the county jail courtrooms to read our victim witness statements and watch Liam be sentenced. At that time, he withdrew his plea.
It seemed it would never end.
Finally, a month later, we went to court again. This time, he showed up and he pled out. The kids went up before the judge to read their statements. Liam turned in his chair at the table to face them.
“Sir, turn your chair around; the witnesses are directing the court, not you.”
He didn’t turn around.
“Sir, turn your chair around.”
He didn’t turn around.
“Let’s let them read,” said the judge.
And that’s how each of the children ended up reading their victim impact statement directly to their father, less than two feet away from him, face-to-face. Avery was by then sixteen, Grayson fourteen, Aidan twelve. Avery went first.
“Hello, my name is Avery Anderson, and I am sixteen years old. I have two younger brothers, Grayson and Aidan. We have been through a lot together over the last ten years.
“NOTE: I will never use his name or anything that associates him with me, so I am using him, he, his, or blank instead of saying his name.
“About ten years ago, when we were still living in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, things changed for the worst. After Hurricane Katrina, my ___ started drinking more and more every day and started screaming at us all the time. One night, he attacked my mom with all of us watching. We left the next morning. My mom filed for divorce, and my dad tried to take us away from her. He told us we’d never see her again. He was drunk and violent and scary. Ever since that time, I have really bad anxiety attacks whenever I see gore, violence, or people being hurt. I’ve even had a panic attack (I pass out cold and faint) because I was so scared he would come to my school for back-to-school night. I still have them to this day, and I’m always scared something is going to set one off. I have to tell all my teachers at school to warn them, and the kids at school have seen me faint. I’ve tried to prevent them, but I can’t control them. This happens because of him.
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“When I was in sixth grade, I got pneumonia. Even though he is a doctor, he refused to even let me stay home from school. He didn’t want me to take up his free time during the day to go shopping and go to bars. I just got more and more sick. He was angry that I was sick so long. One day, he came in my room at his house. He was holding up this huge rusty saw, the kind you cut wood with. He said, ‘I can cut that cough right out of you with this.’ Then he held it up to me and laughed. I was terrified.
“After he attacked Grayson last summer, I had horrible nightmares about him. I had nightmares about us going back to his house, about him beating me up, about him bullying me, and about him coming to my house to try to kidnap me. With all those dreams, I would wake up in tears. Those dreams worry me and make me feel bad because the nightmares are either stuff he did that was horrible, or stuff that I’m really scared will happen.
“On the same night of July 14, 2014, I was physically abused, too. I was in too much shock about Grayson, so I didn’t say anything. The police and the people at the hospital were interviewing Grayson, and I kind of got lost in the shuffle. But when it happened, he grabbed my arm, yanked me out of the closet, and I said, “Stop, stop!” in a panic. My whole arm socket hurt terribly the next day. It felt like it was popped out of place. It makes me sad because I was abused, too.
“One summer, my brothers and I had to go have visitation with him in New Orleans, where he lives half the time. I was going into middle school, so I was twelve years old—Grayson was ten, and Aidan was eight. We were in the square in the French Quarter. He kept getting beer after beer, going from bar to bar. He even left us outside of a bar all alone so he could go inside and drink. It was dark, crowded, and there were drunk people everywhere. A man came up and kissed my hand. It was very scary. It was even scarier because he didn’t take care of us; he was drunk, and we didn’t know anyone else. We felt alone and scared. Events like that made me terrified of going on trips with him. I was also scared to even go to places with him here. You never know what he might do.
“At home, he used to always tell me what’s wrong with me. He said that no one would love me, that I’m gross, and that I’d have to live with the homeless men in the park, that they are the only people who would ever be interested in marrying me. He made fun of how I look and told me no one will ever love me. He made me cry for hours and hours. At any time, he would come in my room just to say a mean thing. Last summer, he kept telling me how I needed to go to a therapist because I was sick in the brain and needed ‘help.’
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