She told me that maybe it was time, and I drove home. He could tell that I was serious when I walked in the door. “I’m leaving,” I said. “I’ll get my parents to help me.”
Still, when I called them and said that I wanted to leave my marriage, my mother was silent. I took her silence as disapproval. She didn’t offer any help. Soon thereafter, Caleb promised to change in every way possible and actually quit drinking.
He got his thirty-day chip from AA, then cracked a beer.
Drinking too much (both of us). Once Caleb looked at me and said sadly, “We only like each other when we’re drinking.”
Anger management (Caleb). Caleb said that his counselor wasn’t helping him enough with his anger. He needed someone who specialized in anger. He found a man named Dan who worked in a methadone clinic. Caleb’s abuse of me got worse. He started bringing me articles about women with personality disorders who antagonized their husbands because they were addicted to chaos.
Once Caleb came home from an appointment with Dan and raged at me. I cried, “Why do you seem worse since you’ve started seeing Dan?”
Caleb looked at me, eyes hard. “Because Dan makes me feel good about myself and has taught me that I don’t need to take your shit,” he said.
Medication (both of us). I took Lexapro (for my anxiety) and Ambien (for my sleep problems). At night I would take the Ambien and feel my body relaxing into sleep. Some mornings I woke up and realized that Caleb and I had sex the night before, but I couldn’t remember it.
A psychiatrist prescribed Zoloft for Caleb, and it seemed to help at first, but when the abuse became frequent, I begged him to tell the psychiatrist what was happening. The psychiatrist kept increasing his dosage until it was at the maximum. Caleb kept hitting me.
Working too hard (both of us). I taught classes, completed an MFA, wrote a full collection of essays. Work was my release.
Caleb taught five or six classes a semester. Work was his prison.
Meditation (Caleb). Dan had recommended that Caleb meditate as a way of managing his anger. Caleb set up a pillow in the corner and sat cross-legged, hands resting on his knees, soft palms facing heavenward.
Moving into the dorm (both of us). One morning I came out of the bedroom and found Caleb meditating underneath a sunny window. I could see the tendons in his neck bulging. Arms furiously tight. Back straight. I knew what was coming, started shivering. He only meditated when he was angry.
Morgantown existed in a rain shadow, and sunny days were rare. I thought of Idaho, of the high-country desert, of the vast blue skies, of climbing mountains with my father, who had only ever treated me with gentleness, of wrestling with my brother who had always let me win. Of Danny and his knife. Of that man in the truck. Of the man who held me down for the first time when I didn’t want to be held down.
Caleb’s eyes opened; he stared at me. I knew that meditation couldn’t save him, and it couldn’t save me either. I knew that the only thing that could save me was to run.
CALEB AND I went to see his counselor one final time together. By then, Caleb was mostly seeing Dan, and I knew that he hadn’t been honest with either of them about what he was doing to me. We sat on the couch, and the words tumbled around in my mind but didn’t escape. Finally Caleb’s counselor said, “We’re almost out of time. Is there anything else we need to discuss?”
I started sobbing and blurted out, “He’s just so mean to me.” Even then, I couldn’t bring myself to confess the violence, because confessing the violence would mean I had to leave.
Caleb’s counselor sat up in his chair. He looked at Caleb. “Caleb,” he said. “Is that true?” Caleb sat stiffly, nodded his head.
Caleb’s counselor sat back. “This is very serious,” he said. “We are going to need to talk about this more, but we don’t have time today.”
As we were walking out, I stopped Caleb’s counselor. “Do you have a recommendation for someone I can see?” I asked.
“But you’re seeing me,” he said.
“I know,” I said, “but I want to see someone on my own.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let me think about it, and I’ll get some names to you.”
THE NEXT DAY, he sent me an e-mail with the name of a counselor named Liz. He wrote, “I think she’ll be able to help you with your issues with your mother.” When I read his note, I realized that he had no idea what my issues really were.
I e-mailed Liz, and we scheduled an appointment. A few nights before the appointment, Caleb beat me late at night. After he had fallen asleep, I slipped out of my bed. I sat at the granite counter in the kitchen and opened my laptop. I e-mailed Liz. I told her that I didn’t know what to do, and I had to say something before I lost my courage. I told her that my husband was abusing me, and I was scared. When I woke up, there was an e-mail from Liz that said, simply, “Come see me today.”
I WENT TO see Liz in Caleb’s counselor’s office. I sat on the same couch where I had sat with Caleb, and I lifted the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I showed her the bruises on my arms. She sat next to me. She touched the bruises gently—traced her fingertips along the shadows—and I gasped, heaved.
She hugged me, and I cried on her shoulder. When I finally stopped crying, she said, “You needed that, didn’t you?”
I told her that I wasn’t ready to leave yet—that I only wanted to learn how to keep myself safe while fixing my marriage. She nodded her head. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s work on fixing your marriage, but what we really need to work on is keeping you safe.”
“Okay,” I said.
I wanted to be safe. I didn’t want the memories of his fists to be a ghost in my bones anymore. I wanted the memories to be just memories.
In time, I thought, I’ll be able to forget.
18
It Will Look Like a Sunset
IT WAS THE day of Reed’s seventh birthday party—a superhero party—and from the way that Caleb was raging, I could tell what was coming. This time, I ran. I ducked under his arm, opened the door of the apartment, and took off as fast as I could.
I was safe.
Except that he had followed me. He had followed me, even though the resident assistants were there. “Call the police,” I cried, but they were young adults. They were confused and did nothing.
Caleb chased me into the street in his socks. Later, he cried on my shoulder in the basement of the dorm. I had already talked to the resident assistants.
I held Caleb as he sobbed. “I fixed it,” I said. “I fixed it.”
REED HAD PLAYED quietly on his bed. It was what he always did during these rages. He stayed there as long as was needed. I went into the hallway, and Reed followed me. He stood in front of me, and I looked down at him. He reached out hesitantly, put his hands on my stomach, and looked into my eyes. His eyes searched mine, moving back and forth. His eyes searched mine in a way that they never had before. He was growing up, and his eyes disclosed to me that he knew. He knew what was happening.
“Mom?” he asked, still holding me gently, eyes still attached to mine.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” I said, reaching down to smooth his thick hair over his forehead. “I’m okay.”
“I don’t like it when the dogs climb into bed with me because they’re scared,” he said. He looked so much like I had when I was a child, the same strawberry hair and big blue eyes. I thought of myself as a little girl in Idaho, a sensitive little girl who witnessed the sadness of the adults around her, but who never imagined that her own future would contain so much heartbreak. In that moment, I knew. I knew we had to leave.
I CLEANED MYSELF up, put ice on my swollen eyes, and hosted the best birthday party that Reed had ever had. A mess of little superheroes were in our apartment, and I fed them pizza and gave them cupcakes. We took them on a scavenger hunt throughout the entire dorm. Joanne, Caleb’s grandmother, and his aunt had driven to Morgantown for the party, and Joanne looked at me like she sensed something was wrong.
Later my own m
other asked me, “Why didn’t you say something to Joanne?”
I responded, “I couldn’t have done that. She wouldn’t have understood.”
But Caleb’s grandmother, the woman who had once told me, “You’ll find that we have a lot of skeletons in our closet,” would have understood.
Joanne, more than anyone, liked to pretend that their family was perfect, but there was a darkness to the stories that other family members told me. The solution was never to try and help the person fix the behavior. The family closed ranks during a crisis. I couldn’t have told Joanne without breaking that code. She would have called in the rest of the family, and they would have closed ranks against me.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY was on Saturday, and although Caleb usually calmed down after a violent incident, I could sense that this time was different. The anger was not spent.
I HAD BEEN meeting Liz every week since I went to see her that first time. She suggested that Caleb and I write back and forth to each other in a notebook when we were angry rather than speaking to each other directly, but even those communications were disorienting.
I would write my feelings to him, and he would respond in a rage, yet a day later he would become apologetic, refuting everything that he had said during his rage.
Rage Caleb would write “Fuck off,” but Apologetic Caleb would write “I don’t deserve your forgiveness” and “You can’t hold what I say when I’m angry against me. That’s not what I mean.”
Rage Caleb told me that he wasn’t happy with me, Reed, his career, his family, or even the sun and weather.
Apologetic Caleb told me that he was ashamed of his behavior and knew that he had messed up.
Apologetic Caleb told me that what he had done was unforgivable, but asked for my forgiveness anyway.
I didn’t even respond to his final letter, which was essentially begging.
I was so tired by then.
ON SUNDAY NIGHT, the day after Reed’s party, I video-called Kelly M. when Caleb went to bed, and started sobbing. “He’s so mean to me,” I said. “He calls me terrible names. He screams at me all of the time. I’m scared of him.” Even then, I didn’t tell her that he hit me.
Kelly M. looked at me, her face horrified. “Oh, honey,” she said. “That’s not okay. It’s not okay for him to treat you that way. I think that you need to leave him.”
I knew that she was right, but I didn’t think that I was capable of leaving him. I didn’t think that I would ever survive on my own. I finished the call, then curled up in bed next to Caleb, but I didn’t wrap my arms around him this time, just turned my back.
ON MONDAY MORNING, I woke up angry. I had a T-shirt on, but had taken my underwear off during the night because it had kept crawling up my body and keeping me up.
Caleb had already taken Reed to the bus stop, and I went out to confront Caleb. He was eating cereal out of a heavy ceramic bowl. I told him that I had talked to Kelly M., and she had helped me realize that I needed to leave him. He screamed some things at me, and I turned to walk away. “Don’t turn your butt to me!” he shouted, and because I was angry, I did a little flip of my bare butt at him. Then he threw the bowl at me. It shattered on my foot, and I fell to the ground, my body crashing into the milk and ceramic shards.
I knew that I was hurt badly.
I also knew that it wasn’t over, and I had to hurry. I got up and hobbled to the bedroom, where I grabbed my phone. I had threatened to call 911 before, but Caleb had always taken my phone and broken it. He had probably broken three to four phones of mine a year.
He came into the room, and I told him, “I am going to call nine-one-one if you don’t leave me alone.”
“Call them, and tell them what a fucking bitch you are!”
And then I did it. I called. From that point on, everything changed.
CALEB ANSWERED THE door, and two campus police officers were there. The younger police officer took me into the back room while the older one talked to Caleb in the front. The first question the younger one asked me was, “Has this happened before?”
I cried and said “Yes,” but that did not seem to be the answer that he was looking for. He told me, “It’s all right. My wife and I fight. Things get crazy. Sometimes you just need time apart.”
I nodded my head in agreement, but I wanted to ask, Do you beat your wife too?
The young policeman went out to the front room and told Caleb, “Go to your parents. Get away for a couple of days. Just let things calm down.”
Caleb left, and the young policeman asked to see my driver’s license, but when I stood up to get it, I found that I couldn’t walk, that my foot was the size of a football, and it was bleeding. When the older policeman saw the swelling, the black and blue, and the toes like little sausage links, his expression turned to dismay. “That’s bad. That looks broken,” he said. “Ma’am, does your husband have a phone number we can reach him at? We need him to come back.”
They waited outside, and I called Caleb. “I’m sorry,” I said. “They are going to arrest you.”
He said he already knew.
He left his phone on while they arrested him so that I could listen. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Did she hit you?” one of the officers asked—it was the older one, I think. “Because we can arrest her too.”
Caleb answered honestly. He said no.
WHILE THE OLDER policeman arrested Caleb, the younger one waited with me for the paramedics to arrive. “Is he going to lose his job?” I asked.
“No, probably not,” he said.
“Is he going to leave me?” I asked.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
I wanted him to hug me so I could hide my face in the folds of his black uniform. I crumpled into the rocking chair instead.
“He’s going to leave me,” I said.
The young policeman called for an ambulance. The EMTs looked at my foot. They didn’t ask about what happened. They just told me it looked bad, that it could be broken. They asked me if I wanted to go to the emergency room, but I declined, so they instructed me to see a doctor and made me sign a waiver saying they weren’t responsible if I didn’t get follow-up care. And then I was alone in our house.
I called my mother, and I have no recollection of what she said. I then called Kelly M. and told her about the violence. After that, I called Megan and told her that Caleb had been beating me. I don’t remember exactly what they said to me either, but I know that they both told me to leave.
Still, I stayed, and Caleb came home. The judge had let him go on his own recognizance and modified the no-contact order to a no-abusive-contact order, which meant that Caleb could come home to me as long as he didn’t batter me. On his way home, he had called his parents and told them that he had been arrested for domestic battery. I don’t know if what he relayed to me was true, but he said that he told them that it wasn’t the first time and that he didn’t want them to be angry with me. He said that Joanne told him to put our troubles at the “foot of the cross.”
IT SEEMED THAT, with the exception of Kelly M. and Megan, no one thought that I was in actual danger, but I kept replaying incidents in my head.
The time that I had tried to fight back, and Caleb had held me down and spit in my face, not once, but four times.
The day that Caleb had told me that he needed to go to the mental hospital and check himself in. He needed to tell them that he wanted to murder his wife. I was terrified. I asked him why he would need to tell them that. I asked him, did he actually want to murder me?
The night that he pulled out my hair, then punched me in the spine with such force that my body arched back as though it had been shocked with electricity. I was jolted out of my cave. He did it again. “No!” I screamed. I could not protect myself.
My only protection was the darkness—the dissociation. I hadn’t felt him ripping out hair, but when he hit me in the spine, the pain was too intense. That part of my body was too vulnerable. I could
n’t curl up. I couldn’t wrap my arms around it.
I was present for what was happening. I stopped breathing for a moment. He paused.
It was as though he, too, felt that I was present, and he stopped.
I knew I couldn’t have been human to him in those moments.
I SPENT TWO days helping Caleb find a lawyer, trying to figure out how we were going to get his charges dismissed, and hoping that our marriage would change, but by then my mom had texted me in secret and made me promise that I would go to the domestic violence shelter. Kelly M. e-mailed me an escape plan that she had devised for me, and Megan, a counselor herself, helped me understand that things weren’t going to change.
I lied and told Caleb that I was going to go grade papers, and then I went to see a counselor at the shelter. She described the cycle of abuse—tension building, battering incident, reconciliation, calm. It was so familiar. She explained to me that as the abuse escalated, we would spend less and less time in the calm stage, and more in the tension-building stage. She explained to me that the inevitable end to the cycle was death. My death.
I still downplayed my situation because I felt I didn’t have the right to be taking up her time. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You probably see women who are so much worse off. I realize that my situation isn’t as bad as those other women’s.”
She looked at me in surprise, then said, “No, your situation is bad. It’s really bad.”
HE CHOKED ME once. Held his hands around my neck until the light around the edges of my eyes grew bright and foggy. While everything grew blurry for me, one thing remained in focus—his face in front of mine, his hands around my neck.
WHEN I RETURNED home, I didn’t tell Caleb where I had been, but I picked up his iPad to search for something, and I saw that he had been looking at porn while I was gone. It hit me that I was the one doing all the work of trying to save a marriage that he was responsible for destroying.
Goodbye, Sweet Girl Page 16