After I left, for the better part of a year, my ex-husband told me he was going to kill me. Not in a heated, one-time, people-say-things way. Repeatedly. To my face. He would ask me when the cancer was going to finish the job. When it was going to come back and kill me — as though my death were a thing he was waiting on and mildly impatient about. He told me flat out he would kill me. He told me he’d get me one way or another. And the phrase he used, the one that has stayed lodged in me all these years, was legally or illegally. He would get me (and my father) legally or illegally. He’d thought about it enough to have a range. The worst of it was that first year. After that the threats came off and on, less often, but that first year they were a constant weather.
I filed a police report once. I was at my dad’s house, where I’d gone when I first left. We had family over that day, my aunt and uncle, my sister and her family, an ordinary gathering, and at some point the police came so I could report what he’d been saying. And my body started shaking, and I could not stop it. It wasn’t crying, exactly. It was adrenaline, pure and physical, my whole body vibrating with it while I tried to recount the things he’d said. I did not feel safe even saying them out loud. The officer who took the report was very kind. She listened, and she wrote it all down, careful and patient. And nothing came of it. Nothing ever came of it. Every time I reported anything, it went into a file and disappeared, and the man who said he’d kill me legally or illegally went right on saying it.
My family was in the room, and their reaction to me was surprise. Not surprise that he was threatening to kill me. Surprise that I was shaking. As if the threats were regrettable but manageable, a thing to be noted, and my body’s response to them was the thing that didn’t fit. I felt it land clearly: it’s not okay that he’s threatening you, but your reaction is a bit much. My fear was too big. I couldn’t even be afraid correctly. I was being told I would be murdered, and I somehow still managed to be the one who was overreacting. That is a specific kind of alone. To be in real danger, and to have the danger dismissed, and then to have your fear of the danger treated as the actual problem.
And it wasn’t theoretical, the danger. Because even with all of it, even with the threats and the report and everything I said, I was still required to hand him our children for his visitation, in person and alone. The exchange spot was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from me, out in the Valley, a dusty lot at the crossroads of highways that might have been a gas station once but wasn’t anything anymore. Nothing around it. I’d make that whole drive and pull in and wait, watching for his car, my heart going the entire time. And I would pray, actually pray, that he would just put our youngest in her car seat and leave. Sometimes he did.
But often he’d make sure to whisper something to me first. He was careful about it — he’d hide it from the older kids, save it for the moment he was handing me the youngest, when he was close enough that only I could hear. So the threat came pressed into the exact second I was taking my daughter into my arms. The most tender thing in the world, receiving my own child, turned into his delivery method. I couldn’t even hold her without holding his words at the same time.
At one point I was advised to record him. To catch the threats on tape, so there’d be proof. This was before smartphones. There was no device in my pocket I could quietly tap. I had a little Walkman recorder in my car and I tried, and it never worked, never caught anything usable, and anyway the whole idea was absurd. I was a frightened woman doing a two-and-a-half-hour drive to a deserted lot to retrieve my children from a man who wanted me dead, and the solution on offer was that I become a private investigator and gather the evidence myself.
That was the whole message, from every direction, said and unsaid. The police wrote it down and did nothing. My family thought my terror was excessive. The arrangement sent me to meet him alone in the middle of nowhere. And when I asked for help, I was told to go prove it myself.
He said he would get me one way or another. He never did. I’m still here — shaking, that day, but here today. That’s the part of the story he didn’t get to write.
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