Ten Years Later (3 page)

Amy had mapped out the quietest escape route before she ever needed to use it.

“The house we were in, the floors would creak. And because I was so heavy,” she explains,
“I would actually, when Robert was gone, get out of bed, and I would walk on the floor
to find out where the boards creaked, so I could make an escape route where he wouldn’t
hear me. I knew the third and the seventh step I couldn’t step on, because I was too
heavy and that the floor would creak, and I would be too scared that he would wake
up.”

Amy’s plan extended beyond the floorboards and out onto the street where her truck
was parked.

“I knew how to pop a clutch without actually turning on the vehicle to get it started
once I rolled down the hill, so he wouldn’t hear us.”

In early 2004, following a series of numbing episodes of abuse,
Amy woke up on a Sunday morning with an intense need to go to church.

“I didn’t even believe in God at that point, because if there was a God I would not
be going through what I’d been going through. But there was just an overwhelming feeling—I
can’t even explain it—that I needed to go to church,” she says. “I didn’t even know
what church I would go to because I hadn’t been to church in years.”

Amy left the bed and went into the bathroom. When she began to shower, Robert woke
up and asked her where she was going. She told him to church.

“So, of course, there was this extreme jealousy, like I was going to see someone.
The next thing I remember is him pulling me out of the shower and beating me.” She
starts to cry, recalling how her youngest found her lying on the bathroom floor. “I
woke up to my four-year-old son waking me up, scrubbing my face with the drenched
bath mat, saying, ‘Mama, wake up. I want to make you look beautiful again.’ ”

Amy never made it to church, but she did make up her mind.

“I was like,
That’s it. I cannot be here anymore
.”

When Robert left the house, Amy packed as much as she could into her truck and, with
her parents’ support, hit the road. She and the boys moved in with girlfriends who
lived in Madison, Wisconsin. Before long, she found a town house and created a more
peaceful setting for herself and her sons.

Three months later, the doorbell rang at midnight.

“And I opened the door and he was standing there,” she says. “The sense of fear and
urgency—I can’t even explain the feeling. He was crying and begging and ‘I’m sorry,
I came to find you,’ and ‘I can’t live without you,’ and all the things abusers do
to get you back. They feed on your insecurities and all the things that they’ve been
priming you for during the years that you’ve been in this ridiculous relationship.”

Amy wanted desperately to believe Dr. Jekyll, standing on her doorstep.

“The person that comes back to you—and this is with every abusive relationship—and
begs for your forgiveness and begs for you to come back to them is the person you
fell in love with. It’s this kind person who is smart and gorgeous and affectionate.
And he is standing on the opposite side of the doorway.”

Robert told Amy he’d enrolled in anger management classes and that he loved her. But
Amy squared up to Robert and beat back the kernel of hope she felt forming in her
heart.

“I was like, ‘Screw off. I’m not taking you back.’ ”

Robert didn’t give up. Every weekend, he drove the four hours from Minnesota to Wisconsin
to see her. He showed her the certificate he got from attending anger management classes.
He reminded Amy of his difficult childhood—raised by a crack-addicted and physically
abused mother who suffered a fatal heart attack in front of him—claiming she, Amy,
was all he had.

I hate to even ask Amy if she took him back, but I do.

“Of course. A complete dumbass. I was a complete dumbass,” she admits.

In mid-2004, she and the boys moved back to Minnesota into Robert’s house. Two weeks
later, Amy needed to drive back to Wisconsin to put her house on the market. The kids
had to go to school, so she left them with Robert. The honeymoon period was in full
effect.

“It was the person I fell in love with,” she says. “He was wonderful with me; he was
wonderful with the kids.”

Amy returned from her trip on a Monday, and asked Robert to go with her to pick up
the boys, now eight and five years old, from school.

“I get to the school, and the principal says to me, ‘I can’t give
you any information about your kids; you have to call social services.’ ”

Confused, Amy got back in the car with Robert and called her mom.

“She said, ‘Are you with Robert?’ and I told her yes. She said, ‘You have a custody
hearing on Thursday morning at eight thirty because your kids were beaten very badly.
And because you were out of state, the state gave your dad and me temporary custody
of the boys.’ ”

The situation that sparked the abuse occurred while the boys were staying by themselves
with Robert. He found laundry on the floor, became angry, and went after Terrell.
When Marcus came to his brother’s defense, Robert beat them both. The boys showed
up for school with welts and bruises on their bodies caused by Robert’s blows with
a cable cord. Ultimately charges were filed against Robert for beating the boys.

Amy was shocked by her mother’s words.
Your kids were beaten very badly.
She was infuriated. The usual nausea she felt before a confrontation with Robert
was replaced by focused rage. Amy turned toward him, still holding the phone.

“I was in the car with him and I looked at him and I said, ‘You beat my kids?’ For
him to see that anger and fear in my face, he must have worried that he was going
to lose control of me. He took the phone while I was still on with my mom and threw
it out the window. My mom said she thought that was the last time she would ever hear
my voice. And he said, ‘I did not beat your children. I disciplined them, and if you
have any lack of understanding between the two, I will show you the difference between
discipline and a beating.’ ”

And he did. He drove Amy home and beat her for the next three days.

“I had no concept of time. I couldn’t see because my eyes were
swollen shut. And when you black out from being beaten, you don’t know if you’ve blacked
out for two minutes or two days. My only concept of time was what I could hear on
the TV. Robert was so physically exhausted from beating me, he would fall asleep.
But before he did, he would shackle me to him. And when you’re almost five hundred
pounds, there is nothing you can do gracefully or quietly. I had lost blood, I hadn’t
eaten, I had urinated on myself; I was a mess. But I knew at that point I had to get
to that hearing in court.”

Amy says when she heard late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien’s voice on television
on what she guessed was the third night, she knew she didn’t have very much time left
to get to the eight thirty
A.M.
hearing.

“I literally got on my knees,” she says, beginning to cry, “and I said, ‘God, I know
that this is my time, and I am asking your forgiveness, because it’s either me or
him. Either I am going to kill him and ask your forgiveness and that you take my soul
to heaven, or he’s going to kill me, and I need you to take care of my kids and take
my soul.’ I was mentally prepared to kill him, still shackled to him, so I could get
away from him and get to my kids.”

When Amy attempted to free herself from Robert, he woke up and was enraged.

“I was at the point where I was done. I didn’t care anymore. The only thing that had
kept me alive for the past two or three years was my kids. If it wasn’t for my kids,
I wouldn’t have cared if he killed me. Abusers take your soul from you. You have no
soul.”

Robert and Amy’s toxic three-year relationship had come down to a death match.

“I said to him, ‘It’s me or you.’ And he said, ‘It’s not gonna be me,’ ” she says.
“The next thing I remember is him stabbing me with a knife in the center of my stomach,
and everything went black.”

When she came to, Amy heard sirens blaring and voices asking her questions.

“I had no ID, nobody knew who I was,” she says. “I was just this fat, bloodied, abused
person lying on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. To this day, I do not know
for sure how I got there.”

Emergency workers in front of the Sherburne County courthouse were trying to get a
handle on the identity of the beaten, bleeding woman. Amy was trying to get answers
about the date and time.

“I’m like, ‘What day is it? What day is it?’ And they said, ‘It’s Thursday. Who did
this to you?’ I told them and said they needed to bring me to my kids,” she says.
“They said, ‘Ma’am, you’re in critical condition.’ I told them I didn’t care, and
I blacked out. Everything went black.”

Amy says emergency workers later told her that they lost her heartbeat for a few seconds.
They managed to stabilize her and get her into the ambulance. She continued to tell
them she needed to go to court, but they insisted that she go instead to the hospital.

“I said, ‘You cannot legally keep me here and I have to get to my kids.’ There was
a cop who told the EMTs they couldn’t legally take me, even though I was in critical
condition. So, they wheeled me to court on a stretcher, covered with a sheet because
I was naked, and they stabilized me with tubes. I will never forget the look on my
father’s face,” she says, breaking down, “but I looked at the judge and I said, ‘I
just want my kids back.’ ” She continues through tears. “And the judge said, ‘You
have to get healthy for them.’ The judge didn’t care that I was five hundred pounds.
The judge didn’t care that I was fat. He was saying, in order for you to get your
kids back, you have to be mentally and emotionally healthy. It wasn’t about me getting
physically healthy, it was mentally and emotionally. I was a freakin’ basket case
because of all the stuff I was going through. And honestly, at that point in my life,
I didn’t care if I lived or died, but my kids are the reason I breathe. The judge
said, ‘In order to get your kids back, you have to get a
job, you have to find a place to live, you have to pass assessments by the state.’ ”

The ambulance took Amy to the hospital, where representatives from a local battered
women’s shelter told her they had a bed waiting for her if she wanted it. She told
them to save it for her.

Once Amy was released from the hospital, she entered the shelter, the Alexandra House.
She took advantage of pro bono legal work offered at the shelter and filed an order
for protection against Robert. She also divorced her estranged husband. Amy wanted
a clean slate and, first and foremost, her boys back. Amy immediately began looking
for a job.

“The judge said to me I needed to have a job, and I didn’t care if it was at 7-Eleven;
I needed to get my kids back,” she says.

Amy applied for any and all jobs. She got a call back from a software company to interview
for a position as an executive assistant and a paralegal.

“I was black and blue when I went to the job interview. My eyes were swollen shut,
I had stitches in my body; I was a hot mess. The guy asked me, ‘What would be your
availability?’ and I said, ‘I’m not leaving here without a job.’ ” Amy pauses, crying.
“And he gave me a job. And that was the only thing I needed, was for someone to be
able to believe in me enough to work so I could get my kids back.”

The job paid her bills, which led to an apartment and a car. In August, Amy threw
a party for Marcus’s ninth birthday and to celebrate their upcoming reunion as a family.
In September, Amy’s hard-earned dream came true: she got full custody of her sons
after a trying four months. All three continued counseling to deal with what they’d
endured over the years at the hands—and mouth—of Robert.

“I lived in fear of him. I always looked over my shoulder. The
counselors gave the kids whistles for around their necks to express their fears. So,
anytime they saw something that reminded them of him, like his sedan,” she explains,
“they would blow the whistle. If they heard a song that reminded them of Robert, they
would blow the whistle. That was their security.”

Ultimately, Robert pled to lesser charges arising from the incidents in May and spent
a few months in jail. Still, Amy’s peace of mind was rattled by the relentless ringing
of her cell phone. Robert’s calls were a violation of the protective order against
him. He even called Amy during the few months he spent in jail.

“Each time he called my cell phone, I called the police, and they would file an order-for-protection
violation,” she says. “The Plymouth police department already had pre-filled-out police
reports because they knew they were going to have to come out and see me, because
I was going to call them to file an order-for-protection violation. They wouldn’t
have to fill out my name and address; they’d just fill in the time that he called
and the number that he called from.”

At some point, Amy said she’d simply had enough.
Ring-ring!

“I looked at my phone and I saw his number come in, and I pushed
talk
on my cell phone. And I think he was just as surprised as I was that I answered,”
she says. “I could hear he was there. I was so angry and filled with hate, but I actually
felt sorry for him, because I knew him as a person, and there is a legitimately good
side of him, and he’s had a horrible life as a child, which is not an excuse, but
he doesn’t know anything different. So I said, ‘I have forgiven you for what you did
to me and my kids, and you have no control over me anymore.’ There was dead silence,
and it felt like an eternity, and he hung up. And I have never heard from him since
then. When they know that they don’t have control, they don’t want you anymore.”

But Amy wanted a lot more. She had finally rid herself of Robert and had earned back
her kids. The counseling had helped her realize the depth of her battered psyche;
she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Amy wanted to be mentally and
physically healthy for her boys, so she began to implement what she already knew from
decades of experience.