Terror To Last A Damaged Lifetime

During the first week of the O.J. trial, I didn’t expect to be sitting in a stranger’s kitchen, listening to tales of abuse from a woman whose scars curl like snakes where her ex-husband wounded her.

There was no way to predict that a friend would tell me about this “nice lady” she knew who’d recently revealed that she and her children had been in hiding for years.

The woman, my friend said, wanted to tell others that “nobody has to stay in an abusive relationship.”

That explains how I came to be sitting in the woman’s home. What it doesn’t explain is her terror, which is so palpable it seems to pulse from her in thick waves. And it doesn’t quite explain the effect of her story - which in some ways is very different from that of the wealthy celebrity wife who was slain with a friend in Los Angeles. Hearing it made attorney Johnnie Cochran’s masterful description of O.J. as a repentant husband sound very different.

I knew that wasn’t fair. O.J. must be judged by his actions only, and Cochran raised valid points and unanswered questions. My encounter with the woman only underscores the obvious:

How things look to you depends on where you’re sitting. Arriving at her home, I found the woman sitting on the floor, drawing pictures with a 2-yearold child whom she was baby-sitting.

Child care has been her salvation. Housing, feeding and focusing on her own school-age children keeps her going. Caring for other people’s kids pays the bills.

The woman explains that she can’t reveal her name, how many children she has, where she lives or any other identifying detail.

You wonder why she bothers. Because over and over, she says she “knows” he will find her.

He started hitting her even before their decade-long marriage, she says, back when she was a teenager.

“I was young, and stupid, to be honest,” she says. “You think that’s part of love - having a guy show jealousy.”

It got worse after they married. He pushed her down stairs, slammed her into walls, perpetrated a panoply of abuse that’s neatly typed in the restraining order that she keeps with her children’s custody papers.

Her husband always apologized. She always forgave him. But each incident added to an edifice of fear that now seems impossible to dismantle.

“One day, I will open my door and he will be out there,” she says. “I don’t care where I go … I can’t forget. Every time I look in the mirror, I see the scars.”

She got them one summer day when he attacked her so brutally that she ended up in the hospital for weeks. She recalls the hospital stay as one of the few times when she had no fear. “I knew I was going to die, so it didn’t matter.”

She didn’t die, so she got to see her husband in the hospital - sobbing, professing love. “Can you believe that?” she asks.

Not any more than I can believe that she didn’t press charges, didn’t even leave him.

She shakes her head. “I beat myself up for being so stupid. … I didn’t press charges because he said, `I love you. I will take care of you.’ Plus, I was told the police had enough to do it without me. … But they threw the case out of court.”

One day, finally, she says, “I got tired. … He hadn’t touched me. But I knew there had to be something better.” When she left home, she says, “I had $23 and my children.”

With the help of a shelter, she found her first job and a place to live. Slowly, she increased her belongings from one donated mattress to a houseful of modest furniture.

Looking at her life, at her polite and happy children, she tells herself, “You haven’t done so bad.”

Now if she could just get him out of her head. She lies awake in bed, jumping at every creak. Walking down the street means constantly turning, searching. The only place she feels protected is in church, “where I say, `God didn’t bring you this far to leave you.”’

She wants to tell that to other abused women who say, “I don’t have money,” or, “I have no job.”

“I left. … It can be done.”

Seeing all that this dignified woman has accomplished, all the achievements fear won’t let her enjoy, I tell her that over the years her abuser may have forgotten her. He may have remarried or landed in jail. He may even have died.

Her look tells me I haven’t a clue, no matter where I’m sitting.

“Even if he was dead,” she says, “I still wouldn’t feel safe.”