2004 was a popular year for the Toyota 4Runner, with more than 114,000 units sold, most in Titanium Metallic, another name for silver. I spot the one I’m looking for from several blocks away, mentally checking a list of parts that confirm what I know as a whole:
towing package
running boards
alloy wheels
stock roof rack, never used
From a block away, I recognize the plates. Silhouette of the Rockies in green against a sky of white, with white text, instead of the more recent plates like mine—the Rockies white and etched with gray, green text, green background. Sometimes, I hear my children in the backseat, reading the numbers and letters out loud, recognizing whether the car we can’t stop watching belongs to their father. I didn’t mean to teach them to look for it.
They recognize his plate number after the many times we spotted him circling parking lots, pulling up next to us in traffic, his path too often synced with ours to be coincidence. There were times I reassured them by showing them the plate near us wasn’t his. I’ve told myself they don’t notice when I press my tongue against the back of my teeth, breath heavy in my chest, willing a calm I don’t feel.
It’s hard to look away, even when I know it’s the wrong one.
I watch the approach and turn, the slow at the light and steady at the wheel. Watch until it drives out of sight or I am first to turn, and still, my mirrors confirm what I knew the moment I spotted the car.
It’s my ex-husband, or it isn’t.
Our children saw, or they didn’t.
He recognized us, or couldn’t.
We’re safe.
Still, we are not safe.
The motor vehicle registration office can’t or won’t respond to my requests for information, such as the number of 2004 Toyota 4Runners registered in my state, county, and town. Dealerships have no interest in sharing sales information with me and I don’t share my wish for a feature on Google maps that would provide an icon for this specific car along my intended path of travel, suggesting alternate routes. Toyota has not called me back to answer my questions about a breakdown of sales per state or zip code. Neither the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration nor the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety can help me calculate the statistical probability of getting through the town we once shared without spotting this potential threat. I don’t need them to tell me my vehicle is safer than his or how likely I am to walk away from a collision. It shouldn’t matter.
113,999 aren’t him.
Vehicle registrations are public record and easily searchable, including physical address. In the database, there is a record of a name that used to be mine on the shared registration of a 2004 Toyota 4Runner, though the title has long been transferred to my ex-husband—the man who abused me and our children. As a survivor of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking, the registration of my current vehicle is confidential, protected under Colorado Statute (CRS 24-30-2108), which applies to the Colorado Address Confidentiality Program. This is one of thirty-six such programs in the country that provide a substitute legal address to victims of certain crimes to prevent offenders from using public records to locate them. As a participant, my physical address is not listed in directories or on my utility bills, not easily accessible to mailing lists or magazines. Many of my friends and family members don’t know where we live. Even pizza is delivered in someone else’s name.
In the game of “two truths and a lie” I could say: I feel safe on a daily basis; I have had five last names; I am a survivor of domestic violence and the color of my trauma is Titanium Metallic.
As a teenager, not long before I met the man who would become my abuser, I practiced writing my name to experiment with different signatures, to see how it paired with the name of another, or to imagine how it would look as an autograph. Now, I practice my name to make sure I’m writing the correct one. To make sure I don’t forget who I am supposed to be.
I kept my birth name almost six years. Given to me by my father; given up when my mom remarried and my dad adopted me, giving me his name. I kept it until the day I got married. My married name lasted almost six years before I let it go in the divorce instead choosing a last name associated with women in my family. Something I could call my own, but with a bit of history. A history removed from:
Did he ever threaten to kill you?
Did he ever say how he would do it?
Is there a protection order?
Is the protection order permanent?
Does he have access to weapons?
Did he ever use any of them on you?
Was substance abuse an issue?
Did he ever hurt or threaten your children?
Do you fear for your safety or the safety of your children?
To enter the address confidentiality program, I met with someone at the safe house where I once stayed with my children. As part of the application, I provided proof of his crimes against us—protection orders, disposition information, and threats he made. I described the rebound and shatter of glass and plastic, of guardrails hit while he punched me, of the method he said he would use to kill me, and the places he bruised. I showed her pictures of my daughter’s arms the night he hurt her because he was angry with me and police reports thick with black redactions. I showed her reports from Child Protective Services labeling me as a protective parent and statements of concern from Child and Family Investigators about his potential to do harm.
I answered the hardest questions.
With instructions to stray from family names and any possibilities he might easily guess, I chose my fifth last name—the stranger to whom all my mail is addressed, my car registered, and the name I must answer to when speaking to utility companies, repair technicians, and my new neighbors. The name I teach my children to use if their classmates ask their mother’s name.
It’s not every stoplight.
I might go an entire day without seeing a 4Runner. Then, several days or weeks in a row. This doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It means I look to make myself feel safer, but when I feel safe, I’m not looking. A phone call or letter will remind me how attached I once was to my name, the way identity frames my movement in a new city, where I am still finding my new safe places and deciding what name to give the barista. Some nights, I can’t look at the envelopes with their printed labels, the repackaged and forwarded correspondence sent to this version of myself, from a warehouse where I am a unit number. My mail stacks up, unopened, for days at a time. I wait until the kids are asleep to open each envelope containing multiple days’ worth of mail, so they don’t associate mail with a set jaw and shaky hand. I know each time a worker touches my name they could be saving my life. As a slight bonus, only first-class mail is forwarded, so I never receive junk mail. Who knew I would miss it?
Under the right circumstances, I can park next to or near a car similar to his, no matter its color. I can walk into the grocery store without mentally mapping cars in the lot, noting which details make it any car but his. On good nights, I sleep in my bed instead of on the couch.
We moved to our current city quickly and unexpectedly, so it was too late when I noticed my bedroom is the furthest from the doors, with the children’s rooms in between. On the nights when worry wins, I sleep on the couch, the first line of defense against the one promise he made that the children still believe—if they told me what he did to them, he would break into our home and kill me, so they would have to live with him. Once I start sleeping on the couch, it is hard to break the cycle, so I do it for weeks or months at a time before fighting my way back to the comfort of my bed. There are stories they still won’t tell me.
When I learned he’d fractured multiple bones in his second wife’s face while she was driving, it took me over a year to move back to my bed. The police report, which I couldn’t stop myself from reading, made clear his patterns remain the same. After she left him, the children and I once again received the force of his attentions. He tried to start arguments over email, threatened to seek custody of the children, manipulated money to try to force us to do without.
Our location, its confidentiality, the ache in my back from sleeping on the couch, and my fifth name all bought my children a voice. I remind myself of this when I wonder who I am now.
I am who I have always been—their protector.
He likes to call me mentally ill and paranoid in his emails, though he is the one who has given me countless reasons to be afraid. We both know the words “I would appreciate your cooperation” aren’t as innocent as they appear in his limited allowed contact. Now that he has lost control over me directly, as well as custody and decision-making regarding the children, he attempts to manipulate his financial reporting to avoid his responsibilities to them and their needs. A few years ago, a judge made it harder for him to jeopardize my child care due to nonpayment and shortly after, he was arrested for assaulting his new wife. By court order, he has not been allowed to see the children alone in 10 years and hasn’t seen them at all in eight. He retains the right to see them in therapeutic visitation because the system doesn’t afford the children the right not to see him. The last therapist cited safety reasons in her resignation letter, but refused to specify the threat. I know she wasn’t afraid of me or the children, and I remember her surprise when investigations and forensic interviews failed to exonerate him. It was clear she didn’t think she could keep us safe. I wonder what she knew.
As the time between visits grows, their night terrors and nightmares are increasingly rare, though they once filled the time we were supposed to be sleeping. Now, his reach extends our direction whenever he suggests he wants to go around court orders to send them an often-inappropriate gift through a third party, or when an envelope arrives in his handwriting with a new threat about seeking custody or reducing his financial obligations. The threat to their safety will feel present until they are legally old enough to assert their wishes to the court. When last asked by a child and family investigator appointed by the court after her father assaulted her, our daughter said she did not trust him to be safe with her and her brother. Many experts have agreed. His criminal record continues to grow—child abuse, felony forgery, driving under the influence, assault of his second wife—each new arrest pointing to an instability that keeps many of my nights sleepless and my days watching the rearview mirror.
There is a permanent protection order prohibiting him from coming within 90 feet of me. For children in our state, a protection order is considered “permanent” when it lasts 120 days. The one covering my children was renewed every 90 days for two and a half years before the courts dropped it, saying we could rely upon the parenting time order which says he has no decision making, no overnights, no contact other than with a therapist in the room. I have been unable to explain to my kids why I am protected by this piece of paper and they are not. On rare occasions, a motion requires me to review our file, which takes up the length of a lateral file cabinet drawer. It would be easier to forget, but I’m reminded that I didn’t imagine the extent of our abuse, and the documents are helpful when I have to retell our story. When the children are old enough and no longer need this protection, I hope they’ll burn the file. In legal proceedings, I’m often called by the name that used to be mine.
Domestic violence is often dismissed as a family crime, a misdemeanor enhancement to another charge. Legislators in our state voted to make the third conviction of domestic violence a felony, adding the “habitual offender” label, but domestic violence is underreported and inconsistently prosecuted. To have three convictions is a rarity, despite the cyclic nature of abuse, in part due to the reluctance of victims to report and the way they are treated when they do. Perpetrators are sentenced with ineffective therapy and deferred sentences that disappear from the record if enough time passes before an abuser is caught or reported again. Each minor sentence, deferral, and dismissal contributes to the reluctance of a victim to prosecute their abuser. We have to prove we are in danger, but little is done to keep perpetrators from having the opportunity to offend again. Mothers are forced to leave their children with men who have shown a pattern of violence they then spread to their children, and even after children are harmed, the rights of the perpetrator take precedence over the right of a child to be safe.
My protection order is only worth the ability of law enforcement to get there fast enough, take him away, and the willingness of our courts to keep him away. Despite multiple DV convictions and violations of protection orders held by myself and his current wife, as well as a child abuse conviction and DUI convictions, he has spent little time in jail. One of his DUI sentences led to more jail time than all of the times he assaulted me, his children, and his new wife, combined.
When looking at the list of lethality factors applied to domestic violence in a Department of Justice report, where any of the possibilities increase his likelihood to be lethal, all but one apply to my situation—the exception is that our children are biologically his. His second wife couldn’t say the same. Until they were divorced and she moved out of state, I worried reports of murder-suicides in their town would eventually bear their names. I worry the courts will do nothing to stop him until someone is dead. I wonder who I would be if I could stop looking over my shoulder.
His most recent arrest for domestic violence was so similar to some of my own assaults that her statement includes, verbatim, the very things he said to me while punching in a moving vehicle, moments before we hit a guardrail, veered off the road, almost drove off a bridge. The police report lists photos of blood spattered on the back seat, windshield, dash, and passenger door. Her assault happened in her vehicle, but he assaulted me in more than one moving vehicle in this manner. There are stains you can’t remove and even healed fractures sometimes ache.
Hypervigilance lives in the body.
My son’s teachers joke about mapping the stationary objects he has run into on the playground, but his therapist and I know that it is not that he fails to pay attention to the world around him. It is that he is paying so much attention to his environment, stationary objects warrant less notice than what is moving toward and away. I have spent years trying to help him get back into his body.
My daughter was five when her father shook her. She can still trace precisely the pattern of his fingers as he grabbed and shook, bruising her arms and ribs, throwing her into a chair as if her body was not her own. She once told me she could still see herself at five, standing at the end of the driveway, staring at his car, wondering if this would be the time he refused to take them home to me. When I hug her, I avoid touching her shoulders so I don’t have to watch her flinch. For similar reasons, we used the code “hug low” for years, so that I wouldn’t panic when my children reached to embrace me quickly.
Once the person who attempted to be the bridge to their relationship with their dad, I have now severed as many connections as possible, leaving only the written contact he’s allowed to have with me about the children and finances. Still, I feel his escalations in my stomach and neck, in moments I know something is wrong and can’t pinpoint why until I order a copy of his arrest record and find a new incident. Intuition is a powerful tool, but it pierces me first. Each new bit of information leaves me sore and shaken for days. I feel a responsibility to know as much as I can, for the sake of the children, in the event he tries to force his way back into the ability to hurt any or all of us. His violence is the best defense I have against him.
Sometimes, people tell me they’ve seen him in the town we used to share, driving, eating at a restaurant, buying groceries without looking over his shoulder. We had to leave the town I loved, the one where the kids and I have the broadest support system, to live where I’m less likely to run into him or those we know in common, so this normalcy is a stone I can’t swallow. I think of the meals he eats without ache, the errands run in simple paths without avoiding routine, not caring about location settings on his phone or carefully guarding who can tag him in photos and at events. I think of his name clearly written on the envelopes in his mailbox.
When my friends see his car, what I really want is for them to witness what has been stolen. To stare until it is out of sight. I want to say, look closely and you might find my hair under the passenger seat. My fingerprints inside the glove compartment. Remnants of my DNA in the spaces between the dash and the door. Titanium Metallic under my nails.
On nights I can’t sleep, I search for my real name online. Once satisfied that I can’t find it associated with my current location, sleep comes more easily. If I can’t find the trail that leads me home, neither can he.
Mandy L. Rose studied creative writing at Colorado State University and lives near the Rocky Mountains with her two children. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Pithead Chapel, and A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park. A disability activist and advocate for survivors of intimate partner violence and their children, she is currently working on a collection of essays. If you or someone you know is in an unsafe relationship, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support, assistance in creating a safety plan, and referrals to resources. Twitter: @Mroseisarose and Facebook: @MandyRoseWrites
Photo on Foter.com