The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

Sandy stops at her mom's house to pick up some clothes, and there he is. He's hiding it, but he's angry. Angry she left him, angry she took the kids and went to the safe house. Red hot angry. They talk for a moment, and then she gets into the car, ready to go, and suddenly he is in the seat behind her, the knife a cold, sharp warning against her throat. Drive, he says. Bitch.

Hours pass.

Sandy's mom, Sharon, and sister Diane know something is wrong, so they get in the car and go - west past the farm fields, past Mike's old haunts, back and forth on the roads he traveled most, where he knew the street signs, because although Sandy had tried to teach him, he still couldn't read too well. Maybe he's holding Sandy captive till she says she'll come back, they think, maybe they're just holing up to talk, maybe they're making up. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

It is 6 a.m. and everybody knows what nobody's saying when Sandy's mom turns on the news. On the screen, at St. Mary's, a Trauma Hawk lands, depositing a stretcher, and on the stretcher is a woman, and before Sandy's mom can process the image, the awful truth of it, the phone rings.

The nurse says, We have your daughter.

The nurse says, She needs surgery.

The nurse says, She says she loves you, and please, please take care of the kids.

Sandy is 28, pretty, with the strong, broad features of her Scandinavian ancestors, luminous green eyes and light brown hair that picks up highlights.

Sometimes she colors it, and once you get to know her, you realize the color says something about how she is feeling: Her hair is a flat, dull brown when she has been depressed; it is a lighter, brighter shade on the weeks she is successful in keeping appointments with doctors and social workers; and on really fine days, after the children bring home good report cards or counseling has been particularly enlightening, it is a beautiful, soft shade of strawberry blond.

Sandy has had so many setbacks in life, so many secrets, you half expect her to pull the curtains and retreat, but withdrawal is not in her nature. She is at heart an extrovert who relishes her connections with the world; and despite all that has happened, or perhaps because of it, she can be uncommonly empathetic and generous, as if she would like to give to others all the security and comfort she has been deprived. If, for example, while driving to the store or the doctor's she happens to intersect with somebody carrying a white bucket to collect change for a good cause, especially one for children, she will give the solicitor not a few quarters but a fistful of dollars - then thank them.

Sandy's dream, before Mike took it, was to win a music scholarship to college. She still keeps a tattered Polaroid of herself singing a Gloria Estefan hit at her high school talent show. The auditorium was so dark that the picture is almost entirely black, except for Sandy, the star soloist, up on stage, arms spread wide, incandescent in a white dress in the last sweet time in her life.

Even now, if you walk past her apartment window, you might hear her deep, gutsy voice doing justice to a gospel tune, or coaching Lindsey through a Mariah Carey hit. Her oldest daughter doesn't always reach the high notes, and sometimes she forgets the words, but like Sandy, she has a voice full of promise.

"Take your time, baby," Sandy will say. "Be patient and you'll get it right one day."

Sandy's sister Betty loves to tell the story of how Sandy won a big dance contest sponsored by Easter Seals when she was only 7. When Betty mentions this to a reporter, to make sure she understands her sister had genuine talent - that she could sing and dance - Sandy buries her face in her hands, mortified.

"Stop!"

"C'mon, Mish," Betty says, calling her little sister by her childhood nickname. "You have to tell the good things about yourself, too. You can't just tell the bad."

"What are the good things?" Sandy says.

"Well," says Betty. "You are a good singer, and a good person. And you are a very good mother.

"But so much bad has happened to you, I think you forget to take any credit."

Sandra Olson was 15, a lovely high school sophomore who liked to study, when she met a 19-year-old Job Corps trainee named Mike Jones. It was Dec. 5, 1985.

It wasn't a date, exactly. Sandy had a friend who was seeing Mike's cousin, and one night they all went out. Sandy remembers two things about this meeting. The first is that she was glad her mom wasn't home, because Michael is black and her mother would never approve of an interracial relationship. The second is how sorry she felt for Mike once she got to know him, even just a little.

"We sat in the back seat and talked and talked. First it was the easy stuff - school, my hobbies, my favorite colors. But Michael came from a family that had experienced extreme poverty and violence. He told me in such detail about how his dad beat his mom - until she literally had to pile the kids on a bus and get out of town - that he just had me crying tears. I felt so sorry for him.

"He said he would call me the next day, and that night I went home and I was lying in bed   thinking, `I don't want to date this guy.' He had so many problems, I was praying he wouldn't like me. But the next day the phone rang, and it was Michael, and I just had this overwhelming feeling of - I don't know - pity."

It took some doing on Mike's part, but soon after, he and Sandy were an item. Mike was so attentive. He brought her flowers, movie tickets, a plastic red rose that lighted up - even a lobster tail from Red Lobster, where he had taken a job as a dish washer and moved up to prep cook. They went to concerts, and, because they loved coffee and conversation, to the doughnut shop down the street for the $6.99 steak-and-egg special. The romance was short on money, but Sandy thought it had a fairy tale quality.

"He was just the sweetest thing," she says. "Back then."

But then she got pregnant and things unraveled. Michael and his mother were thrilled at the news, Sandy recalls, and went out right away to look for cribs; but her own mother and sister saw things differently. Mike was too domineering, they said. Sandy, sweet 16, was too young. So her sister Betty drove her to a clinic, and, sobbing, Sandy had an abortion.

Afterward, at her family's urging, she hopped a plane to her old hometown in upstate New York, to stay with her sister Diane.  Everybody she knew said better to end things now, make a clean break, vanish until he forgets you, but Sandy had a terrible feeling.

Once before she had tried to break up with Mike, to concentrate on her schoolwork, and he had protested by dropping to his knees in the middle of the street, vowing to kill himself. So what would he do now that she had had an abortion and cleared out of town?

Soon enough, she had her answer.

He shot himself in the stomach.

"It messed up all his intestines," Sandy says. "And instantly this became my fault, in Michael's mind, and in mine. I felt so guilty I took an extreme measure - I got back together with him, and I threw away my birth control. I know how crazy this sounds now, but back then, I didn't care what my family thought; to make everything right, I was going to have his baby.

"And that's exactly what I did - quit school, find a job, get pregnant."

The first time he hit her? My God, Sandy says, you don't forget something like that. You keep it on instant replay in your head.

She had just returned from the grocery and was running through their Lake Park townhouse calling Mike's name, so he could help unload bags.

"I found him in the upstairs bathroom with a Cool Whip bowl full of these little white things. He had a can and had scrunched it down and made it into a pipe. Well, Mike used to smoke reefer, but this stuff was new to me. So I said, `Is that drugs?' And he said, `Crack.' He told me to go downstairs and start cooking. Later, when he still didn't come out, I ran back upstairs and opened the bathroom door, and I took the bowl and said, `I'm throwing this in the toilet.' He got mad. Slapped me. Pushed me. I rolled down the stairs, and then he went back and did his drugs.

"And that was how it all started."

That is how it always starts, with a first slap or punch, then another, and another. And so it goes for Sandy, in her 18th year.

Every morning, to try to put him in a good mood, or at least a better one, she tucks a napkin under his neck and serves up bacon, eggs, grits, pancakes, biscuits, sausage - then gets the juice thrown in her face because it isn't chilled. Nights he smashes dirty plates on the kitchen floor. There are many accusations - where have you been? Are you cheating on me? No. No, no, no, no. It doesn't matter. He's hitting her anyway.

Pregnant with her first child, she runs. Her mom says, "Baby, come home," and she does. But the monster knows where she is all the time. He follows her to the store, the bus stop, the doctor's office. She's so scared she sleeps at the foot of her mother's bed, with a machete. Her stepdad has an ax.

She asks for help, and the police say get a restraining order, so they can arrest him when he comes close - but Mike's a magician, good at disappearing. Sandy swears to the ominous, off-the-record remarks of one officer, a woman: "Honey, if he comes for you, the only sure thing you can do is shoot him, then drag him in the house and make it look like a break-in. Because this kind of man, he doesn't give up until he gets what he wants."

Once he disappears for seven months, only to turn up at her baby-sitting job. Come back to me, he says, or I'll kill your family, one by one. Don't hide from me, he says, because I'll find you. And she believes him, so, yes, she goes back. He lays off, for a while. Then one day she makes the wrong kind of Kool Aid, and the next thing she knows she's flying across the dining room with a bloody nose.

It goes on like this. Except when she's pregnant with her younger children. He wants a boy and she's afraid of what he will do if she says no, so they have Mikey. He forces her to have sex, and her birth control fails, so they have Courtney. When she's pregnant, he's Superdad - and this is deceiving. For a while, she has hope.

And he finds God. They go to church. Four times a week they're bowing their heads in the pew, and she's praying, Lord, please make things different, but afterward, back home, he hits her. Once he calls her a devil in front of the whole congregation, and she runs out of church to weep on the front steps. A deacon counsels him, but it doesn't sink in.

It gets worse.

He hurls a coffee table at her, and the glass shatters in glittery pools around the children's feet. He speeds down Federal Highway, calling her names, slams the brakes so hard Lindsey flies from her safety seat into the dashboard. In the driveway one day, when she is sick with a kidney infection and confined to a wheelchair, he tries to run over her with his car.

Her youngest baby is on her lap. She thinks, "This is it." She thinks, "No more."

A few days later, she drops him at his tree-trimming job and kisses him on the cheek, so he won't suspect. And then she is flying down I-95, her pink nightgown fluttering in the breeze.