The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

"I keep all my little horrors in this suitcase," Sandra Manning says in the dim light of her living room.

The American Tourister - bright red and solid - keeps everything locked up tight. She flips it open, reaches in.

"Here," she says, matter-of-factly, fingering a faded Polaroid, "is the monster."    He is a handsome man, with mahogany skin and a big white smile, and at the moment Sandy snapped the photo, he was perched on the edge of a park fountain, hugging his three small children. The very image, Sandy says, of "a regular guy."

Except now, in the American Tourister, is another picture - the regular guy's booking mug. No big white smile, just two glassy eyes confronting the police camera.  Then there's more. Tucked beneath the mug shot are the police reports, which detail exactly what he did to her, on the winter afternoon she almost died.

Beneath the police reports are the court papers, which assign Sandy Manning's monster to a brief prison term - over, it seemed to her, before the ink dried on the tabloid stories.

And here is a picture of Sandy, in her hospital bed, oxygen tubes curling up to her nose, a blue pillow resting lightly across her chest, covering the bandages that bind the holes her husband made when he stabbed her over and over in the marsh beyond the railroad tracks way out on the Beeline Highway.

The stab wounds healed.

That was the easy part.

Sandy:

"My children, my babies, they're everything to me. They have been through so many traumas in their short lives. One day life was one way, and then it was just total upheaval.

"Lindsey's 9, the oldest, she saw the most violence, so she carries the most pain. She still dreams her father's going to stab me, shoot me. I was in the tub one night and she came in, sat down on the toilet seat, said, `Mommy, what will we do if Daddy Mike kills you?' And I told her, `Only thing we can do is pray, baby,' so that's what we did, right there on the bathroom floor.

"Mikey's 7, looks just like his daddy. When he started kindergarten, he was real moody. Lately, he's been worse. One night we were lying on the couch and he kept holding his breath, putting the covers over his head, saying he didn't want to live in this world, that it was too painful. Mikey's counselor thinks the night terrors are tied in with the fear he's going to grow up like his father. Mikey has told him, why does he have to have the same name as the murderer?

"Courtney's the youngest, 6. She's very withdrawn. Courtney will not talk to you. I mean, she will not talk to you. She was not even a year old when all this happened, but I feel like the after-effects have gotten to her.

"My kids, they're angry because they don't have normalcy like other kids do, not by a long shot. And they worry just as much as I do that he's going to come back. One time Lindsey thought she saw him at the Texaco and she ran home screaming, `Mommy! Mommy! I think I saw Daddy Mike!' She just freaked out. I know just how she feels because sometimes I think I see him, too."

There is no simple way to explain what happened.

Sometimes, in the shorthand people use when they have talked about something too many times, Sandy will say, in a single breath, to dispense with it: "My husband kidnapped me and stabbed me and tortured me and I almost died and God knows why I didn't." And unless you already know the story - perhaps you opened the morning paper six years ago and saw the headline, or watched the TV news accounts - you think surely she must be exaggerating. Because who on Earth could survive all that?

Other times, if she's in an upbeat mood and doesn't want to bring herself down, Sandy will refer to "The Incident," pause a bit for emphasis, and let it go at that. Only the very curious will inquire further.

To really understand what happened to Sandy Manning you would have to know 100 little things:

That one morning after a weekend of domestic abuse, she finally got up her nerve to flee - straight down Interstate 95 in her pink nightgown with nothing but her three groggy children and the promise of shelter in a safe house.

That a few weeks later, while living an underground life, she went to court in the morning to renew a restraining order against her husband, and that very afternoon he abducted her at knifepoint.

That the restraining order was on the front seat of the old green Chrysler when he held the butcher knife to her throat and ordered her to drive, north and west through Palm Beach County, toward nowhere.

That when they crossed the long, high bridge on the Beeline where she could see the tree tops blowing in the wind like unruly mops of hair, she thought about jumping out, but he said drive faster, Bitch - and she fought back tears as her chance disappeared in the rearview mirror.

That eventually they parked on a lonely stretch of road and he dragged her across the railroad tracks, and it was here that he stabbed her and held her face down in the brackish water and she said the Lord is my shepherd until her mind went numb.

That after he stabbed her, she pulled the knife from the spot near her heart and nearly sliced her fingers off, and still today she can't use her right hand to pick up a pencil.

That afterward he dragged her back to the car, where he drank Pepsi, and smoked Marlboro reds.

That he wasn't done.

That he beat her with a tire iron, picked her up and kissed her on the forehead. "I love you," he said.

That when the cops came, he blamed the crime on two masked men.

That throughout all of this - for 17 ungodly hours - Sandy Manning felt herself slipping away. But then her three children would visit some small, still-alive place in the back of her mind, and she would tell herself, again and again, taking up a mantra, "Sandy, don't you dare die. Sandy don't you dare die."

But even if you knew 100 little things, you still would not know the whole story, or even the most important part. Because after The Incident there was an investigation, and after the investigation there was a plea bargain, and after the plea bargain there was a brief prison sentence, and after the prison sentence Mike Jones went free, but the woman who had been his wife did not.

After The Incident, Sandy Manning wasn't Sandy Manning anymore, she was somebody else. Somebody who heard the monster's voice in her head. Somebody who hid in the bathtub every time a floorboard creaked. Somebody who three years later still could not chop fresh vegetables for her children's dinner, because chopping fresh vegetables means picking up a knife.

Maybe you've seen Sandy Manning. She is the woman staring blankly at the cereal boxes in the grocery store; the incapacitated soul in the welfare office trying to string together enough benefits to keep the lights on in her small, dim apartment; the weekly regular at group therapy, looking for magic answers when of course there are none.

She is the woman who drops out of the work force so he can't find her, then fights her way back. The woman who swallows too many pills and has her stomach pumped, and who in despair practices holding a revolver to her temple. The woman who wants to clear out of town because she's terrified - and who wants to stay put because she has a right to.

"I'll be looking over my shoulder forever," Sandy Manning says. "Because that day he hurt me, he killed me."

Dec. 10, 1992

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.

Dec. 11, 1992

Sandy is covered in blood and mud, and a tangle of vines from the bog plugs the hole in her chest, and it is just like this, a creature half alive, that she rises from the muck at the Tri-Gas plant, on the Beeline Highway near Jupiter.

The place is so quiet, so damn deserted, a rescue seems impossible - but suddenly out of nowhere in the mist of the dawn, two early shift workers appear at the gate. Mike says, "Hey, fellas, call a tow truck, I'm stuck in the mud." But they're not stupid, so they call the sheriff, too.

And Sandy hangs on. Hangs on until the cops come, and the ambulance, and the Trauma Hawk. Hangs on until the hospital, where a detective leans low over her stretcher, and - safe at last, if you can call it that - she says in a voice surprisingly strong: Forget about two masked men. My husband did this. His name is Michael Anthony Jones.

There are 12 stab wounds in all, scattered like some sick connect-the-dots game across her stomach, her chest, her upper arms, her ears. Her hands are like mincemeat where she grabbed the butcher knife, and the fingers on her right hand flop around like a marionette's. The knife pierced her lung and her breath comes in jagged little spurts.

When Sandy asks the doctor if she will live, he looks a long time at her, bandaged like a mummy and lost in a jungle of plastic tubing, and very softly, he says, "Honey, you should have been dead 16 hours ago."

On Oct. 28, 1993, in Courtroom 315 of the Palm Beach County Courthouse, Mike Jones pleaded guilty to attempted first degree murder and false imprisonment.

The man who did the crime and then confessed to it made a speech:

"I have been searching myself, wondering why things happened the way it did.

"I am not a person of violence.

"I have got plenty of love in my heart."

He got eight years.

Afterward, Sandy wondered aloud if that was how long she had to live.

Sandy:

"After The Incident, I held up real good. I was in this support group for battered women, and I told them my whole story. People thought, `Oh, this girl is wonderful!' I was like a role model for people who were going to survive.

"And then, Michael plea bargained, and I just lost it. What happened was, I met with the prosecutor and she handed me the doctor's reports on Michael, which explained how upset he was about the abortion and me leaving for the women's shelter and taking the kids. The gist was that he was insane at the time he did this to me. So the idea was, we go to trial, he might get off by reason of insanity, and if we go for the plea, then at least we keep him in the system for his prison term, and then 15 years' probation. So I had 24 hours to decide, and I took the plea.

"And then, after Mike went to prison, I just broke down. I started hearing his voice in my head, and one day I flipped out on Lindsey. She was yelling at me about something, and I got it in my head she was her father. I put my hand over her mouth and nose and I didn't let go. Her eyes started fluttering, and then I came to and realized this was my daughter I was trying to kill.

"I wound up at St. Mary's. Three weeks of intense therapy. One hundred different medications. They couldn't tell me if I'd ever be well, but I took the medicine and I saw a therapist, and I just kept going.

"And then one day, at group, this old lady started talking about how her husband had thrown her against the wall and something in me just clicked. Because this woman reminded me of my grandmother, and here somebody was beating the hell out of her, and I just thought, `God, does it ever end?'

"Right then, I left the meeting, screaming, and I went to the water fountain. I had two bottles of pills with me, and I opened them up and I took them all. I just wanted it to be over, all the violence. I wanted out. Waking up in the hospital and realizing I hadn't been successful - that I hadn't killed myself - that was just the worst feeling in the world.

"And you know what?

"Here's the funny thing.

"This whole time, I'm doing the talk shows.

"Because right around this time, the Nicole Simpson case broke, and O.J. was the suspect, and suddenly domestic violence was this really hot topic.

"I went on Geraldo and Montel, and they said I had a real good story."

There is a name for Sandy's condition. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She was propped up in a psychiatric ward when she got the diagnosis. Nightmares. Hallucinations. Anxiety attacks. Depression. Flashbacks. Panic. Numbness. It all fit.

Most people think of the post-trauma illness as a wartime affliction, but it can be triggered by any traumatic event: rape, torture, child abuse, a hurricane, a flood. Or, as too many women can testify, near-death at the hands of the men they married.

But when Sandy got the diagnosis, she thought the wartime explanation might be the best, after all. Hadn't she just been through a war? Wasn't the Beeline her battlefield?

Roy Anderson, who has 20 years' experience as a case manager at the 45th Street Mental Health Center in West Palm Beach, tried to help Sandy put the fragments of her life together in 1994, when she was living in a part of town where drug shootings are not just something you read about. He remembers how smart she seemed - and how scared.

Of what had happened.

Of what might.

Sure, Mike Jones had an eight-year sentence - but that was just on paper. In real life, he would be out before her youngest baby finished kindergarten. Then what would she do?

"Sandy was having visual terrors of being stabbed," Anderson says. "In layman's terms, she was having flashbacks. She was absolutely terrified. When something like this happens, if you don't get help, you wind up like the Vietnam vet who disappears into the mountains and fights the war for the rest of his life."

It is an irreconcilable misery to be married to the man who almost killed you, and so, while Mike Jones was in jail awaiting trial, Sandy did the only logical thing. Divorced him.

By this time, she had found somebody else. You might even say Mike Jones introduced them.

It was a few months before The Incident, and Mike had just dropped off Sandy at her job with an answering service in Riviera Beach, where she worked triple shifts to pay their rent. In the parking lot, they fought. She was still sniffling when she sat down at her desk - with a black eye - and the first call came in. Something about a leaky sink. Please beep Jerry Manning.

When Jerry called back, Sandy tried to deliver the leaky-sink message, but she was sobbing too hard.

Jerry had a soft, deep voice.

"What's wrong, ma'am?"

So she told him. The whole unbearable story.

"Ohmigod, honey," he said, "you sound like a real nice lady. You got to get out."

They met for the first time three months later, after the   Trauma Hawk deposited Sandy's ravaged body at St. Mary's. When she opened her eyes after surgery, she saw Jerry, standing over her bed with a teddy bear, no longer just a soft-deep voice on the phone.

Sandy thought getting married and buying a sweet little house together and setting up shop as a blended family, his kids, hers, might help her start over in life, but she was mistaken.

It was 1996 when they said their vows - and not too much later when they broke up.

Jerry Manning tried, but he stepped into a crowded marriage.

Jerry. Sandy. And her monster.

It is high noon on a beautiful autumn day in 1997, and Sandy has just washed her hair and put on a pretty gray shorts set for an emergency meeting with the principal and teachers at her children's elementary school.

The emergency is, her ex-husband is about to go free.

Mike Jones' travels through the prison system were entirely typical - up to a point. He served 321 days in the county jail, followed by three years in prison, and then, because Florida's prisons were crowded and one way to empty them was to let inmates out early, he was all set to walk out of his prison digs up near the Georgia line - a bus ticket south tucked in his pocket - when there was a hitch.

He had no place to go.

No job.

No plan.

The people in charge of monitoring his 15-year probationary term didn't want him landing on Sandy's doorstep - in a letter to a judge, a Department of Corrections administrator noted that Sandy was "in extreme fear for her life and the safety of her children" - so they took the unusual step of having him assigned to a probation and restitution center in Central Florida for a year.

Now, the year is up.

Sandy plops down in the principal's office. Fiddles with her purse straps.

"What if he tries to take the kids?" she asks.

The principal raises her eyebrows.

"What if he disguises himself?"

The principal jots a note.

"What if he has a gun?"

It's not just her children's physical safety Sandy worries about. Lately her kids have been doing well in school, but Sandy remembers what happened this time last year, when Mike's prison term expired, before the judge sent him to the probation center: Mikey stopped focusing on his schoolwork and started obsessing about the safety of his family. A worried old man at the age of 6.

"I'm afraid for my mom," he told his teacher then, and looking into his small, round face, she knew right away his mom wasn't the only one he was scared for.

The principal pulls up her chair, touches Sandy's arm.

The school, she says, will do everything it can to make sure her kids are safe. And she and the teachers will get them extra counseling.

Sandy smiles. But under the table, her knees are shaking.

Nobody says it, but everybody's thinking it:

What about Sandy? Who's helping Sandy?

November 1997

What is fear, undiluted, uncontrollable fear?

It is the phone ringing and a voice you can't place hissing, "Gonna getcha, gonna getcha." It is a stranger outside your house, inexplicably snapping a picture. It is your ex-husband's relatives finding your apartment, dropping by for the first time in years, saying, casually, "Just want to see how you're doing."

Here's how you're doing: A stranger cuts through your yard, you hide in the tub. A palm frond tickles the window, you punch 911. You pack your kids off to grandma's house, then shake like a leaf alone in your bed. You come across his mug shot, and suddenly he's in the room. You think you're safe working at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant - who possibly could find you there? - and then your boss gets a call from a stranger, asking too many questions about you.

You say his name, your scars itch.

You go to the benefits office, the lady says, "Why not file for child support?" You say no because you can just see his face the day he opens his paycheck and it's short. You can hear him mutter, Bitch.

You move again. Change your phone again. Call the county clerk's office, ask to seal your address. Use an alias. Hand out his picture. You check with the cops, the probation officer, the courthouse. You know what everybody says? "Get a restraining order." This seems so preposterous you laugh. You tell your kids, "Don't walk alone, not even down the block." Tell your mom, "If anything happens to me, I want you to sue the whole damn state."

And then.

He gets out.

And you draw the blinds and lock yourself in.

Mikey's worksheet:

During a fight, what can you do to protect yourself?

lockdoor hide

Who can you call to help?

cops

Make a plan: When I see:

Micke call 911

"Read it, Mom," the kids say. "Read us the story. Read it so we know what happened. What really happened."

The newspaper clipping is titled "The Woman Who Wouldn't Die," and Sandy keeps it pinned to the back of her bedroom door, so that, in her lowest moments, when she undresses and sees her scars - shining like fresh white wounds - she can remind herself that she's tough, that she survived. That headline is her Purple Heart.

Read it, Mom. They already know the rough outline, of course, but an outline is a lusterless substitute for a story in its flesh, and they know this, too.

Did he really hurt you? Why can't we be a family anymore? Her babies are standing shoulder to shoulder like little soldiers by the bedroom door, and they are so insistent, so certain, so tormented, that she gives in. But she is a careful censor, careful about what she leaves out, about how she delivers the truth of what their daddy did.

When she finishes, Courtney is crying, and the corners of Mikey's mouth turn down, the way they do when a math problem is too hard, or a vocabulary word stumps him.

But Lindsey, the oldest, stands perfectly still, then draws an arm around her brother.

Lindsey is an accelerated reader.

And she has been in mother's bedroom many times before.

Sandy is sitting on her bed, wearing purple, because purple will hide the blood.

She has a gun.

She puts it to her temple, then under her chin, practicing different positions.

Lindsey needs help in math.

Mikey's so moody.

Courtney climbs onto my lap when she's sad.

Under her chin. To her temple.

It is perhaps five minutes, but feels much longer than that, when Sandy tiptoes across the hall in the middle of the night to check on the children.

The next morning, she pours a cup of coffee and three bowls of Fruit Loops, and everybody comes running for breakfast, just like always.

"So what about your night terrors, Little Man?" the pretty lady counselor says.

Mikey looks at her with big wet eyes.

"They're pretty scary, huh?"

"Yep."

"How 'bout we make a picture of them?"

"OK."

"After the park?"

"OK."

"Do you want to punch the balloon next time?"

"Yeah."

It feels good to punch a balloon when you're angry.

It is a Saturday morning, and the pretty lady named Zoe is trying to find the key to unlock Mikey. She and her partner, Matt, are from the Children's Home Society, a new program called the Child Witness to Violence Project, which helps youngsters who have seen far too much of what they should not see at all.

Matt Anderson and Zoe Costello first knocked on Sandy's door the week Mike Jones went free, and they have been back many times since to assist Sandy in practical ways - doctors' appointments, shopping, parenting techniques - but mostly, they listen. To all the stuff she and the kids don't usually talk about. "All the dark spots," Sandy says. Sandy's dark spots go back to childhood, when she was raped by a relative. "I learned early," she tells Matt, "how to be a victim."

Talking helps.

Matt asks Sandy to sign a contract: If she is thinking about hurting herself, she is supposed to call right away.

He asks her to keep a diary, and after a while she stops looking over her shoulder to see if anybody is snooping when she writes, on a bad day, "God, if you can hear me, please help!"

He asks her to keep a daily agenda. Her whole day is mapped out, from 6 a.m., when she gets up to make coffee, until 8:30 p.m., when Lindsey goes to bed. In between, she reads the paper, exercises (after The Incident, her weight ballooned), cleans the house, helps with homework, cooks the dinner, bathes the kids, slides in a tape and out-Mariahs Mariah Carey.

Her last assignment, right before bed, is to look in the mirror and repeat a sentence:

"I, Sandy Manning, am a good person, and I'm going to be OK."

On good days, she almost believes it.

It is afternoon, a clean, blue, spring day, and Sandy is scrubbing kitchen counters with the window open, a breeze fluttering in. She has freshly painted nails, a pretty blue dress and beautiful strawberry blond hair.

Life is looking up. Just recently, she moved her family into a cheerful new apartment and decorated it with throw rugs and family photos and banners from her favorite team, the Cowboys (cowboys, you know, are tough). On the kitchen table there is a boom box, which means that Sandy never does dishes without LeAnn Rimes singing How Do I Live as back-up.

Sandy likes to think of the apartment as the place she and the kids will start fresh, put all the junk behind them and live - dare she say it? - a more or less normal life. As if that's possible.

Mike Jones, free now for nearly half a year, is living in Lakeland, where, Sandy hears, he is working at a restaurant and reporting regularly to his probation officer. When she feels jittery, she pulls out the court papers and checks the terms of his 15-year probation, forbidding him from having contact with her or her children.

In the court file, she knows, there is also a note from Judge Roger B. Colton of the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit that states that Mike "should serve his probationary period outside of Palm Beach County and/or in an area other than where the victim in this case resides."

This is a comfort - but not a guarantee.

Sandy looks out the window, ticks off recent developments: Mikey's night terrors are worse. Lindsey still cries a lot. Sandy still hides in the tub.

But some good things have happened, too, and in Sandy's mind these are worth remarking upon, because it has been a very long time since she has been able to list so many.

Sandy took all the kids to Kmart, and right there in the middle of the aisle, Lindsey crossed her arms and said, "We're not leaving, Mom, until you buy yourself something nice," and that is how Sandy got her new pajamas.

Courtney got student of the month, and Sandy posted the certificate on the fridge.

Matt took Sandy to sit for a practice exam to earn her GED, and she couldn't believe it but she did really well.

And here's some news. Sandy heard it through the grapevine, confirmed it with a probation officer. Mike Jones met somebody, got serious fast - and just got married.

When Nancy Ham, 10th Circuit administrator for the Department of Corrections, asks Mike if he will talk to a reporter for a story about Sandy, he declines.

"He mentioned that he doesn't want to cause any more pain and confusion for his children," Ham says.

Sandy pauses a long time when she hears this.

"That would be great," she finally says. "If it's true."

Sunday. Dead summer. She sees him.

He is backing a white van into his cousin's driveway, a few blocks from her apartment, and when she passes by on her way to a manicure, God as her witness, he leans out and waves.

It's Mike all right, she tells herself.

She recognizes his smile.

It's Mike.

She's 100 percent certain.

It's Mike.

Isn't it?

Sandy Manning floors it, and after she adjusts the rearview mirror, she takes a good long look back.

Nov. 7, 1998

On the Saturday morning Sandy Manning left Florida, she packed six worn suitcases and three pillows for the kids, and she said her goodbyes on the phone and in her sister's living room, and if she cried once she cried a dozen times. And then she loaded everybody up in a little gray station wagon for the ride to the Amtrak station, where in the few minutes she had while waiting for the Silver Service she opened up the newspaper and checked her horoscope.

It said: "Let go."

She had whispered about the plan for days, weeks, months. For a long time, nobody thought she was serious; after all, she had left town once before, a few years ago, only to come back a short time later. So saying a thing and doing it are two different enterprises, as Sandy Manning will tell you. But she will tell you, too, that sometimes you have to do a thing, even if you're not absolutely positive it is the right thing, because when you examine your options you realize you have no other choice.

So she had thought it all out. She had her priorities. And her first priority was not to run into Mike Jones on her way to a nail appointment. Or at the Texaco. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Her first priority was not to run into him at all.

And so on Halloween night, Sandy's family threw her a going-away party at a karaoke joint, and since Sandy is a woman who appreciates symbolism, she sang the old Gladys Knight hit about leaving on a midnight train to Georgia. And right then, everyone knew her departure was a sure thing, sure and true.

Where she went, that's a secret. Just say it's a place far, far away. A place where she has people who care about her and the prospect of a good job. A place where she will live in a nice house in a safe neighborhood, and the kids will have their own bedrooms, freshly painted in their favorite colors, and out back there will be a trampoline to jump on before they do their homework.

On the Saturday Sandy left - one year and a day after Mike Jones went free - her train stopped in a Central Florida town where the sun cut dappled patterns on the cobblestone as she and her children walked toward Pizza Hut for one last celebration. If you are going to do a thing, Sandy figured, it is best to do it right. So she put a dollar in the jukebox, and Tracy Chapman belted out Give me one reason to stay here. And everybody thought the pizza tasted so, so good.

After that they were on the train again. The kids pressed their faces against the glass and smiled at the glittery night sky.

"We're on our way, babies," Sandy said.

And when in the mist of the dawn the train whisked across the state line, carrying them up and away, she sank to her knees on the cold, rattling floor, unfolded a note she had written to God, and prayed.