Revisiting Maiden Cliff, 10 Years Later
TW: Domestic Violence
I don’t want to warn you, but I will.
Ten years ago, my dad called me, and I knew something was wrong. I ignored it for a student group meeting, but he called again. My stomach dropped, and I answered. My mom was in a hiking accident. We couldn’t get ahold of anyone else, but not to worry?
The next morning I called my uncle, my mom’s brother, Tom. He’d moved to Maine with my mom and my step-dad at the time, R**d. Tom was there with the ambulances, and he didn’t have the words to tell me himself. Instead, he said “Look at the news article. I’ll send it to you.” If you read that, knowing what’s coming, and you think it seems heartless or cowardly, you have no idea what shock is. How do you put that into words? How do you say aloud for the first time, “Your mom was almost murdered”?
He didn’t have to say it, though, because I knew immediately. I knew before I opened the link. I’d known the night before. I’d known for years. It was no accident. I called my college boyfriend and tried to explain, but he just kept saying “No.” No, your step-dad didn’t cause the “accident.” No that feeling you have is “just a feeling.” No, that’s “crazy.” For future reference, those responses aren’t helpful - don’t invalidate your girlfriend’s (or anyone else’s) lived experience.
R**d asked if he could marry my mom on the way to go sledding at the “backyard school.” You had to walk between the fences protecting the backyards on our street and a creek to get there. I remember wondering if he’d push me down the hill into the creek if I said no. What do you say as a fourteen-year-old by yourself in the suburban wilderness? I said “okay” or “sure” or…
My sister and I cried all night when we learned she’d said yes.
I can’t speak for my sister, but he made me feel uneasy, though it wasn’t grounded in anything concrete. I’m always trying to figure people out, and I think I saw that reflected in him. He wanted to understand us to use us though, to play us against one another.
He was very nice at first: taking us out to nice dinners, picking us up at school, getting my sister a cellphone when our dad said she was too young. But, like so many things, that cellphone was a tool to control her because he could take it away. Once, he threw out all her clothes for not cleaning her room. Eventually, he drove her away, and she lived with my dad most of the time.
I’ve been trying and failing to summarize all the little things and how they escalated into something much bigger. I think that’s in large part because not all these stories are mine to tell, but it is also really hard to tell you in a limited number of words how someone took an exemplary divorce (because I don’t think my sister and I ever once doubted that our parents cared not only for us but for each other) and turned it against our family. Ultimately, I don’t think it matters other than to say that it did happen. He did take four people struggling to find themselves, isolate them, and turn them against each other. Six people, really, if you include my grandpa and uncle, because I strongly believe they were victims too.
A lot of things shifted when my grandpa died in January 2010, and R**d took the money from his wallet for a final “Weller time,” which is what we all called my grandpa’s 3 pm trip to O’Neills to read the mail or newspaper over scotch. But the biggest and most important change was holding an estate sale and moving himself and my mom to Maine before my sister had graduated high school. In Maine, he had much more latitude, and he took full advantage of his ability to isolate and control my mom and her money.
I’m not sure if he ever loved my mom, but I know he loved her money, though perhaps I should say my grandpa’s money. How fortuitous when it became hers, and how cruel of her to take it away. That’s what she was going to do. My mom was going to divorce him. She’d had enough of his cheating, his lies, his wickedness.
He tried to kill her several times before the big one. There was a potential poisoning, when my mom called me vomiting and he talked me out of called an ambulance. He “fell” from the ladder to the loft in the garage, claiming he fainted, but my mom held on. He fainted another time and hit her on the head as he fell, though we’re pretty sure the only thing that fell was a rock.
On April 7th, 2011, R**d took my mom to a cafe in Rockland for lunch, which we now refer to as “The Last Supper,” and then to Mount Megunticook for a hike to Maiden’s Cliff. Legend has it a family was picnicking on the cliff when the wind blew the bonnet off the head of one of the daughters. She tried to catch it but fell 300 feet. Ironically, she survived the fall and was alive when the rescuers found her hours later. Unlike my mom, she ultimately succumbed to her injuries, and a cross now stands on the cliff to remember the girl.
As they hiked, R**d stopped several times to look at rocks and even put at least one in his backpack. He pulled it out later when they were along the cliffs and hit my mom over the head with it. He then pushed her off the cliff while she begged him not to, reminding him that she had children. She said he had this hardened, dead look in his eyes as he threw her off.
But my mom didn’t fall 300 feet, she landed on a ledge 20-30 feet down. She made a drop of another 20 feet on her own to try to escape R**d, who realized he screwed up and was coming after her. In his chase, he slipped and rolled by my mom. She asked him for the phone from his bag to call for help because hers was still on the trail, but he refused to give it to her and she didn’t want to approach him.
My mom hiked for three hours down Mount Megunticook with a punctured lung, broken ribs, a gash on her head, and numerous bruises. If she thought she wasn’t going to make it, she was going to write what he did in lipstick on a rock. She didn’t have to. She got to the road and was able to flag down a passing car.
My dad flew out to Bangor with us to see her two days later. We waited because my mom wanted my sister to take the ACT before we told her. I remember a lot of painful things from that trip: my mom’s guttural sobs when she woke up from a nap, the tube draining fluid from her lungs, being delayed and alone in the Philly airport. But what has always stood out the most from those days in Maine is the care my family has for each other.
I didn’t tell my friends or teachers what had happened or where I had gone - just that there had been a family emergency and I didn’t want to talk about it. But my friends and acquaintances in Kansas City learned from the news. A few people, including some of his former students, reached out. Another piece of advice: don’t tell a victim that you can’t believe this person would do something like that and/or fish around for information not in the news. Consequently, this is also the 10 year anniversary of the last time I’ve spoken to a few people.
In the months that followed, we were all interviewed by detectives. R**d was released from the hospital into custody and then released on bail. For some time he resided a couple of towns over in Rockland, and once we saw him at the Lobster Festival. He strode by us wearing that smug look he had. There were other sightings and false sightings. There were times the alarm went off and my mom and sister hid in the bathtub behind a locked door until the police came, and others where I screamed in the night and woke my roommates.
Three and a half years later, he was sentenced and I read my victim impact statement in court:
On April 7th, 2011, Reed tried to take away one of the most important things in my life: my mom. But before he attempted to murder her, in the years leading up to that day, I watched him beat her down verbally, slamming the rocks that are words into her skull day after day, night after night, until he finally picked up a real rock.
Daily, Reed showed my sister and I what a father-figure and a husband should not be, and on April 7th, Reed showed us what a man should not be. For the three and a half years since Reed tried to kill my mother, I have had nightmares that he was coming to get me, coming to get my sister, and coming to get my mother, to finish what he started. While he walked free by day, he chased me at night when I was in the depths of sleep. In so many dreams he tried to kill me, to kill my family. I have awakened screaming. I have awakened sobbing. And I have awakened in the midst of panic attacks, paralyzed by fear. Over the past three and a half years, I have lost countless hours of sleep. My roommates and boyfriend lost sleep when I woke them with my screams, my sobs, and my hyperventilation, eyes filled with panic. But now, Reed has been convicted of attempting to commit one of the worst crimes a father can commit against a daughter – trying to deprive her of the woman who carried her and raised her, a woman who is the epitome of kindness, a woman who I am proud to call my mother.
But now Reed no longer stalks me in my sleep. I no longer worry about what he is doing and if he will come for us, for my mom, again. He is behind bars, where he should remain so he can no longer hurt someone else, someone else’s family, like he has hurt us. Emotional or physical, he has caused irreparable damage to this family and our relationships with each other. But no more.
Today, I reflect on the pain he has caused me, caused these two wonderful women standing beside me, especially my mother, but tonight I will go to bed and sleep peacefully, knowing that Reed will no longer hurt us. I will wake tomorrow knowing I still have a mom.
In a lot of ways, it was a relief when he went to prison because I can tell that myself that man I saw while cycling was just some other old man with a turtle face, but if you know me, you also know I have a lot of mixed feelings about our prison system. Reforms or lack thereof aside, his imprisonment doesn’t change what he did to us. We have had to grapple with that individually, though I realize we are more fortunate than many. If anything, we have grown closer as a family, therapy is both affordable to us and de-stigmatized, and, most importantly, my mom survived. We all survived.
I read my impact statement for the first time since I read it aloud in September 2014. I’d like to say that my PTSD was cured that day and that I no longer scream in my sleep, that I no longer break into a cold sweat when I see someone who looks like him, that I feel safe. I’d love to say all those things, but I can’t. The one thing I can say, though, is that today I woke up knowing that I still have a mom.
A Resource
The National Domestic Violence Hotline
If your internet usage is monitored, you can also reach them at 800.799.SAFE (7233)