Page 4 of Guarded By the Gargoyle

Despite its name, Cohen College Prep or CCP wasn’t great at getting anyone ready for higher education. It was, in fact, a pretty rough place with metal detectors at every door and teachers that were dead behind the eyes from all the violence they’d witnessed. I felt like the luckiest girl alive when Carlo turned his attention to me and offered me his protection.

I wasn’t feeling quite so lucky after we graduated, went to college, and got married. The minute I said, “I do” the abuse started. It was the beginning of a long, miserable chapter in my life that I was still healing from. For a time, I had become convinced it would end in my death as Carlo got more and more violent.

Yes, I became one ofthosewomen—I wore long sleeves to hide the bruises on my arms and sunglasses even on cloudy days to disguise my black eyes. I tried to pretend that nothing waswrong—both to myself and to everyone around me—but Pop-pop saw through my deception.

“Willow my love,” he said sorrowfully. “He’s no good for you, this football boy. He’s hurting you all the time!”

“I’m fine, Pop-pop,” I mumbled, trying to smile. Inside I was aching though. At that point the abuse had been going on for years and I was used to it—resigned to it. I was numb because I thought I would never get away.

Lots of people wonder why abused women stay with their abusers—why they don’t leave immediately. Why they leave and go back again and again to the same, awful situation.

The reason is complicated and complex. A messy mixture of love and hate and emotional manipulation and betrayal that sucks you in like a spider’s web and keeps you from ever quite getting free.

At first, Carlo would cry after he hit me. He would beg for forgiveness—bring me flowers and take me on dates to fancy restaurants—ones with low lighting where the makeup hiding my bruises wouldn’t show so much. He swore he loved me and he just lost control.

“You know you make me crazy, babe!” he’d say, giving a rueful little laugh. “I wouldn’t get so worked up if I didn’t love you so much!”

I spentyearsbelieving that was true—believing that my husband loved me so much it made him hit me. And that somehow it was all my fault. If only I didn’t provoke him so much, he wouldn’t hurt me. Though usually all it took to provoke him was serving him dinner five minutes late or having another man notice me when we went out, or any of the hundred other little things that made him lose control.

I only began to believe otherwise about halfway into our marriage, but by that time it was too late—Carlo had graduated from the Police Academy and was a full-fledged cop.

Now, I’m not saying “all men” or “all cops” but you can look up the statistics for yourself on how many wives of cops are abused every year and how little they can do about it. The department protects its own and they almost never prosecute a fellow cop, no matter what his spouse says—or how bad she looks at the annual Christmas party for that matter.

I did hear Carlo’s partner, Josh Sampson, try to say something to him once after he came to our house for dinner and saw the state I was in. This was right after Carlo had pushed me down the front steps of our house and I’d ended up with some broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, and multiple bruises.

“Jesus, man!” I heard him mutter to my husband when I was in the kitchen, trying to wrestle a roasted chicken out of the oven one-handed, since my left arm was in a sling. “You’ve got to start going easy on your wife! Willow’s looking really banged up!”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Carlo had demanded defensively. “She fell down the steps—that’s all. Landed on the fucking sidewalk—not my fault.”

“You sure you didn’thelpher down those steps?” Josh demanded. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen her looking like shit.”

“She looks like shit because she won’t take care of herself,” Carlo had protested. “Getting fat as a fucking pig, sitting around here all day while I’m out slaving to keep her in style. So what if I gave her a little push? I had to teach her a lesson. Women are too fucking mouthy—gotta keep ‘em in line, right?”

And then I’d seen him nudge his partner with an elbow and grin as I stared through the crack in the door.

“Yeah, well…just don’t push her into a fucking grave.” Josh had looked uneasy. “That would be going too far.”

But apparently shoving me down the steps and punching me in the facewasn’tgoing too far. I saw Josh giving me sidelongglances throughout the meal, but he never said anything else—and never tried to help me either.

So much for “to protect and to serve.”

That moment in our marriage was a kind of wake-up call for me. I began to open my eyes—which had been swollen shut too often from Carlo’s punches—and realize that what was happening wasn’t right. At long last, I began to think about getting away from my husband.

The problem was, Carlo wasn’t about to let me go.

When I tried to bring it up—pointing out that I had never been able to give him children and he deserved to be with someone who could—he shut me down,hard.

“You’re never leaving me, babe—you understand?” He had me by the shoulders, his fingers digging into my arms and his face shoved right into mine, our foreheads touching. His breath smelled like stale beer and the cigars he and his partner liked to smoke to relax. “Fuckingnever.You try and I’ll hunt you down and drag you back home—and you won’t like what happens next, I promise you that!”

So that was my life. I had just about given up all hope of ever getting away from him when suddenly, for no apparent reason, he just seemed to start losing interest.

He stopped calling me all the time to check on my location. Our whole marriage I hadn’t been allowed to have a job because he wanted me at home where he could keep tabs on me—that way he said, he didn’t have to worry about “other men sniffing around,” as he put it. But all of a sudden, when my Grandfather asked if I could help him at the shop, Carlo agreed, though he had refused to give me permission for years.

That was just the start. Gradually, my husband’s grip on me loosened. He began to stay out late with his friends and go to bars with the guys instead of coming straight home, where I had better have supper waiting for him if I didn’t want a twistedwrist or a fat lip. He even stopped looking through my phone on a daily basis to make sure I hadn’t been “flirting” with strange men. (I never would have dared. The one time a male friend from high school tried to contact me on Facebook, Carlo put my arm in a cast.)

At the time, it felt like a kind of miracle. Slowly but surely the noose that had been around my neck ever since I was stupid enough to say, “I do,” began to loosen. Sometimes Carlo would stay out all night and when he finally came home, he seemed surprised to see me there—it was as though he had forgotten all about me. As though he’d forgotten he even had a wife.

I knew he was seeing other women at this time—I didn’t give a damn. I was just happy and relieved to know that he was finally loosening his grip on me. From high school on, he had been obsessed with me—completely fixated on everything I did and said—and somehow everything was always wrong.

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