I Write Short Stories
I Saw It In Her Eyes... *I am going to tell you a true story. This happened to me several years ago and before I begin I just want to say that it is not uplifting nor is it a wonderful memory. There won't be tears of joy or any heart-warming feelings afterward. Not everything that happens in life is happy. This is not a happy read.
In 1996 I got a job as a secretary for our county's CPS (Child Protective Services). It was a big, busy office with several secretaries, dozens of overworked and underpaid caseworkers, supervisors, case aids (who were responsible for transporting children for family visits, etc), file clerks, not to mention the families that needed to have supervised visits would often have to come into the office. On Tuesdays and Thursdays our office was even busier when the county decided to hold some of the court cases in one of our conference rooms which meant even more caseworkers, families, child advocates and lawyers. There were also two county police officers on the days that court was in session.
There was always a big turnover with most of the county jobs. The healthcare benefits were excellent, but the salaries weren't very good at all. It was a sad place to work because of what we all had to see and come in contact with. I guess because of all of the depressing things we all saw and read about day in and day out, we all tried to make it a pleasant place to work. We did silly things in our down time. Very silly things. For instance, someone had a fake tiara from one of their child's halloween costumes and we decided that every day we would pick someone to be "queen for a day". The queen would get their picture taken and put on the wall. It didn't matter if you were male or female, supervisor or file clerk. We did things to make each other smile and it was because we had to. If we didn't, we would cry because of all the hate in the world that we saw every day.
On a Friday afternoon, our supervisor Judy received a phone call from downtown letting her know that we were getting a new case aid starting on Monday morning and her name was *Mia. Monday arrived and so did Mia, right on time. She was a cute girl with pretty blue eyes, extremely long eye lashes, dyed blond hair (with alot of brown roots to prove that fact) who seemed friendly and outgoing. She looked everyone in the eye when Judy introduced her and smiled broadly, showing a little overbite to her smile that I noticed caused a subtle lisp when she spoke. I liked her on the spot.
She had a great sense of humor and I came to find out, could cuss like a sailor. I found such humor in it because she did not look like the kind of person who could talk like that, but she could. She was such a nice person and would easily fall into the "give the shirt off her back" category. Always bubbly and happy and walked in every day with a smile on her face and happy to see everyone. There wasn't anything I didn't like about Mia.
As the months went on, I started to notice things. She would have little bruises on her arms, red marks on her neck or scratches on her face. Mia had two cats who she claimed were the culprits of her markings, but something didn't seem right. Then one day she came in with a black eye.
I went back to her desk and asked her what happened and she wouldn't look at me. "It's Marty" is all she said. Marty was her live-in boyfriend that she didn't really talk about and now I was understanding why. Her tears started to flow and that scared me because I had never seen her cry before so I said nothing. I let her have that release. After a minute I broke and said "Do you have somewhere to go?" and she didn't answer me. After about twenty seconds she said "I can't. I just can't. You don't understand. I can't" I heard footsteps coming up behind us and I knew she didn't want anyone to see her cry so I just told her I would talk to her later and I walked away.
As the weeks went on, she started to change. Once a happy and boisterous girl, she was slowly turning into an introverted, quiet, serious person who not only didn't look happy, she looked scared. Marty started to become a familiar voice on the switchboard. When she first started there, we knew nothing about the guy nor did he ever call the office. Now, he was calling every hour checking on her whereabouts. He was keeping tabs on her. Not a good sign.
It was my day to work the switchboard in the morning and Mia walked in, her head hanging down and she didn't even speak when she walked passed me. I noticed she had on the same clothes that she had on the day before, her hair hadn't been combed and her face was red as if she had been crying. She was in trouble. I called after her and she continued to walk to the back of the office where her desk was. Ten minutes later, she had to leave to go pick up a child for a family visit. She had to come by the switchboard to leave and when she saw the concern on my face, she said she was alright and that she spent the night at a girlfriend's house and that's why she had on the same clothes. She was making a joke out of it, trying to laugh about the situation but it seemed so forced to me. I went along with it because there were people around and I didn't want to embarass her, but she leaned close to me and whispered in my ear "If Marty calls, do NOT tell him where I'm going, ok?" When she was pulling away from my face, I could see the fear in hers. She was terrified of the guy.
Mia was only gone for fifteen minutes, the switchboard outside line rang and it was Marty. "Can you tell me where Mia is?" was the first thing he said. "No, I'm sorry. I have no idea where she went. She doesn't give out her schedule. Sorry." Then I hung up. Twenty minutes later, that same voice called again, trying to sound frantic this time "I'm sorry but I just got a message that Mia's car broke down. Can you tell me what road she's on because she needs me to go get her." "I don't know where she is. If she calls in, I'll tell her to call you.:" click. Now I was getting scared. He was really trying to find her and get to her. A half an hour later, it's Marty trying to sound as if he's in hysterics, screaming and crying and saying that he found out Mia was hurt really bad to please, please tell him where she is. My heart was beating in my throat. I was so afraid for my friend. I couldnt' wait for her to get back to the office so I could tell her what was going on.
My shift at the switchboard was over at 1:00 and when my replacement came, I filled her in on what was happening with Marty calling and instructed her not to give him any information about Mia and her whereabouts. Finally, Mia came back to the office at 3:00 and I was so glad to see her. I pulled her into the kitchen area so we could have some privacy and I told her about the phone calls. She was crying at first but as I kept telling the details, by the time I got to the part about the third phone call, her tears turned to anger. She stood there, leaned against the wall with her arms crossed and her fingers digging into her upper arms. It was as if she was causing herself physical pain to take away from the mental pain she was going through. I gently rubbed her arm to distract her for a second because I could tell she was sort of in another world. "Mia, Hey, listen. At the end of the day, just follow me to my house. He'll never find you out there. I live out in the country, 25 miles in the opposite direction from where you live. He sounds crazy and I'm afraid something bad is going to happen. Please? Just come home with me." Mia thought for a second, put her hands up to her face and wiped away the tears she shed, took a deep breath and look at me with such determination and said "No. I'll be fine. Really. You don't have to worry. I'm done. Thanks, Baby." and she walked back to her desk.
A little before 4:30 everyone in the office was packing up and getting ready to leave, shutting down their computers, putting away their papers, closing their drawers and wrapping up their last minute phone calls. All the workers started to trickle out and when Mia came to leave, when I saw her walking toward the front of the office, she looked happy. She had a little pep in her step and a smile on her face. I knew why. I saw it in her eyes. She was done with the abuse and she wasn't going to take it any more. She was going to leave. Her mind was made up. She was going to be just fine. She came up to my desk, leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and said "Thanks, Baby", winked at me and told me she'd see me tomorrow.
The next morning traffic was awfully heavy going into the city. Listening to the radio traffic reports there was a "police issue" that the city was dealing with, which was not that uncommon of an occurance. When I got closer to work, I saw a few police cars but our office was in a seedy part of town so didn't really give that a second thought. I pulled up in the parking lot and I saw one of the county police officers that always came when court was in session at our building. The thought occured to me that it was a little strange he was there because it wasn't a court day, but maybe he forgot something the day before. I walked toward the door and he opened it for me without speaking to me. I teased him a little about being a gentleman and opening the door for a lady but with no response and that seemed strange too. When I stepped into the room with all the secretaries standing about, several of them approached me and pulled me toward a chair and forcibly pushed me down to sit. "What?! What?! What is it?!" I remember hearing myself saying as they were pulling me. Leslie, one of the older secretaries, put both of her hands on my face and got extremely close to me and said "Joyce, Mia is dead. Marty killed her."
I cannot describe the feeling that came over me at that moment. I felt sick. I felt faint. I felt angry. I felt scared. I felt confused. Then, things started to get pieced together about the morning and reports were coming in. The "police issue" the radio spoke about was Mia's murder and the fact that Marty was on the run, was heavily armed and seen in the neighborhood of our office building, which explained the police cars I saw and the police officer at our door. We were in lockdown.
Mia went home the day before and she and Marty got into a fight and she packed a bag and went to a friend's house after telling him she was leaving. She did not tell him where she was going. He drove around for hours and eventually found her. Mia and her friend tried to run away from him and the friend got away but Marty shot and killed Mia. Marty then went back to the house they shared and set it on fire in the early morning hours and was last seen with several guns heading in the direction of where Mia worked.
Marty was found going into a abandoned house a few blocks away from our building and the police tried to get him to come out with tear gas. After several attempts to communicate with him with no success, they heard a gunshot. He locked himself in the top floor of this abandoned house and shot himself in the head. Marty too was now dead.
I was so scared that day. I thought that maybe he was coming after me because he knew it was me who wasn't giving him any information about Mia the day before. Then I kept thinking about the what if's....what if she had listened to me and came home with me maybe she would still be alive?......what if she followed me home and he found her at my place and killed both of us?.....what if I would have never said anything to her about the phone calls and maybe she wouldn't have gone home and fought with him and then this would have never happened?....what if? what if? what if?
That day, sitting in that office crying and being afraid, I was also haunted by those beautiful blue eyes of hers. When she made the decision to leave, she was with me and when she lifted her head in the kitchen, I saw it in her eyes. She told me she would be fine. Is she?
In 1996 I got a job as a secretary for our county's CPS (Child Protective Services). It was a big, busy office with several secretaries, dozens of overworked and underpaid caseworkers, supervisors, case aids (who were responsible for transporting children for family visits, etc), file clerks, not to mention the families that needed to have supervised visits would often have to come into the office. On Tuesdays and Thursdays our office was even busier when the county decided to hold some of the court cases in one of our conference rooms which meant even more caseworkers, families, child advocates and lawyers. There were also two county police officers on the days that court was in session.
There was always a big turnover with most of the county jobs. The healthcare benefits were excellent, but the salaries weren't very good at all. It was a sad place to work because of what we all had to see and come in contact with. I guess because of all of the depressing things we all saw and read about day in and day out, we all tried to make it a pleasant place to work. We did silly things in our down time. Very silly things. For instance, someone had a fake tiara from one of their child's halloween costumes and we decided that every day we would pick someone to be "queen for a day". The queen would get their picture taken and put on the wall. It didn't matter if you were male or female, supervisor or file clerk. We did things to make each other smile and it was because we had to. If we didn't, we would cry because of all the hate in the world that we saw every day.
On a Friday afternoon, our supervisor Judy received a phone call from downtown letting her know that we were getting a new case aid starting on Monday morning and her name was *Mia. Monday arrived and so did Mia, right on time. She was a cute girl with pretty blue eyes, extremely long eye lashes, dyed blond hair (with alot of brown roots to prove that fact) who seemed friendly and outgoing. She looked everyone in the eye when Judy introduced her and smiled broadly, showing a little overbite to her smile that I noticed caused a subtle lisp when she spoke. I liked her on the spot.
She had a great sense of humor and I came to find out, could cuss like a sailor. I found such humor in it because she did not look like the kind of person who could talk like that, but she could. She was such a nice person and would easily fall into the "give the shirt off her back" category. Always bubbly and happy and walked in every day with a smile on her face and happy to see everyone. There wasn't anything I didn't like about Mia.
As the months went on, I started to notice things. She would have little bruises on her arms, red marks on her neck or scratches on her face. Mia had two cats who she claimed were the culprits of her markings, but something didn't seem right. Then one day she came in with a black eye.
I went back to her desk and asked her what happened and she wouldn't look at me. "It's Marty" is all she said. Marty was her live-in boyfriend that she didn't really talk about and now I was understanding why. Her tears started to flow and that scared me because I had never seen her cry before so I said nothing. I let her have that release. After a minute I broke and said "Do you have somewhere to go?" and she didn't answer me. After about twenty seconds she said "I can't. I just can't. You don't understand. I can't" I heard footsteps coming up behind us and I knew she didn't want anyone to see her cry so I just told her I would talk to her later and I walked away.
As the weeks went on, she started to change. Once a happy and boisterous girl, she was slowly turning into an introverted, quiet, serious person who not only didn't look happy, she looked scared. Marty started to become a familiar voice on the switchboard. When she first started there, we knew nothing about the guy nor did he ever call the office. Now, he was calling every hour checking on her whereabouts. He was keeping tabs on her. Not a good sign.
It was my day to work the switchboard in the morning and Mia walked in, her head hanging down and she didn't even speak when she walked passed me. I noticed she had on the same clothes that she had on the day before, her hair hadn't been combed and her face was red as if she had been crying. She was in trouble. I called after her and she continued to walk to the back of the office where her desk was. Ten minutes later, she had to leave to go pick up a child for a family visit. She had to come by the switchboard to leave and when she saw the concern on my face, she said she was alright and that she spent the night at a girlfriend's house and that's why she had on the same clothes. She was making a joke out of it, trying to laugh about the situation but it seemed so forced to me. I went along with it because there were people around and I didn't want to embarass her, but she leaned close to me and whispered in my ear "If Marty calls, do NOT tell him where I'm going, ok?" When she was pulling away from my face, I could see the fear in hers. She was terrified of the guy.
Mia was only gone for fifteen minutes, the switchboard outside line rang and it was Marty. "Can you tell me where Mia is?" was the first thing he said. "No, I'm sorry. I have no idea where she went. She doesn't give out her schedule. Sorry." Then I hung up. Twenty minutes later, that same voice called again, trying to sound frantic this time "I'm sorry but I just got a message that Mia's car broke down. Can you tell me what road she's on because she needs me to go get her." "I don't know where she is. If she calls in, I'll tell her to call you.:" click. Now I was getting scared. He was really trying to find her and get to her. A half an hour later, it's Marty trying to sound as if he's in hysterics, screaming and crying and saying that he found out Mia was hurt really bad to please, please tell him where she is. My heart was beating in my throat. I was so afraid for my friend. I couldnt' wait for her to get back to the office so I could tell her what was going on.
My shift at the switchboard was over at 1:00 and when my replacement came, I filled her in on what was happening with Marty calling and instructed her not to give him any information about Mia and her whereabouts. Finally, Mia came back to the office at 3:00 and I was so glad to see her. I pulled her into the kitchen area so we could have some privacy and I told her about the phone calls. She was crying at first but as I kept telling the details, by the time I got to the part about the third phone call, her tears turned to anger. She stood there, leaned against the wall with her arms crossed and her fingers digging into her upper arms. It was as if she was causing herself physical pain to take away from the mental pain she was going through. I gently rubbed her arm to distract her for a second because I could tell she was sort of in another world. "Mia, Hey, listen. At the end of the day, just follow me to my house. He'll never find you out there. I live out in the country, 25 miles in the opposite direction from where you live. He sounds crazy and I'm afraid something bad is going to happen. Please? Just come home with me." Mia thought for a second, put her hands up to her face and wiped away the tears she shed, took a deep breath and look at me with such determination and said "No. I'll be fine. Really. You don't have to worry. I'm done. Thanks, Baby." and she walked back to her desk.
A little before 4:30 everyone in the office was packing up and getting ready to leave, shutting down their computers, putting away their papers, closing their drawers and wrapping up their last minute phone calls. All the workers started to trickle out and when Mia came to leave, when I saw her walking toward the front of the office, she looked happy. She had a little pep in her step and a smile on her face. I knew why. I saw it in her eyes. She was done with the abuse and she wasn't going to take it any more. She was going to leave. Her mind was made up. She was going to be just fine. She came up to my desk, leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and said "Thanks, Baby", winked at me and told me she'd see me tomorrow.
The next morning traffic was awfully heavy going into the city. Listening to the radio traffic reports there was a "police issue" that the city was dealing with, which was not that uncommon of an occurance. When I got closer to work, I saw a few police cars but our office was in a seedy part of town so didn't really give that a second thought. I pulled up in the parking lot and I saw one of the county police officers that always came when court was in session at our building. The thought occured to me that it was a little strange he was there because it wasn't a court day, but maybe he forgot something the day before. I walked toward the door and he opened it for me without speaking to me. I teased him a little about being a gentleman and opening the door for a lady but with no response and that seemed strange too. When I stepped into the room with all the secretaries standing about, several of them approached me and pulled me toward a chair and forcibly pushed me down to sit. "What?! What?! What is it?!" I remember hearing myself saying as they were pulling me. Leslie, one of the older secretaries, put both of her hands on my face and got extremely close to me and said "Joyce, Mia is dead. Marty killed her."
I cannot describe the feeling that came over me at that moment. I felt sick. I felt faint. I felt angry. I felt scared. I felt confused. Then, things started to get pieced together about the morning and reports were coming in. The "police issue" the radio spoke about was Mia's murder and the fact that Marty was on the run, was heavily armed and seen in the neighborhood of our office building, which explained the police cars I saw and the police officer at our door. We were in lockdown.
Mia went home the day before and she and Marty got into a fight and she packed a bag and went to a friend's house after telling him she was leaving. She did not tell him where she was going. He drove around for hours and eventually found her. Mia and her friend tried to run away from him and the friend got away but Marty shot and killed Mia. Marty then went back to the house they shared and set it on fire in the early morning hours and was last seen with several guns heading in the direction of where Mia worked.
Marty was found going into a abandoned house a few blocks away from our building and the police tried to get him to come out with tear gas. After several attempts to communicate with him with no success, they heard a gunshot. He locked himself in the top floor of this abandoned house and shot himself in the head. Marty too was now dead.
I was so scared that day. I thought that maybe he was coming after me because he knew it was me who wasn't giving him any information about Mia the day before. Then I kept thinking about the what if's....what if she had listened to me and came home with me maybe she would still be alive?......what if she followed me home and he found her at my place and killed both of us?.....what if I would have never said anything to her about the phone calls and maybe she wouldn't have gone home and fought with him and then this would have never happened?....what if? what if? what if?
That day, sitting in that office crying and being afraid, I was also haunted by those beautiful blue eyes of hers. When she made the decision to leave, she was with me and when she lifted her head in the kitchen, I saw it in her eyes. She told me she would be fine. Is she?
56-60, F
