I Ain't Me No More (19 page)

Nana drove me to the Columbus Police Department, where officers directed us to the Franklin County Courthouse after we informed them of the reason for our visit. Until Nana told me, I honestly had had no idea that Dub sending me threatening letters was even a crime.

At the courthouse we were steered to the prosecutor's office. After waiting two hours, we were called into the back by a prosecutor's assistant. Nana waited in the lobby with Baby D while I went in the back.

“So what is it we can try to help you with today?” the assistant asked, sitting at his desk with his hands clasped together.

“I don't need you to try,” I told the assistant. “I really need you to help . . . period.” I pulled Dub's letter out of my purse, along with the ones he'd written me in the past. I handed them to the assistant, my hand shaking the entire time.

“My, my,” he said after reading the letters and initially being speechless.

“So can you help?” The tone of my voice was desperate. The look on my face was desperate. I was desperate.

“Has he physically harmed you?” the assistant asked.

“No, I mean, yes. I mean no, not while he's been in jail,” I replied nervously. “But he used to abuse me all the time. That's how I know he's going to do everything he says he's going to do.”

“Is that why he's in jail now, for hitting you?”

“No,” I was sad to say, but then I perked up upon remembering something. “But he did go to jail once before for hitting me.”

The assistant perked up as well, leaning forward. “And you pressed charges and he got sentenced to jail?”

My excitement fizzled out. “No. I dropped the charges.”

“So there's basically just an arrest, no conviction?”

I nodded my head, and his gleam of hope seemed to fizzle out.

“So all we have here are these letters, huh?” He sounded as if he had to try a murder case with no dead body, no DNA evidence, only circumstantial evidence. The assistant thought for a moment before raising his index finger and asking me to hold on a second while he went to speak with one of his superiors. With the letters in hand, he exited the room, returning a few minutes later.

Excitedly, he plopped back down at his desk and began rummaging through his drawers, pulling out forms. He began to write on the forms as I sat in silence, watching him. Once he'd finish doing what he had to do with one form, he'd slide it over to me. “Here. Read this and then sign if you agree with everything.”

I read form after form, which pretty much described my complaint. One of the forms contained excerpts from the letters. After I signed each form, the assistant made copies of the letters and attached them to the forms.

“There!” he said, as if he'd just built the most beautiful sand castle on the beach. “This will stop that lunatic!”

I sighed a breath of relief. At the time I didn't know how all those forms were going to stop Dub, but what I did know was that the assistant hadn't trivialized Dub's words, hadn't characterized them as nothing more than a jailhouse letter from an angry boyfriend.

“These are restraining orders,” the prosecutor said, answering my unasked question. “What these documents will do is prevent Mr. Daniels from sending letters to your home or calling your home. The warden will also receive copies. Miss Lannden, you won't have to worry about receiving any more threats from Mr. Daniels.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” I was relieved as I stood and shook the assistant's hand. But then something hit me. “But he'll get out soon and won't have to write letters anymore. . . .” I knew the assistant knew what I was alluding to. Just because Dub couldn't write down his threats in letters anymore didn't mean he wasn't going to go through with what he'd already written.

“Typically, once guys like him are called out on this type of thing, they eventually get over it and move on. The fact that they know the law is involved is kind of like a wake-up call to them. So not to worry. You should be able to sleep a lot better now.” His warm smile was reassuring.

“Thank you. Thank you so much,” I said again, allowing his words to serve as a dose of comfort.

“No need to thank me. That's my job,” he said as he escorted me back into the lobby and handed me copies of the filed orders for my records.

“So what did they say?” Nana asked me and stood up.

I showed her the papers. “They helped me file a restraining order prohibiting him from sending me any more letters or calling me.”

“See, I knew there was something somebody could do about his threats,” Nana said as she hugged me.

And just as always, Nana was right. Something had been done . . . for now. But I couldn't help but think about a case I saw on the news where a woman had been stabbed, along with her children, by her husband. She and her children were pronounced dead at the scene. She, obviously, hadn't been protected. I could only pray I would never encounter her fate.

“How's it going, Helen?” Keith, the mail guy at my job, asked me as he approached my desk with the mail cart.

I found Keith's questioning strange. It wasn't the question he asked. He always asked everybody how it was going. But today I noticed a different tone in his voice. He asked the question as if expecting a positive response from me to become negative and a negative response to become worse.

“I'm hanging in there, Keith. Why? What's up?”

Without saying a word, he removed a letter from the top of his pile and handed it to me. He didn't even look me in the face after that. He just scurried along to complete his mail route.

The letter was already opened, as that was customary at my job. Sometimes customers would address letters to the wrong person or department, so it was the mail room's job to briefly review any letters not marked “personal” or “confidential” and make sure they were directed to the correct person or department.

I had to look at the envelope for only a second to immediately recognize it as one of Dub's letters. I'd received one other letter at Nana's house since filing the restraining order. I figured it had been sent in between the actual filing and Dub being notified of the filing.

My heart began to race as I pulled the letter out of the envelope and read it. It was the most vulgar, threatening letter he'd sent me to date. It was so disgusting, I had to pull my trash can out from under my desk and vomit.

It had been over a week since I'd filed the restraining order. Certainly, he'd been notified by now that he would be violating the order by sending letters. The first paragraph of the letter cleared up my confusion.

While reading the letter, I could hear Dub's voice say each and every word. I could feel his hot breath on my neck as he snarled the words through gritted teeth. I felt so trapped, I didn't know what to do. At that point, I just wanted to take my own life in a slow, painless manner before Dub got the chance to do all the bodily harm he anticipated doing to me.

“Helen, I need you to—”

I heard the sound of a male voice and felt a hand rest upon my shoulder. The next thing I knew, I was hunched over, crying my eyes out. I thought it was Dub's voice that I'd heard and Dub's touch that I'd felt. My mind was playing tricks on me.

“Helen, are you okay?” I heard the male voice ask, not recognizing that it belonged to my boss.

“Helen?” This time it was a female voice. “What's wrong? Are you okay?” I felt the woman's arms around me as she continued to ask me if I was okay.

I couldn't see who it was, because my eyes were so filled with tears. After a few seconds I felt her release me and bend down. I blinked away as many tears as I could and was able to make out who the woman was. It was Jina, my boss's secretary, and she was rising back up from bending down, having retrieved the letter, which had fallen at my feet. I watched her scan it and then hand it to my boss.

“Have a seat,” Jina suggested to me, and then she helped me to get situated in my chair. “I'll go get you some water.” She walked away as my boss stood there reading the letter.

“I'm sorry,” I said, apologizing for making such a scene.

“No apology necessary, Helen, if your reaction is to the words on this piece of paper.” My boss stood there, holding Dub's letter in front of me. “Is this what has you upset?” My boss had an appalled look on his face from the words he'd just read.

“Yes.” I nodded. “It's from my ex-boyfriend. My son's father. He's going to kill me.” Once again I lost control. I could see other employees peeking over into our area to see what was going on, but I didn't care. For once, I did not care what people thought. What would it matter, anyway, once I was dead and gone? “Oh, God, he's really going to kill me!”

“Calm down, Helen.” He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Let's go into my office and talk about it,” he suggested just as Jina returned with the water.

“Here you go, Helen.” She handed me the water.

“Jina, I'm going to talk to Helen in my office. Can you please come and sit in?” my boss asked her. I could tell the last thing he wanted was to be in his office alone with a hysterical woman who was going nuts. The next thing he knew, I'd be accusing him of harming me or something. I didn't blame him for not wanting to take any chances, because at that moment, I had to admit, I wasn't in my right mind.

“So how long have you been receiving these types of threats?” my boss asked me once the three of us were secure behind the closed door of his office.

“He sent me several a while ago. He started sending them again, so I just got a restraining order against him,” I replied. “I guess some jailhouse lawyer broke down the restraining order to him, and he realized that it didn't prevent him from sending letters here, to my workplace.”

“Do you take these threats seriously?” my boss asked me. “I mean, obviously, you do, but I just need to hear you say it.”

A confused look crossed my face, and I guess my boss detected it, as he began to explain his reason for asking.

“See, I need you to tell me this, because by doing so, you are officially putting your place of employment on notice about this domestic threat. By putting your employer on notice, your employer is now obligated to take every precaution necessary in addressing this situation in the workplace.” My boss took a deep breath and then asked again. “Do you take your ex-boyfriend's threats seriously? Has he ever physically harmed you before, giving you cause to believe he would see his threats through?”

I swallowed hard. Answering my boss truthfully would mean having to tell him that I had allowed Dub to physically harm me. That I had stayed in a relationship for over seven years with someone who was mentally, sexually, and physically abusing me. I'd never had to do that before, confess outright to someone who knew me. Telling that prosecutor had been different. He didn't know me. Well, he knew me, but not like that. He knew me because of the hundreds of other women just like me who had occupied his office chair. Same story, different girl.

My boss
knew
me, though, and so I couldn't fix my mouth to confess it. What kind of stupid idiot would my job think I was? They thought they had hired someone smart, someone college educated who was in the process of earning their bachelor's degree. They'd probably fire me when they realized how dumb I was, after all.

As if Jina, who was sitting next to me, could see my anguish, she rested her hand on my knee for comfort. I looked up at her, and she nodded, as if to say, “You can do this, Helen.”

I sighed and finally spoke. “Yes. Yes, I take the threats seriously, and yes . . . he has physically harmed me before.”