The deputy district attorney from my hometown is calling me this April morning to ask: “Was your mom a heavy drinker?”
My mouth opens and closes twice. Like a fish! I almost answer.
“Look, I can see where this is going,” I say, “but we did this already. We had a trial”—fifteen years ago—“and Maynard was convicted.”
I picture the attorney at his desk in Southern California, a palm tree outside the window. He pushes aside a half-eaten muffin and a stack of manila folders stuffed with parole cases he’s been assigned.
“No, of course,” he says. “It’s just . . . Maynard said something in his psych eval. Here, let me find it.”
I lean forward like an eager gossip: “You have his psych eval? Tell me everything.”
The deputy district attorney’s delivery is both blunt and gentle, like a velvet hammer. I decide to like Velvet Hammer, even if he taps too hard on my bruises. I’ve tapped on them plenty myself.
Velvet Hammer first phoned me yesterday, wanting to know why I was not scheduled to attend the parole hearing. The prison is in California, and I am in Texas, but he explained that I could still attend virtually. The truth is I never considered going, virtually or otherwise. I can’t bear the thought of seeing Maynard’s face, of being teleported back to finding my mother’s body in 2004. She had been missing for two days, and I knew immediately that Maynard, her boyfriend, had killed her.
Even after all these years I’m too aware of the chef’s knife when my husband and I cook dinner. It might as well glow neon. If I take it to the sink to rinse, I say, “Knife, behind,” as if we were still working in a restaurant together, because somewhere inside me a video is constantly playing: handle in hand, blade in flesh.
I did not try explaining this to Velvet Hammer. Instead I protested that I’d already sent my victim-impact statement, which was just an updated version of the statement I’d sent the first time Maynard had applied for parole, nearly four years ago.
“Yes,” he said. “I read it.”
I thought my letter to the parole board had been pretty good: levelheaded and intelligent, neither out for revenge nor holding back. I’d recounted what it had been like to find my mother murdered by her boyfriend when I was twenty-seven years old. I’d cited statistics on violence against women. But so much time had gone by that Maynard had become an old man. And writing that letter, I’d thought about what it would be like to feel your life slipping away in prison. From this soft place, I’d written that my mother would not want Maynard to be denied the feel of the surf against his ankles or the sun on his face for the rest of his life. If the parole board could guarantee that he would never hurt another woman, I’d said, then I wouldn’t fight his release.
Wishy-washy hippie nonsense, I imagine Velvet Hammer muttering.
Now he is reading to me from Maynard’s psych evaluation, conducted when he reapplied for parole sometime last year. As he reads, he affects a sneer like the one the high-heeled prosecutor affected at Maynard’s trial whenever a witness for the defense was on the stand: a professionally trained sneer, meant not only to convey disgust but to inspire it in others.
“Oh, here we go,” he sneers. “So he says: ‘She had the knives, and I got them away from her, and we were running at each other, and I tripped . . . and she got stabbed.’ ”
“ ‘She got stabbed,’ ” I repeat, and now we’re both sneering: The passive language. The refusal of responsibility.
His lawyerly tricks are working. A memory I’ve suppressed for decades—so I could be a pleasant coworker, a kind wife, an easygoing friend—is scratching at the door. (Let it come. I’ve got Velvet Hammer with me.) “That’s what he said at the trial, too,” I recall, reaching for my laptop, “or in his police interview: ‘She got stabbed.’ As if he hadn’t been there at all.”
“He says they’d been drinking and that she was belligerent when she drank.”
I’ve got my laptop open, and I’m searching for the trial transcripts, which I ordered and downloaded years ago but couldn’t bear to look at for a long time. There’s something in here I need to tell Velvet Hammer. All the while I’m ranting: Her fault—ridiculous! She’d been trying to get Maynard to move out for weeks, and he was becoming more controlling and threatening. She was trying to “keep the peace”—those were her last words to me—while she secretly refinanced her condo for cash to flee the state. She was on a nebulizer to help her breathe. She was five foot four, and he was—
“Here they are,” I say, “the transcripts. I can send them to you if you want.”
Velvet Hammer laughs a little. “Yeah, I saw that you had ordered them. All 1,500 pages?”
I’m clicking on files at random, exhilarated, as if I were cracking the case in a John Grisham novel.
“What if I just send you the forensic testimony,” I say, “or the prosecutor’s closing argument? I have it on my screen now. It’s everything you need.” And here I stop talking, my breath taken away by something I’ve just read in the transcript.
In the days after my mother was killed, when I was driving around in a fugue and trying to make funeral arrangements, I saw a squirrel sitting on the side of the road, staring at another squirrel, this one dead. The living squirrel sat transfixed, whipping its treble-clef tail, and I had the sense it was trying to wrap its brain around what this meant: Dead. What is dead? How is dead? It was exactly how I felt. It’s how I still feel.
Every few years I suddenly need to see the things of my mother’s that were taken into evidence, to gather everything they can tell me, all that they might mean: her purse; her computer, containing emails she’d written to friends, to my brother, to me; her answering-machine tape, with her soft, gentle voice on it. Each time I get this longing, I recheck the list of items the police took that night. It helps to see my mother’s things accounted for and safe somewhere. Then I ask when I can get those things. “You can’t” is always the answer. Whenever I feel the longing, I ask again.
The trial transcripts, too, were something I longed to have in my possession because of what they might tell me, but thinking about getting them always rendered me squirrel-brained: made me freeze, flick my tail, and run away. Then when Maynard applied for early parole in 2018, the need to see the transcripts overrode my fear. I emailed the county clerk’s office, and someone there sent me a list of the testimonies: mine, my grandma’s, the neighbors’, the testimonies of people whose names I’d long forgotten and whose roles in my mom’s death had never been clear to me. The clerk’s office asked which ones I wanted. “All of them,” I replied.
I’d thought the transcripts would help me write a letter to the parole board, but when I opened them, I saw a section of my own testimony at Maynard’s trial, and that was that. My head filled with hissing static; my heart raced.
I closed the file, and I closed myself up again, and from that closed place I wrote the letter that left Velvet Hammer so unimpressed.
When the parole board denied Maynard’s parole, it was a relief not to have to think about it for another few years. Then, when I got the second parole notice earlier this year, I thought I could send the same letter again, updating the statistics on violence against women, which had increased during the COVID lockdown. I thought I could hide from the trial transcripts, from the racing heart and freezing-fleeing squirrel brain that came when I remembered too much, too fast.
That’s why Velvet Hammer is calling now, wondering why I’m being so wishy-washy. He won’t say that directly, of course.
“I’m not here to change your mind,” he says. “Some victims’ families don’t want the offender to stay in prison, for some of the reasons you outlined in your statement. Some people even choose to work with or counsel the offender. It’s, like, a way for them to heal and find peace.”
I cringe. This is the exact fantasy I used to entertain after it happened: Maynard and I would begin writing to each other, healing together as only the two people closest to a crime victim could. At the time, my grad-school professor said, “The writer in me says this would make an incredible book, but the father in me hopes you won’t invite that into your life.” Now I wonder if the fantasy was just the magical thinking of a freshly traumatized young woman in a society that wants women to nurture selflessly, no matter the cost.
“All I’m saying,” says Velvet Hammer, “is that one or two sentences from you will have more of an impact than anything I argue in the room.”
One or two sentences that aren’t the sentences you’ve already written is what he means. It’s feedback I’m familiar with, after an MFA program, after working with editors, and as an editor myself. It means You didn’t go far enough. Your meaning isn’t landing. “If you’re certain he won’t hurt another woman . . . ,” I wrote. What does this narrator want? What are the stakes? Don’t I want Maynard to stay in prison?
“I’ll need to think about it.”
Velvet Hammer warns me not to take too long: “You were supposed to register three weeks ago. But it’s worth a shot.”
In the evening I take a hot bath. I think better in the bath, the warm water filled with salt so my body can relax and my mind can study itself, unthreatened. I think about something Velvet Hammer said: that Maynard had letters from his brothers and sisters all saying they’d support him if he gets out.
“Do you think they’ll be at the hearing?” I asked.
“Probably,” he said.
I slide deeper into the water and blow bubbles in a long exhale, thinking about the empty spaces on the screen at the virtual hearing, the spaces where my mother’s people, where I, should be. The parole board will think no one cares.
See how many showed up for him and not for her?
They will think he was the real victim.
“They were just so toxic together.”
That’s what Maynard’s older sister said when she put her arms around me on the front lawn, red and blue lights flashing across our bodies. It had been less than half an hour since I’d found my mother’s body on her bed, covered in blankets.
They. As if my mother had helped murder herself.
I imagine the judge asking, And who is here representing the victim today?
Just me, Your Honor, Velvet Hammer says.
I throw a washcloth over my face and scream.
What’s the difference? says another voice inside my head. She’s gone. Don’t do this. You’ve suffered enough.
But that implies my suffering is something I can leave behind. It’s not. I’m afraid all the time. I’m afraid of noise: afraid of making noise, afraid of other people’s noises. I’m afraid of speaking up in a world where the loathing of strangers has reached a fever pitch. I’m afraid being loathed will lead to being killed. (Let the data show: this is not a far-out belief.) I’m afraid of my rage, of the destruction it could cause in my job, my marriage, my friendships. I’m afraid of getting involved, because my big feelings might derail any work I could do for battered women. But I also know I don’t speak out enough against femicide and abuse. I only whisper disapproval and set up automatic payments to organizations doing the hard work. I cannot face the trial transcripts, and I feel envy and irritation when others stand up to injustice. I am enraged at those who want to silence women, yet all the while I am silencing myself.
Defensive wounds.
Those are the words my eye landed on when I was on the phone with Velvet Hammer. Words from the transcript that shocked me into silence.
“I’ll need to think about it,” I said.
After we hung up, I read the prosecutor’s closing argument in its entirety. It reminded the jury of Maynard’s history of violence against women, and of all the times he’d refused to leave when my mother had tried to kick him out. The prosecutor—a petite, fierce woman in a blazer and high heels—held up an enlarged photo for the jury, reminding them of the slashes on my mother’s small hands.
I twist the washcloth and bite it, remembering. At the trial Maynard’s ex-wife, a middle-aged woman with her hair cut in a neat brown bob, appeared via satellite to testify that she’d fled the state with their two children after he’d threatened her with a gun in front of them. The cops had come once or twice, she said, but she’d been afraid they couldn’t guarantee her safety if she pressed charges. Instead she’d chosen to run. She had a different name now. A new life. That’s why she was testifying from states away: she was too terrified to be in the same room with him. She felt responsible, she said. What happened to my mother could have happened to her.
Another woman, Maynard’s sometime roommate, also testified that he’d threatened her with violence and made her fear for her life. Until those two women took the stand, I’d thought that maybe Maynard hadn’t meant to kill my mother. Maybe she’d just gotten out of control. She’d been trained in violence by her family. I’d seen her fly into a rage; seen a man hold her arms while she struggled to hit him; seen her chase down a car after it nearly hit my brother; seen the star-shaped hole she’d put in a living-room window. I’d grown my own rage, a sidekick’s fury: At fifteen I jumped on a man’s back to free her; at twenty-one I punched my grandfather to protect her.
I was so used to the low hum of violence that when the killer’s sister hugged me and said, “They were just so toxic together,” I mechanically agreed. But later the prosecutor and the women who testified made it clear: my mother’s death wasn’t on her.
She had the knives . . . and she got stabbed.
I get out of the bath and start a new letter. Here is some of what I write:
Among the materials you’re considering today is a letter I submitted first in 2018, and then again a few months ago. In it I recounted the trauma of finding my mother’s body. But I didn’t tell you how that trauma has rewired my brain and body to expect a violence like this one all the time, no matter the circumstance. In an argument with my husband, a stranger with road rage, even a difference of opinion on a social-media post—my heart races, I see black spots in front of my eyes, I can’t catch my breath.
I didn’t describe how my mother’s violent death has made me afraid to stand up for myself and others, take risks, pursue my career fully, to live as powerfully and freely and in service of others as I could. I didn’t describe the further trauma of watching her character be picked apart in court, where I learned that a woman defeated, beaten down, and isolated must never fight back, must never show her rage, or else this is what she gets.
Have you ever had to say this phrase: “My mother’s hands showed defensive wounds”? People ask me how I’ve managed to survive something so horrific. I did it the same way all human beings survive horrors: I suppressed the worst of it. I dissociated. That letter is, in part, a dissociation.
Now I am revisiting the court transcripts and am reminded that, when asked how my mother died, Maynard used passive language: “She got stabbed.” I’m reminded that he said it was she who’d held the knives, that they “somehow” got into his hand and he “tripped.” These claims were all disproven by respected, credentialed professionals in court. He reiterated those claims in his most recent psych evaluation, revealing that he still does not take responsibility for what he did—not only to my mother, but to the former partners he abused as well.
Fully facing this information now, I am gasping for breath, shaking too hard to write, and yet I have to give a voice to my mother, to all the women out here. Because one in four of us will experience, in her lifetime, severe physical violence at the hands of a partner. Nearly 1,800 women in the US were murdered in 2019 by men they knew, and reports show this number is rising. Out here in the world humans are in trouble. We only stand a chance if there are more of us who are brave and clear-eyed enough to take responsibility for the harm we cause each other.
Mom trusted the wrong man and gave him the benefit of the doubt, gave him power over her life. She didn’t realize how much danger she was in until just before the end, and then she didn’t know how to get away. My mother’s last words to me, when she told me she was going back to him, were “I’m just going to keep the peace.” I thought that by not being there today, by not putting myself through this all over again, I’d be keeping some sort of peace. It’s her voice I hear now, warning me not to make the same mistake she did.
Velvet Hammer texts me the next day. Even though it’s late, they’ve added my letter to the file, but he doesn’t know if they’ll allow the audio recording of me reading it yet.
I try to put it behind me. It’s a Monday, and I work in the morning and attend an online class in the afternoon. My husband makes dinner. After, we take a walk, and I vent everything: the memories that the trial transcripts have stirred, my musings about all the ways I’ve been small and quiet. That night I dream I’m cursing someone who has killed a member of my family. I see you, I say to them, over and over. I. See. You. I wake myself up hissing, Iseeyou, through paralyzed vocal cords.
The next afternoon Velvet Hammer texts: Your audio is going on the record. I spoke to the commissioners, and they want it played. We will be starting in about ten minutes.
They want it played. The commissioners want to hear from me.
Two hours later: Hearing is over. We’re awaiting the decision. They played your audio file, and they were absolutely listening.
Was his family there? I ask.
Velvet Hammer says no. And: He was on-screen so I could see him.
I want to ask what Maynard’s face looked like as he listened. Did it crumple, like he might cry? Did he close his eyes? Did he look down? But I don’t think I’ll get the answer I want, and, anyway, I don’t need it.
I am suddenly outside, my legs moving quickly. Homes and cars and trees whiz by, fifteen years, the last three days, squirrels and squirrels and squirrels. In front of a blue house with red and orange flowers I get the text: Parole denied.
Velvet Hammer calls and tells me the board, citing “lack of offender change,” decided to deny parole for another three years, although Maynard can reapply in as little as a year and a half. The deputy district attorney points out that, considering Maynard’s failure to complete any domestic-violence education, it doesn’t seem likely.
Velvet Hammer is almost giddy as he reports that a board member asked Maynard to reflect on all the relationships he’d had with women in the past: Why had they all involved violence? Maynard replied: “I never laid my hands on anyone. I only restrained the offenders.”
“Unbelievable,” I say, even more grateful that I had the chance to rewrite my letter and make a stronger case, in spite of how retraumatizing it’s been.
The end has come to our brief alliance, at least for now, and the conversation turns personal: I ask what he’s learned working with families and victims. What I really want to know is what he thought of my letter, and if I finally got it right in the end.
Velvet Hammer tells me that in the four hundred parole cases he’s tried, the ones who come out of it in the best shape tend to be the victims themselves. Whether it’s to do with catharsis, he doesn’t know, but every one of them, to a person, reports feeling an improvement after testifying, telling their story, taking their stand. It’s the children of murdered parents who have the hardest time. Children like me.
“They’re the only ones who decline to show up at the parole hearings,” he says.
I get it. In my childhood there was both violence and happiness, chaos and laughter, neglect and intense love, all mixed with the desire to protect my mother: such a muddled labyrinth of experiences and feelings that the second I was free—suddenly, horribly free—I ran away. Put two states between us. It was easier at the first parole hearing to stay gone, to gesture vaguely and say, What’s done is done. Let him out if you want to.
I feel like a superhero now. I don’t know how else to put it. I let the rage come, and it did not kill me. I let the rage come, and it did not kill anyone else. It didn’t ruin my job, my marriage, my friendships. It even served a purpose—it gave me power and clarity. Let the record show: I held lightning and did not burn up.
But this is not the end of anything. A year and a half from now, when Maynard applies for parole again, Velvet Hammer will likely call, asking if I will show up. Will I say yes? Will I be able to hold lightning once more? And the time after that? There is so much to rage about, and I’m only just now learning how to rest without retreating; how to make myself safe but not small. What does the narrator of that first letter want? She wants not to have to do this anymore. She wants Maynard to admit he has a problem with violence toward women and that he killed a woman he loved very much and that he is barely hanging on. The narrator would understand that. God, would she understand. She wants him to earn that letter she wrote. She wants him to feel the surf against his ankles and to know that her mother’s ashes are in that ocean and to pray with all his heart that they are coming in with the tide to forgive him.
