A noise filled the room. Her head throbbed and burned in pain.
The next thing she knew, she was gaining consciousness. She didn’t know how long she’d been passed out on the kitchen floor. She couldn’t see anything. She tried to get up, but there was so much blood she kept slipping, falling back down on the floor. She heard footsteps on the basement stairs.
“Michael?” she called out. “Help me!”
It didn’t make any sense to ask the person who’d just shot her for help, but it was a reflex. He was family. And there wasn’t anyone else there to ask.
“Michael?” she called again.
Another shot rang out. A second bullet blast into the back of her head.
This time, she didn’t pass out. This time, she played dead. She lay on the floor, trying not to breathe. She could hear Michael walking around the house. She waited, waited, holding perfectly still. Then the back door closed. Still, she lay on the floor. Maybe he was testing her, tricking her, waiting for her to get up so he could shoot her again. More than pain, more than terror, what she felt was rage. How dare he do this to her? How dare he leave her for dead, leave her for the boys to find when they came home from school? She was damned if she’d let herself die before she could tell someone who’d done this to her, get Michael into custody before he could hurt anyone else.
Finally, the house was completely quiet. She opened her eyes, but she couldn’t see anything. The bullets had damaged something in her brain or optic nerve. She crawled unsteadily across the room and pulled herself up to the kitchen counter, feeling around for the phone. She found the receiver, but when she tried to pick it up, it kept slipping from her hands. When she managed to grasp it, she remembered that she couldn’t see to dial. She banged randomly at the buttons, dropped the phone, picked it up, tried again. But she couldn’t get it to work.
She gave up and crawled slowly, unable to see where she was going or think what to do. Every once in a while, she’d catch a glimpse of light through the fog of blindness, and eventually she managed to follow the light to the front door, and then outside. They lived on a five-acre lot, the nearest neighbor too far away to hear her if she screamed. She’d have to crawl for help. She made it down the driveway and started up the road of her subdivision, screaming and screaming. She knew someone had finally seen her when she heard a woman let out a bloodcurdling wail, like in a horror film. Soon people came running. Someone shouted to call an ambulance. She could recognize some of her neighbors’ voices, but they didn’t seem to know who she was. She realized her face was so disfigured and blown apart that they didn’t recognize her. She spoke fast, spitting out details: Michael’s name, the color of his car, the approximate time when he’d shown up at the house, every detail she could remember. She might not have another chance.
“Call my in-laws,” she gasped. “Tell them to make sure the boys are safe at school. Tell Tom and the boys I love them.”
Caroline knows her parents and in-laws and stepsons were brought to the hospital to say goodbye, that her father-in-law asked a Catholic priest to come, and her mother brought her Anglican minister. The Catholic priest gave her last rites.
Weeks later, the priest visited her at her in-laws’ house, where she was recuperating, and told her, “I’ve never met anybody who’s come back.”
“Come back from where?” she asked.
“My darling,” he said, “you were cold on the table.”
It’s truly a miracle that precious Caroline survived.
But if you’ve lived through a trauma and come out the other side, you know that surviving is only the first battle.
Violence leaves a long and terrible wake. When Caroline reached out to me a few months before Michael was due to be released on parole, almost sixteen years had passed since the shooting, but the psychological wounds were still fresh.
“We see stories on TV,” she said, “about a person who suffered a trauma and is coming home. People say, ‘We’re going to take them home now and make them safe so their lives can go on.’ I look at my husband and say, ‘If they only knew.’ Just because you lived, just because you’re going home, life is not magically better. Any person who’s been traumatized has a long road to travel.”
For Caroline—as for me—some of the residual effects of the trauma are physical. When the swelling on her brain went down, Caroline’s vision slowly returned, but she still has upper, lower, and peripheral blindness. She can’t hear well. She has nerve deprivation in her hands and arms. When she gets nervous, her brain and body seem disconnected. She has trouble feeling and moving her limbs.
The crime has also taken a toll on her family and community. It’s forced everyone to face an evil committed by a loved one, a neighbor, a friend—to suffer a terrible breach of trust. For a long time, Caroline’s youngest stepson, who was only eight when this happened, wouldn’t leave her alone in a room. She’d try to coax him to join his brothers or the rest of the family, but he’d say, “No, I’ll stay here with you. I know you don’t like to be alone.” When she was able to walk and drive and regain some independence, her oldest stepson became the protective parent, following her around, hovering to make sure she didn’t hurt herself. And for a long time, her middle stepson was afraid to hug her or touch her. He was afraid he’d hurt her.
Caroline told me that while some friends and loved ones have coped with the trauma by becoming overprotective, others have dealt with it by minimizing what happened.
“People are often uncomfortable when they know,”
