No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1, Chapter 3

Part 1, Chapters 4-5

Part 1, Chapters 6-8

Part 1, Chapters 9-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-13

Part 2, Chapters 14-16

Part 2, Chapters 17-18

Part 3, Chapters 19-21

Part 3, Chapters 22-24

Part 3, Chapter 25

Author’s Note-Afterword

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 1, Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “The End”

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Daddy Always Lives”

When Michelle’s baby Kristy was six months old, Michelle moved into Rocky’s trailer and insisted that she, Rocky, and the baby try to be a family for her daughter’s sake. Michelle’s parents were devastated but vowed to be supportive. Michelle put Kristy in day care and returned to high school. She was soon pregnant again, but when her son Kyle was born, she would push a stroller two miles to drop the children at daycare so she could attend high school. She never asked for help and graduated on time. Rocky, whose work with a seismic crew kept him on the road working long hours, quit his job to have more time with his family. He took construction jobs but failed to keep them for long. When Michelle considered taking a job to help the family’s finances, Rocky became enraged, and Michelle never again suggested that she work outside the house.

As the years passed, Rocky’s controlling behavior expanded to include forbidding Michelle from wearing makeup, from going out without him, and from socializing at home. Snyder quotes the work of Evan Stark, author of Coercive Control, to show that Rocky’s behavior is typical of domestic abusers, who often “dominate and control every aspect of a victim’s life without ever laying a hand on her” (36). The victim often interprets this as love, because the abuser assures her that he is just trying to protect her. Stark says that law enforcement and the courts need to see this type of behavior as abuse, in part because it cuts the victim off from any means of escape. While France and the UK have enacted legislation against this type of behavior, the US has not.

Michelle’s sister Alyssa recounts a time when Rocky drove into oncoming traffic to yell at Michelle, who was in the car with Alyssa, and says that Rocky never suffered for his numerous reckless acts. The point, Snyder explains, was Rocky “showing Michelle in every way he could that he would risk his own life before he would risk losing control over her” (37).

Rocky also isolated Michelle from her family, particularly her mother, who could not understand why her daughter sided with Rocky, though this is common: “[V]ictims often side with their abusers publicly, to family, to police, to prosecutors. Because long after the police leave […] it is with the abuser that a victim must continually negotiate her life” (38). Furthermore, when women refuse to press charges even after the police get involved, they do so “not out of instability, as many law enforcement officers assume, but out of a measured calculation toward their future safety” (38).

To her friends, Michelle was calm, collected, and determined to provide a stable, two-parent home for her children, so she justified staying with Rocky, who could seem affectionate and vulnerable at times. Michelle’s determination to make her life work kept her from confiding in her mother, although she did sometimes speak to Rocky’s stepmother, Sarah, who admired Michelle’s intelligence. This intelligence, Snyder says, is also part of why Michelle stayed, because Michelle was “[s]mart enough to know that getting away from Rocky wasn’t something she’d be able to do overnight. It would require meticulous planning and preparation” (39).

Gordon tells Snyder that Michelle once called him saying Rocky was threatening to kill her and the kids. Gordon rushed over to pick them up, took Rocky’s gun, spoke to him about his behavior, and convinced himself that the situation was a one-off. As he recounts this episode, Gordon breaks down, crying and lamenting the fact that he believed his son was incapable of hurting Michelle and the kids.

Snyder summarizes several of the home videos Rocky took of Michelle and the kids out camping in the woods and at home. The peaceful, quiet camping videos starkly contrast with the videos shot at home, where heavy metal music plays nonstop. In the final video, Rocky calls the family pit bull to join him, but the dog ignores him. Rocky then grabs the dog’s paws and pulls him forward, but the dog “backs away cowering, unaware of his own power. ‘That’s right, Bandit,’ Michelle says. ‘Too dangerous.’” (42-43). This last scene Snyder describes ends with Rocky disparaging Michelle, reminding her that she does not have a job.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “A Bear Is Coming at You”

Snyder recounts an evening she spent with Alyssa, Michelle’s sister, and Ivan, who was Rocky’s best friend until Rocky entered Pine Hills and then moved to Florida to live with his biological mother. Ivan and Rocky reconnected when Michelle had her children, and Ivan and Alyssa began dating. However, Ivan’s decision to stop drinking and doing drugs and return to school strained the men’s friendship.

Alyssa told Ivan some of what was happening between Rocky and Michelle, but when Ivan attempted to speak to Rocky about it, he was rebuffed. On the few occasions when Michelle managed to slip over to Alyssa’s and Ivan’s house, she would speak about the threats Rocky was making. Michelle was speaking in a code that is common to abused women, gently probing in her efforts to assess the threat level, but never revealing the severity of the situation. Michelle never told Ivan that when Rocky was angry with her, he would take her children away for hours at a time, leaving her “stuck there at home, worried, frantic that maybe this time he wouldn’t come back, and the kids became pawns, a way for him to keep her obedient, conciliatory” (46). Ultimately, Ivan didn’t understand what Michelle was asking him for during these conversations.

Rocky introduced Michelle’s sister Melanie to methamphetamine when she was in high school and had her accompany him on drug deals, telling her to claim the drugs were hers since she was young and had no record. Rocky tried to give Alyssa drugs too, but she resisted. For Alyssa, the incident in which Rocky drove into oncoming traffic to scream at Michelle convinced her of the danger Rocky posed. That incident revealed how unhinged and paranoid Rocky could be—qualities the drugs seemed to exacerbate. Michelle kept a lot of what Rocky was doing from Alyssa, however.

When Kyle entered kindergarten, Michelle enrolled in college and applied for financial aid. When she learned this would be determined by her parents’ tax records, she asked if there was another way to qualify and learned she could use Rocky’s tax records if she married him. Michelle did: “[I]t was the biggest irony of her life, a system that forced her to marry a man she was working so hard to leave” (48).

Michelle walked her kids to school and then walked to her own classes, often with Rocky following her in implicit warning against “misbehavior.” With two small kids underfoot and heavy metal blaring at home, Michelle told Rocky she was enrolled in another class so she could sneak to the library and study in peace.

In 2001, Michelle began to suspect that Rocky was having an affair. She went to a clinic to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and was put on antidepressants, which Rocky threw away. One afternoon, Michelle left her kids with Sjaastad and went home to confront Rocky about the affair, warning her mother not to let Rocky take the kids. Rocky showed up soon afterwards, and Sjaastad watched in horror as he tried to break down the locked doors of her home. She noticed that Kyle and Kristy, in the middle of this violent and chaotic scene, did not seem scared: “They weren’t crying. They had gone still, their eyes in a kind of catatonia. My god, Sally thought, they’ve seen this before. They’ve seen their father like this “ (50).

Rocky broke into the house and took Kristy. When Sjaastad called the police, she found them unhelpful and uninterested. They only charged Rocky with breaking into her house, which left out the violence and the injuries to Sjaastad and her daughter Melanie. Michelle and Kyle stayed with Sjaastad that night, and Michelle filled her mother in on her life with Rocky, including the deadly rattlesnake he had brought home and threatened to put in bed or in the shower with her.

At Sjaastad’s urging, Michelle detailed the abuse in an affidavit she submitted to get a restraining order against Rocky, who returned with Kristy the following morning, intending to get supplies and take his daughter camping for a week. Michelle’s request for a restraining order was filed together with Sjaastad’s police complaint, which was a simple administrative error that would have far-reaching consequences: “In Montana, it takes three PFMA charges before a domestic violence misdemeanor assault can be charged as a felony” (52). When Michelle eventually recanted her affidavit, Sjaastad’s complaint would be dismissed along with it.

Rocky spent the weekend in jail, but on Monday morning his parents paid the $500 to bail Rocky out. Michelle was terrified that Rocky would hurt her children, so she recanted the complaint she had made against Rocky—a decision, Snyder says, that “is one of the most profoundly misunderstood moments in any domestic violence situation” (53). Michelle did not recant because she was weak or stupid or a liar or trusted Rocky; she was trying to ensure her and her children’s survival. Given how often victims of abuse are forced to make decisions like this, Snyder says, it is inappropriate to question their motives, which are usually part of a complex plan to bide time and stay alive. The only appropriate question, Snyder argues, is “how do we protect this person? No qualifiers” (54).

Michelle recanted her statement to a woman at the district attorney’s office named Stacy Tenney, who knew Michelle was recanting under duress but was powerless to do anything about it. The next day, Michelle met Rocky in a park and let him move back home. Alyssa surmised that this was damage control for filing the affidavit, which had “expos[ed] him for who he really was in the eyes of others—something she hadn’t done before. It was taking some of his control from him, and she had to give it back to him in order to not die” (55). When Rocky and Michelle’s mothers found out that Rocky was back at home, both women called the police to warn them that Michelle was in danger. Sjaastad insisted that she herself had pressed charges against Rocky and was devastated to learn that when Michelle recanted her affidavit, her complaint was dropped too.

Michelle, who now knew that their families could not help her and that any further trouble or interference might send Rocky over the edge, cut off contact with both families. Two days before Thanksgiving, Alyssa went by Michelle’s house looking for her sister. The house was quiet and dark, and Alyssa called her father to say that something was wrong.

Part 1, Chapters 4-5 Analysis

Chapter 4 begins with Michelle’s insistence that the right thing to do, now that she had a baby, was to move in with Rocky and make their family work. As Snyder has already established, this thinking—that any home with two parents is better than a healthy home with one parent—is incredibly dangerous to women in abusive relationships, as it puts extraordinary social pressure on the victim to stay in the relationship. In Michelle’s case, another pregnancy and increasing isolation from friends and family followed the move to Rocky’s trailer. The fact that Michelle persevered and graduated high school, Snyder suggests, is a testament to her strength of character and her desire to make a good life for herself and her kids.

Rocky’s treatment of Michelle illustrates the often subtle “coercive control” Evan Stark describes in his work on the invisible side of domestic abuse. Rocky’s wild and reckless behavior only served to heighten Michelle’s fears for her own safety and the safety of the children, which made the threats Rocky issued seem both viable and probable. Yet Michelle stayed, not because she was stupid or irresponsible, but because she was intelligent and was carefully calculating the risks to herself and her children. Michelle was playing a long game, Snyder suggests, laying the groundwork—through education and acquiring the deed to her home—to eventually free herself and the kids from Rocky. Snyder underscores this point rhetorically throughout these chapters, repeating the phrase “to stay alive” to reinforce her argument that Michelle was carefully calculating each step (54).

At the same time, Rocky was not always threatening or evil. There is evidence, particularly on the video tapes he recorded and left behind, that he loved his children and enjoyed instructing them and spending time with them. As Snyder points out, these small moments are often enough to keep women in the home, carrying them from abusive event to abusive event. Rocky’s two sides also reflect a theme Snyder develops more thoroughly in Part 2: how toxic masculinity—especially the difficulty many men have processing and expressing emotions—intersects with domestic violence.

By the end of Chapter 4, Snyder has used Michelle’s story to portray the complexity of domestic abuse, including the subtle insidiousness of coercive control, our unwillingness to believe that people we care about could truly pose a threat, the many social pressures to keep a family intact, the social and institutional barriers to women’s independence, and the overriding concern for children that tethers many women to unsafe situations. The abuse created a cone of silence around Michelle, ensuring that even the people closest to her could not see what was really happening.

This changed with Rocky’s violent entry into Sally’s home—an event that was impossible for those around the couple to ignore. As Snyder depicts it, the most chilling aspect of the entire event is when Sally notices that her grandchildren simply shut down in the face of their father’s rage. Snyder, who uses direct quotes of dialogue sparingly throughout the text, quotes Sally directly in describing the kids’ faces. The unavoidable conclusion, for both Sally and the reader, is that these children have learned to disassociate from the horrors they routinely witness—a behavior they need to survive, but one which might also set them up to repeat the same abuse cycle.