It seemed a typical thing for a wife to leave her husband: a note on the kitchen table.
But Laura's scrawl didn't ask Paul to pick up milk, drop off dry cleaning or pay the telephone bill.
It told him to get out of her life.
Since they married six months earlier, Paul had begun shooting heroin. He routinely berated her. Occasionally, he'd slap her even though she was pregnant.
Laura wasn't a drug user herself, and didn't want to raise her children under that cloud.
``I wanted him to just leave. I couldn't stand living that way anymore. I left him a note because I was afraid to tell him to his face,'' she said. ``I was hoping he'd just be gone when I got back.''
No such luck.
Despite her initial resolve, she suffered years of abuse, dozens of beatings, life in battered women's shelters and other indignities before making a final break with Paul. It took the combined support of friends, family, counselors, women's centers, support groups to help end the violent relationship once and for all. Often, experts said, it takes years, even decades, before a woman finally gets up enough confidence, courage and gumption to leave her batterer. In the meantime, many battered women just stay - out of love, hope or fear.
On a psychological and physical level, staying in the relationship can mean continued verbal abuse, battering and, in some cases, death.
But trying to escape is no picnic either.
National statistics show that 75 percent of women murdered by their abusive partners are killed in the attempt to leave or after they have left.
``People need to stop asking the question, `Why doesn't she leave?' and start asking `What more can we do to help,''' said Sue Audino, program coordinator for Attleboro's shelter for battered women. ``That's the way to break the cycle.''
For a few short moments on the first day she asked Paul to pack his belongings, Laura thought she was free of the violence. When she returned to the apartment, it appeared he had left.
``I thought he was gone, because he had moved his truck so I couldn't see it,'' said Laura, who asked that her real name not be used.
``When I got to the apartment door, he opened it. He grabbed me by the shirt and threw me inside,'' she said. ``He threw me across the room. He grabbed my son, and threw him across the room. We were both on the floor, and he started kicking us.''
She shielded her child, a son from a previous marriage, with her body.
``Then he just really tuned in on me. He was yelling at me that I had no right to ask him to leave, that I was lucky he was with me, that no one else would have me. He was screaming, who was I anyway, and things like that.''
When it was over, she said, her husband telephoned a friend - one Paul knew wouldn't ask too many questions or challenge his treatment of Laura - and asked her to come help Laura clean the mess.
``He had smashed all the pictures in the house, every dish in the cabinets. There were broken dishes on the floor, the mirrors in the bathroom were smashed. He smashed my son's Ghostbuster's firehouse with a bat. He smashed plants, vases, knickknacks. Everything was a shambles.''
Everything, except her husband.
``After, he was calm. He had gotten it out of his system,'' she recalled.
The incident, experts say, is typical in the cycle of violence that mars millions of lives in the United States.
Tensions build when the batterer begins to feel life or the relationship getting out of control. This in turn leads to an explosive incident that instills fear in the victim, and often makes that person more compliant. The violence is followed by a period of calm and sometimes contrition.
Then, it all happens again.
It may be days between incidents, or months. But usually the cloud of violence still lingers even when no one is being beaten.
``When a batterer starts to feel he is losing power and control, he tries to get it back in so many ways. He uses intimidation, threats, coercion. He might say he'll commit suicide, or report you to welfare if you don't drop the charges, or say he's going to DSS or immigration,'' said John DeJesus, who runs a batterers' treatment program for the Portuguese Youth Cultural Organization in Fall River. ``He might not batter her, but he'll kick other things around, kick the dog, put a gun or a knife on top of a table or in his pocket. He might call her names, humiliate her in front of others.''
After Laura finished sweeping up the shattered glass and broken bits of figurines and family pictures, she went to an emergency room.
``I had bruises all over, and my arm was messed up,'' she said. ``My shoulders and arms and legs hurt. About the only place he didn't kick me was in the stomach. So, the baby was okay.''
This time.
She gave birth to their daughter four months later, and then, within the year, she became pregnant again.
Laura decided to stick it out in the relationship for a number of reasons.
She said she wanted to make the marriage work. Paul could sometimes be kind and loving to her.
Laura already had one failed marriage behind her. Her first husband had also been abusive, although not so violent.
It was Paul who encouraged her to finally get her first husband to leave, and stood by her side when she called police to escort her first husband from her apartment.
Laura thought she had found a knight in shining armor.
But soon that armor tarnished.
After her baby daughter was born, Laura resolved to put everything she had into the marriage and make Paul go straight. She had come from a broken family herself. Laura had a fantasy that her children would grow up in a secure home with both parents.
Even as she indulged the idea that having Paul around was better than not having a husband and father, Laura said she was also afraid of him.
She feared her husband would follow through on his threats to kill her, if she tried to leave.
She said she was ashamed to seek help from the courts, the police, government agencies or a women's shelter.
Laura also felt financially and emotionally insecure. Her husband forced her to quit several jobs: throwing jealous fits where she worked, being rude to her co-workers and bosses.
As Paul continued to abuse drugs and alcohol, his personality became more bizarre and frightening.
``I was really, really afraid. I realized that he could really hurt me. What did I do? I tried to make things better. I tried not to provoke him. The only control I felt that I had was if I could get him to stop using drugs. So that became my focal point,'' she said.
She called on God, and became a faithful church-goer.
``I became very involved in the church, the Episcopal church. For some reason, he didn't see that as a threat. I prayed to God every day, asking him to help me do the right thing,'' she said.
Laura did a good job at hiding the abuse from her new church friends, although she finally broke down and confided to one priest.
During her second pregnancy she decided she had to leave Paul. Although he rarely physically hurt the children, Laura decided this was no way for them to grow up.
This time, she tried to cushion the break up hoping it would ease Paul's reaction.
She told her husband she still loved him but felt they should spend some time apart.
``He knew where that was heading, I guess, and he didn't like it,'' she said.
``He started slapping me and yelling at me, what kind of mother are you, you don't deserve to have a baby. Then he started kicking me in the stomach. I was on the floor, crying.''
She said her husband's cousin was in the next room but didn't intervene. Over the years, during the dozens of beatings, the screaming and crying, usually in apartment complexes, no one had ever intervened.
Despite society's belief that pregnant women should be treated tenderly, often these women suffer serious domestic abuse.
Approximately one out of every three pregnant women is battered, according to statistics gathered by Casa Myrna Vazques Inc. and the Boston Healthy Start Initiative. Of the population of battered women, 25 to 40 percent are abused when pregnant.
In Laura's case, her priest called on the telephone shortly after she had been beaten.
The priest was the same one in whom she had confided about the abuse. He caught a hint of trouble from the sound of her voice and came to her home on the pretext of getting her to attend to a church matter.
``When he came, it was obvious there was something wrong. He came in and talked to us. He took the approach, if you're not getting along, why don't you spend a few hours apart. He asked my husband if he had any place to go for a few hours, and when he came back things would be better. So my husband left,'' Laura recalled.
``Then the priest turned to me and said, this was my chance. If I didn't leave now, I might never get the chance to leave again.''
With his encouragement and support from an aunt, she packed a few things, gathered together her children and left for a battered women's shelter.
The next day, she lost the baby.
She had been three months pregnant. If the fetus had been a few weeks older, her husband could have been charged with murder, police told her.
Officials checked her into a hospital as a Jane Doe because her husband, who heard about the miscarriage, was trying to find her.
Police charged him with assault, and he was sent to jail.
A year later, Laura testified for Paul at his parole hearing, helping to win his release.
The turnabout may seem inexplicable to those unfamilar with domestic violence, but to those who work in the field the scenario is all too common in the cycle of abuse.
``Once they've filed for a restraining order, or once the guy is in jail, or once she's left, then the apologies start. They start to feel sorry for him, they think, oh, he's not able to control it and he needs me to help him. They want to fix him,'' said Ginger Waibel, a battered women's counselor with Fall River's Stanley Street Treatment and Resources. ``A lot of times this can be the wooing stage. This is when the flowers come. This is when they say they're sorry. This is when there are dates, dinners, the I love yous, the proposals of marriage. Then the woman thinks, oh, he really loves me.''
The battered woman agrees to take him back, drop the restraining order, stop divorce proceedings, take back the testimony. The batterer often tells her, and she believes, that she is the one person who can change him for the better.
When she miscarried, Laura said, she detested Paul. Then, she blamed herself and made excuses for him.
``I just hated him,'' she said. ``I was just totally in the ground. Someone could have run over me with a train, and I wouldn't have noticed or cared. I wondered if I had left earlier, would that have changed things. I looked to things I could have done to make things different. I couldn't believe that he had meant to do this to me.''
She went to visit him in jail, at his mother's request.
``His mother wanted me to go to the hearing and testify for him so he could get out. Her thing was you shouldn't hold hate. You have to forgive and go on. She told me (Paul) didn't mean to do that. Now, he wants to start a new life, he isn't doing drugs, he needs another chance,'' she said. ``I went to see him. He looked healthy, he wasn't doing drugs. He was remorseful, said he was sorry. He said he cried everyday about what had happened. He said it broke his heart, that he loved me, that he never meant to hurt me.''
His mother told Laura she held Paul's future in her hands. Laura said she didn't feel as if she had the right to deny him another chance.
Laura lied at the parole hearing, and said police had exaggerated the case.
Paul was released, and soon they were back together again.
But things soon deteriorated, and she left him again.
It was a series of events, actions and a growing awareness of the problem that made her decide to leave permanently.
She said that the more time she spent without him, the more self-esteem and strength she collected.
With the help of government and private support systems, she had gone back to school and learned to live independently.
She had undergone lots of counseling, and met other abused women in support groups.
When she left him this time, she knew it would be for good.
But Paul wouldn't take no for an answer. He tracked her down and set fire to her apartment.
This time, she said, she had no qualms about trying to send him to jail.
But despite repeated attempts, she said she couldn't convince fire authorities that they should actively investigate Paul as a suspect.
Laura sees her repeated returns to Paul as part of a growing process - not a failure.
During the times without him and through counseling, she came to understand more about herself, her husband and both their pasts.
Laura was born in Southeastern Massachusetts, as was Paul. Her parents split up when she was a child, and her mother moved out of state with Laura and a younger brother. Theirs was a life of living on the edge of poverty and moving around a lot.
Laura had been a victim of battering since she was a small child. She said her mother routinely beat her - with feet, with hands, with vacuum cleaner attachments and a majorette baton.
Laura's education was incomplete. Over the years, she worked sporadically at a variety of low-paying jobs.
Her husband, too, had grown up in a violent family: his father was abusive to his mother. Paul too worked in a variety of jobs, but never kept one for long.
``It's all we knew. I know it's difficult to understand. But taking a person out of an abusive relationship when that's pretty much all they've known is like taking a fish out of water,'' she said. ``There's part of you that thinks this is the way things should be.''
After a few years without him, Laura said she knows how much better life can be.
She is in college, she has a job and an apartment. She is working with a battered women's shelter on several projects.
Paul's heroin habit finally caught up with him. He died of an overdose in jail.
But not before he abused other women. He beat several girlfriends, and was also charged with stabbing a pregnant woman who was supposed to testify against him in an assault case.
``We got out, and it changed life for me and my children. You can do it. You can break the cycle,'' Laura said. ``But it's almost as if you need to be retrained to live. Looking back, I can't believe we lived that way. It seems crazy.''
