And Never Let Her Go (31 page)

Linda still owed Tom $3,000 and that rankled him. He told his secretary that she had shared her financial problems with him and that he had lent her money. “She hasn't paid me back,” he said, “and I'm going to fix her ass.”

He asked for Linda's personnel file and then had his secretary type up a civil complaint against her. On June 14, Tom filed suit against Linda Marandola, asking for $3,000 plus interest. She didn't even try to answer the suit. There was no point; Linda didn't have any money for an attorney and Tom had so much power in Wilmington. She allowed him to get a default judgment against her.

M
IKE
and Anne Marie had plans to spend some time in Falmouth, Massachusetts, over the Memorial Day weekend, May 25–27; it would be their first real trip together. Jennifer Bartels Haughton's in-laws had a place on Martha's Vineyard, and Mike and Anne Marie planned to see Jennifer and her husband there. They could take the ferry from the mainland to Martha's Vineyard, and it would be a chance for Jennifer to meet Mike, the man she had heard about in the frequent phone conversations she had with Anne Marie.

But their plans fell through. The house in Falmouth where Anne Marie and Mike planned to stay was full, so after only one day, they headed out to visit Mike's college roommate instead—and he lived too far from Martha's Vineyard. On the way home, they stopped in Rhode Island to see Mike's parents. Although Anne Marie had met them, this was the first time she was in their home. And she was the first girl Mike had brought home since high school. She was touched to see that his mother had placed pictures of Mike as a child in the room where she slept.

Jennifer and Annie missed each other, a circumstance that would sadden Jennifer in a most profound way. And it wasn't the best of trips for Anne Marie. She didn't feel well over Memorial Day weekend. She had come to a point where it was almost impossible
for her to eat, and she was getting weaker despite Dr. Sullivan's careful monitoring of her electrolytes. Sullivan knew that Anne Marie was taking as many as fifteen laxatives a day and there was a very real danger that she could have a heart attack.

Anne Marie was under siege. With so many forces attacking her, it was hard for her to fight. She was in love with Mike and afraid of losing him; she was afraid to start eating because she thought she would soon be obese; and she was fearful that she might die because she couldn't eat. But most of all, Tom was haunting her again, despite her many attempts to keep things platonic between them. He had never meant it when he said they would only be friends.

Returning to her job after her trip to Cape Cod, Anne Marie learned from Siobhan Sullivan that Tom had been looking for her over the long weekend. She wasn't really surprised. “He paged me,” Siobhan recalled. “When I returned the page, he asked me if I had talked to Anne Marie, and I said no. And he asked me if I knew where Anne Marie was, and I said no.”

Siobhan hadn't encouraged any further questioning, but when she told Anne Marie that Tom had paged her and was asking where she was, Anne Marie was very upset. “He's fucking stalking me,” she said angrily.

Siobhan tried to calm her down. “Anne Marie, there is a charge. That's a crime, there's a law against that. We can give you protection.” She explained that she was, after all, a State Police officer and involved in protecting not only the governor but everyone in his office.

“No.” Anne Marie sighed. “I can handle it. I just have to end it with Tom.” She confessed to Siobhan that she had been afraid that Tom might have been waiting at her house to confront her and Mike when they got back from New England. She had made the mistake of telling him she was going to Cape Cod for Memorial Day. But she hadn't told him exactly where she was going or with whom. Tom had obviously figured out that she had gone away with Mike.

He had been so insistent that they were going to have dinner at La Famiglia on Thursday night, May 30, that Anne Marie had stopped trying to dissuade him. They met for dinner and she tried to be pleasant, without giving him any signals that she felt more than friendship for him. But the morning after that “date,” he was E-mailing her to ask her to come to his house Sunday afternoon to make pasta. Or if she didn't want to do that, they could have dinner at the Villa d' Roma (the restaurant that Debby considered their “special place”). And, oh yes, Tom wanted Anne Marie to start playing golf with him.

It had taken him only weeks to coil himself around her again. She felt the old pressure to report all of her activities to him. It wasn't that she hated Tom—not at all; he was being so damned nice to her. But he didn't seem to realize that he was almost choking the life out of her. She didn't want all the things he was insistent about giving her, but she didn't seem to have the strength to say no.

Anne Marie was faithful in keeping her appointments with Dr. Sullivan, determined to win her fight for her health and her life. Sullivan was a strong ally. “I began speaking with her about her anger that the gifts were manipulative,” she recalled. “He might ask her to have some time with him having supper, and what might get added on to that is, ‘Oh, let me buy you a dress.' And she found herself angry about that. She had a hard time enough saying no to going out, and she just felt like he kept piling it on and piling it on.”

The two of them worked on exercises, using conversational ploys that would help Anne Marie be strong in her resolve.

Tom had been currying favor with Kim and Jackie, and now he told Anne Marie that he had invited her brother Robert and his wife, Susan, along with Kim, to a Cézanne exhibit on June 15 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was invited too, of course. It would be a grand affair, sponsored by Saul, Ewing—his firm had chosen the Cézanne function to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary.

Anne Marie didn't go to the Cézanne exhibition, but Robert and Susan did and had a good time. Susan wrote Tom a warm thank-you note. Robert had no idea that Anne Marie and Tom had been anything more than friends. Tom and Robert had known each other slightly for years, and now Tom raved about how much he liked Robert, calling him “my second-favorite Fahey.”

Anne Marie was mortified. She didn't want Tom pushing his way into her family. She didn't want her family to know about Tom.

On June 8, Anne Marie and Kim went to a wedding together. Tom had lent Anne Marie his credit card so that she could pay for her gift to the couple: twelve months of floral arrangements. She had repaid him before the wedding; on June 4, she wrote him a check for $122.50 on her Congressional Federal Credit Union account. It was another of the monetary transactions between them, the loans that she berated herself for accepting.

A
S
Tom had predicted, Kim
was
shocked at the wedding to see how thin Anne Marie was. At the same time, she seemed very happy, happier than Kim had ever seen her. Anne Marie told Kim that she was falling in love with Mike.

“Michael was redoing his kitchen,” Kim recalled, “and Annie said it was like they were married—because he let Annie pick out the tiles, and Annie was helping him decorate his house. Mike missed the wedding because he was swimming in a marathon the next day, but Anne Marie called to wish him luck and tell him she was thinking about him.”

Mike had been training for the long-distance swim in Annapolis since January, and there was no way he could have gone with Anne Marie to the wedding and been able to compete. She understood.

Four days later, on June 12, Anne Marie fainted in her office. She knew why she was so weak and sick, and she didn't want to call Mike to take her back to her apartment. That would mean she would have had to explain how serious her eating problem was. She didn't want him to know; she wanted to be well before she ever admitted all of it to him.

Instead, Anne Marie called Tom and asked if he would drive her home. He was close by and he knew about her problem. He came immediately, scooped her up, and took her to her apartment. For him, it was a triumph, and another beachhead. He told Kim later that he had held Anne Marie in his arms as she lay collapsed on her kitchen floor, and that he had forced Gatorade into her to bring up her electrolytes.

Maybe he did. The Tom who kept track of the insulin in case his friend needed it and the Tom who closed Debby's mother's eyes was good in emergencies. He thrived when he was in charge. It was his forte, and if he was called upon for matters dealing with life and death, so much the better. It was preferable to be the guy with the clear head who deftly took care of business than to be some frantic fool.

Anne Marie insisted on returning to work that afternoon, despite Tom's objections. She had had a moment of true awakening; she realized that she had come close to death as the cramps and nausea of severe potassium loss hit her. More than at any other time, she had chosen to live.

I
N MID
-J
UNE
, summer drops over Wilmington like a collapsing balloon, humid and hot, with scarcely an interim period for anyone to adjust. On Fridays, all the roads heading south are full of beach traffic. And all the restaurants that can, including Kid
Shelleen's and O'Friel's Irish Pub, open their outdoor decks and patios. The big old city houses seem to trap the day's heat. In the working-class neighborhoods, people in undershirts and halters emerge to sit on their front stoops or drag lawn chairs out in the yard or parking strip to find a spot of cool.

Homemade water-ice stands spring up in Little Italy. The mixture is not a snow cone. It's less than sherbet, more than lemonade, and balm to parched throats. The vendor sloshes a dipper through a washtub full of a slush of shaved ice, lemon, sugar, and water, and then fills a waxed paper cup to overflowing.

The Trolley Square neighborhood lures yuppies to outdoor decks, where they sip Corona and watch the traffic go by. Every hour or so a train crosses the trestle bridge in front of Kid Shelleen's patio, and conversation stops as the cars rumble past. This had been Anne Marie's milieu in recent years, trendy, loud, and fun, but somehow full of the past, too.

Her apartment on Washington Street was close to downtown Wilmington and not nearly as affluent as the Forty Acres and Trolley Square neighborhoods. From her apartment, she could walk up Eighteenth Street, past Salesianum School, Baynard Stadium, the old Wanamaker's department store, and over the Augustine cutoff into Forty Acres and Trolley Square. In June, it was a lovely walk; home owners were sprucing up their yards, watering the grass, planting flowers, pulling weeds. Everything smelled fresh and new.

The June air in Wilmington smelled of honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass; of submarine sandwiches wrapped in waxy off-white butcher paper to keep in the juices of tomatoes, peppers, and onions; of the Delaware River; and of sweat and suntan oil. It was perhaps, of all seasons, the best time for a new beginning.

O
N
June 14, St. Anthony's festival drew its usual crowds. Anne Marie took her nephews during the day and ran into a man she had worked with in the congressional offices down in Washington. “I saw her with her nephews at the carnival,” he recalled. “I have to say I was taken aback. I recognized her, but she was not the Anne Marie that I had known—she was always very effervescent, just a happy person, generally. She was still the same happy person at the St. Anthony's festival, but she had lost a lot of weight, and her hair was straight, lightened, and brittle looking.” She had in fact reached bottom only two days before, but was rapidly rebounding.

That Friday night, Anne Marie and Mike had fixed Kim up
with a blind date with Mike's friend Dan, thinking how great it would be if they hit it off, too. They all met at Anne Marie's apartment, and it was apparent to both Dan and Kim that there was no magic, but when they went to the festival, there was so much energy, light, and music that it didn't matter.

Kim and Anne Marie had a chance to talk when the men walked ahead through the crowd. “Oh my God,” Anne Marie whispered suddenly.

“Who?”

“Tom
—quick, walk the other way!”

They reversed their steps before Tom saw them. He was with his daughters.

“She said that she had passed out at work,” Kim recalled. “She was faint at work, and she called Capano to come pick her up—she reluctantly shared that with me. She was a little sheepish about it to say that she actually called him to pick her up.”

The two women managed to hide their concern about the close encounter from Mike and Dan.

Anne Marie had avoided Tom at the St. Anthony's festival, but his E-mail continued. He was still trying to lend her money, buy her things, leave food for her, be
with
her. When she mentioned that her apartment was roasting, he bought her an air conditioner. She was trying hard not to say anything in her cautious E-mail that might give him an idea of something else to buy her.

She had accepted too much from Tom and admitted to herself that it had been nice, back in the days when he “treated her like a princess,” to have his presents, his continual concern for giving her what she wanted and needed. No more. And her natural tendency for self-deprecation made her feel that the trap he'd caught her in was her own fault.

I
T
was June 19, and Anne Marie was having her weekly session with Dr. Sullivan. Sullivan had tried every way she knew to convince Anne Marie that she was a good person, deserving of happiness—and she had begun to succeed. Typical of anorectics, Anne Marie had one part of her body that she hated the most: her legs. They seemed immense and ugly to her.

“Write a letter to your legs,” Michelle suggested, and Anne Marie looked at her as if
she
was the one in need of therapy.

It wasn't as silly as it sounded at first; Anne Marie needed to defuse her legs as entities that had power over her. She had begun to
come back from her nadir point, she had cut way down on laxatives, was eating more, and now she had to “forgive” her fat thighs. Perhaps only another woman could understand.