Beyond Obsession (24 page)

After midnight the next day Dennis wrote about his reactions:

Last night, when we got home, I was told a small battalion of police were combing the town. I didn't get much sleep for the first four hours I lay in bed. Sunday, today, I was to call and see if we were going out for dinner that night. I'll not describe how scared I was making that call. I even talked, at first, with an odd voice in case her mother answered in wrath. I was prepared to say it was only Sean. But Karin answered and by some miracle, it seemed to me, her mother was forgiving and understanding about the whole thing. Dinner was off for
that
night, but I sensed some tension in Karin's voice. To me something else sounded wrong. The way she said, “Well, I guess I'll talk to you sometime … call me tomorrow,” has unsettled me to no end. The fact that my brother later told me that Mrs. Aparo had wanted me arrested did not help. Oh god.

For the first time in over a year, or more, I feel emotion stirred deep, deep within me. For some reason I feel I just can't, no matter what, lose this girl. I've fallen for her completely, and it is the most unthinkable fear which causes my worst thoughts. All I want is to talk openly and honestly. To Karin I would be nothing other than open, honest, and sincere. We need a chance, because what's inside me now is a feeling much like love.
Please
understand. What am I going to say to her later this morning?
Please
.

One of the things he did say when he saw her was that they must make definite plans for dinner together. It would be, both decided, their first real date. They had been talking about it for a couple of weeks, since just before the end of school. He had even given her a list of possible restaurants and asked her to choose one. They settled on one of Glastonbury's best, Blacksmith's Tavern. “We planned,” Karin said, “an evening that reeked of class.” There would be that dinner, and then, Dennis promised, he would drive her to a hill from which they would have a spectacular night view of Hartford.

It didn't happen on the night they originally planned. But it did finally on June 25, 1986. They had dinner and then drove around the town, Dennis stopping and kissing her every few minutes. They parked on a hill with a breathtaking view, and Dennis told her he was falling in love with her. They talked about that and about trusting and respecting each other, and then they drove to an area where new houses were being built, where they parked in one of the driveways. They sat in his car and talked about the future, talked about going away together for what they called a honeymoon. She agreed, but on one condition. Before she could spell that out, he asked her to marry him. She said yes. And then they planned their wedding and reception, and a honeymoon trip to Vienna, and even the house in which they would live on their return.

They were home by ten. Karin went to bed. A few minutes later she heard a tapping at her window screen. It was Dennis. She turned out the lights and went over to the window. He had, he said, come to say good-night.

When he was gone, she took a piece of paper and wrote him a letter, then put it in their private mailbox in her window for him to pick up in the morning. She wrote that she wanted to tell him that she had just come home from a truly wonderful night with a wonderful person in a wonderful car, and that they had talked about wonderful things, and that even without the place and the car and the night, it would still have been wonderful, but the person she had been with had made it perfect. He was, she wrote, very special, and her only fear was that she might lose him. “I want to keep you around … yes, forever. Forever and a day.”

But a separation lay just ahead, and even though only temporary, it loomed to them as forever. Karin had been baby-sitting for some neighbors, Kennedy Hudner and his wife, for the past year. In mid-July the Hudners were going to Cape Cod for vacation. They had asked Karin to go along with them, and she had agreed. It would get her out of the house and away from her mother for a couple of weeks, and that was, to her, a prospect much to be desired. Her relationship with her mother was at best volatile; Joyce's demands often seemed to her extreme, and nothing Karin did was ever enough, ever satisfactory. She needed room and rarely had it. The Hudners were offering her some of that necessary space.

But when the Hudners returned to Glastonbury, Karin would not be returning with them. Her mother had arranged for the two of them to go to Nantucket for a short vacation of their own, and that would mean they would be in close proximity all the time they were on the island. There would not even be the kind of limited freedom she enjoyed when Joyce was off at her job. There would be only Joyce. And Dennis would be far away, back in Glastonbury.

Then Joyce offered an option that made the trip inviting. Dennis had driven Joyce to her job at Athena in Waterbury on several occasions, they had talked during those rides and she had grown increasingly fond of him. Now she suggested to him, and he eagerly accepted, a chance for him and Karin to be together. Why, she asked, didn't he go with them to Nantucket? When he said yes, she booked a room for him at the same hotel at which they were staying.

Karin was delighted at the prospect, and not merely because it meant that she and Dennis would be together. He would also be a buffer between her and Joyce, for relations between mother and daughter had been deteriorating over recent weeks, another of those cycles through which she had lived as long as she could remember, things steadily getting worse between them until something happened to cause an improvement. Perhaps Dennis could be that something.

On July 6 she wrote in her diary that she was in trouble again with Joyce, though she didn't spell out the cause of the trouble, and had been grounded, forbidden to see anyone. She was, as a result, very lonely, missing Dennis and hoping that he hadn't forgotten her. “Could cry but no tears. Could scream but no voice. Could die but no heart. Must go on in silence, closed silence.”

In another entry the next day she wrote that she was still, and again, in trouble with Joyce, that Joyce was threatening to take away her violin, was even threatening to hit her with the violin, as she had before. Karin didn't know why; she didn't know what she had done. “Being a teenager is
not my
fault!” Maybe if Joyce did actually use the violin as a club, it would clear the fog that seemed to envelop Karin.

That daze may well have been the result of the mounting intensity in her romance with Dennis as much as anything else. They were seeing each other constantly. Dennis had no time for anything but work and Karin. His friends saw him hardly at all, and when they did, he was not the old Dennis; he was distracted, interested only in Karin. Karin, too, had little time for much but the chores her mother set for her, her violin lessons and practice, the tasks, Joyce set for her as a nursing home volunteer, the work for Archbishop Whealon—and Dennis. If they missed a day, it was as though they had been apart forever. When together, they seemed increasingly unable to control their emotions, and perhaps nothing is so uncontrollable as the sex drives of teenagers.

One day Dennis wrote:

To Karin: A Note

Have you come up with a “sure fire” method of taking care of, well, my “problem?”

I HOPE SO DEAR. I also love you.

The notes went back and forth, Karin responding in kind. Then, on July 7, while sitting at his computer at work, he took a piece of Aetna stationery and wrote:

Hi Karin. This program is bugging me out. Totally. I can't concentrate. Well, about 45 minutes after I left your house, I finally did regain my concentration. However, I am now suffering from something worse than that. There is a lewd term used among males, but it is generally not discussed among mixed company. Point is—it
is
painful and comes from being “stimulated” beyond or to the limits of concentration, but not quite totally. Pain doesn't quite do it justice. Agony—maybe. We'll
have
to find a solution soon. So, are you going to total my concentration now, or what? GO FOR IT!!! Oh my.

Two days later, on July 9, they took a ride early in the day to celebrate a new car Dennis had just bought. The MG was gone. In its place was a Triumph Spitfire, another sports car. And, he told her, he was about to get a special license plate for it. That plate would read DEN-KAR. They rode, and then they returned to the Aparo condo. That afternoon, Karin wrote in her diary, she and Dennis became engaged. The ring he gave her to seal the promise was a twist tie made of yellow and blue string. And then they made love—for the first time.

Dennis celebrated by writing to her, putting the note in their secret mailbox:

Yesterday morning was absolutely wonderful. You don't know how much mental anguish I've put myself through over the last few weeks concerning the subject. That is all over now, because you are wonderful. In my own way, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Actually, I think that's the reason I feel lousy. I've been working myself up to a peak, or forte lately in preparation for our “special time.” I peaked out, did well, and now I'm on a slide down. It's only because I have to concentrate on everything I do so much. You're right—we deserve an “A” and you could've fooled me about not knowing any better. Oh my.

Over the next week they made love together several more times, both because it seemed natural and because they wanted to hold on to each other in anticipation of the absence to come when Karin went to the Cape. They took precautions, but suddenly it looked as though they hadn't worked. Karin's period was late. She was sure she was pregnant. They bought a pregnancy test kit to find out. She wasn't. Dennis wrote:

I love you, I love you. If I seem in “high spirits,” don't think it's because I don't care. I care as much as you. Another thing, it's not
your
fault. All right? Now about this blood thing. Well, seeing as how there's six inches of you and eight of me, one is to expect blood. Believe me, I've heard this before. It comes with the territory, so to speak. It may last one or two days and
that
is why it stings. If it were
anything
else it wouldn't sting at all. I know these things. I love you, I love you. It's good you cried, but don't you worry. I know, I know—how can you not worry? Believe in us. It'll be o.k. I've really got a good feeling about this. There is no doubt. I WILL
NEVER
LEAVE YOU! Especially not now.

Now that Dennis was hers, she began to talk about things that she had only hinted at before. Again and again, in the days before she was to leave for the Cape, Dennis says, “she told me how she felt oppressed and possessed by her mother. She went into a lot of details about her life, about the things her mother had done to her, kind of telling me her life story like you do with someone. She told me about the time when she tried to commit suicide and a lot of other things. At first it wasn't like she was saying, ‘Please kill my mother.' It was more, ‘I wish my mother were dead, or I wish somehow I could change that relationship.'”

How? he asked, pushing aside then any idea of death as a way to change the situation. Did she have any ideas?

If only she could move out, she said.

If she wanted to do that, if it were possible, then he would give her a place to stay. He would ask his mother or father, and he was sure either would take her in. Both of them had grown fond of her; she had baked bread for them, something she did well, something she had learned from her mother. She had done other small favors to win them.

She said, if only he could be her guardian, then he could be responsible for her and that would solve so many problems.

When they had time, they agreed, they would investigate to see if that were possible.

On July 19 Karin left for the Cape with the Hudners. Dennis promised to drive up for a day. He did just that, appearing at the Hudners' on a Tuesday. When he arrived, she wrote in her diary, she gave him a gold chain she had bought for ninety-seven dollars, a bargain because it was half price. He stayed over and that night crept into her room. They made love, taking precautions this time so that there would be no fear of pregnancy (the precautions, she wrote, did what they were supposed to, and she got her period two days later), and then he went to sleep in her closet. It was, she noted, the day that Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson. “Yes,” she concluded, “Denny's mine.”

Indeed, he was. He had thought during the early stages of their romance that he was the leader, the dominant force, the white knight come riding on his charger to woo and win and rescue his lady fair, trapped, he believed from all she was telling him, in some dark tower. He had her wrapped around his finger, he told friends and later told a psychiatrist. All that changed now. Karin became dominant, Dennis, people later said, her slave. His letters to her were more and more filled with pleadings: “Don't ever leave me … I don't know what I would do without you … I need you.… You are my life.” Anything she wanted he would get for her, he told her; anything she wanted him to do he would do without question. “I promise to make you happy and I'll try my absolute, most hardest to give you whatever you want. And don't think I wouldn't give my life for you
right now
if I had to. Even if you asked. But don't 'cause I need to be with you.”

What he didn't realize then was that she was about to put those promises to the test.

*
Remarks delivered to the American Psychoanalytic Society in 1938 and published in 1942 in English as “Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and Their Relationship to Schizophrenia” in
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
.

17

On a Friday, two weeks after Karin left for Cape Cod, Joyce Aparo was preparing to make the trip there herself with Dennis Coleman to pick up her daughter and go on with them to Nantucket for the weekend. She went into her daughter's room and opened the drawer of the night table. It was a thing she did often. Karin never threw anything away, and neither did Dennis. Both kept every letter they had ever received and sometimes copies of letters they had written. And so in that drawer, Joyce Aparo found Karin's diaries and a stack of letters. She read them.