And Never Let Her Go (18 page)

The flight from Montreal was so lonely that Debby had trouble hanging on to the blissful memories of their time together in Montreal. But when they got to Philadelphia, Tom asked her if she wanted to go out to dinner before they drove to Wilmington, and that made her feel better. He took her to a new place—the Panorama. It was an upscale Italian restaurant, very intimate, with the ceiling and walls draped in swaths of cloth so that it seemed as if patrons were dining in an elegant and sensuous boudoir. The maître d' said there was just one table for two left, right near the kitchen, and led them ceremoniously to be seated.

The food was delicious and their meal was very pleasant. Debby felt so much better about the trip; Tom wasn't brushing her off as if she was only some woman he'd spent a couple of nights in bed with and couldn't wait to be rid of. They smiled and talked, and it was OK again.

And then it was all ruined when they started the half-hour drive to Wilmington and Debby realized that she had left her purse on the floor beneath the table. They were on the south side of the Philadelphia airport before she reached for her purse and couldn't find it. She froze, certain that Tom would be absolutely furious with her when she told him.

And he was. “I can't believe you could do something so stupid!” he snarled. “So unbelievably dumb.”

She begged him to let her call the Panorama on the cell phone and he nodded, his jaw set.

“And they had my pocketbook,” Debby said. “So we turned around and went back. And I apologized profusely. By that point in our relationship, I was constantly apologizing to him about something. I was sorry . . . sorry . . . sorry. I was sorry for things that I didn't even need to be sorry for, and I was probably getting on his nerves. He made me feel like such an idiot. He was so verbally abusive that night.”

It was not a propitious ending for their trip, and Debby got home feeling horrible. “He was obsessed with keeping our relationship secret,” she said, “and I had left my purse with all my ID in it for anyone to see.”

She would have felt far worse if she had known that Tom was in the first stages of an affair with a woman seventeen years younger than she was. But it had never even occurred to her that there might be any other woman in his life besides Kay. Debby believed that she and Tom had achieved such a degree of intimacy that they were almost
closer
than a married couple. However cruel he might be when he was in a mood, she could always take comfort in the knowledge that Tom had chosen her to have an affair with out of all the women he encountered. He might get angry with her, but he always came back.

A
NNE
M
ARIE
was seeing Bob Conner for psychological counseling every week that spring of 1994, although she didn't want anyone to know. For that matter, few who knew her would have ever believed that she needed any therapy. She was consummately professional at her job, fun to be around, and she looked great. Her laughter often bounced off the walls of the governor's outer office; it sounded like the laughter of a woman without a trouble in the world. She had a ribald sense of humor and could scatter profanity through her conversation and still look like an angel.

Sometimes she dropped into O'Friel's Irish Pub. She would stand near the bar and bellow
“Keveyyy!!!”
at the top of her lungs, and then laugh when the handsome redheaded proprietor popped his head out of the back room. With its brick walls and wooden floors, O'Friel's might as well have been located in Dublin as in Wilmington; it was the headquarters for so many people in Wilmington, Irish and Italian alike. Many major political decisions had been hammered out at O'Friel's. For the Faheys, though, it was more like home. Anne Marie felt completely at ease there, and she should have because they all loved her.

Ed Freel liked to tease Anne Marie because she was working for
the governor. “We got you after all, Annie!” he said. “You said you'd never work for us—but we got you.”

“I said I wouldn't work
here,
Ed,” she replied with a grin. “And I'm not serving beer, now am I?”

But for Ed Freel, the governor's office was like the family business, too, and he was pleased that Anne Marie was doing so well. She was like a little sister to him and Kevin and Bud. They had known her since she was such a little girl, and now she was five feet ten, all grown up and beautiful.

None of them knew how unhappy and anxious Anne Marie was behind her wide smile. She hid it so well; she had been hiding her true feelings for most of her life. She had constructed a facade that made her seem comfortable with bawdy comments, an earthy young woman who wasn't easily shocked. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She was not nearly as worldly-wise as she liked to pretend, but she never batted an eye in public. Despite her belief that she was overweight at 133 pounds, she had a lovely figure. And yet she worried about every ounce she put in her mouth.

Bob Conner summed up his sessions with Anne Marie in scribbled notes that were typically hard to decipher. But the same themes popped up again and again: “Codependency issues.” “Turns to conflict to avoid depression.” “Emotionally fragile—feels powerless.” “Self-esteem issues.” “Struggling with deeply held fear of abandonment, sense of aloneness, but with a core of ‘unlovedness.' ” “So frightened of hurting others.” “Fear of rejection.”

The Anne Marie she showed to the world was the envy of a lot of young women, who viewed her as having a wonderfully exciting life. Inside, she was fighting to rid herself of the self-image imprinted by her father's drunken taunts. But she had had the guts to seek out help and to peel the scabs away from her blocked memories and deal with her problems. She had a great deal of inner strength and she was making progress. With Bob Conner, whom she trusted completely, Anne Marie was learning ways to assert herself, beginning to believe that she was a good person, a smart person, and that she deserved to be happy.

And to be loved. She wanted so much to be loved.

J
ILL
M
ORRISON
and Anne Marie went to the Tour Du Pont bicycle races at Rodney Square in May of 1994 and watched the cyclists who had gathered from all over the world compete. Afterward, they attended a party in the old Holiday Inn. One floor of the garage was closed off so the riders could bring their bicycles, and band music
bounced off the low ceilings. It was a chance to meet the cyclists, and Anne Marie looked for some of the Spanish-speaking competitors. She tried to make them feel comfortable in a country where they didn't speak the language, surprising them with her fluent Spanish. She loved showing off her Spanish.

Jill was unabashedly flirting with one of the coaches of the bicycling team from Spain. As she and Anne Marie walked out, Jill laughed and said, “He was pretty flirty, Annie. Maybe I should have kissed him. I've never kissed an older man before.”

Anne Marie stopped, turned around, and said slowly, “Well,
I
have.”

From the look on her face, Jill knew whom she meant. It had to be Tom Capano, and it sounded like more than the good-night kiss Anne Marie had described after she'd been to dinner with him six months earlier. She was apparently still seeing him, and that gave Jill a kind of sinking feeling. Annie could seem so together, but her good friends knew she wasn't.

T
HERE
were a lot of changes in store for Anne Marie that spring. Bronwyn was going back to New Zealand, and Jackie was getting married in July, so that meant the end of their sharing Jackie's house. But it was more than that for Anne Marie; she was losing another home. She had no choice but to look for an apartment that she could afford on her own. She was saving her money, putting a little aside each month, for another reason, too. She and her brother Brian had decided that the best way to use their share of the inheritance from their grandmother's estate would be to visit Ireland and walk through the places where Katherine McGettigan had lived when she was a girl. There was just enough for plane fare, but they needed to save so they could rent a car and pay for lodgings.

Annie and Seymour in Ireland
—they both liked the concept and looked forward to the trip that summer of 1994. It was a positive goal for Anne Marie. She and Brian were so much alike and such good friends. If they could trace their roots in Ireland, they would not only honor Nan's memory but also establish some continuity in their own lives. The two of them, who had been the last to leave the childhood home that had been sacrificed to debt and drink, would make new memories.

In the spring of 1994, Anne Marie was already trying to keep from being too dependent upon Tom Capano. He was offering her so many of the things she needed: a listening ear, the protectiveness
of an older man—something she had never known—and the things that money could buy, also something she had never known. It was so tempting and so easy for her to love him. But she knew he could never offer her what she
really
wanted. He couldn't give her marriage or babies or self-respect. She couldn't take him to her family's holiday celebrations; he had a whole other life that would always keep him away from her when she needed him.

It was very difficult for Anne Marie to turn away from
anyone,
so fearful was she that she might hurt their feelings. Tom was being very reasonable and very nice, but she felt the pull of invisible strings. He knew that she desperately wanted to make a side trip from Ireland while she was in Europe. She had always hoped to return for a visit to the family she had lived with in Spain, but that was financially impossible, even with Nan's bequest. She couldn't dream of going to Spain, too.

One night, when Jill went with her to look at an apartment, Anne Marie blurted, “I just have to tell you something. I got a card from Tom—and it had five hundred-dollar bills in it.”

Jill looked at her. “Why—?”

“The note said, ‘Use this to go to Spain.' ”

The two of them discussed whether Anne Marie should accept it. How could she explain how she had suddenly come up with that much money and just go off to Spain? What would Brian think? They agreed that $500 was probably nothing to Tom, but it was so much money to them—too much for Anne Marie to accept.

As the summer approached, it would become clear that Anne Marie was seriously questioning her relationship with Tom. Her Catholic faith was very important to her, her family's approval meant everything, and being with Tom went against those things. Still, she wasn't confident to be just herself, alone. Her diary was full of entries about other men—men who were free to date her. Although she was twenty-seven, she sounded more like a teenager when she wrote about the men in her life. She had begun dating late and she needed approval more than most women. Mature in her career, Anne Marie was sixteen in her heart.

On June 11, 1994, her brother Robert arranged a double date: he and his wife, Susan, along with Anne Marie and Mike Hines, a man Robert worked with. Anne Marie felt the blind date had worked out very well; in a little over a week, she wrote, “I think I'm falling for him real fast! I see myself marrying him.”

Of course, it was much too soon. And the P.S. revealed more
about how frightened she really was of not being good enough, of being alone, of being unloved: “P.S. My weight is 129. I have a serious problem, but right now I am not able to confront it.”

A week later, Anne Marie wrote of a wonderful evening with Mike at the beach, a Saturday night with a romantic stroll home. But—

He said he would talk to me tomorrow, and I never heard from him. . . . He never called me Sunday nor Monday. So of course I now think he's blowing me off, and does not want to see me anymore. God, it is great to be young and insecure. I hope that's not the case, but if it is, I better learn to deal with it quick. Actually, I am good at dealing with rejection, much better than dealing with compliments.

Almost every woman who ever went on a date knew that feeling. Men rarely called when they said they would, and they
always
said they would. But Anne Marie's fear went deeper. She leapt to embrace rejection before it could sneak up and catch her unaware.

Mike Hines eventually called her and they went out again, but she questioned every comment, every phone call that didn't come or came too late. She was sure he wanted to dump her but was afraid to because he worked with her brother. She set arbitrary time limits; if he didn't call by Wednesday, that meant he was dumping her. Or by Friday. When he didn't accept her invitation to a Fourth of July celebration, that meant “I am not pretty, smart, fun, exciting, enough.”

But she
was.
Only, she didn't believe it. When Anne Marie forced a premature confrontation on what Mike's feelings and intentions were after only a month of fairly casual dating, he was polite and sincere, and probably spooked. She did not mention another date with him in her diary.

O
N
July 20, 1994, Anne Marie and Brian arrived in Ireland. It was to be a respite from a frenetic eight months in which she had judged herself so very harshly. With the brother who loved her so dearly, folded into the country of her origins, Anne Marie blossomed. From Shannon to Limerick to Dublin to Ballinor to Cape Clear, her diary entries were full of joy and excitement about the trip, full of her tremendous appreciation for life.

As I sit on this rock elevated at a few hundred feet, below a sky blue ocean, I do not know that I have ever been to a more beautiful
place (or ever will for that matter). As I look out all I can see is water, cliffs, and, last but not least, green pasture. There are a few homes scattered around the island. . . . I lay down for a bit, listening to the waves crash against the cliff with a fair hint of seagulls in the background. . . . I have never seen so many different shades of green, all representing this beautiful country. Everywhere I look (north, south, east, west) I am surrounded by the ocean. . . . I have my grandmother to thank for the relaxation I am experiencing right now. Without her this trip would not have been possible. Of course I would rather have her with me, but we all must die. I hope she knows I am here.