Emily confronted her mother. “What are you doing?”
George had left to be with Donna by then. They were alone.
Gail laughed it off, saying, “You can’t kill yourself with Tylenol and a paring knife.”
“She was trying to make fun of herself, I think,” Emily recalled. “We almost stopped being mother/child and almost reversed roles. In fact, because I knew that Andrew was her favorite, I made sure that
Andrew
knew how she talked about suicide so that he and I could both tell her that we loved her and needed her, and she could not commit suicide and leave us by ourselves. Of course, we listened to her, but then we would say ‘committing suicide is the easy way out and it is selfish’ and ‘we know you love us so much that you would not do this.’”
Emily said, “Please, please don’t do this, Mom. We love you and we need you, please.”
She and Gail cried together.
If they could just get through the next few months, Emily thought. If Emily could have some time with her mother alone, she could convince Gail to move on and forget about her father. Gail could find a better-paying job. Take care of herself. Emily could help. In time Gail would see things differently.
Emily reflected on one night in particular after the Fourth of July weekend fiasco. She was sitting on the floor next to her mother’s bed. Andrew walked into the room. Gail was lying in bed, and Emily and Andrew soon sat on the bed around their mother and cried because neither had seen Gail in so much pain before. Gail had tossed in the towel at that point. She had internalized the entire marriage and its failures. She had taken it all on.
“But at least we had each other through this, and [I had my mentor] to listen to me and to tell me how to respond to it all,” Emily said. “I didn’t know you had to tell the suicidal person to not commit suicide and reiterate how much you love them and need them with you alive.”
A day after the hotel incident, Gail asked Emily if she thought Donna was pregnant. It was the first time Gail had questioned whether Donna was making it all up. Gail knew how her daughter could read people.
“I don’t know,” Emily said. “I cannot think straight. I don’t know.”
George came back the following day, July 5. Apparently, he’d had a rough night, too, with Donna. It wasn’t champagne and caviar out on the hotel terrace; Donna had been hostile and bitter. George had that look in his eye. He wasn’t just coming back to grab things and take off. He was finished with Donna. It was finally over. For good this time.
“I told her,” George explained to his family. “She’s gone back to Florida.”
According to Emily, when Gail sat down with George and told him about the rotten things Donna had said to her inside the hotel room, “my father did not believe my mom.”
“You owe us an apology,” Emily said.
George wouldn’t give it. After all, he had run back to Donna at that hotel and then returned home. What more did they want? Whatever the reason, George was home. He would take care of the baby financially, he explained, but that was it. Gail had won. She had gotten her husband back.
“I stayed with her one night that weekend,” George said later, referring to Donna, “and then I had a change of heart and realized that’s not what I wanted to do, to leave my wife, and I said I had to leave and it had to be over. And that’s when I said [to Donna] that’s when the physical relationship [between us] was over.”
“My dad never apologized,” Emily explained. “He was dictating everything we had to do. There was a lot of tension between us. In my view he needed to get down and beg for forgiveness, but he didn’t. He never once apologized for his actions. He never showed us or had remorse. He simply wanted us to take him back and act like nothing happened. I was irate.”
Gail was more than willing to forgive and forget.
“How can you do that?” Emily asked her mother. “He has to
earn
your love! He has to earn all of our love. We cannot just take his crap.”
Her mother didn’t have much to say. Gail was ready to bring George to church, have him confess his sins, speak to the priest, and then move on.
“You deserve better than this,” Emily said.
To Emily, her mother had turned into “this frail . . . childlike creature that was begging for love, begging for my dad’s love. It was so pathetic.”
The idea that George did not believe the kids or Gail about the things Donna had been saying to them—even after he moved back in—became a recurring issue for Emily, Andrew, and even Melissa, Gail and George’s oldest child, who was living in Virginia. Melissa wrote her father a letter on July 6, 1999. She wanted to let him know that all of them—including Gail—were saying the same things about Donna. He needed to step up and admit Donna had been an awful person who had tried to destroy the family. Take, for example, the “nature,” Melissa wrote, of Donna’s phone calls to Grandma on July 4.
Dora had stopped answering her phone after that first nasty call came from Donna. Instead, the answering machine picked up and recorded Donna in rare form. Donna warned Dora that she was “entitled” to her “own feelings,” but she wanted Dora to understand she “was calling to tell you that you needed to speak with your daughter. She has tried to commit suicide for the past six months. Only Gail, George, and I know about it.... You don’t know what’s been going on for the past sixteen years in that marriage. She is sick and has been sick for the past ten years mentally. She needs help.... If you care, reach out for your daughter. You gave birth to her. You raised her. So if you love her, you need to reach out to her.... You need to be there for your daughter!”
After detailing the nature of the phone call, Melissa wrote how she hoped:
You will see things and believe us once and for all—your family.
43
G
AIL STOPPED CRYING—
at least as a daily occurrence. She was falling back into her role as library clerk, wife, and mother. Things weren’t back to normal, and likely never would be, but life moved on. Gail and George weathered what was a hurricane within their marriage; they had come out the other end with a few bumps and bruises.
“They had been working things out,” Emily told police, “and for the first time my mother was very happy. . . . My father started going back to church and was saying prayer before dinner.”
Donna continued calling the house, spewing spiteful and vengeful things to Gail and Emily. Most of Donna’s calls were centered on George still working for her, but she seemed to always have an earful for whoever answered the phone.
On July 14, 1999, a mutual friend of George and Donna’s, a woman George introduced to Donna, e-mailed to say something was wrong with Donna. The e-mail began with a sincere wish: I hope . . . things are improving in your marriage. This was an indication Donna had gone back home and explained—at least to this woman—that she and George were finished, but there was also an underlying message in the e-mail explaining how Donna had rushed back to Florida and told everyone there was still hope for her and George.
The e-mail explained how Donna had called and left her a message, sounding “very distressed.” The woman asked George pointblank if he had “broken it off ” with her “completely”? The e-mail writer hoped George had, but she would respect any decision George made.
Then there was an interesting query in the correspondence: She wanted to know if George had called Donna’s doctor to find out if Donna “was terminally ill.”
George tapped out a response, saying, all was “sort of fine” with Gail, adding that it was a “long story,” one that he would rather not discuss via e-mail. He was “trying to make things work” with Gail, but he admitted it had been hard for them. George said he had phoned Donna’s doctor, but he hadn’t received a return call. He wasn’t sure what was “truth and fiction.” He admitted he was probably “too close” to the problem to be “objective.”
George said he was trying to work things out with Gail
and
Donna, but felt he was “failing miserably.” He was going away on a business trip and would think about what he needed “to do with” his life. He had one request of his e-mail penpal : Don’t return Donna’s calls. If everyone stuck together and left Donna alone, she would, “hopefully, go away.”
To Donna, things had changed between her and George. However, an e-mail she wrote on July 27, addressing him in it as My Sexy Butt George, gave no indication that the relationship had been the least bit soured. It was written in a way that led one to believe Donna was certain Gail was reading George’s e-mails. Knowing that, Donna twisted the knife as deeply as she could, writing how much she missed holding on to George’s butt and kissing it. She also stressed how she loved “those thrusts it makes inside of me.” George’s lovemaking skills were “pleasurable,” and she spelled out how she missed spending time with him in bed.
The next paragraph talked about how Donna wanted to take Friday night—she was writing the e-mail on Tuesday—to relive their “first night together.” It was as if George had made plans to visit that coming weekend. Clearly, the e-mail was written to make Gail jealous. Donna said she wanted George to meet her at the Sea Gull and reenact that entire first night. They could dance together and sit and talk, and Donna wrote, I could play with your legs again. She wanted to take one car home, so she could “play” with him and get George “hot and hard” and “ready” for her.
By the third paragraph of what was a six-page, single-spaced e-mail, reality finally struck. Donna described how much “pain” she’d endured while they were riding this rough patch. She played up the cancer, saying how none of the surgeries she’d had compared to the pain George had caused. She couldn’t even enjoy the wonders of being pregnant, she complained: Each day is worse. . . .
Then Donna spoke of how much George had said he wanted to be a part of the child’s life, from womb to crib, going with her to her doctor’s appointments and buying baby furniture and clothes. Then came a sad soliloquy regarding how Donna would not be around to see the child grow, talk, and walk. Donna said how she wished to share those moments with George. Then a request: Could George visit Florida and take one photo with her and the child after it was born? I would like very much to be buried with some pictures of us as a family. She complained about never having “been part of a family” and how she thought George was going to give her that one wish to help her “die happy.”
Only you could give me this dream come true.
She was taken aback by the notion that he had “thrown” her away and was “giving” himself to “another woman”—a comment that unleashed a tirade directed at Gail.
Donna accused George of the biggest sin a man could commit in abandoning her and their child, saying Gail had a family already. She warned that “thou shall not kill” was a terrible sin, and George was not only killing her “but also your little baby.” George’s decision to stay with Gail would “kill the baby” because Donna was now more at risk of miscarrying. And if that happened, she warned, George would have blood on his hands.
She said the more she thought about it: Maybe that’s what you want? Donna knew it was what Gail wanted, and perhaps Gail was poisoning George to think the same. If she lost the baby, she challenged: It would be yours and Gail’s fault. She asked George, was he prepared to “live with this”?
It was almost as if every bad thought and disparaging remark Donna could think of was packed into one tedious, hateful, rage-filled e-mail. Donna said, without giving an explanation, that her own mother hated her now because of what George was doing to her.
She attacked George and Gail’s faith, claiming that it wasn’t God or Jesus calling the shots in the Fulton household anymore. Instead, it was the Devil himself “telling Gail what to do.”
Donna even brought her doctor into the act: Dr. [Bevins, pseudonym] . . . thinks what you are doing is wrong. [He] does not ever want to see you again. The doctor, according to Donna, had questioned George’s worth as a man. He supposedly told Donna that George “should divorce” Gail and “marry” her. Anything less was an “unforgivable” sin.
Donna called George a “coward,” a “snob,” “selfish” and “childlike.” She accused Andrew of being the true motivation behind the breakup,
not
Gail. She added that if George was a real man, he would give Andrew a “swift kick in the butt.” What was George teaching his boy? How to run out on a woman and her child.
Donna would likely have to give birth by C-section. She was not eating. She was not sleeping. She was throwing up all the time. She had chest pains, heart palpitations, and fainting spells. She had started to “spot.” God was “going to take” her soon. She blamed it all on George.
The e-mail concluded as Donna came down from her soapbox and tried a different approach. She begged George for his love and asked him to reconsider raising their child. She backtracked at the end of the e-mail, noting how everyone at CCHH wanted them to be together and for George to raise the child after Donna died.
To say that the e-mail was pathetic would be to praise it.
44
D
ONNA TRAPANI WROTE AGAIN
a day later, responding to an e-mail from George. She was close to a breakdown. She was swaying at the end of a long, fraying rope, hanging on every word George spoke. Part of the torture Donna was now putting herself through involved—once again—mixed messages from George Fulton.
In another over-the-top e-mail, Donna did nothing more than attack George for the ups and downs of their relationship, asking him repeatedly what he was going to be doing about his child. She said George should be on his “knees asking for forgiveness” for not being there for her and the unborn child. She asked him why he was mad at “us.” She asked why he would say he cared, if he really did not. She mentioned something about George stopping to visit her while on one of his most recent business trips. George might have been telling Gail he was through with Donna, but this e-mail and a second e-mail he would send Donna in the days ahead told a different story.