We Thought We Knew You

by M. William Phelps

  Adam had met Katie at her high-school graduation party in 2011. A mutual friend knew Katie.

  “Come on, man, I’ll introduce you.”

  Adam was shy, but he liked what he saw. Katie was attractive. A shyness accentuated her natural beauty.

  “Adam,” he said. “Great to meet you.”

  Katie smiled. They looked into each other’s eyes. That spark, or chemistry, was firing between them, neither able to ignore it. Throughout that day, they flirted and talked. There seemed to be a connection.

  After not hearing from Katie for four weeks after the graduation party, by August and into early September, Adam and Katie had connected and were “dating exclusively.” The relationship became sexual immediately.

  During that particular period, Adam was open and honest about how quickly his feelings had progressed. Katie grew up in Utica, her father a property owner and landlord, among other businesses. The family had a solid pedigree and the Conley name was popular and respected around town.

  Adam kept a notebook of poetry and writings, making no secret how much he had fallen in love with Katie in the short time after they hooked up. In one entry, more of a stanza than a complete poem, Adam talked about how, when Katie wasn’t around, all he could do was “sit . . . and stare” at photos of her and wonder if she felt the same about him. It was an intoxicating feeling. Adam talked about how happy he was to have found her. How much he needed Katie. Interestingly, in an obvious exaggeration, Adam explained that he would one day perhaps “kill [himself] to death [on Katie] overload,” because he had an uncontrollable yearning to “OD on [her].”

  As they continued dating, seeing each other every day, living arrangements came up. Adam sketched out the costs of a house, monthly bills, and what they could and could not afford. They seemed to be planning a life together.

  When they disagreed and fought, according to Adam’s apology letters to Katie, their fights were heated and loud. They’d hurt each other deeply. In an undated letter of explanation to Katie after one such incident, Adam pointed out how they likely acted this way because they were “crazy in love.” Both guilty of “saying mean things” to each other without “realizing how much they hurt.” Adam explained he and Katie had a spitefulness inside of them because “that is just how relationships work.” What set them apart was an ability both had to “pull through it” and stay together. Any relationship, he went on to say, was a work in progress, with many difficulties. Adam was not about to allow it all “to fall apart” because of a blowout here and there.

  After getting over one tumultuous period and reconnecting, Adam talked about a problem soiling their relationship. He described an “artificial” joy. He wasn’t truly happy. It had nothing to do with Katie; it was more of an intrinsic part of himself he’d recently recognized. He asked: “Do you know the feeling of dependence?” He then mentioned a false contentment he had been experiencing, noting how “close to the real thing” it was, but then “it always fades.” He blamed it on “prescription pills.” How he’d “asked for it” (that dependence) because he was “curious” and “intrigued” by the prospect of the pills helping him. Concluding this thought, he admitted, “Damn me, it worked.”

  After another breakup, Adam realized Katie had been “unhappy for a long time in the relationship.” At the office one day, after a long period of discontent and fighting, Adam expressed to Katie that his drinking was a factor. His use of Adderall, too. He’d been caught up in both and it caused multiple problems within their relationship.

  “Do you want to just break up?” Adam asked Katie that afternoon. They were toxic together, or maybe they didn’t match up well, after all, and needed to respect what the universe was telling them.

  Katie was filing paperwork. She closed the cabinet loudly. Turned. “Yes!” she responded without saying anything more.

  “And we were done,” Adam recalled.

  As they continued working together, staying out of each other’s way, in the “close stages where there was a possibility of getting back together,” something happened.

  “You had sex with my friend?” Adam asked Katie.

  Katie looked down. Embarrassed. Caught.

  The guy was no casual acquaintance, but someone they both knew. Katie could have chosen to be with anyone, Adam considered. Yet she’d gone and slept with his gym partner, a close friend.

  Such a personal demonstration of disloyalty and deception put an exclamation point on the end of the relationship. Adam couldn’t believe it. He did not see himself coming back from it. She’d done the one thing to hurt him most. For a guy who’d written her poetry and dreamed of one day marrying her, Katie’s decision to end the relationship in such a way was devastating to him.

  Just the previous year, February 2012, Adam had written Katie a seventeen-point list of her greatest qualities. A sincere, devoted, and endearing letter: “you texted before going to sleep . . . told me you loved me”; “you still love me even when I have to blow my nose constantly”; “you ordered a buffalo chicken wrap to share with me.” At the end of the list, Adam drew an engagement ring, an arrow pointing to it, a short note hinting at his feelings: “Valentine’s Day is coming soon!”

  Now this: Katie sleeping with one of his best friends.

  Katie continued working at the office. Adam stopped working with her. He rented a room in a friend’s house. The apartment did not allow cats, so sadly and reluctantly, he had to get rid of his pets. As he was finishing cleaning up the old place one afternoon, Katie stopped by unannounced.

  “Can we talk?”

  Adam was packing boxes. Uninterested, he shrugged. “I guess.”

  Katie sat down. Adam was already upset, having to bring his cats back to Spring Farm CARES, where he’d adopted them. He kept picturing Katie in bed with his friend. He couldn’t get over this.

  Katie broke down crying, without saying a word.

  Adam didn’t console her this time. In the past, he would run and tell her all would be okay. No need to worry.

  “I want us to be together still,” Katie pleaded. “I’ve been . . . I’ve been saving up for a long time to buy a house for the two of us to live in. Please . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s what I’ve been planning.”

  “Wait a minute, you never talked to me about any of this. You cannot be working toward these goals if we are not working toward these goals.” Adam wasn’t taking the emotional carrot. He’d checked out of the relationship.

  “At that point, I am already seeing someone else and I am not interested in this relationship anymore,” Adam recalled. “It’s been bad for years. I really didn’t want to be in it for the time I was in it. I kept getting back in for other reasons, trying to be a decent person.”

  “No,” he told Katie. “We are not getting back together.”

  Adam liked the new woman he was dating. He was moving on, in slow increments. Katie had breached a boundary. By sleeping with a friend, Katie had made her choice. How could he ever trust her again?

  * * *

  WHAT ADAM DIDN’T KNOW then was that the innocent, shy, girl-next-door Katie Conley was advertising on a local social media site to participate in threesomes, while offering her “dirty panties” for sale. Katie possessed a different, more sexually charged side than Adam had really known.

  “This is just so weird for me to hear and understand,” Adam said later. “I have no idea what this is about. She was always relatively reserved. She grew up more conservative, more reticent. I would not say she was open-minded to a lot of things sexually. Or interested in exploring a whole lot [of] kinky stuff, or anything remotely like that. I don’t know where this side of her came from.”

  * * *

  KATIE AND ADAM SPOKE a bit more on that afternoon when he had to return his cats to the shelter, but nothing came of it. Katie walked away upset, crying. She’d made her feelings clear. She’d tried to make amends, although Adam said later she never said sorry
for sleeping with his friend. And yet nothing she could have done or said would have mattered. In Adam’s view, the relationship was done.

  For good.

  A few weeks passed. By now, Adam was spending more time at his new girlfriend’s house. They’d gotten close. He was feeling somewhat better. His life was beginning to get back on track. He felt that emotional pull of Katie was gone.

  Katie was undoubtedly stalking the two of them, however. Watching from afar as the relationship unfolded, realizing Adam had moved on this time for real. She understood he wasn’t just talking about it anymore. Or making soft promises of never talking to or seeing her again. Seeing Adam and his new girlfriend together told Katie he had moved on.

  With that, Katie set a new plan in place, which she would execute at the right moment. She could not allow Adam to walk away, to throw her away. Or, as she herself once put it, “kick me to the curb.”

  7

  DEATH ILLUMINATES AND SURROUNDS the boundaries every human being lives within. Late into the night of July 21, 2015, Mary and Bill, along with the St. Luke’s Hospital staffers, did not know that Mary’s body was murdering itself—slowly shutting down from the inside. The weapon killing Mary had no antidote, its effects irreversible. There was nothing, effectively, anybody could have done, even if the doctors had known what had caused Mary to end up in the ER.

  In raspy whispers, Mary said she was feeling better. Still weak as gum, yes. Dehydrated, of course, with throbbing aches and pains all over her body. But Mary was a fighter, tough. She could take all that. Her most looming complaint?

  “My throat . . .”

  “Your throat?” Bill asked, holding Mary’s hand.

  “Sore . . . dry, scratchy,” Mary explained. “Raw.”

  At some point between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., Mary told Bill that her throat, from nearly twenty-four hours of vomiting, hurt so bad she could not speak anymore. By then, Mary was confined to bed, checked into her own room. Additional testing was ordered.

  Doctors came in at one point and explained to Bill that they had no reason to be overly concerned. She’d get through this. It would pass.

  “It’s likely the same GI bug going around. Another day, she’ll likely be fine,” one doctor told him.

  “I’d love some herbal cough drops,” Mary told Bill. Her favorites, “Ricola.” It took everything she had to get the words out.

  “Okay,” Bill said.

  “Can you get my glasses . . . and my . . . my . . . contact lens case. I’d like to take my contacts out.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Mary wanted her slippers, bathrobe, and some fresh underpants, she whispered after a break from talking.

  Bill called Liana. He explained what was going on, telling his daughter he was heading home to get a few things before driving back to the hospital to sit with Mary.

  “Those things will make her feel comfortable.”

  “Yeah. Keep me updated, Dad. I’ll text you some other items she’ll need.”

  “Okay. Sure thing.”

  Bill drove to the drugstore and picked up Mary’s lemon cough drops. Then he drove home to fetch her belongings. Not spending long inside the house, Bill raced back to the hospital, arriving just after 9:00 p.m.

  Having trouble staying awake, Mary was beyond exhausted. She’d had a rough thirty-six hours. Despite the fatigue, she was feeling better. Even gaining some strength back. The vomiting appeared to be under control with medication.

  “I’m so tired,” Mary said.

  “I’ll be right here all night.”

  “No, no, no,” Mary insisted. “I’m just tired.”

  According to Bill, he explained to his wife that he would cancel the next day’s patients (Mary’s schedule) and stay with her until she was discharged, likely the next day. Bill had written years before that “the most healing gift” we can “offer” another soul included “our own happy and peaceful state of mind.” Following his own philosophy, anything he could do to alleviate any unneeded stress, anxiety, or discomfort for Mary, he was going to try.

  “But I want to. I’ll call in another doctor.”

  “No. Don’t cancel any appointments. Go home. Get some rest.” Mary insisted Bill cover for her. “Go. I’ll be okay.”

  Mary did not want to be a bother. Their patients counted on one of them being in the office.

  Bill did not want to upset Mary. He wasn’t going to argue with her.

  “If I can, before I go into the office tomorrow morning, I’ll swing by and give you a good-morning kiss.”

  Mary smiled. Squeezed her husband’s hand.

  Bill said good-bye. He drove home to get some much-needed rest, followed by waking up and then, hopefully, heading straight back to the hospital to pick up his wife.

  The following day, Wednesday, July 22, happened to be their split shift at the office. If Mary was going to spend the day in the hospital, Bill planned on taking Mary’s patients that morning and seeing his patients that afternoon. He’d spend a full day in the white coat. He knew Mary wanted this.

  “To get up very early and swing by the hospital,” he said later, “see how she was doing and say hello, and then go to work. If by noon I wasn’t picking her up, and she was still being kept, I’d go back and visit.”

  Despite how dire the situation might have seemed, Bill wasn’t worried. He was sure the illness was nothing more than a flu or GI illness. The fact that doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation and a few additional follow-up tests was a good sign. She’d likely be discharged later that day. The worst-case scenario, the following morning.

  Bill once said, “As far as a practical way to learn about and understand life and forgiveness and joy and unconditional love, nothing has taught me more than my day-to-day life with my wife, Mary, and our three grown children.”

  After his hospital visit, Bill walked into the house. Took a moment in the kitchen to catch his breath. It had been a long day. At the time, he sported mostly gray-white hair, streaks of black, a receding hairline, a slight comb-over.

  The Yoders’ landline was on the first floor. They did not have a landline on the second floor, where Mary and Bill slept. Likewise, the charging station for their cell phones was located on the second floor, inside a spare bedroom.

  After Bill downed a glass of water and collected himself, he spoke to Liana again. He then walked upstairs and plugged his cell phone into the spare bedroom’s charging station. He washed up, got ready for bed, and fell asleep. Not putting his phone bedside was more out of habit than a conscious decision.

  “Mary had moved [the charging station] into the spare bedroom about two weeks before because of phone calls we were receiving throughout the night from [a family member],” Bill said.

  Someone close to both him and Mary had “psychiatric problems,” as he described it. This person had recently started texting and calling “all night long.” Therefore, leaving their phones in the spare bedroom became habitual. This practice freed Mary and Bill from having to wake up to buzzing and chiming in the middle of the night.

  Additionally, “I was not really concerned at all about Mary. She was on the mend when I left the hospital,” he said. He knew she’d gone to sleep the moment he walked out of the room. There was no reason to be alarmed. “Her symptoms had been good all day and she seemed okay when I left. The doctors indicated there was no problem.”

  8

  THREE MONTHS PRIOR TO his mother being hospitalized for what were “flulike symptoms,” Adam Yoder was at home one day cramming for finals. Difficult stuff: calculus and other science/math-based classes. Adam knew the material, but he was having difficulty focusing.

  During the previous months leading up to this day, Adam and Katie had been playing a game of push and pull. Katie knew how to rile Adam. In a series of texts on March 11, 2015, Katie mentioned something about leaving. Adam had no idea what she was talking about.

  “What do you mean, ‘leaving’?” he texted.

  �
��I’m sorry,” Katie darted back. “I know. It’s okay, things change.”

  “What do you mean leaving soon, anyways?”

  Katie did not respond.

  “I hate when you do this. There’s no reason whatsoever to be cryptic like this.” Adam waited a few seconds, then texted Katie a message saying he’d be glad to meet her for tea the following day.

  Katie never responded.

  “Will you please just answer my questions?”

  Nothing.

  A month went by and there was little communication between them. Near 9:30 p.m. on April 13, Katie touched the Notes app on her iPhone and began writing. She titled the note, “Optimal for finals—All about that A+ life.”

  She wrote the note as if it were a text, or, rather, a draft of a text she would later send. “You like it? It works at its max with fat to transfer it. Take it consecutively. It’s synergistic so it gets better the more you take it and lasts longer once you run out.”

  Katie continued writing (to herself, apparently) that if Adam experienced “vivid dreams” while taking the supplement she was going to suggest that he should take it earlier in the day. Ingesting it in the morning worked on a different part of the brain’s focus. Knowing he would bite, she compared it to the drug Adderall, as far as its “cranial pathways.”

  “Did a lot of research on it and the brain,” Katie wrote in her Notes app. She called the supplement a “cool nootropic.” She hoped Adam would not be “offended, [it was] just . . . [that] it would be awesome for you to have going into finals.” She further explained she had used it herself and could “tell the difference and it shows in accounting.” Having the extra edge made her “happy . . . in my little math focus needs, so I can only imagine your crazy calc genius classes.”

  The next day, April 14, Adam sent Katie a text asking if she wanted to meet for lunch. He didn’t seem interested in this super pill she had pushed on him in several previous texts. But after she had banged on and on about it, if only perhaps to quiet her, Adam reluctantly agreed to give the Alpha BRAIN supplement a try. Regarding meeting up, he mentioned a restaurant in Whitesboro, on Oriskany Boulevard.