Kiss of the She-Devil

by M. William Phelps

  “Your father is leaving to go take care of Donna,” Gail explained. “Because,” obviously repeating what George had just told her, “‘she has no one else.’”

  “What?” Emily asked.

  “Yes. Donna’s going to have your father’s child! Oh, and she’s dying, too, Emily. She’ll be dead in a matter of months.”

  Emily couldn’t believe it. George did not interrupt or butt in. So it must be true, Emily considered.

  “Look, I cannot have Donna commit suicide and have that on my hands,” George finally said. “I won’t let it happen.”

  Emily’s friend Andrea was with her. “I’m taking Andrea home,” Emily told her mother. “I’ll be back soon.”

  By now, it was late evening. George had dropped Donna off at the hotel and had come back home for more clothes. Emily walked out the door with her friend and drove straight to Donna’s hotel. She parked and got out; together they approached the front-desk clerk.

  “No, I can’t tell you which room she’s in,” the clerk explained.

  “Call her and tell her I’m here,” Emily said.

  The clerk handed Emily the phone.

  “Emily?” Donna said, startled, but also cheery and elated, sounding as if they were old friends.

  “Yes. I thought maybe you would want to meet me in person, so I came.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” Donna said. “But I just threw up all over the bathroom. I’m sick. I need some time to clean it up. Give me five minutes, then come up.” Donna never said where George was, but he was not there then.

  Emily hung up. She and Andrea walked up to Donna’s room.

  “Emily, do you want me to come in there with you?” Andrea asked. Andrea was not a woman to mess with: She was five feet ten inches, husky, all business. “Come on, you shouldn’t be alone with that woman. She’s crazy.” Emily had confided in Andrea since it all began. Andrea knew the history here and how it could easily manifest into violence, once these two got together in the same room.

  “You wait outside the door here,” Emily explained, “and if I scream, you come in.” Emily was going against her own advice here. She knew that anyone close to a situation, as she was in this particular case, could not be rational. (“Your instincts are down,” Emily said later. “You’re too entrenched. You’re not paying attention to the signals. I could not, at that point, sense the danger I was in, or the danger my family was in.”) They were dealing with a crazy, obsessive woman, capable of anything. Donna was desperate.

  “Well,” Andrea said, “you’re in danger going in there.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Look, I am giving you fifteen minutes—then I’m coming in.”

  Part of the visit for Emily was to find out if Donna was, in fact, pregnant. Emily believed in her ability to read people and the auras she sometimes saw hovering over and around a person—that dark cloud she had seen so many times over her father. If she could get in the same room with Donna, Emily convinced herself, she could read Donna. Emily had just finished reading a book about auras. According to the book, pregnant women “would have these stars around them,” Emily said. Emily wanted to see if Donna had those “stars” shrouding her. (“I did not believe Donna was pregnant,” Emily recalled. “I thought she was full of it and just, again, trying to manipulate my dad.”)

  Donna opened the door.

  (“It was really weird,” Emily said through tears, recalling this moment of her life. “She wanted to hug me. Donna, this woman who had destroyed our lives, she wanted to hug me.”) Emily was crying as she walked in. (“And here she is . . . the woman who has caused so much pain in your mother’s life, in your life, your family’s life. Here she is. And she’s so ugly. How is this the woman responsible for all of this pain and anguish?”)

  Emily thought: She’s not in as good a shape as my mother. Why did my dad throw us away for her? Why is she so much better than all of us?

  As Emily looked around the room, she was immediately freaked out to see what could only be described as a “shrine Donna had built to my father” on the nightstand.

  Cards.

  Letters.

  Photographs.

  Candles.

  All were arranged in some sort of homage to George, as if Donna were praying to it. It was strangely spiritual and yet oddly psychotic. One letter she had out on the table was more of a journal entry. It talked about how George had “cried several times” before he last left Florida. According to Donna’s written account, George said, “I wish I was staying . . . I feel like I am deserting you.” He placed his hand on Donna’s stomach and rubbed it gently: “ I love you both—always.” He called Florida his “real home.” That night, before George took off for Michigan, he paged Donna and said: “I would rather be with you than anyone else in the world. I have been crying all day long missing you. You are so good to me. I don’t deserve you.”

  Wow, my dad threw everything away for this woman? Emily later pondered when she heard this statement.

  Emily stared at Donna and looked at the shrine. To Emily, Donna was dumpy; she was the polar opposite to the woman Emily had envisioned. A man generally cheats with some hot young chick, living out a twisted sexual fantasy he would never dream of with his wife. But Donna was plain and unpleasant.

  “Oh, you’re so pretty,” Donna said, trying to make it sound as if she meant it. “Sit down on the bed.... Sit down.” She patted the spot.

  Emily didn’t know what to think.

  “You must have heard by now,” Donna said, rubbing her stomach, “we’re pregnant.”

  “We’re . . .”

  Ouch.

  It was hard for Emily to tell if there were stars hovering around her father’s mistress, because Emily was so upset and taken aback. Emotion got in the way of Emily’s “gift,” for lack of a better way to explain what was going on.

  “Me and your father are going to have a baby,” Donna said, beaming. Then she dropped her voice down a pitch, almost to a whisper: “I’m dying, too.”

  Donna must have realized she wasn’t getting through to Emily. Emily wasn’t saying much. She wasn’t running into Donna’s arms, throwing herself at the woman, looking to work things out. Emily came across as a daughter there to defend her mother. After all, when it came down to it, Gail had done nothing wrong. This entire affair—the entire dynamic now playing out in this hotel room—was George’s doing. Emily was there to protect her mother’s soul, to tell the woman who had destroyed their lives—not taking any of the blame away from her father—to stay the hell away from all of them. Baby or no baby . . . back off!

  “Look,” Donna said, resurrecting that earlier argument she laid on Gail, “your mother has had your father long enough! It’s my turn now. You and your brother and mother never truly appreciated your father, anyway. But I—I . . . damn it, I”—Donna pointed at herself in a spate of fury—“I know him better than any of you!”

  Donna paced, breathing heavily.

  Emily sat, listening to what was turning into one of Donna’s infamous rants.

  “Your father loves me more than any of you—get that through your heads. Look!” Donna pointed toward the shrine. “Read those cards. Read those letters he wrote to me. Look,” Donna screamed, “read them!” She picked up a card and shoved it in Emily’s face. “You can see that he loves me more than any of you! Not your mother. He loves me, Emily. He doesn’t love you, Emily. He loves me.”

  Emily was crying. She picked up the card. It was her father’s handwriting, all right.

  Heavens no . . . Dad?

  (“And I had never,” Emily recalled later, giving into an onslaught of tears while reliving the memory for me, “seen my father write those types of words to my mother.” That was what hurt the most. “He never told us any of those things. Why is he giving these expressions of love to her? Why is she more worthy than the rest of us?”)

  What has my mother gone through? Emily thought as Donna forced more cards and letters on her. What had my mom gone
through—not only in this same room, with this same woman—hours ago, but all this time?

  The thought of how much pain her mother had endured at the hands of this woman consumed Emily. She was ready to confront Donna.

  “You cannot keep doing this,” Emily said, standing. “We want to have a family. It cannot keep going on as this, back and forth. Can you please just stay out of our lives!”

  “Don’t worry,” Donna said. “I’m going to be dead soon. You can have your father back after I’m dead.”

  There was a knock on the door. Andrea’s muffled voice interrupted from behind it. “What’s going on? Come on, Emily, you need to get home. Open this door!”

  “Please stay here with me tonight,” Donna asked.

  “What?”

  “Please. We can talk some more. I’ll give you a ride home in the morning. Let your girlfriend take your car home. Please, please stay.”

  Strange, Emily thought, she claimed to be throwing up earlier and sick to her stomach, but she wants me to stay here?

  “Uh . . . no, Donna. I don’t think so.”

  Emily walked toward the door. (“[The meeting] didn’t really help,” Emily later remarked. “There are never really good enough answers to what I went through. I could not believe that I had finally met this person. . . .”) She was drained.

  George and Gail had been waiting for Emily back home. George had packed more of his belongings and was ready to leave, but he didn’t want to go anywhere until he knew Emily was home, maybe more for Gail’s sake. By now, it was late into the night. Emily walked in. George was sitting on the couch, with his head in his hands.

  “Where were you?” Gail asked. “We were worried.”

  “I went to see Donna.”

  “You what?” both Gail and George said, almost together.

  Emily looked at her dad. “And there was that black cloud over his head. It was back.”

  42

  GAIL FULTON HAD TRIED slashing her wrists the night before George left, but George grabbed the knife out of her hands and scolded her, “What are you doing?”

  Emily couldn’t believe it had come to this.

  Gail said she took a bottle of Tylenol, but the pills hadn’t done anything.

  “So these acts could have been to get my dad’s attention that night,” Emily explained, “but my mom talked about [suicide] a lot when my dad was not there.”

  Perhaps after that run-in with Donna and a husband who wanted her, essentially, to take care of his lover’s baby after his lover croaked, Gail decided it was too much.

  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

  GAIL 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.”