Читать книгу Because You Loved Me - M. William Phelps - Страница 15

Billy Sullivan and Nicole Kasinskas left Dumaine Avenue in Billy’s black Chevy Cavalier, a car Billy’s mother had signed a $3,000 loan for just a few weeks before, sometime before Jeanne left work to pick up a pizza and head home. At around four o’clock that afternoon, a neighbor saw Billy and Nicole fooling around in the backyard, like two grammar-school kids at recess, playing a touchy-feely, juvenile game of tag.

“I knew it was Billy and Nicole,” recalled the neighbor, “because I heard her calling out for Billy. So I looked over. They were just being kids. Billy was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt and these bright white sneakers.”

In youthful glee, Nicole and Billy were lost. Not in a sense of where they were traveling after they left Jeanne’s house, but where their lives were headed. August 6, 2003, was to be their last night together for a long time. Nicole was sure of it. Billy was scheduled to leave for Connecticut the following morning. Nicole had no idea when he was coming back, or if she was going to be allowed to visit him in Connecticut again. At this point in their relationship, they had started referring to each other as “husband and wife.” When Nicole spent the weekend in Connecticut with Billy and his family late into the previous year, they’d taken part in a mock wedding ceremony. “And do you take this woman to be your wife?” one of Billy’s little sisters, playing the part of preacher, jokingly asked.

“I do, I do,” said Billy happily.

After that day, Billy routinely referred to Nicole as his wife. The sound of it made Nicole feel giddy, but also content, safe and, well, loved. Things she claimed to have never experienced in her short life. Feelings and emotions she longed for.

“At that point,” Nicole said later, referring to her state of mind, “I felt as though he was the only one who cared about me.”

Insofar as Nicole was concerned, Billy filled a void. He showered her with a love she had never received from her father. Besides what Jeanne had given Nicole, it was the first time the child felt unconditional love. Every teenager, at some point, goes through a “no one understands me” stage. For Nicole, Billy happened to walk into her life at a time when she was experiencing that uncertainty of adolescence.

But in the reality of the situation, what Billy and Nicole had wasn’t love at all. In truth, during the fifteen months they had dated, they had seen each other in person only four or five times. Here they were, driving around Nashua now on the evening before Billy was to return home, wondering how they were going to get along without each other.

“What are we going to do?” Nicole asked Billy at some point.

Billy just looked at her.

“What?” Nicole wondered.

“You know,” Billy said.

Among other options, they had discussed running away. Vermont maybe. Niagara Falls, in upstate New York. Anywhere but Nashua.

“I don’t know, Billy.”

Chris McGowan wasn’t thinking about anything in particular as he drove home from work on the evening of August 6. It was another Wednesday night in Nashua. Pizza with Jeanne and the kids sounded great. Maybe some television afterward. Then perhaps a board game and walk under the stars before retiring to bed.

The simple life. How Chris loved it—and with Jeanne by his side, the ideal woman in so many ways, he felt what he and Jeanne shared could only grow as time passed. This situation with Billy and Nicole, the one that seemed to be consuming Jeanne over the past few months, escalating only recently, was going to resolve itself. Chris was sure of it. Teen love. Everybody went through it. Even Nicole’s stepsister, twenty-four-year-old Amybeth Kasinskas, viewed Billy (whom she had never met) and Nicole’s love affair in general as nothing more than one of dozens Nicole was going to have throughout her teenage years.

“She told me that she had a boyfriend,” Amybeth later told a local reporter, “I didn’t think too much of it because she’s a teenager, and teenagers have new boyfriends every two weeks.” Moreover, like everyone else, Amybeth adored her stepmother, adding that Jeanne was “a very compassionate person. She always reached out to anybody, no matter what. She took care of her kids…[and] worked herself to the bone.”

“Jeannie was, how can I say it, she was everything to a lot of people,” added Chris. “She lived to help other people. She made so many people happy.”

Somewhere near 5:30 P.M., Chris pulled into his driveway and parked. All he needed to do was run in, rummage through his mail, check his e-mail, throw an overnight bag together and head out to Jeanne’s. For the next two hours, Chris was going to be alone, no one to verify (or back up) his whereabouts.

In a certain commendable way, one could say Chris McGowan had lived a rather private life up until the day he met Jeanne Dominico. Chris never married. Until Jeanne walked into his life, he embodied the term “bachelor” at a time when the word seemed to be one more forgotten piece of 1970s nostalgia. Cupid hadn’t hit Chris. Jeanne had been a blessing, yes. But Chris admitted his love life up until the day he met Jeanne was plagued by shortcomings, lies and the unpredictable, which hardened his awareness and trust of the opposite sex.

During the mid-1980s, shortly after Chris returned to Nashua following some years in New Jersey working for his uncle, he met a woman who seemed to be, as he later described, “the one.” She was outgoing, pretty, quiet, but at the same time a little reserved, which Chris wrote off as shyness. He said he knew she had an ex-husband and two children, and that the state had taken her children from her, but he never pushed the issue. They had been dating for years. He figured he knew everything there was to know about the woman, and if there was something, in his words, “big” she needed to discuss, she would have told him by that point in their relationship.

On New Year’s Eve, four years to the day they had started dating, the woman began talking about her life before she met Chris. At first, Chris felt as if she was opening up. He viewed the talk as intimacy. A few days before, he had gone out and spent “upwards of two thousand dollars on jewelry and gifts” for the woman to “celebrate [their] relationship,” he said.

“It was not like we were gonna get married,” recalled Chris, “but we were headed in that direction.”

The gifts were a celebration of his love for the woman. But he also wanted to nudge her into understanding that he was serious about the relationship. He was showing affection, admiration. Diamonds, he knew, were a way to accomplish that task.

After Chris gave the woman the gifts, she turned to him and said, “This is so nice of you, Chris. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He felt good about being able to make her happy.

“Listen,” she said, “there’s something I need to tell you….”

Chris was puzzled. “What’s up?”

“Well, you know I have two sons, right?”

“Yeah…and—”

“Well, to be honest, I also have a daughter as well.”

Chris sat back. Now he was entirely confused. “I expected at that moment her daughter to walk in the door or something. It was so strange.” He felt he was being set up in some way, like there was this enormous family secret he had been part of but had not known, and the woman was finally letting him in on it.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” said Chris. “What are you talking about?”

“My ex-husband and I,” she said, “we kind of spent some time in prison.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “You ‘kind of’ spent some time in prison?” asked Chris. “For what?”

“Manslaughter.”

“You waited four years and you tell me this now?” Chris said as he got up and walked toward the door. “You’re incredible.”

With one hand on the doorknob, Chris stared at the woman.

“Do you still want to go out?” she asked.

Chris put his head in hands. Then, “It’s gonna take some time for me to decipher this.”

With that, he left her apartment and never saw the woman again.