...And Never Let HerGo

part of a large family.
    Even for her diary, Anne Marie always seemed to put on a bright face, and she used exclamation points often. “Kathleen, Patrick, ‘Seymour’ [Brian], and I went to Robert’s last Thursday for his birthday,” she wrote in March 1994. “What fun! It’s great having such a close beautiful family. Robert looks beautiful with Liam Michael. He will be such a great dad. He was a great substitute for me.”
    However, another entry on the same date revealed that Anne Marie was tremendously conflicted over her infatuation with Tom Capano. She told her diary that she and “Tomas” had had lunch on Friday, but that “we have problems because he has a wife and children,also. I don’t want to be in love, but I can’t help it. My God, please don’t judge me!”
    She continued to see Bob Conner, who had sensed Anne Marie’s inner struggles and started her on a low dose of Prozac in an attempt to counteract her tremendous sense of social isolation, her hypersensitivity, and her obsession about her weight. But rather than easing her internal stress, Prozac only gave her headaches.
    She might well have headaches; she wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive. “No news on weight loss,” she wrote in her diary.
    I am stuck at 135 pounds, and it’s pissing me off! I can’t starve myself any more than I already am. I suppose I should be thankful that I have not gained any weight either. I still avoid situations where there is food involved. G.R. was making mussels marinara and linguine with shrimp and chicken tonight, but I was afraid if I went over, I would eat, and when I got on the scales in the morning, I would have gained a pound or two. So I declined the invitation. When I lose my last five pounds, I will treat myself.
    There were other worries. That March, Kathleen’s three-month-old baby, Kevin—Anne Marie’s godson—was very ill, Mark continued to slide down into the hell of alcoholism, Anne Marie was in love with a man with whom she knew she could have no future, and she had said good-bye to Paul Columbus, her first serious boyfriend, when he went off to the service. She wondered a little sadly in her diary why their romance hadn’t worked out. All around her, people were pairing off, but she was still basically alone.
    March was a hard month. Anne Marie’s mother had died on March 16 nineteen years earlier, and March 24 was the eighth anniversary of her father’s death. On the twenty-fourth, she wrote,
    Today is the day my father died! How sad. My father was a bad father, but he was the only father I ever had, so therefore I loved him. I do not think that he consciously meant to be a bad father—he just had no clue! He really made my life very sad and lonely. I will never forget the pain he caused me. He forced me to lie to protect my identity.
    It was on that bleak anniversary that Tom Capano made an offer to Anne Marie. He, too, asked her to lie, but this time it was more to protect
his
identity. The words scrawled across the page of her diary sound almost childlike: “My boyfriend (Tomas) asked me today if I wanted to be a girlfriend and live alone and he would payrent for my room. I need to think. I love him, but . . . he has four children (girls) and a wife. I will be a silent girlfriend. Oh my God.”
    Tom Capano may have sensed that he had not won over Anne Marie’s housemates and felt their coolness when he dropped in. Or perhaps he liked the idea of having a mistress who would be alone somewhere in a room that he paid for, a young woman waiting for him to visit. But Anne Marie refused his offer. She wanted to stay with Jackie and Bronwyn.
    And then there were the summers at the shore. For years, she and a number of compatible girlfriends had pooled their funds to rent a house on the New Jersey shore during the hot Delaware summer months. On weekends, they joined up either in Sea Isle City or in Avalon, both just north of Stone Harbor. If she had agreed to live in a room that Tommy paid for, Anne Marie knew that everything would change. She was afraid of being cut off from the friends who were such an integral part of her life.
    Kim Horstman, the pretty blonde from Philadelphia who had met Anne Marie during one of the summers at the shore, remained one of her best friends. Kim was
always
a partner in the shared summer houses, although others came and went. And Kim was one of the few people who was privy to every aspect of Anne Marie’s life. They were already