A Life That Matters (4 page)

“Mom, I can’t move,” she wailed.

I hugged her. “What’s wrong, honey?”

“I fell. All day long I kept falling.”

The next day, I took her to the doctor. “She’s just sore,” he said. “She should get more exercise.”

Terri’s solution was to never go skiing again. “We used to go outside and play with the neighborhood kids,” Suzanne remembers. “Freeze tag and stickball, ice-skating and baseball. She had absolutely no interest in exercising. She did
not
like to sweat.”

What she loved were animals. Each of our children had their own room. Terri’s, painted her favorite color, purple, was filled with so many stuffed animals she joked she could start a zoo. Because of her, we endured hamsters, guinea pigs, gerbils, rabbits, fish. Terri had her own fish tank. One of the neighborhood kids, Bret Lader, poured all the fish food in it at once and the fish died. Terri, by this time in her early teens, wanted to scream.

The death of our Labrador, Bucky, was probably the biggest trauma of Terri’s early years. The love of animals never left her. When she was a teenager, she came home hysterical once, thinking she had run over a stray cat and killed it. Bob and a friend of his went to look for it, found it dead, and buried it. They told Terri it had run off chasing another cat. Only then did her tears cease. Bob claims it was the best fib he and his friend ever told.

She loved television, too, especially cartoons and, later,
Starsky and Hutch
. Bob remembers coming into her room one time to find her crying her eyes out because Lassie had been injured.

“Terri, it’s not real,” he said. “The dog didn’t get hurt. There are people standing there with cameras. The dog’s
acting
.”

His reassurance did little good. A few days later, he came in again to find her crying—this time over a cartoon.

We worried that she watched too many shows, that she didn’t get enough fresh air. Corning was the solution. She was happy when she was with her grandparents and also when we vacationed at the Jersey Shore. She’d go to the beach, though only after we convinced her that there were no green flies, but she wouldn’t go swimming.
Jaws
was the reason. She went to see it with her brother, but made him leave halfway through.

“Our routine at the shore was to pull up to our favorite motel,” Bob remembers. “The kids would run out of the car and go up to the room, and I got stuck with the luggage. One summer, when she was thirteen or fourteen, I went outside and saw Terri in her nearly transparent bathing suit, stretching like a beauty pageant queen on the diving board at the pool.
She’s grown,
I thought, with a mixture of awe and shock at her naïveté. I made her go inside and change her suit to something more decent.”

Terri’s clothes were usually jeans and a T-shirt. Her music was Loverboy, Duran Duran, and George Michael of Wham! When she wasn’t at school, she stayed in her room, with the door closed, playing with her animals. Sue Kolb often came over, and I remember the sound of their giggling about boys and whatever secrets schoolgirls share. You could say she had an active fantasy life, though she wasn’t particularly introverted, and maybe, as a child, was a little afraid of the real world. She spooked easily, Bob remembers. But more, he remembers her endearing laughter.

Terri began to draw when she got to junior high. Almost all her pictures were of animals—dogs and horses mostly—and we thought they were terrific. None of the rest of us had any artistic talent whatsoever, and we were awed by this aspect of her. It showed us a side of her that touched us all.

The Kolbs twice took her to Disney World, once when she was fourteen, then again at seventeen, and she fell in love with it. We had taken her earlier, but these trips with the Kolbs seemed to make a bigger impression on her. She asked us for a Mickey Mouse phone, and she drew all the Disney characters with remarkable skill. We have her drawings, of course. They are a way we remain in contact with her.

She used to kid us about wanting to work at Disney World but then, after she’d seen Joan Embrey on television, decided to become a veterinarian at the San Diego Zoo. We told her that to become a certified veterinarian she’d need a college degree—Bob was pushing her in that direction, anyway. She wrote to Ms. Embrey and received an answer. “You were right,” she admitted to her father. “Joan Embrey told me I’m never going to be able to work at the zoo unless I go to college.” To Suzanne, she revealed that she’d become a veterinarian assistant because she didn’t want to go through all that school.

Terri was a chunky child, not a fat one. But when at age twelve she returned from a month spent with her grandparents in Corning, it looked like she had swallowed a watermelon. Her Mema, overweight herself, was a great cook and thought nothing of stuffing Terri without caring about the calories. And when Terri went to high school, for some reason she just kept gaining every year, eventually reaching upwards of two hundred pounds (she was five foot five), to the point where we worried about it. She never mentioned it herself, but I remember shopping with her, and her tearful refusal to buy the prettiest dress she picked out because she thought she looked so ugly in it. With the exception of Sue Kolb, her other friends were overweight, too, reinforcing each other and keeping her and them out of the mainstream social life of their high school class.

Suzanne, who always looked up to her, tells us she often wanted to go into Terri’s room to see what she and her friends were doing. “Sometimes she was kind enough to let me in. But a lot of the times she kept the door shut and wouldn’t let me enter. I never resented it. More often than not, Bobby and Terri had more of a connection because they were thirteen months apart, and I was viewed as the spoiled little sibling—the baby. So I was teased a lot. I was very different than Terri. I was more outgoing, I was more athletic. I was always doing stuff, and she really was the homebody. Terri was about five years older than me, and she really confided more in her girlfriends than she did in me. After she was married, though, I would hear about Michael.”

We were concerned that Terri didn’t date and refused to go to any of the proms, but she seemed happy. (Indeed, she was capable—rarely—of spontaneous gaiety. Bob remembers how it “knocked his socks off” when, at a Tony Orlando and Dawn concert, she rushed onstage when Tony Orlando asked for volunteers from the audience.)

I took her to Dr. Ickler, her pediatrician, to ask for advice about her weight. He examined Terri, then looked her in the eyes. “When you’re ready to lose weight, you’ll know it. Then we’ll talk.” He turned to me. “Now, Mom, I don’t want you to bug her. I don’t want you to push her or say anything about it because when Terri’s ready to lose weight, she’ll tell you.”

The moment she graduated from high school, she came to me. “I’m ready to lose weight,” she said.

I took her back to Dr. Ickler. He put her on a Nutra-System diet, at that time a new kind of weight-loss regimen, and slowly, gradually, the pounds came off.

Her loss of weight triggered a transformation in Terri that thrilled us and delighted her friends. From a stay-at-home, she became a girl who loved to socialize. Her sense of humor, until then sly and quiet, blossomed. She could be the loudest in a group, the least inhibited, given to teasing and being teased. By the time she was twenty, she had lost forty pounds. Friends and strangers commented on the beauty of her figure. She became sure of herself, unafraid to voice her opinions, the center of attention rather than at its outskirts. And her laughter! It seemed to me everything struck her funny, and her glee was evident, her joy of being alive.

It was not surprising that this vibrant, graceful, blossoming girl would attract men. Nor, in retrospect, was it surprising that Terri, sexually innocent and naïvely unaware of the effect of her new power on others and on herself, would fall hard for the first attractive man who fell for her.

She did. His name was Michael Schiavo.

CHAPTER 4

Terri and Michael

Terri was in love. Blond, blue-eyed, six-foot-six Michael Schiavo, at twenty-one, a year older than Terri, was the first boy she had ever dated, and she thought being out with him was romantic and grown-up. They had met in 1982 in a sociology class at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, and when he asked her out for the first time, she was so excited she asked a friend to come down from college and help her with her clothes and makeup.

On their second date, he brought her a single red rose and shortly afterward asked her to marry him.

As a younger teenager, she had fantasized about marriage, often stopping in front of bridal shops and imagining herself in the wedding dresses. It’s hard to know what she fantasized about Michael, but in retrospect, I believe it was the man of her dreams she wanted to marry, not the person she eventually wed.

As we got to know Michael, we began to refer to him as Mr. Charm. He was almost always polite, but his words and behavior toward us seemed rehearsed, as though he was holding something in, something he didn’t want us to see. Michael’s parents were blue-collar, Lutheran, rock-solid. Michael was the last of five boys, and I was happy when I met his parents, for they struck me as gentle and kind. It was easier for our family to maintain a friendship with them, in fact, than it was with Michael. Bob in particular was uncomfortable around him. “He doesn’t seem real,” he’d complain. We didn’t know which Michael would show up on any given day.

The important thing, though, was that Terri was happy. Michael introduced her to a kind of life she had never known. They went frequently to bars and neighborhood restaurants, where Terri enjoyed the social drinking and the flattery of not only Michael but of other young men who obviously found her as attractive as he did.

Terri dropped out of college and got a job as a field-service representative for Prudential Insurance. Just before their marriage, Michael was employed at a McDonald’s, one of a string of restaurant jobs that he had throughout their relationship.

When Terri told us they were planning to get married, I was horrified, as I probably would have been no matter her choice. She was still a girl, an inexperienced, naïve girl, I felt, and Bob and I tried to talk her out of it. But she was so obviously in love that our hearts softened, and soon we kept our objections to ourselves.

They dated for one year, Terri more and more sure she was making the right choice. Her certainty eased our fears. We offered her a choice of a gift of $10,000 or a $10,000 wedding.

“The wedding!” Terri exclaimed. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Terri never looked more beautiful.

She wore a white wedding dress with lace sleeves and a choker collar, a large hat adorned with lace, and a hundred-megawatt smile. The wedding was fun, a party. It was a Catholic ceremony (Michael was given special dispensation), held at our local parish, and afterward there was a reception for more than two hundred people at a restaurant called Hampton Inn. Suzanne, sixteen, Terri’s maid of honor, remembers thinking,
Wow, this is cool!
I thought so, too. For a honeymoon, they went to our condominium in Florida. My doubts about the marriage—that Terri was too young, that Michael was the wrong man for her—receded.

The newlyweds rented an apartment, but it proved too expensive for them, so they moved into our newly redecorated and furnished recreation room in the basement. We weren’t particularly happy about the arrangement, and I don’t think Terri and Michael were, either. We tended to pussyfoot around each other, careful not to get in the way but we were always cordial. Terri worked days, Michael worked nights at McDonald’s.

In 1984, Bob sold his business and planned to move to Florida, which we did two years later. Terri asked if she and Michael could move to Florida with us, and they preceded us there by a few months. Terri was out of work, though she was eventually hired by Prudential. Michael had a number of restaurant jobs. We rented a house, while they stayed in our condo, which we had owned for many years. Michael agreed to pay half the rent. After getting and giving up several jobs over the course of three years, Michael became manager at Agostino’s, an Italian restaurant in St. Petersburg, and they settled into their own apartment, about a twenty-minute drive from our house.

Those were the living arrangements when Terri collapsed. But much more than a change of location was taking place within the marriage.

It was Bobby who first sensed that something was wrong. “Once we moved to Florida, Terri and I became closer than ever,” he told us as we tried to analyze what had gone wrong for the purposes of this book. “Michael was working nights, and Terri and I both worked during the day, so we would call each other two or three times a day, and would often go out at night. We’d go to clubs together. I was single and in my early twenties, and that was part of my life back then. She would join me and my friends, and we’d have fun. There were guys asking her to dance. She would giggle. I would laugh at her, how she would respond to it, because I thought it was hilarious she was so flattered by it. I don’t think she knew how to react.

“I remember one time we were at Bennigan’s. And this local sports anchor was really hitting on Terri. She was giggling and interacting with him. She had this naïveté about her, and she would talk to him, but that’s all it really amounted to. She was beginning to realize that she attracted other men. Because of her self-esteem, I don’t think she ever expected that to happen to her. And as a joke, she would often tell people that I was her boyfriend. She never mentioned she was married.

“There was nothing wrong with what she was doing. She never went home with any of the guys—she was just flirting. She was as devout as any twenty-two-year-old woman could be. I mean, she went to church every Sunday. I
know
she was receiving the sacraments.

“I sensed that she would rather be with her family than she would with Michael. She was able to be her true self when she was away from him.”

Michael and Bobby never got along. “We tolerated each other,” Bobby said, “but we were not close at all. I felt like I always had to try my hardest not to inflame the relationship. We always seemed as though we were on the verge of confrontation. And one time when Terri and Michael were dating, we got into it in the living room. I don’t remember what the fight was about. But Terri was there, and my ex-girlfriend was there, Cindy. I remember Terri and Cindy saying, ‘Stop! Settle down.’ But he didn’t stop. I said something that must have hit a nerve, and he went crazy. He pushed me down on the couch and had me with his hand around my throat. I couldn’t move. And he had his fist cupped in the air. He was ready to punch me. Terri and Cindy were frantic. ‘Stop. Stop!’ And he did. He
let me go. He outweighed me probably by seventy, eighty pounds. And he scared me. From then on, I was scared of him ever reaching that point again. I remember Terri begging me not to say anything about it to anybody. That was the only violent episode I had, but
I knew there were others with other people, such as the one with Suzanne.”