39. Interview with Catherine D’Amico: Part 8

24 June 2011

– I told you, Tony didn’t have to convince Earl of anything. In fact, Earl pretty much convinced Tony this was the solution to all his problems. He had Tony believing nothing bad could come of it all. That Tony was still young, still technically in the beginning of the rest of his life, so he could start over with no problem.

– Tony stood there in Earl’s apartment with tears in his eyes and listened to Earl tell him everything was going to be alright. He let Earl hug him, pat him on the back, grab him a beer and sit down and talk to him about it all. And it worked. Tony felt better when he left Earl’s apartment that night. He didn’t feel so lonely anymore, and he had a plan. A crazy one, I admit but still, it was something.

– The plan was pretty simple once you saw it laid out. Tony summed up the whole thing for me at my apartment one night, sitting in the living room. It was about—two months after we’d started seeing each other and we’d just gotten in this argument because I didn’t understand why he would slip into these moments where he would just be so distant and—somber.

– I mean, I thought it was me at first, and it was really starting to bring me down. Make me lose interest, you know? The closeness I felt when I first met him, the depth of our conversations and the passion of infatuation and all that—crap. [Ms. D’Amico sighs loudly, swipes at her eyes and stares out the window for a moment before continuing] I felt like it was starting to run out. He was just so down all the time, and he wouldn’t tell me why.

– I still don’t know why I dealt with all that baggage from somebody I just met. He just got in my head like that. And, I guess, since I knew there was something that was making him act like that, something particular, something that disappeared every once in a while long enough for us to have a few good evenings, I needed to find out what that thing was if I was going to stay with him.

– I’m not surprised I pursued it so much though. I think—the less I understand a guy, it seems, the more likely I am to fall in love with him. I don’t know why. It’s not by choice, it’s just how I’ve always been. My sister says I have a mothering complex. My sister can be a bitch sometimes though.

– Anyways, I kept badgering him and asking him what his problem was and then I kind of—threatened to leave him.

– Then he just told me. I guess he got scared. Of being alone.

– I’m guessing he told me about their plan the same way Earl first told him, before they filled in all the details. I don’t know if they took notes or anything, but Tony told me that he and Earl collaborated a lot, trying to figure out every possible scenario. They spent hours in Earl’s living room, going over and over it all. It sounded like it had to have been more complicated than that, like what Tony told me was just the basics.

– Basically, Tony had to remove himself from Tallahassee life: no bars, no mingling out in the rec or pool area at his apartment, as little contact with others as possible. He just sat in his apartmnt for a couple of weeks, only going out late at night every once in a while to meet up with Earl and discuss the rest of their plan, which had three parts: the body, the house, and the escape.

– Tony would get the body from his old anatomy class.

– It was a bit of a stretch, I thought, but I guess he trusted Earl, and Earl figured Tony could break in one night easy, throw the body in the back of Earl’s truck, and be out of there before anybody even realized what was going on. It was summer term at the time, so Tallahassee was pretty much a ghost town. Most people’ll choose the beach over another semester of classes.

– Yeah, that’s what they call it. A medical cadaver. One that was around the same age as Tony. Then Earl found an old abandoned house a couple of miles from the university and the rest of the plan was actually simple, on paper at least. Put the body in the house, put Tony’s clothes and ID on it, douse It all with as much gas as they could get their hands on, then light the whole place up.

– Well, I mean, obviously, there was more to it than that. They probably had a few things to fix, little kinks. A lot of technical stuff he never really got into. I’m assuming Earl never really got into it with Tony either. Like I said, it was his plan. So, technically, it’s his fault the whole thing went to shit.

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