Frank and 'Donna | photography

Frank and Donna

It’s the day after Valentine’s Day, I’m standing outside a postcard-like Vermont home burrowed in blustery pines. My leather boots glide along bastard pools of frozen water.

Donna’s inside, but we are both freezing.

Her reading glasses crushed under her body, near the coffee table. Her pink robe now mottled crimson still sprawled on her own living room floor. Did investigators cover her while scraping and scurrying like bubonic plague rats in a fetid blood-stained ally? Did they stop to think about this woman?

It’s the day after Valentine’s Day, Frank is spinning tales to save his muddled soul strands. A tangle of Donna blame. An accidental trigger pull.

Threads unraveling

in each new telling.

Neighbors say Frank, a mean as a snake drunk, stole Donna’s paychecks in drunken distress.

“I love her,” he says. “I’ll always love her.”

Donna smeared blood on hall and kitchen wall, over toaster and coffee, stumbling, gasping from room to room, trying somehow to save herself, trying to grasp a phone pulled out of reach. And in one guttural death howl, their 26 years together evaporated.

I stand outside this perfect home resting on a Cold River Road death curve, the plastic feeders, bird seed bags ready for the next feeding. I’m talking to the state trooper who is also freezing.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” His nubile naivete too clean for dirty death.

I wait in my car, call my editor. No amount of heat warms me. Like the night my ex broke down the door, shotgun cocked, ripping phone from socket, kicking me again, again, again, like a rabid dog. Like the thousands of others thrown onto the burgeoning pyre every 11 minutes.

How is it some are spared and some devoured?

Donna made her own jelly, pasta and dried her denim jumpers on a rack near the fire. She sang an angel’s Hosanna while piling pastrami and mustard on rye, filling the small Vermont deli with raspy-voiced tales.

“We loved her,” they all said.

For months Donna rode in the passenger seat of my Jeep, I’d look over and there she was, smiling.

“It’s OK,” she’d say. “I was leaving Frank anyway.”

In perfect parody precision, it took nearly three years of wrangling plea deals. Frank finally admitted he killed Donna, now in federal prison, second-degree murder.

It is again the day after Valentine’s Day. I’m in the Jeep, driving past those Cold River Road blustery pines crimson-stained sky, a silhouette of mama deer and three yearlings.

The porch feeder drops seeds in its sway.