Free 04.Die.My.Love.2007 by Kathryn Casey

career.
    There were other indications as 1998 drew to a close that all wasn’t well. By then Jocelyn was nine, Paxton six, and Callie three, but those who knew the Jablins sensed a distance in their relationship. “There was a coldness that kind of settled into the marriage,” remembers Loni. “You rarely saw Fred touch Piper, even on the shoulder.”
    Of all the children, Jocelyn seemed to be the most disturbed by the family troubles. Over the years growing up on Hearthglow, the Jablins’ oldest had blossomed into a viva-cious and creative child, spunky and full of life. She led the other neighborhood children when they put on backyard plays, and spent hours laughing in the Fosters’ playroom, directing the younger children as they played games. Yet, as Piper deteriorated, she put more and more responsibility on Jocelyn, who was forced to take over the tasks her mother left undone. Some nights, Joce walked outside to the deck, where her mother sat drinking wine, to ask what frozen en-tree she should put in the oven for dinner.
    A doctor who treated Piper saw something else in her.
    He got the impression that she was on the lookout for a new man in her life. When Piper had an appointment, she fl irted with him, until he issued a standing order: From that point on, a female nurse was in the examination room with them at all times. “I had the feeling Piper would cross the line,”
    says the physician. “I didn’t want her to have that opportunity.”
    Meanwhile, in his classroom at the University of Richmond, Fred Jablin taught his students many concepts, including one he called “the Dance,” an analysis of the way people interact, the give and take between two people in a relationship, business or personal. Many had the feeling that all was not well in the Jablin marriage, that Fred and Piper’s “dance”

    DIE, MY LOVE / 55
    was winding tighter and tighter. When Joanne Ciulla and her husband went to dinner at the Jablins’, his strong reaction to Piper surprised her.
    “I hope we don’t have to do anything else with them,”
    Ciulla’s husband confided in her later. “That woman is frightening.”

    6
    Im a very complex person,” Piper told Dr. Steven Welton, a psychiatrist at Richmond’s Institute for Family Psychi-atry, on January 15, 1999. It was her first visit in what would become yet another cycle of therapy. The next two years in the Jablin marriage would be documented in the notes Welton wrote about their sessions together, painting a portrait of a woman consumed by her own wants and needs.
    While Piper talked, Dr. Welton listened, interjecting questions. That first day, Piper talked of her childhood, saying her early years had been tumultuous and tainted by a family history of alcoholism. When asked to describe herself, she said she had a high IQ, 138, and a competitive, type-A personality. She said she drank wine daily, and told the psychiatrist that during college she had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. If she disclosed her other problem—the bulimia Fred would claim she had—Welton didn’t note it on her chart. Piper talked about her depression, her bouts with despair after the births of her children, and the blues that sent her to bed for days at a time, especially during the Christmas holidays, when what should have been a jolly season propelled her into melancholy.
    When it came to her marriage, Piper described it as faltering. She saw Fred as uninvolved and disinterested and made no secret of what many had suspected in Virginia: that DIE, MY LOVE / 57
    she’d been unfaithful to him. In fact at the time she began seeing Welton, Piper said she was involved in an affair with a younger man, one just in his twenties. Through it all, she remained so upbeat, Welton attempted to explain her demeanor in his rec ords: “There is an impression that her glib surface adaptability hides some clear struggles with sense of self, identity, and relationship problems.” Defi ning his