Miriam?” I said the next morning, after walking over to my neighbors’ home across the street and knocking tentatively on their door. Even though we were friendly, I didn’t make it a habit of stopping by unannounced.
“Would you mind keeping an eye on the house for me?” Ann’s shooting was headline news in the papers and on television. There weren’t many Grosmaires in the country, and we were certainly the only ones in Tallahassee. “Of course,” she said. “Do you want Randy to mow the lawn?”
“You know, I just planted all my tomatoes in the garden,” I said, shocked at how long ago that peaceful afternoon seemed. “If he could just go over a couple of times this week and turn some water on them, that would be great.”
“He’ll make sure things are okay, Kate,” she said, her voice catching.
Like a powerful magnet, this tragedy drew all our family from across the southeastern United States to Tallahassee Memorial Regional Medical Center. Specifically, to a tiny waiting room with plastic chairs and a coffeepot in the corner.
One by one, they showed up, disheveled and concerned after making their unexpected trips. My mom had traveled nine hours straight from Memphis with my brothers; Andy’s brother came up from St. Petersburg, Florida; his sister drove from Robertsdale, Alabama; and my sister Patti drove up from Davie, Florida. They all had the same shocked look of disbelief and concern on their faces when they saw me for the first time. While we waited for information on Ann, a dozen family members crowded into the small room until one of the deacons at our church—Deacon Melvin, who was also the chaplain at the hospital—offered to let us use a classroom down the hall.
“As long as no one’s using this room for a class,” he said, “you guys can hang out here.”
Everyone fit nicely into the huge boardroom, which had a long table down the middle with plenty of chairs on either side. Notably, the room had large windows that made it roomy and bright. Andy’s office staff brought lunch up for us—platters of chicken fingers and little sandwiches—which they did every day we were in the hospital.
It gave us a much more comfortable place to visit with people who’d traveled a long way to see us. Every act of kindness, every visit gave us a taste of God’s love. It felt as if God were hugging us over and over and over again, through the arms of our family, our fellow parishioners, our neighbors. I was very aware of their collective anguish, perhaps the result of God spreading out our grief so we wouldn’t be crushed under its weight. As our church, family, and community mourned with us, it lightened our burden and saved us from despair’s depths.
“I’ve never experienced a Holy Week like this one,” said Father Mike as he stood in the waiting room over the people gathered at the long table. Ann was shot on Palm Sunday, the day on which Christ began his Passion, and it felt as though our friends might’ve been walking with us toward her eventual death. A small group in the corner held hands, bowing their heads and praying. Another group was gathered around a table, setting out snacks. Cindy was encouraging people to sign up for the online meal volunteer system, which ended up providing two months of amazing casseroles, hams, and pies.
As we fellowshipped with our visitors, we were interrupted by consultations with various specialists. A reconstructive specialist asked to speak to us about Ann’s hand, which was injured by the blast of the shotgun. After looking at Ann and consulting his charts, he looked at us earnestly and explained what could be done.
“She needs to be stabilized before we can do any sort of surgery. Because of her brain swelling, her skull is left open,” he explained. “Once that is stabilized, here’s what I’ll do to salvage her hand.”
After his presentation, he left and I watched the nurse tinker around Ann’s body, tending to her as she appeared to sleep. Caring for Ann used to be my job, but her injuries had far exceeded anything I could solve with Neosporin, a kiss, or some strategically placed Band-Aids. I knew I’d never be able to reach over and grab that hand of my daughter’s again, but the visit with the specialist was unnerving. I feared my daughter would not survive the week, so her hand was way down on my list of topics that needed to be addressed. In the hospital everyone had their own area for which they were responsible, which made it hard to get a good overall picture of what was really going on.
But, deep down, I felt I knew.
I went out of the room to get some air and visited with friends near the waiting room, outside the Neuro ICU. That’s when our friend Rick Palmer turned the corner and dashed up to me with the confidence of a man used to navigating hospitals.
“I came as soon as I heard,” he said. Rick and his wife, Barbara, have two very well-manicured acres in a neighborhood a few miles from our home, with neatly trimmed driveways and well-mulched flowerbeds due to Rick’s gardening hobby. In addition to ornamentals, Rick grows the most awesome tomatoes, eggplants, and beans in his backyard. He and I always “dished the dirt,” so to speak.
Of course, he wasn’t there to talk about eggplants. Rick is also an ophthalmologist, a corneal specialist, and the staff ophthalmologist for three hospitals—including Tallahassee Memorial.
“I can help with her eye,” he said. Like everyone else, he simply wanted to do something to make things better. His offer to help with her eye was like a mom’s offer to bring over a casserole. But as I listened to him explain his possible services, it seemed so futile.
“I’m not sure, Rick. No one has said anything about removing her eye,” I said. “I don’t know if or when they might do it.”
But Rick was so insistent. He wanted so badly to help us.
“Andy said I could see Ann,” he said. “Do you mind?”
“Certainly,” I said. I was convinced that tending to her non-functioning eye was not the best use of our time at this point, but I figured a nurse could explain it to him better than I could.
“I’m Dr. Palmer, and I’m an ophthalmologist,” he said to a nurse. “What can I do to help?”
“Thank you, but . . .” She looked at me and paused. “I’m not sure there’s much to do right now.”
“I can enucleate the eye, for example, to try to salvage it,” he suggested. Enucleating simply means removing the eye from the socket, a practice done after orbital trauma. “If you need me to,” he insisted, “I can do that. I’ve been in medical practice for years, and I could easily help.”
She looked at him blankly.
“Please,” he said. “I want to do something.”
Very calmly, and in a measured fashion, she said, “That’s not necessary.”
“If the eye isn’t functional,” he said, “it will need to be taken out.”
“No,” she explained again. “It’s not necessary in this case.”
“It’s a common procedure,” he insisted. “I can do it today.”
“There’s nothing to remove.”
He was shocked by her answer.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
The realization gradually settled on him. He couldn’t enucleate the eye because there was no eye. Part of her—a very significant part of her—was simply gone. Stolen.
“You’re sure?” He just stood there for a moment, trying to wrap his head around just what nothing meant, not wanting to process it.
“Thanks for trying, Rick.”
Rick tilted his head as if there were some answer written in the ceiling tiles, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears. He quickly dropped his head, turned to me, and shuffled out of the room, where Andy intercepted him with a big hug in the corridor.
“I’m sorry,” Rick said to us, sniffling. He was shaking his head in disbelief. “I just got overwhelmed in there.” Rick has three daughters of his own, and a young son.
“Every tear someone else has shed,” I said, “is one I don’t have to cry.”
As Andy comforted Rick, my deepest fears were being confirmed. Ann would not recover. Previously I’d imagined an eye tucked under those bandages somewhere. Now I could only imagine red nothingness where her right eye, her “good” eye, used to be. This is the one she depended on because the other one was considered “lazy,” despite being strengthened through exercise over the years.
And that’s how I realized that—even if she survived—I’d never look into her beautiful, deep, chocolate-colored eyes, inherited from her Native American grandmother, ever again.
I understood Rick’s despair at not being able to do anything productive to make the situation better. “If there’s anything I can do,” our friends said at the end of most conversations, “please let me know.” People want to “do” for you in a time of crisis, and there was very little that could be done.
As I sat in the hospital, I tried to think of more practical ways for others to help. After all, I didn’t need another hundred pounds of cat litter. I didn’t know of it at the time, but there’s a Jewish tradition of bringing a hardboiled egg to a grieving friend or loved one. It’s supposed to symbolize eternal life, but there must be a certain amount of practicality involved as well. Giving a mourning person an egg gives them just the right amount of protein, exactly what they need when food is the last thing on their mind. In a similar vein I tried to accept nourishment from eager friends. Every morning, when the first person offered help, I’d ask them to get me a smoothie from the hospital food court—peaches and cream. I knew I wouldn’t eat unless someone put food in my hand, so those daily smoothies—which I’d nurse until lunchtime—helped a great deal. Some days, it was the only nourishment I had.
I visited with friends in the impromptu snack room until we were called to visit with the trauma surgeon. We left the little cocoon of family, love, and sandwiches to meet the cold harsh reality of Ann’s prognosis. I wasn’t sure how to feel, but I knew I wanted actual information. I didn’t want another confusing report, or the narrow view of a specialist. I wanted to know what we were dealing with.
We had to be “buzzed in” to the Neuro Intensive Care Unit. It was a large room with ten smaller rooms surrounding the nurses’ station in the center. Ann’s room was the first one on the right. The trauma surgeon smiled kindly as we walked up to the nurses’ station where she waited to speak to us.
“We’ve decreased Ann’s pain medications,” she said to us. “We’re hoping to see some sort of response.”
“And?” Andy asked. I detected it again, sitting right there below the surface. Hope.
“Nothing yet,” she said, “but there’s so little we know about the brain, you just never know. We’re going to continue evaluating her.”
The doctor spoke with the certainty that anything could happen. But Ann, completely unresponsive, didn’t seem like she was on the verge of a turnaround.
“With modern medicine,” she continued, “there’s a lot that can be done.”
I wanted to believe, and as she spoke I tried to conjure it. Miracles happen. The brain is mysterious. People are praying.
Should I believe? Should I hope?
“We’ll have to see,” she said. “I’ll keep you posted as we continue to monitor her response.”
When she left, I felt uneasy and unsettled, unable to wrap my mind around Ann’s true condition. I’d hoped the conversation would provide clarity, but I only felt uneasy.
Was it possible that she could survive a blow from a shotgun at almost point-blank range? Though Andy was willing to hope, I didn’t feel I could entertain the idea of her survival.
When the neurosurgeon came into the room later that day, the hopeful tone created by the trauma surgeon dissipated.
“Mr. and Mrs. Grosmaire,” he said as he walked in, immediately getting down to business. “Has anyone shown you the CAT scan?”
“No,” Andy said.
“Would you like to see it?”
“Certainly,” Andy said. “Visual things help me understand.”
He brought the CAT scan up on a computer monitor. The scan took data from several X-ray images of Ann’s head and converted them into pictures. They had taken an X-ray, moved down slightly, taken another X-ray, moved down slightly, and taken another. The resulting CAT scan was composed of probably twenty different images.
“Let’s start from here,” he said. The screen was blank, just dark, until we saw a little circle of grayish-white in the middle. “That’s the top of her skull.” Then, the second picture expanded a little bit and we saw a little bit more. At some point, as I was looking at it, I recognized that we were actually seeing Ann’s head. It was sort of like looking at a bread loaf, one slice of bread at a time.
“What are these?” I asked. I’d noticed two or three little sparks of light on the image. They weren’t just little round dots; they appeared to have little rays coming off of them as well. Almost like stars.
“Every point of light is a shotgun pellet,” he said.
I swallowed hard as the CAT scan moved down her head. In one image, there were three or four little pellets, but in the next there were ten, then fifteen, then more.
“There are so many,” Andy gasped. “It looks like a night sky.”
As the images went down her head, I realized a horrible fact that had been cloaked when the nurses had said to us, “Maybe you ought to step out of the room while we change her bandages.”
On the scan, I began to clearly see her left eye socket, the left side of her cheekbone, skull, jaw, and teeth. On the right side there was nothing but blackness. With a deep, horrifying jolt, I understood what the other doctor didn’t have the fortitude to tell us.
Not only was Ann’s eye missing. The whole side of Ann’s brain was gone.
The doctor rolled his finger down the mouse, and the images scrolled more quickly.
As the slides moved from one to the other, the pellets grew in density. The quick motion and appearance of the shiny, starlike pellets made it look like fireworks going off on the screen—which meant, of course, in Ann’s head.
“This will show you just how devastating your daughter’s injury is,” he said in an almost professorial manner. He pointed directly to a place where the pellets went into Ann’s head. “Here, you’ll see the point of entry. The trauma that the brain has endured is extensive. She has just minimal brain function.”
“So.” I gathered myself. “You’re saying the Ann we know and love has been lost?”
He paused, but only for a moment. The previous doctor seemed more concerned with sparing our feelings, but this one seemed intent on telling us the horrible truth. I scarcely can imagine how two professionals could deliver such different takes, all in the course of one afternoon. As much as I hated what he was saying, I appreciated his straightforwardness.
“She has brain stem function, and that’s about all,” he said. “She’ll continue to deteriorate.”
“Her brain,” I said, pointing to the CAT scan, barely able to formulate the question. “It should be here, right?”
“Correct,” he said. “But that’s not the only concern. The pellets going through her head certainly caused devastation. But the shock of the blast also destroyed the tissue in this part of her brain as well.”
I grabbed Andy’s hand, as the sensation of losing Ann—really losing all hope—made my soul plummet.
He continued, “Her organs will eventually shut down, and her body will continue to deteriorate to the point where even the ventilator won’t be able to sustain her.” He took his hand from the computer mouse and looked directly at us.
He delivered the various pieces of bad news with the regularity of a metronome, one piece after another, with just enough time between his sentences to make sure we understood.
Afterward, we shuffled though the halls. I couldn’t stop thinking about her organs shutting down. Would that mean that she’d eventually have a feeding tube? Would that be something we would want to do?
As I’ve mentioned, we’d been inundated with details of the famous Terri Schiavo case because she had also lived in Florida. The legal battle was heart-wrenching to watch, as courts eventually were forced to decide whether or not to honor Terri’s husband’s request to remove her feeding tube or Terri’s parents’ request to leave it in. Though many doctors and court-appointed physicians diagnosed her as being in a vegetative state, her parents (and the doctors they hired) didn’t believe it. Heartbreaking photos and videos of Terri were shown on the news for more than seven years, as they battled over her life. Politicians, churches, and families had heated conversations about the morality of “pulling the plug” on her life, or what was left of her life. The husband was described as greedy and selfish for wanting to move on with his life. The parents were criticized for being unrealistic. Ultimately, the tube was removed.
Our scenario was not like Terri Schiavo’s yet. No one was pressuring us to make a decision about a feeding tube. When it was mentioned, it was presented as a future possibility, something to consider in case it came up. But our conversation with the neurosurgeon made it seem like a certainty.
What would we decide? Would we suddenly be embroiled in a complicated moral situation? As we walked through the hall, various tidbits of Church doctrine bounded around in my head. Before this moment, I was sure I knew how the Church viewed such instances. We err on the side of life, but what if there’s no hope?
I didn’t have time to consider these issues as we walked, our footsteps echoing in the otherwise empty halls. When we got to the waiting room, all eyes went to us. Our family members, who had been chatting quietly at the table and eating from platters full of little sandwiches, froze when they saw the expressions on our faces.
“Things don’t look so good,” Andy said, standing at the head of the table.
He repeated everything the neurosurgeon had told us. As we spoke, we could see their eyes filling with tears. “But we want you to know that she’s not suffering. She never suffered.”
My son-in-law Scott openly started crying, and my sister Patti got up and hugged me.
“Does that mean . . .?” she asked. No one wanted to ask if death was imminent. Though I’d already gotten there in my head, I could see Andy was still torn. It was disorienting to receive such different reports from doctors in such a short amount of time, but the CAT scan didn’t lie. Half of Ann’s brain was gone; the other half had been injured from the blast.
I cut Patti off before she said the obvious. Ann was going to die, but I didn’t want to hear those words spoken. “We know where this road will lead us, but we don’t yet know how long it will take to get there.”
“Can we talk to you a minute?” I asked Father Chris Tuesday afternoon. He had a beard, which gave him more of an authoritative air than his three years of priesthood would otherwise garner. He followed Andy and me to the classroom we were using as a waiting room and pulled out a chair from the table that still held remnants from lunch—some plastic cups, a paper plate with sandwich crusts, and empty cans of soda.
“How can I help you?” he asked. He had a quiet and wise nature, which made you want to spill your secrets or ask for advice. Because he’d studied in Rome, we considered him a theological scholar.
“So,” I began, “we’ve been told that the Ann we know and love is gone.”
His face fell at the news, but he didn’t look away or interrupt us with words of comfort. He just listened as we relayed the prognosis from the neurosurgeon.
“We’ve been told Ann’s injuries are grave,” I explained. “One by one, her organs will fail, which means that eventually we’ll need to make some hard decisions.”
“God can work a miracle,” Andy said. “But at this point, it would take one to save Ann’s life.”
“We’re not asking what to do,” I said. “But it would be helpful to understand what the Church teaches on end-of-life matters.”
Because I’d been in church for so many years, I felt I had a pretty good understanding of this subject. But there was something about how suddenly this issue landed right in our laps that made me want to hear directly from a church authority.
Father Chris listened carefully and sympathetically as we spoke. Then, when he was sure that we had finished, he spoke words of comfort and love.
“First, I’m so sorry that you’re faced with such a decision,” he said. Even though he was young, he had the bearing of someone who’d ministered people through all types of painful situations.
“Second, the Church respects life, but not to the point where they believe you should keep someone alive at all costs.”
“What about a feeding tube?” Andy asked. “We’re not sure we want to do that, because it seems like it’s prolonging the inevitable.”
“The Church would not suggest you prolong someone’s life just because you medically can,” he said. “The Church doesn’t require you to keep life going under such a circumstance.” He explained that the Church allows people to follow their own consciences, but that it is helpful for our consciences to be informed by the Church’s beliefs on such matters. “You’re following the right path,” he said. “And you would be doing nothing contrary to the teachings of the Church.”
Father Chris didn’t make the decision for us, but he helped confirm our inclinations about the feeding tube. Though no one was directly asking us the question, we’d settled in our hearts that we didn’t want one.
In addition to the daily updates from Ann’s doctors, we continued to receive updates from the Leon County Sheriff’s detectives, Don and Dawn. Dawn had shared with us on Monday what Conor had revealed in his confession: that he and Ann had gone on a picnic to celebrate her making the dean’s list, but somehow they had started arguing. They argued all night until Conor fell asleep, then they continued the argument the next day when they woke up. When Ann left the house, Conor got out his father’s shotgun with the intention of killing himself, but Ann knocked on the door and he let her back in. He waved the gun around to frighten her, and when it was pointed at her, he pulled the trigger.
“So, Conor has pled not guilty to attempted murder,” Don told us on Tuesday.
Did I hear him correctly? It made no sense to us.
“Had he not already confessed?” I asked. “Why would he plead not guilty?”
“Ma’am, it’s just procedural. The defendant has to appear before a judge in a timely fashion. They had to charge him, and he had to plead not guilty. Now his lawyer can start his discovery.”
The words rang in my ears. Attempted murder? If Ann died, I realized, the “attempted” would be dropped.
“What if Conor didn’t want to be charged with murder? Could they do something about that?”
“What do you mean?” Don asked.
“I don’t know. On TV, they file an injunction or something to keep the victim alive so that the defendant won’t be charged with murder.”
“That never happens,” Don assured us. “I’ve never seen anything like that happen in real life. You have the right to make any decision you need to, and they can’t stop you.”
I should have known better than to believe an episode of a TV crime drama, but how could I have known what to expect? I hated being so ignorant of the legal aspects of what was happening, but I was grateful that the detectives took the time to explain things to us.
That evening I was sitting in Ann’s room when the nurse came in to tend to the ventilator.
“Did you know she’s breathing on her own at times?” she asked as she looked at the monitor.
“Really?”
“Yes, she’s really just on assisted breathing, see?” The nurse extended her finger and pointed at the screen. “This ensures she takes a deep enough breath. But if you watch this number, you can see she sometimes is breathing by herself.”
“Wow,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“She’s a fighter. Sometimes she’ll get tired and ride the vent, which means she relies on the ventilator to breathe for her for a while,” she said. “But she’s fighting.”
Ann was a fighter. As devastating as the news concerning her injuries was, here was a little piece of positivity. She was giving us the time we needed to process everything. To allow everyone to see her one last time. My daughter was a fighter.
“Do you mind if I pray?” our friend Bob Schuchts asked Tuesday evening. Bob was a counselor involved in the healing ministry at church. He and Andy had crossed paths during one of the weekend retreats Andy attended fourteen years earlier. I got to know him through many interactions over the years. We could tell he was in shock at seeing Ann in the hospital bed, but mostly at seeing what we were living through.
The prayers of our community seemed to be lifting us up and protecting us from the depths to which we could’ve sunk.
“Please do,” Andy said, as we all bowed our heads.
“Wait,” I said, opening my eyes for a moment. “Will you pray for the McBrides too?”
“Conor’s parents?” he asked.
“And Conor,” I said, very deliberately. I hadn’t had time to really process all my feelings toward Conor or the McBrides. However, I knew our response to them needed to be right and full of grace.
“We’re getting so much love and attention from our friends and community, but they’ve lost a child this week too,” I said. “They’re not a part of a church body, so I don’t know if anyone is reaching out to them.”
Tragedies bring out the best and worst in us, and, as mentioned before, often people’s attempts to explain a horrifying event turn into accusations against the perpetrator’s parents. What kind of parents would raise a kid like that? They must’ve done something really wrong. How did his parents not see the types of magazines he read? Didn’t they notice he was gloomy? Didn’t they see the warning signs?
To help make sense of it, people have to establish rather quickly that there’s a significant difference between the way they’ve raised their families and the way a murderer was raised. It’s a reassuring myth.
This couldn’t have happened in my family.
While we were losing our daughter, our community was rallying around us. As the McBrides were losing their son in a real way, they were being isolated from their community. Their lives would forever be marred by what he’d done—isolated by unspoken accusations, unanswered questions, and wild suspicions.
“It’s easy to feel sorry for us,” Andy continued. “But what they’re going through—being the parents of someone who did something terrible—has to be . . . in a way . . .” His voice broke. “Worse.”
Bob didn’t respond, but I could tell that he was deeply touched by what we were saying. Instead, he simply bowed his head and prayed.
“Lord Jesus,” he began. In those two words, so much anguish, compassion, and love. Sometimes when people prayed for me during these times, I didn’t necessarily hear all of their careful words. Instead, I just let myself feel swaddled by them, as a baby feels the comfort of a bunting.
A few minutes into the prayer, Bob stopped praying when he heard a knock on the door. I jolted back into reality. Instead of being lifted up in prayer before the throne of God, I opened my eyes and saw that I was just in a hospital room—institutional white tiles beneath my feet, and fluorescent lighting washing the life out of me. Andy dropped my hand, walked across the room, and pulled open the heavy wooden door.
On the other side of it were Michael and Julie McBride.
We’d already seen Michael, who’d come to visit just hours after the shooting, but this was the first time we’d seen them as a couple. Bob stood to leave, but I motioned to the chair in the corner. “Stay. Please.”
“We can’t say we’re sorry enough,” Julie blurted out, tears running down her face.
I walked over to Julie and gave her a big hug. I didn’t quite understand all that had happened over the past two days, but I knew this: we were bound to the McBrides in a way that no one else could understand, and we needed to be with them during this time.
“Do people come by?” Andy asked the McBrides. Every day their address had been published in the newspapers as the location of the shooting. “Are you getting phone calls?”
“Not really,” Michael said. “In fact, it’s been quieter than you’d think.”
“Is the press hounding you?” I asked. I imagined the media camping out on the doorstep of the McBrides’ home, giving them no space to grieve without cameras flashing in their faces.
“Yes, but we aren’t answering their questions,” Michael said. “No one wants to hear what we think.”
“We have people from our church who are praying for us all day. We’ve asked them to pray for you too.”
Julie looked down at the Kleenex Andy had given her. “We had friends who came by the house even before I got home to clean things up.” I thought of her coming home to a house surrounded by Do Not Enter tape, and of the women who were caring enough to spare their friend what was inside.
“How is Katy?” I asked. Two years younger than Conor, Katy was his sister with special needs. I remembered a conversation that I’d had with Ann and Conor about the possibility that they might have to care for Katy later in their lives.
“We told her that Conor did something bad to Ann, and that he had to go away to be punished. She doesn’t quite understand it all. How can I explain it to her?” Julie replied.
I took Julie’s hands, looked in her eyes, and said, “We don’t define Conor by that one moment.”
There’s no way to understand a person’s essence by judging one moment of his life. If we defined Conor only as a murderer, that would mean defining my daughter only as a murder victim. If I left him in that place, I was leaving her in that place too. I refused to leave Ann there.
Another memory came to me, of an afternoon talk show with a mother so distraught over her daughter’s murder that years later she still cried daily. She could not get past her daughter’s death. The show’s counselor asked her if she was honoring her daughter’s life by only focusing on the way she died. Ann was an incredible young woman, and I wasn’t going to let one dark moment over-shadow her life. I had to let go, let go of anything that would hold me in that dark place—which meant forgiving Conor.
“Who would want to be defined for the rest of their life by the worst thing they ever did?” I asked.
No one answered, the silence affirming the truth we all knew. We are more than our sins.
Later, Bob described the moments of stillness and quiet during this initial meeting as “a hush of the presence of God.” Even though it was the Holy Week of Easter, perhaps the best soundtrack for the interaction would’ve been “Silent Night.” There was a calmness, a tenderness so powerful it was almost palpable. One could easily imagine heavenly hosts surrounding us and singing alleluia in that moment. It was a night of redemption, of people quaking at the sight of such loss, such love. Both loss and love. Strongly. At once.
But Ann wasn’t sleeping in heavenly peace. She was fighting for her life.
Andy cleared his throat and broke the silence. “How’s Conor?”
“He’s still at the Leon County jail. He’s on suicide watch in the medical pod,” Michael said.
“You haven’t visited him?”
“I’ve only spoken to him.” He noticed my surprised look, and explained, “He’s nineteen, so he’s not a juvenile. That means they don’t give the parents any special visitation. We’re trying to get a good defense attorney now, and we’re hoping to see him soon. I know he just added Julie and me to the list.”
“What list?” Andy asked.
“The jail allows him to make a list of people who can visit him,” Michael said. “He only gets four, and we’re two of them. He wants to add you, too, Kate.”
“Me?”
He nodded solemnly, looking at the ground. “Now that Conor’s named his four, the list can’t be changed for a month.”
“Why me and not Andy?” I said. It seemed to me that he’d want a man-to-man talk after everything that happened.
“Conor’s so sorry about what happened,” Michael said, slowing down the words to make them somehow fit the scope of the moment. Normally when someone apologizes, it’s over something insignificant. I’m so sorry I spilled my wine on you. I’m sorry I’m late. I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I could tell Michael was struggling over the inadequacy of the words. He was right to struggle, because words weren’t enough. His “sorry” couldn’t change what happened, heal our devastated hearts, or put Ann back at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But what the McBrides didn’t know—what perhaps I didn’t even know—was this: I was beginning to forgive the man who shot my daughter.
Conor put me on his visitation list for a specific reason. In a way, it made sense. We’d grown very close over the years that he and Ann had dated. For a couple of months he even slept under our roof. When the police told us that Ann had been shot, my first question was “Where’s Conor?” I knew he’d be one of the first people she’d want by her side.
If Sunday hadn’t happened, Conor and Ann would’ve been dreaming about engagement rings. It was hard for me to suddenly recategorize him from almost family to the enemy.
“It’d help him so much if you could go,” Michael said in a slightly pleading tone. “He’d like to see you.”
I tried to speak, but I felt a catch in my throat. From the very beginning I cared about what was happening to Conor. Even when I read online that he’d driven around for forty-five minutes before turning himself in to the police, I wasn’t outraged. I was gravely disheartened and anguished over his behavior. But I wasn’t angry.
That didn’t mean I wanted to go down to the jail and see Conor. I just didn’t not want to see him.
My name had taken up a space on a very short list. It implied an obligation.
Would I be able to meet it?