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?
CHAPTER 7
It seemed I was living in a tragedy I’d seen on television before. When the deputy and the victim’s advocate showed up on our
porch, I thought, I’ve seen this on television. When the doctor broke the bad news to us, I figured, I know how this goes. As I wondered about Ann’s death, I braced myself for the dramatic showdown that would inevitably occur with Conor’s attorney, thinking, It’s happened a thousand times.
Perhaps we’d seen too many courtroom drama movies.
About nine months before Ann was shot—on Father’s Day—Andy and I were relaxing in the living room when Ann and Allyson came in and lingered near the sofa.
“You need something?” Andy asked. He recognized the look on both their faces. This was going to be a tag team effort.
Allyson smiled an awkward smile and came over to us. “You know how you always taught us to take care of animals? That if we find one that’s sick or injured, we should make sure it has shelter and help?”
We looked at each other, then Andy looked over their shoulders, expecting to see (or hear) their latest rescue. “Go on,” he said, waiting for them to reveal just what they had found.
The story spilled out. Ann had gotten a call from Conor. He was at a friend’s house, having literally been thrown out of his house by his dad. He had nowhere to go and only the clothes on his back.
“Can Conor stay here?” Ann blurted out, bracing for an immediate denial of her request.
“Where is Conor now?” I asked. The girls glanced past the kitchen to the small room off the carport. Conor shuffled in, his head hung low.
A lost puppy would not have looked more forlorn. His eyes were red as if he’d been crying, but there was more—red marks on his face. Fighting with his father? On Father’s Day of all days? It occurred to me how little we really knew about the parents and family life of the young man who was dating our daughter.
“What happened, Conor?” I asked him gently.
“I asked for the car to go to the movies,” he said. “My dad said no, and we started arguing about it. One thing led to another and all of a sudden, he just picked me up and threw me out the front door.”
I knew we were hearing only one side of the story, but the immediate problem was this young man standing in front us with no place to go. Compassion came first. Along with some rules.
Conor and Ann had just graduated from high school, and they were about to really experience the world in college. Conor had been accepted to Stanford but had chosen to go to Tallahassee Community College so he could be closer to Ann. Maybe by opening our home, we could help his last summer before college be less tension-filled.
“Ann,” Andy said, in his most serious dad-voice. “He can stay, but he’ll have to sleep in the rabbit room.” This wasn’t a bedroom with a cute rabbit motif; it was more of a mudroom or spare room where we had kept our pet rabbits when we first moved into the house. It had plenty of room for a spare bed and was where we often put visitors.
“Of course,” she said, leaning over and hugging me.
“But I’m going to call his mom to make sure she knows where her son is,” I said. “I bet she’s worried sick.”
“Fine!” she gushed.
I called Julie to tell her that Conor was at our house. She shared with us that the family had been in counseling. That’s good news, I thought with relief. I offered to make sure that Conor showed up to any appointments.
“It’s good they are working through their issues,” Andy said, relieved, before adding sternly, “and make sure he knows counseling is a condition of him living here.”
He lived with us for a couple of months, until he got an apartment with a few other guys while attending Tallahassee Community College. During those two months, we had the chance to get to know Conor. Even though it wasn’t ideal—he and his parents should’ve been enjoying their last few months together before he went to college—we grew close to Conor, and he became a part of the family.
Conor was the type of teenage boy I appreciated. Not the Eddie Haskell type: “Why, Mrs. Grosmaire, you look quite lovely in that outfit.” Nor was he a mumbly-mouth teen who wouldn’t look you straight in the eye. He said “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am” and even offered to do chores around the house when he stayed with us—like clearing brush and mowing the lawn.
We also had serious conversations about his life at home. I counseled him to work toward making himself the best person he could be and urged him to be accepting of his parents’ shortcomings. We can only change ourselves, and we can’t expect others to change for us. We are each on our own healing journey. He took it all in as much as any eighteen-year-old could. I know it would have been hard for me at eighteen to think I was the one who needed to change and not my parents.
Once Conor moved into his apartment, he suddenly became less of a family member. He and Ann had begun attending classes at Good Shepherd that would lead to Conor joining the church at Easter. But being across town at school, and with no transportation, he stopped attending the classes. Then, it appeared that Ann and Conor were no longer dating.
One day she stopped by my office and asked to use my phone. Clearly Conor was not answering when he saw her number flash up on the screen. When she called him from my phone, he answered. From the half of the conversation I heard, it seemed she wanted to meet and talk things over, but he was refusing.
On another occasion Andy and Ann were riding through Tallahassee on some sort of errand, when Andy posed a question.
“Does being with Conor make you a better person?” he asked.
They drove silently for about a mile before Ann burst into tears.
She never answered.
As with previous breakups, this one lasted only a few weeks. Soon they were back together again, and whatever tension had existed for those few weeks was gone.
That fall, Conor came to Andy and asked for a job. Though Andy wasn’t convinced it was a good idea, he thought it might give Conor a chance to prove himself in the workplace—in the mailroom, actually. He took in the mail, sorted it, and passed it out to people at their desks. He also did odds and ends—scanning, moving paper from one desk to another, and anything else that popped up over the course of the day. Andy wasn’t his direct supervisor, so he figured that giving Conor a job would offer him the opportunity to make a little money and to better himself.
If working for Andy was an effort to demonstrate maturity, it failed. Right off the bat, Conor showed up late and called in sick frequently. He had a hard time adjusting to his new life of living on his own and going to school full time.
Thankfully he didn’t directly answer to Andy, but that didn’t mean Andy didn’t notice how he was barely doing the minimum to get by. “You know,” Andy said to Conor’s direct supervisor after a few weeks, “feel free to treat Conor just like anybody else. It isn’t doing me any favors by keeping him on if he’s not doing the work.” Then, to make sure she understood, he added, “You don’t need my permission to fire him.”
Conor wasn’t fired, and Andy watched his struggles from afar. Then, one crisp October day, Conor showed up at Andy’s office unannounced.
“What can I help you with, Conor?”
“Mr. Grosmaire, I’d love to go to lunch with you next week sometime.”
It was a curious visit, but Andy agreed to the unexpected request. By the time their lunch meeting rolled around, Andy had gone over several scenarios in his mind. Why would Conor want to talk privately with him? He’d braced himself for the worst. Halfway through their sandwiches, Conor worked up the courage to say what he’d wanted to say to Andy.
“I’d like to ask you for Ann’s hand in marriage,” Conor said.
This was the “worst” Andy had feared. It’s not that he didn’t like Conor. In fact—after all we’d been through together—he loved the boy. But that’s what he was. A boy. Though Ann and Conor had dated all through high school and now into college, he didn’t appear to be growing into manhood well. Not only did he show a lack of responsibility at work, but also he’d frequently keep Ann out past her curfew and flout our household rules.
To be fair, he’d been g
oing through a challenging time of life. First, he’d left his parents’ house rather abruptly and lived with us before moving into an apartment with other college students he didn’t know. But even though he was now effectively on his own, he hadn’t developed the life skills required to keep a household. He lost an unhealthy amount of weight during that first semester at school, since his diet consisted of ramen noodles and Red Bull. He didn’t seem to sleep well. Plus, he and his family were supposedly in counseling—but they didn’t seem to go on a regular basis. We figured he’d need some time to figure out his family issues before trying to have a family of his own.
Andy took a long sip of his iced tea, trying to think of a clever response. How can a dad cloak the fact that he doesn’t want his daughter to marry this person at this time? He wanted to say no, or at least that they needed to wait. But he knew that declining to give a blessing might make them more apt to run off and get married anyway.
“It’s a big step, Conor,” Andy said. “I’ll have to think about it.” But before the sentence was out of his mouth, he noticed Conor’s face fall. For the rest of the meal, they picked at their food and slurped their drinks until the waitress mercifully brought their check.
When Andy got home, he and I sat on the couch to discuss all the angles.
“They’re obviously not ready for marriage,” I said. “Neither of them.”
“What if I try to talk her out of it, but it only pushes her toward him?” Andy asked.
“You think they’ll elope?” I asked.
“If we say no, then what better way to defy your parents than to run off to Vegas?”
It was true. We had laid down our curfew policy, but our rules only seemed to cause them to break them even more.
“And think of how disappointed Ann will be if we say no,” I said.
We both knew it would devastate her if we “ruined” this momentous occasion in her life. At that very time, she and Conor were probably feverishly discussing the lunch conversation from their point of view and what it meant for their future.
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