Girls Like Us(11)

“You’re telling me.”

Lee pulls over on the sandy shoulder of the road and cuts the engine. “He was tough on you, huh?”

“You could say that. He had a well-developed sense of right and wrong.”

“Couldn’t have been easy, growing up with him. I mean, he was a good man and all. But he scared the crap out of me.”

“Scared the crap out of most people.” I push open the car door.

There is a news van up ahead, parked behind an SCPD cruiser.

“Fuck.” Lee shakes his head. “These guys are like vultures. They smell blood and come running.”

“What do you expect? You can see the crime scene from the Ponquogue Bridge. And hey, maybe it’s a rich white girl this time.”

Lee hands me an SCPD baseball cap from the back seat of his car. “Put this on. Last thing you need right now is a spot on the five o’clock news.”





4.



We hop out of the car. Sand slips into my sneakers, under my toes. I halt when I see a woman step out of a Jeep on the side of the road. Lee is talking, but I’ve stopped listening. I watch the woman as she closes her car door, her cherry-red lips parting into a smile as she greets a passing police officer.

Twenty-one years ago, Ann-Marie Marshall was a cub reporter at Newsday. I was seven years old. While my father and I were out camping in Sears Bellows County Park, my mother was murdered in our house in Hampton Bays. By the time we got back home, our block was swarming with cops and reporters, Ann-Marie Marshall among them. While I don’t remember the details of the night she died, I have a visceral impression of the following morning. I knew something was wrong as we approached our house because of all the flashing lights. To this day, I seize up at the sight of police lights cutting through fog. Dad made me stay in the car while he got out to see what the fuss was about. I remember that the windshield wipers were on; I can hear them when I dream about that day. I can smell the faint scent of the cigarettes Dad smoked in the car when he was angry and the pine-scented air freshener he used to cover it up. I pressed my face against the window as techs wheeled my mother’s body down the driveway. A sheet was draped over her, but I knew it was her. Dorsey was there. Dad ran to him; collapsed into his arms. It was one of the few times I ever saw either man cry.

Dorsey took us both down to the station. For an hour or so, he separated me from my father. He brought me a soda and asked me questions about the night before. Where had we camped? What did we eat for dinner? What time did we go to bed? Did I sleep through the night? Had Dad and I been together the whole time?

I answered most of the questions silently, just nodding yes or shaking my head no. I knew my answers were important, and my hands shook so hard that I sat on them to make them stop. Eventually, Dorsey patted me on the shoulder and told me I could go home. She did good, he whispered to my father in the hallway. Dad looked relieved. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me an affectionate squeeze. Dorsey winked at me and smiled.

Not long after, a seventeen-year-old boy from down the block confessed. It wasn’t Sean Gilroy’s first brush with the law, but it would be his last. The previous year, a neighbor claimed he’d been watching her shower from a tree outside her window. There were all kinds of rumors about him. People said he killed cats and rabbits, skinned them and kept their pelts in his basement. I never found out if that was true or just a suburban myth about a quiet, strange boy who’d never really fit in. According to his initial confession—one that he would recount and then retell in a narrative that shape-shifted over the course of his sentencing and incarceration—Gilroy saw my mother washing dishes through the window. Her long black hair was down; she wore a low-cut top and a skirt that skimmed her narrow hips. She was tan from the summer, and Gilroy said she was smiling to herself like she had a secret. He was overcome by his sexual desire for her. He knocked on the door and she let him in willingly, even offering him a cold drink from our fridge. He attacked her in the kitchen and they struggled. She pulled a knife out of the butcher’s block on the counter to defend herself. Gilroy overpowered her, seized the knife, and stabbed her in the chest with it, not once, but eight times, straight through the heart. Then he took a shower in my parents’ bathroom, changed into clean clothes that belonged to my father, and returned to his house as though nothing had happened. When the police came to question him, he was sitting on the couch watching baseball. He was still wearing my father’s T-shirt and jeans. His sneakers were splattered with her blood.

Gilroy was sentenced to life in prison without parole. On the morning Gilroy was sentenced, a small cluster of reporters waited for my father and me outside our house. My father instructed me to ignore them. I did, on what felt like an eternal walk from our doorway to the SCPD cruiser that was waiting for us at the curb. I kept my eyes down and counted the cracks in the sidewalk cement. I had almost made it into the car when Ann-Marie Marshall called out, “Nell!” I looked up, and for a second, we locked eyes. Then my father stepped between us and hissed to her that if she approached us again, he’d have her arrested for harassment. At night, I dreamed not about my mother but about Marshall, those red lips of hers calling my name. Not long after, we moved to Pop’s place on Dune Road. Our house was sold and razed to the ground. No one wanted to live in the house where a detective’s wife had been murdered, especially not us.