Two lives, reclaimed
Left for dead, sisters fight to overcome their mother's murder, regain a sense of normalcy
 Brittany (left) and Danielle Cann shared a moment on the steps of their father’s home in Easton. (Jonathan Wiggs/ Globe Staff) |
Wayne Cann puts his arm around his daughter Danielle's shoulders and kisses her head. Wearily, Danielle leans against him. "Listen," Wayne murmurs. "You're alive. That's what matters."
The two are sitting on a cot in the emergency room of
The three-day hospital stay is one more detour in the remarkable road to recovery Danielle and her 13-year-old sister, Brittany, have traveled since Aug. 26, when Robert McDermott, the boyfriend their mother had kicked out again two weeks earlier, critically injured them. Sometime after they and their mother, Elizabeth, who was 44, returned from a Rascal Flatts concert at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, McDermott entered their Norton home and shot them each once in the head and also shot Freedom, the family dog. Their mother did not survive. Neither did Freedom. McDermott shot himself on commuter rail tracks in Walpole moments before an oncoming train struck him.
The five months since then have been a roller coaster of resilience and sorrow, endurance and courage, grief and gratitude. Only now, with Brittany starting school last week, are normal routines returning, but Danielle faces an eighth operation this winter. In a cruel irony, the bullets that shattered the sisters' lives also delivered them from a household made so tense by McDermott's instability and emo tional abuse that their father in 2005 petitioned for emergency custody, only to be turned down for insufficient evidence. Friends who wouldn't enter the Norton house because McDermott unnerved them now visit the girls at their father's home in Easton.
"It's like a weight's been lifted off them. It's hard because they lost their mother," says Wayne, 47. "You can never be OK with that."
"I'm glad to be where I'm safe," Brittany says. She lowers her head and starts to cry. "I'm thinking too much about Mom."
The modest farmhouse that Wayne and Melissa Cann rent overflows with children, now that Danielle and Brittany and their 17-year-old sister, Amanda, live there full-time, not just weekends, along with their two half-brothers, 6-year-old Adam and 8-year-old Curtis; 14-year-old stepsister, Erica Smart; and a gray miniature Schnauzer named Tucker. Amanda, who was in Florida when the shootings occurred, sleeps in a nook on the upstairs landing because the spare room is filled, wall to wall, with the contents of the Norton house.
Amanda's sisters likely owe their lives to her. Her mother phoned her during the Saturday night Rascal Flatts concert. "It was my favorite band," Amanda says. Afterward she didn't return Amanda's calls. Worried, Amanda on Monday morning reached her father, who went to the house, discovered the horrific scene, and dialed 911.
A bubbly Brittany sits in the living room one recent afternoon, stringing beaded bracelets, unhindered, it seems, by the fact that she's now blind in her left eye. She is effervescent by nature, but the frontal lobe injury she sustained leaves her less inhibited and more sensitive to slights, real and perceived, than she used to be.
"She's not the same Brittany," Wayne says. "But she's here."
Danielle, who was so close to her mother that she told her about her first kiss, sits on the sofa with her new boyfriend, her dark bangs hiding her missing forehead. Doctors, fearing infection, removed it in October and plan to reinsert it in March. The helmet Danielle wears to protect her brain when she stands lies beside her.
The other children wander in and out, creating such a whir of activity that Melissa's arrival with a giant syringe of thick formula to insert into Danielle's gastrointestinal feeding tube barely registers. Danielle needs the tube because trauma and treatments robbed her of her appetite. She takes antidepressants and, like the rest of the family, is in therapy.
"I'm doing good physically. I'm getting some strength back," Danielle says. "Emotionally, I'm pretty much a mess right now."
She remembers sleeping with her sister in their mother's bedroom after the concert, then hearing the dog get shot, then seeing Brittany leave the room, then hearing Brittany get shot. "My mom figured it wasn't going to stop," Danielle says. "She said she loved me and gave me a healing stone to hold." Then McDermott shot her mother. Danielle's eyes were closed and she was holding her dying mother when he said, "Lights out, Danielle."
She remembers, too, the moment when she regained consciousness in the hospital. "I was amazed. Did I survive?" she recalls. "It was a feeling of relief. I wouldn't want to die at 15. I have so much more stuff ahead of me."
As life-threatening as the girls' injuries were, pediatric neurosurgeon Stephanie Greene was always optimistic.
"I told their father in the emergency room I thought they both would probably live," Greene says. Her fears that Danielle would be unable to move her left side never materialized. Both girls needed reconstructive surgery.
"They've done amazingly well," Greene says. "Youth is a tremendous advantage. The brain in a child is very plastic."
Brittany was discharged from the hospital Oct. 1. Danielle developed leaks of spinal fluid and an abscess along the bullet's path and was released shortly before Thanksgiving. Both girls spent a month in rehabilitation to regain physical and emotional strength, staying weeknights with their father or stepmother or both at the Ronald McDonald House in Providence and weekends in Easton.
For months, Wayne and Melissa spent long days and nights at the hospital, ricocheting between the injured girls in Providence and their four other children at home, accepting the help of family, friends, and fellow parishioners at the Edgewood Church of Christ in Mansfield. At one point, Erica, craving normalcy, asked to live with her father in Florida. Wayne and Melissa, who wed in 2000, have yet to return to the Quincy pizza shop they bought less than a month before the shootings. Wayne's father and sister have been operating the business.
But for Danielle's short hospitalization, the girls have been home since the week before a bittersweet Christmas. "It was hard," Amanda says. "I have random moments when I just can't deal with it and I can't stop crying."
The task now is to build a new family life and reclaim life outside the home. Brittany, who acted in musicals in Norton, may have trouble remembering lines, and it will be another year before Danielle can return to basketball or volleyball.
Danielle used to tell her mother everything - "even things she'd get mad at I'd tell her, because I wanted her to trust me" - and now she confides in her father. "I told my dad I don't think it's fair that my mom died and Brittany and I survived," she says. Danielle wears a green rubber bracelet with her mother's name that says "In loving memory," and she hasn't removed her hospital identification bands. She wears her mother's silver bracelet and a string bracelet that Melissa gave her.
"One string is my love, and one is hers," Danielle says. "It's an unbreakable bond of love."
Brittany eschews the distinctions of the blended family, preferring the simple label "brothers and sisters" to half-brothers and stepsister. She calls Melissa "Mommy" now.
"My relationship with her changed 100 million percent," Brittany says.
"We are far from the Cleavers," Wayne says, "but in Brittany's head we're the Cleavers. It makes us look better than we are."
Melissa has filled out forms to adopt the girls. "I've known them for 10 years, which I'm grateful for," she says. "It's not like I'm Dad's new chick."
Both girls have become regular Bible readers since the shootings. Danielle was re-baptized in her father's church last summer, with her mother watching. Brittany was re-baptized there in October. "The other day I read the Bible for 1 1/2 hours," Brittany says. "Every day I'm going to read it because I'm alive and God helped us."
Two items top Wayne and Melissa's to-do list. One is to settle their living arrangements, maybe buy the large, foreclosed-on townhouse down the street. The other is to settle Brittany in Easton Junior High School, in seventh grade, with cognitive rehabilitation and special needs support she didn't require before a bullet pierced her brain, and to determine whether Danielle can catch up to her classmates with home tutoring or whether she will have to wait until September to begin 10th grade.
Wayne and Melissa spend a day clearing the living room. The girls thumb through their mother's sketchbook, through pages with intricate heads in various moods and a tree that Amanda remembers watching her mother draw. Melissa unfolds some scarves the girls' mother knitted and drapes them on the coat rack in the front hall.
The children move to the table while the adults finish preparing meat loaf for dinner. Adam snorts and announces, "I'm the best snorter in the world," which triggers snorts from Curtis and Brittany and a "Guys, could you stop?" from a not-amused Danielle.
"Brittany and I have a different kind of bond now because we went through this together," Danielle says, "but we haven't changed fighting-wise."
Melissa and Wayne take their seats. All are quiet when they join hands for grace, then, one by one, offer prayers.
"Dear God," Danielle says. "Thank you for helping me heal."
"Dear Lord, be with us," Brittany says. "Be with us when I go to a strange school without Mom being there."
Then it's back to squabbles and quips and passing the peas. "Are you brain-dead? Did you have brain surgery?" Brittany jokes. Erica shoots back: "Unlike some people in this house."
Brittany complains that Adam and Curtis took most of the corn, and Danielle says "Yes" when Melissa, serving bowl in hand, asks, "Mashed potatoes, sweetie?"
A few days later, Brittany starts her new school. Among the family photos she brings to attach to her locker with magnets is one of her mother and the dog that was on the funeral program. She is the only girl in first period chorus with short hair, which some girls tell her makes her look like a rock star but which Brittany is growing long.
