Lacy Eye (10 page)

Dawn and Rud didn't arrive until late that Friday afternoon, only a half hour or so before we were scheduled to leave for the rehearsal dinner with members of the wedding party, the Darlings, and Claire and Hugh. I remember being surprised that Rud sat in the passenger seat while Dawn was behind the wheel, but I thought that maybe they'd split the driving duty. (As it turned out, Rud said he had an injury that made driving painful. The next day, when Joe asked him for some help adjusting the lattice bower we'd rented for the ceremony, Rud told us he wished he could, but he'd hurt his back earlier in the week lifting a Saint Bernard onto the operating table. Later I'd learn that this was a characteristic common to people like him: they'll do anything to get other people to make life easier for them.)

Joe and Iris and I went out to greet them in the driveway. When Rud emerged from the car, he didn't step out of it so much as unfold himself. Though Dawn had told us he was tall, neither Joe nor I was prepared for him to be quite
so
tall; Joe, who stood about five feet ten, had to tilt his neck up slightly to say hello as Rud shook his hand. (At the trial, I would learn that he was just shy of six and a half feet; this came out during the forensic discussion of blood spatter and the investigator's estimate of our assailant's height.)

In addition to being tall, he was slender, so his body type was the exact opposite of Joe's. And his curly, full hair was dark, whereas Joe's was thinning and sand-colored-collapsing-into-gray. Rud did not wear glasses, as Joe did, and his skin appeared blemish-free. Joe had recently suffered a flare-up of his rosacea, and still showed a peppering of red spots on his face.

If you'd ever seen my husband on the street, you'd have said he was as average as it was possible for a man to be—on the short side, glasses, gaining a little bit around the middle with each year that went by, despite the regular racquetball games he played with Hugh Danzig. When we met, he was twenty-four years old and his hair had already begun to thin. He'd had asthma since he was a child, so his breath often sounded loud and labored, even when he used the inhaler he always carried with him. The condition tended to act up especially when he felt stress, which also manifested itself on his skin in the form of adult acne and sometimes even hives; because of his sensitivity, he kept himself out of the sun, so if he wasn't speckled with red bumps and blotches, he appeared washed out and pale.

Another man might have felt threatened by the superior physical specimen that was Rud Petty, but Joe had always had a quiet confidence in himself, which was one of the first things I noticed and admired. I remember him telling me he thought it was a waste of time to compare himself to other people. “What good would that do me?” he asked, though I knew he didn't expect me to have an answer. It was another example of the way he tended to view things in terms of their cost-effectiveness.

In fact, he took what other people might have perceived as shortcomings, and mined them for their humor. In bed, whispering, he used to call me Cara Mia, which was what the character of Gomez called his wife Morticia on the old
Addams Family
TV show. Growing up, I'd had a crush on Gomez, the actor John Astin, because of his smoldering good looks: his mustache, his dark eyes flashing with passion for Morticia, that goofy-eyed smile that still managed, on him, to be debonair.

Debonair
was not the word that came to mind when you looked at Joe. But he knew this better than anyone. So when he took my arm and began kissing it up and down the way Gomez romanced Morticia, and I giggled, we both knew it was not because it tickled, but because he was making fun of himself. I loved him for not trying to be anything other than what he was.

Joe never told me exactly what his first feeling was upon being introduced to Rud Petty by our younger daughter, who offered her boyfriend up to us with a flourish of her hand, almost as if she were unveiling a piece of art she wasn't sure we would have the sense to appreciate. “This is him,” she said, simply, implying that his name didn't matter as much as the fact that she had a
him
.

Rud shook my hand first, giving me a deferential nod and the smile that, although it appears in my nightmares to this day, made me understand in an instant why Dawn was so smitten. It was a wide and ready smile, accompanied by a gaze so direct that I had to break it, and look away, after a few seconds.

Then he turned to Joe. “Mr. Schutt, it's an honor,” Rud said, and even in those few words it was possible to detect the southern accent that seemed a partner to the smile—conscious of its allure, but careful not to overdo the charm.

When he looked beyond us at our house, I saw a question in his face I didn't identify until that night, as I went over the events of the hours before. The house was not what he'd expected. He'd thought it would be bigger, grander, more ornate. More
impressive
—like the house my father had moved us into on Manning Boulevard before he got arrested for stealing money from people who thought he was their friend. I saw Dawn notice Rud's hesitation, too, and she leaned in to murmur something to him. At the time, I thought I hadn't quite caught what it was. But that night in bed, as if the words had just been waiting for a quiet time to make themselves known, I heard them again:
They don't like to show off.

It was only a fleeting display of doubt on Rud's part; he shook it off almost before I noticed, and I put the moment out of my mind. When Rud was introduced to Iris, he picked up her hand and kissed it, and though I knew she had been prepared to criticize their being so late and arriving on top of the rehearsal dinner, her demeanor shifted gears swiftly upon receiving the kiss, and the look she shot at her sister—surprised, humbled—must have been priceless to Dawn.

The only one who didn't seem intimidated by Rud, or even slightly awed, was Abby. When Dawn's car had appeared in the driveway she trotted out with us to greet Dawn as she always did, but Rud got out first, and Abby gave a couple of quick barks—the signal she used for strangers—before Dawn came around and bent to embrace the dog's head. “What's the matter, girl?” Above her, Rud smiled and tried to explain away the dog's reaction.

“She must smell death on me. I had to help put a dog down this morning—same breed, in fact.” Only later, after everything happened, would I remember him saying this, and realize how odd it was, because Abby was a mongrel and not any singular breed. It was an awkward moment, with Abby growling low in her throat at my side, and Rud failed to save it when he laughed a bit too loudly and promised he'd take an extra-long shower before dressing for dinner.

Since he and Dawn still had to get ready, we told them to meet us at the Schuyler House, while we went on ahead. I could tell by the way Iris looked at Rud that she didn't like or trust him. It would never have occurred to her, I knew, that her mousy, lazy-eyed little sister could show up with a date who was better looking than her own husband-to-be. Though I would have liked to think that both my daughters were more mature than that, I knew that Rud's appearance, the kind of impression he made, upset the status quo between them. The disruption was something I'm sure Dawn celebrated; she'd probably been fantasizing about it for a long time, without actually daring to believe that the fantasy could come true.

When Dawn and Rud did arrive to join us at the table, after appetizers but before the main course and toasts, I noticed the expressions that passed among our guests—the bridesmaids in particular, who began to chat him up before he had even taken his seat next to Dawn. My friend Claire made an elaborate show of catching my eye, though I chose not to try to figure out what she was trying to communicate. I could tell that instead of minding or resenting the attention Rud received, Dawn seemed to enjoy and encourage it. A few times, looking across to where she sat talking so animatedly to some of the people who wouldn't have given her the time of day in high school, I didn't recognize her; that is, I knew it was Dawn who occupied that seat, but the girl I saw chatting away without reservation, laughing and touching Rud's arm in a gesture reminding everyone
He's mine
, was a Dawn I'd never seen before.

When she'd gone off to college, Joe and I tried to suggest that Lawlor could be a fresh start for her, but she seemed afraid to expect too much. In that first week after we dropped her off at the dorm room she had been assigned to share with Opal, she called every night, and I steeled myself each time I answered the phone, thinking she would say she wanted to come back home.

But she didn't. After that week, the phone calls subsided. She and Opal adopted a kitten, and at first I was naïve enough to think that having a pet was what had eased her homesickness—when, really, it was Rud Petty. She met him when she took Bella in to get spayed. Later she told me how lucky she felt, because Opal had been planning to take the cat to the vet, but on the day of the appointment it was one of those mornings she couldn't get out of bed. So Dawn skipped her first class of the day and set off for the animal clinic, smuggling Bella out of the dorm in her sweater.

When I imagine what happened during that first meeting, I see her blushing and stammering as the handsome vet's assistant examines Bella and assures Dawn that the kitten will be just fine when she comes back to pick her up later in the day. How will she be paying for it? he asks, and Dawn tells him she has the use of her parents' credit card. Joe
had
given her an extra card on our account, though he made sure she understood that it was strictly for necessities and emergencies. I'm sure Dawn told herself that Bella's spaying was a necessity.

And that's where it started, I'm sure. When she came to collect Bella, and paid the fee with the card, Rud asked if she might want to go to dinner sometime. I'm at a loss to imagine quite how, during those next few dates, Dawn allowed him to believe the things she apparently did—primarily, that she had a trust fund and that her family held a large estate that would all be hers someday. Or half hers, if you considered that she'd have to split it with her sister. I wouldn't have believed any of this if it hadn't come out in court through the testimony of other students at her school, who had heard Dawn say similar things—that Joe flew a private jet, that my father had been a millionaire, that we owned a villa in Turks and Caicos. (The day I heard that, I had to look up Turks and Caicos on a map.) I'm sure she wanted desperately to be liked, and didn't think enough of herself to believe this would happen if she didn't embellish who she was.

When she was in the fifth and sixth grades, Dawn had kept a diary in one of those old-fashioned black-and-white-speckled notebooks, and one day I went looking for it in the dresser drawer I knew she kept it in. I justified this by telling myself that it was parents' prerogative to check up on their children to make sure they were okay.

I anticipated finding a litany of misery—details of the mocking that Dawn had suffered on any given day, along with notations of how it made her feel. Instead, flipping the book open to a middle page, I came across a list of girls' names that sounded as if they came straight out of a soap opera—Cecilia Devereaux (if I had not fully realized, before, how much Dawn idolized Cecilia Baugh, I understood it then), Blair Cartwright, Gisele Forbes—each one practiced multiple times as signatures, in the most elegant handwriting Dawn's mediocre cursive skills could manage.

A few pages later I saw another list, under the heading “Things to Come True by 25 y.o. Or Else!”

1. Gorgeus—on 2 mag. covers at least (5 better)
   
2. Famous—movies OR write books about vampire trapped inside body of wheelchair girl.
   
3. Tall guy with good hair to marry—looks good in sunglasses.
   

I never did see Rud Petty in sunglasses. But I am sure he looks good in them.

I didn't tell Joe about the notebook when I found it. Instead I reminded myself that it was normal for a teenage girl to daydream, which is how I thought of it even though my skin had prickled when I heard a psychologist on a talk show describe children who took on “fantasy personas.”

While it could happen to adults as well, the psychologist said, teenagers were more likely than anyone else to suffer from this “syndrome.” “They think they're not going to make it through life the way they are naturally, so they have to invent the person they'd like to be.” The psychologist was a woman my age, and I tried not to look at the TV screen as she spoke—I think I was cooking at the time, so that I could pretend I had the program on only as a background to the real task at hand. Still, I remember turning the sound up with the remote. “It's a matter of survival for these kids—or at least, they think it is. If this happens to your child, you want to pay attention. It can be a sign that he or she is losing touch with reality.”

When I heard this, I remembered a day from the year Dawn was in kindergarten. I picked her up and strapped her into the booster seat in the back of my car, wondering what it was that made her even more quiet than usual. When I stopped at a light, she mumbled something I didn't hear, and I asked her to repeat it.

“I said, I don't belong to this family,” she said, looking out the window.

“You mean you feel like you don't belong
in
this family?” I thought maybe she'd started to notice that Iris, who'd always been so attentive as a big sister, was starting to pull away from Dawn as she met more kids her own age. Or was she picking up on the differences between herself and her sister in appearance, sociability, intelligence, and just about every other thing that (perhaps she was beginning to understand) mattered?

We were still halted at the red light. Dawn turned from looking out the window and met my eyes in the rearview mirror. Though it would be another year before she was diagnosed with her amblyopia, I should have noticed something funny about her left eye, but I did not.