Lacy Eye (13 page)

The last time she and I had been in public together was outside the courthouse the day she left town, directly following Rud Petty's verdict. He had not blinked an eye when the jury pronounced him guilty. As the guards led him away, he looked not at Dawn, but at me. Letting that seductive smile of his rise to his lips, he pointed at my daughter, then at me—drawing a sinister line between us—and raised his eyebrows. At the gesture, I felt a chill down my back, and it didn't go away until, that night, I piled my bed high with every blanket in the house.

“Never mind—we can just call for some pizza,” I said to Dawn, now, but she shook her head bravely and told me Pepito's would be fine.

“I have to get it over with sooner or later, don't I?” she added, as we got into my car and I began the familiar drive toward the center of town. I wondered if Everton looked any different to her now that she'd been away. But for some reason, I felt shy about asking her even a question as simple as that.

Pepito's was tucked away in a corner of the shopping plaza where, when the girls were little, we always went to Woolworth's to buy their school supplies. The owners were a Korean couple named Kwan and Sook Dhong, who originally opened a Korean restaurant but switched to Mexican when the citizens of Everton proved slow to welcome Asian cuisine. The Dhongs' timing was off, though, because the year after they reopened as Pepito's, three Asian places—two serving Japanese, and one a Cambodian menu—took root in town and became popular dining spots, because by then people had come to sense that the more foreign the food, the more fashionable.

Nobody seemed to mind that there wasn't an actual Pepito in the place. Sook, the wife, turned out to be as good a cook of Mexican food as she was of Korean, and that kept people coming in. Kwan worked as the host and waited on tables. Probably because Kwan always showed such an interest in us, as he did in everyone who came to the restaurant—he was known for remembering things people told him, from visit to visit—I had not been able to bring myself back there since the attack.

So, after we parked and began walking across the lot toward the restaurant, I braced myself for—what? Someone to shout at us? That wasn't typical behavior for Everton, but given some of the experiences I'd had since the trial (once, standing in the checkout line at the Target in Shelby Falls, two towns over, a woman recognized me and started shouting that I needed to ask God's forgiveness for raising a monster for a child), I knew I should be prepared for anything.

I was relieved when we made it safely to the restaurant's front door and stepped into the foyer under the same four dusty piñatas that had been hanging from the ceiling for years. Dawn used to be afraid of them—the papier-mâché rooster, donkey, crocodile, and macaw—long past the age I would have expected this of her. Iris used to laugh at the way her little sister would cling to me and whimper when she saw the fake beasts hovering overhead. “Baby,” she'd say, gesturing at Dawn. “You're chicken of everything.”

But tonight Dawn didn't even look up as we stepped inside. Instinctively I pulled my hair across my face and shrugged my jacket collar up, hoping Kwan somehow wouldn't notice how different I looked from the last time he saw me. For a moment it seemed as if it worked: when he peered out from behind the host's station and saw that it was us, he gave a startled exclamation with a smile, and I allowed myself to hope that perhaps Dawn's return to town might not be as difficult as I'd expected.

My relief didn't last. When I came closer, Kwan tried to hide a wince when he got a better look at me, then asked why we hadn't come in for so long. To Dawn he added, “Dad outside parking?”—to which, in order to save her, I murmured some vague reply—and I realized that by some fluke, Kwan had missed learning what had happened to us. Maybe he didn't watch the news, or maybe he didn't listen to gossip in English. In any event, he appeared oblivious to the reason my daughter and I might be wary of being seen together by people who had known us before the crime. After he said how glad he was to see us—“Better late than never”—and showed us to a booth, I saw, over Dawn's shoulder, Sook taking her husband aside and speaking urgently in his ear, gesturing without subtlety in our direction. I tried to concentrate on Dawn instead, because I didn't want her to know what was going on. But when Kwan came back to take our orders, it was obvious that something had changed. His face had collapsed; he didn't meet our eyes as we chose our entrees, and didn't give his customary smile as he jotted the order down on his pad.

“I guess Sook must have given him the heads-up back there,” Dawn said, without looking toward the kitchen. “Do you want a glass of wine? I'm going to have one.”

I shook my head, surprised she would ask me this because she had never known me to take a drink. We gave Kwan our orders of Chablis and seltzer and spent the next few minutes crunching on tortilla chips, neither of us seeming to know what to say. I thought Dawn might ask about her sister, but she didn't. I wanted to bring up the subject of Iris because it was so painful to me that my daughters didn't speak to each other, but I had no idea how Dawn might react.

Into the silence she started to speak, then stopped herself. We both laughed a little, trying to ignore our mutual discomfort. Finally Dawn ventured, “So, how's work?”

“It's fine,” I said, grabbing at the life raft she'd thrown out, and I told her the story of what had happened in the clinic a few days earlier, during our urgent care hours, when an eighty-seven-year-old man brought in his eighty-five-year-old wife because, as he told the intake nurse, “her heart doesn't sound right.” When the nurse tried to determine exactly what he meant—did the man have a stethoscope, and know how to use it?—she finally figured out that he was talking about something more intuitive than that; he and his wife had lived together for more than sixty years, and in that time he had come to believe that he was attuned not only to the rhythm of her respiration when it was healthy, but also to the vibrations sent out by the pulsing of her heart.

The woman presented no symptoms, and seemed a little embarrassed by the fuss her husband was making. Bob Toussaint, the doctor on call, was dubious; I could tell from the way he shook his head when the nurse handed him the intake sheet and explained it to him.

And yet within five minutes of his entering the examining room where the woman and her husband were waiting, Bob called for an ambulance to rush her to the medical center. “We've got a rupture!” he shouted, ignoring our usual rule about letting people in the waiting room know anything about what was going on behind closed doors.

As it turned out, the woman had suffered an aortic aneurysm, but there were no external signs of it until the aorta ruptured, just as Bob was about to send her home with her husband, whom he assumed was either suffering from dementia or just seeking attention by inventing an emergency.

They managed to get the woman to the hospital in time to save her, and there was no doubt she would have died if the husband hadn't brought her in to us when he did. Bob Toussaint was so shaken by how wrong his assumptions turned out to be that he got someone to cover the rest of his shift. “I'm still amazed when I see something like that happen,” I told Dawn, “even though you'd think I'd be used to it by now.”

“Used to what?” She had picked up a crayon from the container at the side of the table and, bending over the connect-the-dot puzzle on her paper placemat with unsettling intensity, begun drawing lines between the numbers. When it came out to show a picture of a cheetah, she sat back and looked down at it in satisfaction, and I tried not to think
What's the matter with you?
because of course the puzzle was for children.

“I don't know what you'd call it,” I answered, feeling a little annoyed that she needed to ask. Hadn't she been paying attention? “A sixth sense or something that people have, when they love each other.”

She was quiet for a moment, then set the crayon back in its slot. “It makes me sad.”

“Why? It had a happy ending.”

“I mean about you and Daddy.” She rubbed her arms as if to warm them, and I realized I should have offered her a sweater to wear over her skimpy tee-shirt. “It makes me sad that you'll never get to grow old together, like those two.”

“Oh. Well.” I took a big sip of my water and coughed on it when it went down the wrong way. I hadn't expected that the subject of Joe, and what had happened to him—to us—would come up so soon. And I thought I'd be the one who would have to broach it. “Well, we might not have, anyway. Anything could have happened. A car accident, cancer. And with Daddy's asthma, who knows?” I shrugged and tried to form my face into an expression that said
It doesn't matter now anyway
, but I could tell neither of us believed it.

Beside the table, Kwan appeared with our dinners. Dawn turned her face up to offer a warm smile, which Kwan failed to acknowledge or return. His hands were shaking so much that I had to reach up to take my plate from him.

Dawn made a delicate stab in her quesadilla. “I know I fucked up, Mom,” she said. It was so quiet I almost missed it, and the curse word sounded completely alien coming out of her mouth. She used to turn red if someone said “chicken breast” in front of her. I could only assume the swearing was Rud Petty's influence, like the clothes she was wearing; both were habits she'd held onto from the time she spent with him.

I started to tell her she was wrong, but she wouldn't let me. She took a hard swallow of her wine. “That's what this is partly all about, moving back in. If you start to remember what happened, and you have a hard time, I can be there for you. I can at least start to make up for—everything.” Another swallow as she looked away from me, her eyes sweeping the room.

“You don't have anything to make up for, honey.” What I really meant was that of course what happened
couldn't
be “made up,” by anyone, but saying this wouldn't have done either of us any good.

Barbara, my rehab counselor, sometimes urged those of us in Tough Birds to focus on our sensory images when we wanted to redirect our attention, so I forced myself to find the scent of Dawn's shampoo in the air between us, remembering with a quick glide of joy how good it had always felt to have her so near, how familiar. And how I'd always loved the fact that I didn't have to try to be anything other than what I was, with my younger daughter. Was there a better definition of love than that?

“Well,” Dawn said, “you're nice to say so. But I know Daddy died, and you got, you know”—she gestured at my disfigured face—“because of me. Because I brought Rud into our lives.” Her voice faltered a little on the name Rud.

Not an hour since she'd arrived home, and here it was—the subject of her old boyfriend having won his appeal. And the fact that, depending on the outcome of the new trial, he could walk out of prison a free man.

I wasn't prepared to tell her about the vision I'd had in the
bedroom
—the raised arm with a tattoo—and the small doubt it had planted in my mind about Rud's guilt. It still seemed more likely that I was mistaken than that the police and the jury had gotten it wrong, so until I could put more of the picture together, I wasn't telling anyone.

“But you always said he was innocent,” I reminded her, looking down at my plate.

“I know. But I knew the truth all along, I think. I just wanted to believe something else, so I did.” She drained her wineglass. “Hasn't that ever happened to you?”

I set aside her question because I was still trying to catch up with the first thing she'd said. I hadn't expected such a confession, and I wasn't sure how to respond. For the past three years I'd tried but failed to convince myself that, from the perspective of time and distance, Dawn must have come to see the truth of the situation—that as a vulnerable college freshman away from home for the first time, she'd fallen victim to a sociopath who managed to convince an unconfident and homesick young woman (who he believed, because she led him to believe it, stood to inherit a fortune) that he was in love with her.

I sat back in the booth, waiting for the relief her words should have given me. Instead I felt something so sharp inside that I wondered if a tortilla chip had gone down the wrong way.

“But you can't testify to that, right?” I thought of Gail Nazarian and how much she wanted Dawn's help in the new trial.

“No.” She started to scowl—I could see it forming—but then she seemed to realize that a different expression was called for, and rearranged her features to show regret. “I don't know anything more than what I told you already, Mommy. He dropped me off at the apartment after we left that day, after you and Daddy accused him, and I spent the night at home with Opal. I don't have anything they can use.”

I felt a spark in my gut at her mention of the burglary that had occurred at our house the day of the attack. Was it possible she really still believed that someone other than her boyfriend had committed
that
crime? I almost put the question to her, but at the last minute I remembered my resolution to keep things neutral, at least on her first night back. Trying to sound casual, as if I were just following the flow of the conversation, I asked, “Do you think you'll be going down to see Opal anytime soon?”

Her face darkened further, though again I wasn't sure she intended for me to see it. “We're not in touch with each other,” she said, and it appeared to me that she chose her words carefully. “We had kind of a falling-out after the trial.”

“You mean you haven't talked to her since then?” I felt shocked, because the two of them had been so close as roommates, and it would not have been an overstatement to say that if Dawn herself had been brought to trial, her future could have depended on Opal Bremer. Opal told Peter Cifforelli she was prepared to testify that she and Dawn had stayed up until two o'clock on that Saturday morning three years earlier, watching a Hitchcock marathon on TV. She would have provided an alibi to mitigate the prosecution's circumstantial case against Dawn, which consisted primarily of the burglary earlier in the day, the disabled security alarm, and the fact that our hidden spare key had been used to enter the house that night. There was Warren Goldman's testimony about seeing Dawn's car in the driveway in the early hours of the morning, but when he'd also had to admit on the stand that he took sleeping pills sometimes and might have done so that night, the defense called in experts to say his cognition could have been impaired.