Lacy Eye (20 page)

She gave me a long look, and since I knew I was being tested, I made sure to hold my ground, even though I was squirming inside.
But why?
I asked myself.
It's the truth
.

“And I still don't understand why you don't just call me when you want to say something,” I told her, hoping to deflect the intensity of her gaze, “instead of coming in person.”

“I guess I have an inflated sense of my own persuasive powers.” She gave a rueful smile.

“And if it does have to be in person, why here, instead of my house, like last time?”

The smile vanished so fast it made me breathless. “I didn't want to show up when Dawn was around. Mrs. Schutt, we have reason to believe you might be in danger.”

“From Dawn?” I laughed. “That's ridiculous.”

“From Rud Petty.” She slid awkwardly off the examining table and went over to her briefcase. “I can show you the cell phone records, if you want. He's been in touch with one of his cousins, a real lowlife who's already been in and out of jail twice and he's not even twenty.”

“I don't want to see whatever you have there.”

She must have heard how much I meant it, because she put the briefcase down. “We think he might be using the cousin to talk to Dawn.”

“Of course he isn't. Why would he be talking to Dawn?” I could tell that my voice was scaling upward and louder, but didn't seem to be able to rein it in. “Even if
he
wanted to do that, she doesn't want to talk to him. She's finished with all that. She's trying to start over.”

Gail Nazarian gave me a dubious look. “Did you tell her you were planning to testify in the new trial?”

“I mentioned I was trying to remember what happened.” She made a face as if to say,
See?
“Why?”

“Because that would be information we don't want getting back to Petty. Especially before you've actually remembered anything.”

My mouth betrayed me; I could feel it forming words I didn't want or intend to speak.

“What?” she said, noticing. Her voice took on an excited edge. “You
have
remembered?”

I shook my head, in part because it had begun to hurt, as it always did when I felt a conflict brewing inside.

“Then what?” She wasn't going to let it go; it was probably one of the reasons she'd made it so far as a prosecutor.

I hesitated. “You're sure Rud Petty did it, right?”

“Of course we're sure. Why would you ask me that?”

“I just wondered if you really had everything you needed to clear Emmett Furth.”

The bird eyes widened. “You'd better tell me what you're talking about.”

I told her about the memory I'd had in the bedroom, and about seeing Emmett's tattoo when he helped me carry the box in over the weekend.

“You're sure the arm had a tattoo on it? The arm from that night?” she asked, and I said I was, even though I wasn't, because she seemed skeptical of what I was saying. Even though I felt skeptical myself, I didn't like that she doubted me.

“Okay. Well, thanks. That's useful,” she said, not sounding at all as if she meant it.

“Are you going to follow up?”

“Sure. That's my job.” I could tell she was less than thrilled by my report; she'd gotten her hopes up, I'm sure, that I remembered Rud Petty committing the crime.

To change the subject, I asked, “Do you really have a UTI, or are you making it up?”

“It feels better now. Probably just a false alarm.” She put her blazer on slowly, giving me a suspicious look, and said she wanted me to come down to her office sometime soon, preferably later in the week, to discuss my testimony.

Then she added that if I wanted, her office could offer me protection.

“I don't need you to protect me.” I opened the door and had to stop myself from pushing her out. When she was gone I sat down hard, crushing the fake crown. Then I got up and carried the folder she'd given me out to the shredder behind Francine's desk, intending to destroy whatever was in it, but at the last minute I withdrew the papers from the machine and stuck the whole folder into the bottom of my bag.

W
hen I got home expecting to find Dawn in front of the TV, I was surprised to see her standing at the stove, cooking something I couldn't identify. “I'm making Tuna Helper,” she said, with far more pride than should ever be attached to that sentence.

“I thought we were out of tuna.” I leaned over to pet Abby, who always perked up when I walked in the door.

“We are. I'm just making the Helper.” Dawn laughed, and her hyper cheeriness made me feel wary.

I asked, “Have you been in touch with Rud Petty?”

Her too-big smile collapsed. “Why would you ask me a thing like that?”

“You haven't had any contact with him since the trial, right?” I didn't know if she would hear, as I did, that I was begging her to convince me.

Her lips were as pale as her face. “I can't believe you would even ask me that, Mommy.” She put a hand up to her chest as if something hurt her there. “I mean, what are you saying?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again without speaking. I was hesitant to mention what Gail Nazarian had told me about Rud Petty being found with a cell phone, or about her cautionary visit to the clinic that day. “I don't know,” I faltered. “You were just so close—back then.”

“Well, of course we were. I loved him.” Though she stirred the noodles vigorously, I didn't necessarily detect any anger in it. “But how could I possibly be in touch with him? I've been two thousand miles away.” She set the spoon down straight on the counter. If Joe had been there, he would have told her to use a napkin. “Besides that, why would I
want
to?”

“I meant by phone,” I told her, not answering the second part of her question.

“People in jail don't get phones.”

“A pay phone, I mean. Can't they do that?”

“How am I supposed to know what goes on in
jail
?” If her tone had been indignant, I would have been tempted to think she was feeling defensive. Instead, she just sounded puzzled about why I would be asking her these things.

We sat down to the noodly glop, and I pretended to like how it tasted. I took a long sip of water and decided I might as well ask the other question that had been on my mind. “What about Cecilia?”

“What about her?”

I could read in her face the answer to my question. “You called her, didn't you?”

“No.” She leaned back and glanced away from me, and anyone could have seen that she was lying.

“Dawn.”

That was all it took, my murmuring her name, for her to implode the way I'd witnessed so often over the years, the crumpling-up of her reddening face before tears blasted out of her eyes as if they had a volition of their own. She nodded violently, thrusting her hands up to her face. “I'm sorry! But you don't understand. She's changed, Mommy.”

“Just tell me you didn't let her into the house, after I specifically asked you not to.” I kept my voice as steady as possible.

Dawn shook her head with so much vigor her hair whirled around her head. “No. I would never have done that, knowing how you felt. I met her at Caprice. We had scones and lattes. It was nice, like we were friends or something.” The wistfulness in her voice threatened to scrape another layer of hardness from my heart, but I didn't let it.

I set my fork down, hoping to give the impression that I was resting between bites rather than that I found the dinner inedible. “She can't be trusted.”

“God, Mommy. All you ever do is see the worst in people.” Dawn rose abruptly and clattered her plate into the sink. I was so taken aback—it was so unlike the Dawn I had always known for her to say something like that to me, let alone throw down a plate—that I didn't manage to respond before she flounced into the family room, where I heard her flipping through TV channels and playing Angry Birds on her phone in a way that would have driven Joe crazy. I was used to it by now.

When the doorbell rang a few minutes later, I picked up the bag of peanut butter cups I'd bought at the drugstore that morning. I brushed my hair over to hide my face as much as possible (the last thing I wanted was to scare away some little kid) and thought, too late, that I should have bought a pretty mask in case somebody rang the bell seeking candy.

As it turned out, I needn't have worried. Standing there were not any children I didn't recognize, but Iris and Josie, whose sturdy little torso was wrapped in a cube of yellow foam rubber. “Trick or treat,” Iris said, nudging Josie, who turned suddenly shy and concealed herself behind her mother's leg.

“What are you doing here?” Hearing the question land in the air between us, I recognized how ungracious it sounded. But as glad as I was to see them, my heart froze in anticipation of the confrontation that was no doubt about to take place.

“Nice to see you, too, Mom. Josie wanted to show you her costume.”

“Oh. Good! It's a—is she cheese?” My brain seemed to have frozen, too. I had no idea what my granddaughter was supposed to be.

“No. SpongeBob.” Iris carried Josie beyond me into the living room, then set her down and began shrugging off her jacket. When she saw that I looked at her blankly, she added, “SquarePants?”

Now I saw that the block of yellow encasing my granddaughter showed a face of blue googly eyes and a pair of buck teeth hanging down from a grin, and I vaguely remembered watching the cartoon with Josie once when I was babysitting.

“SpongeBob—of course you are!” I picked her up so that she could go through her routine of feeling my face, but she must have sensed the tension in my body as I held her, and for once she didn't lift her hands.

I could tell that Iris was a little angry and a little hurt, on her own behalf and Josie's, at my lukewarm reception. “You could at least pretend to be excited. We drove all this way.” She wore a stained Snoopy sweatshirt over a sloppy pair of jeans. Looking at her, I wondered if she'd gained even more weight in the short time since I'd seen her last.

“I
am
excited. I'm just surprised, that's all.” I set Josie down again and tried desperately to think of a way to prevent my daughters from facing each other. “Do you want to go out trick-or-treating on my street?” I asked, motioning to the door they had just entered and reaching in the closet for my own coat, but it was too late as I heard Dawn coming in from the other room.

Josie had been in the middle of reaching for the bag of candy I'd set down on the table, but she paused abruptly at this new person's arrival on the scene. It almost looked to me as if she noticed a resemblance between her mother and the stranger, though it was rare for anyone to take them for sisters without knowing it was the case.

Before I could offer any words of preparation, Iris said, “You've got to be fucking kidding me. What the fuck is this?” It was a measure of her shock and consternation that she said the word twice in front of Josie.

“I was going to tell you,” I said, feeling myself retreat from the force of her spit-out ire.

“Oh, my God.” Dawn had stopped short when she realized who it was she'd heard me talking to, but now she moved closer to peer at Iris with her eyes slit, as if she didn't trust what she saw before her. “You got
fat
.” Her voice contained a mix of alarm and fascination.

“Shut up.” Iris reached for a peanut butter cup and opened the package with a savage rip. I thought she might just stuff it whole into her mouth, but instead she seemed to catch herself at the last moment, and handed it down to Josie instead.

“Is there any way,” I said weakly to both my daughters, “that this could be not awful?”

“I don't see how,” Iris said. “Considering she”—she hesitated, glancing down at Josie, and tried to rein in her voice—​“c
onsiderin
g she's responsible for Dad's death. And would have been responsible for yours, too, Mom. I don't understand how you can even let her inside this house.”

“I didn't kill anybody,” Dawn said, and I saw her shoulders form the familiar slump she had always worn when around her pretty sister.

“Somebody got killed?” Josie's mouth opened to show half-chewed chocolate.

Iris glared at Dawn. “Never mind,” she told Josie. “We don't listen to her.”

Dawn had knelt to bring herself to eye level with her niece, whom she was seeing for the first time. “You must be Josephine,” she said softly. “I'm your Aunt Dawnie.” Josie's eyes furrowed with suspicion, and it pained me to realize that Iris might never even have told her daughter that she had an aunt. If she had, she would not have used the name Dawnie, which I'd never heard before. “Did your mother ever teach you to play We're the Same Person? Want me to show you how?” She put her hand out toward Josie's, and for a moment it seemed that my granddaughter might reach out, too.

“Hey.” Iris yanked Josie back within her reach. “You”—she pointed at her sister—“stay away from my kid.”

Well
, I thought,
at least this time it's out in the open
. The last time my girls had been in a room together was a year and a half earlier, when I'd had surgery to relieve the pressure on my brain caused by the blunt-force trauma in the attack. Iris left Josie at home with Archie for a weekend while she made the trip to Albany for my operation and to make sure I got settled in at home afterward.

Without telling us beforehand, Dawn flew in from New Mexico just for the day, having booked a return flight for that same night. She hadn't been in touch with either Iris or me, but she said Peter Cifforelli had informed her that I was having the operation, and she wanted to be there. When she appeared in my room at the hospital after the surgery, I thought Iris might walk over and strangle her. Instead she said to her sister, “You have one hell of a nerve,” and left the room. I could tell she wanted to give Dawn a shove on the way out, and stopped herself only because she knew it would upset me.

That day, Dawn struck me as paler than usual, and unhealthy, and I was about to ask her about it when she reached down, grabbed my hand, and held it up to her face. “Iris still thinks I'm guilty, doesn't she?” she murmured.

My chest puckered from the inside, and I tried to tell her it wasn't true. But we both knew I was lying. Dawn gave me a quiet little smile and said, “It's all right. Someday she'll know better.” I tried to apologize for the way Iris had acted, but Dawn just told me to “Ssh, ssh, Mommy,” and she even stroked my forehead, the way I used to do to them when they were children. Then she asked about Abby, and I told her the dog was doing okay. But when I tried to elaborate, she held a hand up to interrupt me. “I can't hear about what's wrong with her,” she said. “It's too painful.” It took me a moment to comprehend what she'd said. Touching the gauze at my temples, I was confused, because a moment earlier I'd felt so hurt on
her
behalf, but now I wanted to say,
More painful than the fact that I'm lying here with this bandage on my head?
The phrase Ding-Dong Dawn sang through my mind, and the words of Dawn's first-grade teacher came back to me in an unwelcome flash:
It just seems like there's something missing
.

She stayed at the hospital for an hour or so, sitting beside me, neither of us talking much, and then she said that for the sake of peace in the family, she thought she should leave. She was scheduled to take a plane back to Santa Fe in a few hours.

“But it's such a short visit,” I said. I was tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep, but I thought I should at least pretend to object.

It was fine, Dawn said—she'd just wanted to make sure I was okay. Of course, I was anything but okay, but I knew what she meant, and I let it go. She left before Iris came back, and nothing was said about the fact that she had been there.

Since I'd wished more than anything, growing up, that I had a sibling—especially a sister—I'd always regretted that my girls stopped being close around the time Dawn's eye problem was diagnosed. Once they both moved out of the house, I thought they might find their old connection again as adults. But Rud Petty had made that impossible.

Standing in the living room now, I hoped that I might still have some authority when it came to the two of them. “Iris, Dawn came home because she's sorry about what happened. And I invited her.” I did my best to sound convincing, but I could see the flare in Iris's nostrils as I spoke, and knew what I'd said hadn't been enough. “She wants to—what do you call it?—make amends.”

Iris snorted. “Amends, right.” She ventured closer to her sister, and I was surprised to see that Dawn managed to hold her ground without flinching. “How do you think you're going to do that?” At the end of her question the words trailed off, and she leaned more closely to study her sister's face. “Your eye's pointing out again,” she said, and though I wanted to believe it was sympathy I heard in her voice, I was afraid it was only the same fascination Dawn had felt in calling Iris fat—with maybe a little triumph thrown in.

I had explicitly avoided asking Dawn about her eye since she'd been home, even though of course I'd noticed the same thing Iris was seeing now. The “lazy” eye, operated on seven years earlier, was reverting to its amblyopic state. I held my breath, wondering how Dawn would answer.

“It is not,” she said, in a tone I tried not to recognize as hatred. “What's wrong with you people? My eye got fixed. Or did you forget that?” She made a dismissive sound between her lips, as if to say she wouldn't have expected anything else of us.

Iris and I looked at each other. I begged her with my expression to let it drop, but when she turned back to Dawn, I knew there would be no such luck. “I don't know what planet you're living on,” she said to her sister, “or what mirror you're looking in, but that eye”—she held a finger up to Dawn's face—“is pointing out again. Not as bad as it used to, but it's on its way.”