Lacy Eye (26 page)

Dawn's friend seemed only too happy to follow Warren outside. For a moment I entertained the cartoonish vision of them sitting down to dinner together, but Stew got in the shitbox and drove away as Warren crossed the street back to his house, dipping his head in chagrin. I called, “Thanks!” after him, but I could tell he felt he had intruded.

Dawn put the two plates of pizza down and said if she'd known I was going to be there for dinner, she would have gotten pepperoni. It was clear that she planned to pretend our conversation at Dottie Wing's had never happened, and to distract me into doing the same.

But I couldn't let her. “Are you
trying
to get me to kick you out of this house? It almost seems as if that's what you're hoping for.”

She stopped mid-bite. “I don't know what you're talking about, Mommy.”

“Do you understand that I could press charges about that loan signature? It's forgery. It's the same thing Rud did with his father. How could you be so—careless?” I'd been about to say “stupid,” and we both knew it, but I changed my mind at the last minute.

“So are you going to have me arrested?” She looked down at her plate.

“No,” I said, after letting a moment pass without speaking—not because I had to think about the answer, but because I didn't like the idea that she presumed she knew already what I would do.

“It was dumb of me, signing your name,” she said, trying to appear contrite. “That was a mistake.”

I didn't say what we both knew Joe would have said to that:
A mistake is adding up two and two and thinking five is the right answer. What you did was make a bad moral decision.

“I'm sorry, Mommy,” she added. I knew she was counting on her apology to end the conversation, and I let it be. My headache was starting to flare up again, and fighting would only make it worse.

I
told Dawn I wasn't hungry and went straight up to my bedroom, where I popped a couple of aspirin and lay down to wait for my headache to go away. After a while I sat up and from under the pillow next to mine pulled out the folder Gail Nazarian had left with me at the office on Halloween. When I returned home that day I'd taken it out of my bag and left it on my dresser, but then I decided to hide it in case Dawn came into my room for some reason. I knew she wouldn't know what to make of it. Since I hadn't actually looked at the contents yet, I wasn't sure what to make of it myself.

The top page read “Transcript of Interrogation of Dawn Schutt,” and was dated the day after the attack. I was relieved to see that Kenneth Thornburgh hadn't been the main interviewer, because I liked him and didn't want to find a reason to stop feeling that way.

The interrogation had been conducted by another detective, Stephen Peck, whom I remembered from the trial. He was younger than Thornburgh, and he always seemed arrogant to me. He began by asking Dawn a bunch of simple questions—how old she was, where she went to college, how many siblings she had. He asked her if she understood that she was not under arrest—that he was just gathering information—and I imagined Dawn nodding dully, maybe apprehending what he was saying and maybe not.

I expected that the detective would follow up to inquire about the “misunderstanding,” but instead he shifted to another subject entirely. I noticed that he did that throughout—it was probably a technique designed, I thought, to catch people in lies before they could settle into a comfortable groove. He asked Dawn about the layout of our house, then abruptly said, “I imagine this is a shock to you, what happened?”

Wasn't pretty?
I could only think that she'd been in shock during the interview, and had no idea what she was saying. As it had in the newspaper accounts, the word
bludgeoned
made me wince. I tried to will myself to put the transcript aside, but it was no use—I felt compelled to keep reading, even as I recognized that my brain no longer processed the words as having anything to do with me, but had turned them into fiction.

I sat back on the bed, as astounded by this last statement attributed to Dawn as by anything that came before it. Of our daughters, Iris had always been the snarky one—in fact, it was
her
tone I read in this last remark, instead of anything I could imagine in Dawn's voice. Reading on, I saw that Stephen Peck seemed to keep his cool instead of reacting with anger to Dawn's sarcasm.

At this point, the transcript indicated that Dawn had said she'd be happy to keep answering their questions, but she wanted to call her lawyer—“Actually, he's more of a family friend”—first. Not for nothing, I thought, was she addicted to TV shows like
Law and Order
. When Peter Cifforelli showed up, he advised Dawn to stop talking to the police until he could meet with her in private, so there was nothing further for me to read. Not that I
wanted
more. Besides, with all the “inaudible” and “indecipherable” statements, who knew if the transcriptionist had gotten it right?

I wasn't sure what Gail Nazarian's real intention had been, in giving me these pages. Ostensibly, they were supposed to help me remember the attack, but the transcript had the opposite effect—the more I read, the more numb my body and brain became. I stuck the papers back in the folder, laid it on the bed beside me, and fell asleep.

I woke to a shock of electricity and the sensation of being shaken on the shoulder. When I opened my eyes and saw Dawn's face hovering over me, I gasped and threw my hands up, and she stepped back as if I'd struck her.

“Sorry,” I said, sitting up and putting my hands to my temples, which thudded in rhythm to the panicked throb I felt in my gut. “I must have been dreaming,” I told her, though I could not remember any dream.

“What's the matter?” She stepped back from me, asking the question warily from a distance. “Are you remembering something?”

“Nothing. Just give me a minute.” I got up and went into the bathroom, where I covered my face with a warm cloth, hoping to slow down my pulse. When I came back, Dawn was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the transcript I'd forgotten was there.

“What's this?” She shook the folder in front of me as I sat down next to her.

My heart did a flip. “Well, you can see what it is,” I told her, trying to keep my voice even and figure out how I was going to respond to what I knew would come next.

“I mean why do you have it?”

I shrugged, hoping she might take it as some kind of answer.

“How?” she persisted.

“Gail Nazarian.”

“Why?”

I shrugged again. “She thought it would help me remember.”

“Why would an interview with
me
help you remember anything?” Her questions came at me like bullets.

“I don't know, Dawn.” It was the truth.

“Did it work?”

“No. It gave me a headache.”

“Oh.” She closed the folder and put it back beside me. “Well, I'm sorry.” She opened and closed her fists at her sides, but then began peering at something under the bed. “What's that?” She got down on her hands and knees and pulled out the baseball bat. I'd forgotten it was there. “What the hell are you doing with this?”

“I don't know. It made sense when I got it. Sleeping alone—you know. I guess it's just silly.” Her alarm made my head hurt more. “Did you need something?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You came in and woke me up.”

“Oh! Right. I came to tell you I'm leaving.” She leaned the bat carefully against the wall next to my nightstand.

“Leaving? What do you mean?”

“Not
leaving
leaving. But Opal called while you were asleep, and she asked me to come down there. She's in trouble somehow. I think she had a fight with her mother—you know how they are. Anyway, she asked me to come and give her some moral support.”

“But I thought you were the ones who were fighting.”

“We weren't fighting, exactly. More like just not seeing eye to eye.” She blushed, the way she always had at any expression containing the word
eye
. “Anyway, I'm taking off now. She sounded pretty upset. I'll call you tomorrow when I know what's going on.”

“Are you sure you want to be driving all that way in the dark?” Dawn was the one who seemed upset to me, and I didn't like the idea of her making such a trip at night. “Can't you just wait till morning?”

She shook her head. “You know how Opal gets. She's impulsive. She doesn't always take care of herself. I'll be fine—like I said, I'll call you tomorrow.” She leaned forward to kiss me, then seemed to think better of it and pulled me into a long hug. “I love you, Mommy.”

“I love you, too.” The words came automatically. “Be careful, okay?”

She promised and left the room. I heard her collecting things from the bathroom, zipping her suitcase shut, and lugging it downstairs. I waited a few minutes after I heard the Corvette glide down the street before I opened the folder and read the transcript again. My impulse was to call Iris, but I stopped myself, and instead tried Gail Nazarian again. This time I would have liked to speak to her in person, but got her voice mail. “Have you followed up on Emmett Furth yet?” It was difficult to ignore the sound of my own desperation, but I did my best.

When I saw how early it was, not even eight o'clock yet, I threw on a jacket and crossed the street. After ringing Warren's doorbell, I thought for a moment about making a run for it, back to my house, before he could see who was on his stoop.

But even though I might have had the time to do so, I knew that I had left my own house for a reason, and I forced myself to stay put. When Warren opened the door, the pleasure I saw on his face made me know I had done the right thing.

“Hanna,” he said. His voice broke a little saying my name, and I felt a reckless rush of warmth.

“I wanted to say I'm sorry about earlier,” I told him. “I was rude about the cassoulet.”

“Not at all! I shouldn't have just barged in like that.” He ran a hand through his hair, and I wondered if he was worried about how he looked. “I know I must seem like a goof, running around offering people food all the time. But it keeps me out of trouble. By ‘trouble,' I mean lonely. You know?”

“I do.” Many times since Joe died, I had been tempted to take Warren up on one of his offers for us to eat together, instead of heating another meal in the microwave. But I'd always stopped myself before now, afraid of where it might lead. “I'm not really very hungry, but I wondered if you might have some coffee or something? Or tea? Anything. I'm not picky.”

I smiled as if what I'd said had been funny, and felt grateful when he did the same.

He apologized for his manners and said he hadn't been expecting anyone, adding that it was a nice surprise as he put a hand out to usher me inside. When he didn't move to take my coat, I stepped toward the hall closet, and he apologized again, yanking the door open to search for a hanger. Not finding an empty one, he shoved one of his own jackets onto the floor and hung up mine. In the closet's corner I saw a stack of Maxine's old protest signs:
NO MORE COLLATERAL DAMAGE
and
MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
.