Lacy Eye (3 page)

“I didn't have any reason to be there,” I said to Gail.

“You don't care that he got a new trial?”

“Of course I care. It's just that I knew I'd find out sooner or later which way it went. The last thing I wanted was to be in the same room with him again.” I scooped some more food into the dish for Abby and felt happy, as I always did, to see her eat with such appetite. For months after the attack, while I was recuperating in the hospital and she went to a foster home, she ate too little and lost too much weight. Now she was almost her old self again, give or take a few creaks that were part old age, part leftover trauma.

“Well, I came in person,” Gail told me, drawing out her enunciation as if she were speaking to a child, “and on a Friday night, to let you know that I have every intention of putting Rud Petty away again, this time for good.” She would have kept talking, but I held a hand up to interrupt.

“Just a minute. Can you tell me what happened in court?”

She sighed in the weary manner I became used to during the trial.
If you had been there yourself
, the sigh said,
I wouldn't have to explain it to you
. “It was a little complex, in terms of the legalities. But basically, the judge ruled that because of the medical witnesses the defense put up, the nods shouldn't have been let in.”

The Nods. It was a phrase coined by Cecilia Baugh, in that national crime tabloid she freelanced for, to describe in a kind of shorthand what happened when the police found me beaten in my bed that November morning. I had appeared to implicate both Rud Petty and my daughter when Ken Thornburgh questioned me, before the medics sped me away. My testimony about The Nods hadn't been heard by Dawn's grand jury, but the judge at Rud Petty's trial allowed it under the “dying declaration” rule, which basically says that when you think you're about to die, you have no reason to lie about who tried to kill you.

But now the appeals court said The Nods had to be thrown out and the trial started over, apparently because—since by the time the trial started, I couldn't access my memory of that night—Rud's lawyer hadn't been able to question me about them.

My chest knew what the prosecutor was asking of me before she even spoke the question, and the knowledge squeezed my lungs to the point that my next few breaths came out in a pant. For three years, there had been no reason for me to try to remember the attack. Not that I had tried; to be honest, I didn't
want
to remember. Who in her right mind would?

“I still can't testify,” I told Gail. “I don't have anything for you to use.”

She was silent for a moment, and I remembered the way she had, in the courtroom, often allowed herself to pause when she was questioning defense witnesses, not because she needed the extra time, but because it made them nervous; you could see it in their eyes. Even with her own witnesses—including the state police investigator who took the stand to confirm that our alarm system had been disabled by someone who knew the code and then smashed the keypad to make it look like a random break-in—she came off as somewhat hostile. When Warren Goldman testified for the prosecution that he'd gotten out of bed at two o'clock on the morning of the attack and thought he'd seen Dawn's Nova parked in our driveway, he went on to explain that he'd had insomnia since his wife, Maxine, died. But Gail cut him off. “We're only interested in what's relevant,” she said.

In my kitchen she shifted from one foot to the other, and for some reason this simple movement triggered a feeling of dread. “I know you want to protect your daughter, Mrs. Schutt,” she murmured. “I get that. If I were a mother, I'm sure I'd do the same thing.”

“But I'm not ‘doing' anything,” I told her.

She looked at me long and hard. I could tell she didn't believe me. “There's something else you should know.”

There it was, that chill to my neck again. I filed this in my mind as another thing to mention to the neurologist, although I guessed it wasn't actually a physical symptom.

“They found a cell phone on Rud Petty,” she said. “He hadn't made any calls yet, so they couldn't track any numbers. But—well, like I said. I thought you should know.”

She wasn't telling me this because she thought I cared what Rud Petty did with his time at the correctional facility in the northern part of the state. She wanted me to think that it was possible it had been Dawn he was trying to contact. “How did he get a phone?” I asked, to distract myself from the panic I felt gathering in my belly and threatening to break out. “I thought that wasn't allowed.”

“It isn't. But lots of things happen in jail that aren't supposed to.”

“Well. It's a good thing they found the phone, then.”

She sighed again, this time so quietly I assumed she hadn't meant for me to hear it. Then I watched her decide to take the plunge and come right out with what she was thinking. “You aren't worried he might try to get in touch with your daughter?”

“He won't,” I said, loud enough that I hoped I might persuade both of us. “She doesn't want to hear from him. Anyway, even if he tried to, what difference would it make? He's in jail.”

“You're a fool if you think he can't get you from there.”

I swallowed the urge to ask what she meant by “get” me. I didn't say anything as I watched her face and tried to figure out how much she was thinking about her own reasons for wanting another conviction, and how much she was thinking about me and my safety. She asked, “Where is she, anyway?”

“I'm not sure.” This was true only in the sense that at that very moment, my daughter might have been inside her apartment in Santa Fe or out of it. But I didn't have to tell Gail Nazarian that.

“If I find out you're holding something back, I won't be happy,” she said, this time making a point of pushing Abby's snout away. “Look, I don't
actually need you to tell me where she is. My staff can find her. My staff could find the tooth fairy if they wanted to. But it would be better for everyone if you cooperated with us.”

“I am cooperating.” My hope was that if I spoke as calmly as possible, it would infuriate her into leaving. But no such luck.

“We need one of you on that stand,” she said. Then, after a dramatic pause for effect, she added, “Just keep in mind that we always have the option of trying again to indict Dawn.” She took a step back to watch my reaction.

I tried not to let out the gasp I felt. “You can't do that.”

“Of course I can. It's not a question of double jeopardy—she never stood trial.”

“So,” I said, wondering even as I spoke whether I should continue, “you're threatening me?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn't call it that. Just passing on information. Letting you know what our options are.”

When I didn't say anything further because my brain had gone on the blink, she thanked me in a tone that said the opposite of what her words did, and told me to call her, please, if something changed—if I remembered anything,
anything
, that might be of use. “The case might depend on it,” she said. Pointedly, she propped her business card against the salt shaker on the table. I had a half dozen identical cards scattered in my junk drawer.

I told myself she was exaggerating. I didn't doubt for a minute that Rud Petty would be found guilty again, purely on the evidence that had been presented the first time around. He'd had a motive, he'd had access to the alarm code, his prints were on the weapon. They had a nearly perfect match from a shoe print in our bedroom to a shoe they found in his closet when they arrested him. I reminded myself that the prosecution didn't need me, even if I
could
testify.

Gail Nazarian seemed to intuit what I was thinking, and she wasted no time in attempting to set me straight. “It's all circumstantial,” she said. “They can explain everything away. You know that.” Her tone implied that she was sick of repeating herself. “The fact that he knew about the code and the key only means Dawn told him about them at some point—it doesn't necessarily have to do with that night. His prints on the mallet could have been left over from the wedding. Even the shoe print isn't a hundred
percent
—you saw how hard his lawyer worked to prove it could have come from a different pair.

“I watched the jurors when Thornburgh gave his testimony about you identifying Rud,” she went on. “I'm telling you, that's what swung them. Without that—and we
don't
have that now—I can't make any promises.” She paused again to allow the weight of her words to sink in.

Since I didn't have an answer for this, I said instead, “What makes you think I'd work as a witness, anyway? You know his lawyer will get experts to say my memory can't be trusted.”

“Well, we'll get experts who say it can.” She said it with enough confidence that I was tempted to believe her.

I asked when the retrial was likely to be, and she said she wasn't sure. She'd need time to prepare the case, but Rud's attorneys would push to have it start as soon as possible—late winter or early spring.

“But it's over,” I said, recognizing how weak it sounded, my effort to convince myself.

“No,” she told me. “It isn't.”

Then she was gone, still clutching her briefcase, which she'd never loosened her grip on during the whole time we spoke. I watched her get into her Volkswagen, and before turning the key she sagged in her seat, leaning back against the headrest. But she allowed herself only a moment's break before sitting up and starting the car with a ferocious gun to the gas, as if there were something under the pedal she wanted to destroy.

S
ensing my distress after the district attorney's visit, Abby pointed her nose in the air to ask if she could help. Rubbing between her ears, I glanced at the clock and saw that it wasn't even seven yet. I could already tell that the anxiety triggered by the news of Rud Petty's appeal, and the appearance by Gail Nazarian, might overwhelm me. The only solution, I knew, was to get out of the house. Promising Abby I wouldn't be long, I drove to the mall.

I had to do this sometimes, make myself go out in the world, because otherwise it would have been too easy to just sit inside, behind the curtains, and hide. The mall had become my default destination because it held good memories for me—browsing with my daughters for back-to-school clothes, shopping with Joe for the girls' birthday and Christmas presents, strolling through the garden exhibit sponsored by the Horticultural Society every spring.

For the first few months after I returned home from rehab, I found myself at the mall almost every day. I could sit concealed on one of the couches behind a grove of fake trees in the atrium, observing without being observed. The bustle of people going about their lives reminded me of when I had been one of them, and it gave me hope that I might become a normal person again. (If the members of my trauma rehab group had heard me think this way—about not feeling “normal”—they'd have snapped my head off.
You are normal, Hanna
, they'd say, and I'd tell them
I know
, because that's what they'd want to hear. But I didn't really believe it. Inside, I was still waiting to feel normal again. Not like some person who'd gotten her head smashed in with a croquet mallet by her daughter's boyfriend. How normal would that make
you
feel?)

My first stop, as usual, was Lickety Split. As I stood in line, the tired-looking mother in front of me looked down at her daughter, who appeared to be about four, and said, “Sophie, stop arguing with me.” Without missing a beat, the child replied, “I'm not arguing with
you
, Mommy. You're arguing with
me
,” and her mother, realizing that I had overheard this exchange, smiled as she caught my eye. She did a fairly good job of not reacting when she registered my twisted features. I smiled back at her, but by then she'd bent down with a sudden and intense interest in finding out what flavor her daughter wanted. I tried hard not to understand that she was doing her best to distract the child from also noticing my lopsided face.

My breath snagged on the sharp but familiar pain of feeling shunned as I took my peppermint cone back out to the atrium and ate it as I walked. Ever since the attack, ice cream had given me a headache—brain freeze, I knew it was called—but when I came to the mall I always ordered something at Lickety Split anyway, because it allowed me to feel nostalgic for all the times I'd taken Dawn there as a reward after her appointments with the vision therapist in Schenectady.

All through elementary school, she had held out one hope—that when she turned twelve, we would allow her to get surgery on her lazy eye. The doctor had told us that twelve was pretty much the cutoff for surgery to do any good, and I knew that over the years, she'd held that birthday in mind as a kind of deadline, after which she would either finally have a shot at being normal or be consigned to the nickname of Fish Face forever.

But Joe was against Dawn having the operation. When she was first diagnosed he did a lot of research, and he said that since her amblyopia (he always insisted on calling it by its clinical name, because he said there was nothing
lazy
about it) was in fact a problem of the brain rather than the eye muscle, it was wiser to go the route of occlusion and vision therapy. Occlusion meant putting a patch over the good eye, so the weak one would have to work harder and, if the process succeeded, develop improved sight. Vision therapy involved exercises to strengthen the way the two eyes worked together, with the aim of helping them converge.

Surgery has only a cosmetic value, Joe explained to Dawn and me, as she approached her twelfth birthday and made her last bid for him to approve the operation. It doesn't actually help the vision, he said. An operation might fix the eye temporarily, but the odds are in favor of it reverting to its amblyopic state, maybe even worse than before.

At the time, Joe didn't want to make a big deal out of his primary objection, which was that according to what he'd learned, it was possible for someone who'd had the surgery to go blind eventually. He told me he couldn't stand the idea of her not being able to see. I thought we should tell Dawn, so she'd understand we weren't denying her what she wanted without having a good reason. But he worried it would upset her too much.

So we just told her we thought it wasn't a good idea. The only benefit is in appearance, Joe repeated to her, as if using different words this time would somehow make it less hard for her to hear. Dawn didn't point out what I knew she and I were both thinking, which was that when you are a twelve-year-old girl, appearance is all that matters.

When we sat her down in the summer before sixth grade to give her our verdict, she looked at me with a plea to persuade Joe otherwise, but (it pains me to remember) I looked away. When she finally got the message that she wasn't going to convince us, she mumbled, “Thanks anyway” and went up to her room.

It was the “Thanks anyway” that killed us. Joe and I sat for a few minutes in silence before he said, “It isn't supposed to be this hard.” I realized then that he was doing what he did for a living—thinking like an accountant, calculating what the return on our investment, as parents, should be.

Hoping he could make it up to her somehow, he went upstairs and told Dawn, through her closed bedroom door, that for her birthday the following weekend, she could bring twelve of her friends out to dinner—one for every year of her life—to celebrate the occasion. When no response came from Dawn's room, Joe added, “We can go to the Schuyler House,” making the fiasco complete.

As soon as I heard him say it, I groaned to myself. Dawn didn't have twelve friends, or even half that many. How could he be so oblivious as to not know that? Had he completely forgotten what had happened only the year before, when the popular kids invited Dawn to a party they fabricated solely to humiliate her? It was a rare failure of judgment on his part.

I knew Dawn had to be shocked by his extravagant offer—twelve dinner guests, and at the Schuyler House, no less. I waited for her to choke out another “Thanks anyway,” but instead I heard her draw in a deep breath before she opened the door and told him, “Daddy, that's so nice of you. Are you sure? That would be great.” I realized then that she couldn't bear for her father to understand that she was a loser (or, to use Iris's word for it, a freak).

I don't believe I'd ever seen Joe more shaken than when I told him what a mistake he'd made. He went back up to her room and tried to undo it—“I've been thinking about it, and maybe it would be more fun to have a smaller group? Or even just invite one person, like Monica, to make it really special?”—but by then, I knew, she had committed herself to the charade. Up until the night the party was scheduled, she allowed us to hold a reservation for sixteen people at the Schuyler House, even though Iris informed Joe and me that we were, as she put it, cracked. “There aren't even twelve kids who know her
name
,” she told us. “This whole thing is pathetic.” Shortly before we were due to leave the house for the restaurant, Dawn told us that it was a bummer but she'd just had a bunch of phone calls and it seemed that everybody besides Monica, her donkey-voiced best friend since nursery school, had come down with something. They wouldn't be meeting us at the Schuyler House after all.

“You've got to be kidding,” Iris said, laughing outright at the blatancy of her sister's lie. “The phone hasn't rung once.”

“Stop it, Iris,” Joe said sharply, and looking chagrined, Iris cut off her smile. Dawn said she wanted to go to Pepito's instead, and I knew she'd chosen our favorite Tex-Mex place in the strip mall to reduce the expense for Joe and because she felt unworthy of a place as nice as the Schuyler House. The five of us sat at the round table in the corner, where we all pored intently over the menu far longer than necessary, because nobody seemed to have anything to say that was of interest to anyone else. Iris told a series of jokes about beans and what they did to you, until Joe made her stop. At the end of the meal Monica eagerly thrust Dawn's present at her, a set of
Enchanted Forest
books. I could tell it made Iris want to roll her eyes, but she refrained. Then she held out a wrapped package herself, which Dawn seemed apprehensive to open, and it made me sad to realize she could believe her own sister might try to mock her by way of a gift.

Inside was a cosmetic bag containing tubes of concealer, eyeliner, lip gloss, and blush. “Oh,” Dawn said, literally backing away from the collection of items I'm sure she thought could have nothing to do with her. “Thanks, Iris, but I don't think so.”

“Why not? I'll teach you. It's easy.” Iris waved at her own face to illustrate. Then as now, she wore hardly any makeup because she didn't have to, but when you looked closely you could see that her eyes were dramatized by liner and shadow, her cheekbones heightened with a ruddy powder glow, and her lips drawn into a magenta heart.

“You're both too young for that,” Joe said, but all we women ignored him, as he must have known we would. Dawn thanked her sister and set the present aside. I suspect she felt ashamed, thinking that Iris had given her the cosmetics because she wanted a prettier sister, and I didn't blame her, because of the way Iris taunted her sometimes. But I could tell this was a benevolent gesture on my older daughter's part. I don't know whether she ever gave Dawn the lesson she planned to, but I never saw Dawn wear any makeup until she left for college and met Rud Petty.

After the gift-opening, the restaurant's host, Kwan—who had been given the heads-up by Joe when we came in—brought out a flan with a candle in it for dessert, leading everyone in the restaurant in a round of “Happy Birthday.” Iris hid her face, Dawn blushed, and Monica broke out in her familiar, unaware bray. I think we were all relieved when we could step outside, into the cool September air, and call the party over.

Later that night someone left a package wrapped in festive paper on our stoop, addressed to Dawn. I found it when I went to get the newspaper in the morning. I was about to bring it upstairs to her when something told me that I should check it out first. Sure enough, the shoebox inside the wrapping contained pellets of dried dog poop. I flushed them down the toilet, threw away the box, and went out to run my errands.

I remember thinking, when I opened the “present,”
What did she ever do to them?
At the time, I told myself,
Nothing
. I told myself that it was no different from when I was in school, except that back then, there seemed to be a more laissez-faire approach to ostracizing the kids Iris referred to as “fringies”; you were only ignored, not included in invitations, passed by in the hallways as if you were invisible. Nobody delivered poop to your front door in the guise of a birthday gift. I told myself that this generation had just upped the ante.

Yet even as I tried to believe this, I understood that it went deeper than mere scorn. Whoever had done it—and there was probably more than one of them—was afraid of Dawn. Why? Afraid of what? But I couldn't allow myself to wonder, because I couldn't allow myself to understand that I was afraid of the same thing.

Of course I didn't tell Dawn about the delivery to our doorstep, and I never mentioned it to Joe. Though I am ashamed to say so now, I just wanted that unpleasantness to go away.

Once we nixed the idea of surgery, I expected Dawn to rebel against the vision therapy Joe wanted her to do instead. But she was too good a girl; if we told her to do something, she did it. Sometimes I wished she
would
put up a fight, the same way when she was a child I wished she would rip off the patch and refuse to wear it, because it would have been easier to feel angry than sorry for her.

So once a week I took her to Dr. Diamond's office in Schenectady, where she repeated the exercises designed to help her eyes align. Her eyes hurt at the end of every session, so early on, I decided to take her for a treat after each visit. I thought she deserved a reward for working so hard, and I felt guilty. I knew I should have realized something was wrong even before the amblyopia got diagnosed in a test her teacher recommended because she noticed Dawn squinting all the time. Even though I was a nurse, I hadn't seen a problem in my own daughter. Well, I didn't want to.

If Iris had been the one to develop a lazy eye in grade school, she would still have been as popular as she always was—I have no doubt of that. Either she would have found some way to laugh at herself, or her classmates would have felt sympathy for her. Knowing Iris, I'm sure she would have turned a lazy eye into something cool.

But even without the eye problem, Dawn would not have been a pretty girl like her sister. It hurt me to acknowledge this because I knew she was all too aware of it, and because she looked like me: we both had mouths that were too small, noses that were too flat, and hair too thin for us to be called anything but “nice-looking” at our best. Though I knew like any other parent that I wasn't supposed to have favorites, and that if I
were
going to have a favorite it would make sense for it to be the attractive, more promising child (as it clearly was Joe's, even though he tried not to show it), Dawn had my heart because as a kid I had also been nervous, not cute, and insecure.

When she began wearing the eye patch in second grade and kids called her Squint and Fish Face, her normal expression became one of defensiveness, almost a scowl. She walked around looking as if she expected to be made fun of, as if she hated people already because she knew they were laughing at her.