Lacy Eye (32 page)

She murmured something I didn't quite catch, and against my better judgment, I asked her to repeat it.

“I said, you can believe whatever you want about Rud. I know the truth. And I'm the only one who does.” I understood then that she was too far away for me to reach. “He'll be totally psyched when he finds out I got him a Corvette.”

Lacy eye
, I heard Joe saying in my head as I used my last strength to push back from the table and stand up. I made my way to the door, feeling Dawn watch my every move. Halfway across the room, I paused, stilled in my steps by what I thought I heard in a low voice behind me. The words Dawn knew made me cry—and the same ones I'd witnessed by accident years ago, so briefly, in her unexpectedly stunning voice. Was it possible that in these circumstances she could really be singing “Wish me luck, the same to you?”

But when I turned to see if it was a private message, calling me back, I realized I must have hallucinated the music. She was looking beyond, not at me. I knocked, and the detective opened the door from the other side. Without taking a last look back at my daughter, I told him I was finished and walked out of the room.

A
ll this happened more than a year ago, though it seems much more distant in time, maybe because it's so far away in place. I'm in California now, in a cozy carriage house only a few yards away from where Iris, Archie, and Josie live with the new baby, Max. There's room enough for a small garden, where I like to sit with Josie in the afternoons after I pick her up from school. We watch the birds that come to the feeder we made together, and although sometimes I feel a jolt of nostalgia for when Dawn and I did the same thing when she was Josie's age, my granddaughter's presence always soothes me. She keeps away the wim-wams. And on the best days, there is a measure of joy I thought would be impossible for me to feel again.

I planted a bed of irises as a memorial to my mother. After everything that happened with Dawn, I found my thoughts returning often to the night the agents came to arrest my father. I remembered the way he said, “Hanna, I will explain things,” and the impulse I'd recognized in my mother not to answer the doorbell when it rang. It had never occurred to me to wonder, before, why he wouldn't have needed to explain things to her, too. I thought she really believed what she'd always told me, up until the day she died: that the police had made a mistake.

Joe asked me only once if I thought my mother knew anything about what my father had been up to, all those years before he got caught. It was later the same day we'd taken Dawn to the doctor so he could tell her she had a lazy eye. “Of course not,” I said to Joe. “Why are you asking?” He gave me a look that told me my response was just what he'd expected, but he loved me anyway. He never brought it up again, and I forgot he had ever asked.

Having learned it in the most painful way possible, I know better now. The irises are a reminder that as much as I loved my mother, I can't afford to be like her anymore.

Holding my grandson for the first time, a few months back, made me think about the day Dawn was born. I'd had Iris at Albany Medical Center, and we planned to go there for the second baby, too. When I started having contractions at four in the morning, we called Claire to come over and babysit for Iris, and she said she'd be right there. She arrived within fifteen minutes, but it wasn't soon enough. For some reason even my obstetrician couldn't explain afterward, my labor slipped into high gear—went from zero to eighty, she said, trying to hide her nervousness about how things might have gone—in only ten minutes, and by the time Joe said, “Forget it. We're taking her with us,” and went in to wake up Iris, the baby had begun to push herself out. With Iris I'd had a lot of pain and an epidural, but Dawn's birth was fast and simple, with only a slight pressure below my abdomen. For a few moments, I was worried that she wasn't getting the oxygen she needed, but then Joe slid her out. It was so easy I thought she might have been stillborn, but then I heard her noises and began to cry. I think Joe thought the tears came from happiness, and of course some of them did, but mainly it was relief I felt; I'd expected the same excruciating experience I'd had three years earlier, and then, almost before I realized it, it was over and I had nothing more to dread.

When Claire arrived she called Bob Toussaint, and after cutting the umbilical cord, she took Dawn into the bathroom to sponge her off. When Bob came to examine the baby and me, saying I should take things slowly but we should both be fine, I asked him how it was possible that I hadn't felt any pain. He shrugged and smiled. “It happens,” he told me. “Not often, but it happens. Maybe she felt like doing you a favor. You owe her one.”

“And you're sure she's okay? I thought she might not have gotten enough air.”

He assured me that she seemed fine and smiled down at Dawn, who lay next to me asleep. I looked out the window and saw what a perfect morning it was—the sun was just arcing over the garden, making the scarlet-orange blooms on my Oriental poppies brighter and more vivid than I could remember ever seeing before. I wanted to cry again. I knew it was only a surplus of hormones, but I felt as if I couldn't bear how beautiful the flowers were—it was that sharp, that piercing. Though Joe and Claire kept urging me to go back to bed, I asked them to set me up outside, and I spent the day lying with a light blanket over my legs, holding my new baby and listening to the sounds of my family and best friend moving happily around me. Joe set up a plastic pool for Iris, and she entertained herself by splashing around and singing. Claire went out to buy food and came home with cold cuts from the deli, sweets I saw Joe wanted to scold her for but didn't, and a stuffed animal for Iris. Halfway between sun and shade, I drowsed in and out of consciousness, waking every time to the delicious surprise of not being pregnant anymore, and profound relief that my baby was in the world.

Since we hadn't wanted to know the gender, we'd chosen names for both. For another girl we'd settled on Matilda, in memory of Joe's mother. But even though I'd been the one to pick Iris's name after my own mother, I pressed Joe to reconsider, once I had our second daughter in my arms. “She's Dawn,” I told Joe, because the first thing I'd seen when I turned my head to the window, after she emerged, was the sun coming up. It wasn't like Joe to be spontaneous, or to give up something we'd already planned together, but to my surprise he agreed quickly, bending to kiss both the baby and me.

For years, that moment was one of the happiest of my life. But I hardly ever let myself think about that day now. What would be the point?

I spend my weekday mornings at a mammography center in the next town. The women who come in for their tests are more or less my own age, and I enjoy trying to make the experience as comfortable as possible for them.

One of the patients who came into the office this morning told me she'd considered not keeping her appointment. “I was sitting there with my coffee and I thought,
What if there
is
something in there, that
does
want to kill me?
” she said, gesturing at her right breast as I lifted it onto the Plexiglas paddle, then compressed it in the optimum position for the film. She was nervous, and had been babbling a bit since I handed her the gown, and I had to ask her to stop breathing, and talking, while I stepped into the next room to activate the machine.

“I thought,
Am I ready to hear something like that?
” she went on, when I returned to switch to the other breast.

I knew she had reason to be concerned—they'd seen a shadow on the first film, which was why she was sent to us for a second look. But I like to remain as neutral as I can with patients, and there was no way I was about to engage in any worst-case talk with her, especially when we didn't have any results yet.

“Do you know what I mean?” she persisted, reaching to stop my hand on its way up. I could tell she needed an answer before she would let me put her other breast in that vise grip and tell her not to move. “I know it probably sounds irresponsible. Crazy, even. But can you see why I thought about canceling this morning? If there's something in there, it would give me more time to not know.”

She wasn't looking at my face as she asked her questions. I don't know whether it's because she was ashamed of them, or whether it had more to do with the fact that despite all the corrective surgeries I've had, it's still not easy to look at my face.

I knew I should have just given a supportive murmur—it probably would have been enough. But I made a point of moving my head to where her glance fell, so she couldn't avoid my eyes. I wanted her to see that I meant it when I said, “That makes sense to me.”

In the last year, a lot's happened aside from our move west and Max's birth. For one thing, Gail Nazarian got the promotion I knew she wanted.
CROQUET KILLER VERDICT PUTS D.A. ON FAST TRACK
, the headline in the newspaper said. When I'd called that day after returning from the police station, to tell her I remembered what had happened the night of the attack and that—as she already knew—it had nothing to do with Emmett Furth, she asked if I could testify in Rud Petty's retrial, and I told her yes. I heard her hesitate on the phone, and then she asked if there was any chance I'd testify against Dawn as well. I think she was shocked when I agreed to this, too; I believe I heard her gasp on the other end of the line, though I'm sure she wouldn't have wanted me to hear it.

She was more sympathetic with me on the stand than I'd seen her be with anyone in the first trial against Rud. The public defenders working for Rud and Dawn tried to shake my story, but they had to be careful, because I was the victim, after all. Rud was convicted of murder and attempted murder, and also of conspiracy to commit murder, in arranging for Dawn to let his cousin into my house to lie in wait for me. The second trial was much shorter than the first, and didn't come close to living up to the theatrics Cecilia Baugh tried to create on
The Bloody Glove
. The jury deliberated less than a full day before returning its verdict of guilty.

The jury in Dawn's trial had no trouble convicting her, in light of my testimony, the communications they found in Dawn's cell phone records between her and Stew Jerome, and Cecilia's interview. Dawn's court-appointed lawyer did try to get the interview thrown out as hearsay, but the court allowed it because she had made admissions against her own interest, which is an exception to the hearsay rule.

I can't pretend, as I might have once, not to understand why Dawn did what seemed on the face of it so stupid—giving that interview, then trying to disavow it to me as fiction. Why she believed that Cecilia would honor the request to withhold the information until after the trial; why she believed that she could say all those things with immunity, collect the money they paid her, and go off to spend the rest of her life in happiness with Rud Petty. It dismays me to say that I
do
understand it, and all too well: she believed those things because they were more appealing than the truth. She believed them because she wanted to. How can I, of all people, fault her for that?

The whole time I sat in that same witness box—in both trials—I didn't look at my daughter. I didn't look at her when the forewoman announced she was guilty, or six weeks later, when she was sentenced to life in prison. Our last conversation was the one in which she admitted she helped someone attack me two separate times.

Shortly after Iris and Archie brought Max home, I was still staying with them before the carriage house was ready to be moved into. I woke up in the middle of the night and found Iris sitting in the dark in the living room, nursing her son. Without switching on the light, I sat down beside them on the couch, and something about how quiet it was—and how moved I was by the nearness of my grandson's newborn head—made me whisper, without realizing I was going to, “You don't think badness runs in families, do you?” I couldn't bring myself to say the word
evil—
the word Iris had used about my father all those years ago.

“‘Badness.'” She laughed softly. “Okay, Mom, if that's what you want to call it. No, of course not. You don't inherit that.” I could barely hear her, but it was obvious how much vehemence was behind her words, and I realized it was a subject she had given a lot of thought. “If people inherited a gene for moral behavior, then you could never blame anybody or praise them for what they do. Right?” I was a little slow catching up to what she'd said, but when I did, I nodded. “And I want at least some of the credit for who I am.”

“You sound like your father,” I said, because she did, and it made us both smile.

Then she added, “She didn't get that way from anything you or Dad did, either. From your not letting her have the surgery or anything else.” She adjusted the baby against her breast. “And she certainly didn't get that way from being dropped on her head.”

I sucked in my breath, and Max turned his eyes toward me. “He
told
you that?” Warren had never mentioned he'd been in touch with Iris, and neither had she. I felt angry for a moment, and then ashamed, but Iris reached over to touch my shoulder, and I lowered my face to hide the fact that I wanted to cry. “He was worried about you, when you went to see Dawn at the police station that day. I was, too. Thank God you saw through her and did the right thing.” She cupped Max's socked feet with her hand, and I cupped the top of his head with mine.

“I just don't understand how I didn't see it sooner,” I murmured. I was thinking of the notebook I'd found when Dawn was in sixth grade, containing her fantasies about the life she wanted to have someday; about how I hadn't pushed further to find out how she was supporting herself all that time after the trial; about the fact that she'd been trading messages with someone the whole time she'd been home, and I had just let it drop. Though the knowledge about the tree house had always been there—that it was Dawn, not Emmett, who started that fire—I hadn't allowed it to come to the fore. There were so many other clues along the way. If I had intervened in just one of these circumstances, couldn't I have kept things from turning out the way they had?

“I know.” Iris lifted the baby over her shoulder for a burp. “Just because something looks a certain way doesn't mean it
is
.”

When I heard her say these words an image occurred to me that seemed to come out of nowhere, and hit me with such force that I had to sit back. In a video display at the state museum about 9/11, one of the surviving FDNY firefighters talked about what he encountered when he managed to escape one of the towers. He turned a corner and saw dozens of cows piled on top of each other. Later he realized that of course they weren't cows—they were human bodies. “My counselor says that my mind is being helpful by not letting me recognize what it actually was,” he told the camera. At this point, the firefighter started crying, and I'd had to turn away from the video because I couldn't see it through my own tears.