Lacy Eye (18 page)

“But it
would
be you. That's the whole point.”

She clucked, waving away what I had intended, too late, as encouragement. The moment when she thought she might achieve her dream had passed, and we both knew it. Even now, thinking about it, I feel shame burning in my chest. I'd done my best to convince myself it was Dawn I was trying to save from repeating the humiliation she had suffered the first time. What I find too much to let in, most days, is the possibility that I was also trying to save myself.

After we returned from Pepito's and I told Dawn she could move into Iris's old room instead of her own, I said good night, because waiting around for her all day, and feeling anxious about it, had made me tired. The baseball bat I'd bought on impulse at the mall had rolled out from under the bed, still in its bag from Sports Authority, and I pushed it back under with my foot, thinking what an irrelevant purchase it had been and still not understanding why I had made it. I lay in bed with my legs bunched up so that Abby could spread out as usual across the bottom of the mattress, but I couldn't relax enough to fall asleep. I wasn't used to having another person in the house, especially at night. In the next room I heard Dawn unpacking. She kept moving around for another few hours, until finally—when my bedside clock read after twelve thirty—the house grew still. “Thank God,” I sighed to Abby, who sighed back in agreement and shifted beneath my feet.

I'd never had trouble falling asleep, and once I did, I seldom woke up before morning. My mother had always told me I slept the sleep of the dead. But tonight, with Dawn on the other side of the wall between us, I lay there letting my fingers fuss with the edges of the quilt my mother had not quite managed to finish before she died. Throughout the night, I kept jerking awake in a sweat, panicking, certain each time—even though I knew I had only dreamed it—that I'd heard footsteps on the stairs.

T
he day after Dawn's return was a Friday. If it had been any other day, I would have stayed home to help her settle in. But Fridays were our busiest time at the walk-in clinic, and on top of that it was flu shot season, so they needed me. Though I didn't say anything to Dawn about it, I hoped she would go out and get some groceries, but when I got home the cupboard was empty and she was lying in front of the TV, asleep. We ate canned soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for supper, then sat together in the family room and watched reruns of
Law and Order
. Abby lay not next to Dawn, as she used to, but at my feet at the end of the sofa.

As glad as I was to have her back home, I found myself feeling anxious as the weekend approached. I'd grown used to those long quiet stretches, with no one but Abby around, and even though it was
too
quiet sometimes, I knew it would take some time for me to adjust to having someone else in the house.

I also had to get used to the sounds of Angry Birds on Dawn's cell phone; she played it almost constantly as she sat in front of the TV, clucking in a level of frustration that puzzled me because, after all, it was only a stupid game. I could tell she was also sending text messages, and when I asked her who they were to, she looked taken aback, as if she hadn't expected me to be savvy enough to understand such a thing. “Nobody. Somebody in New Mexico,” she said, but her tone warned me not to pursue the question further.

On Saturday morning I asked her if she wanted to help me run some errands. “You could be my helper,” I said as a joke, but when she didn't smile, I remembered that it was Iris, not Dawn, who had taken such pride in being my “helper” at the grocery store when the girls were little. She ran around the aisles retrieving cereals and soups, racing back to present the items proudly for my inspection before plopping them into the cart. Dawn sat in the cart's front, facing me, sometimes whispering to herself with a faraway look on her face. When I asked her if she wanted anything in particular—just to get a response out of her—she shook her head, but often, as we wheeled our bags out of the store, she would start wailing because I hadn't bought the mac-and-cheese she liked or the chocolate milk or the chicken tenders that were, depending on her mood, the only thing she would eat.

Now Dawn just said no thanks, she didn't want to go to the supermarket, she was tired.
From doing what?
I felt like asking, but I didn't.

At Price Chopper, I ran into Pam Furth coming the other way down the Baking Needs aisle. By the time I realized, it was too late to turn around and pretend I hadn't seen her. I smiled and tried the fake “Hi, how're you doing?” pass-by greeting I had polished and perfected with people I knew less well over the past three years, but of course she wasn't going to let me get away with that.

Leaning toward me over her cart, she said she couldn't help noticing that Dawn had come back home. I said yes, and that I was glad to have her. I tried to move on then, but Pam had positioned herself at such an angle that I couldn't get by. “It doesn't make you nervous?” she said.

“Nervous? Why would it make me nervous?” I knew why she'd asked, but that didn't mean I had to accommodate her nosiness.

Even Pam Furth didn't have the nerve to name what she had referred to obliquely—the fact that, like so many other people in town, she believed Dawn was somehow guilty in the attack against her own parents. I leaned over my own cart, and I could tell she was almost licking her chops at the idea that I might be about to take her into my confidence. Instead I said, “Listen, Cecilia Baugh mentioned something about Emmett being arrested for breaking and entering. That must be disappointing. I thought he was over that phase?” I used “phase” deliberately, because it was Pam's favorite word when referring to her son, even now that he was twenty-one years old.

It was obvious how shocked Pam was to hear that the daughter of her Bunco friend had betrayed her son's latest trouble to me. “That was a trumped-up charge,” she said, nearly shouting the words, oblivious to the woman behind her who wanted to get at the chocolate chips. “He had permission to go into that house. From their son. The parents just didn't know it.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I know how hard it is when everybody thinks one thing, but you know the truth is something else.” I jiggled my cart to show that I wanted to move on.

She narrowed her eyes as if she understood I was speaking in a code she hadn't cracked yet. Then, when she got what I was saying, she looked at me with a new and different expression, and let me pass. It might have been respect I saw, or sympathy. I couldn't be sure. As I wheeled my bags out of the store a few minutes later, I wondered whether what she'd said
had
been true: that Emmett's arrest was the result of a mistake or miscommunication. He'd stayed out of official trouble the past few years, as far as I knew, but on the other hand, he was still living in his mother's house and didn't appear to be able to hold down any job for very long. His manner and appearance gave the impression that he didn't care about anything except riding his motorcycle. The innocence I remembered from that day in first grade had long disappeared from his face. I understood how Dawn, especially after her history with him, could have believed once that he might be guilty of assaulting Joe and me. And she had an investment in believing it, just as Pam had an investment in believing that her son's arrest had been “trumped up.”

After putting my groceries in the car, I went to the hardware store, bought a humidifier, and headed home. One of the employees had loaded the box into the trunk for me, so I hadn't realized how heavy it was, and in trying to lift it out I almost dropped it. Cursing under my breath and keeping the box pressed between my thighs and the car, I tried to calculate the chances of Dawn hearing me if I called. Figuring that she wouldn't, I thought about shoving the box back into the car, but then I worried about breaking something. I craned my neck to look over at Warren's; why couldn't this be one of the times he noticed me in the driveway and came running? But his car was gone.

“I could help you.” Emmett's voice startled me, and the sound, along with his sudden appearance behind me when I hadn't heard him approaching, made me jump.

“Oh, God. You scared me.”

“Sorry.” He didn't actually seem sorry, but then, how would I know? I hadn't had a conversation with him in a long time. He was taller than I remembered; in the past few years, I'd seen him only from a distance or on his motorcycle. His hair was uncombed, his shirt crooked, and he looked as if he might have just gotten out of bed. “Here, I'll do it,” he said, reaching for the box. I smelled cigarette smoke on him, and maybe pot, but also the unmistakably sweet aroma of Lucky Charms.

I saw no choice other than to step aside, and in fact, I was grateful for his help. But as I watched him hoist the box out of the car, my eyes fell on the back of his right wrist, where
MATT. 7:7
was etched in a black crescent.

I must have gasped, because he looked up surprised and set the box down. “What?”

“Nothing. Just—I didn't know you had a tattoo.”

“Oh, that.” He gave a small, sheepish smile. “That's old. From when I went through a Jesus phase.” He lifted the box again and carried it on his shoulder toward the door. I ran ahead and opened it for him, so he could set the box on the kitchen floor. From the TV room, I heard the sounds of a football game.

“How old?” I asked Emmett.

“Me?” He raised his eyebrows. “Same as her.” He jerked a thumb toward the next room, and I knew his mother must have told him about seeing Dawn in the driveway the night she arrived.

“No, I mean the tattoo.” Though I tried to hide it, I had to lean against the counter because I felt slightly breathless, even though I hadn't been the one to exert myself on the way in.

“Oh. I don't know. Senior year.” Before Dawn went off to college. Before she met Rud Petty. Before someone, who might or might not have had a tattoo, attacked us in our bed.

He shifted from one foot to the other. “I could apologize,” he said, gesturing again in Dawn's direction. His tone was so low I could barely make out the words.

“For what?” My voice cracked.

He shrugged. “You know. For everything.”

Was he really seeking forgiveness for teasing Dawn, for burning down the tree house, for riding his motorcycle too close to Abby and me? Or was it just a way of throwing me off the scent, in case—now that there would be another trial—I had joined with those who believed Rud Petty's conviction had been unjust?

I didn't know how to answer, and I'm not sure I said anything. I expected Dawn to come into the kitchen when she heard me talking to someone, but then I figured she'd seen Emmett through the window and decided to ignore the fact that he had accompanied me in. I thanked him for carrying the box, and he gave me the same two-fingered salute he'd shown me at the mall the night Rud's appeal was announced. This time it reminded me of those old sailor cartoons:
Aye-aye, matey
. More comical than sinister. Still, watching him walk back across the driveway and into his own house, I locked the back door, something I never did during the daytime.

I went into the TV room, where Dawn sat in front of a college football game. She said, “So you let
him
in, but not Cecilia?”

“He was helping me with the humidifier.”

“I could have done that.”

“Well, you weren't there.” I didn't say what I was thinking, which was
You weren't paying attention
. Then I worried that my tone had been too harsh. Nodding at the TV, I said, “I didn't know you were a football fan,” and she shrugged.

“There's a lot of things you don't know.”

“Like what?” I asked. She shrugged again, switching to the home shopping channel.

I left the room, unpacked the box from the hardware store, and set up the humidifier, taking my time because I knew what my next task would be. I'd had a Bible once, but gave it away after my father was arrested and my mother died. Switching on my computer, I searched for “Matthew 7:7” and found “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” I remembered the words from going to church as a child. They were familiar; I had probably found them comforting back then.

It didn't seem to me to be something a murderer would choose as his mantra. But then, what would I expect? A pentagram or 666? Some other sign of the devil?

I tried to divert myself from these new thoughts, because I didn't want to acknowledge what they meant. Before having the vision of a tattoo in the bedroom that day, I'd never considered the possibility that it was anyone other than Rud Petty who came into our house that November night. But now I couldn't prevent the series of questions buzzing through my mind almost faster than I could keep up with them.

Why hadn't there been any blood (or any other evidence of such a vicious assault) in Dawn's car, if Rud had driven it back up to our house that night and cracked our heads open? Had Warren Goldman been mistaken, confused by a dose of Ambien, when he said he'd seen her car in the driveway in the early morning hours? If it had been Emmett who broke in and struck us with the mallet, he could have just gone home afterward, cleaned himself up, and gotten rid of his bloody clothing (and any gloves he might have used), at his leisure. Couldn't he? By the time the police made their perfunctory search of his house, based on his flimsy police record, whole days had passed since the attack.

But if it had been Emmett,
why
would he have done it? It didn't seem that Joe refusing to give him a job reference was reason enough, but how could I know what went on in a murderer's mind? I'd always thought that Emmett and I had an understanding, based on the fact that we both knew I hadn't implicated him, as I could have, in the tree house arson. Of course, I had no way of truly knowing if he was grateful to me. Maybe I read into his attitude what I wanted to see. Maybe whatever had motivated him to burn down the tree house was the same thing that sent him into our bedroom that night. Impulse. Misplaced rage. Hatred of Dawn, for whatever reason; maybe he recognized in her the “offness” that reminded him too much of the offness in himself. And maybe, though we'd ended up privately accusing Rud for it, Emmett had been the one responsible for poisoning the dog, too.

For the rest of Saturday I kept myself busy, doing my best to escape the memory of Emmett's tattoo and what it triggered inside me. With Dawn still ensconced on the couch in front of the TV, I filled a bag with old clothes for Goodwill and asked her if she had anything she wanted to donate, but she said no. Standing in front of the hall closet, seeing the leather jacket she'd given me, I was tempted to put it in the bag, too. But I decided not to, because I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

Passing by Iris's old bedroom, the one Dawn was using now, I hesitated, wanting to look inside. If the door had been pulled shut, I would not have entered. As it was, it stood a few inches ajar, so telling myself that Dawn would not have left it that way if she didn't mind it being opened, I pushed it aside slightly and held in the exclamation I felt rise in my throat, in case she could have heard me from downstairs.

Everything of Iris's was gone. Or, rather, it had been shoved into the closet, which I could see because it contained so much stuff that the closet door wouldn't shut; moving into the room, I saw that all the clothes, jewelry, photographs, and other mementoes Iris had left behind when she went off to college, and still not reclaimed, had been dumped anywhere they would fit (or
not fit, as it turned out)—the closet first, and then under the bed.

The shelf above the window, which had contained Iris's athletic awards, was bare except for the sole trophy Dawn had received in her lifetime: the one for entering a single race on her fifth-grade Field Day.
PROUD PARTICIPANT
, the trophy's plate said, under the gold-colored plastic figure of a runner in midstride. All the kids had received them, which Joe thought was absurd. I told him it was supposed to help with their self-esteem. He said, “Nobody feels good about getting an award they don't deserve.” Dawn's race required her to run seventy-five yards with an egg balanced on a spoon. Of course she dropped it a few feet from the starting line. Cecilia Baugh won all the sprints.