Lacy Eye (19 page)

On top of the anxiety I felt in the wake of seeing Emmett's tattoo, the memory of that egg-and-spoon race distressed me as much if not more than the fact that Dawn had dismantled her sister's once-sacred space with such apparent indifference, such disregard.

I went back downstairs and waited until a commercial came on, then said carefully, “You didn't need to throw Iris's things all over the room like that.”

“They're not all over the room.” She said it as if she'd known she'd have to correct me on this and had practiced her answer. “Besides, anything that's still here, she doesn't want. Right?”

Of course this wasn't necessarily true, but I didn't see how it would do any good for me to say so. I held my tongue and asked if she wanted to take a walk with Abby and me. Dawn said it was too cold outside, and reminded me that she was used to the heat of the desert. I found myself on the verge of apologizing for the weather, until I realized how ridiculous that was.

She didn't leave the house the entire weekend, and complained about the shocks we both still kept getting: “That humidifier isn't doing a goddamn thing.” She didn't bring up the graffiti on her car, either, or what she was going to do about it. I averted my eyes from the word
killer
every time I took Abby out.

She slept late her first few days home, but on Monday morning she came down as I was eating my cereal and sat across from me at the table. I told her to pour herself a bowl, but she said she wasn't hungry. When I finished and got up, she said she'd changed her mind, and I realized she wanted me to serve her. Joe would have told her to get her own breakfast, but I figured it was no big deal to throw some milk and cereal in a bowl. Still, it would have been nice to receive a thank-you.

I looked out to the driveway and the defaced car. “That paint isn't going to come off by itself, you know,” I said. I had meant to conceal my annoyance, but it came out in my voice.

“I know.” Dawn got up from the table, leaving her empty bowl at her place, and shambled back upstairs.

Exasperated, I went out and began wiping at the spray-painted word with an old towel dipped in nail polish remover. I was making some headway, but not much, when I heard Warren Goldman's door open, and he crossed the street carrying a stained rag and a container labeled
RUBBING COMPOUND
in Magic Marker. He wore flannel pajama bottoms and a parka, and his hair hadn't been combed. “I've been waiting for somebody to do something with this,” he said, pushing his glasses up straighter on his face. “I didn't want to impose myself. But this stuff should do the trick.” Stepping back, I watched as he ran his rag in a circular motion, pressing hard into the car. The blue paint began to come off, and I heard myself saying “Thank God” under my breath.

“Wait!” The back door slammed, and Dawn bolted out of the house with uncharacteristic speed. She hadn't bothered to put anything on over her nightclothes, a pair of sweatpants and a tee-shirt that said
I'M WITH MUGGLE
, left over from her infatuation with the Harry Potter series; besides
Twilight
, they were the only books I ever saw her read that hadn't been assigned by a teacher. “Stop! What are you doing?”

Warren halted in his rubbing motion and took the rag away. He'd managed to erase the first three letters, so that
LER
!
was all that remained. “Just thought I might be able to help,” he said, stepping away from the car and giving her a smile that made me remember how he had always gone out of his way to be nice to Dawn, ever since he and his family moved into the neighborhood when she was two. It might have been because Warren and Maxine's son, Sam, had been born with only three fingers on his left hand, which caused him to be mocked and ostracized by kids like Emmett Furth. I think Dawn's lazy eye always made Warren feel sympathy toward her.

In fact, when she was about nine or ten, Dawn developed a downright crush on Warren. She told us as much one Saturday morning, looking out the window as he washed his car. “I like his curly hair,” she told us, looking pointedly at Joe, whose own hair—what he had left of it—was straight and wispy. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that his style was pure comb-over.

“Isn't Sam the one you're supposed to have a crush on?” I said.

“Sam's weird,” she said, dismissing him with a wave of her cereal spoon. Joe and I looked at each other, and I knew what we were both thinking, though of course we would not say it:
But Dawn,
you're
weird, too
.

Whatever positive feelings Dawn had once held for Warren were not in evidence now. Probably, I thought, it was because Warren had testified at Rud's trial about seeing Dawn's Nova parked in our driveway the night of the attack. “I don't need your help,” she said to him with a bitter tone in her voice, “and be careful with my car. It's a Corvette, you know.”

I was glad to see that though Warren wanted to smile, he held it back. “Yes, I know,” he said, making sure to survey the car with an appreciative eye. “It's a beaut.” After a moment during which none of us spoke, he said, “That's why I thought it would look better if we cleaned it up. You think?” After another moment, Dawn nodded, then turned to head into the house.

“Say thank you,” I called after her, as I'd done when she was a toddler. And as she'd done back then, she said the words half sincerely, without looking at the person they were directed to.

Warren set back to his task, and I told him I was sorry.

“No need to apologize, Hanna.” He rubbed a few more minutes, his breath coming out in white ribbons of exertion. “You didn't mention Dawn was coming home,” he said then, and I remembered our conversation the day the reporters had come to get my reaction to Rud Petty's appeal.

“I didn't know. It was kind of sudden.”

“Ah. Well, that explains it.” He was almost finished. I could see only the faintest trace of the original blue now, and nothing of the ugly word that had been sprayed across the door. He was sweating; drops slid down the sides of his face. “We should give it a wax at some point, but that should do it,” he said, and impulsively, gratefully, I reached up to hug him and kissed one of his damp cheeks. He looked surprised, but then broke into a grin I hadn't remembered seeing since before Maxine died. “I should have offered my services sooner,” he said, and we both blushed.

“I can't tell you how much I appreciate this. How much
we
do—both Dawn and me.” I blushed some more, thinking I'd made a fool out of myself with that last part, considering the way Dawn had acted toward him. But if Warren was thinking the same thing, he didn't show it.

“Well, I've had some experience. When Maxine went to her protests, she sometimes came back to find her car had been—​d
ecorated
.” He smiled, perhaps remembering some particular message his wife had driven home from some rally. As long as I'd known her as a neighbor, Maxine had been an activist. I had a sudden vision of her setting off for one of her demonstrations against the invasion in Iraq: a slightly squat, round woman with her silver curls tucked under a red beret, waiting on the porch to get picked up by fellow sympathizers and driven off to Syracuse or New Paltz or Plattsburgh, where they would lock arms at busy intersections and chant “U.S. Out Now!” She always brought a tambourine to bang for good measure.

I told Warren I wanted to invite him in for coffee but that I had to get to work. He said of course, he'd take a rain check, and we both turned away. But then I heard him turn back and add, as if it were an afterthought, “So what are you going to be?”

Even now, it's hard for me to describe my reaction to this. Of course I heard the words, but I didn't understand them for another few seconds. I felt to the center of my being that he had asked me a profound question I should be able to answer. But I had no idea how.

“I'm sorry—what?” I said, my lips fumbling even those few syllables.

He seemed to recognize the anxiety his question had provoked, and he raised a hand to indicate that he hadn't intended to touch a nerve. “Halloween,” he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the Furths' front stoop, where Emmett had hung a mannequin by a noose. The figure wore a white shirt covered in fake blood and a Hannibal Lecter mask. The first time I'd walked to the driveway and seen it out of the corner of my eye, I cried out and stepped back before realizing the person was a fake. “I was just asking what you were going to be for Halloween,” Warren elaborated, when I didn't show any hint that I grasped what he was saying. “It's a stupid question at our age, I know. I was just trying to be cute.” He smiled and blushed again.

“Oh. That's today? I didn't even realize.” It was true; since Dawn's arrival, I'd lost track of the dates. Warren had made it almost back to his porch when I called, “Thanks!” after him, and he raised his hand again in a wave without turning around to look at me. I'd made a fool of myself again.

I was unprepared. At the clinic, I was the one who'd originally suggested that everyone in the office wear some form of costume on Halloween, even the doctors. I remember the year Bob Toussaint came in dressed as a pirate and made the mistake of using his fake hook to lift a stethoscope to a three-year-old girl's chest. It took me fifteen minutes to calm her down, but even after Bob took the hook off, she wouldn't let him near her—we had to call in one of the female interns, who was dressed as Snow White, instead.

I stopped at the drugstore to see what they had left in the way of costumes. It was slim pickings, but I managed to find a cheap-looking tiara and a blond wig, and when I got to the office I fashioned a wand out of tongue depressors taped together with aluminum foil. All morning I went around saying to people, “Your wish is my command.”

“It's good to see you back in the spirit, Hanna,” Francine said. She had to keep reaching up to adjust the moose ears over her head. “Hey, how's that plant doing?” When I looked at her blankly, she said, “The one you were so sure was worth saving?” I realized she was referring to the ficus I'd picked up from the trash the day Ken Thornburgh came to tell me that Rud Petty had won a new trial.

Once I'd brought the plant in that day and set it down in the dining room, which was hardly ever used, I forgot about it completely. “Mommy, this plant has had it,” Dawn said the day after she moved in. She picked it up and laughed a little to show me how bad it looked. “Could it
be
any deader?”

“Just throw it away, would you?” I said, and she carried it out to the trash barrel in the garage. I didn't want to look at it, remembering how I'd told Francine I would bring it back to life. That used to be my specialty, when I had my garden—my friend Claire always said that if my thumb were any greener, I'd be a Martian.

I didn't feel up to telling Francine the truth. “Still working on it,” I said.

Just before lunch, I did a double take when I saw who was waiting for me in the clinic's examining room: Gail Nazarian. “What, are you stalking me now?” I said, hoping she'd take it as the joke I halfway intended.

To my relief, she smiled—only slightly, but it was more than I'd ever seen her smile before. “That's a good look for you,” she said, gesturing at the tiara on my head. “‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,'” she added, and I couldn't tell if she was showing off or trying to say something to me. When I responded by pulling off the tiara and throwing it on a chair, she sighed and said, “I do have a medical reason to be here. But yes, I'm trying to kill two birds.”

I looked at her closely, without wanting to let on that I was doing so. Her face appeared as unreadable as ever; I saw no signs of illness or distress. “What can we do for you?” I asked.

“It's a urinary tract infection. I get them sometimes. I just need a script.”

“You couldn't call your own doctor?”

She shrugged. “Like I said, I had another reason to come.”

“Okay,” I said, pretending to make a note so I wouldn't have to look at her. “Shoot.”

“First, I wanted to say how happy I was to hear you're going to testify,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you knew that. And we want to help you, if we can.” I guessed that by
we
she meant the people in her office—who, I remembered, could find the tooth fairy if they wanted to.

“How?” I asked. From her briefcase, she pulled a folder and held it out. I didn't want to take it, but I also felt as if I had no choice. “What's this?”

“It's a copy of the interview police did with Dawn when they brought her in the morning after the attack. After they took her to the hospital, once they knew you'd survived the surgery.” She hesitated. “It's not easy reading. But I thought it might nudge your memory.”

“I don't see why it would.” Without looking down at it, I set the folder on the counter behind me.

“Now the second thing: I don't understand why you didn't tell me your daughter was home.” Those bird eyes bored into me; I felt them even when I looked away, realizing how similar this conversation was to the one I'd had with Cecilia on our doorstep the night of Dawn's return. I also understood suddenly that Cecilia, trying to create the best news story possible, must have been the one to contact Gail to tell her that Dawn was back. “You know I want to talk to her.”

“Why? She doesn't have any more information than she did before.” For a moment, because I missed it so badly, I was tempted to feel the kind of intimacy I used to share with Claire when we went for our Saturday morning walks with the dogs and talked about the things we told only each other and no one else. But then I remembered that Gail was a prosecutor, not my friend, and where I had been leaning toward her, I drew myself back.