Lacy Eye (33 page)

“Sometimes I worry I'm not a whole person,” I whispered to Iris, half-hoping she might miss what I said.

“What does
that
mean?” For a moment I thought she was putting her hand over Max's ear so he couldn't hear our conversation, until I saw she was just caressing him.

“I mean, I'm not sure who I am, really. I'm not sure I have a core. You know? The thing that makes people who they are.” I'd never articulated it to anyone before, but it was something I'd felt as long as I could remember. By the time I was old enough to wonder about such a thing, I was the girl whose father had gone to jail. Then I'd been Joe's wife and the girls' mother—a “meek mother,” to use Joe's term from our first date, although I never saw it until now. After that, I was the victim of a savage attack. Now that I've moved to a new place where no one knows me, I feel safe enough to understand that I don't want to die, whenever it happens, without finding out more.

I want my obituary to include more than the fact that I make a good oatmeal crinkle. And I don't want to keep to myself any longer. The Swedish way is going out the window, at least for me.

“Of course you have a core, Mom. How can you not know that?” With the hand not touching the baby, Iris reached out to cover mine.

“Remember when Dawn used to wear a patch?” I gestured at my own left eye. “Remember how they called it ‘occlusion'? You cover up the strong side of something so the weak one will have to work harder.” I'd never realized that all these years, I'd been carrying around the weight of this analogy. “I feel like I've only had a weak side. It's been working; it's been trying. But it'll never be as strong as the part that's covered up.”

Iris nodded. “I can understand how you would feel that way.”

“You can?”

“Of course. With Dad around. He was strong enough for two people, but sometimes it was too much.” As shocked as I was to hear her say this because she and Joe were always such a tight pair, her next words surprised me even more. “I know you never knew how much I loved you. You never got that you were, like, home free.” Hearing her say this, I felt that sharp pull in my chest I remembered only from the time my mother died. “I was always jealous of Dawn because she was your favorite.”

“But that's because you were Dad's!” It came out before I had a chance to check it. She tilted her head at the drowsing Max, asking me to keep my voice down. In another whisper I added, “
You
were jealous of
Dawn
? I'm sure she never knew that.”

“I'm sure she didn't. But it's true.” Pausing for a moment to look down at her son and then in the direction of the room where Josie slept, she said, “If there's one thing I'm going to watch out for with these two, it's that we're not going to divvy up the love.”

Being out here, in a new place, has been good for Iris, too. She's eating better and she started exercising again, though not in the same way as before Joe died, which I'm glad to see, because it always seemed compulsive to me. She's almost back to her old self, both physically and in her spirits. When Max is a little older, she's planning to go back to medical school, and she wants to switch her concentration to psychiatry.

Becoming closer to her has been a balm, especially since I've lost Dawn. I keep remembering something I heard Claire say once: “You can only be as happy as your unhappiest child.” For a long time, that was true of me; my psyche was intertwined with Dawn's, my feelings linked to hers. All that time, and without really thinking about it, I thought this said something positive about our relationship—that we were cut from the same cloth, marched to the same drummer, shared a soul. Most of all, that we understood each other. Now I don't know if I ever understood anything about her at all.

She's going to be in prison until long after I've died. It doesn't matter (I keep telling myself), because I won't ever see her again, even to visit her at Bedford Hills. Not ever seeing Dawn again is the deal I made with Iris when we moved out here. I'm just as relieved that she put that condition on it, because otherwise I might have made the trip back east once a year out of guilt, even though Dawn has not tried to be in touch with me since she was sentenced, and for all I know, she'd refuse to see me if I tried.

I do feel guilt. And a sadness I can't even bear to acknowledge, most days. But being out here, on a different coast and in a different climate, makes it easier somehow. And when I stumble in my resolution about letting Dawn go from my life, I force myself to remember the things she told Cecilia in her interview, and the things she said to me in the police station that last day. I force myself to remember the night of the attack, because once that memory returned in Joe's and my bedroom, it's never left me again—not even on the days I wish it would.

Since I've moved, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what happened to my family. Well, not just
what
, because that seems all too obvious, but
why
. Would Dawn have turned out to be a different person without the amblyopia? Was it possible that during her birth she lost a single, crucial breath of oxygen, as I'd feared that day? What was it that made her so nervous and vacant, so distasteful to other kids, and ultimately so vulnerable to the spell Rud Petty cast on her?

And
did
Rud cast a spell? Or was there something in her that recognized the part of him that would hurt anybody to get what he wanted? Maybe she was a bird without a flock until she found him, or he found her. I imagine him spotting a tiny seed of corruption inside her, spitting on it, then helping it grow until, like a weed gone wild, it choked and strangled whatever had once been beautiful underneath.

Originally I hoped that putting it all down here, in a notebook identical to the one Dawn used to record the names for the identities she might want to claim someday, would help me make sense of the whole thing.

Instead, what I've discovered is that it doesn't make sense, and I expect it never will. The best I can do is acknowledge this, and hope that someday I find a form of peace.

Now I'm glad to be out of the house I once thought I would never leave. Despite the “psychological impact” I'd been told it was tainted by, I managed to sell it, after all. In fact, it was a friend of the Tough Birds leader, Barbara, who bought it—​a
nother
frizzy-haired, kind but disorganized therapist, named Patsy, who told me at the closing that she'd take good care of my memories, and make sure that the house didn't forget me. It was the kind of New Age talk Joe always hated, but I appreciated her saying it. I left the lawyer's office feeling that 17 Wildwood Lane would be in good hands.

When it came time to pack up the things in the attic, I was surprised to find I had no trouble throwing away most of what was up there. The only memento I couldn't bear to leave behind was a tattered handmade scroll I'd forgotten about entirely, with two little handprints in blue paint over a poem rendered in faux-calligraphic script:

I kept the scroll and brought it out here with me, though I haven't hung it up, and won't, because I know I couldn't bear to look at it every day.

I also brought Iris's old trophies, taking a chance that she would be happy to have them back, and I was glad when she seemed so grateful. They're not on display in the new house, but at least she knows they're there.

Claire helped me with the task of packing and cleaning out; maybe because she was relieved to know I was moving and there wouldn't be that strain anymore of living in the same town but not seeing each other, or maybe because she felt, as I did, that this was really the end of a friendship we had both valued so much, she offered to come over and assist me in packing up what I would take to California and deciding what things I would dispose of or give away. We hugged, and cried, but probably neither as much as we each expected to. Though I knew she was relieved to see me go, I also knew she felt the same pain I did. I don't believe I'll ever be able to have a friend like her again.

When Pam Furth saw that I wasn't taking my TV with me because there wasn't room in the truck, she asked if she could have it. Remembering something I had heard Emmett say on more than one occasion, I told her to knock herself out.

The day before I left, a card arrived bearing Art Cahill's return address on the envelope. On the front of the card was a picture of Emily Dickinson, and inside, Dawn's old English teacher had copied one of her poems, which begins “I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there.” I wasn't sure why he had sent it to me, unless it was to communicate some lines from the final stanza: “I told myself, ‘Take Courage, Friend— / That was a former time.'” Or maybe he wanted to make sure he was on my good side, because he was afraid I'd tell somebody what he'd confessed that night at Pepito's about tampering with Dawn's first grand jury. He must have heard that I was moving, because he had signed the card, “With all best wishes for your new life.” My first thought was to throw it away, but at the last minute I tucked it in a flap of my suitcase, where I'd already saved the note Dottie Wing had sent to me after Dawn's conviction. “I know it wasn't any of your fault,” she wrote. “I have one son a deadbeat and the other that never calls.” She's still in the meal delivery program; I had Tom Whitty arrange to pay for the service for the rest of her life.

I also had him set up a scholarship fund at Lawlor College, in Opal Bremer's name. Though Dawn was tried in connection with only one death, as far as I'm concerned she was in large part, if not entirely, responsible for Opal's, too.

It was harder than I thought it would be to say good-bye to the Tough Birds. For three years, every time I went to one of those sessions, I grumbled in my head about it, wishing I didn't have to make the drive, listen to all the complaints, put up with the crazies, and, especially, talk about the things that made me feel the most vulnerable. But on my last night there, I started to say what I had rehearsed in my mind—that I'd miss them, and that I appreciated all they'd done to help me—and found myself crying, because all of it was true. Trudie had brought me a gift-wrapped can of Hawaiian Punch as a going-away present, and I gave her a tin of oatmeal crinkles. During the session, she reached over and held my hand, despite the No Physical Contact rule, and Barbara ignored it. Nelson said, “Just be careful out there,” and we all laughed because this time it sounded like what any normal person might say.

On the last walk I took with Abby around the conservation land, I cried the whole way. She didn't seem surprised, and I thought maybe she understood that we were leaving—that we would never see that place again. I kept her out there a long time, pausing to look at every tree, every slice of sky and sun through the branches, every piece of the path I'd walked almost daily for more than twenty years. At first I thought I might take some pictures, along the route, to bring with me to California. But then I decided I'd rather just remember. It's more alive that way.

As the taxi pulled away from my house to take me to the airport, something caused me to look up to the left, and I saw Emmett watching me from the window of his bedroom. There was a movement behind the shade, making me think he was waving, and automatically I raised my own hand back. Then he disappeared. I wondered again why he had never told anyone, at the time of the tree house fire, that he'd seen Dawn out there that morning. Had he felt some instinct to protect her, some compassion, despite all the distress he'd subjected her to over the years? I choose to believe this, rather than that he thought no one would take his word over ours.

And it makes me feel more remorse than I would, otherwise, about letting myself believe he could have been our attacker. Seeing his tattoo that day allowed me to start down a path I'd glimpsed and wanted to follow, without realizing it, since Dawn called, returned home, and began acting in ways that raised old questions in my mind—along with new ones—that I had trouble ignoring until suspecting Emmett gave me a way. When I look back on the years we lived next door to him, I remember all the times he teased Dawn, but I also remember the time he called to ask if she wanted to be his date for the junior prom. At the time, we all assumed he was playing a cruel joke. But now I wonder if he meant it—if it had been a gesture on his part to say he wanted a do-over.

Kenneth Thornburgh left Everton and returned to Massachusetts. The last I knew, he was still working on the case of the murdered teenager that had haunted him before he pulled up stakes in his old town and moved to ours. He sent me a note after the verdicts, expressing condolences, as if Dawn had died. And I guess, in every way that matters, she did.

Cecilia Baugh is on one of those tabloid TV shows now; I see her by accident sometimes, when I turn the set on to watch with my microwave dinner. She specializes in reporting on grisly murders, and I usually change the channel as soon as I recognize her, because I know she got that job by exploiting what happened in my family—and exploiting the fact that Dawn always wanted to be her friend, no matter (as it turned out) what it might cost. Of course, she tried to get an interview with me after the verdicts. I told her, “Over my dead body,” and even though I hadn't meant it to sound the way it did, I laughed when I saw the look it put on her face.

Warren and I talk every couple of days on the phone and by e-mail, and around New Year's, he's coming out here to visit for the first time. He tells me he's thinking of selling his house, especially since I told him what a good price I got for mine. He didn't say where he'd move, if he did sell. I get the impression that if he likes it out here when he comes to visit, we might talk about something more serious than what we have now, which is already pretty good.