Lacy Eye (6 page)

She answered, but I wasn't really listening, because I'd flipped up the calendar page. In a month it would be the third anniversary of Joe's death. Would Dawn and I observe it in any way? Or would we let the date pass without mentioning it, afraid that if we started talking, we might not stop in time?

I told myself I didn't need to worry about that now. I thought of what Barbara, our counselor, often told those of us in the rehab group: “When you can afford to put off something you know is going to be painful, go ahead and wait until you think it might be easier for you to handle. You've all earned that right.” To Dawn I said, “It'll be good to have you home, honey,” and hoped nothing would happen in the meantime to change her mind.

After I got off the phone, I realized it had probably been silly of me to ask Dawn if her car could contain everything she planned to bring with her. How much could she own? I thought back to when Joe and I were first married, and the little apartment we rented on South Pearl Street, not far from the state Capitol. The only things I brought to our first home together were my clothes, the battered set of pots and pans my mother had cooked with all her married life and refused to replace when we moved to Manning Boulevard, and the notebooks I'd kept in college. Joe didn't have much in the way of possessions, either. For the first few months, we ate our meals at a card table, sitting on folding chairs, and watched TV on a couch we'd salvaged from the curb. Or, on warm nights, we sat on the stoop outside our building, drinking Cokes as we watched state workers stream out of the legislative buildings and made up nicknames for them (Botched Haircut, Sad Lady, Bow-
T
ie Bob).

I wish I could say, as people do sometimes, that those were the best days of our early marriage—that we hadn't needed material things to make us happy, and that love alone was enough. The truth is that even though we did love each other, it only got better and easier when Joe started to make more money, and we had the freedom to buy and do the things that made our everyday lives more comfortable. Like being able to keep the heat on high enough to stay warm—which was a big deal, because the apartment was drafty—and go out to dinner and the movies, and even, occasionally, to the symphony.

I had never been a fan of classical music and I knew nothing about it, but Joe had started listening to records when his family's TV broke, just after his twelfth birthday, and his father said it would cost too much to replace it. At first Joe was furious (he was old enough by then to understand that his father would always choose beer over the family TV) but later he would say it was one of the best things that ever happened to him. His mother began bringing albums of Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart home from the library, and Joe took them to his room at night, after dinner and homework, and lay on his bed and listened. It was an old turntable, and the needle was in bad shape. So one of the first things we saved for together, after he got the job at Stinson and Keyes, was a Sony hi-fi stereo system, which we set up in the bedroom so Joe could listen to music while I watched TV in the living room. If I had to go into the bedroom for something while he was lying with his eyes closed, I tried to do it quietly so that I had a moment or two, before he realized I was there, to watch him take in the music with an expression on his face that suggested he would have to turn it off soon because it was too much, too beautiful to bear.

After returning from rehab, it took me a month or so to work up my courage to put any records on the stereo system, which Joe had maintained all those years by bringing it in for service at a specialized electronics store in Albany (even as we matched the girls' savings to help them buy CD players for their bedrooms). At first, I started playing albums that hadn't held any particular meaning for us—ones we had rarely if ever listened to together, and nothing remotely classical. In rehab, I had managed to keep myself from breaking down in grief, because I didn't want anyone else to witness it, and when I got home—precisely
because
no one else was there, and my emotions scared me—I continued to resist feeling everything I knew lay beneath the visible scars.

But one day in late spring, returning from a walk with Abby, I surprised myself by deciding to put on Bach's Mass in B Minor while I made my tea. Almost as soon as the first chords sounded, Abby's ears pricked and she raised her face in excitement. It was this—the dog's recognition of Joe's favorite music, rather than any particular memory of my husband himself—that caused me to burst into tears as the kettle blew.

But it was a good pain I felt that day. If it hadn't been, I would have taken the needle off the record too quickly, risking a scratch, and put the album away in a place that would be easy to forget. As it was, I sat on the love seat next to Abby, closed my eyes, and let the music choke me while through the window I felt the sun, weak but steady, struggling to break through the clouds. I felt myself transported, with a rich and wistful sweetness, back to the years during which this house had held us all safe.

Remembering this, I looked at Abby a few minutes after Dawn and I had hung up and said, “Come on, girl.” I knew that if I enlisted her in what I had to do next, she wouldn't let me back out. She followed on my heels as I climbed the stairs toward the master bedroom, which I had shared with Joe for more than twenty years. I hadn't stepped across the threshold since the attack almost three years earlier. In many ways, I knew, it was kind of nutty to have a room in my house I never entered or even allowed myself to look into. It felt like a device in a soap opera or a bad haunted house movie:
And now we return to
Don't Go into the Bedroom.

But I'd gotten accustomed to it, and I didn't actually think of it as space that wasn't being used; to me, it was more as if the house just ended at that door. I rarely if ever tried to imagine what lay beyond it, in the form of the redecorating Iris had supervised while I was away in rehab. I paid a housecleaning service to come once every two weeks (an indulgence I never would have considered while Joe was alive), so they went in there, but I'd asked them to make sure the door was closed each time they left.

As hard as I'd always thought it would be, it turned out to be that easy. I just opened the door and walked in. I'd anticipated that my first feeling would be fear, but instead, as I stepped into the room I'd slept in for so many years, it was a sense of euphoria that came over me, in waves so strong I had to put my hand up to my mouth. A conquering. A triumph. I thought of something one of the physical therapists at the rehab center used to say all the time, when I told him I couldn't do what he asked of me: “You
got
this.”

To think of it that way, of course, was sad and silly: all I'd done was walk into a room. Somewhere inside myself, I knew that. But for those first few moments, celebration swam through my bones.

Iris had told me she changed the room entirely, and she was right except for one thing—the placement of the bed. There wasn't much she could do about that, given the location of the windows; the headboard had to lie between them against the far wall, the foot catty-corner to the bathroom door.

But the furniture and colors were so different that it didn't feel like the same space at all. Iris had thought she was doing me a favor, but as I stood there trying to recognize anything familiar, I felt an overpowering desire to have my old room back.
Our
old room—mine and Joe's. It had been simple when he was alive, and things didn't necessarily match—the bureaus, the bed, the bookcase—but that didn't bother us. We hung photographs of the girls on the walls, and the shelves held souvenirs from places we'd visited as a family: Plimoth Plantation, Sturbridge Village, Fort Ticonderoga. Joe loved historical re-creations, and though Iris became bored on these trips once she outgrew the novelty of wearing a rented Colonial dress and bonnet, Dawn, who was always eager to please her father, lingered with him as long as he wanted in the blacksmith's shop or the apothecary or the textile mill. Once, she got called up from a crowd of children to try her hand at running the loom in prerevolutionary Williamsburg. I still have the photograph Joe took of her that day, flushed with excitement at having been chosen, sticking her tongue through her teeth and squinting in concentration as the weaver guided her hand. She focused on her task so hard that you can't tell, from the picture, that something was wrong with her eyes.

On the bedroom floor had lain a faux Oriental rug from Joe's parents' bedroom, which we took from the house in Tonawanda after they died. It was worn through in spots, but we never thought of replacing it.

The room had been nothing fancy. But it reflected who we were, and what we loved together.

Iris had bought a plush comforter and bedding set I never would have chosen for myself, in green and violet complementing the soft rose paint of the walls. Thick carpet covered the entire floor. Bright floral prints faced out from ornate frames. She'd installed a chaise longue next to the closet, across from a flat-screen TV.

The last thing Joe would have wanted in his bedroom was a television. And a chaise longue wasn't my style. Iris had decorated the room more in line with her taste, not mine. But she knew this. I understood that after all that had happened there, she thought a complete makeover was for the best. She also thought she was preparing the house to be sold, so it made sense that she hadn't tried to create a space I'd spend any time in.

I walked to the window and looked out, went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet to its empty and pristine shelves. It was clear nobody lived here. But my husband had been mortally wounded a few feet away from where I was standing, and I waited for it to rush over me—a flood of memory, a flashback that knocked me off my feet. I'd counted on it. It had never occurred to me that going into the bedroom might not bring back, in more detail than I could handle, the events of that night.

I'd expected to feel panic because I thought I would remember. Now I felt panic because I did not.

But: “Be careful what you wish for,” my mother used to remind me, along with “Pride goeth before a fall.” I should have known that the ease I felt was too good to be true. I was only a few feet from the door—I remember thinking the words “home free”—when a shadow passed above my head and I ducked, crying out, before realizing there was nothing there.

What was it, then? A vision so vivid I thought it was happening at that moment, instead of three years before. Was it a hand, a wrist, an arm? I couldn't tell, but whatever it was contained a mark. Black figures pressed into white flesh, dark ink on pale skin. The picture evaporated as soon as I tried to read it. Words? Numbers? Both?

It was gone. Holding my breath, I ran the last few steps to the door, yanked it open, then slammed it shut behind me. I sat on the top stair and shivered, despite the warmth of Abby's breath as she laid her chin on my knee.

The experience was almost enough to make me abandon my resolution to serve as a witness in the new trial. But I didn't want to give in to the fear I'd experienced in the bedroom. I didn't want to be that weak. The only conclusion I could draw was that I'd seen a tattoo, and Rud Petty didn't have one. So either I'd made a mistake—hallucinated somehow, conflated a more recent and random image with what I'd actually observed that night—or I was remembering something that could be important to the case.

Joe and I knew Rud Petty had lied about the burglary in our house the day after Thanksgiving. That, on top of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, was why I and most everyone else, including the police, suspected him in the attack.

But what if he had only committed the burglary, driven Dawn home, then gone to his own apartment for the rest of the night, as he'd always claimed? I could barely bring myself to consider that this might be true, because I'd spent three years thinking it was all behind me. Three years hating him and what he'd done to my family. But I couldn't help what came back to me. Somebody else—memory experts, the jury—could decide if it was real.

Not wanting to lose my nerve, I found Gail Nazarian's card and dialed her office. Since it was a Saturday, I'd expected to get voice mail, but she picked up in person. Recovering from this surprise, I stammered that I just wanted her to know I was on board; I would do everything I could to be able to testify. “My daughter Iris knows someone who could hypnotize me,” I told her, thinking it might be a way to find out the truth about that night. I wasn't ready yet to let on that I might be starting to doubt Rud Petty's guilt; my experience in the bedroom was too fresh, too unsettling to trust.

I thought the prosecutor would be impressed by my resourcefulness, but instead she shouted, “No!” into the phone before making an obvious effort to dial down the volume of her voice. “No hypnosis. It can get very dicey in court, and they may or may not allow it. We can't take that chance. Promise, Hanna?”

She had never called me by my first name before, so I knew she was pulling it out now to show how serious she was. I said yes and told her I had to go, though there was really nothing else waiting for me except the question of how to make myself remember—in enough detail that it would hold up in court, and clear my daughter's name for good—the worst night of my life.

I
didn't tell anyone at work that Dawn was returning, even though I had friends there who would have been interested—who would have cared. As it was, Francine startled me when I arrived on Monday and she said, “Hanna, you okay? I heard,” and at first I thought she meant she'd heard about Dawn's phone call, but then I realized she was talking about Rud Petty's appeal.

When I was in the rehab hospital, I never thought about going back to work when I recovered. But after I'd been home for two weeks, and realized how shaky I felt with all that unstructured time, I called Bob Toussaint, who'd been my boss for almost fifteen years. He understood that I didn't need the salary as much as I needed the work itself again. Joe had seen to it, with his usual conscientiousness, that I'd be taken care of if something happened to him, even with the economy as uncertain as it was; I would still be okay, according to Joe's friend and colleague Tom Whitty, who'd taken over the accounts.

What I craved was the contact with patients and the camaraderie our office had always shared. I didn't want to put Bob in the awkward position of having to turn me down about actual nursing, because there was no question that the skills I'd once prided myself on had been diminished by my injuries in the attack. It wasn't hard to convince him, though, that I could make myself useful, especially with the walk-in patients at our clinic—instructing people how to fill out forms, helping elderly patients in and out of their paper gowns, preparing children for their shots. It made me feel good to soothe patients who were worried about a medical visit, and it made the doctors' jobs easier. Once he saw that I had made a niche for myself, Bob was more than happy to keep me on. Though my job title was appointment liaison, everyone in the office referred to me as the concierge.

It wasn't that I didn't trust Francine or the other people I worked with. But I knew what their reaction would be if I told them Dawn was coming back to live with me, and I wasn't sure how I'd deal with it. Start crying? Get defensive and snap at them? I didn't feel up to any of those things.

I thought about skipping my rehab group the next day, because I knew I couldn't get away with not talking about it there. But if I missed the session, there'd be a follow-up call from Barbara, the group leader, and I'd have to explain. I didn't feel like explaining, so in the end I drove as usual to Pine Manor, where the joke was that there weren't any pine trees around and not a whole lot of manners, either.

We called the group Tough Birds. Officially TBI stood for traumatic brain injury, but one of the other group members, my English friend Trudie, had dubbed us Tough Birds Inc. early on, and we all preferred that. If you had told me three years earlier that I'd want to spend a couple of hours every two weeks in a hospital basement with people who had traumatic brain injuries—who complained about hearing themselves say things like “Button the shoelace” and “What time does it cost?”, how they couldn't calculate the tip in restaurants, and how little things made them fly off the handle—I would have said you were nuts. Of course, I wasn't one of them then.

When it was my turn to check in at the beginning of group and I told everyone that Dawn was coming home to live for a while, I could feel the tension spread among our little circle of dented folding chairs. Nelson, our only male member, twirled his gray ponytail around his finger and said, “Just be careful out there.” It was his stock line, which he'd picked up from some TV show, and it usually meant he was finished listening to one person and ready to move on to the next.

“How did you come to that decision, Hanna?” Barbara asked, leaning forward the way she always did to show she thought something one of us said was important. She was an intense, big-boned woman with frizzy hair that looked windblown even when she was indoors, and huge glasses that came into and went out of style in the eighties. We had all learned that every time she pushed the glasses up on her nose, she believed she was on the trail of something psychologically significant. She pushed them up on her nose now, when she asked me this question.

One of the things we were working on, as a group, was identifying our own thought processes when it came to decisions. We were supposed to slow ourselves down—because a lot of us tended to act impulsively—and force ourselves to make active choices, instead of just going with the first thing that came into our heads.

I told Barbara I hadn't had to make a decision, because Dawn was my daughter and I loved her. (I would have said it was a “no-brainer,” but we had banned that phrase from the group.) “We were always close,” I said. “You know I've been lonely. Why wouldn't I want her home with me?”

When no one answered—I knew what they were thinking—I got up to go to the refreshment table. Trudie and I were the only ones who ever contributed anything; I always made a batch of my mother's oatmeal crinkles, and Trudie always picked up a can of Hawaiian Punch, which made everyone laugh the first time because they'd expected something more decorous from the British lady.

At the table, I turned my back to the group and picked up a cup with trembling fingers. Trudie came over and led me by the elbow into the hall. “Are you sure about this, Hanna?” she said, in her accented murmur.

Trudie was much younger than my mother would have been if she were still alive, but she reminded me of her, nevertheless with silver-white hair that always grew too long before she got it cut, and the sweaters she wore even when it was hot out. For as long as I could remember, my mother had suffered a perpetual chill, and when I learned that Trudie did, too, I felt an immediate connection to her. Though of course I knew better, I sometimes chose to believe, when I needed to, that in my friendship with Trudie it was my mother showing up, all these years after her death, to bring me a little peace.

Before I could answer Trudie's question, Barbara stuck her head into the hall and asked us to rejoin the group. I started back in, but not before Trudie caught my arm at the door and whispered, “Just because you give birth to someone doesn't mean you owe her for the rest of your life. For God's sake, Hanna—if anything, she owes
you
.”

But Trudie didn't have any children; her husband had died young, and she had never remarried. What could she tell me about being a mother?

As much as I would have liked to use the phone to tell Iris that her sister was coming back, I knew I had to do it in person. I called in to work the next morning and told Francine I needed the day off, then put Abby in the hatchback and drove out to the little town where Iris and Archie lived, though at the end of the summer he'd moved out, renting an apartment a few blocks from the house they'd bought near the hospital where he worked as a physician in the endoscopy department. Iris had just started medical school at BU when she became pregnant, but then took a leave of absence after Joe and I were attacked, convincing Archie to accept a job offer in western Massachusetts so they'd be closer to me. We'd all expected her to return to her studies by now, but I'd learned the hard way not to bring it up, because when I did, it made her angry. “What am I supposed to do, commute back and forth to Boston with a kid?” she'd snapped the last time I asked.

I worried that she was depressed, still suffering the emotional effects from what had happened to Joe and me. She'd never lost the weight from being pregnant, and had gained even more in the years since. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn she was over two hundred pounds now, and it worried me. If she'd come into the medical office for a checkup, we would have considered her obese.

I knew Archie was worried about her, too. Not just because she'd gotten so heavy, but because she seemed to be trapped inside herself. She couldn't get out of her own way. From the time she was old enough to walk, I had never seen my older daughter look as if she didn't know which direction the next step should take her. But now she had been this way for the past three years. She lost track of important papers, forgot appointments, spent too much time in bed—the opposite of all the things she had learned from and observed in her father, and chosen as the way to conduct her own life. Archie moved out because he was desperate to jog her out of this altered state; he believed that a separation would be the “bottom” she needed to hit before she came to her senses and rescued herself. But he'd been living in the apartment for a couple of months now, and it hadn't happened yet.

I loved my son-in-law, and I knew Iris appreciated the fact that he was so like Joe in his attention to discipline and detail. Every time Archie played a game of Scrabble, he snapped a photograph of the finished board, and kept the photos arranged chronologically in a notebook. His books, CDs, and DVDs were all alphabetized. Those slightly obsessive personality traits Joe and Archie shared, which could be endearing, had a flip side in the form of the high standards they set for other people as well as for themselves. Iris had always thrived on trying to meet and exceed those standards. But after her father died, she seemed to lose her motivation. Even though I understood why Archie thought she needed to be jolted back to reality, I hoped he wouldn't give up on her too soon.

The colors had peaked earlier in the month, but the trees on the turnpike still held most of their leaves, and the day was glorious: warmer than it should have been for the season, the sun misting off the mountains and looking like white breath from the sky. Such sights reminded me why it was that people loved to be alive, and for fleeting moments that made me want to cry, I was grateful I could still feel like one of them.

Crunching leaves under my wheels as I pulled into the driveway at ten thirty, I half-hoped I might find Iris sitting outside on the stoop with Josie. It made me smile to imagine my granddaughter running to the car to greet me.

We had a routine for when we came together at the beginning of a visit. She would raise her arms, I'd pick her up so that her legs straddled my waist, and she'd place a hand on each of my shoulders to steady herself. Then she'd lean in, close her eyes, and reach out to begin touching the damaged side of my face, starting with the forehead—where the skin met in a seam, having been sewn back together—and working her way down to the edge of my eye socket, the uneven cheek and mouth, and ending with the chin, the one part left intact by the surgeries. It was as if she were a blind person trying to “see” my features with her fingers. I don't know why she did it that way, with her eyes closed, but I didn't want her to think I minded, so I never asked. When she had finished going down the side of my face, she always opened her eyes and said with satisfaction, “It's Grandma,” as if there might have been some question—as if it had been her job to identify me.

I looked forward to the ritual. But today they were not outside to greet me on the stoop. And when I walked Abby up to the front door and rang the bell, nobody answered. I tried a few more times, and then, since I could see Iris's car parked in the garage, I leaned on the buzzer for a good fifteen seconds before finally hearing movement inside the house. She appeared with a wailing Josie wrapped around her leg, and through the bubbled glass of the foyer window, before she realized I could see her, I caught a look of annoyed dismay on my daughter's face.

“Oh, Mom, sorry—I thought we said more like noon,” she said. “The house is a mess. But come in.”

I'd told her I'd be driving out after breakfast, and she had said that was fine. But I bit back the temptation to remind her of it. In the old days, before Joe died, she would have said the house was a mess and it wouldn't have been true. Iris had either inherited or over the years come to imitate her father's preoccupation with orderliness; I could never have counted how many times, during dinner, one of them would get up from the table to straighten a frame on the wall by moving it so slightly that Dawn and I couldn't tell the difference.

But after her father's death, the Iris I'd always known just fell to pieces. It would not be an exaggeration to say she had become a slob. I stepped into the foyer over a pile of laundry that had apparently been tossed down from the top of the stairs.

She came toward me and I waited for a hug, but instead she reached to brush the hair back from where I always let it fall to conceal as much of my face as I could. “I wish you wouldn't do that, Mom. It just draws attention to it. Anyway, you have nothing to be ashamed of—nothing to hide.”

“Easy for you to say.” Even through my irritation over her saying I'd come too early, I marveled for perhaps the thousandth time at how beautiful this child of mine was, with her thick brown hair that managed to hold both wave and gloss even when she hadn't washed it in a few days; the shape and tone of her face, which was an appealing median between circle and oval, with Joe's dark intelligent eyes and a complexion that had always been smooth no matter what she ate; and perhaps most prominent, a proud set to her shoulders it was impossible not to notice. The pounds she'd put on had not traveled to her face, and even the extra flesh she carried around her hips, stomach, and legs she managed to pull off with confidence, almost as if she had decided to become overweight on purpose. On her, it almost looked fashionable. Though I know how crude it sounds, what I thought sometimes when I looked at her was
How did
she
come out of
me
?

I'd recognized early on that Iris belonged to one set of the female population, Dawn and I to the other. In addition to her striking looks, my older daughter was athletic and graceful; from the time she could barely walk, we noted her quick reflexes and eye-hand coordination in almost everything she did. When Dawn was almost three, she still couldn't catch the biggest Nerf ball lobbed directly into her arms from six inches away.