Lacy Eye (7 page)

Until her amblyopia was diagnosed and we understood that it was at least in part a problem of depth perception, I thought Dawn just took after me in her lack of physical grace. “She's a klutz like me, isn't she,” I whispered to Joe once, and he shushed me, worried the girls might overhear. Too late he added, “Hanna, you're not a klutz.” Even though most of the kids at school understood that Dawn's problem was at least partly physical, it didn't keep them from hooting every time she dropped her tray in the cafeteria.

When they were little, I encouraged my girls to play together. It was foolish of me, but I thought that maybe some of Iris's physical talent would rub off on Dawn. Either that or Dawn would learn more about how to move, from watching her sister. I taught them games I remembered watching other kids play through the window on Humboldt Street. My mother wouldn't allow me to join them, saying she was afraid I'd get hurt, but even then I sensed that she was also saving me from the humiliation of losing constantly. I protested, knowing we both understood I was doing it because it allowed me to pretend I didn't see through her.

Ring toss, beanbag toss, hopscotch, jump rope—Iris and Dawn loved it all. When I showed them the three-legged race, wrapping their inside legs together with an ace bandage, they hopped around the house or the garden shouting, “Look at us, we're the same person!” There was no sound I treasured more then, or even now in my memory, than the sound of them giggling together as they tried to move in unison, then fell to the floor or the grass in a half hug, half wrestle before finally rolling apart to their separate selves. Eventually, Iris tired of it and preferred spending time with her friends, and I remember how sad I felt the day Dawn appeared in the kitchen dragging the ace bandage behind her, asking her sister to play We're the Same Person, and Iris said it was too babyish for her.

Iris played on almost every girls' sports team at least once during her four years in high school. The corkboard in her bedroom still contained all her varsity letters. She kept up her exercise in college and after her marriage, until Joe and I got attacked in our bed. It hurt me in an almost physical way now, to see how she'd let her body go.

It was a little early to tell yet, but it seemed that my granddaughter was going to take after her mother more than she would Dawn and me; she could sink the ball into the child's-level basketball hoop in her bedroom just about every time. But now she was still clinging to Iris's leg, and Iris said to her, “Can you stop crying, sweetie? Look who's here.”

Josie took a step backward and shook her head. “It's the dog,” Iris explained to me. “She just decided she's afraid of them.”

She had always called Abby “the dog,” the same way Joe had. They were not animal people like Dawn and me. Sometimes they tried to humor us, but more often we could tell they just thought we were silly, spending so much affection on a creature they believed it wasn't possible to have a conversation with (despite the fact that Dawn and I—and even Abby herself—tried to prove to them otherwise).

With Josie retreating, poor Abby cocked her head at me with a question on her face, as if she knew we were talking about her. “Do you think you could put her back in the car for a while?” Iris asked. “Until Josie calms down?”

“I'm not putting her in the car.” I tried not to show how the suggestion rankled me. “She was just cooped up in there for more than an hour. Josie, honey, come here and say hi.” I picked up Abby's paw to wave it at my granddaughter.

But Josie pulled back even further and started to shriek. I bit my lip and said nothing, directing Abby to a corner of the living room, while Iris soothed Josie and set her up in front of the TV, which was already on, with a snack dish of salt-free, fish-shaped whole wheat crackers. (I knew these were for my benefit. I knew that the cupboard contained packages of Oreos and Chips Ahoy, which Iris broke into when she thought Josie wasn't looking—Josie had shown me her mother's stash once when I babysat—but I'd never confronted Iris about it.)

Iris looked at me. “I don't always have the TV on, you know.”

“I didn't say anything!”

“I know what you were thinking.”

There was nothing I could say to dissuade her, mainly because she was right. Using the TV as a babysitter, especially this early in the morning, was not something I would have expected of her. But then, we'd all changed from the people we used to be.

Iris sat down across from me, and I saw that her face had softened. “I'm actually glad you came a little early, Mom. I've been wanting to talk to you,” she mumbled, and her words filled me with dread.

I wanted to say,
Can't we just have some time first? Can't I just sit here for a minute and catch my breath? Can't we talk about something meaningless, like the weather
(in the past few years, I'd come to appreciate the relief in chatting about meaningless things)
before I have to hear something that's going to change my life?

Because I could tell it was going to, from Iris's tone.

“I have something to tell you, too,” I said, hoping that if I stalled long enough, she would forget what she wanted to say.

Her eyes narrowed. “What?”

But I faltered suddenly. “You first.” Maybe I'm wrong, I tried to tell myself, as I braced for whatever she was going to drop on me. Maybe it was good news, not bad. “You're not pregnant again, are you?” I asked, actually daring to think for a moment that I might be right.

“God, no!” She was so startled that she dropped a handful of crackers on the floor, where Abby sniffed at them before turning up her nose. “You think I'd make that mistake again?”

“Mistake?” I looked over at my granddaughter, who appeared mesmerized by a cartoon.

Iris said, “I mean the mistake of not telling you right away. I would never take the chance of you having an accident on your way here. If I were pregnant, I'd tell you on the phone as soon as I knew.” Her tone was accusatory even though it had been her own decision, the first time around, to save the news of her pregnancy as a Christmas present for us. As things turned out, with Joe dying over Thanksgiving, he never found out that he was going to have a grandchild.

She was about to tell me something I did not want to hear. I felt this with as much certainty as I'd ever felt anything; I could tell with a thorn in my chest that the bomb was about to fall and there was nothing I could do to stop it. She said, “Archie and I are talking about things. We want to make this—
us
—work.”

When she paused, hesitating about how to proceed, I told her through the thudding in my heart that I was happy to hear it. She gave a tense smile and said, “The only thing is, he's going to be interviewing at UCSF when we go out there next month. They told him that with his training, he has a good shot at one of their clinic jobs.”

It took me a moment to understand that “SF” meant San Francisco. “You're going to his parents' for Thanksgiving?” I said, though this was not the question I intended to ask.

“Oh, Mom.” Another sigh. “You know we are. It's the only time we see them all year. Archie was going to just take Josie by himself, but now that we're talking the way we are—well, it made sense for us all to go out together.”

“I know, but”—the real question made me sway, inside, for a moment—“when will I ever see Josie if you live out there?”

Iris leaned forward in an attitude of aggressive enthusiasm, the force of it causing me to sit back in my own seat. “That's just it. If we did this, we'd want you to come with us. Move somewhere else, start over. Watch Josie grow up.” She scrutinized my face carefully for a reaction.

I felt totally blindsided, to the extent that my vision actually blurred for a few seconds. “I'm not really a California person,” I stammered. It was the first thing that occurred to me, although even as I said it I knew how weak an excuse it was. What I sensed inside me was panic, starting in my center and working its way up to my throat.

I could not imagine leaving. None of my friends or family seemed to understand how I could bear to continue living in that house, which was how they always referred to it—as “that house.” When it was time to make plans for me to leave rehab and I told the members of Tough Birds that I was going back home, I heard some of them suck in their breath with shock. Trudie said, “You can't possibly be serious, Hanna. That's just out-and-out masochism.”

Iris felt the same way. She didn't use the word
masochism
, but she'd told me before that I must be living in an extreme state of denial. “Like your delusion that Dawn had nothing to do with it,” she said, and I reminded her to please not say things like that to me again.

But not only could I bear it, I
wanted
to live there. If it bothered me to remain in the house where Joe had been murdered, it was far enough down inside me that I didn't notice it. Couldn't any of us be killed, anywhere at any time, by a fiend like Rud Petty? Did the fact that Joe died there mean I had to give up all the good memories I had of our life together on Wildwood Lane?

It was true that sometimes when I was going up or down the stairs, I thought of the trial testimony—Kenneth Thornburgh talking about how Joe was found on the landing, where he had dragged himself up again, bleeding “profusely” from his head, after somehow making it down to the kitchen with a crushed skull and attempting to unload the dishwasher. Though I think this detail seemed odd to other people, it made perfect sense to me, knowing Joe, that even through the shock of such severe injury, his instinct was to put things in order and follow his routine. The police speculated that he probably tried but failed to take his tee-shirt off in the bedroom, intending to put on clean clothes when he got up. He had only enough strength to lift the shirt halfway. When they found him, his belly was exposed. Joe would have hated that. He was always a modest man, so that kind of information made me cringe on his behalf.

But hearing about it at the trial was kind of like listening to other people tell you their dreams. You follow the plot, but it isn't as if you've had, yourself, the experience they're describing. It isn't
your
dream.

If I were to have sold my house and moved to another one, what would I have had left? Photograph albums, yes, and the mementoes I'd saved in boxes in the attic—the report cards, the Brownie sashes, the ornaments made out of cotton balls glued to egg carton cups. But the rooms themselves were what had contained us all those years, shaped us into a family.

What I remembered were Christmas mornings, when the girls thundered downstairs to open their stockings before it was light out; the “fashion shows” they put on for Joe and me when they were little, modeling their outfits for the first day of school; tears (mostly Dawn's) over homework at the kitchen table; science projects being planned and constructed on the counter, which was also the place where I left out oatmeal crinkles to cool after they baked, letting the girls think they fooled me when they took cookies from the sheets and tried to rearrange the remaining ones so I wouldn't notice; Saturday nights, before Iris began going out with her friends all the time, when the four of us (well, five, if you counted Abby, which of course we did) took our habitual spots on couches and pillows in the family room and watched movies, sometimes all of us falling asleep until somebody's snore or sigh or fart woke us up, laughing; the blizzard we had in October one year, when we lost power and spent most of two days reading to one another from our favorite books in front of the fireplace; later, after both girls moved out, the suppers Joe and I ate together, often on TV tables in front of the news, not because we didn't care to talk to each other but because we had already said so much of it, and were content to hear, together, what was going on in the larger world.

I could name such memories all day. Times like these were what made us a family. If I was grateful for anything about the attack I suffered, it was that it failed to erase any images from before that night. The house was the only thing I had left of when we were an
us
. And even though
us
had been shattered, I couldn't bring myself to let go of how much the house meant to me.

Besides, I'd been advised that people wouldn't necessarily be lining up to buy property where a murder had occurred. The Lizzie Borden House. In real estate terms, 17 Wildwood Lane carried the stigma of “psychological impact.”

There was a more practical reason, too. The house was paid for; Joe had taken out mortgage insurance, which I didn't know until Tom Whitty told me after Joe died. With the economy in such rough shape and the housing market so bad, it wouldn't make sense to try to sell it at what I would get for it now.

Sitting across from me after proposing that we all move to the opposite coast, Iris seemed to read my thoughts. “It's not like you're underwater, Mom. And you have plenty to live on. Even if you sell it for less than you want to, it's still cash in your pocket. And you'd be doing it for a good reason.” When she saw I still struggled with a response, she pulled out her last card. “We'd probably look for a place with an in-law suite, so you wouldn't even have to buy anything.”

Beneath the anxiety I felt as she spoke, I recognized how touched I was that she and Archie had thought this so far through, making a provision for me in their plans. But then it occurred to me that she was likely doing it more for her father than for me; I was sure she'd made some kind of promise to him after he died, whether she knew it or not, to take care of me in his absence. It was why, after the attack, she'd persuaded Archie that they should move from Boston to the Berkshires, closer to where I lived.

But she couldn't ask Archie to keep his own life on hold forever. I understood that. And I also understood that she herself probably relished the idea of moving as far away as possible—at least geographically—from the event that had destroyed us as a family.