I told myself she was exaggerating. I didn’t doubt for a minute that Rud Petty would be found guilty again, purely on the evidence that had been presented the first time around. He’d had a motive, he’d had access to the alarm code, his prints were on the weapon. They had a nearly perfect match from a shoe print in our bedroom to a shoe they found in his closet when they arrested him. I reminded myself that the prosecution didn’t need me, even if I could testify.
Gail Nazarian seemed to intuit what I was thinking, and she wasted no time in attempting to set me straight. “It’s all circumstantial,” she said. “They can explain everything away. You know that.” Her tone implied that she was sick of repeating herself. “The fact that he knew about the code and the key only means Dawn told him about them at some point—it doesn’t necessarily have to do with that night. His prints on the mallet could have been left over from the wedding. Even the shoe print isn’t a hundred percent—you saw how hard his lawyer worked to prove it could have come from a different pair.
“I watched the jurors when Thornburgh gave his testimony about you identifying Rud,” she went on. “I’m telling you, that’s what swung them. Without that—and we don’t have that now—I can’t make any promises.” She paused again to allow the weight of her words to sink in.
Since I didn’t have an answer for this, I said instead, “What makes you think I’d work as a witness, anyway? You know his lawyer will get experts to say my memory can’t be trusted.”
“Well, we’ll get experts who say it can.” She said it with enough confidence that I was tempted to believe her.
I asked when the retrial was likely to be, and she said she wasn’t sure. She’d need time to prepare the case, but Rud’s attorneys would push to have it start as soon as possible—late winter or early spring.
“But it’s over,” I said, recognizing how weak it sounded, my effort to convince myself.
“No,” she told me. “It isn’t.”
Then she was gone, still clutching her briefcase, which she’d never loosened her grip on during the whole time we spoke. I watched her get into her Volkswagen, and before turning the key she sagged in her seat, leaning back against the headrest. But she allowed herself only a moment’s break before sitting up and starting the car with a ferocious gun to the gas, as if there were something under the pedal she wanted to destroy.
Inferences and Conclusions
Sensing my distress after the district attorney’s visit, Abby pointed her nose in the air to ask if she could help. Rubbing between her ears, I glanced at the clock and saw that it wasn’t even seven yet. I could already tell that the anxiety triggered by the news of Rud Petty’s appeal, and the appearance by Gail Nazarian, might overwhelm me. The only solution, I knew, was to get out of the house. Promising Abby I wouldn’t be long, I drove to the mall.
I had to do this sometimes, make myself go out in the world, because otherwise it would have been too easy to just sit inside, behind the curtains, and hide. The mall had become my default destination because it held good memories for me—browsing with my daughters for back-to-school clothes, shopping with Joe for the girls’ birthday and Christmas presents, strolling through the garden exhibit sponsored by the Horticultural Society every spring.
For the first few months after I returned home from rehab, I found myself at the mall almost every day. I could sit concealed on one of the couches behind a grove of fake trees in the atrium, observing without being observed. The bustle of people going about their lives reminded me of when I had been one of them, and it gave me hope that I might become a normal person again. (If the members of my trauma rehab group had heard me think this way—about not feeling “normal”—they’d have snapped my head off. You are normal, Hanna, they’d say, and I’d tell them I know, because that’s what they’d want to hear. But I didn’t really believe it. Inside, I was still waiting to feel normal again. Not like some person who’d gotten her head smashed in with a croquet mallet by her daughter’s boyfriend. How normal would that make you feel?)
My first stop, as usual, was Lickety Split. As I stood in line, the tired-looking mother in front of me looked down at her daughter, who appeared to be about four, and said, “Sophie, stop arguing with me.” Without missing a beat, the child replied, “I’m not arguing with you, Mommy. You’re arguing with me,” and her mother, realizing that I had overheard this exchange, smiled as she caught my eye. She did a fairly good job of not reacting when she registered my twisted features. I smiled back at her, but by then she’d bent down with a sudden and intense interest in finding out what flavor her daughter wanted. I tried hard not to understand that she was doing her best to distract the child from also noticing my lopsided face.
My breath snagged on the sharp but familiar pain of feeling shunned as I took my peppermint cone back out to the atrium and ate it as I walked. Ever since the attack, ice cream had given me a headache—brain freeze, I knew it was called—but when I came to the mall I always ordered something at Lickety Split anyway, because it allowed me to feel nostalgic for all the times I’d taken Dawn there as a reward after her appointments with the vision therapist in Schenectady.
All through elementary school, she had held out one hope—that when she turned twelve, we would allow her to get surgery on her lazy eye. The doctor had told us that twelve was pretty much the cutoff for surgery to do any good, and I knew that over the years, she’d held that birthday in mind as a kind of deadline, after which she would either finally have a shot at being normal or be consigned to the nickname of Fish Face forever.
But Joe was against Dawn having the operation. When she was first diagnosed he did a lot of research, and he said that since her amblyopia (he always insisted on calling it by its clinical name, because he said there was nothing lazy about it) was in fact a problem of the brain rather than the eye muscle, it was wiser to go the route of occlusion and vision therapy. Occlusion meant putting a patch over the good eye, so the weak one would have to work harder and, if the process succeeded, develop improved sight. Vision therapy involved exercises to strengthen the way the two eyes worked together, with the aim of helping them converge.
Surgery has only a cosmetic value, Joe explained to Dawn and me, as she approached her twelfth birthday and made her last bid for him to approve the operation. It doesn’t actually help the vision, he said. An operation might fix the eye temporarily, but the odds are in favor of it reverting to its amblyopic state, maybe even worse than before.
At the time, Joe didn’t want to make a big deal out of his primary objection, which was that according to what he’d learned, it was possible for someone who’d had the surgery to go blind eventually. He told me he couldn’t stand the idea of her not being able to see. I thought we should tell Dawn, so she’d understand we weren’t denying her what she wanted without having a good reason. But he worried it would upset her too much.
So we just told her we thought it wasn’t a good idea. The only benefit is in appearance, Joe repeated to her, as if using different words this time would somehow make it less hard for her to hear. Dawn didn’t point out what I knew she and I were both thinking, which was that when you are a twelve-year-old girl, appearance is all that matters.
When we sat her down in the summer before sixth grade to give her our verdict, she looked at me with a plea to persuade Joe otherwise, but (it pains me to remember) I looked away. When she finally got the message that she wasn’t going to convince us, she mumbled, “Thanks anyway” and went up to her room.
It was the “Thanks anyway” that killed us. Joe and I sat for a few minutes in silence before he said, “It isn’t supposed to be this hard.” I realized then that he was doing what he did for a living—thinking like an accountant, calculating what the return on our investment, as parents, should be.
Hoping he could make it up to her somehow, he went upstairs and told Dawn, through her closed bedroom door, that for her birthday the following weekend, she could bring twelve of her friends out to dinner—one for every year of
her life—to celebrate the occasion. When no response came from Dawn’s room, Joe added, “We can go to the Schuyler House,” making the fiasco complete.
As soon as I heard him say it, I groaned to myself. Dawn didn’t have twelve friends, or even half that many. How could he be so oblivious as to not know that? Had he completely forgotten what had happened only the year before, when the popular kids invited Dawn to a party they fabricated solely to humiliate her? It was a rare failure of judgment on his part.
I knew Dawn had to be shocked by his extravagant offer—twelve dinner guests, and at the Schuyler House, no less. I waited for her to choke out another “Thanks anyway,” but instead I heard her draw in a deep breath before she opened the door and told him, “Daddy, that’s so nice of you. Are you sure? That would be great.” I realized then that she couldn’t bear for her father to understand that she was a loser (or, to use Iris’s word for it, a freak).
I don’t believe I’d ever seen Joe more shaken than when I told him what a mistake he’d made. He went back up to her room and tried to undo it—“I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe it would be more fun to have a smaller group? Or even just invite one person, like Monica, to make it really special?”—but by then, I knew, she had committed herself to the charade. Up until the night the party was scheduled, she allowed us to hold a reservation for sixteen people at the Schuyler House, even though Iris informed Joe and me that we were, as she put it, cracked. “There aren’t even twelve kids who know her name,” she told us. “This whole thing is pathetic.” Shortly before we were due to leave the house for the restaurant, Dawn told us that it was a bummer but she’d just had a bunch of phone calls and it seemed that everybody besides Monica, her donkey-voiced best friend since nursery school, had come down with something. They wouldn’t be meeting us at the Schuyler House after all.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Iris said, laughing outright at the blatancy of her sister’s lie. “The phone hasn’t rung once.”
“Stop it, Iris,” Joe said sharply, and looking chagrined, Iris cut off her smile. Dawn said she wanted to go to Pepito’s instead, and I knew she’d chosen our favorite Tex-Mex place in the strip mall to reduce the expense for Joe and because she felt unworthy of a place as nice as the Schuyler House. The five of us sat at the round table in the corner, where we all pored intently over the menu far longer than necessary, because nobody seemed to have anything to say that was of interest to anyone else. Iris told a series of jokes about beans and what they did to you, until Joe made her stop. At the end of the meal Monica eagerly thrust Dawn’s present at her, a set of Enchanted Forest books. I could tell it made Iris want to roll her eyes, but she refrained. Then she held out a wrapped package herself, which Dawn seemed apprehensive to open, and it made me sad to realize she could believe her own sister might try to mock her by way of a gift.
Inside was a cosmetic bag containing tubes of concealer, eyeliner, lip gloss, and blush. “Oh,” Dawn said, literally backing away from the collection of items I’m sure she thought could have nothing to do with her. “Thanks, Iris, but I don’t think so.”
“Why not? I’ll teach you. It’s easy.” Iris waved at her own face to illustrate. Then as now, she wore hardly any makeup because she didn’t have to, but when you looked closely you could see that her eyes were dramatized by liner and shadow, her cheekbones heightened with a ruddy powder glow, and her lips drawn into a magenta heart.
“You’re both too young for that,” Joe said, but all we women ignored him, as he must have known we would. Dawn thanked her sister and set the present aside. I suspect she felt ashamed, thinking that Iris had given her the cosmetics because she wanted a prettier sister, and I didn’t blame her, because of the way Iris taunted her sometimes. But I could tell this was a benevolent gesture on my older daughter’s part. I don’t know whether she ever gave Dawn the lesson she planned to, but I never saw Dawn wear any makeup until she left for college and met Rud Petty.
After the gift-opening, the restaurant’s host, Kwan—who had been given the heads-up by Joe when we came in—brought out a flan with a candle in it for dessert, leading everyone in the restaurant in a round of “Happy Birthday.” Iris hid her face, Dawn blushed, and Monica broke out in her familiar, unaware bray. I think we were all relieved when we could step outside, into the cool September air, and call the party over.
Later that night someone left a package wrapped in festive paper on our stoop, addressed to Dawn. I found it when I went to get the newspaper in the morning. I was about to bring it upstairs to her when something told me that I should check it out first. Sure enough, the shoebox inside the wrapping contained pellets of dried dog poop. I flushed them down the toilet, threw away the box, and went out to run my errands.
I remember thinking, when I opened the “present,” What did she ever do to them? At the time, I told myself, Nothing. I told myself that it was no different from when I was in school, except that back then, there seemed to be a more laissez-faire approach to ostracizing the kids Iris referred to as “fringies”; you were only ignored, not included in invitations, passed by in the hallways as if you were invisible. Nobody delivered poop to your front door in the guise of a birthday gift. I told myself that this generation had just upped the ante.
Yet even as I tried to believe this, I understood that it went deeper than mere scorn. Whoever had done it—and there was probably more than one of them—was afraid of Dawn. Why? Afraid of what? But I couldn’t allow myself to wonder, because I couldn’t allow myself to understand that I was afraid of the same thing.
Of course I didn’t tell Dawn about the delivery to our doorstep, and I never mentioned it to Joe. Though I am ashamed to say so now, I just wanted that unpleasantness to go away.
Once we nixed the idea of surgery, I expected Dawn to rebel against the vision therapy Joe wanted her to do instead. But she was too good a girl; if we told her to do something, she did it. Sometimes I wished she would put up a fight, the same way when she was a child I wished she would rip off the patch and refuse to wear it, because it would have been easier to feel angry than sorry for her.
So once a week I took her to Dr. Diamond’s office in Schenectady, where she repeated the exercises designed to help her eyes align. Her eyes hurt at the end of every session, so early on, I decided to take her for a treat after each visit. I thought she deserved a reward for working so hard, and I felt guilty. I knew I should have realized something was wrong even before the amblyopia got diagnosed in a test her teacher recommended because she noticed Dawn squinting all the time. Even though I was a nurse, I hadn’t seen a problem in my own daughter. Well, I didn’t want to.
If Iris had been the one to develop a lazy eye in grade school, she would still have been as popular as she always was—I have no doubt of that. Either she would have found some way to laugh at herself, or her classmates would have felt sympathy for her. Knowing Iris, I’m sure she would have turned a lazy eye into something cool.
But even without the eye problem, Dawn would not have been a pretty girl like her sister. It hurt me to acknowledge this because I knew she was all too aware of it, and because she looked like me: we both had mouths that were too small, noses that were too flat, and hair too thin for us to be called anything but “nice-looking” at our best. Though I knew like any other parent that I wasn’t supposed to have favorites, and that if I were going to have a favorite it would make sense for it to be the attractive, more promising child (as it clearly was Joe’s, even though he tried not to show it), Dawn had my heart because as a kid I had also been nervous, not cute, and insecure.
When she began wearing the eye patch in second grade and kids called her Squint and Fish Face, her normal expression became one of defensiveness, almost a scowl. She walked around looking as if she expected to be made fun of, as if she hated people already because she knew they were laughing at her.
Even though when Joe and I discussed our younger daughter’s unhappiness it was always in the context of the eye cond
ition, I’m pretty sure that separately we both understood it was more than that. I know I did. Even in kindergarten, before we were told about the amblyopia, she didn’t seem to fit in with the other kids. When I’d go to birthday parties to pick her up, I’d find her sitting in a corner, staring across the room where everyone else took a whack at the piñata or played musical chairs. When I asked her why, she said those things weren’t fun for her. What is fun for you? I asked, but she always shrugged and said she didn’t know. As she grew older, and especially after her diagnosis, she made more of an effort to join in, which Joe and I were glad to see because we thought it meant she was finally “coming out of her shell,” as we put it to each other. Maybe she’d just felt overwhelmed before, we theorized, being in Iris’s shadow. Maybe now she’ll find out what she likes to do, and she’ll get some confidence, and the other kids will come around.
But it didn’t happen that way. She didn’t enjoy any of the classes we signed her up for—since Iris took tennis and violin, we tried karate and the recorder with Dawn, but she couldn’t have cared less about either—and Joe and I figured it was probably worse to force her to continue when she had no interest. The only thing she wanted to do was use her crayons in coloring books; it seemed to give her pleasure to show us how well she could stay inside the lines. Joe asked if she didn’t want to draw her own pictures—I knew he was trying to encourage her to be more creative, and not just fill in what somebody else had put on the page—but Dawn said no, she liked it when the picture was already there. This was okay in kindergarten, of course. But as she grew older, the other kids began to whisper and laugh. The same teacher who’d told us she thought Dawn needed an eye exam also said to me that maybe we should have her “see someone,” though she didn’t elaborate on what kind of “someone” she had in mind. “It just seems like there’s something missing,” she said, and my stomach fell to exactly the same spot it had when, years earlier, I overheard Peter Cifforelli ask Joe if he was sure I was “enough.”
Lacy Eye Page 3