Lacy Eye

by Jessica Treadway

  Without telling Joe about it, I cleaned the place up and went over to confront Pam. At first she denied it had been Emmett who’d made the mess, but when I said that maybe the police would be interested in asking him a few questions, she conceded that her son might have “checked it out a few times” and said she was sure we could settle it ourselves.

  “What do you expect? A teenage boy looking for a place to himself, and that house just sitting there empty all the time. Right next to our property. That’s what they call an attractive nuisance, you know.” She made it sound as if it had been our fault, but then she must have remembered what I said about the police, and she pulled back.

  “He’s not a teenager.” For some reason it gave me satisfaction to correct her on this. Both Emmett and Dawn were about to start sixth grade.

  “He might as well be. I don’t know what I’m doing with him, Hanna.” For a moment her face caved, and I didn’t know how to react to this uncharacteristic display of vulnerability. “Ever since Paul left…I just have no idea.”

  I wanted to sympathize, but it felt wrong, in light of the reason I had come over. Still, I wish even now that I’d managed to murmur something supportive before I asked her to please just keep Emmett away from our yard. Her tone got snippy again as she said, “I’ll talk to him about it. You don’t have to do anything. Your girls can have their tree house back again.” This last line was sarcastic, of course. She knew they never went up there.

  I didn’t see Emmett in our yard again after that, and throughout the fall I made it a point to climb up the ladder several times to conduct random spot checks. I always found the floor bare except for dead bugs, and the smell of smoke was gone. I didn’t bother during the winter, because it was so cold. When spring came, Joe went out to make sure snow hadn’t weakened the maple’s branches, and announced to the girls that the tree house seemed “shipshape.” They pretended to be happy at this news, but as far as I knew, neither of them ever climbed that ladder again.

  It was three years later that Emmett burned the house down, on a morning before school in the middle of January. Joe was in the shower when I smelled smoke, looked out, and saw the tree on fire. I called 911 and then, yelling at Dawn to stay in the house, I ran out to make sure that nobody was in danger (already I suspected Emmett, and I was afraid he might not have escaped in time). There was a book of Pepito’s matches on the ground, where he must have dropped them after he lit the fire and ran off. But for a combination of reasons—the memory of his violet-tinted glasses in first grade; the way his mother had allowed me to witness the distress she felt at being a newly single mother; the fact that I believed he had burned the tree house down by accident, and not out of malice—I put the matches in my pocket and didn’t mention them to Joe, who threw on his robe and came running as soon as he heard Dawn shouting at him through the bathroom door.

  I persuaded Joe not to give Emmett’s name to the police. Though they determined it was arson, there was no hard evidence of who might have done it—I buried the matches deep under our garbage—and they made no arrests. Though I didn’t know how, it seemed obvious to me that Emmett understood the role I had played in concealing his guilt. After that, it seemed he bothered us less frequently.

  By then he’d grown his hair long, in the style that had been popular when his mother and I were his age. His name appeared in the Eagle’s police blotter for sneaking into the house of a neighbor on the corner and stealing her anxiety meds. He shoplifted beer, and when he was old enough to ride a motorbike, he got into trouble racing other kids on the bypass. I saw Pam crying outside on her back stoop more than once, and although I felt the impulse to go out on some pretext and find a way to comfort her, I refrained. She’d have seen through it; contrived friendship was the worst. So I stayed in my house and pulled the curtain to give her privacy, and called myself content with our détente.

  After Cecilia left, having gleefully pointed out the graffiti on Dawn’s car, Dawn and I began carrying in the boxes from the Corvette. When they were all stacked on the kitchen floor, she picked one off the top and began slicing it open.

  “Careful with that,” I told her, wincing at the sound of the blade through the tape.

  She tsked away my warning and began digging through bubble wrap. Then she pulled out a clothing box wrapped in a shopping circular and said she had a present for me.

  Somewhat uneasily I pulled the tissue paper aside to find a leather jacket, the kind of thing I would never wear. It looked like the female twin of the jacket Rud Petty had worn to our house when they came for Thanksgiving three years earlier, and I could tell it was worth a lot of money. “How did you get this?” I asked, before I realized how it sounded.

  “I bought it. What do you think?” She was trying not to sound insulted, but she didn’t succeed. I thanked her and put the jacket on, letting her admire it and pretending not to have any idea that once I hung it up in the hall closet, she would be claiming it as her own. What I really wanted to do was suggest that instead of having borrowed money from me, she should have sold the jacket. But again I held my tongue.

  “Thank you, honey,” I said.

  “I’m so glad to be here,” she murmured, coming over to hug me. As soon as we touched each other, a spark erupted between us and we both pulled back.

  “What happened to the humidifier?” She sounded annoyed.

  “It died. I have to get a new one.” I tried to ignore realizing that I was just as glad the hug had been interrupted. It’s only natural, I told myself, hoping to believe it. It’s been a long time. But this line of thinking didn’t feel good, so to distract myself I suggested we bring the boxes upstairs. In front of the closed door at the front of the hallway—the master bedroom that had been Joe’s and mine—Dawn paused and set down her box.

  “Do you ever go in there?” she asked.

  “I hadn’t, in a long time. But I tried it the other day. I thought it might help me remember.”

  Her face widened. “So did it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, that’s good,” she said, with what sounded like relief. “I wanted to be here when you started trying to do stuff like that.”

  Rather than take either of the girls’ bedrooms when I came back from rehab, I had made the old guest bedroom, at the end of the hallway, my own. I assumed Dawn would return now to the room that had always been hers, but at the doorway, she hesitated and asked, “Mind if I use Iris’s instead?” I shrugged and said it was fine, though I knew Iris wouldn’t have been happy about it if she’d known. When Dawn saw I was surprised by her request, she told me it was because she wanted to start over—her old room held too many sad memories.

  When I heard her say this, I felt a guilty start. Of all the times I’d spent with her in that room over the years, one in particular rushed back at me. It was the day I learned, firsthand, that what the fifth-grade music teacher had told us was true: the daughter Joe and I considered our graceless one had in fact been endowed with a glorious voice.

  We’d never had any indication that she had the slightest interest in music at all.

  Iris had always sung along with me in the car—our favorite was Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”; she could blast out the whole Brenda-and-Eddie saga perfectly at the age of four—but Dawn had never seemed interested. I always assumed it was just another thing she didn’t want to do next to her talented sister.

  Though Joe had always played down Mrs. Karp’s enthusiasm, I believed what the teacher said, even though I had yet to hear my daughter sing. I believed it because my own mother had a beautiful voice, though the only people who ever heard it were my father and me. She’d be folding the laundry or stirring something on the stove, and the sound would start low as she hummed at first; then she’d work her way up to a full-throated version of “Yesterday” or “Hey, Look Me Over,” which was her favorite because she’d heard Lucille Ball sing it in a musical the one and only time my mother had ever been to New York City
, on my parents’ honeymoon.

  She waved it off when we tried to compliment her, especially if it came from my father. Ordinarily he was quiet and a little gruff—“the Swedish way,” my mother used to call it—but when my mother sang, it was as if she woke up the looser, more generous part of him, the part that wanted to have fun. I remember once she was passing through the living room with a basket of clothes and my father got up from his chair to toss the basket aside and pull her close to him. My mother was so startled she almost stopped singing, but then he danced her over the old, bare rug and they finished the song—“And look out world, here I come!”—as a duet.

  All of this was before he concocted the scheme that would undo us as a family. I am sure of this because the memory takes place in the dark and stuffy house on Humboldt Street, where we didn’t always have enough money to pay every bill at the end of the month, but where my father still knew how to smile. A year or so later, after he started taking the money he knew he would not give back and we’d moved to Manning Boulevard into what my mother called, not happily, “the mansion,” she must have sensed that he was in an even more sour mood than usual, and she tried to reenact the playful scene I could tell they had both enjoyed so much when he let the laundry fall and took her by surprise in a waltz across the room. She put a Frank Sinatra record on the fancy new hi-fi and tried to pull him up from his chair in front of the fancy new TV. “Let’s show her how it’s done,” she said, daring to let a sultry tone slip into her voice as she gestured toward where I sat pretending to do my algebra homework when really I was watching Happy Days.

  But not only did he not comply with her invitation, he shook her hand off his arm and told her not to be stupid. Not long after that he was arrested, and I never heard my mother sing again.

  And I didn’t hear Dawn sing until she was fifteen. When I did, it was by accident. In January of her sophomore year, I learned from a notice in the Eagle that it was the week of auditions for the high school’s spring musical, a production of A Chorus Line.

  A year earlier, Joe had changed his mind and consented to let her have the operation on her eye. He was impressed because Dawn had taken it upon herself to do her own research, and he wanted to reward her initiative. She presented him with entire studies contending that the surgery typically made “a significant difference” in a teenager’s social development and, more important to Joe, that the procedure had progressed to the point that it was less likely to lead to a worsening of the amblyopia, or to blindness, down the road.

  Dawn was determined, when we took her to Boston for the operation that summer, to leave all the teasing behind her once she got to ninth grade, and to do her best to follow in her sister’s popular footsteps. But after all that hope she’d invested, the surgery hadn’t done anything she’d wanted it to, in terms of the way other kids treated her. She looked different, but everyone acted the same way they always had. The night before classes started, I suggested we go to Blue Moon (where she usually felt too intimidated to try on any clothes) so she could pick out an outfit, and though she tried to hide how she was feeling at breakfast the next morning in her new blouse, I could see how hopeful she was. She went to the bus stop with straight shoulders (a first), but when she came in the door at three, they were back to their usual sag. “Cecilia said I can have all the operations I want, but I’ll still be a loser,” she said, and my heart folded in on itself as she went up to her room with Abby following at her heels.

  So it would never have occurred to me—or to anyone, I’m sure—that Dawn might be contemplating an audition for the school play. I found out the day I got home early from a dentist’s appointment. She didn’t know I was there. I admit it: I sneaked in on her. Wednesdays were usually my long day at the clinic; Iris was away at BU, where she’d been accepted into its accelerated undergraduate and medical degree program; Joe was still at work. Dawn would have had every reason to expect she’d be alone in the house until five thirty or quarter of six, but I got home a little after five. Even before I heard the music coming from upstairs, a different vibration I felt as I stepped into the house—having nothing to do with sound—kept me from calling out that I was home.

  Abby didn’t come to greet me, so I knew they were both up in Dawn’s room with the door closed. Usually that meant they were together on the bed. If I knocked and then stuck my head in, Dawn always seemed to be scrambling for whatever textbook was nearest, and I always sensed she was trying to hide the fact that she’d just been lying there, looking at the walls or the ceiling as she stroked Abby’s head.

  This day, I took my shoes off at the bottom of the stairs, walked up quietly, and stood outside the room, humming in my own head the familiar tune of “What I Did for Love” coming from the other side of the wall. I remembered how I’d felt hearing the song onstage when we all went to a regional production of A Chorus Line a few summers earlier in western Massachusetts—the catch in my throat as the character Diana sang that poignant line “Wish me luck, the same to you,” which was so moving to me that I found myself humming it for months afterward, even when I wasn’t consciously summoning the words. Sitting in the audience between my daughters, I could tell that Iris was embarrassed by my emotion, while Dawn patted me on the arm and leaned close to whisper, “Me, too, Mommy.”

  Standing outside Dawn’s door, I realized that it was an a cappella version of the song I was hearing; it sounded so rich and polished that I assumed, without thinking about it, that she was playing the CD soundtrack I’d purchased during the show’s intermission. I knocked as I always did, but she must not have heard me. When I opened the door, I saw her standing with her back to me, watching herself in the bureau mirror as she finished singing with a flourish. For a disorienting moment, I lost track of which daughter I’d walked in on; her voice was so confident, and her movement so graceful and un-Dawn-like, that it seemed impossible I had the right room.

  But of course I did. On the last note, she noticed me behind her and cut herself short, giving a little cry and wrapping her arms around her middle as if it needed protecting.

  “My God, Dawn,” I said, still shocked by what I had heard. “That was you?”

  “What do you mean?” She pulled a sweater around her and gave me a look that was a mix of suspicion, resentment, and—this is the hardest part to remember—hope.

  “What do I mean? That was incredible.”

  “You’re just saying that.” But I saw the ghost of a smile as she reached down to scratch Abby between the ears.

  “I’m not just saying that. Why would I? Besides, we told you what Mrs. Karp said, way back in fifth grade. ‘Gifted.’ That’s the word she used.”

  “They say ‘gifted’ about everybody, Mommy. It doesn’t mean anything.” But there was the smile again, with more body this time.

  “Dawn. Really. That was beautiful.” Then I identified, creeping into my heart, a feeling I wish to this day I had rejected, refused to recognize, been able to ignore: dread.

  Of course I loved the idea of Dawn standing up in the auditorium for her tryout, bowling over Cecilia Baugh and everyone else with the sounds I had just heard, and even more I loved the vision I had in that moment of her inhabiting the stage on opening night and shocking everyone with her rendition of that song.

  But (this is the part it hurts so much to acknowledge) as excited as I felt by that prospect, I felt the dread even more powerfully, remembering the night in fifth grade when she fled the stage in chagrin. There were still kids, five years later, who called her Upchuck when they passed her in the halls.

  Even more painful to remember than the feeling of apprehension itself is the moment I realized that Dawn could see it in my face. I tried to erase it, and to sound only enthusiastic when I asked her, “Are you going to try out?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking about it.” But her posture had deflated, and she flopped down on the bed.

  “You should!” When she winced, I told myself to scale it back. “I mean, why not?”
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  “Because I might get up there and puke, that’s why.” A wry twist of her mouth. “Don’t tell me you’re not thinking the same thing.”

  “That was a long time ago. You didn’t know how to manage your feelings.”

  “Oh, like I know now.” But she was still smiling, the way she might have if we shared a private joke. “I don’t think so, Mommy. It’s too much like a dream. Standing up in front of all those people? Singing? It isn’t me.”

  “But it would be you. That’s the whole point.”

  She clucked, waving away what I had intended, too late, as encouragement. The moment when she thought she might achieve her dream had passed, and we both knew it. Even now, thinking about it, I feel shame burning in my chest. I’d done my best to convince myself it was Dawn I was trying to save from repeating the humiliation she had suffered the first time. What I find too much to let in, most days, is the possibility that I was also trying to save myself.

  After we returned from Pepito’s and I told Dawn she could move into Iris’s old room instead of her own, I said good night, because waiting around for her all day, and feeling anxious about it, had made me tired. The baseball bat I’d bought on impulse at the mall had rolled out from under the bed, still in its bag from Sports Authority, and I pushed it back under with my foot, thinking what an irrelevant purchase it had been and still not understanding why I had made it. I lay in bed with my legs bunched up so that Abby could spread out as usual across the bottom of the mattress, but I couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep. I wasn’t used to having another person in the house, especially at night. In the next room I heard Dawn unpacking. She kept moving around for another few hours, until finally—when my bedside clock read after twelve thirty—the house grew still. “Thank God,” I sighed to Abby, who sighed back in agreement and shifted beneath my feet.