Lacy Eye

by Jessica Treadway

  Her face drained—of color, expression, the appearance of life. “What?”

  “What do you mean, What? It’s on that website. The Bloody Glove.”

  She seemed taken aback, and for a moment I tried to believe that there had been some mistake.

  “She said she wouldn’t put it out until the trial was over. She promised.” Her words came out slowly, as if she were speaking a language she wasn’t sure of. “So she did trick me.”

  “Why would you think she would do anything else?”

  “I don’t know. I keep thinking people are going to be different than they are.” Even now I find myself turning that line over and over in my head, particularly when I’m trying to fall asleep. “She kept saying this would be her big break, I was doing her a favor, she’d be forever grateful, all that bullshit.” At first I thought she spoke with anger, but then she gave another smile, this one more sinister, and my stomach lurched. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I tricked her back.”

  “Tricked her? How?”

  “I made the whole thing up. Don’t you get it, Mommy?” A different kind of energy entered her face and body, some creative force I’d never seen there before. She looked excited about something, for once, and I had to turn my head. “That’s the beauty of it. They paid me all that money, and it was all a lie.”

  I would have given everything I had to be able to believe her. Now, I am glad no one offered me that choice.

  “Why would anybody believe you made up a story implicating yourself?”

  “But I’m not doing that.” Her expression was smug, as if she’d just been waiting for my question. “I looked it up online, and it would be hearsay. They couldn’t allow it in court, even if they did think it was true.”

  “But why make up a story at all?”

  The look she gave me made me think for a moment that she was going to say, ‘Duh’—the word she herself had been the victim of, so many times before. “What else? For the money. Cecilia said nothing sells better than kids killing their parents, except parents killing their kids.”

  I felt my breath leave me, and shut my eyes. “How much money?”

  “You’ll never believe it. Guess. Okay, I’ll tell you.” She paused for effect before adding, “Fifty thousand! Can you believe that?” She said it as if she’d just received a salary raise she knew would make me proud.

  I remembered Dottie Wing’s stolen credit card and the fraud warrant for Dawn in New Mexico. “You were going to give it to Rud for his defense, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.” She lifted her chin, daring me to defy her. “I still am. I want him to get a good lawyer, like Grandpa had.” Grandpa. She had never met the man, and my father had never been known by that name to anyone. What she knew of him was that he’d been able to pay a lawyer to get him the lightest sentence possible. Some of my father’s victims had said he got away with murder, though of course he hadn’t actually killed anyone. This was the legacy Dawn aspired to.

  “When he gets out, we’re moving to Alaska. He has some friend up there who helps people start over. We’ll get new identities. Nobody will know who we are. Who we were.” She waited for me to challenge her, and when I didn’t, she said, “He isn’t guilty. Mommy, trust me on this.”

  I almost laughed—a blast of misery at how absurd a request that was—but managed to contain it at the last moment.

  “He dropped me off that night, after we all had that fight about the burglary, and then he went home to his own apartment,” she went on. “He called me from there. I was with Opal when you and Daddy were attacked—you know that.”

  “No. I don’t.” The words came out faint, because it hurt to say them, but I could tell she heard me loud and clear; her eyes darted in panic she tried to hide. I forced myself to raise my voice. “You weren’t with her last night, either.”

  On the table between us her hands closed in fists. “I was so.”

  “Dawn, I called Opal’s house.” The fists grew tighter, the knuckles white. “She killed herself.” I couldn’t tell from her reaction, or lack of it, whether she had known this before I told her. And if it was news to her, I couldn’t tell if she felt upset. “But not before her mother told me she lied for you on the stand.”

  The look she gave me then was one of shocked indignation. “She said that? That bitch.”

  I was still unaccustomed to hearing her curse. But then, everything about this scene felt unfamiliar and surreal.

  At least she wasn’t trying to tell me Opal’s mother had lied, I told myself. At least she had sense enough not to do that.

  “Daddy’s jacket,” I said. I expected her to pretend she had no idea what I was talking about, but she was smart enough not to do that, either. “‘Puff Daddy.’ That wasn’t part of the trial, either. In fact, I never realized that jacket was missing, until I read the interview.”

  She looked at me steadily. “You gave it away the other day when you were collecting things for Goodwill.”

  For a moment, my heart stumbled. Had I put the jacket in with the other clothes?

  But no; I knew better. I’d only brought one bag to the collection bin, and the jacket would not have fit in it along with everything else I discarded. Now my own daughter was gaslighting me, doing her best to make me think I was losing my mind and that my memory couldn’t be trusted.

  “You should understand something, Dawn.” Her fear emanated toward me as I said this; I could smell its tang, sour and hot, in the air between us. If I reached out, it might have been solid enough to touch. “I do remember. I was remembering all along, I think. But I didn’t know it was real until I read what you said to Cecilia.” I waited, half-hoping she might have something to say that would divert me, even momentarily, from where I was headed. But she just let her head hang as she twirled her hair around her finger and slumped in the metal chair.

  “The inhaler,” I said. The word caused her to look up, and for the first time since she’d come home, it almost seemed that both eyes focused on the same spot. “That was never part of the testimony. The police found it, but they assumed it just got broken in the struggle, and they didn’t put any importance on it. It wasn’t brought up at the trial.

  “But when I read what you said about Daddy having trouble breathing, and reaching for it on the nightstand, it all came back to me. You were the one who stepped on it. And who pulled the phone out. I can see it, Dawn, in my head.” She looked away again. “You couldn’t have known about any of that unless you were there.”

  She mumbled something.

  “What?” I said.

  “That inhaler thing only happened because I remembered how he embarrassed me when I tried to use it on Abby. At Iris’s wedding. I was so humiliated, and in front of Rud.”

  “Are you trying to justify that as an excuse?”

  “No.” She said it quietly, into her collar, and I wished I could believe her at least about this. “It’s just that I felt like I could either crumble or get mad, and mad was safer. It just happened—I didn’t plan it, but then all the pieces were on the floor.”

  “What about cutting the phone off, when I was trying to call for help?”

  She slid further down in her chair. “Part of me wanted you to get through. I swear to God, Mommy. I wanted the police to come and stop what was happening.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because I’m stupid, okay? Is that what you want from me?” She folded her arms on the table and threw her head down on top of them, giving the impression that she was crying, but I could tell there were no tears.

  I was starting to get a headache, a monster one, and I wanted nothing more than to stop talking. But there were still things I needed to get out. “How you could just stand there and let him do what he did? You never tried to stop him.” I almost choked on my own words. “You let him kill Daddy. Kill both of us, really. You didn’t know I wasn’t dead until the next morning. Right?”

  When she didn’t answer or raise her head, I kept going. “The tree ho
use,” I whispered, dropping my voice because this subject had always seemed sacred somehow. “That was you, wasn’t it? Not Emmett.” When I’d read the Bloody Glove story, I realized I’d always known it, which was why I must have hidden the matches when the police came. And why I encouraged Joe not to press charges. But I hadn’t realized that Emmett also knew Dawn was responsible, and for some reason—the same secret decency that caused him to offer me help, the day I saw his tattoo?—he kept it to himself, even knowing that Joe and others continued to suspect him. “I should have said something back then.”

  Dawn’s shoulders had stopped their fake shaking. She lifted her head from the table slowly. “Well,” she said, and a peculiar smile I’d never seen before played at her lips. I still see that smile in my mind, sometimes; it can wake me out of a sound sleep, and I find myself covered with sweat. “I guess you’re not as out of it as I thought you were, Mom.” For a moment I tried to believe she felt as shocked by her own words as I felt hearing them. But I knew it wasn’t the case.

  “‘Out of it’?” The phrase ignited a rage inside me that made everything go white before my eyes. Though I never would have expected it of myself, I said, “I’m not the one they called Ding-Dong.” I’m not the one who got duped by Rud Petty, I could have added. Who gave that interview. Who’s lying right now, thinking there might be some way out of this.

  Yet even as I spoke, I knew it went deeper than “out of it.” That part had always been there. She was in police custody because of some other part.

  “Do I even know you, Dawn? Did I ever?” The dull hammer I recognized as fresh grief began tapping inside my chest. “What kind of a person are you?”

  She let the air out of her mouth slowly, then leaned across the table. Through the window at the top of the door, I could see Kenneth Thornburgh’s head turn slightly as he made sure she was not making a move he would have to interrupt. In a voice that let me know she’d been wanting to ask this question for a long time, Dawn said, “It was never just about my eye, was it?”

  Of course it had never been just about her eye. But I wasn’t about to give her this satisfaction. “I hope you’re not telling me that you think being teased, or being a little different from other people, justifies killing someone,” I said. “Least of all your own parents. I hope you’re not saying that, Dawn.”

  She was so intent on her own vision of things that I don’t think she registered my words. “If you and Daddy had just let it go that day and not made a federal case out of the burglary—if you had just let things be the way they were—none of this would have happened. Daddy dying, the trial, any of it.” The smile again, stronger; it twisted her face into a degree of asymmetry I had never seen there before. It would not have been a stretch to call it grotesque, and it had nothing to do with her amblyopia. “But you couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You just couldn’t let me be happy.”

  The knocking inside my chest grew stronger, threatening to steal my breath. “Are you really going to sit there and tell me that what happened to us—what you did—was our fault?”

  For a moment she looked sorry—looked, even, as if she might give in to grief. Or did she? It’s another thing I can’t be sure of. Maybe it was just the look of someone who was upset because she hadn’t gotten her way. Abruptly she sat up straight, the way she would have if a puppeteer had snapped a string up sharply through her spine.

  Though I sensed it was futile, I tried one last time to get through. “Don’t you understand that if you really had the money he thought you had, he would have killed you, too? He would have married you, yes. But then he would have killed you.”

  She murmured something I didn’t quite catch, and against my better judgment, I asked her to repeat it.

  “I said, you can believe whatever you want about Rud. I know the truth. And I’m the only one who does.” I understood then that she was too far away for me to reach. “He’ll be totally psyched when he finds out I got him a Corvette.”

  Lacy eye, I heard Joe saying in my head as I used my last strength to push back from the table and stand up. I made my way to the door, feeling Dawn watch my every move. Halfway across the room, I paused, stilled in my steps by what I thought I heard in a low voice behind me. The words Dawn knew made me cry—and the same ones I’d witnessed by accident years ago, so briefly, in her unexpectedly stunning voice. Was it possible that in these circumstances she could really be singing “Wish me luck, the same to you?”

  But when I turned to see if it was a private message, calling me back, I realized I must have hallucinated the music. She was looking beyond, not at me. I knocked, and the detective opened the door from the other side. Without taking a last look back at my daughter, I told him I was finished and walked out of the room.

  A Dissimulation of Birds

  All this happened more than a year ago, though it seems much more distant in time, maybe because it’s so far away in place. I’m in California now, in a cozy carriage house only a few yards away from where Iris, Archie, and Josie live with the new baby, Max. There’s room enough for a small garden, where I like to sit with Josie in the afternoons after I pick her up from school. We watch the birds that come to the feeder we made together, and although sometimes I feel a jolt of nostalgia for when Dawn and I did the same thing when she was Josie’s age, my granddaughter’s presence always soothes me. She keeps away the wim-wams. And on the best days, there is a measure of joy I thought would be impossible for me to feel again.

  I planted a bed of irises as a memorial to my mother. After everything that happened with Dawn, I found my thoughts returning often to the night the agents came to arrest my father. I remembered the way he said, “Hanna, I will explain things,” and the impulse I’d recognized in my mother not to answer the doorbell when it rang. It had never occurred to me to wonder, before, why he wouldn’t have needed to explain things to her, too. I thought she really believed what she’d always told me, up until the day she died: that the police had made a mistake.

  Joe asked me only once if I thought my mother knew anything about what my father had been up to, all those years before he got caught. It was later the same day we’d taken Dawn to the doctor so he could tell her she had a lazy eye. “Of course not,” I said to Joe. “Why are you asking?” He gave me a look that told me my response was just what he’d expected, but he loved me anyway. He never brought it up again, and I forgot he had ever asked.

  Having learned it in the most painful way possible, I know better now. The irises are a reminder that as much as I loved my mother, I can’t afford to be like her anymore.

  Holding my grandson for the first time, a few months back, made me think about the day Dawn was born. I’d had Iris at Albany Medical Center, and we planned to go there for the second baby, too. When I started having contractions at four in the morning, we called Claire to come over and babysit for Iris, and she said she’d be right there. She arrived within fifteen minutes, but it wasn’t soon enough. For some reason even my obstetrician couldn’t explain afterward, my labor slipped into high gear—went from zero to eighty, she said, trying to hide her nervousness about how things might have gone—in only ten minutes, and by the time Joe said, “Forget it. We’re taking her with us,” and went in to wake up Iris, the baby had begun to push herself out. With Iris I’d had a lot of pain and an epidural, but Dawn’s birth was fast and simple, with only a slight pressure below my abdomen. For a few moments, I was worried that she wasn’t getting the oxygen she needed, but then Joe slid her out. It was so easy I thought she might have been stillborn, but then I heard her noises and began to cry. I think Joe thought the tears came from happiness, and of course some of them did, but mainly it was relief I felt; I’d expected the same excruciating experience I’d had three years earlier, and then, almost before I realized it, it was over and I had nothing more to dread.

  When Claire arrived she called Bob Toussaint, and after cutting the umbilical cord, she took Dawn into the bathroom to sponge her off. When Bob ca
me to examine the baby and me, saying I should take things slowly but we should both be fine, I asked him how it was possible that I hadn’t felt any pain. He shrugged and smiled. “It happens,” he told me. “Not often, but it happens. Maybe she felt like doing you a favor. You owe her one.”

  “And you’re sure she’s okay? I thought she might not have gotten enough air.”

  He assured me that she seemed fine and smiled down at Dawn, who lay next to me asleep. I looked out the window and saw what a perfect morning it was—the sun was just arcing over the garden, making the scarlet-orange blooms on my Oriental poppies brighter and more vivid than I could remember ever seeing before. I wanted to cry again. I knew it was only a surplus of hormones, but I felt as if I couldn’t bear how beautiful the flowers were—it was that sharp, that piercing. Though Joe and Claire kept urging me to go back to bed, I asked them to set me up outside, and I spent the day lying with a light blanket over my legs, holding my new baby and listening to the sounds of my family and best friend moving happily around me. Joe set up a plastic pool for Iris, and she entertained herself by splashing around and singing. Claire went out to buy food and came home with cold cuts from the deli, sweets I saw Joe wanted to scold her for but didn’t, and a stuffed animal for Iris. Halfway between sun and shade, I drowsed in and out of consciousness, waking every time to the delicious surprise of not being pregnant anymore, and profound relief that my baby was in the world.

  Since we hadn’t wanted to know the gender, we’d chosen names for both. For another girl we’d settled on Matilda, in memory of Joe’s mother. But even though I’d been the one to pick Iris’s name after my own mother, I pressed Joe to reconsider, once I had our second daughter in my arms. “She’s Dawn,” I told Joe, because the first thing I’d seen when I turned my head to the window, after she emerged, was the sun coming up. It wasn’t like Joe to be spontaneous, or to give up something we’d already planned together, but to my surprise he agreed quickly, bending to kiss both the baby and me.