Lacy Eye

by Jessica Treadway

  For years, that moment was one of the happiest of my life. But I hardly ever let myself think about that day now. What would be the point?

  I spend my weekday mornings at a mammography center in the next town. The women who come in for their tests are more or less my own age, and I enjoy trying to make the experience as comfortable as possible for them.

  One of the patients who came into the office this morning told me she’d considered not keeping her appointment. “I was sitting there with my coffee and I thought, What if there is something in there, that does want to kill me?” she said, gesturing at her right breast as I lifted it onto the Plexiglas paddle, then compressed it in the optimum position for the film. She was nervous, and had been babbling a bit since I handed her the gown, and I had to ask her to stop breathing, and talking, while I stepped into the next room to activate the machine.

  “I thought, Am I ready to hear something like that?” she went on, when I returned to switch to the other breast.

  I knew she had reason to be concerned—they’d seen a shadow on the first film, which was why she was sent to us for a second look. But I like to remain as neutral as I can with patients, and there was no way I was about to engage in any worst-case talk with her, especially when we didn’t have any results yet.

  “Do you know what I mean?” she persisted, reaching to stop my hand on its way up. I could tell she needed an answer before she would let me put her other breast in that vise grip and tell her not to move. “I know it probably sounds irresponsible. Crazy, even. But can you see why I thought about canceling this morning? If there’s something in there, it would give me more time to not know.”

  She wasn’t looking at my face as she asked her questions. I don’t know whether it’s because she was ashamed of them, or whether it had more to do with the fact that despite all the corrective surgeries I’ve had, it’s still not easy to look at my face.

  I knew I should have just given a supportive murmur—it probably would have been enough. But I made a point of moving my head to where her glance fell, so she couldn’t avoid my eyes. I wanted her to see that I meant it when I said, “That makes sense to me.”

  In the last year, a lot’s happened aside from our move west and Max’s birth. For one thing, Gail Nazarian got the promotion I knew she wanted. CROQUET KILLER VERDICT PUTS D.A. ON FAST TRACK, the headline in the newspaper said. When I’d called that day after returning from the police station, to tell her I remembered what had happened the night of the attack and that—as she already knew—it had nothing to do with Emmett Furth, she asked if I could testify in Rud Petty’s retrial, and I told her yes. I heard her hesitate on the phone, and then she asked if there was any chance I’d testify against Dawn as well. I think she was shocked when I agreed to this, too; I believe I heard her gasp on the other end of the line, though I’m sure she wouldn’t have wanted me to hear it.

  She was more sympathetic with me on the stand than I’d seen her be with anyone in the first trial against Rud. The public defenders working for Rud and Dawn tried to shake my story, but they had to be careful, because I was the victim, after all. Rud was convicted of murder and attempted murder, and also of conspiracy to commit murder, in arranging for Dawn to let his cousin into my house to lie in wait for me. The second trial was much shorter than the first, and didn’t come close to living up to the theatrics Cecilia Baugh tried to create on The Bloody Glove. The jury deliberated less than a full day before returning its verdict of guilty.

  The jury in Dawn’s trial had no trouble convicting her, in light of my testimony, the communications they found in Dawn’s cell phone records between her and Stew Jerome, and Cecilia’s interview. Dawn’s court-appointed lawyer did try to get the interview thrown out as hearsay, but the court allowed it because she had made admissions against her own interest, which is an exception to the hearsay rule.

  I can’t pretend, as I might have once, not to understand why Dawn did what seemed on the face of it so stupid—giving that interview, then trying to disavow it to me as fiction. Why she believed that Cecilia would honor the request to withhold the information until after the trial; why she believed that she could say all those things with immunity, collect the money they paid her, and go off to spend the rest of her life in happiness with Rud Petty. It dismays me to say that I do understand it, and all too well: she believed those things because they were more appealing than the truth. She believed them because she wanted to. How can I, of all people, fault her for that?

  The whole time I sat in that same witness box—in both trials—I didn’t look at my daughter. I didn’t look at her when the forewoman announced she was guilty, or six weeks later, when she was sentenced to life in prison. Our last conversation was the one in which she admitted she helped someone attack me two separate times.

  Shortly after Iris and Archie brought Max home, I was still staying with them before the carriage house was ready to be moved into. I woke up in the middle of the night and found Iris sitting in the dark in the living room, nursing her son. Without switching on the light, I sat down beside them on the couch, and something about how quiet it was—and how moved I was by the nearness of my grandson’s newborn head—made me whisper, without realizing I was going to, “You don’t think badness runs in families, do you?” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word evil—the word Iris had used about my father all those years ago.

  “‘Badness.’” She laughed softly. “Okay, Mom, if that’s what you want to call it. No, of course not. You don’t inherit that.” I could barely hear her, but it was obvious how much vehemence was behind her words, and I realized it was a subject she had given a lot of thought. “If people inherited a gene for moral behavior, then you could never blame anybody or praise them for what they do. Right?” I was a little slow catching up to what she’d said, but when I did, I nodded. “And I want at least some of the credit for who I am.”

  “You sound like your father,” I said, because she did, and it made us both smile.

  Then she added, “She didn’t get that way from anything you or Dad did, either. From your not letting her have the surgery or anything else.” She adjusted the baby against her breast. “And she certainly didn’t get that way from being dropped on her head.”

  I sucked in my breath, and Max turned his eyes toward me. “He told you that?” Warren had never mentioned he’d been in touch with Iris, and neither had she. I felt angry for a moment, and then ashamed, but Iris reached over to touch my shoulder, and I lowered my face to hide the fact that I wanted to cry. “He was worried about you, when you went to see Dawn at the police station that day. I was, too. Thank God you saw through her and did the right thing.” She cupped Max’s socked feet with her hand, and I cupped the top of his head with mine.

  “I just don’t understand how I didn’t see it sooner,” I murmured. I was thinking of the notebook I’d found when Dawn was in sixth grade, containing her fantasies about the life she wanted to have someday; about how I hadn’t pushed further to find out how she was supporting herself all that time after the trial; about the fact that she’d been trading messages with someone the whole time she’d been home, and I had just let it drop. Though the knowledge about the tree house had always been there—that it was Dawn, not Emmett, who started that fire—I hadn’t allowed it to come to the fore. There were so many other clues along the way. If I had intervened in just one of these circumstances, couldn’t I have kept things from turning out the way they had?

  “I know.” Iris lifted the baby over her shoulder for a burp. “Just because something looks a certain way doesn’t mean it is.”

  When I heard her say these words an image occurred to me that seemed to come out of nowhere, and hit me with such force that I had to sit back. In a video display at the state museum about 9/11, one of the surviving FDNY firefighters talked about what he encountered when he managed to escape one of the towers. He turned a corner and saw dozens of cows piled on top of each other. Later he realized that of course they were
n’t cows—they were human bodies. “My counselor says that my mind is being helpful by not letting me recognize what it actually was,” he told the camera. At this point, the firefighter started crying, and I’d had to turn away from the video because I couldn’t see it through my own tears.

  “Sometimes I worry I’m not a whole person,” I whispered to Iris, half-hoping she might miss what I said.

  “What does that mean?” For a moment I thought she was putting her hand over Max’s ear so he couldn’t hear our conversation, until I saw she was just caressing him.

  “I mean, I’m not sure who I am, really. I’m not sure I have a core. You know? The thing that makes people who they are.” I’d never articulated it to anyone before, but it was something I’d felt as long as I could remember. By the time I was old enough to wonder about such a thing, I was the girl whose father had gone to jail. Then I’d been Joe’s wife and the girls’ mother—a “meek mother,” to use Joe’s term from our first date, although I never saw it until now. After that, I was the victim of a savage attack. Now that I’ve moved to a new place where no one knows me, I feel safe enough to understand that I don’t want to die, whenever it happens, without finding out more.

  I want my obituary to include more than the fact that I make a good oatmeal crinkle. And I don’t want to keep to myself any longer. The Swedish way is going out the window, at least for me.

  “Of course you have a core, Mom. How can you not know that?” With the hand not touching the baby, Iris reached out to cover mine.

  “Remember when Dawn used to wear a patch?” I gestured at my own left eye. “Remember how they called it ‘occlusion’? You cover up the strong side of something so the weak one will have to work harder.” I’d never realized that all these years, I’d been carrying around the weight of this analogy. “I feel like I’ve only had a weak side. It’s been working; it’s been trying. But it’ll never be as strong as the part that’s covered up.”

  Iris nodded. “I can understand how you would feel that way.”

  “You can?”

  “Of course. With Dad around. He was strong enough for two people, but sometimes it was too much.” As shocked as I was to hear her say this because she and Joe were always such a tight pair, her next words surprised me even more. “I know you never knew how much I loved you. You never got that you were, like, home free.” Hearing her say this, I felt that sharp pull in my chest I remembered only from the time my mother died. “I was always jealous of Dawn because she was your favorite.”

  “But that’s because you were Dad’s!” It came out before I had a chance to check it. She tilted her head at the drowsing Max, asking me to keep my voice down. In another whisper I added, “You were jealous of Dawn? I’m sure she never knew that.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t. But it’s true.” Pausing for a moment to look down at her son and then in the direction of the room where Josie slept, she said, “If there’s one thing I’m going to watch out for with these two, it’s that we’re not going to divvy up the love.”

  Being out here, in a new place, has been good for Iris, too. She’s eating better and she started exercising again, though not in the same way as before Joe died, which I’m glad to see, because it always seemed compulsive to me. She’s almost back to her old self, both physically and in her spirits. When Max is a little older, she’s planning to go back to medical school, and she wants to switch her concentration to psychiatry.

  Becoming closer to her has been a balm, especially since I’ve lost Dawn. I keep remembering something I heard Claire say once: “You can only be as happy as your unhappiest child.” For a long time, that was true of me; my psyche was intertwined with Dawn’s, my feelings linked to hers. All that time, and without really thinking about it, I thought this said something positive about our relationship—that we were cut from the same cloth, marched to the same drummer, shared a soul. Most of all, that we understood each other. Now I don’t know if I ever understood anything about her at all.

  She’s going to be in prison until long after I’ve died. It doesn’t matter (I keep telling myself), because I won’t ever see her again, even to visit her at Bedford Hills. Not ever seeing Dawn again is the deal I made with Iris when we moved out here. I’m just as relieved that she put that condition on it, because otherwise I might have made the trip back east once a year out of guilt, even though Dawn has not tried to be in touch with me since she was sentenced, and for all I know, she’d refuse to see me if I tried.

  I do feel guilt. And a sadness I can’t even bear to acknowledge, most days. But being out here, on a different coast and in a different climate, makes it easier somehow. And when I stumble in my resolution about letting Dawn go from my life, I force myself to remember the things she told Cecilia in her interview, and the things she said to me in the police station that last day. I force myself to remember the night of the attack, because once that memory returned in Joe’s and my bedroom, it’s never left me again—not even on the days I wish it would.

  Since I’ve moved, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what happened to my family. Well, not just what, because that seems all too obvious, but why. Would Dawn have turned out to be a different person without the amblyopia? Was it possible that during her birth she lost a single, crucial breath of oxygen, as I’d feared that day? What was it that made her so nervous and vacant, so distasteful to other kids, and ultimately so vulnerable to the spell Rud Petty cast on her?

  And did Rud cast a spell? Or was there something in her that recognized the part of him that would hurt anybody to get what he wanted? Maybe she was a bird without a flock until she found him, or he found her. I imagine him spotting a tiny seed of corruption inside her, spitting on it, then helping it grow until, like a weed gone wild, it choked and strangled whatever had once been beautiful underneath.

  Originally I hoped that putting it all down here, in a notebook identical to the one Dawn used to record the names for the identities she might want to claim someday, would help me make sense of the whole thing.

  Instead, what I’ve discovered is that it doesn’t make sense, and I expect it never will. The best I can do is acknowledge this, and hope that someday I find a form of peace.

  Now I’m glad to be out of the house I once thought I would never leave. Despite the “psychological impact” I’d been told it was tainted by, I managed to sell it, after all. In fact, it was a friend of the Tough Birds leader, Barbara, who bought it—​another frizzy-haired, kind but disorganized therapist, named Patsy, who told me at the closing that she’d take good care of my memories, and make sure that the house didn’t forget me. It was the kind of New Age talk Joe always hated, but I appreciated her saying it. I left the lawyer’s office feeling that 17 Wildwood Lane would be in good hands.

  When it came time to pack up the things in the attic, I was surprised to find I had no trouble throwing away most of what was up there. The only memento I couldn’t bear to leave behind was a tattered handmade scroll I’d forgotten about entirely, with two little handprints in blue paint over a poem rendered in faux-calligraphic script:

  These are prints you’ve seen before

  On bathroom towels and kitchen door.

  Those you removed so graciously;

  These you may keep for memory.

  I kept the scroll and brought it out here with me, though I haven’t hung it up, and won’t, because I know I couldn’t bear to look at it every day.

  I also brought Iris’s old trophies, taking a chance that she would be happy to have them back, and I was glad when she seemed so grateful. They’re not on display in the new house, but at least she knows they’re there.

  Claire helped me with the task of packing and cleaning out; maybe because she was relieved to know I was moving and there wouldn’t be that strain anymore of living in the same town but not seeing each other, or maybe because she felt, as I did, that this was really the end of a friendship we had both valued so much, she offered to come over and assist me in pac
king up what I would take to California and deciding what things I would dispose of or give away. We hugged, and cried, but probably neither as much as we each expected to. Though I knew she was relieved to see me go, I also knew she felt the same pain I did. I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to have a friend like her again.

  When Pam Furth saw that I wasn’t taking my TV with me because there wasn’t room in the truck, she asked if she could have it. Remembering something I had heard Emmett say on more than one occasion, I told her to knock herself out.

  The day before I left, a card arrived bearing Art Cahill’s return address on the envelope. On the front of the card was a picture of Emily Dickinson, and inside, Dawn’s old English teacher had copied one of her poems, which begins “I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there.” I wasn’t sure why he had sent it to me, unless it was to communicate some lines from the final stanza: “I told myself, ‘Take Courage, Friend— / That was a former time.’” Or maybe he wanted to make sure he was on my good side, because he was afraid I’d tell somebody what he’d confessed that night at Pepito’s about tampering with Dawn’s first grand jury. He must have heard that I was moving, because he had signed the card, “With all best wishes for your new life.” My first thought was to throw it away, but at the last minute I tucked it in a flap of my suitcase, where I’d already saved the note Dottie Wing had sent to me after Dawn’s conviction. “I know it wasn’t any of your fault,” she wrote. “I have one son a deadbeat and the other that never calls.” She’s still in the meal delivery program; I had Tom Whitty arrange to pay for the service for the rest of her life.

  I also had him set up a scholarship fund at Lawlor College, in Opal Bremer’s name. Though Dawn was tried in connection with only one death, as far as I’m concerned she was in large part, if not entirely, responsible for Opal’s, too.