Whatever kept me from telling Joe about the dog poop kept me from telling him what the teacher said, too.
By the time she was in middle school, she was begging me every day to pick her up from school instead of making her take the bus home, because that was when the teasing, led by Emmett Furth, was the worst.
But I couldn’t pick her up, because of my job. Besides, Joe would have said I was giving in to the bullies. He would have been right, but I still wished I could do it to save Dawn that heartache.
So because I felt guilty, and because I knew how much she’d had her heart set on the surgery she thought would cure her of being different, I took her out for ice cream. The trips were our secret, because Joe didn’t like the girls eating too much sugar. When Dawn started to gain weight in eighth grade and Joe asked me why I thought that was, I pretended not to have any idea. But to Dawn I said that maybe we should cut down on the Lickety Split visits, which had started to make my waistbands tight, too. That was when she came up with the idea of getting a dog, and Abby replaced Sonic Sundaes as her primary comfort.
At the mall, after leaving the ice-cream store, I found myself in front of the display window at Sports Authority. I must have been standing there for a few minutes without realizing, because I’m a slow eater, and my cone was almost gone. I went inside and browsed through a rack of sale jerseys: Rodriguez, Jeter, Canó. When the college-age salesman asked if he could help me, I pulled my hair over my bad eye and said no, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.
I walked toward the back of the store, ignoring the colorful croquet sets—FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!—and picked up a baseball bat, which I carried to the counter. “For my granddaughter,” I told the salesman, though of course he had not asked me who the bat was for.
“How old is she?”
“Two and a half.”
He smiled. “This one might be a little big, then.”
“That’s okay. She’ll grow into it.” I signed the receipt quickly, then turned to leave; he had to call me back to hand me the bag with the bat sticking out. Immediately I felt silly about the purchase, but I didn’t have what it took to say I’d changed my mind.
As I left the store, I thought I felt someone watching me, and turned to see a young man who looked to be about college age, though his face was so vacant he did not fit my idea of a college student. He stood to the side of the store, slurping soda through a straw from a cup the size of a bucket. He was on the short side, and thin, with reddish hair that curled down around his neck. It would have looked pretty on a girl, I thought, but it only made him appear sloppy, as did the low-slung jeans he wore with a chain hanging from the belt loops across the front. His untucked tee-shirt displayed a cartoon of a joint-smoking Cat in the Hat.
When he caught me looking back at him, he seemed to choke a little on his drink. I told myself I was just being paranoid. I reminded myself that people often stared at me because of my mangled face. This felt like more than that, but I decided to put it out of my mind. When he turned and walked off in the other direction, I tried to laugh at myself.
Outside Blue Moon, the boutique for teenage girls, I paused to remember all the times I’d taken Iris here over the years, when my role was to stand at the cash register and remind her that I couldn’t buy all the clothes she’d chosen. She’d sulk and negotiate, and in the end she usually wore me down and brought home more than I knew Joe would have allowed if he’d been there. I went in and moved some hangers, pretending I was shopping for a daughter, and couldn’t help eavesdropping on a conversation between two girls who didn’t even look old enough to be in high school. “I wish I had it in me to break his heart again,” one of them said to the other, and I smiled to myself.
Then, looking up, I froze as I saw Emmett Furth through the display window. He stood with two of his friends, watching the girls inside browsing the racks. It struck me as creepy, since Emmett was twenty-one now and the girls just teenagers. But he had always been immature. Remembering how he’d scared Abby and me during our walk less than an hour before, I wondered if he’d followed me to the mall, before I realized that it was just a coincidence; even Emmett Furth had better things to do than that.
I tried to escape the store without his noticing, but then I saw one of his friends pop him on the shoulder and point at me. In a voice loud enough for everyone around us to hear, the friend seemed to enjoy himself as he drew out the chant that was all too familiar: “Lizzie Borden took an axe… gave her mother forty whacks.”
Emmett looked over. When he saw it was me, he locked us in a gaze so tight I was afraid I might sink to my knees. My tongue went sour and I coughed. He turned his back and resumed joking with his friends, but not before I thought I saw him flick two fingers from his forehead in my direction, a signal of some kind.
A signal of what? I couldn’t be sure. I tried to convince myself it was a greeting, but that wouldn’t be like him. And it felt more ominous than that.
For a panicked moment I lost my vision, and then it came back alternating between blurry and black. Feeling a cry in my throat that I knew better than to let out, I rushed to the nearest mall exit, which was not the closest to where I’d parked. As I stumbled across the lot toward my car, I could feel my head pounding. The plastic bag with the baseball bat banged against my knees. Just get home, just get home, I told myself, using the words as a mantra to focus my attention through the pulsing ache. Pulling up to my house, I felt the heat of relief spread through me, both because I’d arrived safely and because there were no reporters confronting me as I went inside. Even though I knew it wasn’t good for her I let Abby have a piece of leftover pizza from the fridge, because I knew she’d love it, and love me for it, and I felt like being loved just then. Then I sat down at the kitchen table, drawing deep breaths and pressing my fingers into my temples.
The only time I’d ever had an actual conversation with Emmett Furth was fifteen years earlier, when he and Dawn were in first grade. I was working at the medical office part time back then, and once a week I went into the school as a parent volunteer. Though at the time I liked to believe that my motivation for visiting her classroom was a pure desire to contribute, to do my share, I understand now that I was also trying to figure out what made my daughter different from her sister and other kids, even at the age of six, aside from the lazy eye. What caused the other kids, including sometimes her own sister, to call her—in addition to all the other nicknames—Ding-Dong Dawn.
When I went in that day she was sitting by herself on the padded window seat, her knees drawn up to her chest as she looked out at the empty playground. I wanted to go over and ask why she wasn’t working in her book, like everyone else, but the teacher intercepted me and said that Emmett Furth needed help with his reading comprehension, so I gave up trying to catch Dawn’s attention and went over to pull out the little chair at the little table in the corner where Emmett was sitting.
Back then what set him apart from the other kids, besides his behavior, were his buzz cut and his granny glasses with violet-tinted lenses. I’d always assumed the glasses were Pam’s mistake, but one day, probably wanting to assure me she’d had nothing to do with them, she told me that Emmett had refused even to consider any glasses other than the purple ones. By the time he got to middle school he’d switched to contacts, and he looked just like any regular troublemaker. I was secretly sorry to see those glasses go.
As silly as it sounds, the memory of those glasses was the main reason I’d never been able to take Rud Petty’s attorney very seriously when he suggested it might have been Emmett who came into our house that night and attacked us in our bed.
In the classroom that day I tried to smile at him as I sat down, even though he had already made a reputation for himself—at such a young age—as a neighborhood pest. But he was in no mood for preliminaries, or maybe it was just that he felt embarrassed when he recognized me as one of the ladies whose yard he’d trampled on his bike. In any event, he ignored my smile
and got right down to business. The instructions were for him to read passages aloud to me from the workbook, after which we would look at the comprehension questions together.
Craig and his father bought a bird feeder. They studied their backyard to find a good place for it. When the feeder was set up, Craig filled it with birdseed. Then he and his father began watching the feeder every morning.
“Bird feeders are stupid,” Emmett said, after reading the story. “They can just eat nuts from the trees.”
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to engage him in conversation, so instead I just pointed at the text and, as the directions instructed, asked him which sentence described what most likely happened next, based on the paragraph we had read. “A., Craig and his father will eat the birdseed.”
“Ha!” Emmett liked this answer. “They’re gonna eat the birdseed!”
“B., Craig and his father will watch the birds eating. C., Craig and his father will knock the bird feeder to the ground.”
“They kick it, they punch it, they knock the stupid thing over!” He rose up in his chair and gave the air two fierce jabs with his fists, so hard that his glasses almost fell off.
Eventually I got him to settle down, and I pointed again to the choices on the page. “So, Emmett. Which is it?” He sat there for a long time, looking at the options. I tried not to fiddle with my pencil or shift in my seat. I could see that Dawn was still looking out the window, and I made a mental note to ask Joe that night whether we should bother scheduling another conference with her teacher. Finally, Emmett said, “I don’t think it’s any of those. A cat might come over and scare the birds away. That, or squirrels might jump up and eat all the seeds.”
Those things could happen, I admitted. But I reminded him that they wanted him to pick an answer from the list.
“No.” Emmett was firm in his refusal, and I remember thinking that as exasperating as he could be, part of me admired the way he stuck to his guns. “These are stupid questions, anyway.” He pointed to the workbook, where the words Inferences and Conclusions danced in jazzy letters across the top. “How can you know something’s gonna happen until it does?”
The bird feeder example in the workbook reminded me of my own garden, where I had spent so many of my best hours. When we moved into our house before I became pregnant with Iris, the backyard was overgrown and ugly because the previous owners had let it go. But within a few seasons I’d transformed it into the green and blooming sanctuary my mother had always dreamed of cultivating herself. She never got the chance, because when my father moved us to Manning Boulevard, he insisted on hiring a gardener. As much as my mother had always told him she wanted to work in the dirt herself, I don’t think he actually believed her. She died before I met Joe, but I still liked to imagine that her spirit was in the air around me as I dead-headed my begonias or pruned my roses or fertilized my rhododendrons. Often, I paused on my knees just to turn my face up to the sun and breathe. Though I had been brought up going to church, working in my garden was the closest I ever came to what felt like God.
Especially when the girls were younger, we ate dinners outside in the summer. Joe had never grilled before we moved to the suburbs, but he took to it right away. He loved to cook up a bunch of kebobs, different kinds of meat and vegetables in colorful combinations. Sometimes they were too fancy for Dawn and Iris, so he’d throw some hot dogs on the grill for them. One of my favorite memories is of the time Joe put one end of a hot dog straight into Abby’s mouth, the other in his own, then raced her as they both ate toward the middle until their noses touched. Especially because it was so out of character for their strict and sanitary father, the girls both laughed so hard they almost fell together off the bench.
I’d always kept two bird feeders in the garden, one in a log-style and the other a netted onion bag filled with suet pudding. After Joe died, the police claimed the log feeder as evidence. I don’t know why they thought the attacker might have left fingerprints on a bird feeder, but I guess they were covering all their bases. As it turned out, the only fingerprints they found on it were mine.
When I came home from the rehab hospital in March of the following year, I didn’t have the heart or the energy to tend to anything but getting myself out of bed every morning. That fall when Rud Petty’s trial started, I thought about trying to divide and transplant some of my perennials, but I just couldn’t seem to take the first step out the back door. Slowly, over the next months and through the winter, the garden faded into an ordinary yard. Where once the view from my kitchen window had been one of my greatest pleasures, eventually I kept the blinds closed even during the daytime, so I didn’t have to be reminded of how comforting it had once been.
When Dawn called from Santa Fe the morning after my trip to the mall, I asked her, “Wait a minute, what day is it?” before she could even start talking.
“Saturday,” she told me. “I know, I’m early. But I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow.”
Since she’d left for college, we’d always spoken on Sundays. When I was growing up on Humboldt Street, my father had drummed it into my head that Sunday was the time for long-distance calls, because the rates were cheapest then. Of course that didn’t matter anymore, and all Dawn had was a cell phone, but I liked the comfort of our routine. Dawn seemed to, too. It was another thing we shared, while Iris called any time she felt like it.
Dawn said she’d just wanted to hear my voice. She added, “All of a sudden I’m afraid of wildfires,” and I remembered, as I did every week, her tendency to jump from one subject to another without warning; you had to stay on your toes. “It’s like something’s creeping up on me from behind.”
“It sounds awful,” I said, though I hadn’t seen anything about wildfires on the news and wasn’t exactly sure what she was referring to. Then I blurted what had been at the front of my mind since I’d received the information the day before. “He won his appeal. He’s getting a new trial. You know that, right?” I knew I did not have to identify who “he” was. Saying the name, I knew, would cause a cold clash of cymbals at the back of my neck.
“Well, yes.” Dawn’s voice flickered briefly.
The district attorney had intimated that Dawn had been in touch with Rud Petty, but of course I knew better. “How’d you find out?” I asked.
“Peter called.”
I was glad she couldn’t see how I winced at the name. Peter Cifforelli had been Joe’s best friend from Buffalo; they’d gone to college together there, then both moved to Albany for graduate school, Joe in accounting and Peter in law. Peter and his wife, Wendy, became engaged within weeks of when Joe and I did, and the four of us all became friends. At least, that’s what I thought, until the day Peter invited everybody to his apartment to watch the Super Bowl and I overheard Peter ask Joe in the kitchen, when neither of them knew I was approaching, “You’re sure about Hanna, right? You’re sure she’s—enough?” For a moment I thought I’d missed a word—smart enough? Good enough? Pretty enough? But then I realized he’d just said enough, which could have covered all three of those things and more. Instead of waiting to hear how Joe would answer him, I made a point of walking into the kitchen to refill a bowl of chips. From that day on, I both despised Peter and worried that he was right. But I vowed to myself I’d never show those feelings, and I never told Joe that I’d heard what his best friend asked him that day.
Joe always referred to Peter and Wendy as “the Darlings,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do the same. Still, our families remained close all the time our children were growing up, celebrating birthdays and holidays and graduations together, and one year we shared a vacation rental in the Outer Banks during the kids’ spring break from school. (One of the things I had been shocked to learn, during Rud’s trial, was that Dawn apparently told her dorm mates at college that among the property she would inherit someday was a beachfront estate on the coast of North Carolina. It shocked me not only because of the lie itself, but because that vacation had been a
disaster, and I couldn’t imagine she had any good memories of it; it rained almost every day, and the Cifforelli kids and Iris ganged up on Dawn in every game they played.)
Peter was the first person Iris called after the police notified her, by phone, of the attack. He and Wendy arrived at the hospital—where I was in surgery and expected to die—before Iris and Archie could drive there from Boston. Later, Peter said he would serve as Dawn’s attorney, if she got indicted and her case went to trial. When he offered to do this, I didn’t know whether he believed she was guilty of helping to kill her father but also entitled to the best defense she could get, or whether he thought she was innocent. I was afraid of what it would mean about me if I even asked the question. In the end it didn’t matter, because she was never tried.
You’d think the fact that he was willing to fight for Dawn in a courtroom would have erased my bitterness toward Peter, but it hadn’t.
“They’re not letting him out, are they?” Dawn asked me. They were almost the exact words I had used when Ken Thornburgh informed me about Rud Petty’s appeal.
“No,” I said. “I mean, they say not. Gail Nazarian came over last night to try to get me to testify.”
“But you said no, right?” She spoke so emphatically into the phone that I had to hold the receiver away.
“Right.” I reached down to work Abby’s hair with my fingers under the table, where she always sat when I talked on the phone. When she gave a little groan I knew I’d pulled too hard, and I apologized by rubbing the scar on the soft spot between her eyes. “But I changed my mind. I’m going to try.”
It was one of those times you say something you hadn’t planned on, but the minute you hear it in your own voice, you know it’s true. I realized then that my mind had been working on the decision, even without my being aware. I believed Rud Petty was guilty, and I couldn’t take a chance on his being acquitted this time. Short of someone else showing up to say they’d been in our bedroom that night three years earlier and witnessed what happened to us—and short of Dawn remembering something new that might be of use to the prosecution—I knew it was up to me, despite the warning that kept flashing somewhere below my heart.
Lacy Eye Page 4
