Besides that, I had my daughter to protect, since the prosecutor had threatened to try again to indict her if she couldn’t get either of us to take the stand. But I decided not to mention that to Dawn now.
She took in a stuttered breath, and I was reminded of the old days when she used to have asthma. “I don’t think you should do that to yourself,” she said in a hollow voice. “After everything you’ve been through—it could traumatize you all over again.”
“It would be worth it, if that’s the only way to keep him in jail.” And if I can prove your innocence once and for all.
I tried to sound braver than I actually felt. We’d had a woman in my rehab group for a few weeks who was standing at the bus stop one day when the memory of her rape as a teenager flooded over her in a rush. She was so undone that the police had her admitted to a psych ward, and she never came back to the group.
Dawn sighed. “Don’t let them bully you, Mommy,” and although I should have known better, I felt a rise of happiness, because it had been so long since I’d heard that word. Of our two daughters, Dawn was the only one who ever called me Mommy. She continued long after most of her friends had abandoned it; she seemed to understand that it made me feel good, and it created an intimacy between us that I regret to say I never felt with Iris.
“I’m not,” I told her. “Gail Nazarian is just doing her job. She doesn’t want him set free.”
Dawn made a noise, but I couldn’t tell what she meant by it. Then she said she had to get ready to go to work. When she first moved out west, she was always vague when I asked her what kind of job she had, using words like temp and provisional and in training. I thought it must come from embarrassment, so I’d stopped asking. She’d dropped out of college after the attack and never returned, as far as I knew, so I didn’t see how she could be making all that much money, whatever she was doing. “I’ll call you back,” she told me, and I said okay, even though I didn’t know what more we had to talk about.
I assumed she just said it for a way to end the conversation—that she didn’t mean it. But inside of an hour, I saw her number pop up again on caller ID.
“I thought you had to go to work,” I said.
“I called in sick. Mommy, I’ve been thinking. I want to come home for a while. If you’re really going to do this—try to remember what happened—I don’t want you to be alone.”
“I’m not alone. I have my group,” I told her, not yet allowing my mind to register her sentence about coming home. I would have added “and Iris,” but I stopped myself because I knew it would hurt Dawn to hear her sister’s name.
“But they’re not your family.” Dawn took a breath. “Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. I’ve maxed out my credit cards.” On the pad I kept next to the phone, I wrote max. Later I would wonder who Max was. I’d been more forgetful than usual lately. I wasn’t even fifty yet, but I had some residual damage from the attack. Not as much as some people who’d been through similar things—God knows I heard their stories over and over again in my group—but I could tell I wasn’t quite the same as I used to be. I’d pick up the phone and forget who I was calling. I had trouble finding the right words. And names of people—often, I had to go through the alphabet to help me remember.
Probably taking my silence for hesitation, Dawn added, “They’re really cracking down on credit these days,” as if I might not be aware how far the economy had fallen during the past few years.
It took me longer than it should have to realize that she was serious about coming home, and I was afraid to feel too hopeful. Now is when I should tell her what Gail Nazarian said about indicting her, I thought. But I didn’t; I was afraid Dawn would back away from her offer, and I couldn’t take that chance.
The idea of her returning made me happier than I’d been in a long time. Already I was imagining that we could re-create the comfort of those days before she went off to college, her final year of high school, when Joe was working so hard on the Marc Sedgwick case that he hardly ever made it home for dinner. Back then, it was just Dawn and me in the house or the garden much of the time, both feeling safe—secure, not afraid of saying the wrong thing or making a mistake—in the connection between us. Neither of us ever said anything about the fact that at the end of the summer she’d be leaving. It was as if we both understood that to mention it would cause it to come sooner, and make the separation worse than we already knew it would be.
I missed those days, the last good ones. And now the prospect that we might have them back again gave me such a rush that I had to put a hand on my heart to settle it. I found my voice and told her, “Of course you can come home, honey. You never have to ask.”
She fell all over herself thanking me, and said she’d never forget it. Her gratitude made me feel good, as if I were finally giving her something she really wanted. We’d always had enough money—more than enough, by a lot of people’s standards—but Joe was reluctant, because of the way he had grown up, to spend it on things he didn’t consider necessities. So we didn’t give the girls the trips to Disney World they asked for, or the fancy jeans. Living in Everton, they felt deprived, and I didn’t blame them. Joe and I had words about it, but what could I do? I know I should hesitate to admit it, but the way my mother raised me was that you let your husband take care of the finances. Even though both our paychecks went into the joint account, I just didn’t think to fight him too hard on it.
“I can be in charge of suppers,” Dawn continued through the phone, and I held back the first thing that popped into my head: Kentucky Fried Chicken or Hunan Wok? Then I reprimanded myself, Maybe she’s learned to cook. Don’t be so critical. It was what Iris used to say to Joe all the time she was growing up: “Don’t be so critical.” I could tell this bewildered him, and hurt him a little, too. When he replied, “I’m not being critical; I’m teaching you to have standards,” I knew he wished he’d had a father who’d done the same for him.
He’d never been as tough on Dawn as he was on Iris; he was satisfied to let our older daughter be his protégé and leave the younger one, who had less on the ball, to me. I know that’s an awful way to say it, but it’s true.
Dawn said, “I can be there by Halloween.”
I glanced at the calendar on the wall, a giveaway from the local fire department. In the old days, I used to buy myself a calendar from the Horticultural Society every year, and I kept all our appointments and plans on it, but at this point there wasn’t much to write down. I figured the freebie was good enough.
Halloween was a week and a half away. “You can be here so soon?” I asked.
I could almost hear her shrugging over the phone. “I don’t have much to take care of before I leave here.”
“Do you think your car will make it this far?” I was thinking of all the problems she’d had with the old Nova over the years.
She paused for a moment. “I think so. I got a new one.”
“And you can fit everything in it?”
She answered, but I wasn’t really listening, because I’d flipped up the calendar page. In a month it would be the third anniversary of Joe’s death. Would Dawn and I observe it in any way? Or would we let the date pass without mentioning it, afraid that if we started talking, we might not stop in time?
I told myself I didn’t need to worry about that now. I thought of what Barbara, our counselor, often told those of us in the rehab group: “When you can afford to put off something you know is going to be painful, go ahead and wait until you think it might be easier for you to handle. You’ve all earned that right.” To Dawn I said, “It’ll be good to have you home, honey,” and hoped nothing would happen in the meantime to change her mind.
After I got off the phone, I realized it had probably been silly of me to ask Dawn if her car could contain everything she planned to bring with her. How much could she own? I thought back to when Joe and I were first married, and the little apartment we rented on South Pearl Street, not far from the state Capitol. The only things
I brought to our first home together were my clothes, the battered set of pots and pans my mother had cooked with all her married life and refused to replace when we moved to Manning Boulevard, and the notebooks I’d kept in college. Joe didn’t have much in the way of possessions, either. For the first few months, we ate our meals at a card table, sitting on folding chairs, and watched TV on a couch we’d salvaged from the curb. Or, on warm nights, we sat on the stoop outside our building, drinking Cokes as we watched state workers stream out of the legislative buildings and made up nicknames for them (Botched Haircut, Sad Lady, Bow-Tie Bob).
I wish I could say, as people do sometimes, that those were the best days of our early marriage—that we hadn’t needed material things to make us happy, and that love alone was enough. The truth is that even though we did love each other, it only got better and easier when Joe started to make more money, and we had the freedom to buy and do the things that made our everyday lives more comfortable. Like being able to keep the heat on high enough to stay warm—which was a big deal, because the apartment was drafty—and go out to dinner and the movies, and even, occasionally, to the symphony.
I had never been a fan of classical music and I knew nothing about it, but Joe had started listening to records when his family’s TV broke, just after his twelfth birthday, and his father said it would cost too much to replace it. At first Joe was furious (he was old enough by then to understand that his father would always choose beer over the family TV) but later he would say it was one of the best things that ever happened to him. His mother began bringing albums of Beethoven and Brahms and Mozart home from the library, and Joe took them to his room at night, after dinner and homework, and lay on his bed and listened. It was an old turntable, and the needle was in bad shape. So one of the first things we saved for together, after he got the job at Stinson and Keyes, was a Sony hi-fi stereo system, which we set up in the bedroom so Joe could listen to music while I watched TV in the living room. If I had to go into the bedroom for something while he was lying with his eyes closed, I tried to do it quietly so that I had a moment or two, before he realized I was there, to watch him take in the music with an expression on his face that suggested he would have to turn it off soon because it was too much, too beautiful to bear.
After returning from rehab, it took me a month or so to work up my courage to put any records on the stereo system, which Joe had maintained all those years by bringing it in for service at a specialized electronics store in Albany (even as we matched the girls’ savings to help them buy CD players for their bedrooms). At first, I started playing albums that hadn’t held any particular meaning for us—ones we had rarely if ever listened to together, and nothing remotely classical. In rehab, I had managed to keep myself from breaking down in grief, because I didn’t want anyone else to witness it, and when I got home—precisely because no one else was there, and my emotions scared me—I continued to resist feeling everything I knew lay beneath the visible scars.
But one day in late spring, returning from a walk with Abby, I surprised myself by deciding to put on Bach’s Mass in B Minor while I made my tea. Almost as soon as the first chords sounded, Abby’s ears pricked and she raised her face in excitement. It was this—the dog’s recognition of Joe’s favorite music, rather than any particular memory of my husband himself—that caused me to burst into tears as the kettle blew.
But it was a good pain I felt that day. If it hadn’t been, I would have taken the needle off the record too quickly, risking a scratch, and put the album away in a place that would be easy to forget. As it was, I sat on the love seat next to Abby, closed my eyes, and let the music choke me while through the window I felt the sun, weak but steady, struggling to break through the clouds. I felt myself transported, with a rich and wistful sweetness, back to the years during which this house had held us all safe.
Remembering this, I looked at Abby a few minutes after Dawn and I had hung up and said, “Come on, girl.” I knew that if I enlisted her in what I had to do next, she wouldn’t let me back out. She followed on my heels as I climbed the stairs toward the master bedroom, which I had shared with Joe for more than twenty years. I hadn’t stepped across the threshold since the attack almost three years earlier. In many ways, I knew, it was kind of nutty to have a room in my house I never entered or even allowed myself to look into. It felt like a device in a soap opera or a bad haunted house movie: And now we return to Don’t Go into the Bedroom.
But I’d gotten accustomed to it, and I didn’t actually think of it as space that wasn’t being used; to me, it was more as if the house just ended at that door. I rarely if ever tried to imagine what lay beyond it, in the form of the redecorating Iris had supervised while I was away in rehab. I paid a housecleaning service to come once every two weeks (an indulgence I never would have considered while Joe was alive), so they went in there, but I’d asked them to make sure the door was closed each time they left.
As hard as I’d always thought it would be, it turned out to be that easy. I just opened the door and walked in. I’d anticipated that my first feeling would be fear, but instead, as I stepped into the room I’d slept in for so many years, it was a sense of euphoria that came over me, in waves so strong I had to put my hand up to my mouth. A conquering. A triumph. I thought of something one of the physical therapists at the rehab center used to say all the time, when I told him I couldn’t do what he asked of me: “You got this.”
To think of it that way, of course, was sad and silly: all I’d done was walk into a room. Somewhere inside myself, I knew that. But for those first few moments, celebration swam through my bones.
Iris had told me she changed the room entirely, and she was right except for one thing—the placement of the bed. There wasn’t much she could do about that, given the location of the windows; the headboard had to lie between them against the far wall, the foot catty-corner to the bathroom door.
But the furniture and colors were so different that it didn’t feel like the same space at all. Iris had thought she was doing me a favor, but as I stood there trying to recognize anything familiar, I felt an overpowering desire to have my old room back. Our old room—mine and Joe’s. It had been simple when he was alive, and things didn’t necessarily match—the bureaus, the bed, the bookcase—but that didn’t bother us. We hung photographs of the girls on the walls, and the shelves held souvenirs from places we’d visited as a family: Plimoth Plantation, Sturbridge Village, Fort Ticonderoga. Joe loved historical re-creations, and though Iris became bored on these trips once she outgrew the novelty of wearing a rented Colonial dress and bonnet, Dawn, who was always eager to please her father, lingered with him as long as he wanted in the blacksmith’s shop or the apothecary or the textile mill. Once, she got called up from a crowd of children to try her hand at running the loom in prerevolutionary Williamsburg. I still have the photograph Joe took of her that day, flushed with excitement at having been chosen, sticking her tongue through her teeth and squinting in concentration as the weaver guided her hand. She focused on her task so hard that you can’t tell, from the picture, that something was wrong with her eyes.
On the bedroom floor had lain a faux Oriental rug from Joe’s parents’ bedroom, which we took from the house in Tonawanda after they died. It was worn through in spots, but we never thought of replacing it.
The room had been nothing fancy. But it reflected who we were, and what we loved together.
Iris had bought a plush comforter and bedding set I never would have chosen for myself, in green and violet complementing the soft rose paint of the walls. Thick carpet covered the entire floor. Bright floral prints faced out from ornate frames. She’d installed a chaise longue next to the closet, across from a flat-screen TV.
The last thing Joe would have wanted in his bedroom was a television. And a chaise longue wasn’t my style. Iris had decorated the room more in line with her taste, not mine. But she knew this. I understood that after all that had happened there, she thought a complete makeover was
for the best. She also thought she was preparing the house to be sold, so it made sense that she hadn’t tried to create a space I’d spend any time in.
I walked to the window and looked out, went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet to its empty and pristine shelves. It was clear nobody lived here. But my husband had been mortally wounded a few feet away from where I was standing, and I waited for it to rush over me—a flood of memory, a flashback that knocked me off my feet. I’d counted on it. It had never occurred to me that going into the bedroom might not bring back, in more detail than I could handle, the events of that night.
I’d expected to feel panic because I thought I would remember. Now I felt panic because I did not.
But: “Be careful what you wish for,” my mother used to remind me, along with “Pride goeth before a fall.” I should have known that the ease I felt was too good to be true. I was only a few feet from the door—I remember thinking the words “home free”—when a shadow passed above my head and I ducked, crying out, before realizing there was nothing there.
What was it, then? A vision so vivid I thought it was happening at that moment, instead of three years before. Was it a hand, a wrist, an arm? I couldn’t tell, but whatever it was contained a mark. Black figures pressed into white flesh, dark ink on pale skin. The picture evaporated as soon as I tried to read it. Words? Numbers? Both?
It was gone. Holding my breath, I ran the last few steps to the door, yanked it open, then slammed it shut behind me. I sat on the top stair and shivered, despite the warmth of Abby’s breath as she laid her chin on my knee.
Lacy Eye Page 5
