The experience was almost enough to make me abandon my resolution to serve as a witness in the new trial. But I didn’t want to give in to the fear I’d experienced in the bedroom. I didn’t want to be that weak. The only conclusion I could draw was that I’d seen a tattoo, and Rud Petty didn’t have one. So either I’d made a mistake—hallucinated somehow, conflated a more recent and random image with what I’d actually observed that night—or I was remembering something that could be important to the case.
Joe and I knew Rud Petty had lied about the burglary in our house the day after Thanksgiving. That, on top of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, was why I and most everyone else, including the police, suspected him in the attack.
But what if he had only committed the burglary, driven Dawn home, then gone to his own apartment for the rest of the night, as he’d always claimed? I could barely bring myself to consider that this might be true, because I’d spent three years thinking it was all behind me. Three years hating him and what he’d done to my family. But I couldn’t help what came back to me. Somebody else—memory experts, the jury—could decide if it was real.
Not wanting to lose my nerve, I found Gail Nazarian’s card and dialed her office. Since it was a Saturday, I’d expected to get voice mail, but she picked up in person. Recovering from this surprise, I stammered that I just wanted her to know I was on board; I would do everything I could to be able to testify. “My daughter Iris knows someone who could hypnotize me,” I told her, thinking it might be a way to find out the truth about that night. I wasn’t ready yet to let on that I might be starting to doubt Rud Petty’s guilt; my experience in the bedroom was too fresh, too unsettling to trust.
I thought the prosecutor would be impressed by my resourcefulness, but instead she shouted, “No!” into the phone before making an obvious effort to dial down the volume of her voice. “No hypnosis. It can get very dicey in court, and they may or may not allow it. We can’t take that chance. Promise, Hanna?”
She had never called me by my first name before, so I knew she was pulling it out now to show how serious she was. I said yes and told her I had to go, though there was really nothing else waiting for me except the question of how to make myself remember—in enough detail that it would hold up in court, and clear my daughter’s name for good—the worst night of my life.
Psychological Impact
I didn’t tell anyone at work that Dawn was returning, even though I had friends there who would have been interested—who would have cared. As it was, Francine startled me when I arrived on Monday and she said, “Hanna, you okay? I heard,” and at first I thought she meant she’d heard about Dawn’s phone call, but then I realized she was talking about Rud Petty’s appeal.
When I was in the rehab hospital, I never thought about going back to work when I recovered. But after I’d been home for two weeks, and realized how shaky I felt with all that unstructured time, I called Bob Toussaint, who’d been my boss for almost fifteen years. He understood that I didn’t need the salary as much as I needed the work itself again. Joe had seen to it, with his usual conscientiousness, that I’d be taken care of if something happened to him, even with the economy as uncertain as it was; I would still be okay, according to Joe’s friend and colleague Tom Whitty, who’d taken over the accounts.
What I craved was the contact with patients and the camaraderie our office had always shared. I didn’t want to put Bob in the awkward position of having to turn me down about actual nursing, because there was no question that the skills I’d once prided myself on had been diminished by my injuries in the attack. It wasn’t hard to convince him, though, that I could make myself useful, especially with the walk-in patients at our clinic—instructing people how to fill out forms, helping elderly patients in and out of their paper gowns, preparing children for their shots. It made me feel good to soothe patients who were worried about a medical visit, and it made the doctors’ jobs easier. Once he saw that I had made a niche for myself, Bob was more than happy to keep me on. Though my job title was appointment liaison, everyone in the office referred to me as the concierge.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Francine or the other people I worked with. But I knew what their reaction would be if I told them Dawn was coming back to live with me, and I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with it. Start crying? Get defensive and snap at them? I didn’t feel up to any of those things.
I thought about skipping my rehab group the next day, because I knew I couldn’t get away with not talking about it there. But if I missed the session, there’d be a follow-up call from Barbara, the group leader, and I’d have to explain. I didn’t feel like explaining, so in the end I drove as usual to Pine Manor, where the joke was that there weren’t any pine trees around and not a whole lot of manners, either.
We called the group Tough Birds. Officially TBI stood for traumatic brain injury, but one of the other group members, my English friend Trudie, had dubbed us Tough Birds Inc. early on, and we all preferred that. If you had told me three years earlier that I’d want to spend a couple of hours every two weeks in a hospital basement with people who had traumatic brain injuries—who complained about hearing themselves say things like “Button the shoelace” and “What time does it cost?”, how they couldn’t calculate the tip in restaurants, and how little things made them fly off the handle—I would have said you were nuts. Of course, I wasn’t one of them then.
When it was my turn to check in at the beginning of group and I told everyone that Dawn was coming home to live for a while, I could feel the tension spread among our little circle of dented folding chairs. Nelson, our only male member, twirled his gray ponytail around his finger and said, “Just be careful out there.” It was his stock line, which he’d picked up from some TV show, and it usually meant he was finished listening to one person and ready to move on to the next.
“How did you come to that decision, Hanna?” Barbara asked, leaning forward the way she always did to show she thought something one of us said was important. She was an intense, big-boned woman with frizzy hair that looked windblown even when she was indoors, and huge glasses that came into and went out of style in the eighties. We had all learned that every time she pushed the glasses up on her nose, she believed she was on the trail of something psychologically significant. She pushed them up on her nose now, when she asked me this question.
One of the things we were working on, as a group, was identifying our own thought processes when it came to decisions. We were supposed to slow ourselves down—because a lot of us tended to act impulsively—and force ourselves to make active choices, instead of just going with the first thing that came into our heads.
I told Barbara I hadn’t had to make a decision, because Dawn was my daughter and I loved her. (I would have said it was a “no-brainer,” but we had banned that phrase from the group.) “We were always close,” I said. “You know I’ve been lonely. Why wouldn’t I want her home with me?”
When no one answered—I knew what they were thinking—I got up to go to the refreshment table. Trudie and I were the only ones who ever contributed anything; I always made a batch of my mother’s oatmeal crinkles, and Trudie always picked up a can of Hawaiian Punch, which made everyone laugh the first time because they’d expected something more decorous from the British lady.
At the table, I turned my back to the group and picked up a cup with trembling fingers. Trudie came over and led me by the elbow into the hall. “Are you sure about this, Hanna?” she said, in her accented murmur.
Trudie was much younger than my mother would have been if she were still alive, but she reminded me of her, nevertheless with silver-white hair that always grew too long before she got it cut, and the sweaters she wore even when it was hot out. For as long as I could remember, my mother had suffered a perpetual chill, and when I learned that Trudie did, too, I felt an immediate connection to her. Though of course I knew better, I sometimes chose to believe, when I needed to, that in my friendship with Trudie it
was my mother showing up, all these years after her death, to bring me a little peace.
Before I could answer Trudie’s question, Barbara stuck her head into the hall and asked us to rejoin the group. I started back in, but not before Trudie caught my arm at the door and whispered, “Just because you give birth to someone doesn’t mean you owe her for the rest of your life. For God’s sake, Hanna—if anything, she owes you.”
But Trudie didn’t have any children; her husband had died young, and she had never remarried. What could she tell me about being a mother?
* * *
As much as I would have liked to use the phone to tell Iris that her sister was coming back, I knew I had to do it in person. I called in to work the next morning and told Francine I needed the day off, then put Abby in the hatchback and drove out to the little town where Iris and Archie lived, though at the end of the summer he’d moved out, renting an apartment a few blocks from the house they’d bought near the hospital where he worked as a physician in the endoscopy department. Iris had just started medical school at BU when she became pregnant, but then took a leave of absence after Joe and I were attacked, convincing Archie to accept a job offer in western Massachusetts so they’d be closer to me. We’d all expected her to return to her studies by now, but I’d learned the hard way not to bring it up, because when I did, it made her angry. “What am I supposed to do, commute back and forth to Boston with a kid?” she’d snapped the last time I asked.
I worried that she was depressed, still suffering the emotional effects from what had happened to Joe and me. She’d never lost the weight from being pregnant, and had gained even more in the years since. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she was over two hundred pounds now, and it worried me. If she’d come into the medical office for a checkup, we would have considered her obese.
I knew Archie was worried about her, too. Not just because she’d gotten so heavy, but because she seemed to be trapped inside herself. She couldn’t get out of her own way. From the time she was old enough to walk, I had never seen my older daughter look as if she didn’t know which direction the next step should take her. But now she had been this way for the past three years. She lost track of important papers, forgot appointments, spent too much time in bed—the opposite of all the things she had learned from and observed in her father, and chosen as the way to conduct her own life. Archie moved out because he was desperate to jog her out of this altered state; he believed that a separation would be the “bottom” she needed to hit before she came to her senses and rescued herself. But he’d been living in the apartment for a couple of months now, and it hadn’t happened yet.
I loved my son-in-law, and I knew Iris appreciated the fact that he was so like Joe in his attention to discipline and detail. Every time Archie played a game of Scrabble, he snapped a photograph of the finished board, and kept the photos arranged chronologically in a notebook. His books, CDs, and DVDs were all alphabetized. Those slightly obsessive personality traits Joe and Archie shared, which could be endearing, had a flip side in the form of the high standards they set for other people as well as for themselves. Iris had always thrived on trying to meet and exceed those standards. But after her father died, she seemed to lose her motivation. Even though I understood why Archie thought she needed to be jolted back to reality, I hoped he wouldn’t give up on her too soon.
The colors had peaked earlier in the month, but the trees on the turnpike still held most of their leaves, and the day was glorious: warmer than it should have been for the season, the sun misting off the mountains and looking like white breath from the sky. Such sights reminded me why it was that people loved to be alive, and for fleeting moments that made me want to cry, I was grateful I could still feel like one of them.
Crunching leaves under my wheels as I pulled into the driveway at ten thirty, I half-hoped I might find Iris sitting outside on the stoop with Josie. It made me smile to imagine my granddaughter running to the car to greet me.
We had a routine for when we came together at the beginning of a visit. She would raise her arms, I’d pick her up so that her legs straddled my waist, and she’d place a hand on each of my shoulders to steady herself. Then she’d lean in, close her eyes, and reach out to begin touching the damaged side of my face, starting with the forehead—where the skin met in a seam, having been sewn back together—and working her way down to the edge of my eye socket, the uneven cheek and mouth, and ending with the chin, the one part left intact by the surgeries. It was as if she were a blind person trying to “see” my features with her fingers. I don’t know why she did it that way, with her eyes closed, but I didn’t want her to think I minded, so I never asked. When she had finished going down the side of my face, she always opened her eyes and said with satisfaction, “It’s Grandma,” as if there might have been some question—as if it had been her job to identify me.
I looked forward to the ritual. But today they were not outside to greet me on the stoop. And when I walked Abby up to the front door and rang the bell, nobody answered. I tried a few more times, and then, since I could see Iris’s car parked in the garage, I leaned on the buzzer for a good fifteen seconds before finally hearing movement inside the house. She appeared with a wailing Josie wrapped around her leg, and through the bubbled glass of the foyer window, before she realized I could see her, I caught a look of annoyed dismay on my daughter’s face.
“Oh, Mom, sorry—I thought we said more like noon,” she said. “The house is a mess. But come in.”
I’d told her I’d be driving out after breakfast, and she had said that was fine. But I bit back the temptation to remind her of it. In the old days, before Joe died, she would have said the house was a mess and it wouldn’t have been true. Iris had either inherited or over the years come to imitate her father’s preoccupation with orderliness; I could never have counted how many times, during dinner, one of them would get up from the table to straighten a frame on the wall by moving it so slightly that Dawn and I couldn’t tell the difference.
But after her father’s death, the Iris I’d always known just fell to pieces. It would not be an exaggeration to say she had become a slob. I stepped into the foyer over a pile of laundry that had apparently been tossed down from the top of the stairs.
She came toward me and I waited for a hug, but instead she reached to brush the hair back from where I always let it fall to conceal as much of my face as I could. “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Mom. It just draws attention to it. Anyway, you have nothing to be ashamed of—nothing to hide.”
“Easy for you to say.” Even through my irritation over her saying I’d come too early, I marveled for perhaps the thousandth time at how beautiful this child of mine was, with her thick brown hair that managed to hold both wave and gloss even when she hadn’t washed it in a few days; the shape and tone of her face, which was an appealing median between circle and oval, with Joe’s dark intelligent eyes and a complexion that had always been smooth no matter what she ate; and perhaps most prominent, a proud set to her shoulders it was impossible not to notice. The pounds she’d put on had not traveled to her face, and even the extra flesh she carried around her hips, stomach, and legs she managed to pull off with confidence, almost as if she had decided to become overweight on purpose. On her, it almost looked fashionable. Though I know how crude it sounds, what I thought sometimes when I looked at her was How did she come out of me?
I’d recognized early on that Iris belonged to one set of the female population, Dawn and I to the other. In addition to her striking looks, my older daughter was athletic and graceful; from the time she could barely walk, we noted her quick reflexes and eye-hand coordination in almost everything she did. When Dawn was almost three, she still couldn’t catch the biggest Nerf ball lobbed directly into her arms from six inches away.
Until her amblyopia was diagnosed and we understood that it was at least in part a problem of depth perception, I thought Dawn just took after me in her lack of physical grace. “She’s a klutz
like me, isn’t she,” I whispered to Joe once, and he shushed me, worried the girls might overhear. Too late he added, “Hanna, you’re not a klutz.” Even though most of the kids at school understood that Dawn’s problem was at least partly physical, it didn’t keep them from hooting every time she dropped her tray in the cafeteria.
When they were little, I encouraged my girls to play together. It was foolish of me, but I thought that maybe some of Iris’s physical talent would rub off on Dawn. Either that or Dawn would learn more about how to move, from watching her sister. I taught them games I remembered watching other kids play through the window on Humboldt Street. My mother wouldn’t allow me to join them, saying she was afraid I’d get hurt, but even then I sensed that she was also saving me from the humiliation of losing constantly. I protested, knowing we both understood I was doing it because it allowed me to pretend I didn’t see through her.
Ring toss, beanbag toss, hopscotch, jump rope—Iris and Dawn loved it all. When I showed them the three-legged race, wrapping their inside legs together with an ace bandage, they hopped around the house or the garden shouting, “Look at us, we’re the same person!” There was no sound I treasured more then, or even now in my memory, than the sound of them giggling together as they tried to move in unison, then fell to the floor or the grass in a half hug, half wrestle before finally rolling apart to their separate selves. Eventually, Iris tired of it and preferred spending time with her friends, and I remember how sad I felt the day Dawn appeared in the kitchen dragging the ace bandage behind her, asking her sister to play We’re the Same Person, and Iris said it was too babyish for her.
Iris played on almost every girls’ sports team at least once during her four years in high school. The corkboard in her bedroom still contained all her varsity letters. She kept up her exercise in college and after her marriage, until Joe and I got attacked in our bed. It hurt me in an almost physical way now, to see how she’d let her body go.
Lacy Eye Page 6
