It was a little early to tell yet, but it seemed that my granddaughter was going to take after her mother more than she would Dawn and me; she could sink the ball into the child’s-level basketball hoop in her bedroom just about every time. But now she was still clinging to Iris’s leg, and Iris said to her, “Can you stop crying, sweetie? Look who’s here.”
Josie took a step backward and shook her head. “It’s the dog,” Iris explained to me. “She just decided she’s afraid of them.”
She had always called Abby “the dog,” the same way Joe had. They were not animal people like Dawn and me. Sometimes they tried to humor us, but more often we could tell they just thought we were silly, spending so much affection on a creature they believed it wasn’t possible to have a conversation with (despite the fact that Dawn and I—and even Abby herself—tried to prove to them otherwise).
With Josie retreating, poor Abby cocked her head at me with a question on her face, as if she knew we were talking about her. “Do you think you could put her back in the car for a while?” Iris asked. “Until Josie calms down?”
“I’m not putting her in the car.” I tried not to show how the suggestion rankled me. “She was just cooped up in there for more than an hour. Josie, honey, come here and say hi.” I picked up Abby’s paw to wave it at my granddaughter.
But Josie pulled back even further and started to shriek. I bit my lip and said nothing, directing Abby to a corner of the living room, while Iris soothed Josie and set her up in front of the TV, which was already on, with a snack dish of salt-free, fish-shaped whole wheat crackers. (I knew these were for my benefit. I knew that the cupboard contained packages of Oreos and Chips Ahoy, which Iris broke into when she thought Josie wasn’t looking—Josie had shown me her mother’s stash once when I babysat—but I’d never confronted Iris about it.)
Iris looked at me. “I don’t always have the TV on, you know.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“I know what you were thinking.”
There was nothing I could say to dissuade her, mainly because she was right. Using the TV as a babysitter, especially this early in the morning, was not something I would have expected of her. But then, we’d all changed from the people we used to be.
Iris sat down across from me, and I saw that her face had softened. “I’m actually glad you came a little early, Mom. I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” she mumbled, and her words filled me with dread.
I wanted to say, Can’t we just have some time first? Can’t I just sit here for a minute and catch my breath? Can’t we talk about something meaningless, like the weather (in the past few years, I’d come to appreciate the relief in chatting about meaningless things) before I have to hear something that’s going to change my life?
Because I could tell it was going to, from Iris’s tone.
“I have something to tell you, too,” I said, hoping that if I stalled long enough, she would forget what she wanted to say.
Her eyes narrowed. “What?”
But I faltered suddenly. “You first.” Maybe I’m wrong, I tried to tell myself, as I braced for whatever she was going to drop on me. Maybe it was good news, not bad. “You’re not pregnant again, are you?” I asked, actually daring to think for a moment that I might be right.
“God, no!” She was so startled that she dropped a handful of crackers on the floor, where Abby sniffed at them before turning up her nose. “You think I’d make that mistake again?”
“Mistake?” I looked over at my granddaughter, who appeared mesmerized by a cartoon.
Iris said, “I mean the mistake of not telling you right away. I would never take the chance of you having an accident on your way here. If I were pregnant, I’d tell you on the phone as soon as I knew.” Her tone was accusatory even though it had been her own decision, the first time around, to save the news of her pregnancy as a Christmas present for us. As things turned out, with Joe dying over Thanksgiving, he never found out that he was going to have a grandchild.
She was about to tell me something I did not want to hear. I felt this with as much certainty as I’d ever felt anything; I could tell with a thorn in my chest that the bomb was about to fall and there was nothing I could do to stop it. She said, “Archie and I are talking about things. We want to make this—us—work.”
When she paused, hesitating about how to proceed, I told her through the thudding in my heart that I was happy to hear it. She gave a tense smile and said, “The only thing is, he’s going to be interviewing at UCSF when we go out there next month. They told him that with his training, he has a good shot at one of their clinic jobs.”
It took me a moment to understand that “SF” meant San Francisco. “You’re going to his parents’ for Thanksgiving?” I said, though this was not the question I intended to ask.
“Oh, Mom.” Another sigh. “You know we are. It’s the only time we see them all year. Archie was going to just take Josie by himself, but now that we’re talking the way we are—well, it made sense for us all to go out together.”
“I know, but”—the real question made me sway, inside, for a moment—“when will I ever see Josie if you live out there?”
Iris leaned forward in an attitude of aggressive enthusiasm, the force of it causing me to sit back in my own seat. “That’s just it. If we did this, we’d want you to come with us. Move somewhere else, start over. Watch Josie grow up.” She scrutinized my face carefully for a reaction.
I felt totally blindsided, to the extent that my vision actually blurred for a few seconds. “I’m not really a California person,” I stammered. It was the first thing that occurred to me, although even as I said it I knew how weak an excuse it was. What I sensed inside me was panic, starting in my center and working its way up to my throat.
I could not imagine leaving. None of my friends or family seemed to understand how I could bear to continue living in that house, which was how they always referred to it—as “that house.” When it was time to make plans for me to leave rehab and I told the members of Tough Birds that I was going back home, I heard some of them suck in their breath with shock. Trudie said, “You can’t possibly be serious, Hanna. That’s just out-and-out masochism.”
Iris felt the same way. She didn’t use the word masochism, but she’d told me before that I must be living in an extreme state of denial. “Like your delusion that Dawn had nothing to do with it,” she said, and I reminded her to please not say things like that to me again.
But not only could I bear it, I wanted to live there. If it bothered me to remain in the house where Joe had been murdered, it was far enough down inside me that I didn’t notice it. Couldn’t any of us be killed, anywhere at any time, by a fiend like Rud Petty? Did the fact that Joe died there mean I had to give up all the good memories I had of our life together on Wildwood Lane?
It was true that sometimes when I was going up or down the stairs, I thought of the trial testimony—Kenneth Thornburgh talking about how Joe was found on the landing, where he had dragged himself up again, bleeding “profusely” from his head, after somehow making it down to the kitchen with a crushed skull and attempting to unload the dishwasher. Though I think this detail seemed odd to other people, it made perfect sense to me, knowing Joe, that even through the shock of such severe injury, his instinct was to put things in order and follow his routine. The police speculated that he probably tried but failed to take his tee-shirt off in the bedroom, intending to put on clean clothes when he got up. He had only enough strength to lift the shirt halfway. When they found him, his belly was exposed. Joe would have hated that. He was always a modest man, so that kind of information made me cringe on his behalf.
But hearing about it at the trial was kind of like listening to other people tell you their dreams. You follow the plot, but it isn’t as if you’ve had, yourself, the experience they’re describing. It isn’t your dream.
If I were to have sold my house and moved to another one, what would I have had left? Photograph albums
, yes, and the mementoes I’d saved in boxes in the attic—the report cards, the Brownie sashes, the ornaments made out of cotton balls glued to egg carton cups. But the rooms themselves were what had contained us all those years, shaped us into a family.
What I remembered were Christmas mornings, when the girls thundered downstairs to open their stockings before it was light out; the “fashion shows” they put on for Joe and me when they were little, modeling their outfits for the first day of school; tears (mostly Dawn’s) over homework at the kitchen table; science projects being planned and constructed on the counter, which was also the place where I left out oatmeal crinkles to cool after they baked, letting the girls think they fooled me when they took cookies from the sheets and tried to rearrange the remaining ones so I wouldn’t notice; Saturday nights, before Iris began going out with her friends all the time, when the four of us (well, five, if you counted Abby, which of course we did) took our habitual spots on couches and pillows in the family room and watched movies, sometimes all of us falling asleep until somebody’s snore or sigh or fart woke us up, laughing; the blizzard we had in October one year, when we lost power and spent most of two days reading to one another from our favorite books in front of the fireplace; later, after both girls moved out, the suppers Joe and I ate together, often on TV tables in front of the news, not because we didn’t care to talk to each other but because we had already said so much of it, and were content to hear, together, what was going on in the larger world.
I could name such memories all day. Times like these were what made us a family. If I was grateful for anything about the attack I suffered, it was that it failed to erase any images from before that night. The house was the only thing I had left of when we were an us. And even though us had been shattered, I couldn’t bring myself to let go of how much the house meant to me.
Besides, I’d been advised that people wouldn’t necessarily be lining up to buy property where a murder had occurred. The Lizzie Borden House. In real estate terms, 17 Wildwood Lane carried the stigma of “psychological impact.”
There was a more practical reason, too. The house was paid for; Joe had taken out mortgage insurance, which I didn’t know until Tom Whitty told me after Joe died. With the economy in such rough shape and the housing market so bad, it wouldn’t make sense to try to sell it at what I would get for it now.
Sitting across from me after proposing that we all move to the opposite coast, Iris seemed to read my thoughts. “It’s not like you’re underwater, Mom. And you have plenty to live on. Even if you sell it for less than you want to, it’s still cash in your pocket. And you’d be doing it for a good reason.” When she saw I still struggled with a response, she pulled out her last card. “We’d probably look for a place with an in-law suite, so you wouldn’t even have to buy anything.”
Beneath the anxiety I felt as she spoke, I recognized how touched I was that she and Archie had thought this so far through, making a provision for me in their plans. But then it occurred to me that she was likely doing it more for her father than for me; I was sure she’d made some kind of promise to him after he died, whether she knew it or not, to take care of me in his absence. It was why, after the attack, she’d persuaded Archie that they should move from Boston to the Berkshires, closer to where I lived.
But she couldn’t ask Archie to keep his own life on hold forever. I understood that. And I also understood that she herself probably relished the idea of moving as far away as possible—at least geographically—from the event that had destroyed us as a family.
“Let me think about it,” I said, though in fact I had no intention of doing so. I felt as if I were being abandoned, or at least forced to choose between two options I didn’t like. And despite knowing that it was perverse of me, and wrongheaded, I said, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Dawn might want to move back home someday.” In that moment, I’d decided not to carry out my plan to tell Iris that Dawn was, in fact, coming back to Everton. As glad as I was to hear that Iris and Archie were talking about reconciling, I needed time to absorb the idea that they were probably going to leave and take my granddaughter with them.
I’m not proud to remember the satisfaction I felt at the expression I saw in my older daughter’s eyes at that moment. Then I watched her brow wrinkle in suspicion, as if she had figured something out. “You said you had something to tell me, too,” she said. “Is she coming home?” I also heard the words she wasn’t saying: Are you crazy?
“Of course not,” I said, answering the unspoken question as much as the one she’d actually asked. In the back of my mind, I told myself that I’d figure out, later, how to escape this lie. For now, it was what I needed.
“I thought it might make you happy to hear I’ve decided to testify at the new trial,” I said. “If I can get myself to remember.” I hadn’t intended to mention it, during this visit—I figured there was plenty of time. And probably, without realizing, I wanted to preserve the option to chicken out.
But I was proud of myself for my fast thinking in presenting this as the reason I’d come to see her. For a moment, I saw a flash of doubt in Iris’s face, as if she thought I might be playing some kind of trick. She’d wanted so much for me to take the stand, during the first trial, that when I couldn’t do so, it created a strain between us. Not one that we ever talked about, but one we both felt, and one that charged every interaction we’d had since then. Now she got up and came over to hug me. “Thank God,” she said. The relief in her voice scared me a little. What if, after really trying, I still couldn’t produce anything reliable for Gail Nazarian to use? “Mom, it’s the right thing.”
I felt uneasy for a moment, because her words implied what I’d always guessed, that she believed I was somehow choosing not to recall the events of that night. During the first trial and maybe even still, she believed as the prosecutor did that I was only pretending not to remember anything, in an effort to protect Dawn. But I didn’t feel up to arguing with her now. “I don’t know if it’ll be that easy,” I told her. “I get bits and pieces in my head sometimes—”
“You do?” She looked surprised. “Like what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Flashes of things. Noises, a few shapes.” I had decided not to reveal yet, to anyone, the disturbing possibility that I had remembered a tattoo. “That’s the problem; I can’t tell what they are. I couldn’t get up there on that stand today, if they asked me to.”
She put her hands on my shoulders and looked me squarely in the eye. “Whatever it takes,” she said firmly, “you do. Archie can hook you up with that woman at the hospital who does hypnosis—you just say the word.”
I didn’t tell her that the district attorney had forbidden this, or that I wasn’t sure I believed in hypnosis. All I said was, “Maybe. But I want to see if I can do it on my own first.” Casting about for a way to change the subject, I let my glance fall on the framed photograph at the end of the mantelpiece. I tried to look away before Iris noticed, but it wasn’t in time.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.” I put up my hand to shush her and looked over to see if Josie had heard the word, but my granddaughter was still riveted to the TV. “You’re looking at this,” Iris said, grabbing the frame and shoving it under me, so that I had no choice but to see it. “Every time you come here, you look at this picture, and every time I know you want to say something to me, but you never do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but even to me the words sounded like another lie.
“Say it, Mom. Say what you want to say when you see this picture.” She wasn’t backing down, even though she could no doubt see what it was doing to me. I made a few more mumbles—nothing that made any sense—and finally, when I felt angry enough, I said, “Fine! What do you think you’re doing, putting this on display like that?” I stopped just before adding, What’s the matter with you?
The photograph was from Iris and Ar
chie’s wedding: the bride and groom flanked on one side by Joe and me, and on the other by Dawn and Rud Petty. Having gotten me to say what she wanted to hear, Iris moved to replace it carefully on the shelf.
“I keep that picture there because it’s my wedding day, and the truth is that Rud Petty was at my wedding. Just because I wish it weren’t true doesn’t mean I can change the facts.” She lifted a finger to brush Joe’s framed face with her fingertip, and I knew we were both remembering that day, though from different angles and with a different combination of feelings. She must have misread something in my face then, because she went on to say, “What, Mom, you think I should Photoshop Rud Petty out of the picture? Maybe I could bring Dad back to life while I’m at it. As long as we’re going to live in fantasy land.”
She had never learned the phrase her father used, lacy eye, when he believed I was trying to make something prettier than it actually was. It originated the day we brought Dawn to the ophthalmologist to hear his diagnosis, knowing what he would say even though I harbored a hope that we might be wrong and he would tell us it was just a temporary condition that would go away on its own. During the drive to the doctor’s office, Dawn nattered away in the backseat, not seeming to notice that Joe and I barely responded to her; it was as if she were in her own little world, a phrase we had used about our younger daughter in the past with amused affection, but which was beginning to seem less and less amusing—and scarier—as time went on and she didn’t outgrow it.
After the doctor had examined her, Dawn sat in the corner of the office looking at a baby’s book that was far too young for her—I think it might have been Goodnight, Moon—while I tried to keep my fists unclenched in my lap. Next to me, Joe asked the doctor questions and took notes. A few times I looked over to see whether Dawn was listening, but she seemed oblivious, turning pages and murmuring the words of the book to herself under her breath. When we got back into the car to return home, I asked her, “Honey, did you understand what the doctor said?” and I saw Joe glance in his rearview mirror to check her reaction, while I turned in the seat to look at her.
Lacy Eye Page 7
