I set my fork down, hoping to give the impression that I was resting between bites rather than that I found the dinner inedible. “She can’t be trusted.”
“God, Mommy. All you ever do is see the worst in people.” Dawn rose abruptly and clattered her plate into the sink. I was so taken aback—it was so unlike the Dawn I had always known for her to say something like that to me, let alone throw down a plate—that I didn’t manage to respond before she flounced into the family room, where I heard her flipping through TV channels and playing Angry Birds on her phone in a way that would have driven Joe crazy. I was used to it by now.
When the doorbell rang a few minutes later, I picked up the bag of peanut butter cups I’d bought at the drugstore that morning. I brushed my hair over to hide my face as much as possible (the last thing I wanted was to scare away some little kid) and thought, too late, that I should have bought a pretty mask in case somebody rang the bell seeking candy.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Standing there were not any children I didn’t recognize, but Iris and Josie, whose sturdy little torso was wrapped in a cube of yellow foam rubber. “Trick or treat,” Iris said, nudging Josie, who turned suddenly shy and concealed herself behind her mother’s leg.
“What are you doing here?” Hearing the question land in the air between us, I recognized how ungracious it sounded. But as glad as I was to see them, my heart froze in anticipation of the confrontation that was no doubt about to take place.
“Nice to see you, too, Mom. Josie wanted to show you her costume.”
“Oh. Good! It’s a—is she cheese?” My brain seemed to have frozen, too. I had no idea what my granddaughter was supposed to be.
“No. SpongeBob.” Iris carried Josie beyond me into the living room, then set her down and began shrugging off her jacket. When she saw that I looked at her blankly, she added, “SquarePants?”
Now I saw that the block of yellow encasing my granddaughter showed a face of blue googly eyes and a pair of buck teeth hanging down from a grin, and I vaguely remembered watching the cartoon with Josie once when I was babysitting.
“SpongeBob—of course you are!” I picked her up so that she could go through her routine of feeling my face, but she must have sensed the tension in my body as I held her, and for once she didn’t lift her hands.
I could tell that Iris was a little angry and a little hurt, on her own behalf and Josie’s, at my lukewarm reception. “You could at least pretend to be excited. We drove all this way.” She wore a stained Snoopy sweatshirt over a sloppy pair of jeans. Looking at her, I wondered if she’d gained even more weight in the short time since I’d seen her last.
“I am excited. I’m just surprised, that’s all.” I set Josie down again and tried desperately to think of a way to prevent my daughters from facing each other. “Do you want to go out trick-or-treating on my street?” I asked, motioning to the door they had just entered and reaching in the closet for my own coat, but it was too late as I heard Dawn coming in from the other room.
Josie had been in the middle of reaching for the bag of candy I’d set down on the table, but she paused abruptly at this new person’s arrival on the scene. It almost looked to me as if she noticed a resemblance between her mother and the stranger, though it was rare for anyone to take them for sisters without knowing it was the case.
Before I could offer any words of preparation, Iris said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. What the fuck is this?” It was a measure of her shock and consternation that she said the word twice in front of Josie.
“I was going to tell you,” I said, feeling myself retreat from the force of her spit-out ire.
“Oh, my God.” Dawn had stopped short when she realized who it was she’d heard me talking to, but now she moved closer to peer at Iris with her eyes slit, as if she didn’t trust what she saw before her. “You got fat.” Her voice contained a mix of alarm and fascination.
“Shut up.” Iris reached for a peanut butter cup and opened the package with a savage rip. I thought she might just stuff it whole into her mouth, but instead she seemed to catch herself at the last moment, and handed it down to Josie instead.
“Is there any way,” I said weakly to both my daughters, “that this could be not awful?”
“I don’t see how,” Iris said. “Considering she”—she hesitated, glancing down at Josie, and tried to rein in her voice—“considering she’s responsible for Dad’s death. And would have been responsible for yours, too, Mom. I don’t understand how you can even let her inside this house.”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Dawn said, and I saw her shoulders form the familiar slump she had always worn when around her pretty sister.
“Somebody got killed?” Josie’s mouth opened to show half-chewed chocolate.
Iris glared at Dawn. “Never mind,” she told Josie. “We don’t listen to her.”
Dawn had knelt to bring herself to eye level with her niece, whom she was seeing for the first time. “You must be Josephine,” she said softly. “I’m your Aunt Dawnie.” Josie’s eyes furrowed with suspicion, and it pained me to realize that Iris might never even have told her daughter that she had an aunt. If she had, she would not have used the name Dawnie, which I’d never heard before. “Did your mother ever teach you to play We’re the Same Person? Want me to show you how?” She put her hand out toward Josie’s, and for a moment it seemed that my granddaughter might reach out, too.
“Hey.” Iris yanked Josie back within her reach. “You”—she pointed at her sister—“stay away from my kid.”
Well, I thought, at least this time it’s out in the open. The last time my girls had been in a room together was a year and a half earlier, when I’d had surgery to relieve the pressure on my brain caused by the blunt-force trauma in the attack. Iris left Josie at home with Archie for a weekend while she made the trip to Albany for my operation and to make sure I got settled in at home afterward.
Without telling us beforehand, Dawn flew in from New Mexico just for the day, having booked a return flight for that same night. She hadn’t been in touch with either Iris or me, but she said Peter Cifforelli had informed her that I was having the operation, and she wanted to be there. When she appeared in my room at the hospital after the surgery, I thought Iris might walk over and strangle her. Instead she said to her sister, “You have one hell of a nerve,” and left the room. I could tell she wanted to give Dawn a shove on the way out, and stopped herself only because she knew it would upset me.
That day, Dawn struck me as paler than usual, and unhealthy, and I was about to ask her about it when she reached down, grabbed my hand, and held it up to her face. “Iris still thinks I’m guilty, doesn’t she?” she murmured.
My chest puckered from the inside, and I tried to tell her it wasn’t true. But we both knew I was lying. Dawn gave me a quiet little smile and said, “It’s all right. Someday she’ll know better.” I tried to apologize for the way Iris had acted, but Dawn just told me to “Ssh, ssh, Mommy,” and she even stroked my forehead, the way I used to do to them when they were children. Then she asked about Abby, and I told her the dog was doing okay. But when I tried to elaborate, she held a hand up to interrupt me. “I can’t hear about what’s wrong with her,” she said. “It’s too painful.” It took me a moment to comprehend what she’d said. Touching the gauze at my temples, I was confused, because a moment earlier I’d felt so hurt on her behalf, but now I wanted to say, More painful than the fact that I’m lying here with this bandage on my head? The phrase Ding-Dong Dawn sang through my mind, and the words of Dawn’s first-grade teacher came back to me in an unwelcome flash: It just seems like there’s something missing.
She stayed at the hospital for an hour or so, sitting beside me, neither of us talking much, and then she said that for the sake of peace in the family, she thought she should leave. She was scheduled to take a plane back to Santa Fe in a few hours.
“But it’s such a short visit,” I said. I was tired and wanted
nothing more than to sleep, but I thought I should at least pretend to object.
It was fine, Dawn said—she’d just wanted to make sure I was okay. Of course, I was anything but okay, but I knew what she meant, and I let it go. She left before Iris came back, and nothing was said about the fact that she had been there.
Since I’d wished more than anything, growing up, that I had a sibling—especially a sister—I’d always regretted that my girls stopped being close around the time Dawn’s eye problem was diagnosed. Once they both moved out of the house, I thought they might find their old connection again as adults. But Rud Petty had made that impossible.
Standing in the living room now, I hoped that I might still have some authority when it came to the two of them. “Iris, Dawn came home because she’s sorry about what happened. And I invited her.” I did my best to sound convincing, but I could see the flare in Iris’s nostrils as I spoke, and knew what I’d said hadn’t been enough. “She wants to—what do you call it?—make amends.”
Iris snorted. “Amends, right.” She ventured closer to her sister, and I was surprised to see that Dawn managed to hold her ground without flinching. “How do you think you’re going to do that?” At the end of her question the words trailed off, and she leaned more closely to study her sister’s face. “Your eye’s pointing out again,” she said, and though I wanted to believe it was sympathy I heard in her voice, I was afraid it was only the same fascination Dawn had felt in calling Iris fat—with maybe a little triumph thrown in.
I had explicitly avoided asking Dawn about her eye since she’d been home, even though of course I’d noticed the same thing Iris was seeing now. The “lazy” eye, operated on seven years earlier, was reverting to its amblyopic state. I held my breath, wondering how Dawn would answer.
“It is not,” she said, in a tone I tried not to recognize as hatred. “What’s wrong with you people? My eye got fixed. Or did you forget that?” She made a dismissive sound between her lips, as if to say she wouldn’t have expected anything else of us.
Iris and I looked at each other. I begged her with my expression to let it drop, but when she turned back to Dawn, I knew there would be no such luck. “I don’t know what planet you’re living on,” she said to her sister, “or what mirror you’re looking in, but that eye”—she held a finger up to Dawn’s face—“is pointing out again. Not as bad as it used to, but it’s on its way.”
“You’re just saying that because I said you were fat,” Dawn said, then pounded up the stairs to her bedroom and slammed the door.
The sound made Josie run to her mother, and Iris drew her up in the best hug she could manage for a child wrapped in foam rubber. Then she turned to me. “How could you?”
“I was going to tell you when I came out last time,” I murmured. “But you were talking about moving to California, and that hurt.”
“But I asked you to come with us!”
“And now you know why I can’t.”
“The idea of the two of you in this house together makes me physically sick.” Without even seeming to realize, Iris ate one of the peanut butter cups Josie had opened, then reached for another before swallowing the first. I looked away from the smears around her mouth as she spoke. “It’s not safe.”
“Of course it is. We’re fine.” My voice trembled.
“Mom, I’m worried about you.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.” I paused, hearing Dawn stomp out of her bedroom and into the upstairs bathroom. “It would probably be best if you take Josie and…” I trailed off before saying leave, but it was clear Iris got the message. For a moment, it looked as if she might cry, but then she allowed anger to fill that space. She scooped up Josie and muttered, “This isn’t over,” as she carried her daughter out to the car.
Only a minute or two passed between their departure and the sound of Dawn clomping back downstairs. She had on a pair of pajamas Joe and I had given her one Christmas, years ago, when she was obsessed with the TV program The X-Files. She’d discovered the show when she was in middle school, and promptly began covering the walls of her room with posters related to aliens and the paranormal. “This is foolishness,” Joe said to me one night, when he’d tried to get Dawn’s attention during a commercial and she shushed him. “Hanna, we can’t let her start believing this stuff.”
“She’s just having fun,” I told him. “Shouldn’t we be glad she has something to think about, besides how unhappy she is about her eye?” This was only a few months after he’d originally said no to the surgery, so he gave in without too much argument. What I didn’t tell Joe (because I knew he’d consider it silly) was that I remembered my own days as a Star Trek worshiper, walking around giving the Vulcan salute to everyone, especially my father when I wanted to annoy him. I practiced the salute so much back then that I still find my fingers separating into that formation sometimes, all these years later; my brain trauma may have taken away the ability to add numbers, but the Vulcan salute remains intact.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE was printed across the front of Dawn’s pajama top, and there was a small rip in the word truth. I expected her to say something about meeting her niece for the first time, but instead, when she plopped down next to me on the couch, she asked, “You don’t think what Iris said is true, do you?”
I was startled she would bring it up so abruptly, when we had both been so careful to avoid talking about the attack in any kind of a direct way. “Of course not,” I told her, though as I recall it took everything in me not to look away from her as I said it. “What are you talking about? I know you had nothing to do with that night.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head a little impatiently, as if that night were of no interest to her. “I don’t mean that. I mean what she said about my eye. It’s not really going out again, is it?”
I hesitated without wanting to let her see it. Her eye was indeed straying again; there was no doubt about it. But I saw that she needed me to tell her it was hardly noticeable, so I did. In my mind, I reasoned that she must know the answer—she looked in the mirror every day—but that for some reason, at that moment, she needed the comfort and relief of hearing from me that it wasn’t so bad.
She pushed her hair away from her face, another old gesture that stirred a wave of nostalgia in me, and displayed the smile I hadn’t seen in many years; probably I hadn’t seen it, in fact, since she became a teenager. It was the smile I remembered most vividly from bath time when she was a child. Up until we rejected her bid for surgery before she began middle school, Dawn’s favorite part of the day was after dinner and before bed, when she and I secluded ourselves in the bathroom the girls shared and spent an hour or more together, talking about things that were of no importance and, especially as she got older, about things that were. She was always careful to signal me when she wanted to bring up something more substantive than the sweet but relatively directionless chatter we often exchanged. “Can we have one of our discussions, Mom?” she’d ask, as I laid her pajamas on the bed while the bath water ran. When she was settled in the tub, she began talking, usually about her eyes.
“Why doesn’t Daddy want me to get better?” she asked once, and I said, “Oh, honey, he does—it’s just that he doesn’t believe the operation is the best way to go about it.”
The smile came when she stepped out of the tub, into the towel I held open for her, and looked up at me to say, “You’re my favorite mother.”
“I’m your only mother,” I’d say, rubbing her wet hair and thinking—for some reason I never figured out—that I shouldn’t let her know how good her words made me feel. Looking back, I realize it was superstition: I was afraid that if I showed her how much her love meant to me, she’d decide she didn’t want to give it anymore.
Sitting with my coffee the next morning, Dawn still asleep, I was wondering if it was too early to call and apologize to Iris when my own phone rang. It was Peter Cifforelli, telling me that Iris had contacted him to find out what the requirements would
be for her to obtain a guardianship.
“Guardianship of who?” I asked, and when Peter didn’t answer, I realized what he was saying. “Oh, my God! You can’t be serious.”
“She’s concerned. She told me what happened at your house last night.”
“What does she think that will accomplish?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask her. Anyway, I told her you’re not nearly far gone enough. I told her to call me when you take your clothes off at Price Chopper or stir your soup with the broom handle, that kind of thing.”
He spoke of it lightly to make me feel better, but I didn’t laugh. I thanked him, hung up, and dialed Iris. I could tell she was eating something, and although I had no way of knowing, I assumed it was some of Josie’s Halloween candy from the night before. “Peter just called me. What do you think you’re doing, asking him a question like that?”
“Mom, calm down.” Of course, this only inflamed me further. “You’re not making good decisions for yourself. Your focus needs to be on remembering what happened that night, and getting ready to testify.”
“I told you I’m going to!”
There was a pause on the other end before she swallowed. “Gail Nazarian called me. She told me about the cell phone they found on Rud Petty. If you don’t look out for yourself, somebody else has to.”
“I don’t need you to look out for me, Iris.” I felt tempted to tell her my suspicions about Emmett, but I knew it would only make her more certain that I wasn’t in my right mind.
“I think you do.” Another wrapper got ripped open on the other end of the line. “Listen, do you want to come out here and stay with us for a while? Josie would love it. So would I. And you could even come to San Francisco with all of us for Thanksgiving.”
She had to know I would turn her down, and I felt sorry about the distress I heard in her voice. I told her I appreciated her concern, but that I was fine, and as I hung up I heard the sound of her exasperation. I knew I hadn’t bought much time between now and whatever she would try next, but at least it was something.
Lacy Eye Page 19
