Lacy Eye (16 page)

“Don't call me that,” Dawn said, lifting her chin in a feeble attempt at defiance.

Joe's eyes met mine, and I knew he wanted me to step in. When I answered him by looking away, he cleared his throat and said, “Are you sure, Dawn? Because Cecilia seems like she's changed a little, to me. She wasn't very nice after—” Mercifully, he stopped himself before mentioning the Spring Showcase fiasco. “Why would she all of a sudden decide she wants to be friends again?”

“Because she feels bad! She said so!” Dawn threw her napkin on the table, and for a moment I thought she would get up and leave, but instead she put her face between her hands and stared down at her plate. I saw her jaw trembling. “She knows she's been a jerk. Now she just wants to go back to the way things were.”

“I think it sounds great, honey,” I said. Around me I felt darts of disbelief and resentment coming from Joe and Iris. “It sounds like fun.”

“All the popular kids are going to be there.” Having calmed herself down with this reminder, Dawn put her napkin back on her lap and began eating again.

Of course, Joe and Iris had been right in their suspicions. Dawn told me the details later, when she could bear to talk about it, during one of our ritual bath-time discussions. But even before then I knew the truth, and on some level she must have known it, too, but like me, she chose to ignore her better judgment in favor of the wish that Cecilia Baugh really wanted to atone for her previous acts of unkindness. When I dropped her off at the rink, I asked her if she wanted me to wait for a minute, and when she said, “Why?” I realized there was no reason I could give her, so I drove away and watched her enter the building in my rearview mirror, feeling my heart miss a beat.

The only parties being held at Hot Wheels that day were for a seven-year-old girl named Anna and a six-year-old boy named Jake. Shortly after she went inside and asked to be directed to Cecilia Baugh, Dawn heard herself being paged over the rink's loudspeaker, and summoned to the front desk. She identified herself and was told she had a phone call. Later, when I asked her if she knew who it was going to be on the other end of the line, she told me no, and though it occurred to me that maybe she just felt too sheepish to admit that she'd known what was coming, I was afraid it was true—she'd picked up that phone completely unaware of what she was about to hear, despite the fact that she couldn't find the party she'd been invited to.

Of course, it was Cecilia. “We changed our minds, Upchuck,” she said, and Dawn, hearing other kids' laughter in the background, understood finally that she should have listened to her father and her sister—it
was
all a setup. But she wasn't fast enough to disconnect before she heard Cecilia add, “We decided not to have the party in a place nobody would be caught dead in after third grade, and we decided only to invite people who aren't, like, total tards.” This line was followed by louder snickers from behind her. Then Cecilia said, “I can't believe even you were stupid enough to actually
go
there, Ding-Dong”—before somebody urged her to “Hang up already,” and she did.

Dawn didn't ask if she could use the phone at the counter again, to call me to come get her, and she didn't go to the pay phone in the corner. Instead she waited there for three hours, until the fictional party would have been over, and came outside to meet me at the time we had arranged. Even then, she didn't tell me what had happened. I asked her how it had gone, and she told me it was fun—more fun than she'd expected. But her lips were shaking, and that was how I knew the truth.

When we got home she went up to her room and shut the door, and I assumed she was taking a nap. That night at dinner, speaking with more energy than usual, she told us all about the party: how thirty of the most popular kids in her grade had been there, how roller-skating was actually a lot easier than she'd expected, how surprised she was that some of the kids she'd thought were the meanest were actually pretty nice.

I should have just called her on it then. But I thought she'd feel less ashamed if she came to the conclusion by herself to tell us what really happened. “I'm glad you had a good time, honey,” I said.

“Oh, my God.” Iris stood up and carried her plate to the kitchen, then grabbed the phone and went out to the garden. I knew that Joe would have liked to do something similar, but he didn't let himself.

Dawn looked down at her plate. “Can I be excused, please?” She smiled in both our directions, but couldn't look at us.

Joe and I sat without speaking for a minute or more, waiting until we heard the closing of her bedroom door. “How can you continue to do that, Hanna?” he asked, and immediately I felt defensive.

“How can I do what?” But we both understood I was stalling.

“Lacy eye,” he said as he rose from the table, using the words that had become a code between us. I wanted to tell him that wasn't fair, but I couldn't because I knew better. He put a hand on my shoulder, and though I knew he meant it as a sign of support, I shrugged it off and left the room so he wouldn't see me cry.

Before Cecilia brought it up during the conversation on our doorstep, it had been a long time since I'd thought about the night the tree house burned. Joe had built it for the girls when they were eleven and fourteen. When they were younger it would have been the perfect thing, but at that point they were too old—at least, Iris was. “You have to tell him, Mom,” she said, after Joe announced his plan. We'd all watched a movie one Friday night that featured kids who had a tree house in their backyard, and it put the idea in Joe's head. Once an idea got in there, it was almost impossible to get out. Iris knew this as well as I did, yet she insisted I try.

But I couldn't bring myself to discourage him—he was too excited. And Dawn was, too, though I couldn't tell if it was for her own sake or her father's. Claire's husband, Hugh, and Peter Cifforelli and Warren from across the street all offered to help, but Joe wanted to do it by himself. He bought a book of instructions and supplies from Home Depot, and spent an entire weekend banging wood into the maple tree on the line dividing our property from the Furths'. He told the girls the “unveiling” would be after dinner on Sunday, and he persuaded me to serve the spaghetti at four thirty, which let me know how much he had invested in this project and the girls' reaction.

I watched them both slow down and then stop as they approached the rope ladder hanging down the trunk. Remembering the movie that had inspired the project, I knew they thought they should be seeing a proper wooden stepladder leaned at just the right angle for them to scale without any effort. As it was, though Iris gamely began climbing and pretended she enjoyed the challenge, Dawn hung back and hesitated in following her sister. It occurred to me that she might be right in this; she was so uncoordinated that it didn't seem it would take too much for her to lose her grip on the rope and fall backward onto the ground.

Once Iris reached the top, she found another obstacle to her appreciation of her father's gift. Instead of a wooden door with a window (the one in the movie had a pretty rainbow-colored sun catcher hanging on it), this tree house's entryway was an old burlap blanket Joe had nailed in place. “I didn't want to put a door in,” he told me, when he saw I had a question about it. “This way there's ventilation, and they can never get stuck inside.”

I'm ashamed to say I wondered if those were the real reasons, or if it was just too difficult for him with his limited carpentry skills to figure out how to fit a door.
It's kind of ugly
, I wanted to say. Couldn't he see that? On top of which, once you were inside the house, the heavy blanket made everything darker than it would have been otherwise. There was a small window on the back wall, but it was covered in plastic rather than glass, so you couldn't see out clearly.

The tree house in the movie had had carpeting, comfy beanbag chairs, and even its own little TV, on which the movie children played video games. There was a soft-light lamp on a table in the corner and a fan for when the weather got hot.

Joe's house had a bare plank floor and no electricity. When we were all standing inside and he held the blanket open so we could see better around us, the girls' expressions were dubious, though they both tried to hide it for Joe's sake. “Cool, Dad,” Iris said. She went to the plastic window and looked out, and I saw her lip tremble.

“I love this!” Dawn put her arms out on either side and twirled herself around, and I had to catch her before she fell. “Just think of the things we can do up here!” It was a line Joe himself had used when he described to them his plans for the house. He envisioned kids playing board games and telling secrets. A space for rainy-day reading. They could even spend some nights out here if they wanted, he'd told them. Before construction, Iris had halfheartedly thought she might have an outdoor sleepover, but now I knew she was reconsidering; she was not a flashlight or sleep-on-a-wood-floor kind of girl.

Only after we'd all navigated the ladder backward, down to the ground again, did I notice what Joe had painted over the burlap doorway, and I pointed it out to Iris and Dawn:
FORT SCHUTT.
Cool, Iris mumbled again.

Joe didn't seem to notice their lack of enthusiasm. Over the next few days, when they got home from school, I encouraged them to go out and play in the tree house, but there was always some reason for staying inside or going over to someone else's. I admit I lied to Joe; when he got home and asked if they'd gone out there, I told him yes. But it was the end of the school year, I reminded him, and things were busy. They were doing final projects and studying for exams. I was sure, I said, that when summer came, we wouldn't be able to get them to come down for meals. Of course I knew this wouldn't happen, but it satisfied Joe in the short term.

Summer came and went, and as I suspected, the tree house got used only a few times. Used a few times, at least, by the children it had been built for, and those were short, mercy visits: Iris and two of her softball teammates went up one day with a tube of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough and copies of the high school yearbook, planning which boys to stalk; Dawn and her friend Monica struggled up the ladder with a box of Monica's model horses and then called me in to watch an impromptu round of jumps and dressage. In both cases, squadrons of daddy longlegs in the corner chased the girls out, and they tumbled recklessly from the tree with disgusted squeals.

After they stopped using the house altogether, Emmett Furth claimed it as his own. I don't know exactly when he started, but it was at the end of the summer, after his father moved out, that I noticed the sign over the door had been amended to read
FART SCHUTT
. One night I caught sight of him hopping down from the tree in the dark, and when I opened the back door and called, “Hey!” he only scurried fast into his own yard. Climbing up the rope ladder, I could smell the cigarette smoke that had been trapped inside the house, and when I pulled the blanket back I saw butts littering the floor, along with matchbooks from Pepito's, candy wrappers, empty chip bags, soda and a few beer cans.

Without telling Joe about it, I cleaned the place up and went over to confront Pam. At first she denied it had been Emmett who'd made the mess, but when I said that maybe the police would be interested in asking him a few questions, she conceded that her son might have “checked it out a few times” and said she was sure we could settle it ourselves.

“What do you expect? A teenage boy looking for a place to himself, and that house just sitting there empty all the time. Right next to our property. That's what they call an attractive nuisance, you know.” She made it sound as if it had been our fault, but then she must have remembered what I said about the police, and she pulled back.

“He's not a teenager.” For some reason it gave me satisfaction to correct her on this. Both Emmett and Dawn were about to start sixth grade.

“He might as well be. I don't know what I'm doing with him, Hanna.” For a moment her face caved, and I didn't know how to react to this uncharacteristic display of vulnerability. “Ever since Paul left…I just have no idea.”

I wanted to sympathize, but it felt wrong, in light of the reason I had come over. Still, I wish even now that I'd managed to murmur something supportive before I asked her to please just keep Emmett away from our yard. Her tone got snippy again as she said, “I'll talk to him about it. You don't have to do anything. Your girls can have their tree house back again.” This last line was sarcastic, of course. She knew they never went up there.

I didn't see Emmett in our yard again after that, and throughout the fall I made it a point to climb up the ladder several times to conduct random spot checks. I always found the floor bare except for dead bugs, and the smell of smoke was gone. I didn't bother during the winter, because it was so cold. When spring came, Joe went out to make sure snow hadn't weakened the maple's branches, and announced to the girls that the tree house seemed “shipshape.” They pretended to be happy at this news, but as far as I knew, neither of them ever climbed that ladder again.

It was three years later that Emmett burned the house down, on a morning before school in the middle of January. Joe was in the shower when I smelled smoke, looked out, and saw the tree on fire. I called 911 and then, yelling at Dawn to stay in the house, I ran out to make sure that nobody was in danger (already I suspected Emmett, and I was afraid he might not have escaped in time). There was a book of Pepito's matches on the ground, where he must have dropped them after he lit the fire and ran off. But for a combination of reasons—the memory of his violet-tinted glasses in first grade; the way his mother had allowed me to witness the distress she felt at being a newly single mother; the fact that I believed he had burned the tree house down by accident, and not out of malice—I put the matches in my pocket and didn't mention them to Joe, who threw on his robe and came running as soon as he heard Dawn shouting at him through the bathroom door.