Lacy Eye (5 page)

I'd always kept two bird feeders in the garden, one in a log-style and the other a netted onion bag filled with suet pudding. After Joe died, the police claimed the log feeder as evidence. I don't know why they thought the attacker might have left fingerprints on a bird feeder, but I guess they were covering all their bases. As it turned out, the only fingerprints they found on it were mine.

When I came home from the rehab hospital in March of the following year, I didn't have the heart or the energy to tend to anything but getting myself out of bed every morning. That fall when Rud Petty's trial started, I thought about trying to divide and transplant some of my perennials, but I just couldn't seem to take the first step out the back door. Slowly, over the next months and through the winter, the garden faded into an ordinary yard. Where once the view from my kitchen window had been one of my greatest pleasures, eventually I kept the blinds closed even during the daytime, so I didn't have to be reminded of how comforting it had once been.

When Dawn called from Santa Fe the morning after my trip to the mall, I asked her, “Wait a minute, what day is it?” before she could even start talking.

“Saturday,” she told me. “I know, I'm early. But I didn't want to wait until tomorrow.”

Since she'd left for college, we'd always spoken on Sundays. When I was growing up on Humboldt Street, my father had drummed it into my head that Sunday was the time for long-​d
istance
calls, because the rates were cheapest then. Of course that didn't matter anymore, and all Dawn had was a cell phone, but I liked the comfort of our routine. Dawn seemed to, too. It was another thing we shared, while Iris called any time she felt like it.

Dawn said she'd just wanted to hear my voice. She added, “All of a sudden I'm afraid of wildfires,” and I remembered, as I did every week, her tendency to jump from one subject to another without warning; you had to stay on your toes. “It's like something's creeping up on me from behind.”

“It sounds awful,” I said, though I hadn't seen anything about wildfires on the news and wasn't exactly sure what she was referring to. Then I blurted what had been at the front of my mind since I'd received the information the day before. “He won his appeal. He's getting a new trial. You know that, right?” I knew I did not have to identify who “he” was. Saying the name, I knew, would cause a cold clash of cymbals at the back of my neck.

“Well, yes.” Dawn's voice flickered briefly.

The district attorney had intimated that Dawn had been in touch with Rud Petty, but of course I knew better. “How'd you find out?” I asked.

“Peter called.”

I was glad she couldn't see how I winced at the name. Peter Cifforelli had been Joe's best friend from Buffalo; they'd gone to college together there, then both moved to Albany for graduate school, Joe in accounting and Peter in law. Peter and his wife, Wendy, became engaged within weeks of when Joe and I did, and the four of us all became friends. At least, that's what I thought, until the day Peter invited everybody to his apartment to watch the Super Bowl and I overheard Peter ask Joe in the kitchen, when neither of them knew I was approaching, “You're sure about Hanna, right? You're sure she's—
enough
?” For a moment I thought I'd missed a word—
smart
enough?
Good
enough?
Pretty
enough? But then I realized he'd just said
enough
, which could have covered all three of those things and more. Instead of waiting to hear how Joe would answer him, I made a point of walking into the kitchen to refill a bowl of chips. From that day on, I both despised Peter and worried that he was right. But I vowed to myself I'd never show those feelings, and I never told Joe that I'd heard what his best friend asked him that day.

Joe always referred to Peter and Wendy as “the Darlings,” but I couldn't bring myself to do the same. Still, our families remained close all the time our children were growing up, celebrating birthdays and holidays and graduations together, and one year we shared a vacation rental in the Outer Banks during the kids' spring break from school. (One of the things I had been shocked to learn, during Rud's trial, was that Dawn apparently told her dorm mates at college that among the property she would inherit someday was a beachfront estate on the coast of North Carolina. It shocked me not only because of the lie itself, but because that vacation had been a disaster, and I couldn't imagine she had any good memories of it; it rained almost every day, and the Cifforelli kids and Iris ganged up on Dawn in every game they played.)

Peter was the first person Iris called after the police notified her, by phone, of the attack. He and Wendy arrived at the hospital—where I was in surgery and expected to die—before Iris and Archie could drive there from Boston. Later, Peter said he would serve as Dawn's attorney, if she got indicted and her case went to trial. When he offered to do this, I didn't know whether he believed she was guilty of helping to kill her father but also entitled to the best defense she could get, or whether he thought she was innocent. I was afraid of what it would mean about me if I even asked the question. In the end it didn't matter, because she was never tried.

You'd think the fact that he was willing to fight for Dawn in a courtroom would have erased my bitterness toward Peter, but it hadn't.

“They're not letting him out, are they?” Dawn asked me. They were almost the exact words I had used when Ken Thornburgh informed me about Rud Petty's appeal.

“No,” I said. “I mean, they say not. Gail Nazarian came over last night to try to get me to testify.”

“But you said no, right?” She spoke so emphatically into the phone that I had to hold the receiver away.

“Right.” I reached down to work Abby's hair with my fingers under the table, where she always sat when I talked on the phone. When she gave a little groan I knew I'd pulled too hard, and I apologized by rubbing the scar on the soft spot between her eyes. “But I changed my mind. I'm going to try.”

It was one of those times you say something you hadn't planned on, but the minute you hear it in your own voice, you know it's true. I realized then that my mind had been working on the decision, even without my being aware. I believed Rud Petty was guilty, and I couldn't take a chance on his being acquitted this time. Short of someone else showing up to say they'd been in our bedroom that night three years earlier and witnessed what happened to us—and short of Dawn remembering something new that might be of use to the prosecution—I knew it was up to me, despite the warning that kept flashing somewhere below my heart.

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?”