Lacy Eye (14 page)

“You know Opal,” Dawn said, and I sensed that even saying her former friend's name caused her distress. “She was always a little unstable. It's hard to be friends with a person like that.”

“Well, I think it's a shame.” I could tell that neither of us was quite sure which I was referring to—Opal's state of mind or the fact that she and Dawn had lost contact.

I was about to say how much I'd liked Opal, the time she came to visit us at Christmas, when Dawn put her fork down and asked, “Are you still keeping that headache log?”

This was my neurologist's idea; he had suggested I keep a record of how often I got the headaches, how bad each was on a scale of one to ten, and whether they were accompanied by what I had described to him as “flashes”—little jolts of vision, like tiny electrical seizures in my brain. Sometimes they seemed to be about nothing in particular, and other times I thought they might be glimpses of what had happened in our bedroom that night.

I had mentioned the headaches to Dawn, but I left out the part about the flashes. I hadn't even told the people in Tough Birds about those.

“It comes and goes,” I told Dawn. “I can go whole weeks without feeling anything. Then, bam! it'll come up and hit me, like somebody split my head open.” Even as they came out, I couldn't believe I was actually uttering those words. Splitting my head open was exactly what Rud Petty had done, and Dawn's hand jerked a little when she registered what I'd said. I raised my own hand above the table as if I could pull back some of the sting with my fingers.

Luckily, Kwan chose that moment to come by and ask if everything was okay. With too much energy, we both told him that it was. Quietly, I told Dawn that I appreciated her concern about my health.

“Well, I just want you to be all right.” She seemed to be measuring what to say next, though when she decided, her voice didn't fully commit. She opened and closed her fists on the table before me, and I sensed that she was gathering something—courage? But why? It made me feel sad that she might be nervous about anything she had to say to her own mother.

“How are you going to make yourself do it? Remember that night?” She wasn't looking at me, having picked up the crayon again and begun scribbling on her mat.

I shrugged, not wanting to admit I hadn't made much progress. I said, “Iris thinks I should get hypnotized,” then looked for Dawn's reaction to hearing her sister's name. She was running her tongue over her teeth, a leftover habit from childhood that reappeared when she was tense. What did she have to be tense about in that moment, I wondered?

Seeming to ignore my mention of Iris, she said, “That lady neurologist testified you would probably never get those memories back.”

“But the doctor for the prosecution said it was possible. I don't know. Maybe the neurologist's right, and it got knocked out of me forever.”

“That wouldn't be so bad, would it?” Dawn said. When I looked up to see what was in her face, she added, “I mean, if you don't remember, you can't have
bad
memories, right? I think I could go for that.” She smiled, but a shadow crossed her eyes.

Grateful to have been handed a task, I picked up the check holder Kwan left at the edge of the table and stuck my credit card in the slot. In the old days, Joe used to take care of the check, adding the amounts in his head to make sure there was no mistake. I had never been good with numbers, and it would have been impossible now for me to figure out if they were right, with what the trauma had done to my brain. For big things like taxes and the fund Joe had set up for me in the event of his death, I depended on Tom Whitty. But for smaller things like restaurant tabs and retail transactions, I had to trust that most people were honest, and that if mistakes got made, things pretty much evened out in the end. It was just easier that way.

As we were putting our coats on, I saw that we were being approached by a middle-aged man who'd been sitting in a far booth across from a woman I'd assumed to be his wife.

“Is that you, Dawn?” he said, drawing near.

“Oh, shit,” Dawn muttered. An instant later—shifting so fast that I could barely follow it—she turned up a face that was bright and welcoming. “Mr. Cahill!” Her middle school English teacher seemed hesitant about what to do next, putting his hand out tentatively for her to shake, but she hugged him instead. I saw that this startled Art Cahill, and startled his wife, too. He pulled her forward and introduced her to us. When I saw that both of them noticed and then made an effort to avoid looking at Dawn's lazy eye, I knew it wasn't only my own perception that it had begun moving outward again.

“Yes, of course,” his wife said, though her words might just as well have been
I know who they are, you idiot
. She gave me an expression I'd seen in town before—a combination of pity, repulsion, and fear. The pity and repulsion said that although she felt sorry about what I had been through, she wasn't prepared to absolve me of responsibility for it. The fear came from not understanding how it could have happened. I shrank under her glare.

Art Cahill had gained weight and lost hair since I'd seen him last, during Joe's and my meeting with him in his office almost ten years earlier. A few weeks into her sixth-grade year, he called us into his classroom to tell us he thought Dawn was depressed. “I checked with her other teachers, and they all say she doesn't seem engaged in her classes,” he told us, as Joe sat next to me tapping his fingertips on his knees. I knew the gesture sprang from resentment at this other man for trying to give us information about our own daughter.

A moment followed during which we all realized that the teacher was weighing whether he should say the next words, and he made the wrong decision. Lowering his voice as if inviting us to make a confession, he asked, “Everything okay at home?”

“Of course everything's okay!” Joe exploded before I could send him a message to take it easy. He didn't lose his temper often, but when he did, it was usually because he felt threatened. I could tell he believed that Art Cahill was challenging his competence as a father.

“This has nothing to do with home,” Joe went on, and I was relieved to hear that already his tone had come down a notch. “It's about her eye. It's about other kids calling her Spaz and Fish Face.” From the side, I could see the vein in his temple twitching. “I mean, how would
you
like that?”

Another person might have backed off, but Mr. Cahill continued pressing. “She's had the lazy eye for years, though, right? Why would it be affecting her mood all of a sudden now?”

“Amblyopia,” Joe said, irritably. “Not ‘lazy eye.' There's nothing lazy about it.” But I knew he didn't say it because he actually cared to educate Art Cahill about the correct term for our daughter's condition. He already felt like the villain in our decision not to let her get the surgery over the summer, and he didn't want to give the English teacher any more ammunition if he saw it that way, too.

Joe rose then to indicate that the meeting was over, and I knew he was wishing that the teacher would, by way of making small talk, ask how Iris was doing. Joe liked nothing better than to brag about our older daughter, who'd skipped a grade and excelled at everything she tried, and part of me would have liked to do this, too. Didn't Iris's success mean that, as parents, we were doing something right?

But it would have been disloyal to Dawn, under the circumstances, so I knew we both believed it was just as well that Mr. Cahill didn't ask.

Driving me back to the medical office before returning to work, Joe seemed subdued.

Murmuring into the steering wheel, he said, “You understand why I didn't want her to have the surgery, right?”

“Of course,” I told him.
Now ask me if I agree with you
. I wished he would add, but he didn't.

 “She hates me, doesn't she?” he said. When I heard that, I felt the anger slide right out of my heart.

“Of course not,” I said, although
I hate him
were the exact words Dawn had used.

When Mr. Cahill leaned close to speak to us in Pepito's, I saw that his pupils were so dilated that his eyes appeared black, and I remembered that the kids used to call him Mr. Kay-Pill. “I've told you that Dawn wrote one of the best papers on Emily Dickinson I've ever received from a student,” he said, addressing both his wife and me. In fact, this assessment about the paper Dawn wrote for him, when she was in sixth grade, was part of the letter he wrote and intended to send as a character reference to the grand jury. Peter Cifforelli had to tell him that there was no such thing as a defense in the grand jury; he could submit the letter only if the case went to trial. In the letter, Mr. Cahill left out the fact that Dawn was in English R as opposed to
S;
R
denoted “regular” (although the kids of course said it stood for “retarded”), while
S
meant “seminar” (or “snobs”) and was for the more advanced students. Iris had been an S student all along. When Dawn entered middle school, we hoped that she could manage S, too. But it didn't take long for us to realize that this was aiming too high.

In the restaurant, Dawn mumbled “Thank you” to her old teacher. I could tell she wanted to leave, and I tried to move us toward the restaurant exit, but Mr. Cahill didn't seem to want to let us go. He asked Dawn what she'd been up to the past few years.

She stared at him blankly. Feeling alarmed, I stepped in to say, “I think she's still a little tired. She had a long drive here from New Mexico.”

“Oh, really?” He cocked his balding head. “What were you doing out there?”

“What do you mean?” She asked it as if she couldn't make sense of the question.

“Um—for work.” The Cahills glanced at each other. I wondered if one or both of them might be thinking
Ding-Dong
, with the same singsong inflection all the kids used to use.

I waited for Dawn to give them an answer, because I'd been wondering what her job had been, too. Instead she said, “I like a look of agony,” and a rope yanked through my stomach as Gwen Cahill gasped, “
What
?”

But her husband let a smile cross his lips as he picked up my daughter's prompt, a look of conspiracy passing between them. “‘I like a look of Agony,'” he intoned, “‘Because I know it's true.'”

“Oh, my God,” his wife murmured. “It's a goddamn poem.” She turned away to exhale so loudly we could all hear it, and I felt the same relief.

Dawn gave what she probably thought was a surreptitious tug on my sleeve, though it was clear to me that both Cahills saw it. He put his hand up as if to halt us and, leaning closer even though there was nobody else around to hear him, said, “I never got a chance to tell you, and I shouldn't mention it now because it's all supposed to be a secret. But my brother-in-law was on your grand jury.” He looked at Dawn blurrily, and if I'd doubted before that he was under the influence of something other than Mexican food, I didn't doubt it then.

If it had been me he tried to focus on, I would have taken a step back. But Dawn didn't. She looked right at him and said, “So?”

I could tell Art Cahill had expected a different reaction. He seemed to lift himself up out of his shoes in an effort to emphasize the importance of what he had to say. “So, maybe it's possible I had something to do with the fact that you didn't go to trial. They needed a certain number of votes to indict. My brother-in-law was all set to vote yes, but I might have persuaded him otherwise.”

A small smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. His wife looked disgusted by the fact that he had divulged what he did, though the content of it was obviously not news to her.

“You're right. You shouldn't be telling us this,” I said.

“I just wanted Dawn to know how much I believe in her. Somebody who loves Emily Dickinson that much, a soul who loves poetry like that—no way that person could have been involved in, in what she was accused of.” He stumbled a bit over the last phrase, making me realize he had probably thought better at the last minute of saying the word
murder
.

I'm sure he thought Dawn would thank him again. Even though I was aghast at the turn the conversation had taken, I thought she might, too. Instead she raised her eyes in an expression of—defiance? Anger? Shame? I couldn't tell. “They didn't indict me because I was innocent,” she said. “You had nothing to do with it.”

The smile vanished from Mr. Cahill's face.

“And I never really did like Emily Dickinson,” Dawn went on. “I just picked her because the poems were so short.”

Mr. Cahill caved forward a little and gave a gasp. He looked and sounded as if someone had let the air out of him.

“She's tired after her long drive,” I told the Cahills again. “I'd better get her home.” Without looking back, I steered Dawn toward the door and out to the parking lot.

The air was frosty, containing that hard winter bite. She looked up at the sky and murmured, “It's dark so early.”

“It'll be worse in a little more than a week.”

“Why?”

“Daylight Savings ends then.” Was she really that unaware?

“Oh.” She smiled feebly. “Well, can't see.” It was a phrase we'd learned as a family on one of our historical visits; the guide had told us that people worked in the cotton mills from before sunup to after sundown—“from can't see to can't see.”

Then it occurred to me that she hadn't forgotten about the time change. She was just trying to distract me from the discomfort I'd felt during our encounter with the Cahills. I said to her, “That wasn't like you. What was that all about?”

She shrugged. “I don't know.”

“He thought he was telling you something you'd want to hear.” I paused before adding, “You jumped all over him.”