Lacy Eye (23 page)

“Would you let the officer take a look in your car?” Though I could see that Joe also felt shaken by the shift in our daughter's demeanor, he would not let it deter him from persisting in his inquiry. When she hesitated, he added, “After all, if there's nothing to hide, there's no reason not to allow a search, right?”

He was right, of course, and I saw that Dawn wanted to say yes, so that she would have the satisfaction of proving our suspicions wrong. But Rud stepped in front of her and said, “We are not going to stand here and listen to you accuse us like common criminals. I was taught not to talk back to my elders, but if you want to know the truth, Mr. and Mrs. Schutt, I think you should be ashamed of yourselves.” He lifted his chin, and literally standing by her man, Dawn did the same.

I thought about reminding him that nobody was accusing
Dawn
of anything, but I recognized it as one of those cases that called for restraint of tongue. At that moment I wished Joe were the type of man who would just say the hell with it and pop the trunk himself before anyone could stop him, or that I had the courage to do it myself, but neither was the case, and I knew it. A weighty silence followed, after which Thornburgh cleared his throat and told us that if anything changed we should call him, and he'd let us know if, on their end, the police had any news. “You have my number if that camera turns up,” Rud said to him, and Thornburgh—also exercising restraint, it seemed—barely acknowledged the statement before getting into his car and pulling out of the driveway.

“What now?” I whispered to Joe as I followed him into the house, but he must not have heard me.

Dawn said to Rud, “Honey, Mom made you a sandwich.” I hadn't done so, and she knew it, but she held out the plate I'd prepared for the detective.

Rud just looked at it, and then at her, before taking the plate from her and setting it back on the table with exaggerated delicacy, as if he considered it contaminated. “We won't be staying for lunch,” he said, ostensibly answering Dawn but directing his words at Joe and me. “Get our things together, Kitten. We're obviously not welcome here.”

“Dawn is most certainly welcome here,” Joe said, unwilling to hold back what both of us wanted to say. Until then Dawn had only looked anxious as we all waited to see how the scene would unfold, but at her father's words, she erupted in tears.

“How can you
do
this,” she said to him and me, pushing past us to run up the stairs. We heard her rummaging around in her bedroom, throwing clothes into bags, collecting things from the bathroom. The whole time, Rud did not move to help her, but pulled a chair out and sat down at the table. Despite his stated refusal to remain in our house for another meal, he picked up the detective's sandwich and finished it in a few bites, all the while ignoring Joe and me as we stood by watching him, stunned by his nerve. Then he got up, strolled to the hall closet, took out his leather jacket, and fitted his arms into the sleeves as if he were a model preparing for a shoot.

When they left a few minutes later, Dawn having slung their belongings into the Nova's backseat, it was without any further words among any of us. We listened to the car chug down the street, and across from me at the table, Joe put his face in his hands. “We shouldn't have let them leave,” I told him. “It's snowing, they're angry, and we're not really sure what happened.” I was pleading with him to agree with me. “Are we?”

“Oh, Hanna.” I could see that it wearied him to have to insist, again, upon what we both knew. I was grateful that he didn't invoke our private expression:
lacy eye.
“Yes, we're sure.” He rubbed at his temples. “This is my fault. I'm the one who left him alone in our house.”

“We all did that,” I told him, but I could tell it didn't get through.

Then there was another long stretch of silence before he stood, rinsed Rud's plate, and put it into the dishwasher, as if knowing that I would not want to touch it. (He was right; it was the kind of moment I loved him for.) Without even talking about it, we decided not to go to see
Hamlet
that night as we had planned. Our hearts were heavy, and we were in no mood to watch a tragedy. Instead, we stayed in and ordered a movie on cable.

I did not remember doing this; when Kenneth Thornburgh came to question me in the hospital, after I emerged from my coma nearly three weeks later, I could not tell him anything about the hours leading up to the attack. The last thing I remembered was turning the outside light on and watching the snow fall lightly in its track, then deciding to call Dawn to make sure she'd gotten back safely to her apartment. I resolved not to mention anything about the burglary, so that our conversation wouldn't disintegrate the way the Thanksgiving visit had; I would keep it short and sweet, a check-up call just to say, “I love you, no matter what.”

But Dawn wasn't home. Opal answered and told me she hadn't seen Dawn since Tuesday night, and then she kept me on the phone for fifteen minutes, chattering away about anything and nothing; I sensed she was lonely, and I hoped for her sake as well as for Dawn's that it would not be long before Dawn returned to their apartment. I asked Opal to have my daughter call me when she got home. But if she did so, I could not remember.

I also didn't remember calling Claire to confirm our date to walk our dogs at Two Rivers the following morning, although she gave testimony that I did.

Opal maintained that Dawn was in their apartment from six o'clock on, when she returned after dropping Rud off at his place on the way home from our house. Our phone records showed that I made my call at five fifteen, so there was no reason for the grand jury not to believe her.

One of the investigators testified that our cable records showed that Joe and I had ordered a movie that Friday at 8:11 p.m. When Gail Nazarian asked the witness what the movie was, he answered in as matter-of-fact a manner as his position called for, yet Gail Nazarian allowed a pause before her next question, to ensure that the irony was not lost on anyone in the room. Just hours before someone came into our house and crushed our skulls with a croquet mallet, my husband and I selected—and presumably watched—
Catch Me If You Can
. Even the judge raised her eyebrows as a nervous titter bounced off the courtroom walls.

I
'd felt sure that once Warren removed the graffiti from Dawn's car, she would go out and try to find a job. It was what we had agreed on, one of the conditions for her coming home. But three days after Halloween the car still sat where it was, and still she did not leave the house except for the rare times I asked her to walk Abby, which both Dawn and Abby seemed to resent.

It annoyed me to come home from work every day and find her sitting in front of the TV. She'd made dinner only that one time, on Halloween—if you could call it dinner—and I found it more and more difficult to see any reason to cut her some slack. I knew Joe would never have stood for it. And frankly, I didn't feel very sympathetic, either, especially given the fact that I hadn't had much choice about going to work when I was younger than Dawn.

I still remember, all too well, the night during my junior year in high school that federal agents came for my father. It was during a blizzard, school had been canceled, and every radio and TV station was warning people not to go outside, let alone drive, if they could avoid it. I was doing my homework in the living room as my mother sat across from me, working on a quilt. My father was playing solitaire at the dining room table, which I had just helped my mother clear after supper. In our old house on Humboldt Street, there had never been enough space for us to be very far away from one another. Manning Boulevard was a different story. Even though my mother and I were in the same room, it felt as if I watched from a distance when she jumped at the sound of the doorbell and murmured, “Aj!” as the quilting needle in her hand slipped and her finger began to bleed.

Sucking on the finger, she went to the door. There were two of them on the stoop, but only one spoke. He called my mother “ma'am” and asked if Carl Elkind was at home. I watched my mother freeze as she took her finger away from her mouth, and I could tell that for a moment she thought about lying, but then she called my father to come to the door, and he did. When he saw the uniformed officers, he let out a big sigh that still, even in my memory today, sounds more like relief than anxiety, as he understood why his name had been called.

“You couldn't wait until this was over?” he asked the men, nodding toward outside, where the wind whipped the snow in icy gusts. My mother was gripping the back of her chair, making a whimpering sound I had never heard before, which almost made my dinner come back up and spill from my throat. “Hanna, I will explain things,” my father said to me as they led him out the door and down the slippery steps into the idling black car. My mother and I watched the headlights leave, and, too late, she thought to run to the closet to pull down my father's coat. She let out the whimper again, and it took me all night to calm her down.

Eight months after they took him away, my father was convicted of securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, and filing false statements about the investment accounts he handled, mainly for friends we knew from Trinity Lutheran. The newspapers made a big deal of the fact that he was accused of committing “affinity fraud” against so many people who had considered him a close friend. My mother insisted to anyone who would listen—though there weren't many by then—that they had the wrong man. I thought maybe she was just saying that in public in an effort to save face, but even when it was just the two of us, she told me the same thing. My father was “a victim of circumstance,” she said, and though I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that, I didn't ask her to explain.

He had a good lawyer (and it wasn't until Joe's gentle suggestion, years later, that I realized there must have been a secret account somewhere, from which my father paid the guy) who, along with coming up with phrases such as “legal infelicities,” managed to convince the court that my father's sentence should be on the minimal side. As it turned out, it didn't matter that he got only five years instead of fifteen, because he died of a stroke in prison before he was halfway through.

The judge had frozen all his assets; the only thing he allowed us to retain was the house on Manning Boulevard, where my mother and I continued to live. Even before my father was officially declared guilty, I knew my own plans would have to change. I'd always wanted to go to college and become a nurse, but after my father's conviction we didn't have the money. On top of that, my mother got diagnosed with uterine cancer two weeks after I graduated. I stayed home taking care of her until she went into the hospital. About an hour before she died, she made a sign for me to move closer, so I could hear her whisper. She was moving her hands, and I didn't know what she was doing, until she tried to pull off the ring her own mother had given to her when
she
died. But she was too weak. “You do it,” she said, and I shook my head. “
Yes
,” she told me, more strongly, using all her energy, and afraid to send her into a tailspin, I did as she instructed and slid the ring off her finger. She wouldn't stop agitating in the bed until I put it on, and I felt that sting in my chest that goes deeper than crying.

I'd thought that was the worst of it, but no; the worst was reading her obituary in the Albany newspaper two days later. I didn't know why, but whoever handled it hadn't contacted me for details about my mother's life; instead, the brief “appreciation” was written with information provided by a neighbor, Estelle Graber, who was in my mother's monthly bridge group but otherwise didn't know her very well. Either Estelle wasn't aware of or she didn't tell the writer about my father's imprisonment, or (more likely) she did, and the newspaper decided, out of respect for the deceased or because of a space shortage, not to include it. In any case, I was grateful for my mother's sake that the notice said only that she was survived by her husband and daughter.

But the item was short, and the last sentence pierced me to the core: “She enjoyed playing bridge and was renowned for her oatmeal crinkles.” Both were true (although “renowned” might have been a stretch), but reading those words evoked more grief in me than I'd felt in the moment my mother died as I held her hand. The fact that I knew it wouldn't have bothered
her
to have her legacy reduced to these two dubious notes made me all the sadder.

I began working for Kip Gunther, who hired me on the spot to be his receptionist and secretary when I answered his ad in the
Schenectady Gazette
. A lawyer specializing in divorces and contract disputes, Kip—who instructed me to call him that, never Mr. Gunther—wore his hair long, tucked behind his ears, and his glasses dark, even inside the office. He had a way of talking out of the edge of his mouth as if he didn't really want you to understand what he was saying. I suspected even during our interview that there was something shady about him, but I didn't listen to myself until it was too late.

I tried not to pay attention to the questionable work tasks Kip had me do, because I didn't want to know that I was working for an unscrupulous person—after all, what would that say about
me
?—but I was pretty sure he was padding his billable hours, and more than once he had me type up double invoices, to two different clients for expenses on the same business trip. I told myself that I just didn't understand the law, and who was I to say anything? The man paid me well. Of course, he also said more than once that he gave me such a good salary because he could tell I was the type of girl who'd always be loyal. I wished he hadn't said that, because how else could I take it other than that he expected me to keep my mouth shut if anyone came around asking?

I'd be doing my work, typing up some document—he mostly handled little things, like people suing their contractors—and he'd come over and stand next to me, too close, waiting for me to take my fingers off the keyboard. Then he would ask me his raunchy riddles. “What do a Christmas tree and a priest have in common? Their balls are just for decoration.” I always made a noise that I knew he took to be appreciation of his humor, because he got a satisfied look on his face and went back to his desk, whistling off-key.

I worked there for two years, during which time my father died in the New Jersey prison they'd sent him to. I sold the house on Manning Boulevard to pay off my mother's medical bills and rented a crappy apartment across the river. I could have gone to college then, but instead I kept spending my days doing what Kip told me to do, and my nights watching television and drinking cheap wine. I had thought I would start making a quilt, the way my mother taught me before she died, but all the squares came out uneven because I was drunk while making them, and eventually I put the fabric and needles away. I knew this wasn't how I should be living. A combination of grief and panic thrummed through me every waking moment, and years later, when I heard Opal Bremer say she had “the wim-wams,” I understood she was describing what I had felt back then.

That
was when I was in danger, I should have told Gail Nazarian when she tried to warn me about Rud Petty being in touch with Dawn. I fought the wim-wams every night by getting wasted—even then I knew that that word,
wasted
, was the most apt one I could have used—and felt sick every morning before I stumbled my way, usually late, to the law office.

Looking back, I realized I was waiting for something, though I had no idea what it might be.

What pushed things over the edge was the day I returned to the office after lunch and found Kip sitting behind his desk, smiling stupidly, looking more boldly at my breasts than he usually did. It took me a few minutes to realize he was drunk and he told me he'd had a fight with his wife that morning. I said I was sorry to hear that and sat down at my desk, hoping to ignore him, but he wouldn't leave me alone. He came over and began massaging my neck, even after I lied and told him that it tickled. He bent closer to my ear and whispered in it. “What do you call a virgin on a waterbed?” Usually he just delivered the punch line immediately, but this time he waited for me to guess.

“I don't know. What?” I said. I had never been so close to a man before, aside from my father. The idea of sex scared me.

“A cherry float,” Kip said, and made a gurgling, giggling sound deep in his throat as he pulled me up out of my chair, turned me around to face him, and kissed me firmly as he slipped his hands under my blouse and up to my bra. I felt immobilized, not knowing what to do. (Years later, when I heard Iris use the word
clueless
for the first time, my mind flew me back to that moment, and my daughter had to ask me what was wrong.)

Even as naïve as I was, I knew I was supposed to slap his hands away and get out of there as fast as I could. But I didn't. I let his hands linger, and without wanting or intending to, I felt the quick shiver of a sexual itch rise up between my legs. He unbuckled his pants. I did say, “Stop,” but at the same time, I didn't move away when he slid his hand down to my crotch.

Finally, my senses returned to me when he suggested we move out to his car, which, he told me with a wink, had fold-down seats. He tried to lead me to the door by the hand, and when he separated his body from mine, I got hold of myself, straightened my clothing, collected my purse from the bottom drawer of my desk, and walked out on my own, somewhere finding the courage to shake his hand off when he reached out to touch me again. I drove off trembling, the tires sputtering on gravel, leaving Kip literally standing in the dust.

The next day I went to the bank to take out a loan, and enrolled for the spring semester at the state university.

I'd never been a great student in high school, but I loved college right away—the classes themselves and feeling as if I were forging my own path in life, even if I couldn't envision where it might end. In April, a few thousand students gathered for Fountain Day, when the huge spray fountain in the center of the quad was finally turned on after the long winter. You could feel the excitement in the air as noon approached and people began to collect around the long rectangular pool, putting their books and backpacks aside, turning their faces up to the weak but oh-so-​w
elcome
spring sun.

I sat at the pool's edge, preparing with everyone else to make a big fuss when the fountain spouted for the first time. Most of the people around me on the quad that noontime wore casual clothes—tee-shirts and shorts, even though it wasn't nearly warm enough for bare legs. They were trying to fool spring into acting like summer. I had on jeans and a pink long-sleeve jersey I'd picked up at Goodwill, with
FREE SPIRIT
spelled out in sequins across the front. I'd bought it as a kind of joke with myself, because I was not a sequins kind of girl. But I grew to like wearing the shirt. Being able to glance down and see those words on my chest made me feel as if they might, someday, be true. Who wouldn't, after all, want to be a free spirit?

Well, Joe Schutt, as it turned out. When the fountain came on and I stood up with everyone else to cheer, I saw that the short, already balding guy standing a few feet away from me, who was wearing a tie with a blue Oxford and khaki slacks, had caught sight of my shirt's message, and he was smiling. I didn't know whether to feel complimented that he had noticed me, or annoyed that he appeared to be amused by what I was wearing. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him maneuver along the pool until we were standing next to each other. Then he turned and gave me a full-on grin.

I had never seen him before, but I felt a charge of something like recognition as I returned the smile. Otherwise I might have moved away from him, thinking that he could be a stalker (though in those days the word would have been
weirdo
). This is how I know what Dawn felt, so many years later, when Rud Petty turned his charms on her; I felt the same breathless rush at realizing a man had taken an interest in me.

“Why are you wearing that?” he asked, pointing at the glittery silver letters spelling out
free spirit
.