Lacy Eye (4 page)

Even though when Joe and I discussed our younger daughter's unhappiness it was always in the context of the eye condition, I'm pretty sure that separately we both understood it was more than that. I know I did. Even in kindergarten, before we were told about the amblyopia, she didn't seem to fit in with the other kids. When I'd go to birthday parties to pick her up, I'd find her sitting in a corner, staring across the room where everyone else took a whack at the piñata or played musical chairs. When I asked her why, she said those things weren't fun for her. What
is
fun for you? I asked, but she always shrugged and said she didn't know. As she grew older, and especially after her diagnosis, she made more of an effort to join in, which Joe and I were glad to see because we thought it meant she was finally “coming out of her shell,” as we put it to each other. Maybe she'd just felt overwhelmed before, we theorized, being in Iris's shadow. Maybe now she'll find out what she
likes to do, and she'll get some confidence, and the other kids will come around.

But it didn't happen that way. She didn't enjoy any of the classes we signed her up for—since Iris took tennis and violin, we tried karate and the recorder with Dawn, but she couldn't have cared less about either—and Joe and I figured it was probably worse to force her to continue when she had no interest. The only thing she wanted to do was use her crayons in coloring books; it seemed to give her pleasure to show us how well she could stay inside the lines. Joe asked if she didn't want to draw her own pictures—I knew he was trying to encourage her to be more creative, and not just fill in what somebody else had put on the page—but Dawn said no, she liked it when the picture was already there. This was okay in kindergarten, of course. But as she grew older, the other kids began to whisper and laugh. The same teacher who'd told us she thought Dawn needed an eye exam also said to me that maybe we should have her “see someone,” though she didn't elaborate on what kind of “someone” she had in mind. “It just seems like there's something missing,” she said, and my stomach fell to exactly the same spot it had when, years earlier, I overheard Peter Cifforelli ask Joe if he was sure I was “enough.”

Whatever kept me from telling Joe about the dog poop kept me from telling him what the teacher said, too.

By the time she was in middle school, she was begging me every day to pick her up from school instead of making her take the bus home, because that was when the teasing, led by Emmett Furth, was the worst.

But I couldn't pick her up, because of my job. Besides, Joe would have said I was giving in to the bullies. He would have been right, but I still wished I could do it to save Dawn that heartache.

So because I felt guilty, and because I knew how much she'd had her heart set on the surgery she thought would cure her of being different, I took her out for ice cream. The trips were our secret, because Joe didn't like the girls eating too much sugar. When Dawn started to gain weight in eighth grade and Joe asked me why I thought that was, I pretended not to have any idea. But to Dawn I said that maybe we should cut down on the Lickety Split visits, which had started to make my waistbands tight, too. That was when she came up with the idea of getting a dog, and Abby replaced Sonic Sundaes as her primary comfort.

At the mall, after leaving the ice-cream store, I found myself in front of the display window at Sports Authority. I must have been standing there for a few minutes without realizing, because I'm a slow eater, and my cone was almost gone. I went inside and browsed through a rack of sale jerseys: Rodriguez, Jeter, Canó. When the college-age salesman asked if he could help me, I pulled my hair over my bad eye and said no, I wasn't looking for anything in particular.

I walked toward the back of the store, ignoring the colorful croquet sets—
FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY
!
—and picked up a baseball bat, which I carried to the counter. “For my granddaughter,” I told the salesman, though of course he had not asked me who the bat was for.

“How old is she?”

“Two and a half.”

He smiled. “This one might be a little big, then.”

“That's okay. She'll grow into it.” I signed the receipt quickly, then turned to leave; he had to call me back to hand me the bag with the bat sticking out. Immediately I felt silly about the purchase, but I didn't have what it took to say I'd changed my mind.

As I left the store, I thought I felt someone watching me, and turned to see a young man who looked to be about college age, though his face was so vacant he did not fit my idea of a college student. He stood to the side of the store, slurping soda through a straw from a cup the size of a bucket. He was on the short side, and thin, with reddish hair that curled down around his neck. It would have looked pretty on a girl, I thought, but it only made him appear sloppy, as did the low-slung jeans he wore with a chain hanging from the belt loops across the front. His untucked tee-shirt displayed a cartoon of a joint-smoking Cat in the Hat.

When he caught me looking back at him, he seemed to choke a little on his drink. I told myself I was just being paranoid. I reminded myself that people often stared at me because of my mangled face. This felt like more than that, but I decided to put it out of my mind. When he turned and walked off in the other direction, I tried to laugh at myself.

Outside Blue Moon, the boutique for teenage girls, I paused to remember all the times I'd taken Iris here over the years, when my role was to stand at the cash register and remind her that I couldn't buy all the clothes she'd chosen. She'd sulk and negotiate, and in the end she usually wore me down and brought home more than I knew Joe would have allowed if he'd been there. I went in and moved some hangers, pretending I was shopping for a daughter, and couldn't help eavesdropping on a conversation between two girls who didn't even look old enough to be in high school. “I wish I had it in me to break his heart again,” one of them said to the other, and I smiled to myself.

Then, looking up, I froze as I saw Emmett Furth through the display window. He stood with two of his friends, watching the girls inside browsing the racks. It struck me as creepy, since Emmett was twenty-one now and the girls just teenagers. But he had always been immature. Remembering how he'd scared Abby and me during our walk less than an hour before, I wondered if he'd followed me to the mall, before I realized that it was just a coincidence; even Emmett Furth had better things to do than that.

I tried to escape the store without his noticing, but then I saw one of his friends pop him on the shoulder and point at me. In a voice loud enough for everyone around us to hear, the friend seemed to enjoy himself as he drew out the chant that was all too familiar: “Lizzie Borden took an axe… gave her mother forty whacks.”

Emmett looked over. When he saw it was me, he locked us in a gaze so tight I was afraid I might sink to my knees. My tongue went sour and I coughed. He turned his back and resumed joking with his friends, but not before I thought I saw him flick two fingers from his forehead in my direction, a signal of some kind.

A signal of what? I couldn't be sure. I tried to convince myself it was a greeting, but that wouldn't be like him. And it felt more ominous than that.

For a panicked moment I lost my vision, and then it came back alternating between blurry and black. Feeling a cry in my throat that I knew better than to let out, I rushed to the nearest mall exit, which was not the closest to where I'd parked. As I stumbled across the lot toward my car, I could feel my head pounding. The plastic bag with the baseball bat banged against my knees.
Just get home, just get home
, I told myself, using the words as a mantra to focus my attention through the pulsing ache. Pulling up to my house, I felt the heat of relief spread through me, both because I'd arrived safely and because there were no reporters confronting me as I went inside. Even though I knew it wasn't good for her I let Abby have a piece of leftover pizza from the fridge, because I knew she'd love it, and love me for it, and I felt like being loved just then. Then I sat down at the kitchen table, drawing deep breaths and pressing my fingers into my temples.

The only time I'd ever had an actual conversation with Emmett Furth was fifteen years earlier, when he and Dawn were in first grade. I was working at the medical office part time back then, and once a week I went into the school as a parent volunteer. Though at the time I liked to believe that my motivation for visiting her classroom was a pure desire to contribute, to do my share, I understand now that I was also trying to figure out what made my daughter different from her sister and other kids, even at the age of six, aside from the lazy eye. What caused the other kids, including sometimes her own sister, to call her—in addition to all the other nicknames—Ding-Dong Dawn.

When I went in that day she was sitting by herself on the padded window seat, her knees drawn up to her chest as she looked out at the empty playground. I wanted to go over and ask why she wasn't working in her book, like everyone else, but the teacher intercepted me and said that Emmett Furth needed help with his reading comprehension, so I gave up trying to catch Dawn's attention and went over to pull out the little chair at the little table in the corner where Emmett was sitting.

Back then what set him apart from the other kids, besides his behavior, were his buzz cut and his granny glasses with violet-tinted lenses. I'd always assumed the glasses were Pam's mistake, but one day, probably wanting to assure me she'd had nothing to do with them, she told me that Emmett had refused even to consider any glasses other than the purple ones. By the time he got to middle school he'd switched to contacts, and he looked just like any regular troublemaker. I was secretly sorry to see those glasses go.

As silly as it sounds, the memory of those glasses was the main reason I'd never been able to take Rud Petty's attorney very seriously when he suggested it might have been Emmett who came into our house that night and attacked us in our bed.

In the classroom that day I tried to smile at him as I sat down, even though he had already made a reputation for himself—at such a young age—as a neighborhood pest. But he was in no mood for preliminaries, or maybe it was just that he felt embarrassed when he recognized me as one of the ladies whose yard he'd trampled on his bike. In any event, he ignored my smile and got right down to business. The instructions were for him to read passages aloud to me from the workbook, after which we would look at the comprehension questions together.

Craig and his father bought a bird feeder. They studied their backyard to find a good place for it. When the feeder was set up, Craig filled it with birdseed. Then he and his father began watching the feeder every morning.

“Bird feeders are stupid,” Emmett said, after reading the story. “They can just eat nuts from the trees.”

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to engage him in conversation, so instead I just pointed at the text and, as the directions instructed, asked him which sentence described what most likely happened next, based on the paragraph we had read. “A., Craig and his father will eat the birdseed.”

“Ha!” Emmett liked this answer. “They're gonna eat the birdseed!”

“B., Craig and his father will watch the birds eating. C., Craig and his father will knock the bird feeder to the ground.”

“They kick it, they punch it, they knock the stupid thing over!” He rose up in his chair and gave the air two fierce jabs with his fists, so hard that his glasses almost fell off.

Eventually I got him to settle down, and I pointed again to the choices on the page. “So, Emmett. Which is it?” He sat there for a long time, looking at the options. I tried not to fiddle with my pencil or shift in my seat. I could see that Dawn was still looking out the window, and I made a mental note to ask Joe that night whether we should bother scheduling another conference with her teacher. Finally, Emmett said, “I don't think it's any of those. A cat might come over and scare the birds away. That, or squirrels might jump up and eat all the seeds.”

Those things could happen, I admitted. But I reminded him that they wanted him to pick an answer from the list.

“No.” Emmett was firm in his refusal, and I remember thinking that as exasperating as he could be, part of me admired the way he stuck to his guns. “These are stupid questions, anyway.” He pointed to the workbook, where the words
Inferences and Conclusions
danced in jazzy letters across the top. “How can you know something's gonna happen until it does?”

The bird feeder example in the workbook reminded me of my own garden, where I had spent so many of my best hours. When we moved into our house before I became pregnant with Iris, the backyard was overgrown and ugly because the previous owners had let it go. But within a few seasons I'd transformed it into the green and blooming sanctuary my mother had always dreamed of cultivating herself. She never got the chance, because when my father moved us to Manning Boulevard, he insisted on hiring a gardener. As much as my mother had always told him she wanted to work in the dirt herself, I don't think he actually believed her. She died before I met Joe, but I still liked to imagine that her spirit was in the air around me as I dead-headed my begonias or pruned my roses or fertilized my rhododendrons. Often, I paused on my knees just to turn my face up to the sun and breathe. Though I had been brought up going to church, working in my garden was the closest I ever came to what felt like God.

Especially when the girls were younger, we ate dinners outside in the summer. Joe had never grilled before we moved to the suburbs, but he took to it right away. He loved to cook up a bunch of kebobs, different kinds of meat and vegetables in colorful combinations. Sometimes they were too fancy for Dawn and Iris, so he'd throw some hot dogs on the grill for them. One of my favorite memories is of the time Joe put one end of a hot dog straight into Abby's mouth, the other in his own, then raced her as they both ate toward the middle until their noses touched. Especially because it was so out of character for their strict and sanitary father, the girls both laughed so hard they almost fell together off the bench.