Free Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway

thought about skipping my rehab group the next day, because I knew I couldn’t get away with not talking about it there. But if I missed the session, there’d be a follow-up call from Barbara, the group leader, and I’d have to explain. I didn’t feel like explaining, so in the end I drove as usual to Pine Manor, where the joke was that there weren’t any pine trees around and not a whole lot of manners, either.
    We called the group Tough Birds. Officially TBI stood for traumatic brain injury, but one of the other group members, my English friend Trudie, had dubbed us Tough Birds Inc. early on, and we all preferred that. If you had told me three years earlier that I’d want to spend a couple of hours every two weeks in a hospital basement with people who had traumatic brain injuries—who complained about hearing themselves say things like “Button the shoelace” and “What time does it cost?”, how they couldn’t calculate the tip in restaurants, and how little things made them fly off the handle—I would have said you were nuts. Of course, I wasn’t one of them then.
    When it was my turn to check in at the beginning of group and I told everyone that Dawn was coming home to live for a while, I could feel the tension spread among our little circle of dented folding chairs. Nelson, our only male member, twirled his gray ponytail around his finger and said, “Just be careful out there.” It was his stock line, which he’d picked up from some TV show, and it usually meant he was finished listening to one person and ready to move on to the next.
    “How did you come to that decision, Hanna?” Barbara asked, leaning forward the way she always did to show she thought something one of us said was important. She was an intense, big-boned woman with frizzy hair that looked windblown even when she was indoors, and huge glasses that came into and went out of style in the eighties. We had all learned that every time she pushed the glasses up on her nose, she believed she was on the trail of something psychologically significant. She pushed them up on her nose now, when she asked me this question.
    One of the things we were working on, as a group, was identifying our own thought processes when it came to decisions. We were supposed to slow ourselves down—because a lot of us tended to act impulsively—and force ourselves to make active choices, instead of just going with the first thing that came into our heads.
    I told Barbara I hadn’t had to make a decision, because Dawn was my daughter and I loved her. (I would have said it was a “no-brainer,” but we had banned that phrase from the group.) “We were always close,” I said. “You know I’ve been lonely. Why wouldn’t I want her home with me?”
    When no one answered—I knew what they were thinking—I got up to go to the refreshment table. Trudie and I were the only ones who ever contributed anything; I always made a batch of my mother’s oatmeal crinkles, and Trudie always picked up a can of Hawaiian Punch, which made everyone laugh the first time because they’d expected something more decorous from the British lady.
    At the table, I turned my back to the group and picked up a cup with trembling fingers. Trudie came over and led me by the elbow into the hall. “Are you sure about this, Hanna?” she said, in her accented murmur.
    Trudie was much younger than my mother would have been if she were still alive, but she reminded me of her, nevertheless with silver-white hair that always grew too long before she got it cut, and the sweaters she wore even when it was hot out. For as long as I could remember, my mother had suffered a perpetual chill, and when I learned that Trudie did, too, I felt an immediate connection to her. Though of course I knew better, I sometimes chose to believe, when I needed to, that in my friendship with Trudie it was my mother showing up, all these years after her death, to bring me a little peace.
    Before I could answer