Free Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway Page A

Trudie’s question, Barbara stuck her head into the hall and asked us to rejoin the group. I started back in, but not before Trudie caught my arm at the door and whispered, “Just because you give birth to someone doesn’t mean you owe her for the rest of your life. For God’s sake, Hanna—if anything, she owes you .”
    But Trudie didn’t have any children; her husband had died young, and she had never remarried. What could she tell me about being a mother?
    *  *  *
    As much as I would have liked to use the phone to tell Iris that her sister was coming back, I knew I had to do it in person. I called in to work the next morning and told Francine I needed the day off, then put Abby in the hatchback and drove out to the little town where Iris and Archie lived, though at the end of the summer he’d moved out, renting an apartment a few blocks from the house they’d bought near the hospital where he worked as a physician in the endoscopy department. Iris had just started medical school at BU when she became pregnant, but then took a leave of absence after Joe and I were attacked, convincing Archie to accept a job offer in western Massachusetts so they’d be closer to me. We’d all expected her to return to her studies by now, but I’d learned the hard way not to bring it up, because when I did, it made her angry. “What am I supposed to do, commute back and forth to Boston with a kid?” she’d snapped the last time I asked.
    I worried that she was depressed, still suffering the emotional effects from what had happened to Joe and me. She’d never lost the weight from being pregnant, and had gained even more in the years since. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she was over two hundred pounds now, and it worried me. If she’d come into the medical office for a checkup, we would have considered her obese.
    I knew Archie was worried about her, too. Not just because she’d gotten so heavy, but because she seemed to be trapped inside herself. She couldn’t get out of her own way. From the time she was old enough to walk, I had never seen my older daughter look as if she didn’t know which direction the next step should take her. But now she had been this way for the past three years. She lost track of important papers, forgot appointments, spent too much time in bed—the opposite of all the things she had learned from and observed in her father, and chosen as the way to conduct her own life. Archie moved out because he was desperate to jog her out of this altered state; he believed that a separation would be the “bottom” she needed to hit before she came to her senses and rescued herself. But he’d been living in the apartment for a couple of months now, and it hadn’t happened yet.
    I loved my son-in-law, and I knew Iris appreciated the fact that he was so like Joe in his attention to discipline and detail. Every time Archie played a game of Scrabble, he snapped a photograph of the finished board, and kept the photos arranged chronologically in a notebook. His books, CDs, and DVDs were all alphabetized. Those slightly obsessive personality traits Joe and Archie shared, which could be endearing, had a flip side in the form of the high standards they set for other people as well as for themselves. Iris had always thrived on trying to meet and exceed those standards. But after her father died, she seemed to lose her motivation. Even though I understood why Archie thought she needed to be jolted back to reality, I hoped he wouldn’t give up on her too soon.
    The colors had peaked earlier in the month, but the trees on the turnpike still held most of their leaves, and the day was glorious: warmer than it should have been for the season, the sun misting off the mountains and looking like white breath from the sky. Such sights reminded me why it was that people loved to be alive, and for fleeting moments that made me want to cry, I was grateful I could still feel like one of them.
    Crunching leaves under