Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway

this time. Short of someone else showing up to say they’d been in our bedroom that night three years earlier and witnessed what happened to us—and short of Dawn remembering something new that might be of use to the prosecution—I knew it was up to me, despite the warning that kept flashing somewhere below my heart.
    Besides that, I had my daughter to protect, since the prosecutor had threatened to try again to indict her if she couldn’t get either of us to take the stand. But I decided not to mention that to Dawn now.
    She took in a stuttered breath, and I was reminded of the old days when she used to have asthma. “I don’t think you should do that to yourself,” she said in a hollow voice. “After everything you’ve been through—it could traumatize you all over again.”
    “It would be worth it, if that’s the only way to keep him in jail.” And if I can prove your innocence once and for all.
    I tried to sound braver than I actually felt. We’d had a woman in my rehab group for a few weeks who was standing at the bus stop one day when the memory of her rape as a teenager flooded over her in a rush. She was so undone that the police had her admitted to a psych ward, and she never came back to the group.
    Dawn sighed. “Don’t let them bully you, Mommy,” and although I should have known better, I felt a rise of happiness, because it had been so long since I’d heard that word. Of our two daughters, Dawn was the only one who ever called me Mommy. She continued long after most of her friends had abandoned it; she seemed to understand that it made me feel good, and it created an intimacy between us that I regret to say I never felt with Iris.
    “I’m not,” I told her. “Gail Nazarian is just doing her job. She doesn’t want him set free.”
    Dawn made a noise, but I couldn’t tell what she meant by it. Then she said she had to get ready to go to work. When she first moved out west, she was always vague when I asked her what kind of job she had, using words like temp and provisional and in training . I thought it must come from embarrassment, so I’d stopped asking. She’d dropped out of college after the attack and never returned, as far as I knew, so I didn’t see how she could be making all that much money, whatever she was doing. “I’ll call you back,” she told me, and I said okay, even though I didn’t know what more we had to talk about.
    I assumed she just said it for a way to end the conversation—that she didn’t mean it. But inside of an hour, I saw her number pop up again on caller ID.
    “I thought you had to go to work,” I said.
    “I called in sick. Mommy, I’ve been thinking. I want to come home for a while. If you’re really going to do this—try to remember what happened—I don’t want you to be alone.”
    “I’m not alone. I have my group,” I told her, not yet allowing my mind to register her sentence about coming home. I would have added “and Iris,” but I stopped myself because I knew it would hurt Dawn to hear her sister’s name.
    “But they’re not your family.” Dawn took a breath. “Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. I’ve maxed out my credit cards.” On the pad I kept next to the phone, I wrote max . Later I would wonder who Max was. I’d been more forgetful than usual lately. I wasn’t even fifty yet, but I had some residual damage from the attack. Not as much as some people who’d been through similar things—God knows I heard their stories over and over again in my group—but I could tell I wasn’t quite the same as I used to be. I’d pick up the phone and forget who I was calling. I had trouble finding the right words. And names of people—often, I had to go through the alphabet to help me remember.
    Probably taking my silence for hesitation, Dawn added, “They’re really cracking down on credit these days,” as if I might not be aware how far the economy had fallen during the past few years.
    It took me longer than it should