Read Online Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway - Free Book Online

emotions scared me—I continued to resist feeling everything I knew lay beneath the visible scars.
    But one day in late spring, returning from a walk with Abby, I surprised myself by deciding to put on Bach’s Mass in B Minor while I made my tea. Almost as soon as the first chords sounded, Abby’s ears pricked and she raised her face in excitement. It was this—the dog’s recognition of Joe’s favorite music, rather than any particular memory of my husband himself—that caused me to burst into tears as the kettle blew.
    But it was a good pain I felt that day. If it hadn’t been, I would have taken the needle off the record too quickly, risking a scratch, and put the album away in a place that would be easy to forget. As it was, I sat on the love seat next to Abby, closed my eyes, and let the music choke me while through the window I felt the sun, weak but steady, struggling to break through the clouds. I felt myself transported, with a rich and wistful sweetness, back to the years during which this house had held us all safe.
    Remembering this, I looked at Abby a few minutes after Dawn and I had hung up and said, “Come on, girl.” I knew that if I enlisted her in what I had to do next, she wouldn’t let me back out. She followed on my heels as I climbed the stairs toward the master bedroom, which I had shared with Joe for more than twenty years. I hadn’t stepped across the threshold since the attack almost three years earlier. In many ways, I knew, it was kind of nutty to have a room in my house I never entered or even allowed myself to look into. It felt like a device in a soap opera or a bad haunted house movie: And now we return to Don’t Go into the Bedroom.
    But I’d gotten accustomed to it, and I didn’t actually think of it as space that wasn’t being used; to me, it was more as if the house just ended at that door. I rarely if ever tried to imagine what lay beyond it, in the form of the redecorating Iris had supervised while I was away in rehab. I paid a housecleaning service to come once every two weeks (an indulgence I never would have considered while Joe was alive), so they went in there, but I’d asked them to make sure the door was closed each time they left.
    As hard as I’d always thought it would be, it turned out to be that easy. I just opened the door and walked in. I’d anticipated that my first feeling would be fear, but instead, as I stepped into the room I’d slept in for so many years, it was a sense of euphoria that came over me, in waves so strong I had to put my hand up to my mouth. A conquering. A triumph. I thought of something one of the physical therapists at the rehab center used to say all the time, when I told him I couldn’t do what he asked of me: “You got this.”
    To think of it that way, of course, was sad and silly: all I’d done was walk into a room. Somewhere inside myself, I knew that. But for those first few moments, celebration swam through my bones.
    Iris had told me she changed the room entirely, and she was right except for one thing—the placement of the bed. There wasn’t much she could do about that, given the location of the windows; the headboard had to lie between them against the far wall, the foot catty-corner to the bathroom door.
    But the furniture and colors were so different that it didn’t feel like the same space at all. Iris had thought she was doing me a favor, but as I stood there trying to recognize anything familiar, I felt an overpowering desire to have my old room back. Our old room—mine and Joe’s. It had been simple when he was alive, and things didn’t necessarily match—the bureaus, the bed, the bookcase—but that didn’t bother us. We hung photographs of the girls on the walls, and the shelves held souvenirs from places we’d visited as a family: Plimoth Plantation, Sturbridge Village, Fort Ticonderoga. Joe loved historical re-creations, and though Iris became bored on these trips once she outgrew the novelty of