Black-Eyed Susans (4 page)

Did anyone hear?
I glance around
quickly. The tent is half-down. Someone is laughing. Shadows moving, none of them my
way. I push myself up, hands stinging, brushing off the death and grit clinging to my
jeans. I tug my cell phone out of my back pocket, and it casts its friendly light when I
press the button. I shine it over the gravestone. A red smear from my hands marks the
sleeping lamb guarding over Christina Driskill.

Christina entered the world, and escaped it,
on the same day. March 3, 1872.

My mind burrows into the rocky dirt,
fighting its way to the small wooden box that rests under my feet, tilted, cracked open,
strangled by roots.

I’m thinking of Lydia.

“Do you cry often?” First
question. Gentle.

“No,” I say. So much for
Lydia’s beauty fix of sticking two frozen spoons under my eyes after my little
jags.

“Tessie, I want you to tell me the
very last thing you saw, before you went blind.” No lingering on my puffy face.
Taking up right where we left off last time.
Smart tactic,
I think grudgingly.
He actually used the word
blind,
which no one else would dare say to my face
except Lydia, who also told me three days ago to get up and wash my hair because it
looked like stale cotton candy.

This doctor has already figured out that a
warm-up act with me was a complete waste of time.

I saw my mother’s face. Beautiful,
kind, loving.
That’s the last perfectly clear image that hung before me,
except that my mother has been dead since I was eight, and my eyes were wide open. My
mother’s face, and then nothing but a shimmering gray ocean. I often think it was
kind of God to introduce me to blindness that way.

I clear my throat, determined to say
something in today’s session, to appear more cooperative, so he will tell Daddy
that I am making progress. Daddy, who takes off from his job every Tuesday morning to
bring me here. For whatever reason, I don’t think this doctor will lie to him,
like most of the others. The way this doctor asks his
questions is not
the same. Neither are my answers, and I’m not sure why.

“There were a bunch of cards on the
windowsill in my hospital room,” I say casually. “One of them had a picture
of a pig on the front. Wearing a bow tie and a top hat. It said, ‘I hope you
squeal better soon.’ The pig—that’s the last thing I saw.”

“An unfortunate choice of wording on
the card.”

“Ya think?”

“Did anything else bother you about
that greeting card?”

“No one could read the
signature.” An illegible squiggle, like a wire spring.

“So you didn’t know who it was
from.”

“A lot of strangers sent cards from
all over. And flowers and stuffed animals. There were so many, my father asked them to
be sent on to the children’s cancer floor.” Eventually, the FBI got a clue
and swept everything to a lab. I later worried about what they might have ripped out of
a dying kid’s hands in return for not a scrap of useful evidence.

The pig held a daisy in his pink hoof. I had
left that part out. At sixteen, drugged up in a hospital bed and scared out of my mind,
I didn’t know the difference between a yellow daisy and a black-eyed Susan.

My cast is itching like crazy, and I reach
into the slim gap between my calf and the cast with two fingers. Can’t get to the
spot on my ankle. Oscar licks my leg with a sandpaper tongue, trying to help.

“OK, maybe that card was the
trigger,” the doctor says. “Maybe not. It’s a start. Here’s my
thinking. We’re going to talk about your conversion disorder before we move on to
preparing you for court. In the interest of time, there was hope by … others
… that I could work around it. But it is in the way.”

Ya think?

“As far as I’m concerned, time
stands still in this room.” He’s telling me
no pressure.
That
we’re sailing together in my gray ocean, and I control the wind. This is the first
lie I know he’s told me.

Conversion disorder. The
nice, fancy name for it.

Freud called it hysterical blindness.

All those expensive tests and nothing physically wrong.

All in her head.

Poor thing doesn’t want to see the world.

She will never be the same.

Why do people think I can’t hear
them?

I tune back in to his voice. I’ve
decided he sounds like Tommy Lee Jones in
The Fugitive.
Rough Texas drawl.
Smart as hell, and knows it.

… it’s not that uncommon in
young females who have endured a trauma like this. What is uncommon is that it’s
lasted this long. Eleven months.”

Three hundred and twenty-six days,
doctor.
But I don’t correct him.

A slight squeak as he shifts in his chair,
and Oscar rises up protectively. “There are exceptions,” he says. “I
once treated a boy, a virtuoso pianist, who had practiced eight hours a day since he was
five. He woke up one morning and his hands were frozen. Paralyzed. Couldn’t even
hold a glass of milk. Doctors couldn’t find a cause. He began to wiggle his
fingers exactly two years later, to the day.”

The doctor’s voice is closer. At my
side. Oscar bangs my arm with his nose, to let me know. The doctor is sliding something
thin and cool and smooth into my hand. “Try this,” he says.

A pencil. I grasp it. Dig it deep into the
side of my cast. Feel intense, gratifying relief. A slight breeze as the doctor moves
away, maybe the flap of his jacket. I’m certain he looks nothing like Tommy Lee
Jones. But I can picture Oscar. White as fresh snow. Blue eyes that see everything. Red
collar. Sharp little teeth if you bother me.

“Does this piano player know that you
talk about him to other patients?” I ask. I can’t help myself. The sarcasm
is a horsewhip I can’t put away. But on our third Tuesday morning together, I have
to admit this doctor is starting to get to me. I’m feeling the first pinch of
guilt. Like I need to try harder.

“As a matter of fact,
yes. I was interviewed for a Cliburn documentary about him. The point is: I believe you
will see again.”

“I’m not worried.” I blurt
it out.

“That is often a symptom of conversion
disorder. A lack of caring about whether you’ll ever go back to normal. But, in
your case, I don’t think that’s true.”

His first direct confrontation. He waits
silently. I feel my temper flare.

“I know the real reason why you made
an exception to see me.” My voice cracks a little when I want it to sound defiant.
“What you have in common with my father. I know you had a daughter who
disappeared.”

Angie’s utilitarian metal desk looks
exactly the way I remember, buried in mountains of paper and file folders. Shoved into a
corner of an expansive, open basement room at St. Stephen’s, the stone-and-brick
Catholic church that sits defiantly in the 2nd Avenue and Hatcher Street corridor of
hell. Smack in the center of a Dallas neighborhood that made a Top 25 FBI list for most
dangerous in the nation.

It is high Texas noon outside, but not in
here. In here, it is gloomy and timeless, colored by the stains of a violent history,
when this church was abandoned for eight years and this room was used as an execution
factory for drug dealers.

The first and only time I’d been here,
Angie told me that the hopeful young priest who rented her the space whitewashed the
walls four times himself. The indentations and bullet holes in the walls, he told her,
were going to be permanent, like the nails in the cross. Never forget.

Her desk lamp is the single thing glowing,
casting faint light on the unframed print tacked above it.
The Stoning of Saint
Stephen.
Rembrandt’s first known work, painted at nineteen. I had learned
about the chiaroscuro technique in another basement, with my grandfather bent over his
easel. Strong lights and heavy shadows.
Rembrandt was a master of it.
He made sure the brilliance of heaven was opening up for Saint Stephen, the first
Christian martyr, murdered by a mob because evil people told lies about him. Three
priests huddle in the upper corner. Watching him die. Doing nothing.

I wonder which came first to the basement:
this print or Angie, who decided Saint Stephen’s fate was a most appropriate
marker for her desk. The edges of the print are soft and furry. It is attached to the
pockmarked wall by three scratched yellow thumbtacks and one red one. A small rip on the
left side has been repaired with Scotch tape.

Two inches away is another vision of heaven.
A drawing on lined notebook paper. Five stick figures with lopsided butterfly wings
illuminated by a bright orange sunburst. A child’s crooked print tumbles across
the sky: ANGIE’S ANGELS.

I learned in Angie’s obituary that
this drawing was a long-ago gift from the six-year-old daughter of Dominicus Steele, an
apprentice plumber accused of raping an SMU coed outside a Fort Worth bar in the
’80s. Dominicus was identified by the victim and two of her sorority sisters.

That night, he’d flirted with the
victim up close. He was big and black, and a good dancer. The white college girls loved
him until they decided he was the guy in the gray hooded sweatshirt running away from
their drunk, crumpled friend in the alley. Dominicus was freed by DNA extracted from
semen stored for twelve years in an evidence storage unit. Dominicus’s mother was
the first to speak to reporters in terms of “Angie’s Angels,” and her
sweet little moniker stuck.

I’d never describe Angie as an angel.
She did whatever she had to. She was a very good liar when she needed to be. I know,
because she had lied for Charlie and me.

I take a step, and the hollow sound of my
boot echoes on the cheap yellow linoleum that covers up God knows what. The four other
desks that are scattered around the floor, in similar states of paper chaos, are also
empty.
Where is everybody?

There’s a blue door
on the far side of the room that’s impossible to miss. I venture over. Knock
lightly. Nothing. Maybe I should just hunker down in Angie’s chair for a while.
Swerve it around on the cranky roller wheels she complained about and stare into
Rembrandt’s heaven. Ponder the role of the martyr.

Instead, I twist the knob and open the door
a crack. Knock again. Hear animated voices. Push the door all the way. A long conference
table. Blazing overhead lights. Bill’s startled face. Another woman, jumping out
of her chair abruptly, knocking over her cup of coffee.

My eyes, traveling down the table, follow
the river of amber liquid.

Head thrumming.

Copies of drawings, stretched edge to edge
across the scratched surface.

Tessie’s drawings.

The real ones. And the ones that
aren’t.

I am staring at the score, 12–28,
scrawled in white chalk on a blackboard. A lopsided Little League game, maybe, or a bad
day for the Dallas Cowboys. It is clear from the chart’s wording that these are
the twelve men who have been freed over the years by Angie and her rotating legal crew,
and the twenty-eight who have not.

The woman who tipped over the coffee,
introduced to me as a third-year University of Texas law student named Sheila Dunning,
has left us. William quickly swept up the copies of my drawings, tucked them out of the
way, and set a fresh mug of hot coffee in front of me. He’s apologized multiple
times, and I’ve said over and over,
It’s OK, it’s OK, I have to
see those drawings again sometime
and
I should have knocked
louder.

Sometimes I long for the Tessie in me, who
would have just spit out the unvarnished, angry truth:
You’re a jerk. You knew
I was coming. You knew I hadn’t looked at these since I dug them out of a
wall.

“Thanks for driving
all the way down here.” He slides into a chair beside me and slaps a new yellow
legal pad on the table. He is wearing jeans, Nikes, and a slightly pilled green pullover
sweater that is too short for his frame, the curse of a broad-shouldered man. “Are
you still in the mood to do this?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Tessie, retorting. Still in there, after all.

“We don’t have to talk here. In
this room.” He gazes at me intently. “This is our war room. Generally off
limits to clients.”

My eyes linger over the walls. Beside the
chalkboard, enlarged snapshots of five men. Current cases, I assume. Four of the men are
African-American. A young Terrell Darcy Goodwin stars in the center photograph. His arm
is tossed around a guy in a red-and-gray high school baseball uniform, a little brother,
maybe. Same good looks, wide-spaced eyes, chiseled cheekbones, café latte skin.

On the opposite wall: Crime scenes. Gaping
mouths. Blank eyes. Confused limbs. I don’t linger.

I flick my head around to a giant erase
board that is scribbled with some sort of timeline.

I see my name. Merry’s.

I open my mouth to speak and find his eyes
glued to my crossed legs and the patch of bare white thigh above my black boots. I keep
meaning to let out the hem of this skirt. I scoot my legs under the table. He resumes a
professional mask.

“I’m not a client.” I
swallow a sip of bitter liquid, read the words on the side of the mug.
Lawyers Get
You Off.

William follows my eyes. Rolls his.
“Most of our cups are dirty. Could use a good washing out.” Joking. Letting
the other moment, the curiosity about what’s under my skirt, pass.

“I’m fine in here,
William.”

“Bill,” he reminds me.
“Only people over seventy get to call me William.”

“Did the exhumation Tuesday go as
planned?” I ask. “They kept it quiet. It didn’t even make the
papers.”

“You should know the answer to
that.”

“You saw me by the
tree.”

“That hair of yours is hard to miss,
even in the dark.”