Black-Eyed Susans (6 page)

A short silence. “That’s good,
Mom. You need to be absolutely sure. You’ve been worrying about this a lot lately.
People are getting released on DNA stuff all the time now. Our science teacher told us
that Dallas has freed more innocent people from Death Row than almost every other state.
People just think we kill everybody.” I hear her crumple up the hamburger
wrapper.

“Don’t toss that on the
floor,” I say automatically. To myself, I think:
Is that because we
have
more innocent people on Death Row?

“And Angie,” Charlie adds.
“She was nice. She was, like, totally convinced. And she said that none of it was
your fault.”

“I’ll be in the news
again.” Meaning, Charlie won’t be immune.

“I’ve been through it before. My
friends will take care of me. I got this, Mom.”

The naivete of it almost makes me want to
cry. At the same time, it is hard to believe that Charlie is three years younger than I
was when I testified. She seems so much more
prepared.

I pull into our driveway and switch off the
ignition. Charlie is rustling to get her stuff, but I don’t turn around.
“Never,
ever
get in
a car with someone you don’t
know. Never walk alone. Don’t talk to reporters.” My voice sounds sharper
than I’d like in the tiny, closed-up space. “If I’m not home, turn the
security system on as soon as you close the door.”

It’s ridiculous to deliver these
worn-out instructions for the thousandth time, but I’d become too complacent. I
have vowed ever since Angie’s wake to know where Charlie is every single second. A
few days ago, I turned down a freelance design project in Los Angeles to build a
staircase out of old cars and recycled glass. It would have carried our finances for the
next two years.

“Mom.”
She packs as
much teen-age patronization in those three letters as will fit. “I
got
this.”

Before I can respond, she’s tumbling
out of the car, loaded up like a soldier entering battle, jogging to the front door with
her house key in hand. She’s in the house in seconds. Prepared, like I taught her.
Innocent, and not.

The question that neither of us ever asks
out loud:
But if not him, then who?

I follow her slowly, fiddling with my phone.
I almost trip over the duffle she dumped in the foyer, think about calling out to her,
stop myself. I head to the small desk in the living room where my laptop sits, call up
the email I just sent to my own address, download, hit print. Listening to it
regurgitate a couple of feet away, I think Charlie’s right—our house needs a
more efficient grasp on technology.

The printer spits out three grainy pictures
of wilting flowers. Charlie’s door is already closed when I pass by.

A few seconds later, I am on my tiptoes,
pulling from the top shelf of my bedroom closet the shoebox boldly marked,
Tax
Documents.

The killer has planted black-eyed Susans for
me six times. It didn’t matter where I was living. He likes to keep me guessing.
I’m sure about this now.

He waited so long between plantings
sometimes that, before
Angie, I was able to convince myself on most
days that the right killer sat in jail. That the first black-eyed Susans were the work
of a random stalker, and the other times the whims of the wind.

This box, made for ASICS running shoes, size
7, marked
Tax Documents,
contains the photographs I snapped every time anyway.
Just in case.

I set the box on the bed and lift the lid.
Right on top, the one taken with my granddaddy’s old Polaroid Instant camera.

That first time, right after the trial, I
had thought either I was crazy or that black-eyed Susans had suddenly sprung up in
October under the live oak in our back yard because of a bizarre weather pattern. Except
the ground looked disturbed. I dug up the wildflowers by myself a little frantically
with an old kitchen spoon.

I didn’t want to tell anybody because
life in my house was returning to some semblance of normal. I was done with therapy.
Terrell Darcy Goodwin sat in jail. My dad was dating for the first time.

The spoon struck another surprise in the
dirt that day—something hard, orange, and plastic. An old prescription bottle. The
label ripped off. Childproof cap.

Charlie has turned up her music. It strains
through the wall, but can’t drown out the words on a scrap of paper curled up in a
little orange bottle.

Oh Susan, Susan, lovely dear

My vows shall ever true remain

Let me kiss off that falling tear

I never want to hurt you again

But if you tell, I will make

Lydia

A Susan, too

After he leaves the office, my fingers brush
over three stubby charcoal crayons; the cool metal coil binding a drawing pad; a Dixie
cup of water; a few brushes, a narrow paint box with a squeaky hinge. The doctor has
repeated the order of the paint colors four times, left to right. Black, blue, red,
green, yellow, white.

As if what colors I choose will make a
significant difference. I am already thinking of swirling the colors to make purple and
gray, orange and aqua. The colors of bruises, and sunsets.

This is not the first time I have drawn
blind. Right after Mom died, Granddaddy was constantly trying to distract me from
grief.

We sat at his old cedar picnic table. He
punched a No. 2 pencil through the center of a paper plate, a de facto umbrella, so that
I could grasp the pencil but not watch my hand draw. “Making pictures in your head
is primal,” he said. “You don’t need your eyes to do it. Start with
the edges.”

I remember the faint blue flower border that
etched the paper plate, that my fingers were sticky with sweat and chocolate, but not
what I drew that day.

“Memories aren’t like
compost,” the doctor had said, as he guided me over to his desk. “They
don’t decay.”

I knew exactly what he wanted out of this
little exercise. The
priority was not to cure my blindness. He wanted
to know why my ankle shattered into pieces, what implement etched the pink half-moon
that hung under my eye. He wanted me to draw
a face.

He didn’t say any of this, but I
knew.

“There’s infinite storage space
up here.” He tapped my head. “You simply have to dig into every
box.”

One more self-help bite from him before he
shut the door, and I would have screamed.

I can hear my father outside the door,
droning blurry words, like a dull pencil. Oscar has settled into the cave under the
desk, his head resting on my cast. Pressure, but nice pressure, like my mother’s
hand on my back. The doctor’s voice floats through the door. They are talking
about box scores, like the world is running along just fine.

My head is blank when the charcoal begins to
rub insistently against the paper.

The click of the door opening startles me,
and I jump, and Oscar jumps, and my pad slides and clunks to the floor. I have no idea
how much time has passed, which is new, because ever since I went blind, I can guess the
time of day within five minutes. Lydia attributes it to a primitive internal clock, like
the one that reminds hibernating animals to wake up in the black isolation of their
caves and venture back into the world.

I smell him, the same Tommy cologne that
Bobby always liberally sprays on himself at Dillard’s. My doctor wears Tommy
Hilfiger, sounds like Tommy Lee Jones. Everything Tommy.

“Just checking to see how it’s
going,” he says.

He is at my side, reaching down, picking up
the pad from the floor, placing it gently on the desk in front of me. My drawings,
except for the one on the pad, are ripped out and scattered across his desk. My head
pounds, and I press a finger into my right temple like there’s a pause button.

“May I?” he
asks, which is ridiculous because I’m certain his eyes are already greedily
scanning. He picks up a sheet, puts it down, picks up another.

The air is thick with the heat of his
disappointment; he’s a teacher with a second-rate student who he has hoped will
surprise him.

“It’s just the first
time,” he says. Awkward silence. “You didn’t use any paint.” A
hint of reproach?

He stiffens. Leans in closer, tickling my
shoulder, turning my pad, which was apparently upside down. “Who is
this?”

“I’m not done.”

“Tessie, who
is
this?”

I had scrubbed the charcoal against the page
until it was black. I had dug into his desk drawer for the No. 2 pencil eraser that I
used to swirl a chaotic nest of hair around her head. My fingernail carefully scratched
out big eyes, delicate cheekbones and nose, full lips rounded into a frightened O.

I thought about
the edges.
No neck
anchored her in the blackness. She floated in outer space, a silent, screaming
constellation. I had drawn a face, but not the one he wanted.

“It’s your daughter.” Why
I felt the urge to torture him, I do not know. I could have said it was Lydia. Or my
mother. Or me. But I didn’t.

I feel a slight whoosh of air as he abruptly
draws back. I wonder whether he wants to strike me. Oscar is whining way back in his
throat.

“It looks nothing like her.”
There is a slight crack in his voice. A picture forms in my head of a perfect black egg
with a white hairline fracture.

I know that his reply is inappropriate, even
silly. I am a skilled artist at seventeen, but this drawing is surely distorted, even
childish.
Of course
it looks nothing like her. I’ve never met her.
I’m blind.

He’s a doctor. He shouldn’t
allow me to make any of this personal for him.

When did I become capable of such cruelty?

I’m thinking of Lydia as I shove a
digger deep into the loose soil under my windowsill, pulling out the poisoned Susans,
stacking them in a neat, weedy pile beside me. The metal of the digger is stained with
traces of bloody rust, but the shiny part glints in the light filtering out the screen
of my bedroom window.

The yellow curtains blow white in the
moonlight, billowing and retracting. While I’d waited for Charlie to conk out, I
plopped on the couch, flipped on
Jimmy Kimmel Live,
and scratched out a list on
the back of a grocery slip, as if that somehow made the contents more harmless.

I wanted to see them neatly written down.
Every single place I’d found a patch of black-eyed Susans in the years since the
trial. The big question, which I already knew the answer to:
Should I go back to
each one of them alone? With Bill? With Joanna?
Wouldn’t it just waste their time, make them think I was even crazier than
they already did?

It seemed highly unlikely that I’d be
able to find things he might have buried for me in the ground all these years later, or
that I’d hit the right spot to dig, even with the photographs. Rain gushes, the
earth moves.

Now, down on my hands and knees in the inky
night, sifting my
hand through the dirt, I wonder if I am wrong. I find
an errant screw dropped from a worker’s hand when the windows were replaced two
years ago. A scrap of paper. The stubborn roots of a vine that appeared like a white
bone.

Lydia always knew what to do in these
situations. She was the one with the scientific and logical mind, able to shove aside
emotion and examine everything with the clinical detachment I didn’t possess. The
summer we were eight, she stayed inside the lines of her coloring books, while I tried
to invent a new color by melting crayons together on the sidewalk in the brutal Texas
sun.

In elementary school, I liked to run against
the wind for the battle of it; Lydia waited for me cross-legged on a blanket, reading
something way too old for her.
The Great Gatsby. Hamlet.
1984.
Afterward, as I lay panting on the ground, she pressed cool fingers to my
wrist and counted the beats of my pulse.

I knew that I would not die on Lydia’s
watch. She’s the one who whispered in my ear while I stared at a waxy yellow
version of my mother in the casket.
She is not in there.
She was unusually
drawn to death, from the beginning.

When we were assigned a world history
project on “a fascinating moment in British history,” two-thirds of Mrs.
Baker’s freshman class wrote about the Beatles. I carefully etched a replica of
the medieval London Bridge and pondered the miracle of God that kept the shops and
houses crammed on top from crashing into the mighty Thames.

Lydia chose a river of evil so black and
swirling you couldn’t see the bottom. Mrs. Baker asked her to read her report out
loud to the class, probably because she knew it would keep us awake at our desks.

I’ll never forget Lydia’s
chilling delivery of her opening lines, stolen from the coroner’s report.

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis
of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left
cheek.

While most of her
classmates were contemplating whether “I Am the Walrus” was just one big
John Lennon acid trip, Lydia had buried herself in the story of Jack the Ripper’s
final victim.

Mary Kelly met her grisly death at the 26 Dorset Street boardinghouse, room 13. She
was 5’7”, twenty-five years old, a buxom prostitute, and owed
twenty-seven shillings on her rent.

She was heard singing in her room hours before she died.

It doesn’t take a memory expert to
figure out why I remember such details so many years later and very little about the
medieval London Bridge. Lydia had turned on a British accent during her presentation. At
one point, her fist thumped her chest three times in a dramatization of the first knife
strikes.