Black-Eyed Susans (8 page)

Deep breath. I’m on this side of the glass. This side of hell.

She nods casually to the group. Besides Bill
and me, four other people are cleared for this event: three Ph.D. students—one
from Oxford, two from the University of North Texas—and a beautiful, unbottled
blond scientist from Sweden named Britta.

We’d spent the last fifteen minutes
together, strangers pretending we weren’t about to observe death at its most
sadistic. The students’ eyes flicked to me with interest, but no one was asking
questions.

Before Jo arrived, we had settled on
discussing the three places in Dallas and Fort Worth that Britta should not miss seeing
before returning home to her Stockholm lab in two weeks: the Amon Carter for its muscled
bronze Russells and Remingtons, and for the beautiful black boy in the newspaper hat;
the Kimbell for the silvery light cascading on buxom masterpieces and for the ill-fated
young man in the company of wicked sixteenth-century cardsharps; the Sixth Floor Museum,
where Oswald angled his rifle, and a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist defiantly roamed the
sidewalk, saying,
Nope, not like that.

As Britta eyes Bill, I am thinking it is
more likely she will end up in his bed. I’d gotten a curt smile from him this
morning.

“Stephen King researched part of his
Kennedy time-travel opus at the Sixth Floor Museum archives,” Bill is telling
them.

“Great book,” Jo says.
“King’s a genius. But he never really got Texas. And I’m saying that
as an Oklahoman. Hi, Bill. Tessa. Sarita. John and Gretchen. Britta, glad you could make
it today. Looks like they are just getting started.”

The skull is now facing us, leering from its
spot on the counter. The woman in white is still unwrapping puzzle pieces. A long,
pearly leg bone, and then another in much worse shape, like a tree branch snapped off in
winter.

“Tammy’s in charge today,”
Jo says. “Running the room.” The
two exchange a brief wave.
Four other women dressed in sterile suits are taking their places in the lab in front of
clear glass hoods. The fluorescent light is brutal, and cold.

“Looking into a serial killer’s
refrigerator,” Bill mutters in my ear.

Jo glances our way, but I can’t tell
if she heard. “Each forensic analyst has a specific job,” she explains.
“Margaret will cut a small piece out of the bone. Toneesha will clean it with
bleach, ethanol, and water. Jen will pulverize it to a fine powder, from which we
extract the DNA. Bessie’s only role is to spray down the surfaces as we go, to
keep things as sterile as possible. It’s protocol. Always.”

Her eyes are focused on the activity behind
the window. Jo’s in her element. Brilliant, without ego. Empathetic, without
cynicism.

I am thinking that Jo remembers every single
person by name on both sides of the glass. I am thinking, she could be talking about how
to refine sugar.

“Never forget protocol.”
Suddenly stern. “Never get sloppy. Somebody accused me of that once. Worst time of
my life.”

She doesn’t extrapolate. So far, no
talk of the actual case—who these bones represent, why they are special.

“We like the skull and the denser
bones, particularly femurs,” she continues. “Gives us the longest string of
mitochondrial DNA and the best chance at retrieving information on our way to finding
out who they are. We’re lucky we’ve got these three specimens, considering
the bones have been scavenged and moved at least once.”

The skull is being tucked under one of the
hoods. The buzzing of the saw drifts through glass, like it is floating down the street
on a lazy Saturday.

When the first Susan returns to the counter,
a new one-inch-square hole glares out of the top of her head.

One more degradation in an endless string of
them.

I’m sorry,
I say silently.
But there is no toothless, hollow answer in my head.

The Dremel saw drills a leg bone while the
piece of skull is
scrubbed raw in the second station. The technicians
have forgotten us, slipping into a comfortable rhythm. I don’t know what I was
expecting, but not this surreal, matter-of-fact routine.

“It must be especially exciting to
work on the Black-Eyed Susans,” Sarita says brightly. The student from Oxford. Her
voice is British, clipped. Her black heels are too high. “It must be an honor for
these techs. These must be your best.”

I can feel Jo’s body go taut as if it
is my own. “To them,” she says. “And to me, this case … these
bones … are no different than any other bone entrusted to us. Each one represents
the same thing. A family, waiting.”

Admonished. All of us.

“Why are there three bones?”
Bill shifts the conversation abruptly. “For two unidentified skeletons? I thought
you only tried one bone from a victim at a time.”

“Now, there’s the question
I’ve been waiting for.” Still an edge to Jo’s voice. “The
girls’ skeletons were ransacked by critters over time. Moved by their killer at
least once. The old case file documents foreign soil along with the red clay mixture in
that field. So, of course, not every bone was there. Our forensic anthropologist laid
out what was exhumed from the two caskets, and counted. He counted three right
femurs.”

I hear someone suck in a strangled breath.
It takes a second to realize it’s me.

“Three skeletons, not two,” Bill
whispers, as if I can’t do the math.

Five Susans in all, not four. One dead girl
named Merry, three gnawed-on nobodies, and me. Another member of my tribe. Another
family, waiting.

I’m the one,
a Susan says
conspiratorially.
I’m the one with the answers.

Jo shoots me an odd look, even though I know
I am the only one who can hear.

I wonder what he is looking at first.

The girl without a mouth. The girl with a
red blindfold. The spider’s web with the trapped swallowtail. The faceless runner
on the beach. The roaring bear, my personal favorite. I’d worked hard on the
teeth.

“Did you remember to bring your
drawings today?” he had asked first thing.

Anything was preferable to talking about the
day of my mother’s death. Last time, he might as well have taken a hot poker and
stuck it in my belly button.

And what did he learn? That I heard nothing.
Saw nothing. That all I remember is a vague image of blood, but that was dead wrong,
because the police told me there was no blood. All of it seemed so freakin’ off
point. Another way to clutter up my head.

So, yes, I brought drawings today. As soon
as he asked, I handed Doc a white cardboard poster-mailing tube. It once held the
Pulp Fiction
poster now hanging over Lydia’s bed. Lydia had rolled up
my drawings carefully after our three-hour session sprawled on the rough Berber of her
bedroom floor surrounded by a kindergarten chaos of paper and crayons and markers.

She didn’t like my idea when I sprang
it on her two days ago, but
I begged. More than anyone else, she
understood my fear—that someone else would find out my secrets before I did.

So she’d ridden the bus back to the
TCU library. Skimmed
The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. The Childhood
Hand That Disturbs.
And, because she was Lydia:
L’Imagination dans la
Folie,
which translates to
Imagination in Madness,
some random tome
that studied the drawings of insane people in 1846. She had educated me on the principle
of the House-Tree-Person test. House, how I see my family. Tree, how I see my world.
Person, how I see myself.

When it was all over, the black crayon worn
to a flat nub, I thought we’d faked it pretty well. Lydia was even inspired to
draw a picture herself, which she described to me as an army of giant black-and-yellow
flowers with angry faces.

The doctor is sitting directly across from
me, not saying a word. I can hear the crisp rustle of paper as he flips from one sheet
to the next.

The silence has to be something they teach
all these manipulative bastards.

Finally, he clears his throat.
“Technically excellent, especially since you have no vision. But, mostly,
cliché.” No emotion in his words, just a statement of fact.

My scars begin to thrum. Thank God, I
didn’t give him my real drawings.

“This is why I don’t like
you.” I speak stiffly.

“I didn’t know you didn’t
like me.”

“You don’t
know
?
You’re like all of the others. You don’t give a flip.”

“I give a flip, Tessie. I care very
much about what happens to you. So much that I’m not going to lie to you. You
obviously spent some time on these drawings. You are a very smart, talented girl. The
thing is, I don’t believe them. The angry animal. The girl who has no voice. The
idea of running along the ocean’s abyss. These Jackson Pollock black and red
swirls. They’re all just a little too pretty. Too pat. There
is
no single emotion that connects these drawings to one another. They stand alone. That
isn’t how trauma works. Whatever emotions you are feeling right now … they
connect everything.”

His chair creaks as he leans over, placing a
sheet in front of me. “Except for this one. This one is different.”

“Am I supposed to guess?” Trying
to be sarcastic. Trying to figure out how he saw through me so fast. Which drawing he
found meaningful.

“Can you?” he asks.
“Guess?”

“Are you really going to make me play
this game?” I grip Oscar’s leash like a lifeline, letting it bite into my
flesh. Oscar obediently clambers up. “I’m going home.”

“You can go home anytime you like. But
I think you want to know.”

My stillness says everything.

“Tell me.” I barely croak it
out, suffused with rage.

“The field of strangled flowers.
Leering. The little girl cowering. It’s terrifying. Messy.
Real.
”

Lydia’s drawing. She’d spent two
hours on it while singing along to Alanis.
Got a plastic smile on a plastic
face.

Lydia used to laugh about the fact that she
couldn’t even draw Snoopy.

She hadn’t told me about the little
girl. I wanted to see.

I dropped the leash and scooted myself to
the edge of the cushion, words rushing up my throat before I could stop them.

“What would you say if I told you that
the main thing I’ve been drawing …” I suck in a breath. “Is a
curtain. Over and over, until I want to crawl out of my skin?”

“I’d say, it’s a
start.”

A slightly higher pitch to his voice. Is it
hope?

I jiggle the key into the first of two locks
on the front door. My mind is dwelling on pristine white laboratories and trees made of
brittle bones and the fraction of statistical hope that one of the three tiny pieces of
dead girl will lead somewhere. All the way home, there was blessed silence from the
Susans. While the lock refuses to cooperate, a shadow clobbers into mine, making me
gasp.

“What are you so damn jumpy for,
Sue?”

Euphemia Outler, right-hand neighbor. Known
to me as Effie, to Charlie as
Miss
Effie (despite a marriage or two) and to a
few mean boys on the block as Miss Effing Crazy. She is an ex–science professor, a
self-employed suburban spy, and an early dementia patient who regularly calls me
Sue—not because of my past, but because it is her only daughter’s name, the
one who lives in New Jersey, who had decided when her mother turned eighty,
What the
hell, out of sight, out of mind.

“Hey, you snuck up on me,” I
say. “How’s it going today?”

In her right hand, Effie proffers a small,
oblong item wrapped in aluminum foil so crinkled that it could have been reused since
the Depression. In her left hand, a vase of flowers, in the tight professional array of
a florist. None of the flowers are yellow and black. On her head, the floppy
blue-checked sun hat that Charlie and I
bought from a beach vendor in
Galveston four summers ago as a gift. Effie’s eyes, still those of a provocative
teen, peer out of a face toughened by sun.

“I made you some banana bread. Threw
some bulgur in it. And I brought in these flowers for you this morning. I saw the guy
plop them on your front porch. Thought the wind might blow ’em over. Plus,
I’ve got a problem to discuss with you.”

“That was so nice. Thank you.” I
twist the second lock. The deadbolt is a little cranky, too.
Need to take care of
that. Maybe add a third lock.
I shove open the door and Effie tramples after me
in her battered green Crocs without invitation.

“Let me stick these groceries
away.” I avert my eyes from the flowers. “Go ahead and put the flowers and
bread here on the counter, and then you can tell me about your … problem. I have
iced tea in the fridge. Charlie brewed it last night. Caffeine, sugar, mint,
lemon—the works. Charlie stole the mint from your garden after dark.”

“I put bulgur in the bread because I
know Charlie especially likes it. And I’ll take that tea.”

I am pretty sure my daughter has no idea
what bulgur is, but this is likely a step up from last week’s offering of oatmeal
and carob cookies that Charlie cheerfully likened to eating cow manure.

Effie fancies herself as something of a
chef. The problem is, she thinks like a scientist. For instance, deciding it would be a
good idea to boil fresh pumpkin for pumpkin pie rather than using a time-tested can of
Libby’s puree. Chunks and pumpkin strings and
a lot
of canned whipped
cream are what I will remember about last year’s Thanksgiving dinner. But
that’s OK: Most Thanksgivings just flow into a dull, pleasant river, and Charlie
and I will laugh about that one forever.

“
The New York Times
called
bulgur ‘a wheat to remember,’” Effie informs me. “They try to
make everything so damn profound. I’d stop reading the paper if it weren’t
for the science section and if I didn’t think the crossword puzzles were reviving
my dead brain cells.
What the hell do they know? Dead isn’t
necessarily dead. Do you think
they
know a four-letter word for Levantine
coffee cup?”
They
generally referred to her neurologist.