Black-Eyed Susans, page 10
She accurately interprets my silence. “Not today. But maybe soon?”
“Yes, yes. Soon.”
“May I give you a homework assignment? I would like you to draw the curtain again from memory. Then call me. I’ll make time.” She pats my knee. “Excuse me for a minute.”
She walks toward the closed door at the back of the room. I notice a slight arthritic limp. As the door cracks open, I glimpse her personal refuge—warm light and a large antique desk.
She is back quickly, proffering a business card. Nothing else in her hands. She is not returning my drawings—at least, not today. No cheating.
“I scribbled my cell number on the bottom,” she says. “I did have one more question before you go, if that’s OK.”
“Sure.”
“The drawing of the field. The giant flowers leering like monsters over the two girls.”
Girls. Plural. Two.
“It means nothing,” I say. “I didn’t draw it. A friend of mine did. We drew together. She was in on my … deception. My partner in crime.” I laugh awkwardly.
Nancy shoots me a strange look. “Is your friend OK?”
It seems like an unusual question. So many, many years have passed. Why does it matter?
“I haven’t seen her since we were seniors in high school. She left town before we graduated, right after the trial.” She just disappeared.
“That must have been hard.” Every word is careful. “To lose a good friend so soon after the trauma.”
“Yes.” For more reasons than I want to explain. I am inching toward the door. Lydia is not a place I will go. Not today.
Yet Dr. Giles won’t let me leave, not yet.
“Tessa, I believe the girl who drew that scene, your friend Lydia, was genuinely terrified.”
“You said there were … two girls in that picture. I always thought there was one girl. Bleeding.” A tiny, tiny red tornado.
“At first, so did I,” she says. “The shapes are not distinct. But if you look closely, you can see four hands. Two heads. I believe one of the girls is a protector, crouching over the other one. I don’t think that is blood from the attack of the flower monsters. I think the protector has red hair.”
Tessie, 1995
It is hard, pretending not to see. It has been two days. I know that I can’t keep it up very long, especially with my dad. I need some time to observe, to analyze body language. To know what everyone is really feeling about me when they think I’m not looking.
The doctor scribbles away at his desk, a scritch-scratching sound that makes me want to scream.
He glances up with a concerned frown to see if I might have changed my mind about talking. Or my pose. Arms crossed, staring straight ahead. I had marched in the room at our appointed time and told him that I was done. Done, done, done.
We had a deal, I’d reminded him.
No freakin’ way was I doing hypnosis, where I float along like a dizzy bluebird and tell him secret things. I set out my rules from the beginning, and if it was so easy to erase this one from his mind, what else might he do? Offer up a happy cocktail? I’d read Prozac Nation. That girl was sad. So messed up. She wasn’t me.
I didn’t want to be like her, or Randy, the guy with the locker next to mine, wearing an Alice in Chains T-shirt every day, popping Xanax between classes and sleeping through high school. I had heard that his mother has breast cancer. I don’t want to ask, but I am always sure to smile at him when we meet at the lockers. I get it. Randy sent me a cute card at the hospital with a thermometer sticking out of a cat’s mouth. He wrote inside, Sometimes life is so unkind. I wonder how long it took him to find that lyric. Alanis is plastered inside my locker, so he had to know. He probably couldn’t find any Alice in Chains tunes that wouldn’t tell me to go kill myself or something.
Lydia had caught on right away. Tiny clues. My Bible on the dresser opened to Isaiah instead of Matthew. The TV ever so slightly more angled toward my spot on the bed. The pink-and-green T-shirt that matched the leggings, and the brown and peach Maybelline eye shadow that I hadn’t put on for a year. It wasn’t just one thing, she said. It was all of them.
There were surprises, everywhere. My face in the bathroom mirror, for one. Everything about me, more angular. My nose juts out like the notch on my grandfather’s old sundial. The half-moon scar under my eye is fading, more pink than red, less noticeable. Dad tentatively suggested a few weeks ago that we could talk to a plastic surgeon if I wanted, but the idea of lying there like Sleeping Beauty while a man with a knife stands over me … not ever gonna happen. I would rather people stare.
Oscar is even whiter than I imagined, although maybe that’s just because everything seems a little blinding at the moment. He’s the first thing I saw at the end of my bed the morning I opened my eyes for real—a pile of dove feathers with a head. I had called out his name softly. When his tongue slapped my nose, I knew for sure I wasn’t dreaming.
There was no drama to my sudden transformation. I went to sleep, I woke up, and I could see again. The world had crept back into sharp and excruciating focus.
The doctor’s still at it with the scritch-scratching at the desk. I twitch my eyes over to the clock on the wall. Nine minutes left. Oscar’s sleeping at my feet, but his ears are flicking around. Maybe an evil squirrel dream. I kick off my sneaker and run my foot back and forth across his warm back.
The doctor notices my movement, hesitates, and puts down his pen. He makes his way slowly over to the chair across from me. I think again what an excellent job Lydia had done of describing him.
“Tessie, I want to tell you how sorry I am,” he begins. “I didn’t honor our agreement. I pushed you. It is everything a good therapist should not do, regardless of the circumstances.”
I greet him with silence but keep my gaze locked over his shoulder. Tears, barely under the surface.
Because there are things I’d still rather not see. My brother’s face after my dad talked to him quietly last night about his grades, which used to be straight A’s. The medical insurance forms scattered all over the table like someone lost at poker and tossed the deck. The sad, bare state of the refrigerator, weeds choking the cracks in the driveway, tight lines curved around my father’s mouth.
All of this, because of me.
I need to keep trying. I want to get better. I can see. Isn’t that better?
Didn’t this man asking for forgiveness right now probably have something to do with that? Shouldn’t I let him score that victory? Don’t we all make mistakes?
“What else can I say, Tessie, that might begin to restore your trust in me?”
I think he knows that I can see.
“You can tell me about your daughter,” I say. “The one you lost.”
Tessa, present day
The tutu is finished.
I steam it gently, even though it doesn’t really need it. Charlie makes fun of me and my Rowenta IS6300 Garment Steamer. But Rowenta has probably been my best and most faithful therapist. She pops out of the closet about once a month and never asks a single question. She’s mindless. Magic. I borrow her wand and all of the wrinkles disappear. Results are instant, and certain.
Except for today.
Today, a mobile spins in my head, dangled by an unseen hand. I’m transfixed by the pictures whizzing by. Lydia’s face is on one. Terrell’s is on another. They dance among yellow flowers and black eyes and rusty shovels and plastic hearts. All of them, strung together with brittle bone.
It has been two days since Dr. Nancy Giles of Vanderbilt/Oxford/Harvard interpreted Lydia’s drawing, right after she had announced in no uncertain terms that she didn’t put too much stock in Freudian crap.
Dr. Giles thinks something was wrong with Lydia. That Lydia perceived me as the protector. Which can’t be. I never told anyone about the poem he left me in the ground by the live oak. Lydia drew the picture before the poem. I would have died without Lydia back then, not the other way around.
I need to see this drawing again, dammit. Why didn’t Dr. Giles offer to show it to me? Did she think I was a liar? That I knew something I wasn’t telling? As always, as soon as I left a therapist’s office, the doubts wriggled out like slimy worms.
I miss you. That’s what Lydia wrote on the flowers delivered to my home after all those years of silence. Unless she wasn’t the one who sent them. What if they are from my monster? What if my silence killed her? What if, because I didn’t warn her, he carried out the poetic threat so coyly buried by my tree house? If you tell, I will make Lydia a Susan, too. What if my denial and stupidity sacrificed both Terrell and her?
Terrell. I think about him all the time now. I wonder if he hates me, if his arms are thick from push-ups on concrete, if he has already thought about his last meal, just in case. Then I remember, he can’t ask for a last meal. One of the guys who chained James Byrd Jr. to a pickup and dragged him to death ruined that for everybody. He requested two chicken-fried steaks, a pound of barbecue, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover’s pizza, an omelet, a bowl of okra, a pint of Blue Bell, peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and three root beers. It was delivered before his execution. And then he didn’t eat it. Texas said, no more.
I can rattle off this menu ordered by a racist freak, but can’t remember the day my world blew apart. I can’t remember a single thing that will save Terrell.
I glance out to my studio window, glinting at the top of the two-story garage in the corner of the back yard. I should go up there. Shut the blinds. Pull out my pencils and paints, and draw the curtain. Begin my homework.
The garage was renovated from crumbling disaster two years ago. Effie gave the plan her historical stamp of approval. Blue window boxes and straggly red geraniums for her, Internet and a security system connected to the house for me.
Cheerful. Safe.
The bottom level, which once housed the previous owner’s blue 1954 Dodge, is jammed with my table saw and biscuit joiner, router and drills, nail gun and orbital sander, vacuum press and welder. The tools that curve cabinet doors like sand dunes and solder master staircases into a dizzy spiral. Machines that make my muscles ache and reassure me that I can take on a man, or a monster.
The top level was designed just for me. My space. For the quieter arts. It seemed so important—a real home for my drawing table, easels, paints, paintbrushes, and sewing machines. I splurged on a Pottery Barn couch and a Breville tea maker and a Pella picture window so that I could spy into the upper floors of our live oak.
The week after the nail pounding stopped, as I sat and sipped tea bathed in the studio’s white, clean, new-smell glory, I realized that I didn’t want my space. I didn’t want isolation, or to miss Charlie’s burst through the door after school. So I stuck with the living room. The studio turned into the place my little brother, Bobby, hangs out to write when he visits from his home in Los Angeles twice a year and where Charlie goes on the occasion when every word out of my mouth sets her nerves on fire. I don’t know why, Mom. It’s not what you’re saying. It’s just that you’re talking.
This is the reason that the living room is piled with brocade fabric and designer dress patterns and bead carousels that mingle with Charlie’s flip-flops and textbooks and misplaced earrings and itsy-bitsy “seahorse” rubber bands for braces. Why my daughter and I have an unspoken agreement not to speak about the state of the living room, unless it involves ants and crumbs. We clean it together every other Sunday night. It’s a happy place, where we create and argue and refine our love.
The studio is crowded. My ghosts moved in right away, when I did, after the last stroke of linen white on the walls. The Susans feel free to talk as loudly as they want, sometimes arguing like silly girls at a sleepover.
I should climb the steps. Greet them with civility.
Draw the curtain. Find out whether it swings from a window in the mansion in my head where the Susans sleep. Let them help.
But I can’t. Not yet. I have to dig.
I’m staring into a gaping hole again. This time, a swimming pool, empty except for a chocolate slurry of leaves and rainwater.
Feeling ridiculous. Disappointed. And cold. I pull up the hood of Charlie’s Army sweatshirt. It’s 5:27. I haven’t stood in this place since Charlie and I lived here when she was two. Charlie has already texted the word hungry while I was driving the wrong direction on I-30 with a red pickup on my tail, and twenty minutes after that, home, and five minutes after that, cool tutu, and one minute after that um?????
I tried calling back, but no answer. Now the phone in my pocket is buzzing. The sun is dropping lower every second, a big orange ball going somewhere else to play. The apartment windows wink fire with the fading light, so I can’t see in. I hope no one is staring down at the hooded figure in the shadows armed with a shovel.
“Why aren’t you at Anna’s?” I blurt into the phone, instead of hello. “You are supposed to be at Anna’s.” As if that would make it so.
“Her mom got sick,” Charlie says. “Her dad picked us up. I told him it was OK to bring me home. Where are you? Why didn’t you answer my texts?”
“I just tried to call you. I was driving. I got lost. Now I’m on … a job. In Dallas. Did you lock the doors?”
“Mom. Food.”
“Order a pizza from Sweet Mama’s. There’s money in the envelope under the phone. Ask if Paul can deliver it. And look through the peephole before you answer to make sure it’s him. And lock the door when he leaves and punch in the code.”
“What’s the number?”
“Charlie. You know the security code.”
“Not that number. The number for Sweet Mama’s.”
This from the girl who last night Googled that Simon Cowell was the young assistant who polished Jack Nicholson’s axe in The Shining.
“Charlie, really? I’ll be on my way home soon. I’m late because … I thought I’d remember the way.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Pizza, Charlie. Peephole. Don’t forget.” But Charlie has already hung up.
She’ll be fine. Was that me, or a Susan? Which of us would know better?
“Hey.” A man with a weed eater is quickly approaching from the other side of the house. Busted. I lean the shovel against a tree, too late. Even at this distance, something about the way he carries himself stirs a memory.
“This is private property!” he shouts. “What do you think you’re doing here with that shovel at dinnertime?” A drawl mixed with a threat and a reprimand about proper mealtime etiquette. A perfect Texas cocktail.
Because I’m scared of the dark. Because I think there are plenty of people with itchy fingers in this neighborhood who have a gun tucked in a drawer. I know I did.
“I used to live here,” I say.
“The shovel? What’s that for?”
I’ve suddenly figured out who he is, and I’m a little astonished. The handyman. The very same one who worked here more than a decade ago, who swore every day he was quitting. As I recall, he was a distant cousin of the grouchy woman who owned the place, a converted Victorian in East Dallas advertised as a four-plex with character. Translated: ornate crown molding that dropped white crumbs in my hair like dandruff, windows requiring Hercules to open them, and hot showers lasting two and a half minutes if I was lucky enough to beat the exercise freak on the first floor who woke up at 5 A.M.
The windows were why I took the place. No one crawling up and in. That, and the listing’s promise of Girls Only.
“When did the owner take out the parking spaces and dig this swimming pool?” I ask. “Marvin? Is it Marvin?”
“You remember old Marvin, do ya? Most of the girls do. Pool went in about three years ago. It used to be a gravel lot with numbered signs where everybody had a spot. But then, you’d know that. Now everybody complains they have to fight it out in the street. And Gertie has stopped filling the pool. Says it’s not worth the money and that Marvin don’t keep the leaves out. Old Marvin’s doing the best he can. When did you say you lived here?”
“Ten years ago. Or so.” Vague. I’d forgotten his habit of addressing himself in the third person. It partly explains why he never found another job.
“Ah, the good old days, when these whiney college brats didn’t call Marvin at 2 A.M. about how their Apples ain’t connectin’ to the Universe.”
I shove the laugh back down in my throat and don’t correct him. I pull the hood off so I can see better, and instantly realize the mistake. I toss my hair, trying to cover the side of my face with the scar. The toss is enough for Marvin to take renewed interest in me even though I’m in roomy black sweats and running shoes and not wearing a stitch of makeup. It must have been a slow day for him at the Girls Only House, which is the real reason I’m guessing he stays.
“I’m curious,” I say hesitantly. “Did they find anything when they dug up the pool?”
“Ya mean like a dead body? Whoa, you should see your face. No bodies, sweetheart. Are you missing one?”
“No. No. Of course not.”
Marvin is shaking his head. “You’re just like those damn kids. Or maybe you’re a scout for one of those ghost shows?”
“What kids?”
“The sorority that rents the apartment right up there on the left-hand corner every fall, thinking it is haunted. Use it to scare the shit out of their pledges. Drape skeletons dressed in see-through nighties out the window. Invite their rich frat boys and serve black-eyed-pea dip and trashcan punch, the stuff they vomit up on the front porch for me to clean up. Gertie started charging a premium to rent that apartment. But do you think she pays Marvin more? Nope. Marvin just has to suck it up and clean it up.”
“Why do they think … there are ghosts?” As soon as the question rolls off my tongue, I regret it. You know the answer.
“Because of the girl who lived there a long time ago. The one who got away from the Black-Eyed Susan killer. We didn’t even know it was her until a year and a half after she moved in. She was nice enough. Worked at a little design firm downtown. She complained a few times that we wouldn’t let her gate up the staircase for her little girl. Gertie said it would take away the old house charm.”
