Black-Eyed Susans, page 11
Suddenly, his face freezes.
“Jesus, you’re that girl, ain’t ya? You’re the Susan that lived up there.”
“My name isn’t Susan.”
“Shoulda known soon as I saw your red hair. Crap, no one is gonna believe this. Can Marvin take a picture? You’re for real, right? Not a ghost?” For a second, he seems to be truly considering this.
Before I can think, the phone is out of his pocket, the button pressed. I am recorded, with flash, for all time, into infinity, about to be passed from phone to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram—Marvin’s Universe and beyond.
“Great,” he says to himself, peering at his phone. “Got the shovel in the background.”
If my monster didn’t know already, he will soon.
I am on the hunt.
A light blares from every window as I swing into our driveway around 7. Not a sign that Charlie is scared, I remind myself, just her habit of flipping lights on as she goes and never bothering to turn them off.
I spoke with Charlie about half an hour ago. A pizza with Canadian bacon and black olives had, indeed, been delivered, eaten, and deemed “solid.” Everything seemed so normal on the other end of the line. Far, far removed from my disturbing encounter with Marvin. So much so that I had stopped at Tom Thumb to fill Charlie’s texted list of special requests for her lunch: yelo cheez, BF (nt honey) ham, Mrs. B’s white brd, grapes, hummus, pretz, mini Os.
“I’m home,” I yell, kicking the door closed behind me. The security system is switched on. Check. Charlie had even cleaned up the pizza box from the coffee table in front of the TV, where I assumed she’d been sneaking in a Netflix rerun of something on my waffle-y I don’t really like you to watch shows like that list.
But no Charlie. No backpack. The TV, warm. I pass through the living room and set the bag of groceries on the counter with my keys.
“Charlie?” Probably in her room, living inside Bose headphones while reluctantly tramping around nineteenth-century England with Jane Austen.
I knock, because Aunt Hilda never did. No answer. I crack her door. Shove it wide open. Bed unmade. Pride and Prejudice operating as a coaster for a water bottle. Clothes strewn everywhere. Her underwear drawer dumped on the bed. A streak of mud across the floor.
Pretty much as she left it this morning. But no Charlie.
The rest of the house sweep takes about a minute, plenty of time for sickening waves of panic to roll in. I thrust open the sliding glass doors to the back yard, yelling her name. She’s not in the hammock along the back fence line, jerry-rigged from the thick trunk of the live oak to an ancient horse post that Effie had saved from a carpenter’s axe. The studio windows gleam black above me; the garage doors are shut tight.
My phone. I need my phone.
I rush back inside and fumble for it in my purse. Clumsily punch in the new security code that I had to choose after the software update yesterday. Locked out. Shit, shit, shit. Try the four numbers one more time, slowly. Promise myself that I will never, ever update my phone again. Hit the icon.
And there it is, my one-word, God-sent reprieve.
@ Effie’s
In seconds, I am banging wildly on Effie’s door. It seems to take forever for her to answer it. She’s cloaked in a long white nightgown with lace that strangles her neck. Gray hair, sprung from its usual braided bun, rains down to her waist. I’d peg her as a runaway from Pemberley if she were clutching a candle instead of the largest laminated periodic table I’ve ever seen.
“What in heaven’s name is wrong?” Effie asks.
Be patient, be patient, be patient.
“Is Charlie here?” Breathless.
“Of course she is.” Effie steps aside, and there’s my girl, the most beautiful sight in the world, cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table, scribbling in a notebook. I pick up every detail: hair fanned out around her face like red turkey feathers, swept up by a chip clip; the volleyball shorts she’s still wearing even though it’s 50 degrees outside; the fuzzy pink pig slippers; the chipped gold glitter fingernail polish. Her lips are moving, exaggerated, like a silent film star. Save me.
“I was sitting a bit on the front porch swing and I saw a man roaming around our yards,” Effie begins.
Pizza guy, Charlie is mouthing now. Her eyes are rolling and Effie’s still chattering while all my brain can do is pound out, He doesn’t have her.
“… I thought about how your car was gone but the lights in the house were on. Got me concerned. I called and Charlie answered and I went right over and got her. I was just helping her with a little early chemistry prep for next year.”
Charlie points to a plate on the coffee table that holds either very burnt or dark chocolate cookies, arranged in a smiley-face pattern. The smiley face is Charlie’s work, I’m sure. She picks up two of the cookies and holds them over her face like eyes. Definitely burnt.
Charlie’s antics, Effie’s sincerity, the inedible cookies. Charlie and I will talk later about breaking one of my hard and fast rules. An @ symbol and a single digital word do not yet replace an old-fashioned, handwritten note and a piece of Scotch tape. Which means I might as well have just stepped out of Pemberley myself.
“That’s very considerate of you, Effie,” I say.
“Charlie thinks it was the pizza deliveryman,” Effie says, “but I thought he had a stealthy air about him. We both know you can’t be too careful.”
My mind is basking in a warm cocoon of relief when this registers. Is Effie hinting at what we never talk about? Is she, too, on high alert for my monster?
“You know who I think it was?” Effie asks.
I shake my head, numbly pondering all the things she might say that I don’t want Charlie to hear.
“I think,” she says, “it was the digger snatcher.”
Tessie, 1995
I know a few things about the doctor’s daughter now. Her name is Rebecca. She was sixteen. Not because he told me. Because Lydia is a digger.
She disappeared the same year that a madman robbed the world of John Lennon and Alfred Hitchcock died less violently than he deserved. Lydia and I found out that much as we carefully spun the microfiche of a local newspaper until it landed on a two-year-old profile of my doctor, produced right after he won a prestigious international award for research into normal people and paranoia.
Who the hell is normal, Lydia had muttered. Then she spun a few pages and read Hitchcock’s obit aloud to me. She was especially riveted by the revelation that he tortured his own daughter during the filming of one of Lydia’s favorite movies, Strangers on a Train. He stuck her on a Ferris wheel, halted her car at the top, turned off all the lights on the set, and abandoned her all alone in the dark. By the time some crew person brought her down, she was hysterical. Lydia clicked a button on the machine and copied both the doctor’s interview and the Hitchcock obit, which she deemed worthy of adding to the personal files of weirdness she kept in the box under her bed.
In fact, on the bus ride home from the library, she was more distracted by the fate of Hitchcock’s daughter than by how little she’d learned about Rebecca. He was a freaking sadist, she announced, while everyone seated near us stared at my little moon scar.
Rebecca was a single paragraph in the feature story summing up my doctor’s life, which makes me unbelievably sad. My guess? He told the reporter that the subject of his daughter’s disappearance was off the table.
He certainly made it clear it was off the table for us at our last session. A nice long silence followed my question about Rebecca. So I announced I liked the print of The Reaper hanging over his desk. “My grandfather went through a Winslow Homer wheat period,” I said. And, oh yeah, I’m not blind anymore.
I couldn’t tell if he was faking his surprise. The doctor appeared genuinely thrilled about what he declared a “major, major breakthrough.” He had fiddled around with a silly old-fashioned eye test that involved a pencil and my nose. Asked me to close my eyes and describe his face in the greatest detail possible.
He reassured me again that even though he wouldn’t discuss it with me, his daughter had absolutely nothing to do with the Black-Eyed Susan case. I had never asked that, but even if she does, I’m not at all sure at this point I want to know.
It’s hard not to be a little happy. I’ve gained three pounds in five days. My dad and brother squeezed me so hard in a three-way hug when they found out I could see again that I thought my heart would burst in my chest. Aunt Hilda hustled over a three-layer German chocolate cake, gooey with her famous coconut pecan frosting, and I’m pretty sure it was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.
Last night, a brand-new hardback copy of The Horse Whisperer appeared on my bedside table, in a house where it is unheard of not to wait until a book comes out in paperback.
The trial is fifty-two days away. That means twelve more sessions or so, if I count a couple extra to wrap things up after the trial. The end is near. I really don’t want to drag distractions, like Rebecca, into things. It was kind of a mean thing for me to bring up.
Unfortunately, Rebecca is now Lydia’s latest obsession, and she’s on a mission to hunt down more about her in other newspapers. Whatever she finds, I tell her, will be meaningless. Rebecca was pretty, with a lot of friends. She was such a nice girl and It was such a nice family and blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to sound cold, but there it is.
I know, because I’ve read every possible exaggeration about my life since I became a Black-Eyed Susan. My mother died under “suspicious” circumstances and my grandfather built a creepy house and I am practically perfect. The truth? My mother was struck by a rare stroke, my grandmother was the crazier one, and I am not and never will be a heroine out of a fairy tale. Even though they were all victims first, too. Snow White poisoned. Cinderella enslaved. Rapunzel locked up. Tessie, dumped with bones.
Some monster’s twisted fantasy.
Bet the doctor would like me to talk about that, I think, as he settles into his chair.
He smiles. “Fire away, Tessie.”
Last week, he had agreed to let me lead in this session. He also promised he wouldn’t tell my dad I’d faked blindness for a little bit. A promise kept so far. I wondered if he bargained with all of his patients. If this was appropriate.
It doesn’t matter. Today I am prepared to offer him something real.
“I’m afraid every time the lights dim … that I am going blind again,” I say. “Like when my family went to Olive Garden and some waitress turned the lights down for dinner mood or whatever. Or when my brother shut the living room blinds behind me so he could see the TV better.”
“When this happens, instead of thinking you are going blind again, why don’t you just tell yourself emphatically that you aren’t?”
“Seriously?” Ay yi yi. My dad was paying for this?
“Because you want to see, Tessie. It’s not like a little goblin is sitting inside your head manning a light switch. You are in control. Statistically, the chances of this ever happening again are almost nil.”
OK, kind of useful. At least encouraging. Even though chances of this happening to me were almost nil to begin with.
“What else is going on in there?” He taps his skull with a finger.
“I’m worried … about O. J. Simpson.”
“What exactly are you worried about?”
“That he might fool the jury and get off.” I don’t tell him that Lydia had soaked one of her own red leather gloves in V8 juice, dried it in the sun, and demonstrated how she could spread her hand wide and get the same effect as O.J.
The doctor crosses one long leg over the other. He’s much more of a conservative dresser than I’d imagined. Starched white shirt, black dress pants with a stand-up crease, loosened blue tie with tiny red diamonds, black shoes grinning with polish. No wedding ring.
“I think the chances of that happening are also practically zero,” he says. “You are simply worried that your own attacker will be set free. I’d advise you not to watch any of the O.J. coverage and ratchet things up in your head.”
Aunt Hilda offered this same advice for free, and tempered it by handing me a plate of fried okra fresh out of her skillet while snapping off my TV.
“Tessie, today is supposed to be all your show, but we need to divert for a second. The prosecutor called right before you arrived. He wants to meet one-on-one with you before the trial. I could ask to sit in on the interviews if you’d feel more comfortable. He’s thinking about conducting the first interview next Tuesday. We can even do it in our regular session if you like.”
He uncrosses his leg and leans toward me. My stomach wads itself into a hard ball, a roly-poly beetle protecting itself.
“Getting your sight back is huge. Meeting the prosecutor and getting over your fear of the trial is a logical next step. It might even help … jog your memory. Think of your brain as a sieve or a colander, with only the tiniest, safest bits getting through at first.”
I’m barely listening to his psycho mumbo-jumbo about kitchen gadgets.
Seven days away.
“I hope you don’t mind that I told him the good news,” he says.
“Of course not,” I lie.
I’m thinking about the little bag, packed and ready for months, wedged into the far back corner of my closet.
Wondering if it’s too late to run.
Tessa, present day
Charlie and I are playing an old game on the front porch swing. Rain drills steadily on the roof.
We’re pretending to be tiny dolls rocking to and fro. A little girl is pushing our swing with her finger. She’s locked up her big yellow cat, so he can’t paw at us. She’s baking a tiny plastic cake for us in the oven, and she’s made all the beds and arranged all the tiny dishes in the cabinet. She’s used a toothbrush to sweep the carpet. There are no monsters in the closet, because there are no closets.
For just this moment, everything is perfect. Nothing can get to us. We are in the dollhouse.
My daughter’s head is warm in my lap. She lies sideways on the front porch swing with me, her knees bent because she isn’t three years old anymore with room to spare. I’ve covered her bare legs with my jacket for when the wind shifts and spits at us between the brick columns.
She wiggles into a more comfortable position and turns her face up to me. Her violet eyes are rimmed with black eyeliner, which makes them even bigger and lovelier, but so much more cynical. Two silver studs are punched in each ear, one slightly smaller than the other.
The eye makeup can be washed off; the extra holes will close up. I try not to get too worked up about these things. She’d just point out the tattoo on my right hip, a butterfly among the scars.
When Charlie’s braces come off in three months, that’s when I’ll worry. “Mom, you seemed a little crazy last night at Miss Effie’s. Like, I know you were worried, but still. I’d never seen you like that. Is it because you’re afraid you can’t stop that guy from getting executed?”
“Partly.” I fiddle with a lock of her hair, and she allows it. “Charlie, we’ve never talked much about what happened to me.”
“You never want to.” A statement, not a reproach.
“I’ve just never wanted you to be a part of it.” Never wanted her innocence disturbed with more than the straight facts, and a sanitized version of those.
“So you still think about … those girls?” Tentative. “I dreamed about one of them once. Merry. She had a cool name. Someone taped a People magazine story to my bike a while back. It was about her mom. She said she wants a front row seat to Terrell Goodwin’s execution. Have you decided for sure he didn’t do it?”
I will myself to stay put instead of leaping up, to keep my foot pushing firmly and steadily against the concrete floor. A stranger left Charlie a gift. A Susan crept from my head into hers. Worse, she is just telling me about this now. I don’t want to think that Charlie carries these secrets around because she is afraid to bring them up, and yet I know that is exactly why.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course I think about those girls. About how they died, and who hurts for them. Especially right now. The forensic scientist I told you about has extracted DNA from the girls’ bones. It’s a long shot, and involves a lot of luck, but if their families are still looking, maybe we can find out who they are.”
“You would still be looking for me. You would never give up.”
I blink back tears. “Never, never. Honey, do you mind telling me what your dream was about? The one with Su—Merry?”
“We took a walk on this island. She never said anything. It was nice. Not scary.”
Thank you, Merry.
“So you’re sure Terrell’s innocent?” she asks again.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure. The physical evidence isn’t there.” I leave out the seventeen-year trail of black-eyed Susans. The voices in my head, amplifying my doubts.
“Whoever the real killer is, he’s not coming back, Mom.” She says it earnestly. “He was smart enough not to get caught the first time. He isn’t going to risk it. And if he was going to do anything, it would have happened years ago. Maybe he’s in prison for another crime. I’ve heard that happens all the time.”
My daughter’s clearly given this a lot of thought. How could I be so stupid to think her teen-age brain wasn’t as wired as Lydia’s and mine? I don’t tell her one of Jo’s shocking statistics—that of 300 active serial killers roaming the United States, most of them will never be caught.
“Listen to me, Charlie. More than anything, I want to give you a normal life. I don’t want you to live in fear, but I need you to be very careful right now, until we know what’s happening to … Terrell. My job is to protect you, and you need to give in and let me for a while.”
Charlie pushes herself up. “We’re, like, more normal than half the people I know. Melissa Childers’s mom drove the cheerleaders around one Saturday night and they stuck raw chicken inside mailboxes of these girls they don’t like. Like, her mom’s mug shot is on Facebook. And Anna’s mom didn’t get sick the other night when she was supposed to pick us up. She was drunk. Anna says she puts vodka in that Big Gulp Diet Coke in her car cup holder. Kids know things, Mom. You can’t hide stuff.” A rare, unfettered stream of information.
