Black-Eyed Susans, page 13
“Ma’am, we’ve asked that you not participate in this meeting unless asked to. You are here strictly as a courtesy to the family.”
She draws her hands back reluctantly and winks, as if we are on the same team. I am repulsed. I want back whatever she thinks she has snatched out of me with her moist psychic paw.
The detective is droning out introductions while my eyes are now fixed, by process of elimination, on Hannah’s mother—a pale, sharp-faced woman in her sixties. Jo had told me she was a middle school English teacher. She has that no-nonsense air about her. Except she brought a psychic.
For a split second, as our eyes meet, I glimpse horror, as if I’d just crawled out of her daughter’s grave, like a mud monster.
The Steins have already met the coroner this morning to receive the official identification. Jo’s job is strictly to help them believe it beyond a doubt. She is explaining the basics of mitochondrial DNA, the careful lab work, the mind-blowing genetic probabilities, within half a percent, that this is her daughter. It takes about ten minutes.
“Mrs. Stein, your daughter has been handled with the greatest of care,” Jo says. “I am terribly sorry this has happened to your family.”
“Thank you. I appreciate your time with us. I believe this is Hannah.” She directs her gaze to the police. It is obvious she is having a hard time looking at me.
“Tessa.” Detective No. 2, the woman, is speaking. I heard her name but I can’t remember it. “Can I call you Tessa?”
“Of course.” It comes out scratchy, and I clear my throat.
“Since there is some … speculation … in the media about whether the right man was convicted for their daughter’s death, the Steins are curious if you can pick out a photo of a relative who took an unusual interest in their daughter. A suspect at the time. He is no longer alive, so you don’t need to be afraid of any kind of retaliation. They are simply seeking peace of mind. No one wants the wrong man executed.” She says this without rancor, but I wonder what’s really in her head.
I suddenly want Bill to be here. I want him to smother my hand with his again. “That’s fine.”
“You remind me of my daughter,” Mrs. Stein says. “Not the red hair, of course. But you give off that same … free spirit.”
The detective slides two sheets of mug shots flat in front of me. The brother, up until now a silent, poker-straight soldier, leans in. It occurs to me that he wasn’t even born when his sister disappeared. He was the recovery baby.
“He was an awful person,” Mrs. Stein tells me brokenly. The twelve men on the table swim before me. Bald, white, middle-aged.
“I believe God sent that deer in front of his car.” The brother’s first words are a cold, hard slap. “Put him in a coma so we could yank the plug. So I didn’t have to shoot the bastard myself.”
I’m bewildered. Seriously? A deer? I want to meet Jo’s eyes but don’t. Too much deer metaphor for one day. Too much coincidence. Too much anger and certainty about God’s wrath, when sometimes everything is just pointless.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally. “I just don’t know. There is so much I don’t remember.” At the same time, I realize that I am remembering something. Fabric. A pattern. I know where I’ve seen it before, but I don’t know what it means.
Impulsively, I reach my hands out to the psychic.
“Do you mind?” I ask the female detective.
“Not if you don’t.” Bemused.
Mrs. Stein is nodding animatedly, a doll brought to life. Her son is casting me a look of scathing disappointment.
I know I have to do this, whatever I believe. For Hannah. For her mom, eaten by grief. For her brother, who is probably a cop for all the wrong reasons. For her father, who is conspicuously absent.
“Something is coming back to me.” This is exquisitely true. “There’s a curtain. Can you help me see behind it?”
The psychic’s sweaty grip tightens. Her nails bite into my flesh. I feel like I’m being consumed by a slobbery shark.
“Of course.” Her eyes glisten like shards of ice, the first thing that reassures people she is special and a window to the netherworld.
“It’s a black man,” she says.
I remove my hands carefully and turn to Hannah’s mother. Rachel Stein’s eyes are not glistening. They are a boggy, open sinkhole, and I don’t want to stumble.
“Mrs. Stein, I lay in that grave with your daughter. Hannah will forever be a part of me, like we share the same DNA. Her monster is my monster. So please believe me when I say I know exactly what she would tell you right now. She would tell you she loves you. And she would tell you this woman will only hurt you. She’s a liar.”
Tessie, 1995
“Are you ready to nail a killer, Tessie?”
Mr. Vega is prowling, from desk to window to couch. “Because you need to be mentally tough. The defense attorney is going to try to screw with your head. I want to make sure you’re prepared for his little circus tricks.”
The doctor catches my eye and nods encouragement. He managed not to get kicked out of the room today. Mr. Vega and Benita have met with me two more times in the last week, once at a bowling alley and another time at a Starbucks. Mr. Vega introduced me to Mocha Frappuccinos and grilled jalapeños on hot dogs. He asked me why I like to run and why I like to draw and why I hated the Yankees so much. I went along with the “getting to know me” sessions because it was a lot less painful than hanging out on the couch with the doctor. Like Dad said, they were all just doing their jobs.
Things turned for me sometime during disco bowling on lane 16, while the lights flashed psychedelic and pins thundered and Sister Sledge got down. Mr. Vega and I were locked in a bowling duel. Benita was keeping score and yelling some crazy Spanish cheer from her high school days. Mr. Vega wasn’t cutting me any slack, even though I had to get my surgeon’s permission to temporarily strip off the boot brace to play. The man about to prosecute my monster threw a spare/strike/spare to win the game, even when I faked a limp at the end.
So maybe he was manipulative and maybe he was genuine and maybe he was a little of both. Regardless, when I sat down on the couch today to officially prepare for the trial, I was in the game—no longer on Mr. Vega’s team simply because there was no way out. I wanted to win.
“I know every play this guy has.” Mr. Vega is still roving the room, like he’s already in court.
“He likes to get kids on the yes-no train,” he continues. “Remember, the less narrative your answers, the less the jury can feel your pain. He will ask you a series of questions, where the answer is positively ‘yes.’ So you will answer, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Then he will slip in a question that is absolutely a ‘no’ answer, but you’ll be on the train, in the ‘yes’ rhythm. You’ll say ‘yes’ and when you are immediately flustered and change to ‘no,’ he’ll ask whether you are confused. And so it begins.”
I nod. This seems easy enough to handle.
“He will throw dates and numbers at you until your head spins. Whenever you are confused, ask him to explain himself again. Every. Single. Time. This makes him look more like a bully.” He steps toward me, and his face goes slack.
“If four times six equals twenty-four and twice that is forty-eight, what is fifty times that plus six?”
I stare at him, disbelieving. Begin to multiply.
He jams his finger in the air. “Fast, Tessie. Answer.”
“I can’t.”
“OK. That feeling right now, numb and slightly panicky? That’s it. That’s how it’s going to feel. Times four.” He is on the prowl again. I’m glad that Oscar isn’t here. He’d be going nuts. “This will be the toughest part. He will insinuate you are hiding things. Why is it that you can remember buying tampons on the day of the attack but not this man’s face? Why did you have a relationship with a crazy homeless man? Why did you run alone every day?”
“I run too fast for most of my friends to keep up,” I protest. “And Roosevelt isn’t that crazy.”
“Uh-uh, Tessie. Don’t just react. Think about the question. I always ran in the daylight hours on two routes approved by my father. Roosevelt has been sitting on the same corner for ten years, and is good friends with everyone, including the local cops. Matter-of-fact. Don’t let him get to you. You did nothing wrong.”
“Will he really bring up the … tampons?”
“I would bet on it. It’s another way to make you uncomfortable. A subtle move that the jury won’t notice. The tampons are a fact of life for them. For you, a teen-age girl, they are intimate and embarrassing. Believe me, Dick has no boundaries even when it comes to child victims of sexual abuse.”
His eyes are laser-focused on me again.
“Why did you get suspended from two track meets last year?”
The doctor shifts positions. He wants to interfere. Mr. Vega senses it and holds up his hand in his direction, a halt signal. He keeps his eyes trained on me.
Is this the Vega who is pretending, or the real one? Either way, this question really ticks me off. Anger always starts as a little tingle in the roots of my hair, and then spreads like spilled hot water.
“A girl on another track team pushed my friend Denise off a hurdle in a regional meet so she could win in the prelims. If you were watching, and you’re not a hurdler, you wouldn’t have noticed. But there are certain moves, and I know them. So I walked over to her after the race and told her that I knew she cheated. She shoved me to the ground. When the track officials ran over, she told them I’d shoved her first. We were both suspended for two meets.”
I straighten up. Level my gaze at him, and just him. Let him know I am mad, but under control. “It was totally worth it,” I say. “Because everyone will be watching her now. She won’t try it again.”
Nobody speaks. I wonder if they believe me. Everyone else who knows me did. Lydia even wrote an indignant letter to the UIL board. She signed it Sincerely, Ms. Lydia Frances Bell.
“Perfect,” Mr. Vega says. “Narrative. Calm. Perfect.” He takes a few steps and places his hand on my shoulder.
The hand on my shoulder—it feels good. Still, it is so hard to know whether I like this man, or whether I just like what he is giving back to me. Power. The thing that my monster snatched away and threw in the gutter at Walgreens.
Mr. Vega removes his hand. Picks up his briefcase, on the floor next to Benita. “A short session, but I think we’re done for the day. Benita’s going to show you the courtroom at some point. I recommend sitting in every seat. The jury’s. The judge’s—my personal favorite. I want to wait until closer to the trial to go over your own testimony. We’ll see whether you and the doc get any further in that time.”
All of them rise, except for me. I stay planted on the couch. “Twenty-four hundred and six.”
Mr. Vega stops at the door.
“That’s my girl,” he says. “You’ll always get to the right answer if you slow down and think about it.”
Tessa, present day
Of course, it’s been banging me in the head, ever since I learned her name.
Rachel Stein, Hannah’s mother, does not have a first name that begins with S or U or N. She does not fit neatly into the mnemonic device that I’ve put aside like a crossword puzzle I always planned to finish later. S-U-N. The letters that Merry provided while we chatted in the grave, to help me remember the names of all of the mothers and hunt them down.
Ever since the discovery of a third set of bones, I’ve been thinking that maybe my conversation with Merry wasn’t a hallucination. There were the bones of three other girls in that grave, not two, just like Merry told me. That couldn’t be a coincidence, right?
And yet. The black-and-white, driver’s license, DNA certainty of Rachel Stein’s name makes me wonder whether I was nuts back then, and just as nuts now. I actually had to restrain myself from peppering Mrs. Stein with questions: Is Rachel your nickname? Your middle name? Did you change your name?
I couldn’t mess with her head anymore—trade the psychic’s crazy for my crazy. Hannah’s mother drifted out of that hollow conference room as a more haggard spirit than when she entered. Closure is a myth, Jo told me afterward. But there is value in knowing. Mrs. Stein’s son had to carefully prop up his mother as they exited. She moved like she was a hundred years old.
Hannah’s brother and I made an unspoken pact that he would drop-kick the psychic to her altered universe. She was fuming and tripping at their heels on the way out. As soon as he had heard the word liar come out of my mouth, his head popped up and he shot me the most grateful look I’d ever received. As for the psychic … well, if I’m not cursed already, I’m sure she finished the job. My scars tingled for an hour afterward.
My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.
Ever since I left that room, I can’t get this string of words out of my head. I imagine Merry punching a button on a jukebox, over and over. Each punch a little firmer, more frustrated. Remember.
My boots clunk out a rhythm as I climb the staircase. One step. My. Two steps. Very. Three steps. Energetic. Four steps. Mother. At the top, I throw open the door to my studio. Warm, stale air rushes out. I shove the picture window wide open and drink in air that is like an ice-cold tequila shot. A brave blue jay stares me down from his perch on a branch, and I blink first.
I pick up a few pages off the dusty hardwood, remnants of one of Bobby’s projects the last time he stayed for a weekend. My sweet, half-doomed little brother. Now he writes for movies that end in numerals and tries to heal himself with holotropic breath-work and a sexy production assistant with a nose ring. He left for college in California and basically never returned except for short visits and funerals, which is probably what I should have done. He even chopped his last name to Wright.
I draw hearts in the dust on my drawing table, until my finger is black. I pick a white tea from the selection in the cabinet and plug in the teakettle. Listen to its friendly hiss. Decide that the old honey in the cabinet smells a little like beer and watch two sugar cubes dissolve to sand in my mug instead. Merry gives the jukebox one last punch with her finger and disappears.
I have always loved this room. I just didn’t want to share it with the Susans. Today it seems that I don’t have to. I wipe off the drawing table with a paper towel and clip on a piece of paper with a sharp snap that scares the bird into an irritated flutter. I begin to loosely sketch the folds of fabric, a soft sound, like a rat under the floor. I’m in a hurry so I can get to the intricate, important work. A pattern had emerged in my head while I was staring at Mrs. Stein’s simple cotton blouse. At breasts that sagged with the weight of middle age.
Surprise. I am sketching flowers and it doesn’t bother me. An hour floats by. Then another. There are so many, many petals, and a leafy vine that meanders, connecting them all, like a demented family tree. I fill a Dixie cup with water and open up my watercolor box. Blue, pink, and green.
These flowers are not black-eyed Susans.
And these folds of fabric are not a curtain. They were never a curtain.
I’m drawing my mother’s apron. You can’t see me, but I am underneath, hiding my face. I can feel the cloth tickle my nose and cheeks. It is dark under here, but enough light sifts through the thin cotton that I am not scared. The warm cushion of my mother’s body is at my back.
I can’t see what is on the other side.
It reminds me of being blind.
Dr. Giles is holding my painting gingerly edge to edge because it isn’t completely dry.
It’s closing time. All the toys and books in the room are tidied up. A couple of table lamps are glowing, but the overhead lighting is flipped off. The elephant is tucked in for the night in a doll bed, the blanket pulled up to his ears.
“So what do you think?” I ask. “Is the apron the curtain? Does the curtain have nothing to do with me being dumped in that grave? Is it meaningless?” I’m feeling guilty about sounding so urgent.
“Nothing is meaningless,” she says. “The apron probably represents comfort to you. It would not be a surprise for you to connect some element of your first trauma—the death of your mother—to the other one. Tessa, the most important thing is for you to eliminate the unknown, which is frightening. If you came here and told me you could see the killer behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, well … that isn’t what you really expected, is it?”
Yes. That is exactly what I expected. I grew up in Oz.
I don’t tell her that, though. Or say that this painting of my mother’s apron leaves me as unsettled as the blank curtain I drew a hundred times.
Tessie, 1995
“How do you like Mr. Vega and Benita?”
Is it my imagination or does the doctor sound a little jealous?
“He’s nice,” I say carefully. “They’re both very nice.” Adults make things so complicated. Am I supposed to like the doctor better than them? Is this some kind of contest?
“If you have any questions or concerns, you can let me know. Al Vega can come on a little strong.”
And you don’t? “I’m good right now. But I will for sure if I do.” Lately, this need to reassure him has been taking the place of my desire to annoy the hell out of him. “I do have a question about … something else, though.”
Lydia says it’s ridiculous that I’m carrying this fear around and letting it devour me, although she also thinks what’s happening is kind of cool. “It isn’t just Merry who has spoken to me.”
“What do you mean?” the doctor asks. “Who else is speaking to you?”
“The other Susans … talk to me sometimes. The ones in the grave. Not all the time. I don’t think it’s a big deal. Lydia just thought I should bring it up.”
“Lydia seems like an extremely sensitive friend.”
