Black-Eyed Susans, page 15
I point to the left side of the yard, at the very back. The weeds are a wild and shaggy carpet, but you can still make out the small hill that Mr. Bell used to call the Grassy Knoll. Lydia had inherited that need to nickname things.
Bill follows behind me, dragging his left shoe, trying to scrape off dog poop as he goes. I stop abruptly, lean over, and begin to yank at weeds.
“What the hell are you doing?” He glances back to the house. My weeding efforts have revealed a small metal door planted sideways into the rise of the tiny hill.
The rusty padlock that holds it closed would probably fall apart with a swift kick. I’m tempted.
“It’s an old storm cellar from the ’30s when the house was built. I don’t recall Lydia’s family ever using it. Mrs. Bell thought they were better off in the bathtub during tornado warnings than hanging out with poisonous spiders and beetles in a black hole.”
“Where were the flowers?”
“Planted across the top. There’s always been a layer of dirt above the concrete. Used to be grass.”
“You didn’t bring a shovel,” Bill says, almost to himself. He’s trying to fit the pieces together, and I’m holding back the big one. “You think he buried something for you … in the storm cellar?”
An image of Charlie flashes into my mind, crammed on a bus with shrieking volleyball girls, headed to Waco.
I’m missing her game for this.
“Yes.” I place two fingers on my wrist and feel my racing pulse, because Lydia always did. “Last night, I dreamed that Lydia is down there. That the flowers marked her grave.”
Tessie, 1995
“Do you ever have nightmares?”
The doctor’s demeanor today, all stiff and formal, suggests he has renewed purpose. I imagine him stabbing at a random page in his Book of Tricks right before I arrived. It is probably thick as a loaf of bread, with crackled yellow pages, a worn red velvet cover, and thousands of useless magic spells.
“Let me think,” I say. I’ve added this cheerful line to my arsenal of sure and sounds good, part of my campaign to get off this couch as soon as possible.
I could tell him that last night’s dream wasn’t exactly a nightmare, as my nightmares go, and that his daughter, Rebecca, was the guest star. I was camped out in the grave with the Susans, per usual. Rebecca peered down at us, pale and pretty, in one of my mother’s flowered church dresses. She fell to her knees and extended a hand. Her hair, wound in these goofy old-fashioned ringlets, tickled my cheek. Her fingers, when they reached me, were white-hot. I woke up, my arm on fire, choking for air.
I could tell him, but I won’t. It seems unkind to bring it up, and I am working on being kinder.
“I dream a lot about the grave.” This is the first time I’ve admitted this. It also happens to be true. “The dream is always exactly the same until the end.”
“Are you in the grave? Or hovering above it?”
“For most of the dream, I’m lying in it, waiting.”
“Until someone rescues you?”
“No one ever rescues us.”
“What do you hear?”
A truck engine. Thunder. Bones crackling like firewood. Someone cursing.
“It depends on the ending,” I say.
“If you don’t mind, tell me about the different endings.”
“It is pouring rain, and we drown in muddy water. Or snow falls until it covers our faces like a baby blanket, and we can’t see.” Or breathe. I swig out of the glass of water his secretary always leaves for me. It tastes a little like the lake smells.
“And to be clear … we means … Merry and … the bones.”
“It means the Susans.”
“Are there … other endings besides those?”
“A farmer doesn’t see us and shovels dirt into the hole with his tractor plow. Someone lights a match and drops it inside. A huge black bear decides the hole is the perfect place to hibernate and lies down on top of us. That’s one of the nicer endings. All of us just go to sleep. He snores. Anyway, you get the idea.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, sometimes he comes back and finishes the job. Buries us for real.” With bags and bags of manure.
“He … meaning the killer?”
I don’t answer, because once again, it seems obvious.
“Do you ever see a face?” he asks.
Come on, doesn’t he think I would have said if I saw his face? Still, I think about his question. Rebecca’s is the only face I’ve ever seen in this recurring event. She was lovely in her first appearance last night. Big, innocent eyes, dark corkscrew curls, skin like ivory silk.
She looked very much like Lillian Gish, probably because Lydia and I had just rented Birth of a Nation.
Lydia says that Lillian Gish loved to play tortured characters, as a rebellious counter to her devastating beauty. Lydia knows this because her dad has a huge crush on this actress, even though Lillian Gish is quite dead. She said her dad especially likes the finale of Way Down East, where Lillian floats unconscious on an ice floe toward a seething waterfall, while her long hair dangles in the water like a snake. Right after she told me, Lydia said she shouldn’t have. That it might provoke more nightmares while I was in this state.
It ticked me off. She hardly ever says things like that. It makes me worry. Am I looking in more of a state than usual? Isn’t she noticing I’m more cheerful? Aren’t I getting better?
Either way, it probably isn’t relevant to tell the doctor about his daughter showing up in my dream as a silent movie queen, wearing my mother’s clothes. It was certainly weird and random, like just about everything else.
“No,” I say. “I don’t see his face.”
Tessa, present day
Once again, I’m in the shadows. Watching.
My body is tucked under the eaves, pressed against the cold, dirty siding, hopefully out of camera range for the television van camped by the curb out front.
I’m trying to steady my nerves by picturing Lydia’s yard the way it used to be: green, neat, and shady with two giant clay pots of red and white impatiens on each of the front corners of the flat concrete porch. Always red and white, like the Christmas lights that Mr. Bell strung along the front roofline that every single year ended ten bulbs short on one side. It was tradition for my father to comment on it whenever we drove by.
Lucy and Ethel used to live back here. Mr. Bell’s hunting dogs. When he wasn’t around to call them off, their excited claws left little white streaks on my calves. The old boat was usually up on blocks in the back corner, perpetually waiting for July 4th. Lydia and I used to throw off the tarp when Mr. Bell wasn’t home so we could do our homework and work on our leg tans at the same time.
But there’s a circus assembling here today. And I’m responsible for it. My gut cramps. Bill and Jo are staking their reputations on me.
It took three days for Bill to retrieve the judge’s permission to dig at Lydia’s house and another twenty-four hours to set the time for 2 P.M., which is exactly fourteen minutes from now. The district attorney was surprisingly cooperative, probably because the police are getting killed in the media. A local newspaper editorial criticized the county for “an embarrassing lack of Texas frontier justice in not identifying the bones of the Black-Eyed Susans and returning them to their families.”
It wasn’t a particularly well-written or researched opinion, just fiery, something Southern journalists are good at pulling out of the air on a slow day. But it had worked a little magic on Judge Harold Waters, who still reads newspapers and has presided over the Black-Eyed Susan case from the beginning. He scribbled his signature and handed it down from his perch on top of his favorite cutting horse, Sal.
I barely remember Waters during the trial, just that Al Vega was worried he was too wishy-washy on the death penalty. A few years ago, I saw the judge on CNN giving an eyewitness account of a UFO hovering over Stephenville “like a twenty-four-hour Super Walmart in the sky.”
“Could have been a worse draw,” Bill had told me.
And so here we are, because of my dream about Lydia, and a judge who believes in flying saucers.
Two uniformed cops are squaring off the back yard with yellow crime tape. Jo is standing on top of the Grassy Knoll with the same female detective who attended the meeting with Hannah’s family. A SMU geology professor is rolling by with a high-tech ground-penetrating radar device on wheels that will never in a million years fit through the door to the cellar. It barely fit through the gate. His grim face says he’s figured this out.
Jo has told me that GPR is still more theoretical than practical when searching for old bones underground, but she and Bill decided it couldn’t hurt to add to the melodrama. The DA agreed. He’ll make hay out of it either way.
The professor is the acknowledged local expert in the complicated task of reading GPR imagery. Still, the ground is not a womb, and Jo tells me he will not be able to discern a skeletal face. He’ll be searching for evidence of soil disturbances that would suggest someone dug a grave once upon a time. He might be able to make out a human shape, but it’s doubtful. He’s mostly part of the show.
The yard is now buzzing with conversations, an impromptu lawn party that’s starting to gel. Bill is schmoozing the pretty assistant district attorney assigned to witness this latest crazy turn of events. Her real face is buried under a Southern coat of makeup. I’m calculating the distance between them. Two feet, now one.
Mr. and Mrs. Gibson are propped up in lawn chairs in their Sunday best Dallas Cowboys T-shirts, smoking like fiends, the only two people who appear to be enjoying themselves. One of them has mowed the weeds for the occasion.
The professor is suddenly making a beeline for them. He shakes their hands. From his wild gesticulating, I’ve deduced that the professor wants to run his device over both the front and back yards. The Gibsons are vigorously nodding yes.
Are they imagining movie rights? Is that what prompted Mrs. Gibson to wash her hair and stick on flip-flops and fresh toe Band-Aids? Is she hoping to add a plaque under her No Soliciting sign that declares this house a historical landmark, like Lizzie Borden’s?
The gate clanks behind me, and the back yard suddenly snaps to attention. Four more people are striding in. Two cops in jeans, hoisting shovels and a metal detector. Two women in CSI protective gear with an unlit lantern and a large camera. Their arrival signals that my tortured wait is almost over.
Across the yard, one of the uniformed cops is already cutting through the lock on the storm cellar. He yanks on the door and it gives way easily. He leaps back and slaps a hand over his nose and mouth, as does every person within ten feet of the door. Even Jo, who told me that on the site of the 9/11 tragedy, she smelled things she will never forget.
Now everything is going too fast. One of the crime scene investigators is busily handing out masks. One of the cops in jeans disappears into the hole like an agile snake. The shovel and lantern are handed down to him. Next, a CSI disappears. The space must be tiny, because everyone else remains aboveground. Eager. Chattering into the hole.
Mr. Bell would never let us open that door. It’s nasty down there, girls.
Empty plastic evidence bags are dropped into the cellar. In fifteen minutes, two of the bags return to the surface, bulging. They are set alongside the back fence.
The CSI pokes her head out from the hole and she beckons for the cop with the metal detector. In case there is jewelry? I could tell them that Lydia always wore her grandmother’s thin gold wedding band with the pinprick red ruby. I wonder for the hundredth time in four days why the cops couldn’t find any of the Bell family in a search of public records. It’s as if they sailed off the face of the earth.
Jo is offering her hand to the CSI, covered with muck and filth, climbing up through the door. The cop with the metal detector descends to take her place. The Gibsons are munching potato chips and passing a plastic tub of ranch dip back and forth. The geologist is methodically rolling his device over the grounds like a wheelbarrow, pausing every now and then to read his screen.
A circus.
Another evidence bag is handed up from the hole. And another and another. All of them are set along the back fence line with the others. In the end, eight black bags, like the bodies of lumpy spiders, their legs ripped off. Finally, both cops emerge, black from the knees down, tearing off latex gloves. The group huddles for a short conversation.
Jo turns and searches the yard until her eyes land on me. She walks toward me, her face twisted with concern, the longest twenty yards of my life.
How could I have left Lydia down there for so long? Why did I not figure this out sooner?
Jo’s hand is heavy on my shoulder. “We didn’t find anything, Tessa. We’re going to go a little deeper, but they’ve already dug three feet and struck clay and limestone. It would have taken the killer forever to dig through it. Seems very unlikely that he did.”
“What … is in the bags?”
“Someone used the place as a root cellar. It was trashed with broken jars and rotting fruits and vegetables. And a couple of now-dead moles that burrowed in somehow for a last supper. There was plenty of moisture to keep it rancid. Cracks in the concrete.”
“I’m so sorry … that I wasted everyone’s time.”
Nothing inside me feels that sorry. Lydia could be alive. Those flowers might really be from her. I feel a rising tide of unexpected joy.
“We’ll still sift through the contents of those bags, back in the lab. We always knew this was a shot in the dark. Literally. And I like to leave no stone unturned. Or any cliché unturned.” Trying to make me smile.
Behind her, the professor has wheeled his device right below the gaping mouth of the cellar. A small crowd is gathering, including the Gibsons, who’ve ducked under the crime tape. Someone in the center of the circle gives a shout. The uniforms are pushing everyone back to make room for the cops and their shovels.
The crime scene investigators are talking to the professor like he’s an umpire about to make a critical decision. They turn to the cops and direct how wide to make the hole.
The men nod, and carefully crack the earth.
Tessie, 1995
The doctor is telling me a story about when he was twelve.
I’m sure there’s going to be a point, but I wish he’d get to it. Lately, he’s been a little all over the place.
I’m annoyed by that smudge on his glasses, by Lydia flushing all of my Benadryl down the toilet last night. I’m sorry, she said, but it seemed to be about much more than swirling away those pink pills. Something is going on with Lydia. For the last two weeks, she’s been late instead of exactly on time and sometimes cancels on me altogether. She makes vague excuses, her cheeks flush and she rakes her teeth across the pink lip gloss on her bottom lip. She is a terrible liar. Eventually, Lydia will tell me what is wrong, so I don’t bug her.
Of course, two sentences into the doctor’s tale, I’m wondering if he’s lying. He says he was a chubby boy and yet he’s got all that wiry muscle under the shirt with the collar that stands like a pinned white butterfly. I bumped up against his arm once. It was immovable, concrete, a runner’s leg extending from his shoulder.
“I’d come home every day after school to an empty house,” he is saying.
I’m suddenly scared for the boy in an empty house even though he’s sitting across from me alive and well with no visible scars.
“Tessie, do you want me to continue? Is this story bothering you?”
“Um, no. Go ahead.”
“In the winter, the house was always dark and cold. So the first thing I did after I unlocked the door, before I put down my books or took off my coat, was walk to the thermostat and turn up the heat. To this day, the thump of the furnace, the smell of heat coming on … is the smell of loneliness. Tessie, are you listening?”
“Yes. I’m just trying to figure out your lesson here. I thought you were about to tell me something terrible happened to you.” I’m disappointed. Relieved. Vaguely intrigued.
It occurs to me that I love all of the smells associated with heat. Fireplace smoke drifting my way on a chilly night run, barbecue coals declaring it Saturday afternoon. Sizzling pork chop grease, Banana Boat sunscreen, hot towels tumbled in our old Kenmore dryer. Especially after Mama died, I couldn’t get hot enough. I flipped my electric blanket on high so much that it streaked a black scorch mark on the blue fabric and Daddy took it away. I still stretch out by the heating vent in the floor of Mama’s walk-in closet and read. I’m not sure I would have survived the last year if I couldn’t slam the screen door behind me, sprawl on the back porch lounger, and let the brutal sun fry every black thought to ashes.
“Smell is the sense that is most instantly connected with memory. Do you know anything about Marcel Proust?”
“Am I failing this test if I say no?” I can’t wait to tell Lydia that the doctor is pulling a depressed French philosopher with a handlebar mustache out of his bag. It’s a big step up. Lydia christened my last therapist Chicken Little after the woman suggested I read Chicken Soup for the Soul.
“This isn’t a test. There is no way to fail in this room, Tessie.” His tone is plodding, predictable—and, I realize, a little tired. “One of Proust’s characters recalls an entire event from his childhood after smelling a tea-soaked biscuit. Science has been chasing this theory ever since—that smell retrieves deep memories. The olfactory bulb rests near, and instantly communicates with, the part of our brain that holds the past.”
“So this is a test. You are telling me I can retrieve my memory through smell.”
“Maybe. Are there any smells that … bother you since the event?”
Peanut butter, peanut butter, peanut butter. My dad interrogated Bobby and me last week about why an almost-full jar of Jif was in the trash. Bobby didn’t tell on me.
