Black-Eyed Susans, page 16
The muscles in my thighs and legs suddenly cramp.
“Tessie, what’s happening?”
I can’t breathe. I have drawn my knees up to my chin. My fingers are in my ears.
“Why can’t I remember? Why can’t I remember?”
His arm is around me. He’s saying something. My head falls onto his shoulder. I feel him stiffen slightly, and then relax. His body is warm, a hot water bottle, like Daddy’s. I do not know or care if this is appropriate behavior for a therapist.
He is heat.
Tessa, present day
I spend forty-five minutes in the shower, but it doesn’t help. I pace the house. Open the refrigerator, swig out of the orange juice bottle, slam the door shut. Pick up my phone on the counter. Consider calling Charlie. Bill. Jo. Stop myself.
Punch around on Facebook. Stick my daughter’s old iPod into the speakers, and turn it way, way up so that Kelly Clarkson full vibrato is massaging my brain. Rearrange the kitchen canisters, the magazines, the mail, Charlie’s scattered papers and notebooks. Fold and refold a leftover piece of satin on the floor. Obsess over neat, exacting edges in a house where things usually roll around at the whims of a churlish tide.
I want, need to know the contents of the box unearthed seven hours ago near Lydia’s storm cellar. From my vantage point under the eaves, I couldn’t tell anything other than it was metal, about twelve inches square, and easy for a CSI to carefully lift out with blue-latex-covered hands. At that point, the cops began the process of clearing the back yard of extraneous people like me. In the rising clatter of voices, Jo didn’t even look my way. Bill and the assistant DA had reappeared and stood together off to the side of the hole, arms crossed, observing.
The knock at the door, three short raps, snaps me to attention. I glance down to see whether I’m decent. The answer is no. Bare legs and feet. The only thing covering me is one of Lucas’s old camouflage Army T-shirts that hits about four inches below a patch of lace that Victoria’s Secret calls underwear. No bra. I grab a pair of shorts out of the pile of clean clothes on the couch and hurriedly hop into them, one leg at a time.
Two more urgent raps.
The shorts are Charlie’s, and they ride high under the T-shirt so that it still appears that I’m wearing nothing. But, good enough.
I thrust my eye up to the peephole. Bill.
He is perfectly framed in the oval, as if he is standing in a tiny, tiny picture from another era. His hair is wet and slicked back. I can almost smell the soap.
I know he is not here to talk about Lydia. We almost kissed on that curb. This silent debate has been going on between us ever since he brushed his head on the Galveston sea glass dangling from the ceiling in my bedroom.
I open the door. He’s wearing faded Levi’s, and an easy, tentative smile that is going to get me in trouble tonight. I cannot stop staring at his mouth. He’s carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. One red, one white. Considerate, because he doesn’t know my preference, which is neither. On a night like this, I’m a beer girl all the way. The heat in the few feet between us is unmistakable now, flushing my skin. Pretenses, denials, the fact that I’m a mom of fourteen years and he’s probably still getting carded—all of it undeniably stripped away after I fell apart in his arms. Bill has barely said an unnecessary word to me since.
At this moment, we are the same people we were before we sat down on that curb, and two very different ones.
“This isn’t a good idea,” I say.
“No,” he says, and I open the door wider.
I have three important rules when it comes to sex.
I have to be in a committed relationship.
It cannot happen in my house, in my bed.
It must be dark.
Bill abandons the wine bottles on the hall table and kicks the door closed without saying anything. He pushes me back against the wall. His body is still chilled with night air, but his fingers and lips on my skin are like drifting flames. My arms are up around his neck, and I’m pressing my body into his, craning my neck up. I have not felt this certain I should be alive in a very long time. It’s making me slightly woozy.
He cradles my chin in one hand. His gaze is long enough and deliberate enough to assure me that he knows exactly what he’s doing. I think, If I look away now, if I stop this, it will still be OK, almost like it never happened. But he bends to kiss me again, and I am lost. I want this intimate dance in my hallway to go on forever. His hands have slipped under my T-shirt and are sliding up my back.
I don’t protest when he lifts me and carries me down the hall. I wrap my legs around his waist and keep my mouth on his.
In my room, he sets me down gently. His head brushes the glass again, setting off a trickle of muted music. He strips off my shirt. His shirt. Pulls me down onto my soft, messy sheets. We are instantly coiled, like people who have made love to each other hundreds of times. I close my eyes and swirl to the bottom of the river.
“Tessa, you beautiful girl,” he groans, his breath on my neck. “You drive me crazy.”
Crazy.
Maybe another one of his lines. Perhaps a last-ditch plea for one of us to come to our senses.
I pull away slightly, but not enough that he can see the scar near my collarbone. He’s been too busy so far to notice. I’m always so careful about this. Never too drunk on love or lust to forget. My hand reaches for the switch on the lamp by my bed, and stops. The bulb has cast his face in half-glow, half-shadow. Every cliché pops into my head. Light and dark, life and death, true and false, comedy and tragedy, good and evil, yin and yang.
Golden boy lawyer and girl marked by the devil.
I use one hand to tug at the pins holding up my hair. I know exactly what I’m doing, too. There is a look on his face that I will never forget, that I will hold on to forever, no matter what happens after tonight.
No matter whether we fail Terrell.
No matter whether my monster eats us both alive.
I reach over, and snap off the light.
This is the one rule I will not break tonight.
Sex is the only time I worship the dark.
“This one?” he asks. His finger is tracing the faint line on my ankle, and I shiver.
“From surgery. You know that I broke my ankle … that night. Please, come up here.” I tug at his hair, and he ignores me.
“And this?” He’s smothering the tiny butterfly above my right hip bone with the tip of his finger.
“An impulse right before the trial,” I say. I’m suddenly flooded with the memory of the exquisite pain of the needle. When I encounter people smothered in tattoos, chattering eagerly about the next one, I understand the addiction.
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
Lydia’s voice is ringing in my head. She quoted that line from Bleak House to a tattoo artist at a carnival on the state fairgrounds. Lydia was lying facedown on a fresh towel on a metal cot. The flap of the tent was closed, making it an oven. Lydia’s jeans were unbuttoned and slightly pulled down over the curve of her smooth white hip. I’d gone first, oddly brave. The wings of my tattoo were stinging, even more as I watched this stranger carve out Lydia’s identical twin butterfly.
Bill’s fingers are urging me back to the present. He is inching his way up my body slowly, exploring, as if he is clinically gathering evidence for court. It is the first sign in the last hour and a half that my brain is working.
My hair is covering the three-inch line above my left collarbone. He pushes it aside. He knows.
“Tell me about this one,” he says.
It is the scar I am the most ashamed of. It feels like my monster’s work as much as if he’d inked it himself. In reality, he drew none of my scars with his own hand. “The ER doctors panicked a little the night I was … found. Everybody did. The EMT carried me in the emergency room door in his arms, screaming. Later, my cardiologist was furious. He said I would have needed a pacemaker eventually but not that night. Not that soon. They used wires that would be tough to extract so they left it in.” My body stiffens slightly as he nuzzles my neck. This can’t be a surprise to him. “Poor little pacemaker girl. Al Vega rammed it home on the stand. Don’t you remember from the transcript?”
“Yes, but I wanted to hear it from you.”
So Bill is on the clock. The love spell is settling like dull party glitter.
“Should we call Jo and ask what was in the box at Lydia’s?” Changing the subject. Trying not to sound hurt.
“Trust me, she’ll call. Try not to think about it.
“What about Charlie’s father?” he asks abruptly. “Is he in the picture? I like to know when there’s competition.”
His question sounds an off note for me. “Lucas would say no one could compete. He’s generally quite full of himself. He’s a soldier. His ego keeps him alive.” I touch Bill’s cheek. “We haven’t been together for years. Not like this.”
Bill and I are uncomfortably working backward. It’s wrong. This is why I generally follow my sensible rules for sex. I’m leaning over to grab for the T-shirt on the floor when it occurs to me that I should adopt another rule: Never wear the Army shirt of one man while making love to another.
“Don’t leave,” Bill says softly. “I’ll shut up. Stay with me.” He’s yanking me down again, spooning his warm body against my back and tossing the comforter over us. I can’t resist the heat.
Sleep isn’t coming.
I nestle into Bill’s back. Close my eyes and drift.
I’m back in the tent, watching Lydia’s butterfly get its wings. The tattoo artist isn’t that old. Maybe twenty-five. She’s wearing a red, white, and blue halter top that shows a lot of skin. Her back is laced with old white scars, probably from a belt.
A four-word tattoo is flushed defiantly against the damaged canvas.
I am still here.
Tessie, 1995
“Tessie, are you listening?”
Always with the listening.
My lips are glued to the pin-striped straw of a Dairy Queen Dr Pepper. The leaves brushing the office window have turned a brilliant red in the last week. I’ve never seen a tree so lit up in August, like Monet has picked it out and struck a match to it. I figure God is using this tree as a reminder to be grateful that I’m not still blind. But he’s a fickle God or I wouldn’t have gone blind in the first place.
I rub at a smudge of mascara sweat stinging my eye. Lydia has been obsessed with trying new cosmetics lately, while I am busy trying to be the blur that no one notices. She had experimented on me until she perfected the blend to hide my half-moon scar—Maybelline Fair Stick 10 combined with a tube of something puke green and Cover Girl Neutralizer 730. She wrote all of this down for me, including the order in which I was to apply it, and then she made up herself in my bathroom mirror. She looked amazing when she finished. My dad once said, not meanly, that if Lydia didn’t open her mouth, every boy in school would be after her. While she added a layer of clear mascara and smacked on pink lip gloss, she told me all about Erica Jong and the zipless fuck. It is the first time I ever heard her use the f-word and it was like she’d fired a shot that killed our remaining childhood.
“Sex with a stranger,” she had explained. “No remorse. No guilt.” More and more, I feel like I’m the wheel spinning in the mud, while Lydia’s foot is on the gas.
The doctor interrupts my train of thought. “Tessie, what’s with you today? What are you thinking about?”
Zipless fucks. Scar recipes.
“I’m hot. Kind of bored.”
“OK, how about this. What is the emotion you have felt most of the time since you were here two days ago?” Since you hugged me on the couch and acted like a person?
“I don’t know.” I squirm. I hate this odd habit of his—starting an intimate conversation while standing five feet away.
“I think you feel guilt. Almost all of the time. Ever since the event. We keep skirting around it.”
I suck slowly out of my Styrofoam cup and stare at him. The event. Yep, still drives me crazy when he says it.
“Why would I feel guilty?”
“Because you believe you could have prevented what happened to you. Maybe even what happened to Merry.”
“I was sixteen years old. An athlete. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m sure I could have prevented this if I’d been paying attention. It’s not like I’m a two-year-old who could be tossed in a car like a pillow.”
He finally sits down across from me. “You’ve hit right on the problem, Tessie. You aren’t two or four or ten, Tessie. You are a teen-ager, so you think you’re pretty smart. More perceptive than adults, even. Your father. Your teachers. Me. In fact, I hate to tell you, but this is the smartest you will ever feel in your whole life.” Lydia hates the no-socks loafer look on men, and right now, so do I. I stare at his pearly ankle with the bone jutting out and think about how we are just a bunch of ugly parts. I feel so many conflicting emotions about this man. About males in general right now. If he really wanted to get anywhere, he’d ask about that.
“Rebecca thought she was smarter, too,” he says.
His daughter’s name hits the humid air like a grenade. I’m not bored anymore, if that was his intent.
“There is a reason you feel the need to blame yourself,” he continues. “From all accounts, you were a very careful girl. If you accept the blame—decide you took a rare misstep—you can reassure yourself this was not a random event. If you blame yourself, you can believe that you are still in control of your universe. You’re not. You never will be.”
“And what about you?” I ask. “I bet you still think your daughter is alive, when she’s decomposing in the muck of a river or being snacked on by coyotes. Let me enlighten you. Rebecca is dead.”
Tessa, present day
The sunrise is painting the bedroom pink. The best time of day for talking to angels and taking photographs, according to my grandfather. For admiring clouds that drift like feathers off a flamingo, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
For shoving midnight monsters to the back of the closet.
Bill is sliding a long, skinny leg into his jeans. His back is bare, broad, wired with muscle. It’s been a long time since I woke up on a Saturday morning with someone in my bed who wasn’t furry or sick. I’m trying to identify the emotion in my gut. Scared, maybe. Hopeful?
Charlie isn’t due back on the bus for another couple of hours but she’s delivered a series of texts that dinged through a third, lazy round of lovemaking. I’m propped up against the headboard and am thumbing through them, the sheet modestly pulled up to my chest.
Third place . Coach got ejected.
Forgot need tub of blue hair gel for bio lab Monday. Soooorry.
What’s for dinner?
Bill’s cell phone rings on the bedside table while I’m thinking about where to buy a tub of blue hair gel without returning to 1965. I pick up his phone and toss it over but not before I see the caller ID.
Bone Doc.
My throw across the tumbled comforter falls short, but Bill leans in, catches the phone anyway. Winks.
I remember the first time a man winked at me. Lydia was blowing out eleven candles, one to grow on, while I watched her father’s eye open and shut under the ragged brow that never quite filled in after an auto shop accident.
Bone Doc. Jo calling, to divulge the secrets of the box? For hours, even with the distraction of Bill’s tongue, my mind has been prying the lid open and slamming it shut.
The box is filled with sand, silky enough to run through my fingers like a waterfall.
It is crammed with girls’ jawbones, grinning wickedly at every angle.
It holds a package tied up with glittering black tinsel made of Lydia’s hair.
“Hey.” Bill speaks low into the phone and glances back at me. He listens without interrupting for at least a minute. “Uh-huh. I can reach Tessa.”
He’s zipping up his jeans at this point, balancing the phone between his ear and shoulder.
The doctor had taught me in our sessions that I could have waited five years to sleep with this man, and never really known him. The doc was speaking generally, of course. He believed that a person’s most profound flaws or virtues emerge in great crisis, or they remain buried forever. I remember leaving his office that day thinking it was sad that ordinary, dull people die all the time without ever knowing they are heroes. All because a girl didn’t go under in the lake right in front of them, or a neighbor’s house didn’t catch fire.
“Be there in about an hour,” Bill is saying.
Five of us are stuffed into the tiny room, all looking like we’d come off a sleepless night.
Jo, in running shorts and a well-worn T-shirt that says Pray for Moore, OK. Bill, wearing the same clothes as the night before. Alice Finkel, the flirtatious assistant district attorney, hiding under a face made up with Mary Kay precision, so desperately interested in Bill that it hurts to watch. Lt. Ellen Myron, in Wrangler’s, a gun strapped to her hip.
I concentrate on the three plastic evidence bags, lying in a neat row.
My fingers itch to rip them open and get this grim party rolling.
Lieutenant Myron clears her throat.
“Tessa,” Lieutenant Myron says, “there were three items recovered from the box exhumed in the back yard of Lydia Bell’s childhood home. We’re hoping you can identify the items.”
“There were no … bones inside?” I ask. Just tell me, dammit. Tell me you found a piece of Lydia.
“No. Nothing like that.” Lieutenant Myron flips over one of the bags. I recognize the small book immediately. Gold, frayed cover. A design of yellow flowers with green shoots trickling up toward the title. Poe’s Stories and Poems.
“Can I pick it up?” I ask.
“No. Don’t touch. I’ll do it.”
“That’s Lydia’s,” I confirm. “I was with her when she bought it. Her dad drove us into Archer City to Larry McMurtry’s bookstores.”
