Black-Eyed Susans, page 21
“Good morning, Tessa.” She beams. “So nice to see you and … your friend.”
“I’m Lucas, ma’am. Let me help you with those glasses.” He picks one and swallows a quarter of it in the first swig. “Delicious tea. Thank you.”
Bessie’s eyes are fastened on Lucas’s snake tattoo, which starts around his belly button and disappears into his jeans.
“Have you found anything yet?” She raises her eyes from Lucas’s belt buckle.
“A few fossils, a plastic plant marker, a rusty piece of metal.”
Bessie barely acknowledges my stash. “I wanted to tell you about my box. Herb said he didn’t tell you about my box.”
“Your box?” A curl of uneasiness.
“It’s a bunch of junk, really,” she says. “I’ve even labeled it, Stuff Nobody Wants But Mom. You know, so my kids don’t have to add it to the crap they’re cleaning out when we die. There might be something in there you’re interested in, though.”
The sweat under my arms is icy. What is wrong with me? It’s just Stuff Nobody Wants.
“I’m going inside to get it,” she says. “I couldn’t carry the box and the tea. Meet me at the picnic table.”
“Are you all right? You don’t look right.” Lucas pulls me up. “We need a little break anyway.”
“Yes. Fine.” I don’t say what I’m thinking—that I have a bad feeling about Bessie and her relentless tilling. We walk thirty yards and plant ourselves on the bench of an old picnic table slopped carelessly with green paint.
Lucas nods toward the house. “Here she comes.”
Bessie is hauling an old U-Haul box across the yard, breathing with furious intention. Lucas jumps up and meets her halfway, relieving her of the box. He sets it in front of me, but I don’t reach. I’m mesmerized by Bessie’s large bold print, which says exactly what she declared it did, thereby assuring that this will be the one box her grieving, surely sentimental kids will never throw away no matter what.
“This holds all the odds and ends I’ve found on the outdoor property since we moved in.” Bessie pops open flaps. “Useless archaeology, really. Except the old bottles. I got those on the kitchen windowsill. But if it comes out of the earth and isn’t wriggling or biting me, I keep it in here. I don’t organize it by year or location. It’s all dumped together. So I have no idea what came out of the garden and what got kicked up by the mower.”
Lucas is bending over the box, pawing through it.
“Just dump it,” Bessie says. “Can’t hurt anything. Then Tessa can see, too.”
Before I can prepare, the contents are rolling recklessly across the table. Wire springs and rusty nails, an old, half-crushed yellow-and-red-striped Dr Pepper can, and a blue Matchbox car with no wheels. A tiny tin for Bayer aspirin, a chewed dog bone, a large white rock streaked with gold, a broken arrowhead, fossils of cephalopods that once skulked around with tentacles and eyes like cameras.
Lucas is fingering through pieces of broken red glass. He’s pushed aside a tiny brown object with a point.
“This is a tooth,” he says.
“That’s what I thought!” Bessie exclaims. “Herb told me it was a candy corn.”
But I’m staring at something that lies all alone at the edge of the table.
“I think that was Lydia’s.” The words catch in my throat.
“Spooky.” Bessie picks up the little pink barrette, frowns at it. I pull off my gloves and take it with unsteady fingers.
“What do you think it means?” she wants to know. “Do you figure it’s a clue?” Bessie isn’t breathing fast because she’s old, or because Lucas is a sweaty god. Bessie is a junkie. She’s probably devoured everything ever written on the Black-Eyed Susans. How could I not have seen this? She bought my grandfather’s house when no one else would. She apparently knows exactly who Lydia is without explanation.
Lucas has placed his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll borrow the tooth and the … hair thing, if that’s OK,” he tells Bessie.
“Of course, of course. Whatever Herb and I can do.”
I rub my finger absently over the yellow smiley face etched into the plastic. This means nothing, I scold myself. It was probably tugged out of Lydia’s hair by a cornstalk during a game of hide-and-seek back when we thought monsters were imaginary.
And yet. The pink barrette with the smiley face. The Victorian ring, the Poe book, the key. Why do I feel like Lydia is the one playing a game with me, planned cunningly in advance?
Lucas scans my face, and there’s no discussion of whether to sift through the rest of the dirt.
I look up. On the roof, the flash of two girls. One with fiery red hair. I blink, and they’re gone.
Lydia’s barrette is wrapped in a tissue in my purse. The tooth is in Lucas’s pocket. About fifteen miles down the road, Lucas clears his throat and breaks the silence. “Are you going to tell me what happened to that mermaid chick?”
My passenger window swims with blue and brown. The Texas sky, a bell of glass; the rolling farmland, once buried under an unfathomable sea. Sun so powerful that the mermaid was often obliged to dive under the water to cool her burning face.
I still my grandfather’s voice. Place my hands on burning cheeks. Turn to Lucas’s profile, a rock to cling to.
“The mermaid can’t bring herself to murder the prince,” I say. “She throws herself into the sea, sacrificing herself, and dissolves into sea foam. But a miracle happens—her spirit floats above the water. She has transformed into a daughter of the air. She can now earn her immortal soul and go to live with God.”
Daughters of the air. Like us, like us, like us, breathe the Susans.
“The Baptist in your grandfather must have loved that one,” Lucas says.
“Not really. Baptists believe you can’t earn heaven. The only way to save yourself is to repent. Then you’re good to go, even if you turn sweet mermaids to sea foam.”
Or girls to bones.
September 1995
MR. LINCOLN: Tessie, do you love your grandfather?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. Of course.
MR. LINCOLN: It would be very hard to think something terrible about him, right?
MR. VEGA: Objection.
JUDGE WATERS: I’ll give you a little leeway here, Mr. Lincoln, but not much.
MR. LINCOLN: Did the police search your grandfather’s house the day after you were found?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. But he let them.
MR. LINCOLN: Did they take anything away?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Some of his art. A shovel. His truck. But they gave it all back.
MR. LINCOLN: And the shovel had just been washed, correct?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes, my grandmother had run the hose over it the day before.
MR. LINCOLN: Where is your grandfather today?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: He’s home with my grandmother. He’s sick. He had a stroke.
MR. LINCOLN: He had a stroke about two weeks after you were found, right?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. He was very upset about … me. He wanted to hunt down whoever did this and kill him. He said the death penalty wasn’t good enough.
MR. LINCOLN: He told you that?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I overheard him talking to my aunt.
MR. LINCOLN: Interesting.
MS. CARTWRIGHT: No one thought I could hear while I was blind.
MR. LINCOLN: I’d like to get to your episode of blindness a little later. Did you ever think your grandfather was odd?
MR. VEGA: Objection. Tessie’s grandfather isn’t on trial here.
MR. LINCOLN: Judge, I’m almost done with this line of questioning.
JUDGE WATERS: You can answer the question, Ms. Cartwright.
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I’m not sure what he means.
MR. LINCOLN: Your grandfather painted some grisly images, didn’t he?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I mean, yes, when he was imitating Salvador Dalí or Picasso or something. He was an artist. He experimented all the time.
MR. LINCOLN: Did he ever tell you scary stories?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: He read fairy tales to me when I was little.
MR. LINCOLN: The Robber Bridegroom who kidnaps a girl, chops her up, and turns her to stew? The Girl Without Hands, whose own father cuts them off?
MR. VEGA: Oh, come on, your honor.
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Her hands grow back. Seven years later, her hands grow back.
26 days until the execution
I wonder if Jo is in a freezing lab scraping enamel off a tooth that looks like a candy corn while I fold and stack clothes still warm from the dryer. If Terrell is sitting on his rock hard cot, composing his last words, drinking water that tastes like raw turnips, while I sip my $12 pinot and decide to throw out Charlie’s pink socks with the hole in the left heel. If Lydia is out there somewhere laughing at me, or missing me, or up in heaven pestering dead authors while her body rots in a place only my monster knows about. I wonder if the tooth from the ground at Granddaddy’s could be hers.
For three days, I debated about whether to turn the tooth over to Jo. I couldn’t explain to Lucas why I waited. It made perfect sense to try every unlikely thing, to hold nothing back unless what I really wanted was not to know. Jo had met us in the parking lot of the North Texas Health Science Center a few hours ago. She was still wearing white shoe covers from the lab. She had listened in taut silence to my rambling about drowning Black-Eyed Susans in boiling water and a box of useless objects that no one cared about but Bessie. I didn’t mention Lydia’s pink barrette with the smiley face. Jo accepted the tooth from Lucas. Said little in return.
I wonder if Jo will forgive me for not bringing her with us, although it doesn’t seem all that important right now. Nothing does. Numbness grips me, a slow-acting poison that drugs the Susans to sleep and yet still allows my hands to build perfectly tidy little towers of clothes. Clothes that have mingled intimately in the washer—Lucas’s Army underwear, Charlie’s flannel pajamas with the pink cotton-candy sheep, my neon running shorts.
Lucas is slugging a beer at the end of the couch, watching CNN and rolling his briefs into tiny eggrolls, Army Ranger-style, then aiming and tossing them at my head, my butt, whatever is a good target. We’re pretending to be just fine while the clock ticks the seconds off my sanity. Because after Terrell dies, then what?
Keep folding. The doorbell rings, and Lucas is up, opening the door. Probably Effie dropping off a food bomb. I glance at my watch: 4:22 P.M.—a couple of hours before I have to pick up Charlie from practice.
“Is Tessa home?” A nerve, plucked like a guitar string, as soon as I hear his voice.
Lucas’s feet are planted deliberately, blocking my view of the door. “And this would be regarding what?” The drawl pulls out every bit of the West Texas in him. In slow motion, I see Lucas’s left hand, the support hand, casually rise and rest on his upper chest. The fingers on his right hand, clinching. The ready position for the fastest way to yank a gun out of your pants. He’d demonstrated for me in the back yard not an hour before.
“Lucas!” I jolt myself away from the couch, toppling three of the piles. “This is Bill, the lawyer I’ve told you about who is handling Terrell’s appeal. Angie’s friend.” All I can see beyond Lucas is the tip of a Boston Red Sox cap. I’m behind Lucas, pushing uselessly against hard muscle. I feel around his waist for a gun that isn’t there. His movements a few seconds ago, just the reflex of a wary man. I realize that while Bill can’t see my face, he has a perfect view of my hand curled intimately near Lucas’s crotch.
Old resentment flushes heat into my face. This macho idiocy from Lucas is the primary reason we were drawn to each other when I was a scared, hormonal eighteen-year-old, and the primary reason we broke up. He descended from a generation of men who sent hearts skittering in terror with the one-two clunk of their boots. Who lived life like everyone was about to quick-draw. Lucas leaps eagerly at cat screeches, car backfires, knocks on the door. He’s a good man and a terrific soldier, the best, but as an everyday life partner, he electrocutes the roots of every hair on my skin.
“Lucas, move.” I shove a little harder.
Lucas steps aside slightly so I can wriggle beside him.
“Bill, Lucas,” I say. “Lucas, Bill.”
Bill sticks out a hand. Lucas ignores it. “Hello there, Bill. I’ve been wanting to meet you. I’ve been wanting to ask how involving Tessa at this very late date is a good thing. Don’t you think it’s time to step away? Ride off in your BMW out there? Give Tessa and my daughter the peace they deserve?”
For a moment, I’m speechless. I had no idea Lucas was pulsing with this kind of anger. We were melting down, every one of us. I step firmly onto the porch. “Lucas. Butt out of this, OK? Whatever I’m doing, it’s my call. Bill isn’t forcing me.”
I shut the door in Lucas’s face, not for the first time. “You can wipe off that expression, Bill.” Not exactly what I meant to say. Not, I miss you.
“So that’s your soldier?” Bill asks.
“If you mean Charlie’s father, yes.”
“He’s living here?”
“On a short leave. Long story, but Charlie was scared after that night of the … vandal. She Skyped Lucas about it and shortly after that he showed up on my doorstep. He has an understanding boss and was overdue for a leave to visit Charlie anyway. I didn’t invite him, but I’m not sorry he came. He’s on … the couch.”
“That doesn’t seem like a very long story.” Bill’s voice is cool. “If you’re still in love with him, just say so.”
My arms are crossed tight against my thin sweater. I have no interest in inviting Bill inside and refereeing between the two of them.
“This isn’t a conversation … we need to have,” I say. “You and me … we can’t be a thing. We slept together for the wrong reasons. It’s not like me to do something that impulsive. I’m not that girl.”
“You didn’t answer the question.” I meet his eyes. Flinch. The intensity is almost unbearable. Lucas had never looked at me like that. Lucas was all hands and instinct.
“I’m not in love with Lucas. He’s a good guy. You just caught him at a bad moment.” Already I’m wondering if Bill’s laser gaze is for real, or if it’s method acting with an on/off switch. Useful for withering a witness, or stripping a girl down to her scars.
Lydia had always sworn no one could reach her vagina with his eyes but Paul Newman, “Even though he’s ancient.” She hadn’t met Bill. I wouldn’t want her to meet Bill. To tarnish this, whatever this is.
Why am I thinking about Lydia right now?
Bill plunks himself down in the swing, clearly not going anywhere. I reluctantly position myself on the other end. For the first time, I notice a large manila envelope about two inches thick, in his hand.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“I brought you something. Have you ever read any of your testimony from the trial?”
“It never occurred to me.” A lie. I’d thought about it plenty. The jury ogling me like I was an alien and the sketch artist scratching long, swift pencil strokes for my hair. My father, sitting in the front row of a packed room, petrified for me, and Terrell, in a cheap blue tie with gold stripes, keeping his eyes glued to a blank piece of notebook paper in front of him, the one for his notes. He never once looked at me or took a note. The jury interpreted it as guilt.
So did I.
“I’ve pulled out a few sections for you,” Bill says.
“Why?”
“Because you feel such guilt about your testimony.” Bill halts the swing abruptly. He taps the envelope that now rests between us. “Please read this. It might help. You are not the reason Terrell sits in prison.”
I cross my arms tighter. “Maybe you’re just thinking that the more I take myself back there, the more I might remember something that would help Terrell.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
My heart begins to pound, hating this. “No. Of course not.”
He pushes himself up and the swing bounces and jerks in protest. “Jo told me about the tooth. I wish you’d let us know you were going to your grandfather’s. I wish you weren’t so intent on shutting me out. Are you planning to dig somewhere else?” He’s stilling the swing with his hand while I get up.
“No. It was the last place. Is Jo … mad?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
He’s moving away, bristling with frustration. At life. At me. I grab the envelope off the swing and follow him to the steps. “Tell me the truth. Is there any hope at all for Terrell?”
He starts to step off the porch before swiveling halfway around, almost knocking me back. I am already there, only inches away. “There are a few more appeals to file,” he says. “I’m driving to Huntsville to see him for the last time next week.”
I grip his arm. “The last time? That doesn’t sound good. Will you tell Terrell … that I’m still trying very hard to remember?”
Bill’s eyes are glued to my fingernails gripping his sweatshirt, always unpolished and cut short, still crumbed with dirt from my grandfather’s garden. “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
“You can’t be serious! I’d be one of the last people he’d want to see.”
Bill removes my hand deliberately. He might as well have shoved me down.
“It isn’t my idea,” he says. “It’s his.”
“Doesn’t Terrell … hate me?”
“Terrell is not a hater, Tessa. Not bitter. He’s one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met. He believes you have it the worst. For a long time, he said he could hear your weeping at night over the other sounds of Death Row. He says a prayer for you before he goes to sleep. He’s told me not to push you.”
Terrell has heard me crying on Death Row. I’m keeping him awake. I’m an echo in his head, like the Susans are in mine.
“Why in the hell didn’t you tell me this before?”
“There’s no human touch. Can you imagine that? Twenty-three hours a day in a tiny cage with a narrow slot for food. A tiny Plexiglas window that’s so high he has to ball up his mattress and stand on it to see out, for a fuzzy view of nothing. One hour a day to briskly walk around another small cage for exercise. Every second to think about dying. You know what he says is the worst part? More than the sounds of men screaming, or trying to choke themselves, or arguing over imaginary chess games, or incessantly tapping typewriters? The smell. The stench of fear and hopelessness oozing from five hundred men. Terrell never takes deep breaths on Death Row. He thinks he might suffocate or go insane if he does. I can’t swig a deep breath without thinking of Terrell. Why didn’t I tell you before, Tessa? Because you have enough to carry around.”
