Black-Eyed Susans, page 3
While I fought for life in that grave, the doctors say my heart wound down to around eighteen. An EMT at the scene even mistook me for dead.
The district attorney told the jury that I surprised the Black-Eyed Susan killer, not the other way around. Set off a panic in him, prompted him to get rid of the evidence. That the large bruise on Terrell Darcy Goodwin’s gut in the blown-up exhibit photograph, blue and green and yellow tie-dye, was my artwork. People appreciate pretty fantasies like this, where there is a feisty hero, even when there is no factual basis for it.
A dark van is slowly backing up to the tent. O. J. Simpson got off the same year I testified, and he massacred his wife and left his blood behind on her gate. There was no solid DNA evidence against Terrell Darcy Goodwin, except a tattered jacket mired in the mud a mile away with his blood type on the right cuff. The spot of blood was so tiny and degraded they couldn’t tackle DNA, still fairly new in criminal court. It was enough for me to hold on to back then, but not anymore. I pray that Joanna will work her high priestess magic, and we will finally know who these two girls are. I’m counting on them to lead all of us to peace.
I turn to go, and my toe catches the edge of something. I pitch forward, instantly breathless, palms out, onto an old broken gravestone. The roots have bullied the marker until it toppled over and broke in half.
Did anyone hear? I glance around quickly. The tent is half-down. Someone is laughing. Shadows moving, none of them my way. I push myself up, hands stinging, brushing off the death and grit clinging to my jeans. I tug my cell phone out of my back pocket, and it casts its friendly light when I press the button. I shine it over the gravestone. A red smear from my hands marks the sleeping lamb guarding over Christina Driskill.
Christina entered the world, and escaped it, on the same day. March 3, 1872.
My mind burrows into the rocky dirt, fighting its way to the small wooden box that rests under my feet, tilted, cracked open, strangled by roots.
I’m thinking of Lydia.
Tessie, 1995
“Do you cry often?” First question. Gentle.
“No,” I say. So much for Lydia’s beauty fix of sticking two frozen spoons under my eyes after my little jags.
“Tessie, I want you to tell me the very last thing you saw, before you went blind.” No lingering on my puffy face. Taking up right where we left off last time. Smart tactic, I think grudgingly. He actually used the word blind, which no one else would dare say to my face except Lydia, who also told me three days ago to get up and wash my hair because it looked like stale cotton candy.
This doctor has already figured out that a warm-up act with me was a complete waste of time.
I saw my mother’s face. Beautiful, kind, loving. That’s the last perfectly clear image that hung before me, except that my mother has been dead since I was eight, and my eyes were wide open. My mother’s face, and then nothing but a shimmering gray ocean. I often think it was kind of God to introduce me to blindness that way.
I clear my throat, determined to say something in today’s session, to appear more cooperative, so he will tell Daddy that I am making progress. Daddy, who takes off from his job every Tuesday morning to bring me here. For whatever reason, I don’t think this doctor will lie to him, like most of the others. The way this doctor asks his questions is not the same. Neither are my answers, and I’m not sure why.
“There were a bunch of cards on the windowsill in my hospital room,” I say casually. “One of them had a picture of a pig on the front. Wearing a bow tie and a top hat. It said, ‘I hope you squeal better soon.’ The pig—that’s the last thing I saw.”
“An unfortunate choice of wording on the card.”
“Ya think?”
“Did anything else bother you about that greeting card?”
“No one could read the signature.” An illegible squiggle, like a wire spring.
“So you didn’t know who it was from.”
“A lot of strangers sent cards from all over. And flowers and stuffed animals. There were so many, my father asked them to be sent on to the children’s cancer floor.” Eventually, the FBI got a clue and swept everything to a lab. I later worried about what they might have ripped out of a dying kid’s hands in return for not a scrap of useful evidence.
The pig held a daisy in his pink hoof. I had left that part out. At sixteen, drugged up in a hospital bed and scared out of my mind, I didn’t know the difference between a yellow daisy and a black-eyed Susan.
My cast is itching like crazy, and I reach into the slim gap between my calf and the cast with two fingers. Can’t get to the spot on my ankle. Oscar licks my leg with a sandpaper tongue, trying to help.
“OK, maybe that card was the trigger,” the doctor says. “Maybe not. It’s a start. Here’s my thinking. We’re going to talk about your conversion disorder before we move on to preparing you for court. In the interest of time, there was hope by … others … that I could work around it. But it is in the way.”
Ya think?
“As far as I’m concerned, time stands still in this room.” He’s telling me no pressure. That we’re sailing together in my gray ocean, and I control the wind. This is the first lie I know he’s told me.
Conversion disorder. The nice, fancy name for it.
Freud called it hysterical blindness.
All those expensive tests and nothing physically wrong.
All in her head.
Poor thing doesn’t want to see the world.
She will never be the same.
Why do people think I can’t hear them?
I tune back in to his voice. I’ve decided he sounds like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. Rough Texas drawl. Smart as hell, and knows it.
… it’s not that uncommon in young females who have endured a trauma like this. What is uncommon is that it’s lasted this long. Eleven months.”
Three hundred and twenty-six days, doctor. But I don’t correct him.
A slight squeak as he shifts in his chair, and Oscar rises up protectively. “There are exceptions,” he says. “I once treated a boy, a virtuoso pianist, who had practiced eight hours a day since he was five. He woke up one morning and his hands were frozen. Paralyzed. Couldn’t even hold a glass of milk. Doctors couldn’t find a cause. He began to wiggle his fingers exactly two years later, to the day.”
The doctor’s voice is closer. At my side. Oscar bangs my arm with his nose, to let me know. The doctor is sliding something thin and cool and smooth into my hand. “Try this,” he says.
A pencil. I grasp it. Dig it deep into the side of my cast. Feel intense, gratifying relief. A slight breeze as the doctor moves away, maybe the flap of his jacket. I’m certain he looks nothing like Tommy Lee Jones. But I can picture Oscar. White as fresh snow. Blue eyes that see everything. Red collar. Sharp little teeth if you bother me.
“Does this piano player know that you talk about him to other patients?” I ask. I can’t help myself. The sarcasm is a horsewhip I can’t put away. But on our third Tuesday morning together, I have to admit this doctor is starting to get to me. I’m feeling the first pinch of guilt. Like I need to try harder.
“As a matter of fact, yes. I was interviewed for a Cliburn documentary about him. The point is: I believe you will see again.”
“I’m not worried.” I blurt it out.
“That is often a symptom of conversion disorder. A lack of caring about whether you’ll ever go back to normal. But, in your case, I don’t think that’s true.”
His first direct confrontation. He waits silently. I feel my temper flare.
“I know the real reason why you made an exception to see me.” My voice cracks a little when I want it to sound defiant. “What you have in common with my father. I know you had a daughter who disappeared.”
Tessa, present day
Angie’s utilitarian metal desk looks exactly the way I remember, buried in mountains of paper and file folders. Shoved into a corner of an expansive, open basement room at St. Stephen’s, the stone-and-brick Catholic church that sits defiantly in the 2nd Avenue and Hatcher Street corridor of hell. Smack in the center of a Dallas neighborhood that made a Top 25 FBI list for most dangerous in the nation.
It is high Texas noon outside, but not in here. In here, it is gloomy and timeless, colored by the stains of a violent history, when this church was abandoned for eight years and this room was used as an execution factory for drug dealers.
The first and only time I’d been here, Angie told me that the hopeful young priest who rented her the space whitewashed the walls four times himself. The indentations and bullet holes in the walls, he told her, were going to be permanent, like the nails in the cross. Never forget.
Her desk lamp is the single thing glowing, casting faint light on the unframed print tacked above it. The Stoning of Saint Stephen. Rembrandt’s first known work, painted at nineteen. I had learned about the chiaroscuro technique in another basement, with my grandfather bent over his easel. Strong lights and heavy shadows. Rembrandt was a master of it. He made sure the brilliance of heaven was opening up for Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, murdered by a mob because evil people told lies about him. Three priests huddle in the upper corner. Watching him die. Doing nothing.
I wonder which came first to the basement: this print or Angie, who decided Saint Stephen’s fate was a most appropriate marker for her desk. The edges of the print are soft and furry. It is attached to the pockmarked wall by three scratched yellow thumbtacks and one red one. A small rip on the left side has been repaired with Scotch tape.
Two inches away is another vision of heaven. A drawing on lined notebook paper. Five stick figures with lopsided butterfly wings illuminated by a bright orange sunburst. A child’s crooked print tumbles across the sky: ANGIE’S ANGELS.
I learned in Angie’s obituary that this drawing was a long-ago gift from the six-year-old daughter of Dominicus Steele, an apprentice plumber accused of raping an SMU coed outside a Fort Worth bar in the ’80s. Dominicus was identified by the victim and two of her sorority sisters.
That night, he’d flirted with the victim up close. He was big and black, and a good dancer. The white college girls loved him until they decided he was the guy in the gray hooded sweatshirt running away from their drunk, crumpled friend in the alley. Dominicus was freed by DNA extracted from semen stored for twelve years in an evidence storage unit. Dominicus’s mother was the first to speak to reporters in terms of “Angie’s Angels,” and her sweet little moniker stuck.
I’d never describe Angie as an angel. She did whatever she had to. She was a very good liar when she needed to be. I know, because she had lied for Charlie and me.
I take a step, and the hollow sound of my boot echoes on the cheap yellow linoleum that covers up God knows what. The four other desks that are scattered around the floor, in similar states of paper chaos, are also empty. Where is everybody?
There’s a blue door on the far side of the room that’s impossible to miss. I venture over. Knock lightly. Nothing. Maybe I should just hunker down in Angie’s chair for a while. Swerve it around on the cranky roller wheels she complained about and stare into Rembrandt’s heaven. Ponder the role of the martyr.
Instead, I twist the knob and open the door a crack. Knock again. Hear animated voices. Push the door all the way. A long conference table. Blazing overhead lights. Bill’s startled face. Another woman, jumping out of her chair abruptly, knocking over her cup of coffee.
My eyes, traveling down the table, follow the river of amber liquid.
Head thrumming.
Copies of drawings, stretched edge to edge across the scratched surface.
Tessie’s drawings.
The real ones. And the ones that aren’t.
I am staring at the score, 12–28, scrawled in white chalk on a blackboard. A lopsided Little League game, maybe, or a bad day for the Dallas Cowboys. It is clear from the chart’s wording that these are the twelve men who have been freed over the years by Angie and her rotating legal crew, and the twenty-eight who have not.
The woman who tipped over the coffee, introduced to me as a third-year University of Texas law student named Sheila Dunning, has left us. William quickly swept up the copies of my drawings, tucked them out of the way, and set a fresh mug of hot coffee in front of me. He’s apologized multiple times, and I’ve said over and over, It’s OK, it’s OK, I have to see those drawings again sometime and I should have knocked louder.
Sometimes I long for the Tessie in me, who would have just spit out the unvarnished, angry truth: You’re a jerk. You knew I was coming. You knew I hadn’t looked at these since I dug them out of a wall.
“Thanks for driving all the way down here.” He slides into a chair beside me and slaps a new yellow legal pad on the table. He is wearing jeans, Nikes, and a slightly pilled green pullover sweater that is too short for his frame, the curse of a broad-shouldered man. “Are you still in the mood to do this?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Tessie, retorting. Still in there, after all.
“We don’t have to talk here. In this room.” He gazes at me intently. “This is our war room. Generally off limits to clients.”
My eyes linger over the walls. Beside the chalkboard, enlarged snapshots of five men. Current cases, I assume. Four of the men are African-American. A young Terrell Darcy Goodwin stars in the center photograph. His arm is tossed around a guy in a red-and-gray high school baseball uniform, a little brother, maybe. Same good looks, wide-spaced eyes, chiseled cheekbones, café latte skin.
On the opposite wall: Crime scenes. Gaping mouths. Blank eyes. Confused limbs. I don’t linger.
I flick my head around to a giant erase board that is scribbled with some sort of timeline.
I see my name. Merry’s.
I open my mouth to speak and find his eyes glued to my crossed legs and the patch of bare white thigh above my black boots. I keep meaning to let out the hem of this skirt. I scoot my legs under the table. He resumes a professional mask.
“I’m not a client.” I swallow a sip of bitter liquid, read the words on the side of the mug. Lawyers Get You Off.
William follows my eyes. Rolls his. “Most of our cups are dirty. Could use a good washing out.” Joking. Letting the other moment, the curiosity about what’s under my skirt, pass.
“I’m fine in here, William.”
“Bill,” he reminds me. “Only people over seventy get to call me William.”
“Did the exhumation Tuesday go as planned?” I ask. “They kept it quiet. It didn’t even make the papers.”
“You should know the answer to that.”
“You saw me by the tree.”
“That hair of yours is hard to miss, even in the dark.”
So he’s a liar, too. My hair is down today, long, curling loosely past my shoulders. Still the same burnt color as the sixteen-year-old me. Two nights ago, at the cemetery, it was tucked up tight in my daughter Charlie’s black baseball cap.
“You tricked me,” I say. “Nice.”
I shift uncomfortably in the chair. I’m talking to a lawyer, one I haven’t paid a cent to keep my confidences. Sure, he could be the boy next door with those doe-y brown eyes and clean-cut hair and ears that stick out a little and enormous hands that could cover a grapefruit. The funny best friend of the guy you really want, until you realize … oh, shit.
He grins. “You look like my little sister does right before she slaps me. In answer to your question, a forensic anthropologist is getting a look at the bones first. Then Jo and her people step in. She would like both of us to watch her techs work the Black-Eyed Susan case next week. Asked me to invite you personally. Kind of as a peace offering since she ordered you not to be present at the exhumation. She really did feel bad about it.”
I shiver slightly. There’s no vent, no visible source of heat in here. My father used to say that February in Texas is a cold, bitter lady. March is when she loses her virginity.
“Bones are processed every Monday morning,” he continues. “Jo had to pull some strings to push the Susans to the head of the line. I can pick you up, if you like. The lab’s about twenty minutes from your place.”
“No worry this time about contamination?” This had been Joanna’s concern about me officially attending the exhuming of the bodies. She didn’t want even the slightest hint of broken protocol.
“We’ll be watching the process through a glass window. The new lab is set up as a teaching facility. State-of-the-art. Bones are flown in from all over the world. So are students and scientists who want to see Jo’s techniques firsthand.” He smiles tightly and picks up his pen. “Want to get started? I’ve got to be somewhere by two. For my job that pays the bills.” A corporate mediator, whatever the hell that is, according to his law firm’s website. I wonder where he is hiding his suit.
“Yep. Go ahead.” Spoken much more casually than I felt.
“Your testimony in ’95. Has anything changed? Have you remembered anything else in the last seventeen years about the attack or your attacker?”
“No.” I say it firmly. I am willing to help, I remind myself, but only to a point. I have two teen-agers to protect, the one I was and the one who sleeps in that purple room.
“Just to be sure, I’m going to ask a few specifics anyway, OK?”
I nod.
“Can you describe the face of your attacker?”
“No.”
“Do you remember where you met up with him?”
“No.”
“Do you have any memory of being dumped in that field?”
“No.”
