Black-Eyed Susans (13 page)

“Dr. Giles …”

“Please. Nancy.”

“Nancy, then. Not to be rude …
but why exactly did you take Bill up on this request? If you don’t believe there
is really anything there to talk about.”
Does she know that more than half of
my drawings are faked? Do I need to tell her?

Jo’s chilling,
detached lesson on bones, that damn heart in a box, the pink elephant perched beside us
who knows way too much about the terrible, terrible things people do—it’s
about all the reality I can take today.

In an hour and a half, I will be planted in
the stands at Charlie’s volleyball game, surrounded by weary moms who will scream
their throats raw, where the most important thing isn’t worrying about the Middle
East’s urgent signs of Armageddon, or the 150 million orphans in the world, or
glaciers melting, or the fate of all the innocent men on Death Row.

It will be whether a ball touches the
ground.

Afterward, I will pull a bag of carrot
sticks out of the refrigerator, throw four Ham & Cheese Hot Pockets in the
microwave, one for me and three for Charlie, toss in a load of clothes, and attach white
gauze to lavender silk. These are the pricks of light that have kept me mostly sane,
mostly happy, day after day.

“Don’t misunderstand me,”
Nancy is saying. “I’m not at all sure your drawings are meaningless. Your
case is … complicated. I very much appreciate your permission to view the
doctors’ notes on your sessions. It was helpful, although the notes from your last
doctor were a little sparse. You were blind when you created many of those pictures,
correct? Your doctor at the time clearly thought you were faking most of them.” So
she knows. Good. “He also believed that the two of you explored every avenue when
it came to figuring out the drawings of the curtain. The drawings that were,
essentially, the ones that you declared spontaneous and genuine.”

She glances down at the beeper vibrating at
her waist, checks the number, silences it. “So there are many reasons to discount
the drawings. At least that was your doctor’s assessment. Would you
agree?”

“Yes.” My throat is dry.
Where was this going?
And a random thought,
Should I have ever asked to
see the doctor’s notes?

A Susan quickly chimes:
You don’t
want to know what he said.

“Of course, it’s always a little
hard to know exactly what we are faking,” Dr. Giles continues. “The
subconscious is busy. The truth
tends to creep through. I am, of
course, drawn to the curtain. It reminded me of a famous case history that I thought
would be worthwhile to share. It’s ironic, or a sign if you believe in those, but
the girl’s name in this other case history is also Tessa. Her name has probably
been changed and her story is far different, of course. She was a young girl who had
been sexually abused in her home but was far too traumatized to name her abuser. The
young girl drew a cutaway picture of her two-story house, so her therapist could see
inside. She drew a number of beds on the top floor. The child said the beds were for all
the many people living in the house. She drew a living room downstairs, and a kitchen
with an oversized teakettle. But instead of asking the girl about the beds, the
therapist asked the girl about the teakettle and why it was important. The girl told her
that every morning, each member of the house would pour hot water out of that kettle for
instant coffee as they left for school or work. So, using the teakettle, the therapist
took the little girl through that awful day of the abuse. Tessa remembered, one at a
time, who had used the teakettle that morning before leaving the house. The one person
remaining, who didn’t use it, is the one who stayed alone in the house with her.
The abuser. The girl was then able to tell the story of what happened to her.”

Against my will, this woman has mesmerized
me.

“I can’t know for sure,”
she says gently. “But I believe your ordinary object could be a similarly powerful
tool. It belongs somewhere. We need to look around that place. If you like, we can try
some exercises.”

My head pounds. I want to say yes, but
I’m not sure I can. Nothing,
nothing,
is ever what I expect.

She accurately interprets my silence.
“Not today. But maybe soon?”

“Yes, yes. Soon.”

“May I give you a homework assignment?
I would like you to draw the curtain again from memory. Then call me. I’ll make
time.” She pats my knee. “Excuse me for a minute.”

She walks toward the closed door at the back
of the room. I
notice a slight arthritic limp. As the door cracks
open, I glimpse her personal refuge—warm light and a large antique desk.

She is back quickly, proffering a business
card. Nothing else in her hands. She is not returning my drawings—at least, not
today. No cheating.

“I scribbled my cell number on the
bottom,” she says. “I did have one more question before you go, if
that’s OK.”

“Sure.”

“The drawing of the field. The giant
flowers leering like monsters over the two girls.”

Girls. Plural.
Two.

“It means nothing,” I say.
“I didn’t draw it. A friend of mine did. We drew together. She was in on my
… deception. My partner in crime.” I laugh awkwardly.

Nancy shoots me a strange look. “Is
your friend OK?”

It seems like an unusual question. So many,
many years have passed. Why does it matter?

“I haven’t seen her since we
were seniors in high school. She left town before we graduated, right after the
trial.”
She just disappeared.

“That must have been hard.”
Every word is careful. “To lose a good friend so soon after the trauma.”

“Yes.” For more reasons than I
want to explain. I am inching toward the door. Lydia is not a place I will go. Not
today.

Yet Dr. Giles won’t let me leave, not
yet.

“Tessa, I believe the girl who drew
that scene, your friend Lydia, was genuinely terrified.”

“You said there were … two girls
in that picture. I always thought there was one girl. Bleeding.” A tiny, tiny red
tornado.

“At first, so did I,” she says.
“The shapes are not distinct. But if you look closely, you can see four hands. Two
heads. I believe one of the girls is a protector, crouching over the other one. I
don’t think that is blood from the attack of the flower monsters. I think the
protector has red hair.”

It is hard, pretending not to see. It has
been two days. I know that I can’t keep it up very long, especially with my dad. I
need some time to observe, to analyze body language. To know what everyone is really
feeling about me when they think I’m not looking.

The doctor scribbles away at his desk, a
scritch-scratching sound that makes me want to scream.

He glances up with a concerned frown to see
if I might have changed my mind about talking. Or my pose. Arms crossed, staring
straight ahead. I had marched in the room at our appointed time and told him that I was
done. Done, done,
done.

We had a
deal,
I’d reminded
him.

No freakin’ way was I doing hypnosis,
where I float along like a dizzy bluebird and tell him secret things. I set out my rules
from
the beginning,
and if it was so easy to erase this one from his mind, what
else might he do? Offer up a happy cocktail? I’d read
Prozac Nation.
That
girl was sad. So messed up. She wasn’t me.

I didn’t want to be like her, or
Randy, the guy with the locker next to mine, wearing an Alice in Chains T-shirt every
day, popping Xanax between classes and sleeping through high school. I had heard that
his mother has breast cancer. I don’t want to ask, but I am always sure to smile
at him when we meet at the lockers. I get it.
Randy sent me a cute
card at the hospital with a thermometer sticking out of a cat’s mouth. He wrote
inside,
Sometimes life is so unkind.
I wonder how long it took him to find that
lyric. Alanis is plastered inside my locker, so he had to know. He probably
couldn’t find any Alice in Chains tunes that wouldn’t tell me to go kill
myself or something.

Lydia had caught on right away. Tiny clues.
My Bible on the dresser opened to Isaiah instead of Matthew. The TV ever so slightly
more angled toward my spot on the bed. The pink-and-green T-shirt that matched the
leggings, and the brown and peach Maybelline eye shadow that I hadn’t put on for a
year. It wasn’t just one thing, she said. It was all of them.

There were surprises, everywhere. My face in
the bathroom mirror, for one. Everything about me, more angular. My nose juts out like
the notch on my grandfather’s old sundial. The half-moon scar under my eye is
fading, more pink than red, less noticeable. Dad tentatively suggested a few weeks ago
that we could talk to a plastic surgeon if I wanted, but the idea of lying there like
Sleeping Beauty while a man with a knife stands over me … not ever gonna happen. I
would rather people stare.

Oscar is even whiter than I imagined,
although maybe that’s just because everything seems a little blinding at the
moment. He’s the first thing I saw at the end of my bed the morning I opened my
eyes for real—a pile of dove feathers with a head. I had called out his name
softly. When his tongue slapped my nose, I knew for sure I wasn’t dreaming.

There was no drama to my sudden
transformation. I went to sleep, I woke up, and I could see again. The world had crept
back into sharp and excruciating focus.

The doctor’s still at it with the
scritch-scratching at the desk. I twitch my eyes over to the clock on the wall. Nine
minutes left. Oscar’s sleeping at my feet, but his ears are flicking around. Maybe
an evil squirrel dream. I kick off my sneaker and run my foot back and forth across his
warm back.

The doctor notices my
movement, hesitates, and puts down his pen. He makes his way slowly over to the chair
across from me. I think again what an excellent job Lydia had done of describing
him.

“Tessie, I want to tell you how sorry
I am,” he begins. “I didn’t honor our agreement. I pushed you. It is
everything a good therapist should
not
do, regardless of the
circumstances.”

I greet him with silence but keep my gaze
locked over his shoulder. Tears, barely under the surface.

Because there are things I’d still
rather not see. My brother’s face after my dad talked to him quietly last night
about his grades, which used to be straight A’s. The medical insurance forms
scattered all over the table like someone lost at poker and tossed the deck. The sad,
bare state of the refrigerator, weeds choking the cracks in the driveway, tight lines
curved around my father’s mouth.

All of this, because of me.

I need to keep trying. I want to get better.
I can see. Isn’t that better?

Didn’t this man asking for forgiveness
right now probably have something to do with that? Shouldn’t I let him score that
victory? Don’t we all make mistakes?

“What else can I say, Tessie, that
might begin to restore your trust in me?”

I think he knows that I can see.

“You can tell me about your
daughter,” I say. “The one you lost.”

The tutu is finished.

I steam it gently, even though it
doesn’t really need it. Charlie makes fun of me and my Rowenta IS6300 Garment
Steamer. But Rowenta has probably been my best and most faithful therapist. She pops out
of the closet about once a month and never asks a single question. She’s mindless.
Magic. I borrow her wand and all of the wrinkles disappear. Results are instant, and
certain.

Except for today.

Today, a mobile spins in my head, dangled by
an unseen hand. I’m transfixed by the pictures whizzing by. Lydia’s face is
on one. Terrell’s is on another. They dance among yellow flowers and black eyes
and rusty shovels and plastic hearts. All of them, strung together with brittle
bone.

It has been two days since Dr. Nancy Giles
of Vanderbilt/Oxford/Harvard interpreted Lydia’s drawing, right after she had
announced in no uncertain terms that she didn’t put too much stock in Freudian
crap.

Dr. Giles thinks something was wrong with
Lydia.
That Lydia perceived
me
as the protector. Which can’t
be. I never told anyone about the poem he left me in the ground by the live oak. Lydia
drew
the picture
before
the poem. I would have died without
Lydia back then, not the other way around.

I need to see this drawing again, dammit.
Why didn’t Dr. Giles offer to show it to me? Did she think I was a liar? That I
knew something I wasn’t telling? As always, as soon as I left a therapist’s
office, the doubts wriggled out like slimy worms.

I miss you.
That’s what Lydia
wrote on the flowers delivered to my home after all those years of silence. Unless she
wasn’t the one who sent them. What if they
are
from my monster? What if
my silence killed her? What if, because I
didn’t
warn her, he carried out
the poetic threat so coyly buried by my tree house?
If you tell, I will make Lydia a
Susan, too.
What if my denial and stupidity sacrificed both Terrell and
her?

Terrell. I think about him all the time now.
I wonder if he hates me, if his arms are thick from push-ups on concrete, if he has
already thought about his last meal, just in case. Then I remember, he can’t ask
for a last meal. One of the guys who chained James Byrd Jr. to a pickup and dragged him
to death ruined that for everybody. He requested two chicken-fried steaks, a pound of
barbecue, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover’s pizza, an omelet, a
bowl of okra, a pint of Blue Bell, peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and three
root beers. It was delivered before his execution. And then he didn’t eat it.
Texas said, no more.