Black-Eyed Susans (22 page)

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, 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.”

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.

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.”

Why would Lydia bury this book?
After
my kidnapping, she probably scourged her room of anything with a yellow flower on it. But
Lydia wouldn’t be able to completely part with a treasured book. She’d romanticize
it like this, in a time capsule to dig up later.

Except she never came back
.

Lieutenant Myron sets the book aside and dangles
another bag from her thumb and forefinger. “What about this?”

I swallow hard and peer closer. “A key? I
don’t even recognize the random keys in my own junk drawer.”

“So that’s a no?”

“That’s a no.”

“Worth
asking.”

Lieutenant Myron reaches for the third bag. She
holds it up, six inches from my eyes.

The room is waiting for me.

Tick, tick, tick.

Can everyone hear that?
I don’t
know if it’s my pacemaker, which never makes a sound, or the deer heart trapped in that
box.

At ten, I could recite every word of “The
Tell-Tale Heart.” Lydia was better at it, of course. Once, she hid a loud clock under my
pillow.

“Tessa?” Bill grips my shoulders.
I’m swaying. The ticking is louder. His watch,
dammit,
near my ear.
Tick,
tick.
I push his arm away.

“I thought this was lost.”
It’s the voice of a seething teen-ager. “She must have taken it.”

“Who took it?” The
lieutenant’s voice is sharp.

“Lydia. Lydia took it.”

The doctor is already seated in his chair
right by the couch. He doesn’t bother to stand up and greet me. I can’t tell
by his expression if he is still angry after last week, when I spewed that acid about
his daughter being eaten by coyotes. He certainly hadn’t objected when I just got
up and stalked out.

I throw my purse on the floor, flop back on
the couch, and cross my legs, hiking the skirt so he can see to China. He’s not
the slightest bit interested. I could be his eighty-year-old aunt. My face burns hot and
angry, but I don’t know why. I twist the ring on my finger, wishing it were his
neck.

“Your mother,” he says smoothly.
“You found her on the day she died.”

Payback for conjuring his daughter.
He’s wielding his sharpest knife today. It opens up a place where I store the
exquisite pain of missing her. I want to scream, to shatter that pleasant, professional
mask that he snaps on with an invisible rubber band. Sometimes I wonder if I died in
that hole. If this room is hell’s purgatory, and everything else—Daddy,
Bobby, Lydia, O.J. the Monster—is part of a dream when the devil lets me sleep. If
this judge in a pin-striped shirt is deciding whether to throw me in a locked attic with
a bunch of cackling Susans or set me free to haunt our killer for eternity.