Black-Eyed Susans (12 page)

His tone reminds me that he is pushing a
truck of bricks uphill every day with one hand and dragging me behind him with the
other. This morning, I’d reluctantly agreed to ride along to meet the
“expert” who is poring over my teen-age drawings. The detour to Jo’s
office was a last-minute surprise, and welcome. I could breathe freely for a few more
minutes before I started inspecting the swirls in a curtain for a face. That is, I could
breathe if my eyes stopped wandering to that heart in a box.

“That was my boss on the phone,”
Jo continues. “As we speak, the DNA of those two girls is being input into the
national missing persons database. I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s a
useless hunt, obviously, if the families of the victims haven’t also placed their
DNA into the system for a match. The database wasn’t even around when these girls
went missing. Their families have to be ones who haven’t given up hope, who are
still bugging police and on their knees praying every night. You two are most definitely
not on a movie set with Angelina Jolie, and please don’t forget it.”

I wonder how many times she has repeated
this. Hundreds. Thousands.

Her left hand is doodling a drawing on the
edge of a magazine. A DNA strand. It has tiny shoes. I think it is jogging. Or
dancing.

“Six weeks until D-Day,” Bill
says. “But I’ve had less at this point with other cases and landed on top.
Tell everybody thanks for persevering. Any detail about those girls’ identities
could provide more reasonable doubt. I want to pile it on at the hearing.”

Jo’s hand pauses. “Tessa, do you
know anything about the forensic use of mitochondrial DNA? I’d like you to
understand what we do here.”

“A little,” I say. “It
comes only from the maternal side. Mother. Grandmother. I … read … that you
were able to use it to identify the bones of one of John Wayne Gacy’s victims
thirty years later.”

“Not me specifically, but this lab,
yes. William Bundy. Otherwise
known as Victim No. 19, because he was
the nineteenth victim pulled from the crawl space under Gacy’s house in Chicago.
That was a very good day for his family. And science.”

John Wayne Gacy. Put to death by lethal
injection in 1994, a month and a half before my attack.

Jo’s pen is moving again. Dancing DNA
guy now has a partner. With high heels. Jo sticks the pen behind her ear. “Let me
give you the twenty-five-cent science lesson I deliver to my sixth-grade tour groups.
There are two kinds of DNA in our cells: nuclear and mitochondrial. Nuclear DNA was the
kind used way back in the O.J. trial, and, by the way, if you have a scintilla of doubt,
they had him dead to rights. But that was a fresh crime scene. For older bones, we have
come to depend on mitochondrial DNA, which hangs around longer. It is tougher to
extract, but we’re getting better all the time. You’re exactly right: It
remains identical in ancestors for decades. Which makes it perfect for cold cases, like
this one. And
really
cold cases, like, say, the Romanovs, where forensic work
finally disproved the myth that Princess Anastasia escaped from that cellar where her
family was slaughtered. Science was able to prove that anyone who claimed to be her, or
descended from her, was a liar. Another great case. It rewrites history.”

I nod. I know plenty about Anastasia. Lydia
had been fascinated with all of the romantic conspiracy theories—the ten women who
claimed to be the only surviving daughter of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, who were
executed with their children by the Bolsheviks, like dogs. I’d also watched the
convoluted, sanitized, entirely imagined, happily-ever-after Disney version of
Anastasia
while babysitting my six-year-old cousin, Ella. “Are you a
princess, too?” Ella had asked when it was over. “Weren’t you the girl
who forgot?”

Bill moves restlessly. Impatient.
“What about the hair, Jo?”

“Still in process. A little more red
tape than we thought before we got the police to turn it over. Separate evidence
box.”

“The hair?” I ask. “What
hair?”

“Do you really still not know the
details of the case?” Bill asks
impatiently. “The hair is
one of two pieces of physical evidence used to convict Terrell. They found it on the
muddy jacket on the farm road.” Muddy jacket. Bloody glove. Suddenly I was back in
O.J. Land.

“I’ve made it a point not to
read much about the case,” I say stiffly. His frustration with me hurts. “It
was a long time ago. I was only in that courtroom when I testified. I don’t
remember a hair.”

Jo is examining me carefully, her pen
stilled. “The hair was red.”

My hair.

“It was brought up at the last minute
at trial. The prosecution expert examined it under a microscope and testified that it
belonged to you. He was just one hundred percent damn
sure
it came off your
head
.
It was the kind of junk science used back then. It is impossible to
match a hair to a specific person by looking at it under a microscope. The only way is
through DNA analysis. Which we are now doing.”

Yet … only 2 percent of the population
has red hair. My grandmother had drilled that into me. First, after she caught me
hacking off my orange locks with scissors at age four and then again six years later
when I tried to dye it gold by squeezing thirteen lemons over my head and sitting like a
piece of salmon in the Texas sun.

Red hair was something else that made me
lucky.
Special.

“I know about the jacket, of
course,” I say steadily. “I know about the ID from the person who saw
… Terrell … hitchhiking by the field. I just didn’t know about the
hair.”
Or I forgot.

Bill stands abruptly. “Maybe you also
don’t know
that seventy percent of wrongful convictions overturned on
DNA involve eyewitness misidentification. That the jacket found on the road was a size
too small for Terrell. And the red hair on the jacket? It was stick straight. If your
school pictures are any indication, you looked like you were growing Flamin’ Hot
Cheetos curls. It could have been a poodle hair, for Christ’s sake.”

Poodles
have
curly hair. And I
don’t think red poodles exist. Although Aunt Hilda once dyed hers blue.

But I understand his anger.
The need to lay it on.

I know what he’s thinking, although he
isn’t saying it out loud. The real reason Terrell Darcy Goodwin lost the last
seventeen years of his life isn’t because of a red hair or a jacket tossed
carelessly by the side of the road or a woman who thought she could see in the dark
while she was whizzing by in her Mercedes.

The real reason Terrell Darcy Goodwin sits
on Death Row is because of the Black-Eyed Susan who testified, scared out of her
mind.

I can’t wait to tell him.

“I know that last week was
rough,” he begins. “But there are only a couple of months left before the
trial begins. That’s a very short time to learn what you do or do not know, and
help you feel prepared.”

Fifty-nine days, to be exact.

“We should reconsider light
hypnosis,” he says. “I know how you feel about it, but there are things
lying in the shadows. Just inches away, Tessie. Inches.”

We had a deal. No drugs. No hypnosis.

My heart is slamming, my breath rapid, like
a hot cat on the driveway. Like the time I ran three miles full out in the park last
August, and Lydia had to yank the emergency paper bag out of her backpack.

Lydia, always there, always calm.
Breathe. In and out. In and out.
The paper bag, crickling and crackling,
puffing and collapsing.

“What do you think?” he
persists. “I’ve talked with your father about this.”

The silence between this threat and his next
sentence is going to kill me. I’m trying to remember where I usually focus my
eyes. Down? Up? At his voice? It’s important.

“Your father says he
won’t support hypnosis unless you want it,” he says finally. “So this
is between us.”

I’ve never loved my father more than
this moment. I am filled with the relief of it, this simple, profound gesture of respect
from the man who has watched his flame-haired daughter who believed she could beat the
wind shrink to skin and bones and bitterness. My father holds up my future like a
banged-up trophy that still means something, no matter how heavy it gets.

He is sitting outside this door, fighting
for me. Every single day, fighting for me. I want to run out there and throw myself in
his arms. I want to apologize for every silent night, every carefully prepared meal not
eaten, every tentative invitation I have refused: to rock on the front porch swing or go
for a walk or head up to Dairy Queen for a dipped cone.

“Our goals are the same,
Tessie,” the doctor says. “For you to heal. Justice is part of the
package.”

I haven’t uttered a word since I
walked in the door. And I had planned to say so much. Tears hang in my eyes. What they
mean, I don’t know. I refuse to let them fall.

“Tessie.” Going in for the kill.
Corrupting my name into an order. Reminding me that he knows better than I do.

“This could help you see again,”
he says.

Oh.

I want to laugh.

What he doesn’t know, what nobody
knows yet, is that I already can.

I could have lived very happily with the idea
of never, ever again. Never again plunking down on a therapist’s couch. Never
again thinking about my manipulative drawings of the girl running in the sand and the
girl without the mouth. Never again fighting this sick feeling that the other person in
the room wants to take a paring knife and slowly carve out my secrets.

Dr. Nancy Giles almost immediately ushered
Bill out the door, politely telling him he would be in the way. Actually it wasn’t
all that polite. The fact that she is a beautiful gazelle-like creature probably took
the edge off. Bill grumbled about being banned in such a little-boy manner that it made
me think the two of them had known each other intimately for a long time, although he
failed to mention it on the ride over.

My grandfather once told me that God puts
pieces in the wrong places to keep us busy solving puzzles, and in the perfect places so
that we never forget there is a God. At the time, we were standing on a remote stretch
of Big Bend that was like a strange and wondrous moon.

Dr. Giles’s face may be the human
equivalent, a glorious landscape of its own. Velvet brown skin with eyes dropped in like
glittering lakes. Her nose, lips, cheekbones—all chiseled by a very talented
angel. She understands her beauty and keeps things simple. Hair
cropped
into a bob. A well-cut blue suit with a skirt that strikes her mid-knee. Gold strings
dangle from her ears, with a single large antique pearl at the end of each that dances
every time she moves her head. I guess her age to be creeping toward seventy.

Her office, though, is like the favorite fat
uncle who wears loud shirts and offers up a slightly smashed Twinkie from his pocket.
Walls the color of egg yolk. A red velour couch, with a stuffed elephant plunked in the
corner for a pillow. Two comfy plaid chairs. Low-slung shelves shooting out a riot of
color, crammed with picture books and Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket, American Girl
dolls of every ethnicity, trucks and plastic tools and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. A table
topped with a tray of markers and crayons. An iMac at i-am-a-Child level. A refrigerator
door riddled with the graffiti of children’s awkward, happy signatures. Off to the
side, a basket loaded with snacks both forbidden and polyunsaturated, and no mother to
smack your hand.

My eyes linger on the framed
prints—not your usual doc-in-a-box muted abstractions. Instead, Chagall’s
magical, musical animals and the loveliest blue ever imagined. Magritte’s steam
engine shooting out of a fireplace, and his giant green apple, and men in bowler hats
floating up like Mary Poppins.

Perfect,
I think. If anything is
surreal, it is childhood.

“My usual customer is a little
younger.” Dr. Giles says it with good humor. She has misinterpreted my roving
eyes, still on the hunt for my own grim artwork. I tell my nerves to shut up, but they
don’t. My sweaty hands are probably stickier than the five-year-old who skipped
out of the room with a dripping green Popsicle right before I stepped in.

“I’m not sure we can accomplish
exactly what William wants, are you?” She has placed herself on the other side of
the couch, crossing one knee over the other, her skirt inching up slightly.

Relaxed. Informal.

Or purposeful. Rehearsed.

“William has always set
near-impossible goals, even when he was
a boy,” she continues.
“The older I get, and the more horrors I’ve seen, my goals have become
… less specific. More flexible. More patient. I like to think that is because I am
wiser, not tired.”

“And yet … he brought me to
you,” I say. “With a deadline. For very specific reasons.”

“And yet he brought you to me.”
Her lips curve up again. I realize how easily that smile could melt a child, but I am no
longer a child.

“So your plan is
not
for us
to look at my drawings together.”

“Do we need them? This is going to
disappoint William, but I don’t think you wrote the killer’s name in the
waves in the ocean. Do you?”

“No.” I clear my throat.
“I do not.” I wasn’t sure whether this was true. One of the first
things I did the night after my sight returned was to examine every swirl of the brush.
Just in case.
Who knows what the unconscious mind will paint?
Lydia had asked
rather dramatically.

“I find that drawings after a trauma
like yours are often widely misinterpreted.” Dr. Giles reaches for the stuffed
elephant tucked behind her, which is preventing her from leaning back. “There is a
lot attached to the use of color, and the vigor of the pen. But a child may use blood
red in his drawing simply because it’s his favorite color. The drawing only
represents the feeling on that day, at that very moment in time. We all hate our parents
on some days, right? A scratchy, angry version of a father doesn’t mean he is an
abuser, and I’ll never testify to things like that. So I use the drawing
technique, but mostly as a way to allow young patients to get out their emotions so they
don’t eat away at them. It is much, much harder to say the words. I’m sure I
don’t have to tell you that.”