Black-Eyed Susans (15 page)

“… I thought about how your car
was gone but the lights in the house were on. Got me concerned. I called and Charlie
answered and I went right over and got her. I was just helping her with a little early
chemistry prep for next year.”

Charlie points to a plate
on the coffee table that holds either very burnt or dark chocolate cookies, arranged in
a smiley-face pattern. The smiley face is Charlie’s work, I’m sure. She
picks up two of the cookies and holds them over her face like eyes. Definitely
burnt.

Charlie’s antics, Effie’s
sincerity, the inedible cookies. Charlie and I will talk later about breaking one of my
hard and fast rules. An @ symbol and a single digital word do not yet replace an
old-fashioned, handwritten note and a piece of Scotch tape. Which means I might as well
have just stepped out of Pemberley myself.

“That’s very considerate of you,
Effie,” I say.

“Charlie thinks it was the pizza
deliveryman,” Effie says, “but I thought he had a stealthy air about him. We
both know you can’t be too careful.”

My mind is basking in a warm cocoon of
relief when this registers. Is Effie hinting at what we never talk about? Is she, too,
on high alert for my monster?

“You know who I think it was?”
Effie asks.

I shake my head, numbly pondering all the
things she might say that I don’t want Charlie to hear.

“I think,” she says, “it
was the digger snatcher.”

I know a few things about the doctor’s
daughter now. Her name is Rebecca. She was sixteen. Not because he told me. Because
Lydia is a digger.

She disappeared the same year that a madman
robbed the world of John Lennon and Alfred Hitchcock died less violently than he
deserved. Lydia and I found out that much as we carefully spun the microfiche of a local
newspaper until it landed on a two-year-old profile of my doctor, produced right after
he won a prestigious international award for research into normal people and
paranoia.

Who the hell is normal,
Lydia had
muttered. Then she spun a few pages and read Hitchcock’s obit aloud to me. She was
especially riveted by the revelation that he tortured his own daughter during the
filming of one of Lydia’s favorite movies,
Strangers on a Train.
He stuck
her on a Ferris wheel, halted her car at the top, turned off all the lights on the set,
and abandoned her all alone in the dark. By the time some crew person brought her down,
she was hysterical. Lydia clicked a button on the machine and copied both the
doctor’s interview and the Hitchcock obit, which she deemed worthy of adding to
the personal files of weirdness she kept in the box under her bed.

In fact, on the bus ride home from the
library, she was more distracted by the fate of Hitchcock’s daughter than by how
little she’d
learned about Rebecca.
He was a freaking
sadist,
she announced, while everyone seated near us stared at my little moon
scar.

Rebecca was a single paragraph in the
feature story summing up my doctor’s life, which makes me unbelievably sad. My
guess? He told the reporter that the subject of his daughter’s disappearance was
off the table.

He certainly made it clear it was off the
table for us at our last session. A nice long silence followed my question about
Rebecca. So I announced I liked the print of
The Reaper
hanging over his desk.
“My grandfather went through a Winslow Homer wheat period,” I said. And, oh
yeah, I’m not blind anymore.

I couldn’t tell if he was faking his
surprise. The doctor appeared genuinely thrilled about what he declared a “major,
major breakthrough.” He had fiddled around with a silly old-fashioned eye test
that involved a pencil and my nose. Asked me to close my eyes and describe his face in
the greatest detail possible.

He reassured me again that even though he
wouldn’t discuss it with me, his daughter had absolutely nothing to do with the
Black-Eyed Susan case. I had never asked that, but even if she does, I’m not at
all sure at this point I want to know.

It’s hard not to be a little happy.
I’ve gained three pounds in five days. My dad and brother squeezed me so hard in a
three-way hug when they found out I could see again that I thought my heart would burst
in my chest. Aunt Hilda hustled over a three-layer German chocolate cake, gooey with her
famous coconut pecan frosting, and I’m pretty sure it was the best thing
I’ve ever eaten.

Last night, a brand-new hardback copy of
The Horse Whisperer
appeared on my bedside table, in a house where it is
unheard of not to wait until a book comes out in paperback.

The trial is fifty-two days away. That means
twelve more sessions or so, if I count a couple extra to wrap things up after the trial.
The end is near. I really don’t want to drag distractions, like Rebecca, into
things. It was kind of a mean thing for me to bring up.

Unfortunately, Rebecca is now Lydia’s
latest obsession, and she’s
on a mission to hunt down more about
her in other newspapers. Whatever she finds, I tell her, will be meaningless.
Rebecca was pretty, with a lot of friends. She was such a nice girl
and
It was
such a nice family
and blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to sound cold, but
there it is.

I know, because I’ve read every
possible exaggeration about my life since I became a Black-Eyed Susan. My mother died
under “suspicious” circumstances and my grandfather built a creepy house and
I am practically perfect. The truth? My mother was struck by a rare stroke, my
grandmother was the crazier one, and I am not and never will be a heroine out of a fairy
tale. Even though they were all victims first, too. Snow White poisoned. Cinderella
enslaved. Rapunzel locked up. Tessie, dumped with bones.

Some monster’s twisted fantasy.

Bet the doctor would like me to talk
about that,
I think, as he settles into his chair.

He smiles. “Fire away,
Tessie.”

Last week, he had agreed to let me lead in
this session. He also promised he wouldn’t tell my dad I’d faked blindness
for a little bit. A promise kept so far. I wondered if he bargained with all of his
patients. If this was
appropriate.

It doesn’t matter. Today I am prepared
to offer him something real.

“I’m afraid every time the
lights dim … that I am going blind again,” I say. “Like when my family
went to Olive Garden and some waitress turned the lights down for dinner mood or
whatever. Or when my brother shut the living room blinds behind me so he could see the
TV better.”

“When this happens, instead of
thinking you are going blind again, why don’t you just tell yourself emphatically
that you aren’t?”

“Seriously?” Ay yi yi. My dad
was paying for this?

“
Because you
want
to
see, Tessie. It’s not like a little goblin is sitting inside your head manning a
light switch. You are in control. Statistically, the chances of this ever happening
again are almost nil.”

OK, kind of useful. At
least encouraging. Even though chances of this happening to me were almost nil to begin
with.

“What else is going on in
there?” He taps his skull with a finger.

“I’m worried … about O. J.
Simpson.”

“What exactly are you worried
about?”

“That he might fool the jury and get
off.” I don’t tell him that Lydia had soaked one of her own red leather
gloves in V8 juice, dried it in the sun, and demonstrated how she could spread her hand
wide and get the same effect as O.J.

The doctor crosses one long leg over the
other. He’s much more of a conservative dresser than I’d imagined. Starched
white shirt, black dress pants with a stand-up crease, loosened blue tie with tiny red
diamonds, black shoes grinning with polish. No wedding ring.

“I think the chances of that happening
are also practically zero,” he says. “You are simply worried that your own
attacker will be set free. I’d advise you not to watch any of the O.J. coverage
and ratchet things up in your head.”

Aunt Hilda offered this same advice for
free, and tempered it by handing me a plate of fried okra fresh out of her skillet while
snapping off my TV.

“Tessie, today is supposed to be all
your show, but we need to divert for a second. The prosecutor called right before you
arrived. He wants to meet one-on-one with you before the trial. I could ask to sit in on
the interviews if you’d feel more comfortable. He’s thinking about
conducting the first interview next Tuesday. We can even do it in our regular session if
you like.”

He uncrosses his leg and leans toward me. My
stomach wads itself into a hard ball, a roly-poly beetle protecting itself.

“Getting your sight back is huge.
Meeting the prosecutor and getting over your fear of the trial is a logical next step.
It might even help … jog your memory. Think of your brain as a sieve or a
colander, with only the tiniest, safest bits getting through at first.”

I’m barely listening to his psycho
mumbo-jumbo about kitchen gadgets.

Seven days away.

“I hope you don’t mind that I
told him the good news,” he says.

“Of course not,” I lie.

I’m thinking about the little bag,
packed and ready for months, wedged into the far back corner of my closet.

Wondering if it’s too late to run.

Charlie and I are playing an old game on the
front porch swing. Rain drills steadily on the roof.

We’re pretending to be tiny dolls
rocking to and fro. A little girl is pushing our swing with her finger. She’s
locked up her big yellow cat, so he can’t paw at us. She’s baking a tiny
plastic cake for us in the oven, and she’s made all the beds and arranged all the
tiny dishes in the cabinet. She’s used a toothbrush to sweep the carpet. There are
no monsters in the closet, because there are no closets.

For just this moment, everything is perfect.
Nothing can get to us. We are in the dollhouse.

My daughter’s head is warm in my lap.
She lies sideways on the front porch swing with me, her knees bent because she
isn’t three years old anymore with room to spare. I’ve covered her bare legs
with my jacket for when the wind shifts and spits at us between the brick columns.

She wiggles into a more comfortable position
and turns her face up to me. Her violet eyes are rimmed with black eyeliner, which makes
them even bigger and lovelier, but so much more cynical. Two silver studs are punched in
each ear, one slightly smaller than the other.

The eye makeup can be washed off; the extra
holes will close up.
I try not to get too worked up about these
things. She’d just point out the tattoo on my right hip, a butterfly among the
scars.

When Charlie’s braces come off in
three months, that’s when I’ll worry. “Mom, you seemed a little crazy
last night at Miss Effie’s. Like, I know you were worried, but still. I’d
never seen you like that. Is it because you’re afraid you can’t stop that
guy from getting executed?”

“Partly.” I fiddle with a lock
of her hair, and she allows it. “Charlie, we’ve never talked much about what
happened to me.”

“You never want to.” A
statement, not a reproach.

“I’ve just never wanted you to
be a part of it.” Never wanted her innocence disturbed with more than the straight
facts, and a sanitized version of those.

“So you still think about …
those girls?” Tentative. “I dreamed about one of them once. Merry. She had a
cool name. Someone taped a
People
magazine story to my bike a while back. It
was about her mom. She said she wants a front row seat to Terrell Goodwin’s
execution. Have you decided for sure he didn’t do it?”

I will myself to stay put instead of leaping
up, to keep my foot pushing firmly and steadily against the concrete floor. A stranger
left Charlie a gift. A Susan crept from my head into hers. Worse, she is just telling me
about this
now.
I don’t want to think that Charlie carries these secrets
around because she is afraid to bring them up, and yet I know that is exactly why.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course I
think about those girls. About how they died, and who hurts for them. Especially right
now. The forensic scientist I told you about has extracted DNA from the girls’
bones. It’s a long shot, and involves a lot of luck, but if their families are
still looking, maybe we can find out who they are.”

“You would still be looking for me.
You would never give up.”

I blink back tears. “Never,
never.
Honey, do you mind telling me what your dream was about? The one
with Su—Merry?”

“We took a walk on this island. She
never said anything. It was nice. Not scary.”

Thank you, Merry.

“So you’re sure Terrell’s
innocent?” she asks again.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure. The
physical evidence isn’t there.” I leave out the seventeen-year trail of
black-eyed Susans. The voices in my head, amplifying my doubts.

“Whoever the real killer is,
he’s not coming back, Mom.” She says it earnestly. “He was smart
enough not to get caught the first time. He isn’t going to risk it. And if he was
going
to do anything, it would have happened years ago. Maybe he’s in
prison for another crime. I’ve heard that happens all the time.”

My daughter’s clearly given this a lot
of thought. How could I be so stupid to think her teen-age brain wasn’t as wired
as Lydia’s and mine? I don’t tell her one of Jo’s shocking
statistics—that of 300 active serial killers roaming the United States, most of
them will never be caught.

“Listen to me, Charlie. More than
anything, I want to give you a normal life. I don’t want you to live in fear, but
I need you to be very careful right now, until we know what’s happening to …
Terrell. My job is to protect you, and you need to give in and let me for a
while.”