Black-Eyed Susans (18 page)

“A girl on another track team pushed
my friend Denise off a hurdle in a regional meet so she could win in the prelims. If you
were watching, and you’re not a hurdler, you wouldn’t have noticed. But
there are certain moves, and I know them. So I walked over to her after the race and
told her that I knew she cheated. She shoved me to the ground. When the track officials
ran over, she told them I’d shoved her first. We were both suspended for two
meets.”

I straighten up. Level my gaze at him, and
just him. Let him know I am mad, but under control. “It was totally worth
it,” I say. “Because everyone will be watching her now. She won’t try
it again.”

Nobody speaks. I wonder if they believe me.
Everyone else who knows me did. Lydia even wrote an indignant letter to the UIL board.
She signed it
Sincerely,
Ms. Lydia Frances Bell.

“Perfect,” Mr.
Vega says. “Narrative. Calm. Perfect.” He takes a few steps and places his
hand on my shoulder.

The hand on my shoulder—it feels good.
Still, it is so hard to know whether I like this man, or whether I just like what he is
giving back to me. Power. The thing that my monster snatched away and threw in the
gutter at Walgreens.

Mr. Vega removes his hand. Picks up his
briefcase, on the floor next to Benita. “A short session, but I think we’re
done for the day. Benita’s going to show you the courtroom at some point. I
recommend sitting in every seat. The jury’s. The judge’s—my personal
favorite. I want to wait until closer to the trial to go over your own testimony.
We’ll see whether you and the doc get any further in that time.”

All of them rise, except for me. I stay
planted on the couch. “Twenty-four hundred and six.”

Mr. Vega stops at the door.

“That’s my girl,” he says.
“You’ll always get to the right answer if you slow down and think about
it.”

Of course, it’s been banging me in the
head, ever since I learned her name.

Rachel Stein, Hannah’s mother, does
not have a first name that begins with
S
or
U
or
N.
She does
not fit neatly into the mnemonic device that I’ve put aside like a crossword
puzzle I always planned to finish later.
S-U-N.
The letters that Merry provided
while we chatted in the grave, to help me remember the names of all of the mothers and
hunt them down.

Ever since the discovery of a third set of
bones, I’ve been thinking that maybe my conversation with Merry wasn’t a
hallucination. There
were
the bones of three other girls in that grave, not
two, just like Merry told me. That couldn’t be a coincidence, right?

And yet. The black-and-white, driver’s
license, DNA certainty of Rachel Stein’s name makes me wonder whether I was nuts
back then, and just as nuts now. I actually had to restrain myself from peppering Mrs.
Stein with questions:
Is Rachel your nickname? Your middle name? Did you change your
name?

I couldn’t mess with her head
anymore—trade the psychic’s crazy for my crazy. Hannah’s mother
drifted out of that hollow conference room as a more haggard spirit than when she
entered.
Closure is a myth,
Jo told me afterward.
But there is value in
knowing.
Mrs.
Stein’s son had to carefully prop up his
mother as they exited. She moved like she was a hundred years old.

Hannah’s brother and I made an
unspoken pact that he would drop-kick the psychic to her altered universe. She was
fuming and tripping at their heels on the way out. As soon as he had heard the word
liar
come out of my mouth, his head popped up and he shot me the most
grateful look I’d ever received. As for the psychic … well, if I’m not
cursed already, I’m sure she finished the job. My scars tingled for an hour
afterward.

My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

Ever since I left that room, I can’t
get this string of words out of my head. I imagine Merry punching a button on a jukebox,
over and over. Each punch a little firmer, more frustrated.
Remember.

My boots clunk out a rhythm as I climb the
staircase. One step.
My.
Two steps.
Very.
Three steps
.
Energetic.
Four steps.
Mother.
At the top, I throw open the door to my
studio. Warm, stale air rushes out. I shove the picture window wide open and drink in
air that is like an ice-cold tequila shot. A brave blue jay stares me down from his
perch on a branch, and I blink first.

I pick up a few pages off the dusty
hardwood, remnants of one of Bobby’s projects the last time he stayed for a
weekend. My sweet, half-doomed little brother. Now he writes for movies that end in
numerals and tries to heal himself with holotropic breath-work and a sexy production
assistant with a nose ring. He left for college in California and basically never
returned except for short visits and funerals, which is probably what I should have
done. He even chopped his last name to Wright.

I draw hearts in the dust on my drawing
table, until my finger is black. I pick a white tea from the selection in the cabinet
and plug in the teakettle. Listen to its friendly hiss. Decide that the old honey in the
cabinet smells a little like beer and watch two sugar cubes dissolve to sand in my mug
instead. Merry gives the jukebox one last punch with her finger and disappears.

I have always loved this room. I just
didn’t want to share it with
the Susans. Today it seems that I
don’t have to. I wipe off the drawing table with a paper towel and clip on a piece
of paper with a sharp snap that scares the bird into an irritated flutter. I begin to
loosely sketch the folds of fabric, a soft sound, like a rat under the floor. I’m
in a hurry so I can get to the intricate, important work. A pattern had emerged in my
head while I was staring at Mrs. Stein’s simple cotton blouse. At breasts that
sagged with the weight of middle age.

Surprise. I am sketching flowers and it
doesn’t bother me. An hour floats by. Then another. There are so many, many
petals, and a leafy vine that meanders, connecting them all, like a demented family
tree. I fill a Dixie cup with water and open up my watercolor box. Blue, pink, and
green.

These flowers are not black-eyed Susans.

And these folds of fabric are not a curtain.
They were never a curtain.

I’m drawing my mother’s apron.
You can’t see me, but I am underneath, hiding my face. I can feel the cloth tickle
my nose and cheeks. It is dark under here, but enough light sifts through the thin
cotton that I am not scared. The warm cushion of my mother’s body is at my
back.

I can’t see what is on the other
side.

It reminds me of being blind.

Dr. Giles is holding my painting gingerly
edge to edge because it isn’t completely dry.

It’s closing time. All the toys and
books in the room are tidied up. A couple of table lamps are glowing, but the overhead
lighting is flipped off. The elephant is tucked in for the night in a doll bed, the
blanket pulled up to his ears.

“So what do you think?” I ask.
“Is the apron the curtain? Does the curtain have nothing to do with me being
dumped in that grave? Is it meaningless?” I’m feeling guilty about sounding
so urgent.

“Nothing is meaningless,” she
says. “The apron probably
represents comfort to you. It would
not be a surprise for you to connect some element of your first trauma—the death
of your mother—to the other one. Tessa, the most important thing is for you to
eliminate the unknown, which is frightening. If you came here and told me you could see
the killer behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, well … that isn’t what
you really expected, is it?”

Yes.
That is exactly what I
expected. I grew up in Oz.

I don’t tell her that, though. Or say
that this painting of my mother’s apron leaves me as unsettled as the blank
curtain I drew a hundred times.

“How do you like Mr. Vega and
Benita?”

Is it my imagination or does the doctor
sound a little jealous?

“He’s nice,” I say
carefully. “They’re both very nice.” Adults make things so
complicated. Am I supposed to like the doctor better than them? Is this some kind of
contest?

“If you have any questions or
concerns, you can let me know. Al Vega can come on a little strong.”

And you don’t?
“I’m good right now. But I will for sure if I do.” Lately, this need
to reassure him has been taking the place of my desire to annoy the hell out of him.
“I do have a question about … something else, though.”

Lydia says it’s ridiculous that
I’m carrying this fear around and letting it devour me, although she also thinks
what’s happening
is kind of cool.
“It isn’t just Merry who
has spoken to me.”

“What do you mean?” the doctor
asks. “Who else is speaking to you?”

“The other Susans … talk to me
sometimes. The ones in the grave. Not all the time. I don’t think it’s a big
deal. Lydia just thought I should bring it up.”

“Lydia seems like an extremely
sensitive friend.”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s
start this way. What’s the first thing you remember one of the other …
Susans … saying to you?”

“It was in the hospital. When I first
woke up. One of them told me the strawberry Jell-O sucked. And it did. It was
sugar-free.”

“And what else?”

“Mostly warnings. Be careful. Like
that.”
We told you not to touch the pig-and-daisy card.

“When they speak, do you think they
are trying to control you? Or make you do things you don’t want to?”

“No. Of course not. I think, like,
they want to help. And I promised to help them. Sort of a pact.” It sounds
absolutely insane when I say it out loud. I am rocked by the sudden terror he might
convince my father to toss me in a loony bin. I am 100 percent certain that Lydia was
wrong about her advice this time.

“So you talk back to them?”

“No. Not usually. I just hear
them.”
Careful.

“And they never suggest that you harm
yourself?”

“Are you kidding? What the crap are
you talking about? Do you think I’m suicidal? Possessed?” I waggle my
fingers on either side of my head, like horns.

“Sorry, Tessie. I have to ask the
question.”

“I have never once thought about
killing myself.” Defensive. And a lie. “I have thought about killing
him.
”

“Normal,” he says.
“I’d like to do it myself.” This does not seem at all like something a
psychiatrist should say. I don’t want to feel warm and gushy about him right now.
I want a freaking answer.

“So … the voices. Do you think
I’m … schizophrenic? Maybe borderline?” It occurs to me that I’m
opting to be schizophrenic rather than possessed by demons. Lydia absolutely refused to
help me research anything about schizophrenia. Whatever knowledge I had about it up to
that point was gleaned from Stephen King.

So Oscar and I ventured to the local library
on our own. The eighty-five-year-old volunteer who can barely see was on duty so I
thought it was safe to ask for her help. She didn’t recognize the
Cartwright Girl, which is what old people call me instead of a Black-Eyed Susan.

After fifteen minutes, while the checkout
line stacked up eight deep, she brought over
An Existential Study in Sanity and
Madness,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
and a Harlequin romance titled
Kate
of Outpatients,
all published in the 1960s. The gist of the one by the
existential psychologist was to let crazy people be crazy and stop bothering them. I
reshelved it and
Cuckoo
and checked out
Kate of Outpatients.
Lydia and
I are taking turns doing dramatic readings from it.

The doctor’s gaze is surprisingly kind
and steady but he lets the silence stretch. Probably trying to figure out how to deliver
the bad news to the poor little girl who’s soon going to be rocking and drooling
in a room full of checker players.

“You are not a schizophrenic, Tessie.
I know there is a set of psychiatrists out there who always think that voices indicate
mental illness. There are an equal number of us who don’t. Lots of people hear
voices. When a spouse or child dies, the people left sometimes talk to them on and off
all day, and hear them respond. For the rest of their lives. It doesn’t make them
dysfunctional. In fact, many of them claim these conversations make their lives better
and
more
productive.”

I love this man.
I love this man.
He is not going to lock me up.

“The Susans don’t make my life
better,” I say. “I think they are ghosts.”

“As we discussed previously, the
paranormal is a normal
temporary
response.”

He isn’t getting it. “How do I
get rid of them?”
I don’t want to make them mad.

“How do you think you could get rid of
them?”

In this case, my answer is immediate.
“By sending the killer to prison.”

“You are well on the way to doing
that.”

“And by finding out who the Susans
are. Giving them real names.”

“What if that is not
possible?”

“Then I don’t know if
they’ll ever leave me.”

“Tessie, did your mother ever talk to
you after she died? Like the Susans do?”

“No. Never.”

“I ask only because you have endured
two terrible traumas for someone so young. Your mother’s death and the horror of
that grave. Part of me thinks you are still grieving for your mother. Tell me, do you
remember what you did at the wake?”

My mother
again.
I shrug. “We
ate food people brought over and then my little brother and I played basketball on the
driveway.”
I let him win.
We played H-O-R-S-E. The score was ten games to two.