Black-Eyed Susans (19 page)

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Authors: Julia Heaberlin

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“Children often play the day of the
funeral as if it’s any other day. It’s deceptive. They grieve far longer and
more deeply than adults.”

“I don’t think so.” I
remembered the awful sounds of my dad and aunt weeping, like someone was peeling off my
skin.

“Adults grieve harder in the
beginning, but they move through it. Kids can get stuck in one stage … anger or
denial … for years. It might be at the root of your symptoms—the memory
loss, the blindness, the Susans, the code that you made up in the
grave—”

“I’m not stuck,” I
interrupt. “Merry and I didn’t
make up
a code in the grave. And I
don’t want to talk about my mother. She’s gone. My problem is strictly with
ghosts.”

Tessa, present day

It is only thirteen blocks from where I live
now.

Lydia’s old house.

It might as well be a hundred miles.
I’m standing in front of her childhood home for the first time in years. It is the
second place he left black-eyed Susans, and the first time I turned and ran.

Lydia always described her house as a
shotgun wedding cake, a two-story beige box with a last-minute white piping of scalloped
trim. A lot has changed since our childhood. The icing is crumbling. What used to be a
perfectly tended green square of lawn is now black dirt choked by hoodlum weeds. No more
wooden stake poked in the ground with welcome y’all and a painted yellow
sunflower. Lydia told me that her dad ripped the sign out of the ground before I came
home from the hospital.

“Hey.” I didn’t hear his
car pull up, but Bill is suddenly striding toward me, lankier and taller than I
remember. Maybe it’s because his long legs are extending out of black Nike shorts
and expensive athletic shoes. Everything about him is damp—hair, face, neck, arms.
A triangle of sweat stains the front of a crimson Harvard T-shirt, so beloved that a few
rips don’t matter. He finally got a haircut but it’s too short for his big
ears. I want him to go the hell away. And stay.

“I said not to come,” I protest.
“I thought you were playing
basketball.” I’d
regretted my impulsive phone call the second Bill answered. He was out of breath. I
wondered whether I had interrupted acrobatic sex with a fellow do-gooding lawyer. He
claimed he was playing a pickup game.

“All but over. My fellow law pals and
I were getting creamed by a bunch of high-schoolers. Your call was a welcome distraction
on the way to my parents’ house in Westover Hills, where I’ve unfortunately
committed to dinner. Unless you’d like to invite me over. Or accompany me. So you
said you had something to tell me. What’s up?”

I promptly burst into tears.

I’m unprepared for this, and by the
look on his face, so is Bill. And, yet, the river is flowing like it hasn’t since
my father died so swiftly four years ago of pancreatic cancer. He hugs me awkwardly,
because what’s he going to do, which makes me sob harder.

“Oh, hell,” he says.
“I’m too sweaty for this. Here, let’s sit.”

He guides me to a sitting position on the
curb and curls his arm around my shoulders. The brace of solid muscle, his
kindness,
is waking up every hormone in my body. I need to pull out of this
embrace immediately.
No complications.
Instead, my head falls sideways like a
rock onto his chest and my shoulders heave.

“Uh, I don’t really recommend
that you put your nose in that … underarm,” he says. But once he realizes
how fully committed I am, he pulls me tighter.

After a few seconds, I lift my head slightly
and let out a choke. “Hold on. I’m under control.”

“Yes, you definitely have things under
control.” He pushes my head back down but not before I catch something hungry on
his face that isn’t do-gooding at all.

I raise my chin again. Our lips are two
inches apart.

He pulls back. “You’re red all
over. Like a plum.”

I giggle and hiccup at the same time.
I’m a giggling, hiccuping plum. I tug my skirt down. He averts his eyes and
gestures to the house behind us, the one whose address he had plugged into his GPS
at my behest only twenty minutes ago. “What’s up with
this house? Who lives here?” It is an abrupt, purposeful shift.

God, I’m pitiful. I stand up.

“You, um, need to wipe your
nose.”

Utter,
utter
humiliation. I use my
sweater because at this point, it doesn’t matter. I suck in a deep breath as a
test. It doesn’t trigger another tsunami. “Hear me out for a second
first,” I say stiffly. “I think the Black-Eyed Susan killer has been leaving
me flowers for years. Not just the other night at my house.”

“What? How
many
other
places?”

“Six. If you include under my bedroom
window.”

“Are you sure …”

“That they aren’t just growing
up in places like God intended and I’m a lunatic? Of course not. That is why I
said, I
think.
The first time, I was only seventeen. It was right after
Terrell’s conviction. The killer left me a poem buried in an old prescription
bottle. I found it when I dug up a little patch of black-eyed Susans, in the back yard
of the house over there.” I point four houses down, at a yellow two-story on the
opposite side of the street. “My childhood home. He planted the flowers by my tree
house three days after the trial ended.” I watch for the awareness to set in.
“That’s right,
after
Terrell was locked up.”

“Go on.”

“The … person who left it
twisted a warning into a poem called ‘Black-Eyed Susan’ written by an
eighteenth-century poet named John Gay. The poem indicated that Lydia would die if I
didn’t keep my mouth shut.” Bill’s face is blank. I don’t know
whether it’s because he doesn’t know who the hell John Gay is, or whether he
is trying to contain his fury.

“I didn’t figure out who John
Gay was until about ten years ago. He was most famous for
The Beggar’s
Opera.
Have you heard of it? Captain Macheath? Polly Peachum? No? Well, more to
the point, he also wrote a ballad about a black-eyed girl named Susan sending her
lover off to sea. There’s some romantic theory that this is how
the flower got its name …”

I begin to recite softly, as a mower revs up
in a nearby back yard.

“Oh Susan, Susan, lovely dear

My vows shall ever true remain

Let me kiss off that falling tear

I never want to hurt you again

But if you tell, I will make Lydia

A Susan, too.”

“Jesus, Tessa. What did your
father say?”

“I never told him. You’re the
first person I have ever told, other than Angie. I just couldn’t … worry my
father anymore.”

“And Lydia?”

“We weren’t speaking.”

Bill looks at me curiously.

“I told Angie right before she
died,” I continue. “She was concerned for Charlie and me. At the end, she
was considering leaving me completely out of things.”

“Why …”

“Why didn’t she tell you?
Because she was protecting me. I think she was wrong, though. I can’t live with
knowing I might be part of killing an innocent man. It wasn’t a hard decision at
seventeen. The trial was over. I wanted everything to go back to normal. I figured it
could be just another sick individual who was obsessed with the case. There were plenty
of those. Which meant Terrell could still be guilty as hell. The prosecutor, Al Vega,
was
sure.
And Lydia … I was furious with her, but I certainly
didn’t want her life in danger.”

“Hold on, OK?”

Bill leaps up and jogs to his car, a small
black BMW, three little letters that I think turn normally nice human beings into road
demons. He disappears inside his fancy womb for so long, I wonder whether he is
listening to Bach and contemplating whether to flip on
the ignition
and screech off. When he finally emerges, he holds a pen and pad in his left hand. He
plops back down on the curb. He’s already written some notes, and I glimpse a few
of the words.

John Gay. 1995.

“Keep going,” he orders.

“Lately, I’ve revisited a couple
of the places I
think
he left flowers … on my own. In no particular
order.”

“Whoa. Stop right there. You’ve
been returning to these places. Why in the hell are you doing that?”

“I know, I know. Crazy. You see, after
the first time, I never dug to see if he buried something else for me. It was like I
couldn’t give him the satisfaction. I couldn’t let myself believe that much.
I thought it could be some kid’s idea of a joke. Or a random freak. We were all
over the newspaper, even Lydia.” She always pointed out her name to me. She was
thrilled when she made
The New York Times
as
Miss Cartwright’s
neighbor and confidante.

“I survived on denial,” I
continue. “And, yes, I realize it’s insane to think anything would still be
there. And yet, what if? I just thought if I did find something, it might help …
Terrell.”

And I promised the Susans.

“You’re digging? Alone? Have you
found anything?”

“Nothing. It’s a relief, and it
isn’t.”

“Why are we here, if your old house is
there?”

“This is Lydia’s house. Well, it
used to be. I found black-eyed Susans here, too, a few weeks after the trial.”

How much should I explain? I’d shown
up at the door on a Friday afternoon with a cardboard box of her stuff. I was enacting a
ritual goodbye, after our friendship imploded at the end of the trial. She hadn’t
been at school for a week and a half. The box held two videotapes,
The Last of the
Mohicans
and
Cape Fear,
the backup makeup bag she always left in my
bathroom, her Mickey Mouse pajamas.

But the house was asleep at three in the
afternoon, which was unusual. No cars. The living room shades were drawn for the first
time ever. I could have dumped the box and run. Instead, I unlocked
the back gate. Curious. When I glimpsed the small sea of yellow flowers, I was even
angrier at Lydia, and I hadn’t thought that possible.
How could she let them
grow?
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Two weeks later, a For
Sale sign went up, and the Bells were gone, like no one was worth a goodbye.

“Let her go,” my father had
advised.

“I was in the back yard returning
something to Lydia and saw them,” I tell Bill. I place my fingers at my temples
and rub in concentric circles. “It’s OK if you think this is stupid.
Let’s go. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

He stands and yanks me up. Then he surprises
me. “We’re here. Might as well check it out.”

We knock three times before a pasty woman
with short, frustrated black hair opens the door about six inches. She surveys us like
we are Texas liberals and stabs a finger at the sign under the mailbox attached to the
porch siding, a slight variation on a familiar plaque to ward off solicitors:
WE’RE PISS POOR. WE DON’T VOTE. WE’VE FOUND JESUS. OUR GUN
IS LOADED
.

Bill ignores her warnings and sticks out his
hand. “Hello, ma’am, I’m William Hastings. My friend Tessa here used
to have a very good friend who lived in your house. Tessa has fond childhood memories of
playing in the back yard. Would you mind if she took a quick look back there for old
times’ sake?”

The door opens a little wider, but
it’s clearly not an invitation. She swivels to shove her foot at a fat yellow cat
that can’t make up its mind about going out. I’m guessing she’s around
forty-five, wearing tight jean shorts that are the size she wore two sizes ago. She is
carting around a lumpy rear end on skinny legs, and I’m figuring the legs are what
she’s gauging her weight by as she sits on her ass and sucks down another
beer.

No shoes. Band-Aids are wrapped around her
big toes. Her breasts are generous flat pancakes, encased in a tank top. A tattoo of red
roses snakes from her left shoulder to her elbow. The tattoo clearly required a lot of
both time and clenching of teeth.

“Yeah, I
mind.” The woman ignores Bill’s outstretched hand. She’s staring at
the scar under my eye. I perceive a fleeting flash of respect in her eyes. She’s
probably thinking
bar fight.

“I’m curious, Mrs.
…?”

“Gibson. Not that it’s any of
your damn business.”

Bill flashes his courthouse badge.

“I’m just curious, Mrs. Gibson,
at 5216 Della Court, if you were a no-show to jury duty in the last five years. I have a
few friends in the courthouse who would be happy to look that up for us.”

“Son of a bitch,” she fumes.
“Five minutes. That’s it. Go around the side by the gate and be sure to shut
it when you go. I have a dog.” She spits out the last four words like a threat and
slams the door.

“Nice move,” I say.

“It’s not my first Mrs.
Gibson.”

The same old chain link fence is standing
guard around back, although several degrees rustier. The horseshoe catch on the side
gate requires a good thump from Bill to lift. I think about how Lydia’s dad oiled
it religiously.

It is a small, crunched yard with too many
plastic buildings. A fake-shingled shed is shoved into the right corner, the
“fancy” version with a flower box that was forgotten a long time ago. A
filthy white doghouse with a red roof is plopped on the slab of concrete posing as a
back porch.

A picnic table used to sit directly under a
red oak tree that is now a four-foot stump topped by a statue of a bald eagle with
outspread wings. The grass is long and tickly. It creeps up my leg, like a rambling
daddy longlegs. Maybe it is. I almost trip over a toy plastic fire truck transformed
into a weed planter.

Bill’s foot lands in an enormous pile
of soft dog poop, and he lets out a loud
“Shit.”

We halt, and stare more intently at the
doghouse. It’s big enough for a two-year-old child to sleep in. Bill whistles. A
dog starts a serious racket somewhere inside the house, and I wonder if Mrs. Gibson is
loading her shotgun.

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