Black-Eyed Susans (21 page)

“I’m so sorry … that I
wasted everyone’s time.”

Nothing inside me feels that sorry.
Lydia could be alive.
Those flowers might really be from her. I feel a
rising tide of unexpected joy.

“We’ll still sift through the
contents of those bags, back in the lab. We always knew this was a shot in the dark.
Literally. And I like to leave no stone unturned. Or any cliché unturned.”
Trying to make me smile.

Behind her, the professor has wheeled his
device right below the gaping mouth of the cellar. A small crowd is gathering, including
the Gibsons, who’ve ducked under the crime tape. Someone in the center of the
circle gives a shout. The uniforms are pushing everyone back to make room for the cops
and their shovels.

The crime scene investigators are talking to
the professor like he’s an umpire about to make a critical decision. They turn to
the cops and direct how wide to make the hole.

The men nod, and carefully crack the
earth.

The doctor is telling me a story about when
he was twelve.

I’m sure there’s going to be a
point, but I wish he’d get to it
.
Lately, he’s been a little all
over the place
.

I’m annoyed by that smudge on his
glasses, by Lydia flushing all of my Benadryl down the toilet last night.
I’m
sorry,
she said, but it seemed to be about much more than swirling away those
pink pills. Something is going on with Lydia. For the last two weeks, she’s been
late instead of exactly on time and sometimes cancels on me altogether. She makes vague
excuses, her cheeks flush and she rakes her teeth across the pink lip gloss on her
bottom lip. She is a terrible liar. Eventually, Lydia will tell me what is wrong, so I
don’t bug her.

Of course, two sentences into the
doctor’s tale, I’m wondering if
he’s
lying. He says he was a
chubby boy and yet he’s got all that wiry muscle under the shirt with the collar
that stands like a pinned white butterfly. I bumped up against his arm once. It was
immovable, concrete, a runner’s leg extending from his shoulder.

“I’d come home every day after
school to an empty house,” he is saying.

I’m suddenly scared for the boy in an
empty house even though he’s sitting across from me alive and well with no visible
scars.

“Tessie, do you want me to continue?
Is this story bothering you?”

“Um, no. Go
ahead.”

“In the winter, the house was always
dark and cold. So the first thing I did after I unlocked the door, before I put down my
books or took off my coat, was walk to the thermostat and turn up the heat. To this day,
the thump of the furnace, the smell of heat coming on … is the smell of
loneliness. Tessie, are you listening?”

“Yes. I’m just trying to figure
out your lesson here. I thought you were about to tell me something terrible happened to
you.” I’m disappointed. Relieved. Vaguely intrigued.

It occurs to me that I love all of the
smells associated with heat. Fireplace smoke drifting my way on a chilly night run,
barbecue coals declaring it Saturday afternoon. Sizzling pork chop grease, Banana Boat
sunscreen, hot towels tumbled in our old Kenmore dryer. Especially after Mama died, I
couldn’t get hot enough. I flipped my electric blanket on high so much that it
streaked a black scorch mark on the blue fabric and Daddy took it away. I still stretch
out by the heating vent in the floor of Mama’s walk-in closet and read. I’m
not sure I would have survived the last year if I couldn’t slam the screen door
behind me, sprawl on the back porch lounger, and let the brutal sun fry every black
thought to ashes.

“Smell is the sense that is most
instantly connected with memory. Do you know anything about Marcel Proust?”

“Am I failing this test if I say
no?” I can’t wait to tell Lydia that the doctor is pulling a depressed
French philosopher with a handlebar mustache out of his bag. It’s a big step up.
Lydia christened my last therapist Chicken Little after the woman suggested I read
Chicken Soup for the Soul.

“This isn’t a test. There is no
way to fail in this room, Tessie.” His tone is plodding, predictable—and, I
realize, a little tired. “One of Proust’s characters recalls an entire event
from his childhood after smelling a tea-soaked biscuit. Science has been chasing this
theory ever since—that smell retrieves deep memories. The olfactory bulb rests
near, and instantly communicates with, the part of our brain that holds the
past.”

“So this
is
a test. You are telling me I can retrieve my memory through smell.”

“Maybe. Are there any smells that
… bother you since the event?”

Peanut butter, peanut butter,
peanut
butter.
My dad interrogated Bobby and me last week about why an almost-full jar
of Jif was in the trash. Bobby didn’t tell on me.

The muscles in my thighs and legs suddenly
cramp.

“Tessie, what’s
happening?”

I can’t breathe. I have drawn my knees
up to my chin. My fingers are in my ears.

“Why can’t I remember?
Why
can’t I remember?
”

His arm is around me. He’s saying
something. My head falls onto his shoulder. I feel him stiffen slightly, and then relax.
His body is warm, a hot water bottle, like Daddy’s. I do not know or care if this
is appropriate behavior for a therapist.

He is heat.

I spend forty-five minutes in the shower, but
it doesn’t help. I pace the house. Open the refrigerator, swig out of the orange
juice bottle, slam the door shut. Pick up my phone on the counter. Consider calling
Charlie. Bill. Jo. Stop myself.

Punch around on Facebook. Stick my
daughter’s old iPod into the speakers, and turn it way, way up so that Kelly
Clarkson full vibrato is massaging my brain. Rearrange the kitchen canisters, the
magazines, the mail, Charlie’s scattered papers and notebooks. Fold and refold a
leftover piece of satin on the floor. Obsess over neat, exacting edges in a house where
things usually roll around at the whims of a churlish tide.

I want,
need
to know the contents
of the box unearthed seven hours ago near Lydia’s storm cellar. From my vantage
point under the eaves, I couldn’t tell anything other than it was metal, about
twelve inches square, and easy for a CSI to carefully lift out with blue-latex-covered
hands. At that point, the cops began the process of clearing the back yard of extraneous
people like me. In the rising clatter of voices, Jo didn’t even look my way. Bill
and the assistant DA had reappeared and stood together off to the side of the hole, arms
crossed, observing.

The knock at the door, three short raps,
snaps me to attention. I glance down to see whether I’m decent. The answer is no.
Bare legs
and feet. The only thing covering me is one of Lucas’s
old camouflage Army T-shirts that hits about four inches below a patch of lace that
Victoria’s Secret calls underwear. No bra. I grab a pair of shorts out of the pile
of clean clothes on the couch and hurriedly hop into them, one leg at a time.

Two more urgent raps.

The shorts are Charlie’s, and they
ride high under the T-shirt so that it still appears that I’m wearing nothing.
But, good enough.

I thrust my eye up to the peephole.
Bill.

He is perfectly framed in the oval, as if he
is standing in a tiny, tiny picture from another era. His hair is wet and slicked back.
I can almost smell the soap.

I know he is not here to talk about Lydia.
We almost kissed on that curb. This silent debate has been going on between us ever
since he brushed his head on the Galveston sea glass dangling from the ceiling in my
bedroom.

I open the door. He’s wearing faded
Levi’s, and an easy, tentative smile that is going to get me in trouble tonight. I
cannot stop staring at his mouth. He’s carrying a bottle of wine in each hand. One
red, one white. Considerate, because he doesn’t know my preference, which is
neither. On a night like this, I’m a beer girl all the way. The heat in the few
feet between us is unmistakable now, flushing my skin. Pretenses, denials, the fact that
I’m a mom of fourteen years and he’s probably still getting carded—all
of it undeniably stripped away after I fell apart in his arms. Bill has barely said an
unnecessary word to me since.

At this moment, we are the same people we
were before we sat down on that curb, and two very different ones.

“This isn’t a good idea,”
I say.

“No,” he says, and I open the
door wider.

I have three important rules when it comes
to sex.

I have to be in a committed
relationship.

It cannot happen in my
house, in my bed.

It must be dark.

Bill abandons the wine bottles on the hall
table and kicks the door closed without saying anything. He pushes me back against the
wall. His body is still chilled with night air, but his fingers and lips on my skin are
like drifting flames. My arms are up around his neck, and I’m pressing my body
into his, craning my neck up. I have not felt this certain I should be alive in a very
long time. It’s making me slightly woozy.

He cradles my chin in one hand. His gaze is
long enough and deliberate enough to assure me that he knows exactly what he’s
doing. I think,
If I look away now, if I stop this, it will still be OK, almost like
it never happened.
But he bends to kiss me again, and I am lost. I want this
intimate dance in my hallway to go on forever. His hands have slipped under my T-shirt
and are sliding up my back.

I don’t protest when he lifts me and
carries me down the hall. I wrap my legs around his waist and keep my mouth on his.

In my room, he sets me down gently. His head
brushes the glass again, setting off a trickle of muted music. He strips off my shirt.
His shirt. Pulls me down onto my soft, messy sheets. We are instantly coiled, like
people who have made love to each other hundreds of times. I close my eyes and swirl to
the bottom of the river.

“Tessa, you beautiful girl,” he
groans, his breath on my neck. “You drive me crazy.”

Crazy.

Maybe another one of his lines. Perhaps a
last-ditch plea for one of us to come to our senses.

I pull away slightly, but not enough that he
can see the scar near my collarbone. He’s been too busy so far to notice.
I’m always so careful about this. Never too drunk on love or lust to forget. My
hand reaches for the switch on the lamp by my bed, and stops. The bulb has cast his face
in half-glow, half-shadow. Every cliché pops into my head. Light and dark, life and
death, true and false, comedy and tragedy, good and evil, yin and yang.

Golden boy lawyer and girl marked by the
devil.

I use one hand to tug at
the pins holding up my hair. I know exactly what I’m doing, too. There is a look
on his face that I will never forget, that I will hold on to forever, no matter what
happens after tonight.

No matter whether we fail Terrell.

No matter whether my monster eats us both
alive.

I reach over, and snap off the light.

This is the one rule I will not break
tonight.

Sex is the only time I worship the dark.

“This one?” he asks. His finger
is tracing the faint line on my ankle, and I shiver.

“From surgery. You know that I broke
my ankle … that night. Please, come up here.” I tug at his hair, and he
ignores me.

“And this?” He’s
smothering the tiny butterfly above my right hip bone with the tip of his finger.

“An impulse right before the
trial,” I say. I’m suddenly flooded with the memory of the exquisite pain of
the needle. When I encounter people smothered in tattoos, chattering eagerly about the
next one, I understand the addiction.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Lydia’s voice is ringing in my head.
She quoted that line from
Bleak House
to a tattoo artist at a carnival on the
state fairgrounds. Lydia was lying facedown on a fresh towel on a metal cot. The flap of
the tent was closed, making it an oven. Lydia’s jeans were unbuttoned and slightly
pulled down over the curve of her smooth white hip. I’d gone first, oddly brave.
The wings of my tattoo were stinging, even more as I watched this stranger carve out
Lydia’s identical twin butterfly.

Bill’s fingers are urging me back to
the present. He is inching his way up my body slowly, exploring, as if he is clinically
gathering evidence for court. It is the first sign in the last hour and a half that my
brain is working.

My hair is covering the
three-inch line above my left collarbone. He pushes it aside. He
knows.

“Tell me about this one,” he
says.

It is the scar I am the most ashamed of. It
feels
like my monster’s work as much as if he’d inked it
himself. In reality, he drew none of my scars with his own hand. “The ER doctors
panicked a little the night I was … found. Everybody did. The EMT carried me in
the emergency room door in his arms, screaming. Later, my cardiologist was furious. He
said I would have needed a pacemaker eventually but not that night. Not that soon. They
used wires that would be tough to extract so they left it in.” My body stiffens
slightly as he nuzzles my neck. This can’t be a surprise to him. “
Poor
little pacemaker girl.
Al Vega rammed it home on the stand. Don’t you
remember from the transcript?”

“Yes, but I wanted to hear it from
you.”

So Bill
is
on the clock. The love
spell is settling like dull party glitter.

“Should we call Jo and ask what was in
the box at Lydia’s?” Changing the subject. Trying not to sound hurt.

“Trust me, she’ll call. Try not
to think about it.

“What about Charlie’s
father?” he asks abruptly. “Is he in the picture? I like to know when
there’s competition.”