Black-Eyed Susans (27 page)

My most logical theory was witness
protection. Someone had to plant the For Sale sign. Mr. Bell dealt in recycled auto
parts with Mexican mafia types in the salvage yards. He rushed off in the middle of the
night all the time to meet them. Lydia had shown me his drawer full of hundred-dollar
bills.

I do know this. If another family on the
block had quietly slipped
out of town right after the trial, and Lydia
was the one speculating, she’d suggest that the father was the Black-Eyed Susan
killer. His wife and daughter were in on it. They were spooked by my survival and now
travel from town to town, changing their names as they go, killing girls.

That’s exactly the kind of story Lydia
would have made up when we were under the blanket with our flashlights, and she was
scaring the crap out of me.

October third, nineteen hundred and
ninety-five, 1
P.M.

O.J. was set free an hour ago, which makes
me sick to my stomach.

In mere minutes, if I don’t screw this
up, I will be, too.

This is my last session. The doctor is
recommending a follow-up every six months for the next two years, and,
of
course,
I should call before then if I’m ever feeling any distress.
He’s taking a sabbatical in China, so he won’t be around, but he will
recommend someone
perfect for me.
In fact, he already has someone in mind.
There’s a little transfer paperwork to fill out, but he’ll take care of that
before he leaves.
How lucky,
he says,
that the trial only lasted a
month.
That the jury took only one day to reach a verdict.

Everyone is beaming. The doctor. My dad.
I’m beaming back because otherwise I might explode.
Almost free, almost free,
almost free.

“I want to say again how brave you
were to testify,” the doctor says. “You held your own. The bottom line:
Because of you, a killer is on Death Row.”

“Yes. It’s a relief.” A
lie. The only thing that’s a relief is the news that my doctor is moving to
China.

He’s sitting there,
so smug. I can’t let him get away with it. I won’t forgive myself.

“Dad, can you just give us one second
alone to say goodbye?”

“Sure. Of course.” He plants a
kiss on my head. Shakes the doctor’s hand.

Dad doesn’t pull the door shut hard
enough when he leaves, so the doc gets up to close the two-inch gap.
Click.
Doctor-client confidentiality and all.

“Why wouldn’t you ever talk
about Rebecca?” I ask, before he sits down.

“Tessie, it’s very painful.
Surely you can understand that. And it would have been unprofessional of me to do so. I
shouldn’t have even said what I did. You need to let this go. It can’t be a
part of our professional relationship.”

“Which is ending. Right
now.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter.
You are still my patient until you walk out that door.”

“I saw you with her.”

“You’re really beginning to
worry me, Tessie.” And, in fact, his face does look worried. “You were
right. My daughter is most likely dead. She isn’t … talking to you, is she?
Like the Susans?”

“I’m not talking about your
daughter.”

“Then I have no idea what you
mean,” he says.

I don’t say it out loud, because
what’s the point?

We both know he’s lying.

“See you around,” I say.

“According to the
L.A. Times,
Attorney
General John Ashcroft wants to take ‘a harder stance’ on the death penalty.
What’s a harder stance on the death penalty? We’re already killing the guy. How do
you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him
itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair?”—Jay Leno

—Tessa, listening to
The Tonight Show
in bed, 2004

MR. VEGA
: I know that this has
been a very difficult day of testifying, Tessie. I appreciate your willingness to speak
for all of the victims and I know the jury does, too. I have just one more question for
now. What was the worst part of lying in that grave?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Knowing that
if I gave up and died, my father and little brother would have to live without knowing
what happened. That they would think things were more horrible than they were. I wanted
to tell them that it wasn’t that bad.

MR. VEGA
: You were lying
near-comatose with a shattered ankle in a grave with a dead girl and the bones of other
victims—and you wanted to tell your family that it wasn’t that bad?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Well, it was
bad. But imagining what happened for the rest of your life is worse. You know, letting
your mind fill all that in, like, a million different ways. That’s what I thought
about a lot … how they’d have to do that. When the rescuers came, I was,
like, so relieved that I could tell my dad it wasn’t that bad.

In a month, Terrell’s coffin, black and
shiny as a new Mustang, will be hitched on a wagon to the back of a John Deere tractor.
He will sink into the ground with the bodies of thousands of rapists and killers rotting
in the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery. Most of these men lived violently on the surface but
they are interred on a pretty little hill in East Texas summoned out of Walt
Whitman’s dreams. These were men officially unclaimed in death. In Terrell’s
case, people claim him,
love
him—they just don’t have the money to
bury him. The state of Texas will do that with $2,000 of taxpayer money and surprising
grace.

Inmates will rumble that tractor. They will
be his pallbearers and bow their heads. They will chisel out his stone. Stencil on his
inmate number. Maybe misspell his name.

They will use a shovel like the one in my
hand.

My stomach churns for Terrell as I stare at
the patch of black earth that my grandfather used to till behind his fairy tale house.
At the very place where, twelve years ago on a hot July day, I found a suspicious patch
of black-eyed Susans. It is the last place I’d ever want to dig for a gift from my
monster, and so that’s what I’ve done. Left it for last. My stomach boiled
in a sick stew that day, too.

I was twenty-two. Aunt Hilda and I had
banged a For Sale sign
onto the front lawn a few hours earlier. Granny
had died eight months before. She was buried beside her daughter and husband in a small
country cemetery, eight miles down the road from their fantastical house.

That day, I’d gone outside to breathe
after opening a drawer in Granny’s jewelry box and sucking in a powerful hit of
her church perfume. Charlie was almost three, and she’d slammed the screen door to
the back porch ahead of me a few minutes earlier. When I opened the door, my beaming
daughter stood several feet from the bottom of the steps, hands behind her back. She
thrust out the handful of black-eyed Susans that she was strangling in her sweaty fist.
Behind her, a hundred feet away, their sisters danced in flouncy yellow
skirts—pretty little bullies hanging out near a row of sickly beans and a
bonsai-like fig tree.

I poured a pot of boiling water into their
eyes while Charlie stared from the porch. When my aunt called out from the house and
asked what I was doing, I told her I was getting rid of a vicious pile of fire ants,
which was just a bonus.
Don’t want Charlie to get stung.
A few ants were
already carting the dead away on their backs.

I’m jolted back to the present as Herb
Wermuth lets the screen door slam behind him. It echoes like a tinny symbol. More than a
decade later, it’s his castle, not my grandfather’s. He’s gone inside,
abandoning Lucas and me with little instruction to the devious winter sun and the garden
that he says his wife, Bessie, chews up with a tiller twice a year.
Good luck
finding anything.
Herb has made it clear he couldn’t care less where we
are digging as long as it is not for a dead body and the media isn’t involved. He
did ask us to try to get our business done before his wife returned in a couple of hours
from a session with her new personal trainer.

At first, when we showed up on his front
porch, Herb hadn’t been so accommodating. “I listen to the news,”
he’d said grimly. “After all this time, you’re not sure they got the
right killer. You’re working with his lawyer.” His eyes had raked over the
shovel hanging from my hand. “Do you actually think one of his girls is buried out
back?”

“No, no, of course
not.” I had rushed to reassure him while hiding my revulsion at the use of the
pronoun.
His.
Like the monster owns us. Owns me. “The cops would be here
if that was the case. As I said, I’ve just always thought that it was possible
that the mon … killer buried … something for me in the garden.”

Herb couldn’t hide it on his
face—he believes, like most people around here, that the Cartwright girl had never
been right in the head again.

“You’ve got to promise,”
he insisted. “No media. I got rid of some tabloid photographer yesterday asking to
snap a picture of the room where the Black-Eyed Susan slept. And some guy called the
other day from
Texas Monthly
wanting permission to get a portrait of you in
front of the house. Said you hadn’t called him back. It’s so bad I’m
taking Bessie to a condo in Florida until this execution thing passes over.”

“No media.” Lucas had responded
firmly. “Tessa only needs to ease her mind.” Patronizing. It sent a trickle
of annoyance up my neck, but it did the trick for Herb. He even retrieved a shiny new
shovel out of the garage for Lucas.

So Herb has left us to it. Except Lucas and
I haven’t budged since the screen door ricocheted on its hinges a minute ago.
Instead of investigating the garden, Lucas is casting watchful eyes up the walls and
windows of my grandfather’s mythical house. He has never been here before, even
though it’s just an hour’s drive from Fort Worth. By the time Lucas and I
were wrestling in the backseats of cars, my grandfather was half-blind and permanently
propped in bed.

It is comforting to know that Lucas is so
focused. Protecting me from my monster, even if he has always believed, no matter what I
say, that the monster is mostly confined to my head.

The house has cast a cool, dark arm across
my shoulders. I know this house like it is my own body, and it knows me. Every hidden
crevice, every crooked tooth, every false front. Every clever trick from my
grandfather’s imagination.

I start a little when
Lucas steps beside me, armed with his shovel and ready to go.

The Susan times her warning to my first
squishy step into the soil.

Maybe he did bury one of our sisters here.

If it weren’t for the fig tree
standing there like an arthritic crone, I wouldn’t know where to dig. The garden
is twice as large as when my grandmother grew her precise rows of Early Girl tomatoes
and Kentucky Wonder beans and orange habanero peppers, which she turned to jelly that
ran on my tongue like lava. This morning, other than the fig tree climbing out of it,
the plot is a flat brown rectangle.

I used to stand in this garden and pretend.
The blackbirds stringing across the sky were really wicked witches on brooms. The
distant fringes of wheat were the blond bangs of a sleeping giant. The black,
mountainous clouds on the horizon were the magical kind that could twirl me to Oz. The
exceptions were brutal summer days when there was no movement. No color. Nothingness so
infinite and dull it made my heart ache. Before the monster, I would always rather be
scared than bored.

“This is a very open area,
Tessa,” Lucas observes. “Anyone who looked out a window on the west side of
the house could have seen him plant the flowers. That’s pretty brazen for a guy
you think has managed to fool everybody into thinking he doesn’t exist.” He
shades his eyes to look up. “Is that a naked woman up there on the roof? Never
mind. It is.”

“She’s a replica of
The
Little Mermaid
statue that gazes over the harbor in Copenhagen,” I say.
“The Hans Christian Andersen one—not the Disney version.”

“I get that. Definitely not
G-rated.”

“My grandfather cast it himself. He
had to rent a crane to lift it up there.” I take three carefully measured steps
north from the fig tree. “About here,” I say.

Lucas thrusts the glistening metal of
Herb’s shovel with crisp,
clean determination into the dirt. My
own rusty shovel is leaning against a tree. I’ve brought a stack of newspapers, an
old metal sieve from the kitchen, and a pair of work gloves. I plunk myself down and
begin to sift through the first chunks of overturned soil. I hear Jo’s voice in my
head insisting that
this isn’t the way.