Black-Eyed Susans (28 page)

I glance up, and for a second, see a little
Charlie on the porch. I blink, and she’s gone.

It isn’t long before Lucas has
stripped off his shirt. I keep sifting, averting my eyes from the muscles rippling
across his back.

“Tell me a story,” he says.

“Really? Now?” A black bug is
skittering down my jeans. I blink, and it’s gone.

“Sure,” Lucas says. “I
miss your stories. Tell me all about the girl up there on the roof with the nice
boobs.”

I pull out a rough piece of old metal. Think
about how many layers to leave out of a multi-layered fable. Lucas has a short attention
span. I know that he is just trying to distract me.

“A long time ago, a mermaid fell madly
in love with a prince she rescued from the sea. But they were from different
worlds.”

“I’m already sensing an unhappy
ending. She looks lonely up there.”

“The prince didn’t know it was
the mermaid who rescued him.” I pause from breaking apart a large chunk of soil.
“She had kissed him and laid him on the beach, unconscious, and swum back out to
sea. But she desperately wanted to be with him. So she swallowed a witch’s potion
that burned away her beautiful singing voice but in return carved out two human legs.
The witch told the mermaid that she would be the most graceful dancer on earth, yet
every single step would feel like she was walking on knives. The mermaid didn’t
care. She sought out the prince and danced for him, mute, unable to speak her love. He
was mesmerized. So she danced and danced for him, even though it was
excruciating.”

“This is a horrible story.”

“There’s lovely imagery when
it’s read aloud. It loses a lot in my
retelling.” I raise
my eyes to the window in the turret of my old bedroom. The partly drawn shade makes it
appear like a half-closed eye. I imagine the muffled sound of my grandfather reciting on
the other side of the stained glass.
An ocean as blue as the prettiest cornflower.
Icebergs like pearls. The sky, a bell of glass.

“And did this a-hole of a prince love
her back?” Lucas asks.

“No. Which means the mermaid was
cursed to die unless she stabbed the prince and let his blood drip on her feet, fusing
her legs back into fins.”

At this point, I stop. Lucas has already
produced an impressive hole the circumference of a small plastic swimming pool and about
as deep. I’m way behind on sifting through his piles of earth. All I have to show
for my efforts are a stack of rocks, the ribbon of rusted metal, and two plastic pansy
markers.

Lucas drops the shovel and falls to his
knees beside me. “Need some help?” he asks. I know him well enough to
translate. He thinks this is futile. My heart isn’t really in it, either.

I hear the creak of a door opening,
punctuated by a noisy slam. Bessie Wermuth is trotting our way in fire-engine-red
workout gear that clings to two narrow inner tubes of fat around her waist. She’s
carrying tall yellow Tupperware cups chunked with ice and amber liquid.

“Good morning, Tessa.” She
beams. “So nice to see you and … your friend.”

“I’m Lucas, ma’am. Let me
help you with those glasses.” He picks one and swallows a quarter of it in the
first swig. “Delicious tea. Thank you.”

Bessie’s eyes are fastened on
Lucas’s snake tattoo, which starts around his belly button and disappears into his
jeans.

“Have you found anything yet?”
She raises her eyes from Lucas’s belt buckle.

“A few fossils, a plastic plant
marker, a rusty piece of metal.”

Bessie barely acknowledges my stash.
“I wanted to tell you about my box. Herb said he didn’t tell you about my
box.”

“Your box?” A
curl of uneasiness.

“It’s a bunch of junk,
really,” she says. “I’ve even labeled it,
Stuff Nobody Wants But
Mom.
You know, so my kids don’t have to add it to the crap they’re
cleaning out when we die. There might be something in there you’re interested in,
though.”

The sweat under my arms is icy.
What is
wrong with me? It’s just Stuff Nobody Wants.

“I’m going inside to get
it,” she says. “I couldn’t carry the box and the tea. Meet me at the
picnic table.”

“Are you all right? You don’t
look right.” Lucas pulls me up. “We need a little break anyway.”

“Yes. Fine.” I don’t say
what I’m thinking—that I have a bad feeling about Bessie and her relentless
tilling. We walk thirty yards and plant ourselves on the bench of an old picnic table
slopped carelessly with green paint.

Lucas nods toward the house. “Here she
comes.”

Bessie is hauling an old U-Haul box across
the yard, breathing with furious intention. Lucas jumps up and meets her halfway,
relieving her of the box. He sets it in front of me, but I don’t reach. I’m
mesmerized by Bessie’s large bold print, which says exactly what she declared it
did, thereby assuring that this will be the one box her grieving, surely sentimental
kids will never throw away no matter what.

“This holds all the odds and ends
I’ve found on the outdoor property since we moved in.” Bessie pops open
flaps. “Useless archaeology, really. Except the old bottles. I got those on the
kitchen windowsill. But if it comes out of the earth and isn’t wriggling or biting
me, I keep it in here. I don’t organize it by year or location. It’s all
dumped together. So I have no idea what came out of the garden and what got kicked up by
the mower.”

Lucas is bending over the box, pawing
through it.

“Just dump it,” Bessie says.
“Can’t hurt anything. Then Tessa can see, too.”

Before I can prepare, the contents are
rolling recklessly across the
table. Wire springs and rusty nails, an
old, half-crushed yellow-and-red-striped Dr Pepper can, and a blue Matchbox car with no
wheels. A tiny tin for Bayer aspirin, a chewed dog bone, a large white rock streaked
with gold, a broken arrowhead, fossils of cephalopods that once skulked around with
tentacles and eyes like cameras.

Lucas is fingering through pieces of broken
red glass. He’s pushed aside a tiny brown object with a point.

“This is a tooth,” he says.

“That’s what I thought!”
Bessie exclaims. “Herb told me it was a candy corn.”

But I’m staring at something that lies
all alone at the edge of the table.

“I think that was
Lydia’s.” The words catch in my throat.

“Spooky.” Bessie picks up the
little pink barrette, frowns at it. I pull off my gloves and take it with unsteady
fingers.

“What do you think it means?”
she wants to know. “Do you figure it’s a clue?” Bessie isn’t
breathing fast because she’s old, or because Lucas is a sweaty god. Bessie is a
junkie. She’s probably devoured everything ever written on the Black-Eyed Susans.
How could I not have seen this?
She bought my grandfather’s house
when no one else would. She apparently knows exactly who Lydia is without
explanation.

Lucas has placed his hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll borrow the tooth and the … hair thing, if that’s
OK,” he tells Bessie.

“Of course, of course. Whatever Herb
and I can do.”

I rub my finger absently over the yellow
smiley face etched into the plastic.
This means nothing,
I scold myself. It was
probably tugged out of Lydia’s hair by a cornstalk during a game of hide-and-seek
back when we thought monsters were imaginary.

And yet.
The pink barrette with the
smiley face. The Victorian ring, the Poe book, the key.
Why do I feel like Lydia is
the one playing a game with me, planned cunningly in advance?

Lucas scans my face, and there’s no
discussion of whether to sift through the rest of the dirt.

I look up. On the roof,
the flash of two girls. One with fiery red hair. I blink, and they’re gone.

Lydia’s barrette is wrapped in a
tissue in my purse. The tooth is in Lucas’s pocket. About fifteen miles down the
road, Lucas clears his throat and breaks the silence. “Are you going to tell me
what happened to that mermaid chick?”

My passenger window swims with blue and
brown. The Texas sky, a bell of glass; the rolling farmland, once buried under an
unfathomable sea.
Sun so powerful that the mermaid was often obliged to dive under
the water to cool her burning face.

I still my grandfather’s voice. Place
my hands on burning cheeks. Turn to Lucas’s profile, a rock to cling to.

“The mermaid can’t bring herself
to murder the prince,” I say. “She throws herself into the sea, sacrificing
herself, and dissolves into sea foam. But a miracle happens—her spirit floats
above the water. She has transformed into a daughter of the air. She can now earn her
immortal soul and go to live with God.”

Daughters of the air. Like us, like us,
like us,
breathe the Susans.

“The Baptist in your grandfather must
have loved that one,” Lucas says.

“Not really. Baptists believe you
can’t earn heaven. The only way to save yourself is to repent. Then you’re
good to go, even if you turn sweet mermaids to sea foam.”

Or girls to bones.

MR. LINCOLN
: Tessie, do you
love your grandfather?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Yes. Of
course.

MR. LINCOLN
: It would be
very hard to think something terrible about him, right?

MR. VEGA
: Objection.

JUDGE WATERS
: I’ll
give you a little leeway here, Mr. Lincoln, but not much.

MR. LINCOLN
: Did the police
search your grandfather’s house the day after you were found?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Yes. But he
let them.

MR. LINCOLN
: Did they take
anything away?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Some of his
art. A shovel. His truck. But they gave it all back.

MR.
LINCOLN
: And the shovel had just been washed, correct?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Yes, my
grandmother had run the hose over it the day before.

MR. LINCOLN
: Where is your
grandfather today?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: He’s
home with my grandmother. He’s sick. He had a stroke.

MR. LINCOLN
: He had a stroke
about two weeks after you were found, right?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Yes. He was
very upset about … me. He wanted to hunt down whoever did this and kill him. He
said the death penalty wasn’t good enough.

MR. LINCOLN
: He told you
that?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: I overheard
him talking to my aunt.

MR. LINCOLN
:
Interesting.

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: No one
thought I could hear while I was blind.

MR. LINCOLN
: I’d like
to get to your episode of blindness a little later. Did you ever think your grandfather
was odd?

MR. VEGA
: Objection.
Tessie’s grandfather isn’t on trial here.

MR. LINCOLN
: Judge,
I’m almost done with this line of questioning.

JUDGE WATERS
: You can answer
the question, Ms. Cartwright.

MS.
CARTWRIGHT
: I’m not sure what he means.

MR. LINCOLN
: Your
grandfather painted some grisly images, didn’t he?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: I mean, yes,
when he was imitating Salvador Dalí or Picasso or something. He was an artist. He
experimented all the time.

MR. LINCOLN
: Did he ever
tell you scary stories?

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: He read
fairy tales to me when I was little.

MR. LINCOLN
: The Robber
Bridegroom who kidnaps a girl, chops her up, and turns her to stew? The Girl Without
Hands, whose own father cuts them off?

MR. VEGA
: Oh, come on, your
honor.

MS. CARTWRIGHT
: Her hands
grow back. Seven years later, her hands grow back.

I wonder if Jo is in a freezing lab scraping
enamel off a tooth that looks like a candy corn while I fold and stack clothes still
warm from the dryer. If Terrell is sitting on his rock hard cot, composing his last
words, drinking water that tastes like raw turnips, while I sip my $12 pinot and decide
to throw out Charlie’s pink socks with the hole in the left heel. If Lydia is out
there somewhere laughing at me, or missing me, or up in heaven pestering dead authors
while her body rots in a place only my monster knows about. I wonder if the tooth from
the ground at Granddaddy’s could be hers.

For three days, I debated about whether to
turn the tooth over to Jo. I couldn’t explain to Lucas why I waited. It made
perfect sense to try every unlikely thing, to hold nothing back unless what I really
wanted was
not to know.
Jo had met us in the parking lot of the North Texas
Health Science Center a few hours ago. She was still wearing white shoe covers from the
lab. She had listened in taut silence to my rambling about drowning Black-Eyed Susans in
boiling water and a box of useless objects that no one cared about but Bessie. I
didn’t mention Lydia’s pink barrette with the smiley face. Jo accepted the
tooth from Lucas. Said little in return.

I wonder if Jo will forgive me for not
bringing her with us, although it doesn’t seem all that important right now.
Nothing does.
Numbness grips me, a slow-acting poison that drugs the
Susans to sleep and yet still allows my hands to build perfectly tidy little towers of
clothes. Clothes that have mingled intimately in the washer—Lucas’s Army
underwear, Charlie’s flannel pajamas with the pink cotton-candy sheep, my neon
running shorts.

Lucas is slugging a beer at the end of the
couch, watching CNN and rolling his briefs into tiny eggrolls, Army Ranger-style, then
aiming and tossing them at my head, my butt, whatever is a good target. We’re
pretending to be just fine while the clock ticks the seconds off my sanity. Because
after Terrell dies, then what?