Black-Eyed Susans (37 page)

It’s OK,
I say softly,
walking toward her.
It is not your fault. I’m the one who’s sorry. I
should have saved you.

By the time I press my palm flat against the
glass, Merry’s already gone, replaced by a pale woman with messy red hair, green
eyes, and a gold squiggly charm in the hollow of her throat. My breath fogs the mirror,
and I disappear, too.

Merry has shown up twice before. She
appeared in the doctor’s office window when I was seventeen, five days after I got
my sight
back. Four years ago, she sang “I’ll Fly
Away” in the back row of the church choir at my father’s funeral.

I walk over to the kitchen drawer, pull out
a knife, and slice it across the package.

The Susans, a rising hum in my head.

I’m pounding on the door and yelling
Tessie’s name.

She’s locked me out. I’m stuck
in her stupid pink fairy tale bedroom that was fine
when we were ten.
I woke up
and she wasn’t in bed and now I can’t get the door to the terrace open. I
told
her I didn’t want her out there alone tonight because
she’s blind and it’s dangerous and I’ve been left in charge. But,
really, it’s because I think she might jump off her grandfather’s roof.

Today was another Sad Day. She’s had
twenty-six in a row. I mark a smiley face on my calendar every day she smiles
once.
No one else is marking smiley faces on a calendar and yet if Tessie
kills herself tonight, it will be the fault of Lydia Frances Bell.

Lydia was never a good influence. Lydia’s morbid. Lydia might have given
Tessie a little push.

I put my ear on the door. Still alive.
She’s playing something dirge-y on her flute. It takes a lot of breath to blow a
flute. I wouldn’t want to stand too close and get a whiff. She hasn’t
brushed her teeth for six days. No one but me is counting
that
number, either.
One life lesson of the Tessie thing is that it’s harder to love people when they
smell. Of course, there are a lot of good parts, too. It’s
cool to be called her
fairy tale friend
by
People
magazine. And I feel
a secret, tickly thrill all the time now, the same as when I’m staring into the
ocean and thinking about how deep and black it goes, and what lurks on the bottom. I
like
walking around inside a terrible novel,
living
it, getting up
every day to write a new page, even if people always see Tessie as the main
character.

The door is budging a little, so I bang my
hip into it a little harder. It was her grandparents’ stupid idea, not mine, to
bring her to their castle for the weekend. Of course, they crashed at 9:30 and are
half-deaf.

Surely she wouldn’t jump because of
that Frida Kahlo remark I made at dinner. Her grandmother had given me a dirty look. I
mean, it was her grandfather who brought it up.

He was telling Tessie about how Frida Kahlo
had painted in bed after the terrible bus accident when she was eighteen that left her
frozen in a body cast. Frida’s mother made this special easel for her bed. So
Tessie’s grandfather asked her if she’d like him to make something like it
for her. He was trying to inspire her, but it seems to me the lesson there is that a
random bus accident screwed up Frida Kahlo pretty much for life, just like
Tessie’s going to be. And all I
said
was that it was a good thing Kahlo
killed herself because she was literally painting herself to death. I thought it was
funny. Like, how many Frida Kahlo faces can the world take?

The door suddenly gives way, and I stumble
onto the terrace. She’s sitting on the ledge with her back to me, wearing her
grandfather’s extra-large white Hanes T-shirt, looking like Casper the Friendly
Ghost. She forgot her nightgown on our little overnight trip, so she borrowed the shirt
out of her grandfather’s drawer.

There are much better ways to kill
yourself,
I am thinking
. And I wouldn’t wear that.

Maybe I should let her jump. It just pops in
my head.

If she did, she’d probably just end up
in a wheelchair because
she’s just that lucky. Or unlucky.
It’s such a freaky line. All this hard work to bring her back to life when
I’m pretty sure she wishes she’d gone to sleep in that grave and never woken
up.

I’m really, really pissed off tonight.
More than usual. I’m
crying.
I’m not sure how long I can keep this
up. All those stories in the newspaper, and yet the ugly, real story is never told.

She’s still playing the stupid flute.
It makes
me
want to jump.

“Please get off the ledge,” I
choke out.
“Please.”

I reach into the package and tug out a
plastic bag.

A shirt is inside.

Crusted with blood.

I recognize it.

I could draw
twenty
smiley faces in my
calendar today.

My mom just brought us freezing cans of Coke
with straws, and Chips Ahoy on a plate. She said it was good to hear us laughing so much
again. I locked the door after that. It was Tessie’s idea to draw these fake pictures
for her new doctor, a big shocker, because it’s more like the kind of thing
I
would come up with. Tessie was never a big liar but I’ve never had a problem if
it’s a means to an end. She told me she’s not ready to let this new doctor peer
into her soul. The soul thing was just her mimicking the doctor she got stuck with right
before this one. That idiot told her she could cure her blindness if she jumped off the high
dive and opened her eyes underwater. I’ve never seen Tessie’s dad so mad as when I
told him.
He might as well be suggesting she kill herself!

Tessie’s wearing these white nerdy pajamas
with lace that her Aunt Hilda gave her. If she could see, she wouldn’t be caught dead in
them. But she can’t, and it’s kind of sweet. They make her look all innocent, like
the world isn’t ending.

“Do you have the black marker?”
Tessie’s asking.

“Yes.” I perfect a grimace on a
flower and hand it over.

For once, I’m not
embarrassed to draw in the same room as Tessie. She had to go blind for that to happen.
Everything she draws is always so
perfect.
I like this picture. I definitely draw
better when Tessie’s no competition.

Still, I’m thinking this picture’s a
little
literal.
A field of monster flowers. A girl cowering. It needs
drama.

I add another girl right on top of the other
one. Scratch in some red. Are the girls fighting to the death? Is one killing the other? Are
the poor little flowers actually just worried and trying to make it stop?

Ha-ha. Let him wonder.

My eyes are glued to the brown stain on the
pink shirt. My shirt. She borrowed it from me a very long time ago and never returned
it.

It’s a lot of blood.

Not for the first time, I’m numbly
contemplating the idea of Lydia, murdered.

Lydia was fond of ketchup,
I remind
myself. Of corn syrup and red dye, manipulation and guessing games.

There’s something else in the
package.

A college-ruled notebook. I recognize it,
too. There used to be a whole box of them.

A date is scribbled on the front of this
one. And a name.

The
L
curls up on the end, like a
cat’s tail. I’d seen her write that
L
a hundred times.

My hand hovers between the notebook and my
cell phone.

Deciding how to play.

“I’m Lydia Frances Bell,” I
introduce myself, wishing I hadn’t added the
Frances.
Or used the
Lydia,
which I never felt was my true name. I’m more of an Audriana
or Violetta or Dahlia. I should have given him a fake name. Tessie would say it was
stupid to introduce myself to him in the first place. She’d be mad. I told her I
was just going to sit in her doctor’s class one time to observe and not even raise
my hand. I’ve come twice since then. Tessie is driving me freaking crazy. Last
night, she nearly tore my head off when I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and
brought it to her room. I mean, get over it. It’s a
sandwich.

Today is the first time I signed up for his
office hours. I feel as fully prepared as I can be. I’ve researched everything I
can about him. I’ve read his lecture series
From Marilyn Monroe to Eva Braun:
History’s Most Powerful Bimbos.
I
devoured
the case study of
that girl who survived being buried alive by her stepdad, which got everyone all into
him being Tessie’s therapist when his name appeared on the list of candidates.
He’s been a visiting professor at
three
Ivy League schools. He
never
teaches anything with 101 in the title. I couldn’t find much
personal, so that was a bummer, and
nothing
about his missing daughter, but I’m sure he’s a private
man and is totally devoted to his life’s work.

“I’m so glad you dropped by,
Lydia,” he’s saying. “I’ve seen you sitting in the front
row.” His smile is a draught of sunshine. He makes me
think
in Keats.

I lay down my
copious
notes on his
last lecture, about the dark triad of personality, so he can see right away what a good
student I am. He asks me whether I agree with Machiavelli that we are not helpless at
the hands of bad luck. It was apparently a rhetorical question, because he’s still
talking. I love the sound of his voice rolling over all those four-syllable words. I
feel like he is having sex with my brain.

I have ten brilliant questions all set to
impress him, and I haven’t asked a single one.

He has rolled his chair over from behind the
desk. His knee is pressing against my leg in this delicious pleasure-pain thing. I can
barely
think
with his knee on mine and yet he acts like it’s not even
there.

I know I need to tell him I’m the
Lydia who is Tessie’s best friend, but not when he’s looking at me like
that.

Next time.

I’m whipping through the pages.
They’re brutal. Nicking me, stabbing me, kicking me in the gut. Blowing me a few
kisses. Love and resentment, all mixed up.

A whole other Lydia going on when I was
sixteen years old. A picture behind a picture. I flash back to that night on the terrace
when I thought we dredged up everything. Every unspoken pebble of anger. Every benign
tumor that had been growing since our friendship began—the tumors that live under
the skin of every relationship until the unforgivable moment that changes their
chemistry forever.

I was wrong. There was so much more.

I’m trying to reconcile the girl in
this notebook with the one who gave me back my breath with a brown paper bag. Who hugged
me all night when my mother died, and braided my hair when I was blind. Who read me
breathless poetry. Who wrote notes in Edgar Allan Poe’s favorite cipher, with
invisible ink made from lemon juice, and stuck them in a crack in my tree house for me
to find the next day. So I could hold her words up to the sun.

I feel sick.

The phone rings. I jump
up, knocking over a bottle of water.

Lydia’s ink begins to blur.

I blot frantically at the pages.

The phone shrills again. Insistent.

I stare at the Caller ID.

Outler, Euphemia.

At least a quarter of the pages left. I
don’t know how Lydia’s story ends. Or how quickly my time with the journal
will be up. I have to figure, very, very soon.

I pick up the receiver.

“Sue? Sue?” Full-on Effie
panic.

She lowers her voice.

I think the damn digger snatcher is here.

Tessie is
screaming
at me.

You gave my diary to the doctor? You rifle through my things?

“I had to give jurors the full
picture.” Good grief, she is freaking
out.
I thought she’d get it.
“I gave him the diary to
protect
you. I testified to all that stuff to
help convict Terrell.”

“Yeah, right. You had to tell them I
didn’t bathe? That you found lice in my hair? That I stole painkillers out of Aunt
Hilda’s medicine cabinet?”

“I’m sorry I said the boys call
you Suzy Scarface. That was a very unfortunate headline.”

“Do they really call me that,
Lydia?” Tessie looks like she’s about to cry. But I can’t give in. She
always wants things both ways.

“You testified for
you,
” Tessie is saying. “So
you
could be a
star.”

We’re standing on her
grandfather’s terrace like we have a million times before. She’s shaking,
she’s so freaking mad at me. But, like, I’m getting madder by the second,
too.
Doesn’t she understand everything I’ve done for her?
She’s yelling, and I’m yelling right back, the catfight of the century.
Finally, she doesn’t have a comeback. There’s just silence and black night
and us, breathing hard.

“I saw you with the
doctor.” Her tone creeps me out.

“What are you talking about?” Of
course, I
know
what she’s talking about.
But which time? How much
does she know?
I take a stab. “You mean the time I gave him your
diary?”

“I guess. I was walking Oscar at the
college. What did you think you were doing, Lydia?
Get out.
”

Her grandmother is suddenly at my back,
clawing my shoulder, wheezing a little, because she had to climb all those stairs. She
never liked me much. “Girls—”