Black-Eyed Susans (39 page)

It takes no time to motor back, yank up the
tarp in the boat, and collect all our stuff around the cabin.
Be out by 11
A.M
., the notice on the back of the door instructs me.
Make sure the boat is properly docked. Leave the cabin key on the
table.

My teeth are chattering and my hands and
feet are numb when I stick his key in the ignition, but I’m feeling pretty good
about myself. I drive around to the Lake Texoma State Park camping area and dump the
tarp and his suitcase in two giant garbage bins on either end.

I’m halfway to the rental place to
return his car when I run out of gas.

My monster’s dead.

My best friend’s alive, folding a
white napkin into a tidy point.

So why do I feel this terrifying urge to
run?

To scream at Effie.

Run.

I thought Daddy was going to kill me. He had
to pick me up at a Whataburger in Sherman. I had walked four miles. There was blood on
my face and clothes. I told the woman behind the counter that it was a burst packet of
ketchup when I asked if I could use the phone. Daddy is smarter than that.

He broke me just like he always does. I was
so tired. I could barely move. He didn’t have to threaten much. I wish I could
have called Tessie.

Daddy said a lot of things on the way home.
You have no proof he was the killer. Under no circumstances will you have an
abortion. Jesus Christ, Lydia. Jesus Christ.

I overheard him make a call to two of his
salvage yard pals. He was paying them to gas up the doctor’s rental car and return
it.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t get
warm.

It seems like a million years ago that I
stood behind a shed and watched him bury flowers under Tessie’s tree house.

Now my parents are on the couch making a
plan and I’m out here in my back yard doing a little burying of my own. I’m
calling it the little box of Bad Things. The key to the cabin that I forgot to leave
on the counter. Tessie’s ring that I stole and stuck in a
corner of my jewelry box because it was bad luck for her. My favorite Edgar Allan Poe
book, because I thought I heard it ticking tonight on the shelf and I wasn’t going
to live with that the rest of my life. I’m not
ever
going to be crazy
like Tessie.

She’s crazy.
Lydia is
crazy.

When should I have known? As soon as she sat
down beside me in second grade with her red glitter pencils sharpened like ice
picks?

She’s prattling now, like Lydia always
does when she tells the truth, about Keats and the sky cracking over the lake and how
the last thing I saw of him was a bald spot like a big mosquito bite
and
then
black, black, black.

The doctor. My monster. Her lover.

At the bottom of the lake. The one where I
taught Charlie to slalom. She probably skied right over him.

He was always dead.

Relief, flooding me. Realization, rocking me
to hell.

I’m the one who kept my monster
alive.

My best friend let that happen. Let me
suffer. Let Terrell pay for what he did not do.

Lydia, a greedy flower. More like a
black-eyed Susan than any of the girls in that grave. Controlling. Thriving in
devastated soil.

“I watched him plant black-eyed Susans
under your tree house
four hours after we made love for the last
time,” Lydia is saying smoothly. “I found them in little plastic pots under
his cabinet and then I followed him and watched him dig the hole. You don’t have
to hit
me
over the head.” She giggles.

He will never touch my daughter,
I’m thinking
.

He is bones.

Lydia loved him.

“You look strange, dear,” Effie
says. “Tired. You should sit.”

“The flowers …?” I stutter
at Lydia.

“Yes?” Impatient. Waiting for
something.

Gratitude
. Lydia’s waiting
for gratitude. I strain against a flood of anger and disbelief. She held my sanity
hostage for seventeen years and would like to be thanked for it. I feel a rabid urge to
slap her, to tear at her shiny fake hair, to scream
why
until Effie’s old
house shakes on its foundation.

Lydia is already restless, and I need to be
sure. “Lydia,” I start again. “If he’s dead … who kept
planting black-eyed Susans for me all these years?”

Her eyes steady on mine. “Are you
accusing me? How should I know? They’re just
flowers,
Tessie. Are you
still freaked out by a PB and J, too?”

“Liz’s job has not a thing to do
with planting,” Effie interjects. “It’s Marjory Schwab over at the
garden society who’s in charge of wildflowers. And it’s Blanche something
who provides the sandwiches. Or maybe her name is Gladys. And it’s Liz, not Lydia,
dear.”

“It’s OK, Effie,” I
say.

Lydia dabs a napkin at her lips. More
pretend. She hasn’t taken a bite of whatever Effie lump is on the plate in front
of her. “I know you’re mad, Tessie. But perfect murders don’t just
happen.
Timing is everything. It was very O.J. of me to keep my shirt,
don’t you think?”

“That’s …
his
blood on the shirt,” I say slowly. “The night you killed him.”

“Did you not finish the
journal?” she demands. “I gave you forty-five minutes.”

My mind is shutting her
out. Focusing like a laser on the one thing that is still important. That can still be
fixed.
Terrell.

The doctor’s blood on the pink shirt.
The fetus in the grave. Aurora’s DNA.

All connected. Science that could help free
Terrell. If Lydia is telling the truth, the blood on that shirt links them all. The
doctor not only fathered Lydia’s daughter, but the child of a murdered Black-Eyed
Susan.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why
I’m here?” Lydia sounds plaintive, just like she did at ten and twelve and
sixteen. “I have three years of research about the doctor out there in the shed.
Colleges he taught at. Girls who disappeared while he was there. Circumstantial, but it
ties up pretty nicely. And we’ll get them to drag the lake, of course. And
I’ll let them interview me but I’ll be too devastated to share
everything.
” She’s giddy with her Lydia-ness. “I showed
up
for a reason,
Tessie. The last-minute stay will be a fantastic way to end my
new book. Even if they kill him, I’m a hero for trying. The book’s all about
the
other
surviving Black-Eyed Susan.
Me.
I tell it like a modern
feminist fairy tale. You’ll love it. The point being, the monster gets it in the
ass.”

“I’m beginning to think you are
not with the historical society,” Effie says.

Lydia is sticking her fork into a piece of
Effie’s cake. It’s almost to her lips.

I don’t stop her.

For the first time in a long time, I feel
hope. Like a cool wind has whistled my head clean.

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

Cheers to O.J., who just walked out of court a free man.

It’s our final session. Tessie’s got that telltale flush in her cheeks.
She’s upset.

Her itty-bitty scar stands out on her tan like a new moon in a sky of freckles. No
makeup covering it up today. I like that. A sign of restored confidence. The nuclear
emerald eyes are sharp and focused. That glorious copper hair is pulled back flat
against her skull like she’s about to run a race. The muscles in her face are
taut and purposeful, not a limp bag hanging off bone like the first day she walked
in here. She’s still biting her nails but she’s painted them carefully
with a lovely lavender polish.

I want to tell her so many things.

How I intended to tear her apart, but it was much, much more thrilling to put her
back together.

How Rebecca was both a flippant lie I told a lazy reporter and a metaphor for
everything. Rebecca is the ghost who kept me company on the worst night of my life.
She is every wife and daughter I will never have and every special girl who sat down
in my class, lifted her eyes, and did not glimpse her fate.

I want to tell Tessie that sometimes—many times—I am sorry.

I want to finish that story I started about the sad boy who walked to a lonely house
after school and turned on the heat.

Tessie had been worried about that boy, I could tell. When she’s sad, her face
always crinkles prettily, like origami.

That boy’s mother always left a horrible surprise for him to find while she
was at work. A dead baby bird on his pillow. A live water moccasin in the toilet. A
cat turd in the Twinkies box. Gags, she called them.

The Saturday night that he put twenty
crushed pills into his mother’s cheap red wine, she fell asleep on page 136
of
Rebecca.
Daphne du Maurier. She pronounced it doomayer, like the fat
clod she was.

He had plumped up her pillow, flipped on the air conditioner to high in the middle
of winter, and read the whole book before he called the police and told them
she’d been suicidal for months.

“I saw you with her.” Tessie is taunting me.

I want to put my hand on Tessie’s knee to stop its jackhammering.

I want to place that well-thumbed book in her hand.

I want to tell her that red flowers, not yellow ones, had a special meaning for
Rebecca.

I want to tell her that very soon, I’m going to run my finger over the
butterfly tattoo on her hip. The one just like Lydia’s.

Imagination, of course, can open any door—turn the
key and let terror walk right in.

—Lydia, age 16, reading
In Cold Blood
under the bridge
in Trinity Park, waiting for Tessie to finish her run,
ten days before the attack, 1994

One at a time, the pieces have come forward,
like shy girls stepping up to dance.

Lydia admitted to a cold-blooded killing and
to a relationship with the doctor, but never to planting the black-eyed Susans in her
back yard or at my old apartment or nestled by my grandmother’s dead tomato vines
or under the bridge that roared like an ocean.

If that’s true, the doctor planted
flowers exactly once, the first time. The wind and a death penalty nut were responsible
for the rest. I allowed a diabolical gardener to live in my head for more than a decade.
Like the Brothers Grimm, I ascribed power to an ordinary, innocent object. Oh, the hell
that can be wrought from a hand mirror. A single pea. A one-eyed flower.

I remembered the T-shirt Merry was wearing,
one morning while I watched Charlie eat Frosted Cheerios out of a yellow cereal bowl
that used to be my mother’s.
Welcome to CAMP SUNSHINE,
the shirt read,
except the dirt and the blood obliterated everything but the
SUN. S-U-N.
My
desperate mnemonic device naming the mothers of those girls was just a brain chip gone
haywire.
A survival tool,
Dr. Giles says.

Dr. Giles tries to convince me every other
session that the Susans in my head weren’t real. I’ll never believe her. The
Susans are about
as real as it gets. I used to lie awake at night
imagining my mind as my grandfather’s house, with passageways and dark rooms
seeking a candle and Susans sleeping and waking in all of the many beds. Now the moon is
pouring like melted butter through those windows. The floors are swept. The beds are
made. The closets emptied.

The Susans have flown from my head, but only
because I kept my promises. That was my grandfather’s one survival tip if I ever
found myself trapped in a fairy tale. Keep your promises. Bad things happen if you
don’t.

The bones of the two other Susans in that
grave have been officially identified as Carmen Rivera, a Mexican foreign exchange
student at University of Texas, and Grace Neely, a cognitive studies major at
Vanderbilt. The earth’s code turned out to be remarkably accurate. Eight other
unidentified girls in morgues in three states have been linked to Lydia’s
meticulous research.

To my relief, Benita Alvarez Smith does not
peer out of any picture lineup except the one in her church’s directory. Lucas
tracked her down for me. She’s a happily married mother of two in Laredo
who’s meeting me for coffee when she’s in Fort Worth next month to visit her
parents.

The best part, of course, is Terrell.
Lydia’s encyclopedic research set Terrell free. That, and the DNA match between
her shirt and the fetus, created enough reasonable doubt for a state court to halt the
execution and release Terrell six weeks later. I was worried that three days
wouldn’t be enough time to brake the Texas death train. Bill declared that, on
Death Row, three days is an eternity.