Black-Eyed Susans (7 page)

Silly.
Creepy.

To write that report, Lydia had immersed
herself for two weekends in the Texas Christian University library, reading
dissertations and nineteenth-century medical reports and essays from self-proclaimed
“Ripperologists.” She tucked it in a plastic binder and told me to flip to
the last page before she was supposed to turn it in.

I was gripped by horror porn: a
black-and-white photograph of Mary Kelly lying in her flophouse bed, her insides ripped
out. I never knew where Lydia found this, in the days before Google. Only that Lydia was
always a relentless digger.

Why am I thinking about this now?
I
rub my hand across my forehead, wiping away sweat, leaving crumbs of dirt. I’m
back in the kitchen, my foot on the trashcan pedal, dropping my collection into the
trash. And then it hits me.

I had dismissed the scrap of paper because
it didn’t bear a sadistic poem. Now I’m picking it out of the bin, examining
it more closely. It
could
be part of a candy bar wrapper.
Was it the kind
of candy bar I bought at Walgreens the night I disappeared? The kind I bought every
Tuesday for Roosevelt?

Roosevelt was a fixture on my Wednesday
running route, nicknamed because at straight-up noon every single day, he stood on top
of an old red bucket and spouted the entirety of FDR’s first
inaugural speech.

By the time I flew by on Wednesdays after
school, he was always long done with his diatribe. We had worked out a routine. I tossed
a Snickers bar, his favorite, into the air without slowing my pace. He never failed to
catch it and shoot me a big, toothy grin. It became a ritual of good luck during track
season and a pact I kept up when summer started. I never lost a race after meeting
Roosevelt.

And so it was decided. Every Tuesday night,
I bought a Snickers bar. I didn’t buy two or three or four at a time. I
didn’t buy them on Mondays or Saturdays. I bought one every Tuesday night, and he
caught it on Wednesday afternoon, and I won and won and won.

But in those missing hours, I apparently did
something I would never, ever consider doing. I ate his candy bar. There were traces of
it in my vomit at the hospital.

I was committed to my ritual with Roosevelt.
To winning. Did I eat the candy bar that night because I thought that I would never run
a race again?

I grab a plastic snack bag out of the pantry
shelf and seal the wrapper inside.
Did he touch this? Did he stand under my window,
snacking?
My cell phone rings out from the living room couch, disturbing the
silence that is everywhere except my chest.

Hastings, William.

“It’s late, Bill.” No
hello.

“The day got away from me,” he
says. “I just want to be sure you remember to be at the UNT lab tomorrow by 9:45,
fifteen minutes before the techs start the process on the bones.”

How could I forget?
I want to shout
it at him, but instead say: “I’m driving myself.” This has to be the
reason he called. He seems determined to pick me up.

Bill lets a couple of seconds elapse.
“Joanna wouldn’t tell me what over the phone, but she says the forensic
anthropologist has already found something.”

“How is the drawing at home
going?” He asks this before my butt hits the cushion.

“I forgot to bring any of them with
me.” A lie. The drawings, nine new ones, are right where I want them—in a
red Macy’s shirt box in my closet labeled
Xtra Tampons,
sure to dissuade
my nosy little brother.

The phone on his desk suddenly buzzes. The
emergency buzz, one of my favorite sounds in the world because it sucks minutes away
from me.

“I’m sorry, Tessie,” he
says. “Excuse me for just a moment. I’ve just checked in a patient at the
hospital and was expecting a few questions from the nurse.”

The doctor’s voice travels over from
the other side of the room. I can make out a few words.
Elavil. Klonopin.
Shouldn’t he be doing this privately? I’m really trying hard not to hear
because I don’t want to imagine a person like me on the other end and get
emotionally involved. So I focus on other things, like trying to match the
doctor’s lazy drawl with Lydia’s description of him.

It was Lydia’s idea. Yesterday, with
my blessing, she had hopped the bus to the TCU campus and sneaked into one of the
doctor’s late
afternoon summer classes:
Anastasia Meets
Agatha Christie: Exploring the Gray Matter About Amnesia.

When she told me the class title, I cringed
a little. Too gimmicky. But then, I was looking for reasons to be critical.

If Lydia stuck on the big rounded plastic
frames she wore when her contacts itched, she could easily disappear into a crowd of
college students. Lydia’s father told her once that she was one of those people
born thirty, and repeated it often, which Lydia carried around like a mortal wound. Me,
well … I can’t tell Lydia but I feel a little uncomfortable around her dad
these days.

Through our formative years, Mr. Bell
concocted a kick-ass chili recipe, and hauled us to the shooting range, and whipped us
around Lake Texoma in the unsinkable
Molly
every Labor Day and July 4th. But he
was moody and known to strike out. And, since I turned fourteen, his eyes sometimes
hesitated in the wrong places. Maybe he was just being more honest than most men greeted
with puberty in bloom. Probably better to know, I reasoned, and wear longer shorts at
her house.

Last night, after her successful day of
spying and some of my dad’s leftover Frito pie, Lydia had been in especially good
spirits. “Did you know that Agatha Christie went missing for eleven days in 1926
and no one had a clue where she was?” she had asked me breathlessly, from the
corner of my bed.

I had her pictured in the usual position:
legs pretzeled into an easy lotus, her pink-flowered Doc Martens lost somewhere on the
floor, a hot pink scrunchy holding up a mountain of black hair. Pink was Lydia’s
color.

A recap of the day’s events in the
O.J. trial buzzed in our ears as background. It was impossible to get away from it.
Daddy didn’t like a TV perched on top of my dresser, certainly didn’t like a
bloody soundtrack, but he had relented instantly when I told him the constant noise made
me feel less alone. That I wasn’t really listening to it.

It was only a half-lie. I
found something soothing about Marcia Clark’s methodical voice. How could anyone
not
believe her?

“Agatha kissed her daughter goodnight
and disappeared,” Lydia had continued. “They thought she maybe drowned
herself in this pond called the Silent Pool because that’s where they found her
wrecked car.”

“The Silent Pool?” I was
skeptical. It was how anyone sane had to be with Lydia at least part of the time.

“
Really.
You can read it
yourself.” She thrust a piece of paper at me. If it had been anyone else, this
would have seemed like a mean poke. But it was Lydia. My vision was less gray when she
was around. Lighter, like I was splayed flat on the tickly grass, staring up into late
summer dusk. I let my fingers grasp her tangible proof that Agatha Christie lived out a
page in her novels, as if it were important.

“Anyway, that’s where they found
her car,” Lydia repeated. “The other thought was that her a-hole of a
cheating husband killed her and abandoned the car there. While all of this was going on,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even took one of her gloves to a medium to try to figure out
where she’d gone. It was on the front of
The New York Times.
” More
rustling of paper. “But she showed up. It turned out she had
amnesia.
For eleven days.
”

“This was the focus of his
lecture?” It was comforting, and somehow not.

“Uh-huh. I was intrigued by the class
title, so I stopped off at the library before. When I got to class, your
doctor
was talking about the etiology of the fugue state and how it’s related to
dissociative amnesia.”

It would be very hard to live in
Lydia’s head. I imagined it blindingly bright and chaotic, like an exploding star.
Both sides of her brain constantly at war. Because brilliant, steady Lydia was an addict
when it came to murder and celebrities. The O.J. trial, her LSD. Any inane detail got
her high. Like the other night, giggling about how O. J. Simpson had asked the cops for
a glass of
orange juice
after the Bronco chase, followed up by ten minutes of
her railing
about the jury not getting the concept of restriction
fragment length polymorphism.

“So what happened to her?”
Trying to shuttle things along because I was curious, but wanting to know whether my
doctor appeared to be a manipulative asshole.

“She was found in a spa hotel under an
assumed name. She claimed not to recognize pictures of herself in the newspaper. Some
doctors said she was suicidal, in a psychogenic trance. That’s like a fugue state,
thus
the title of your doctor’s class.”

“I’d rather think of her as a
nice old lady writing cozy mysteries by the fire.”

“I know. It’s kind of like
finding out that Edna St. Vincent Millay slept around and was a morphine addict. Ednas
and Agathas should be true to their names.”

I’d laughed, something close to the
way I used to, and imagined it drifting under the bedroom door, smoothing out a tight
wrinkle in my father’s face.

“A mystery novelist with a cheating
husband, gone missing. Sounds like a publicity stunt.”

“Some people might say that about
you,” my best friend retorted. A rare slip, for her. It had hit its mark, a sharp
pain to the right side of my stomach.

“Sorry, Tessie, it just came out. Of
course that’s not true,
either.
He’s the kind of professor you
could get a real crush on, you know, because he has that
brain.
He’s not
a fake.” She sat silently for a second. “I like him. I think you can trust
him. Don’t you?”

Smacked again. Fifteen hours later, back on
the doctor’s couch, I’m fully absorbing the repercussions of this turn of
events. Now, Lydia, my objective, loyal friend, would give my doctor the benefit of the
doubt. I wondered if she’d been crazy enough to raise her hand. Ask a question.
Get noticed.
I should have thought this through.

The doctor has just excused himself and left
the room. The longer he’s gone, the darker it gets. You wouldn’t think it
would make
any difference when you’re blind, but it does. The
air-conditioning is noisily blowing through the vents, but it’s harder and harder
to breathe. I’ve drawn my knees up tight and crossed my arms around them. My
tongue tastes like a dead trout. There is growing dread that no one will find me and
pull me out in time. That I will suffocate in here.

Is this one of your tests, doctor?

The second I decide I can’t take it
any longer, he strides into the room. His chair creaks with his weight as he settles in.
I fight the surge of gratefulness.
You came back.

“That took longer than I thought. We
can make up the time in our next session. We have about a half-hour left. I’d like
to talk about your mother this week, if that’s OK.”

“That’s not why I’m
here.” My response is quick. “I went over and over that years ago. Lots of
people have mothers who die.” A fog drools at the corners of my vision. Frenetic
pricks of light everywhere, like a swarm of frightened fireflies. New guests in my head.
I wonder if this means I am about to faint.
How would I know the difference?
My
lips contort, and I almost giggle.

“So you shouldn’t mind talking
about it,” he says reasonably. “Catch me up. Where were you the day she
died?”
Like you don’t already know. Like there isn’t a big fat
file on your desk that you don’t even have to bother to hide from a blind
girl.

My ankle throbs and sends a message to the
crescent scar on my face and to the three-inch pink line drawn carefully under my left
collarbone.
Can he not see how upset I am? That he should back off?

The pieces of his face spin around,
stubborn, refusing to lock in place. Gray-blue eyes, brown hair, wire-rim glasses. Not
at all like Tommy Lee Jones, Lydia had said. Still, no picture falling together for me.
No way to draw him blind.

This is the worst session yet, and we are
just getting started.

“I was playing in the tree
house,” I tell him, while the fireflies do their panicked dance.

The first Susan has arrived, bundled in white
cloth, like she is dressed for a holy baptism. The woman holding her is covered in
head-to-toe white, too, her mouth and nose masked, so that all I can see are brown eyes.
They look kind.

She unbinds the cloth and raises Susan
carefully up to the window. Most of the small group gathered in the hall on the other
side eagerly raise their iPhones. Susan is bathed in brief flashes, like a movie
star.

Her skull is a horror show. Her eyes are
holes going to the bottom of the ocean. Most of the lower half of her jaw, gone. A few
rotten teeth hanging like stalactites in an abandoned cave. It is the emptiness, those
two gaping, awful holes that remind me she was once human. That she could once stare
back.

Remember?
Her hollow, toothless
voice bubbles up in my ear. An unspent grenade erupts in my chest. It’s a shock,
but it shouldn’t be. The Susans had been silent for more than a year this time. It
had been foolish to think they were gone.

Not now.
I imagine my hand clamped
over her mouth. I screech out “The Star-Spangled Banner” in my head.

Bombs bursting in air.
Jo is
squeezing my arm.

“Sorry I’m late.” I gulp
in her quirky normalness. White lab coat,
khaki pants, purple Nikes,
plastic badge hanging off a skull-and-crossbone-printed lanyard around her neck. A whiff
of something chemical, but not unpleasant.