“Just checking to see how it’s going,” he says.
He is at my side, reaching down, picking up the pad from the floor, placing it gently on the desk in front of me. My drawings, except for the one on the pad, are ripped out and scattered across his desk. My head pounds, and I press a finger into my right temple like there’s a pause button.
“May I?” he asks, which is ridiculous because I’m certain his eyes are already greedily scanning. He picks up a sheet, puts it down, picks up another.
The air is thick with the heat of his disappointment; he’s a teacher with a second-rate student who he has hoped will surprise him.
“It’s just the first time,” he says. Awkward silence. “You didn’t use any paint.” A hint of reproach?
He stiffens. Leans in closer, tickling my shoulder, turning my pad, which was apparently upside down. “Who is this?”
“I’m not done.”
“Tessie, who is this?”
I had scrubbed the charcoal against the page until it was black. I had dug into his desk drawer for the No. 2 pencil eraser that I used to swirl a chaotic nest of hair around her head. My fingernail carefully scratched out big eyes, delicate cheekbones and nose, full lips rounded into a frightened O.
I thought about the edges. No neck anchored her in the blackness. She floated in outer space, a silent, screaming constellation. I had drawn a face, but not the one he wanted.
“It’s your daughter.” Why I felt the urge to torture him, I do not know. I could have said it was Lydia. Or my mother. Or me. But I didn’t.
I feel a slight whoosh of air as he abruptly draws back. I wonder whether he wants to strike me. Oscar is whining way back in his throat.
“It looks nothing like her.” There is a slight crack in his voice. A picture forms in my head of a perfect black egg with a white hairline fracture.
I know that his reply is inappropriate, even silly. I am a skilled artist at seventeen, but this drawing is surely distorted, even childish. Of course it looks nothing like her. I’ve never met her. I’m blind.
He’s a doctor. He shouldn’t allow me to make any of this personal for him.
When did I become capable of such cruelty?
Tessa, present day
I’m thinking of Lydia as I shove a digger deep into the loose soil under my windowsill, pulling out the poisoned Susans, stacking them in a neat, weedy pile beside me. The metal of the digger is stained with traces of bloody rust, but the shiny part glints in the light filtering out the screen of my bedroom window.
The yellow curtains blow white in the moonlight, billowing and retracting. While I’d waited for Charlie to conk out, I plopped on the couch, flipped on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and scratched out a list on the back of a grocery slip, as if that somehow made the contents more harmless.
I wanted to see them neatly written down. Every single place I’d found a patch of black-eyed Susans in the years since the trial. The big question, which I already knew the answer to: Should I go back to each one of them alone? With Bill? With Joanna? Wouldn’t it just waste their time, make them think I was even crazier than they already did?
It seemed highly unlikely that I’d be able to find things he might have buried for me in the ground all these years later, or that I’d hit the right spot to dig, even with the photographs. Rain gushes, the earth moves.
Now, down on my hands and knees in the inky night, sifting my hand through the dirt, I wonder if I am wrong. I find an errant screw dropped from a worker’s hand when the windows were replaced two years ago. A scrap of paper. The stubborn roots of a vine that appeared like a white bone.
Lydia always knew what to do in these situations. She was the one with the scientific and logical mind, able to shove aside emotion and examine everything with the clinical detachment I didn’t possess. The summer we were eight, she stayed inside the lines of her coloring books, while I tried to invent a new color by melting crayons together on the sidewalk in the brutal Texas sun.
In elementary school, I liked to run against the wind for the battle of it; Lydia waited for me cross-legged on a blanket, reading something way too old for her. The Great Gatsby. Hamlet. 1984. Afterward, as I lay panting on the ground, she pressed cool fingers to my wrist and counted the beats of my pulse.
I knew that I would not die on Lydia’s watch. She’s the one who whispered in my ear while I stared at a waxy yellow version of my mother in the casket. She is not in there. She was unusually drawn to death, from the beginning.
When we were assigned a world history project on “a fascinating moment in British history,” two-thirds of Mrs. Baker’s freshman class wrote about the Beatles. I carefully etched a replica of the medieval London Bridge and pondered the miracle of God that kept the shops and houses crammed on top from crashing into the mighty Thames.
Lydia chose a river of evil so black and swirling you couldn’t see the bottom. Mrs. Baker asked her to read her report out loud to the class, probably because she knew it would keep us awake at our desks.
I’ll never forget Lydia’s chilling delivery of her opening lines, stolen from the coroner’s report.
The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek.
While most of her classmates were contemplating whether “I Am the Walrus” was just one big John Lennon acid trip, Lydia had buried herself in the story of Jack the Ripper’s final victim.
Mary Kelly met her grisly death at the 26 Dorset Street boardinghouse, room 13. She was 5’7”, twenty-five years old, a buxom prostitute, and owed twenty-seven shillings on her rent.
She was heard singing in her room hours before she died.
It doesn’t take a memory expert to figure out why I remember such details so many years later and very little about the medieval London Bridge. Lydia had turned on a British accent during her presentation. At one point, her fist thumped her chest three times in a dramatization of the first knife strikes.
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.