“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.
Tessa, present day
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.
Deep breath. I’m on this side of the glass. This side of hell.
She nods casually to the group. Besides Bill and me, four other people are cleared for this event: three Ph.D. students-one from Oxford, two from the University of North Texas-and a beautiful, unbottled blond scientist from Sweden named Britta.
We’d spent the last fifteen minutes together, strangers pretending we weren’t about to observe death at its most sadistic. The students’ eyes flicked to me with interest, but no one was asking questions.
Before Jo arrived, we had settled on discussing the three places in Dallas and Fort Worth that Britta should not miss seeing before returning home to her Stockholm lab in two weeks: the Amon Carter for its muscled bronze Russells and Remingtons, and for the beautiful black boy in the newspaper hat; the Kimbell for the silvery light cascading on buxom masterpieces and for the ill-fated young man in the company of wicked sixteenth-century cardsharps; the Sixth Floor Museum, where Oswald angled his rifle, and a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist defiantly roamed the sidewalk, saying, Nope, not like that.
As Britta eyes Bill, I am thinking it is more likely she will end up in his bed. I’d gotten a curt smile from him this morning.
“Stephen King researched part of his Kennedy time-travel opus at the Sixth Floor Museum archives,” Bill is telling them.
“Great book,” Jo says. “King’s a genius. But he never really got Texas. And I’m saying that as an Oklahoman. Hi, Bill. Tessa. Sarita. John and Gretchen. Britta, glad you could make it today. Looks like they are just getting started.”
The skull is now facing us, leering from its spot on the counter. The woman in white is still unwrapping puzzle pieces. A long, pearly leg bone, and then another in much worse shape, like a tree branch snapped off in winter.
“Tammy’s in charge today,” Jo says. “Running the room.” The two exchange a brief wave. Four other women dressed in sterile suits are taking their places in the lab in front of clear glass hoods. The fluorescent light is brutal, and cold.
“Looking into a serial killer’s refrigerator,” Bill mutters in my ear.
Jo glances our way, but I can’t tell if she heard. “Each forensic analyst has a specific job,” she explains. “Margaret will cut a small piece out of the bone. Toneesha will clean it with bleach, ethanol, and water. Jen will pulverize it to a fine powder, from which we extract the DNA. Bessie’s only role is to spray down the surfaces as we go, to keep things as sterile as possible. It’s protocol. Always.”
Her eyes are focused on the activity behind the window. Jo’s in her element. Brilliant, without ego. Empathetic, without cynicism.
I am thinking that Jo remembers every single person by name on both sides of the glass. I am thinking, she could be talking about how to refine sugar.
“Never forget protocol.” Suddenly stern. “Never get sloppy. Somebody accused me of that once. Worst time of my life.”
She doesn’t extrapolate. So far, no talk of the actual case-who these bones represent, why they are special.
“We like the skull and the denser bones, particularly femurs,” she continues. “Gives us the longest string of mitochondrial DNA and the best chance at retrieving information on our way to finding out who they are. We’re lucky we’ve got these three specimens, considering the bones have been scavenged and moved at least once.”