“The hair?” I ask. “What hair?”
“Do you really still not know the details of the case?” Bill asks impatiently. “The hair is one of two pieces of physical evidence used to convict Terrell. They found it on the muddy jacket on the farm road.” Muddy jacket. Bloody glove. Suddenly I was back in O.J. Land.
“I’ve made it a point not to read much about the case,” I say stiffly. His frustration with me hurts. “It was a long time ago. I was only in that courtroom when I testified. I don’t remember a hair.”
Jo is examining me carefully, her pen stilled. “The hair was red.”
My hair.
“It was brought up at the last minute at trial. The prosecution expert examined it under a microscope and testified that it belonged to you. He was just one hundred percent damn sure it came off your head. It was the kind of junk science used back then. It is impossible to match a hair to a specific person by looking at it under a microscope. The only way is through DNA analysis. Which we are now doing.”
Yet… only 2 percent of the population has red hair. My grandmother had drilled that into me. First, after she caught me hacking off my orange locks with scissors at age four and then again six years later when I tried to dye it gold by squeezing thirteen lemons over my head and sitting like a piece of salmon in the Texas sun.
Red hair was something else that made me lucky. Special.
“I know about the jacket, of course,” I say steadily. “I know about the ID from the person who saw… Terrell… hitchhiking by the field. I just didn’t know about the hair.” Or I forgot.
Bill stands abruptly. “Maybe you also don’t know that seventy percent of wrongful convictions overturned on DNA involve eyewitness misidentification. That the jacket found on the road was a size too small for Terrell. And the red hair on the jacket? It was stick straight. If your school pictures are any indication, you looked like you were growing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos curls. It could have been a poodle hair, for Christ’s sake.”
Poodles have curly hair. And I don’t think red poodles exist. Although Aunt Hilda once dyed hers blue.
But I understand his anger. The need to lay it on.
I know what he’s thinking, although he isn’t saying it out loud. The real reason Terrell Darcy Goodwin lost the last seventeen years of his life isn’t because of a red hair or a jacket tossed carelessly by the side of the road or a woman who thought she could see in the dark while she was whizzing by in her Mercedes.
The real reason Terrell Darcy Goodwin sits on Death Row is because of the Black-Eyed Susan who testified, scared out of her mind.
Tessie, 1995
I can’t wait to tell him.
“I know that last week was rough,” he begins. “But there are only a couple of months left before the trial begins. That’s a very short time to learn what you do or do not know, and help you feel prepared.”
Fifty-nine days, to be exact.
“We should reconsider light hypnosis,” he says. “I know how you feel about it, but there are things lying in the shadows. Just inches away, Tessie. Inches.”
We had a deal. No drugs. No hypnosis.
My heart is slamming, my breath rapid, like a hot cat on the driveway. Like the time I ran three miles full out in the park last August, and Lydia had to yank the emergency paper bag out of her backpack.
Lydia, always there, always calm. Breathe. In and out. In and out. The paper bag, crickling and crackling, puffing and collapsing.
“What do you think?” he persists. “I’ve talked with your father about this.”
The silence between this threat and his next sentence is going to kill me. I’m trying to remember where I usually focus my eyes. Down? Up? At his voice? It’s important.
“Your father says he won’t support hypnosis unless you want it,” he says finally. “So this is between us.”
I’ve never loved my father more than this moment. I am filled with the relief of it, this simple, profound gesture of respect from the man who has watched his flame-haired daughter who believed she could beat the wind shrink to skin and bones and bitterness. My father holds up my future like a banged-up trophy that still means something, no matter how heavy it gets.
He is sitting outside this door, fighting for me. Every single day, fighting for me. I want to run out there and throw myself in his arms. I want to apologize for every silent night, every carefully prepared meal not eaten, every tentative invitation I have refused: to rock on the front porch swing or go for a walk or head up to Dairy Queen for a dipped cone.
“Our goals are the same, Tessie,” the doctor says. “For you to heal. Justice is part of the package.”
I haven’t uttered a word since I walked in the door. And I had planned to say so much. Tears hang in my eyes. What they mean, I don’t know. I refuse to let them fall.
“Tessie.” Going in for the kill. Corrupting my name into an order. Reminding me that he knows better than I do.
“This could help you see again,” he says.
Oh.
I want to laugh.
What he doesn’t know, what nobody knows yet, is that I already can.
Tessa, present day
I could have lived very happily with the idea of never, ever again. Never again plunking down on a therapist’s couch. Never again thinking about my manipulative drawings of the girl running in the sand and the girl without the mouth. Never again fighting this sick feeling that the other person in the room wants to take a paring knife and slowly carve out my secrets.
Dr. Nancy Giles almost immediately ushered Bill out the door, politely telling him he would be in the way. Actually it wasn’t all that polite. The fact that she is a beautiful gazelle-like creature probably took the edge off. Bill grumbled about being banned in such a little-boy manner that it made me think the two of them had known each other intimately for a long time, although he failed to mention it on the ride over.
My grandfather once told me that God puts pieces in the wrong places to keep us busy solving puzzles, and in the perfect places so that we never forget there is a God. At the time, we were standing on a remote stretch of Big Bend that was like a strange and wondrous moon.
Dr. Giles’s face may be the human equivalent, a glorious landscape of its own. Velvet brown skin with eyes dropped in like glittering lakes. Her nose, lips, cheekbones-all chiseled by a very talented angel. She understands her beauty and keeps things simple. Hair cropped into a bob. A well-cut blue suit with a skirt that strikes her mid-knee. Gold strings dangle from her ears, with a single large antique pearl at the end of each that dances every time she moves her head. I guess her age to be creeping toward seventy.
Her office, though, is like the favorite fat uncle who wears loud shirts and offers up a slightly smashed Twinkie from his pocket. Walls the color of egg yolk. A red velour couch, with a stuffed elephant plunked in the corner for a pillow. Two comfy plaid chairs. Low-slung shelves shooting out a riot of color, crammed with picture books and Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket, American Girl dolls of every ethnicity, trucks and plastic tools and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. A table topped with a tray of markers and crayons. An iMac at i-am-a-Child level. A refrigerator door riddled with the graffiti of children’s awkward, happy signatures. Off to the side, a basket loaded with snacks both forbidden and polyunsaturated, and no mother to smack your hand.
My eyes linger on the framed prints-not your usual doc-in-a-box muted abstractions. Instead, Chagall’s magical, musical animals and the loveliest blue ever imagined. Magritte’s steam engine shooting out of a fireplace, and his giant green apple, and men in bowler hats floating up like Mary Poppins.