It seems like an unusual question. So many, many years have passed. Why does it matter?
“I haven’t seen her since we were seniors in high school. She left town before we graduated, right after the trial.” She just disappeared.
“That must have been hard.” Every word is careful. “To lose a good friend so soon after the trauma.”
“Yes.” For more reasons than I want to explain. I am inching toward the door. Lydia is not a place I will go. Not today.
Yet Dr. Giles won’t let me leave, not yet.
“Tessa, I believe the girl who drew that scene, your friend Lydia, was genuinely terrified.”
“You said there were… two girls in that picture. I always thought there was one girl. Bleeding.” A tiny, tiny red tornado.
“At first, so did I,” she says. “The shapes are not distinct. But if you look closely, you can see four hands. Two heads. I believe one of the girls is a protector, crouching over the other one. I don’t think that is blood from the attack of the flower monsters. I think the protector has red hair.”
Tessie, 1995
It is hard, pretending not to see. It has been two days. I know that I can’t keep it up very long, especially with my dad. I need some time to observe, to analyze body language. To know what everyone is really feeling about me when they think I’m not looking.
The doctor scribbles away at his desk, a scritch-scratching sound that makes me want to scream.
He glances up with a concerned frown to see if I might have changed my mind about talking. Or my pose. Arms crossed, staring straight ahead. I had marched in the room at our appointed time and told him that I was done. Done, done, done.
We had a deal, I’d reminded him.
No freakin’ way was I doing hypnosis, where I float along like a dizzy bluebird and tell him secret things. I set out my rules from the beginning, and if it was so easy to erase this one from his mind, what else might he do? Offer up a happy cocktail? I’d read Prozac Nation. That girl was sad. So messed up. She wasn’t me.
I didn’t want to be like her, or Randy, the guy with the locker next to mine, wearing an Alice in Chains T-shirt every day, popping Xanax between classes and sleeping through high school. I had heard that his mother has breast cancer. I don’t want to ask, but I am always sure to smile at him when we meet at the lockers. I get it. Randy sent me a cute card at the hospital with a thermometer sticking out of a cat’s mouth. He wrote inside, Sometimes life is so unkind. I wonder how long it took him to find that lyric. Alanis is plastered inside my locker, so he had to know. He probably couldn’t find any Alice in Chains tunes that wouldn’t tell me to go kill myself or something.
Lydia had caught on right away. Tiny clues. My Bible on the dresser opened to Isaiah instead of Matthew. The TV ever so slightly more angled toward my spot on the bed. The pink-and-green T-shirt that matched the leggings, and the brown and peach Maybelline eye shadow that I hadn’t put on for a year. It wasn’t just one thing, she said. It was all of them.
There were surprises, everywhere. My face in the bathroom mirror, for one. Everything about me, more angular. My nose juts out like the notch on my grandfather’s old sundial. The half-moon scar under my eye is fading, more pink than red, less noticeable. Dad tentatively suggested a few weeks ago that we could talk to a plastic surgeon if I wanted, but the idea of lying there like Sleeping Beauty while a man with a knife stands over me… not ever gonna happen. I would rather people stare.
Oscar is even whiter than I imagined, although maybe that’s just because everything seems a little blinding at the moment. He’s the first thing I saw at the end of my bed the morning I opened my eyes for real-a pile of dove feathers with a head. I had called out his name softly. When his tongue slapped my nose, I knew for sure I wasn’t dreaming.
There was no drama to my sudden transformation. I went to sleep, I woke up, and I could see again. The world had crept back into sharp and excruciating focus.
The doctor’s still at it with the scritch-scratching at the desk. I twitch my eyes over to the clock on the wall. Nine minutes left. Oscar’s sleeping at my feet, but his ears are flicking around. Maybe an evil squirrel dream. I kick off my sneaker and run my foot back and forth across his warm back.
The doctor notices my movement, hesitates, and puts down his pen. He makes his way slowly over to the chair across from me. I think again what an excellent job Lydia had done of describing him.
“Tessie, I want to tell you how sorry I am,” he begins. “I didn’t honor our agreement. I pushed you. It is everything a good therapist should not do, regardless of the circumstances.”
I greet him with silence but keep my gaze locked over his shoulder. Tears, barely under the surface.
Because there are things I’d still rather not see. My brother’s face after my dad talked to him quietly last night about his grades, which used to be straight A’s. The medical insurance forms scattered all over the table like someone lost at poker and tossed the deck. The sad, bare state of the refrigerator, weeds choking the cracks in the driveway, tight lines curved around my father’s mouth.
All of this, because of me.
I need to keep trying. I want to get better. I can see. Isn’t that better?
Didn’t this man asking for forgiveness right now probably have something to do with that? Shouldn’t I let him score that victory? Don’t we all make mistakes?
“What else can I say, Tessie, that might begin to restore your trust in me?”
I think he knows that I can see.
“You can tell me about your daughter,” I say. “The one you lost.”
Tessa, present day
The tutu is finished.
I steam it gently, even though it doesn’t really need it. Charlie makes fun of me and my Rowenta IS6300 Garment Steamer. But Rowenta has probably been my best and most faithful therapist. She pops out of the closet about once a month and never asks a single question. She’s mindless. Magic. I borrow her wand and all of the wrinkles disappear. Results are instant, and certain.
Except for today.
Today, a mobile spins in my head, dangled by an unseen hand. I’m transfixed by the pictures whizzing by. Lydia’s face is on one. Terrell’s is on another. They dance among yellow flowers and black eyes and rusty shovels and plastic hearts. All of them, strung together with brittle bone.
It has been two days since Dr. Nancy Giles of Vanderbilt/Oxford/Harvard interpreted Lydia’s drawing, right after she had announced in no uncertain terms that she didn’t put too much stock in Freudian crap.
Dr. Giles thinks something was wrong with Lydia. That Lydia perceived me as the protector. Which can’t be. I never told anyone about the poem he left me in the ground by the live oak. Lydia drew the picture before the poem. I would have died without Lydia back then, not the other way around.
I need to see this drawing again, dammit. Why didn’t Dr. Giles offer to show it to me? Did she think I was a liar? That I knew something I wasn’t telling? As always, as soon as I left a therapist’s office, the doubts wriggled out like slimy worms.
I miss you. That’s what Lydia wrote on the flowers delivered to my home after all those years of silence. Unless she wasn’t the one who sent them. What if they are from my monster? What if my silence killed her? What if, because I didn’t warn her, he carried out the poetic threat so coyly buried by my tree house? If you tell, I will make Lydia a Susan, too. What if my denial and stupidity sacrificed both Terrell and her?
Terrell. I think about him all the time now. I wonder if he hates me, if his arms are thick from push-ups on concrete, if he has already thought about his last meal, just in case. Then I remember, he can’t ask for a last meal. One of the guys who chained James Byrd Jr. to a pickup and dragged him to death ruined that for everybody. He requested two chicken-fried steaks, a pound of barbecue, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover’s pizza, an omelet, a bowl of okra, a pint of Blue Bell, peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and three root beers. It was delivered before his execution. And then he didn’t eat it. Texas said, no more.