“I think,” she says, “it was the digger snatcher.”
Tessie, 1995
I know a few things about the doctor’s daughter now. Her name is Rebecca. She was sixteen. Not because he told me. Because Lydia is a digger.
She disappeared the same year that a madman robbed the world of John Lennon and Alfred Hitchcock died less violently than he deserved. Lydia and I found out that much as we carefully spun the microfiche of a local newspaper until it landed on a two-year-old profile of my doctor, produced right after he won a prestigious international award for research into normal people and paranoia.
Who the hell is normal, Lydia had muttered. Then she spun a few pages and read Hitchcock’s obit aloud to me. She was especially riveted by the revelation that he tortured his own daughter during the filming of one of Lydia’s favorite movies, Strangers on a Train. He stuck her on a Ferris wheel, halted her car at the top, turned off all the lights on the set, and abandoned her all alone in the dark. By the time some crew person brought her down, she was hysterical. Lydia clicked a button on the machine and copied both the doctor’s interview and the Hitchcock obit, which she deemed worthy of adding to the personal files of weirdness she kept in the box under her bed.
In fact, on the bus ride home from the library, she was more distracted by the fate of Hitchcock’s daughter than by how little she’d learned about Rebecca. He was a freaking sadist, she announced, while everyone seated near us stared at my little moon scar.
Rebecca was a single paragraph in the feature story summing up my doctor’s life, which makes me unbelievably sad. My guess? He told the reporter that the subject of his daughter’s disappearance was off the table.
He certainly made it clear it was off the table for us at our last session. A nice long silence followed my question about Rebecca. So I announced I liked the print of The Reaper hanging over his desk. “My grandfather went through a Winslow Homer wheat period,” I said. And, oh yeah, I’m not blind anymore.
I couldn’t tell if he was faking his surprise. The doctor appeared genuinely thrilled about what he declared a “major, major breakthrough.” He had fiddled around with a silly old-fashioned eye test that involved a pencil and my nose. Asked me to close my eyes and describe his face in the greatest detail possible.
He reassured me again that even though he wouldn’t discuss it with me, his daughter had absolutely nothing to do with the Black-Eyed Susan case. I had never asked that, but even if she does, I’m not at all sure at this point I want to know.
It’s hard not to be a little happy. I’ve gained three pounds in five days. My dad and brother squeezed me so hard in a three-way hug when they found out I could see again that I thought my heart would burst in my chest. Aunt Hilda hustled over a three-layer German chocolate cake, gooey with her famous coconut pecan frosting, and I’m pretty sure it was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.
Last night, a brand-new hardback copy of The Horse Whisperer appeared on my bedside table, in a house where it is unheard of not to wait until a book comes out in paperback.
The trial is fifty-two days away. That means twelve more sessions or so, if I count a couple extra to wrap things up after the trial. The end is near. I really don’t want to drag distractions, like Rebecca, into things. It was kind of a mean thing for me to bring up.
Unfortunately, Rebecca is now Lydia’s latest obsession, and she’s on a mission to hunt down more about her in other newspapers. Whatever she finds, I tell her, will be meaningless. Rebecca was pretty, with a lot of friends. She was such a nice girl and It was such a nice family and blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to sound cold, but there it is.
I know, because I’ve read every possible exaggeration about my life since I became a Black-Eyed Susan. My mother died under “suspicious” circumstances and my grandfather built a creepy house and I am practically perfect. The truth? My mother was struck by a rare stroke, my grandmother was the crazier one, and I am not and never will be a heroine out of a fairy tale. Even though they were all victims first, too. Snow White poisoned. Cinderella enslaved. Rapunzel locked up. Tessie, dumped with bones.
Some monster’s twisted fantasy.
Bet the doctor would like me to talk about that, I think, as he settles into his chair.
He smiles. “Fire away, Tessie.”
Last week, he had agreed to let me lead in this session. He also promised he wouldn’t tell my dad I’d faked blindness for a little bit. A promise kept so far. I wondered if he bargained with all of his patients. If this was appropriate.
It doesn’t matter. Today I am prepared to offer him something real.
“I’m afraid every time the lights dim… that I am going blind again,” I say. “Like when my family went to Olive Garden and some waitress turned the lights down for dinner mood or whatever. Or when my brother shut the living room blinds behind me so he could see the TV better.”
“When this happens, instead of thinking you are going blind again, why don’t you just tell yourself emphatically that you aren’t?”
“Seriously?” Ay yi yi. My dad was paying for this?
“Because you want to see, Tessie. It’s not like a little goblin is sitting inside your head manning a light switch. You are in control. Statistically, the chances of this ever happening again are almost nil.”
OK, kind of useful. At least encouraging. Even though chances of this happening to me were almost nil to begin with.
“What else is going on in there?” He taps his skull with a finger.
“I’m worried… about O. J. Simpson.”
“What exactly are you worried about?”
“That he might fool the jury and get off.” I don’t tell him that Lydia had soaked one of her own red leather gloves in V8 juice, dried it in the sun, and demonstrated how she could spread her hand wide and get the same effect as O.J.
The doctor crosses one long leg over the other. He’s much more of a conservative dresser than I’d imagined. Starched white shirt, black dress pants with a stand-up crease, loosened blue tie with tiny red diamonds, black shoes grinning with polish. No wedding ring.
“I think the chances of that happening are also practically zero,” he says. “You are simply worried that your own attacker will be set free. I’d advise you not to watch any of the O.J. coverage and ratchet things up in your head.”
Aunt Hilda offered this same advice for free, and tempered it by handing me a plate of fried okra fresh out of her skillet while snapping off my TV.
“Tessie, today is supposed to be all your show, but we need to divert for a second. The prosecutor called right before you arrived. He wants to meet one-on-one with you before the trial. I could ask to sit in on the interviews if you’d feel more comfortable. He’s thinking about conducting the first interview next Tuesday. We can even do it in our regular session if you like.”
He uncrosses his leg and leans toward me. My stomach wads itself into a hard ball, a roly-poly beetle protecting itself.
“Getting your sight back is huge. Meeting the prosecutor and getting over your fear of the trial is a logical next step. It might even help… jog your memory. Think of your brain as a sieve or a colander, with only the tiniest, safest bits getting through at first.”
I’m barely listening to his psycho mumbo-jumbo about kitchen gadgets.
Seven days away.
“I hope you don’t mind that I told him the good news,” he says.
“Of course not,” I lie.
I’m thinking about the little bag, packed and ready for months, wedged into the far back corner of my closet.
Wondering if it’s too late to run.