The gray lump, still covered in dust and ancient spider threads, sits between us on the coffee table.
“I’m Bill,” he says. “Not William. And definitely not Willie.” He smiles. I wonder if he’s used this line on a jury. I think he needs a better one. “Tessa, as I said on the phone, we’re thrilled that you called. Surprised, but thrilled. I hope you don’t mind that Dr. Seger-Joanna-tagged along. We don’t have any time to waste. Joanna is the forensic scientist excavating the bones of the… Susans tomorrow. She’d like to take a quick sample of your saliva. For DNA. Because of the issues we face with lost evidence and junk science, she wants to do the swab herself. That is, if you’re really serious. Angie never thought-”
I clear my throat. “I’m serious.” I feel a sudden pang for Angela Rothschild. The tidy silver-haired woman hounded me for the past six years, insisting that Terrell Darcy Goodwin was an innocent man. Picking at each doubt until I was no longer sure.
Angie was a saint, a bulldog, a little bit of a martyr. She’d spent the last half of her life and most of her parents’ inheritance freeing prisoners who’d been bullied by the state of Texas into wrongful convictions. More than 1,500 convicted rapists and murderers begged for her services every year, so Angie had to be choosy. She told me that playing God with those calls and letters was the only thing that ever made her consider quitting. I’d been to her office once, the first time she contacted me. It was housed in an old church basement located on an unpleasant side of Dallas known best for its high fatality rate for cops. If her clients couldn’t see the light of day or catch a quick Starbucks, she said, then neither could she. Her company in that basement was a coffeepot, three more attorneys who also worked other paying jobs, and as many law students as would sign on.
Angie sat in the same spot on my couch nine months ago, in jeans and scuffed black cowboy boots, with one of Terrell’s letters in her hand. She begged me to read it. She had begged me to do a lot of things, like give one of her expert gurus a shot at retrieving my memory. Now she was dead of a heart attack, found facedown in a pile of documents about Goodwin’s case. The reporter who wrote her obituary found that poetic. My guilt in the week since she died has been almost unbearable. Angie, I realized too late, was one of my tethers. One of the few who never gave up on me.
“Is this… what you have for us?” Bill stares at the filthy plastic grocery bag from Granddaddy’s basement like it is stuffed with gold. It has left a trail of pebbly mortar across the glass, right beside a pink hair band twisted with a strand of my daughter Charlie’s auburn hair.
“You said on the phone that you had to go… find it,” he says. “That you’d told Angie about this… project… but you weren’t sure where it was.”
It isn’t really a question, and I don’t answer.
His eyes wander the living room, strewn with the detritus of an artist and a teen-ager. “I’d like to set up a meeting at the office in a few days. After I’ve… examined it. You and I will have to go over all of the old ground for the appeal.” For such a large guy, there is a gentleness about him. I wonder about his courtroom style, if gentleness is his weapon.
“Ready for the swab?” Dr. Seger interrupts abruptly, all business, already stretching on latex gloves. Maybe worried that I’ll change my mind.
“Sure.” We both stand up. She tickles the inside of my cheek and seals microscopic bits of me in a tube. I know she plans to add my DNA to the collection provided by three other Susans, two of whom still go by the more formal name of Jane Doe. I feel heat emanating from her. Anticipation.
I return my attention to the bag on the table, and Bill. “This was kind of an experiment suggested by one of my psychiatrists. It might be more valuable for what isn’t there than what is.” In other words, I didn’t draw a black man who looked like Terrell Darcy Goodwin.
My voice is calm, but my heart is lurching. I am giving Tessie to this man. I hope it is not a mistake.
“Angie… she would be so grateful. Is grateful.” Bill crooks a finger up, the Michelangelo kind of gesture that travels up to the sky. I find this comforting: a man who is bombarded by people blocking his path every day-half-decent people clinging stubbornly to their lies and deadly mistakes-and yet he still believes in God. Or, at least, still believes in something.
Dr. Seger’s phone buzzes in her pocket. She glances at the screen. “I’ve got to take this. One of my Ph.D. students. I’ll meet you in the car, Bill. Good job, girl. You’re doing the right thing.” Gurrl. A slight twang. Oklahoma, maybe. I smile automatically.
“Right behind you, Jo.” Bill is moving deliberately, shutting his briefcase, gingerly picking up the bag, in no apparent hurry. His hands grow still when she shuts the door. “You’ve just met greatness. Joanna is a mitochondrial DNA genius. She can work goddamn miracles with degraded bones. She rushed to 9/11 and didn’t leave for four years. Made history, helping identify thousands of victims out of charred bits. Lived at the YMCA at first. Took communal showers with the homeless. Worked fourteen-hour days. She didn’t have to, it wasn’t her job, but whenever she could, she sat down and explained the science to grieving families so they could be as sure as she was. She learned a smattering of Spanish so she could try to talk to the families of the Mexican dishwashers and waiters who worked in restaurants in the North Tower. She is one of the best forensic scientists on the planet, who happens to be one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever met, and she is giving Terrell a chance. I want you to understand the kind of people on our side. Tell me, Tessa, why are you? Why are you suddenly on our side?”
A slight edge has crept into his voice. He is gently telling me not to screw them.
“There are several reasons,” I say unsteadily. “I can show you one of them.”
“Tessa, I want to know everything.”
“It’s better if you see it.”
I lead him down our narrow hall without speaking, past Charlie’s messy purple womb, usually pulsing with music, and throw open the door at the end. This wasn’t in my plan, not today anyway.
Bill looms like a giant in my bedroom, his head knocking into the antique chandelier dangling with sea glass that Charlie and I scavenged last summer on the gray beaches of Galveston. He ducks away and brushes against the curve of my breast by accident. Apologizes. Embarrassed. For a second, I see this stranger’s legs tangled in my sheets. I can’t remember a time that I let a man in here.
I watch painfully as Bill absorbs intimate details about me: the cartoonish portrait of Granddaddy’s house, gold and silver jewelry littered across my dresser, the close-up of Charlie staring out of lavender eyes, a neat pile of freshly laundered white lace panties on the chair, which I wish to God were tucked in a drawer.
He is already edging himself backward, toward the door, clearly wondering what the hell he has gotten himself into. Whether he has pinned his hopes for poor Terrell Darcy Goodwin on a crazy woman who has led him straight to her bedroom. Bill’s expression makes me want to laugh out loud, even though I am not above entertaining a fantasy about an all-American guy with two degrees, when my type runs the opposite direction.