Lydia always described her house as a shotgun wedding cake, a two-story beige box with a last-minute white piping of scalloped trim. A lot has changed since our childhood. The icing is crumbling. What used to be a perfectly tended green square of lawn is now black dirt choked by hoodlum weeds. No more wooden stake poked in the ground with welcome y’all and a painted yellow sunflower. Lydia told me that her dad ripped the sign out of the ground before I came home from the hospital.
“Hey.” I didn’t hear his car pull up, but Bill is suddenly striding toward me, lankier and taller than I remember. Maybe it’s because his long legs are extending out of black Nike shorts and expensive athletic shoes. Everything about him is damp-hair, face, neck, arms. A triangle of sweat stains the front of a crimson Harvard T-shirt, so beloved that a few rips don’t matter. He finally got a haircut but it’s too short for his big ears. I want him to go the hell away. And stay.
“I said not to come,” I protest. “I thought you were playing basketball.” I’d regretted my impulsive phone call the second Bill answered. He was out of breath. I wondered whether I had interrupted acrobatic sex with a fellow do-gooding lawyer. He claimed he was playing a pickup game.
“All but over. My fellow law pals and I were getting creamed by a bunch of high-schoolers. Your call was a welcome distraction on the way to my parents’ house in Westover Hills, where I’ve unfortunately committed to dinner. Unless you’d like to invite me over. Or accompany me. So you said you had something to tell me. What’s up?”
I promptly burst into tears.
I’m unprepared for this, and by the look on his face, so is Bill. And, yet, the river is flowing like it hasn’t since my father died so swiftly four years ago of pancreatic cancer. He hugs me awkwardly, because what’s he going to do, which makes me sob harder.
“Oh, hell,” he says. “I’m too sweaty for this. Here, let’s sit.”
He guides me to a sitting position on the curb and curls his arm around my shoulders. The brace of solid muscle, his kindness, is waking up every hormone in my body. I need to pull out of this embrace immediately. No complications. Instead, my head falls sideways like a rock onto his chest and my shoulders heave.
“Uh, I don’t really recommend that you put your nose in that… underarm,” he says. But once he realizes how fully committed I am, he pulls me tighter.
After a few seconds, I lift my head slightly and let out a choke. “Hold on. I’m under control.”
“Yes, you definitely have things under control.” He pushes my head back down but not before I catch something hungry on his face that isn’t do-gooding at all.
I raise my chin again. Our lips are two inches apart.
He pulls back. “You’re red all over. Like a plum.”
I giggle and hiccup at the same time. I’m a giggling, hiccuping plum. I tug my skirt down. He averts his eyes and gestures to the house behind us, the one whose address he had plugged into his GPS at my behest only twenty minutes ago. “What’s up with this house? Who lives here?” It is an abrupt, purposeful shift.
God, I’m pitiful. I stand up.
“You, um, need to wipe your nose.”
Utter, utter humiliation. I use my sweater because at this point, it doesn’t matter. I suck in a deep breath as a test. It doesn’t trigger another tsunami. “Hear me out for a second first,” I say stiffly. “I think the Black-Eyed Susan killer has been leaving me flowers for years. Not just the other night at my house.”
“What? How many other places?”
“Six. If you include under my bedroom window.”
“Are you sure…”
“That they aren’t just growing up in places like God intended and I’m a lunatic? Of course not. That is why I said, I think. The first time, I was only seventeen. It was right after Terrell’s conviction. The killer left me a poem buried in an old prescription bottle. I found it when I dug up a little patch of black-eyed Susans, in the back yard of the house over there.” I point four houses down, at a yellow two-story on the opposite side of the street. “My childhood home. He planted the flowers by my tree house three days after the trial ended.” I watch for the awareness to set in. “That’s right, after Terrell was locked up.”
“Go on.”
“The… person who left it twisted a warning into a poem called ‘Black-Eyed Susan’ written by an eighteenth-century poet named John Gay. The poem indicated that Lydia would die if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.” Bill’s face is blank. I don’t know whether it’s because he doesn’t know who the hell John Gay is, or whether he is trying to contain his fury.
“I didn’t figure out who John Gay was until about ten years ago. He was most famous for The Beggar’s Opera. Have you heard of it? Captain Macheath? Polly Peachum? No? Well, more to the point, he also wrote a ballad about a black-eyed girl named Susan sending her lover off to sea. There’s some romantic theory that this is how the flower got its name…”
I begin to recite softly, as a mower revs up in a nearby back yard.
“Oh Susan, Susan, lovely dear
My vows shall ever true remain
Let me kiss off that falling tear
I never want to hurt you again
But if you tell, I will make Lydia
A Susan, too.”
“Jesus, Tessa. What did your father say?”
“I never told him. You’re the first person I have ever told, other than Angie. I just couldn’t… worry my father anymore.”
“And Lydia?”
“We weren’t speaking.”
Bill looks at me curiously.
“I told Angie right before she died,” I continue. “She was concerned for Charlie and me. At the end, she was considering leaving me completely out of things.”
“Why…”
“Why didn’t she tell you? Because she was protecting me. I think she was wrong, though. I can’t live with knowing I might be part of killing an innocent man. It wasn’t a hard decision at seventeen. The trial was over. I wanted everything to go back to normal. I figured it could be just another sick individual who was obsessed with the case. There were plenty of those. Which meant Terrell could still be guilty as hell. The prosecutor, Al Vega, was sure. And Lydia… I was furious with her, but I certainly didn’t want her life in danger.”
“Hold on, OK?”
Bill leaps up and jogs to his car, a small black BMW, three little letters that I think turn normally nice human beings into road demons. He disappears inside his fancy womb for so long, I wonder whether he is listening to Bach and contemplating whether to flip on the ignition and screech off. When he finally emerges, he holds a pen and pad in his left hand. He plops back down on the curb. He’s already written some notes, and I glimpse a few of the words.
John Gay. 1995.
“Keep going,” he orders.
“Lately, I’ve revisited a couple of the places I think he left flowers… on my own. In no particular order.”
“Whoa. Stop right there. You’ve been returning to these places. Why in the hell are you doing that?”
“I know, I know. Crazy. You see, after the first time, I never dug to see if he buried something else for me. It was like I couldn’t give him the satisfaction. I couldn’t let myself believe that much. I thought it could be some kid’s idea of a joke. Or a random freak. We were all over the newspaper, even Lydia.” She always pointed out her name to me. She was thrilled when she made The New York Times as Miss Cartwright’s neighbor and confidante.
“I survived on denial,” I continue. “And, yes, I realize it’s insane to think anything would still be there. And yet, what if? I just thought if I did find something, it might help… Terrell.”