It is midnight, and I am at least three hundred feet away, under a tree. I have darted under the police tape that marks off the site. I wonder who the hell they think is walking a cemetery at this time of night but ghosts. Well, I guess I am.
They’ve erected a white tent over the two graves, and it glows with pale light, like a paper lantern. There are far more people here than I expected. Bill, of course. I recognize the district attorney from his picture in the paper. There’s a balding man beside him in an ill-fitting suit. At least five policemen, and another five human beings dressed like aliens in Tyvek suits, wandering in and out of the tent. I know that the medical examiner is among them. Careers ride on this one.
Did the reporter who wrote Angie’s obituary know that his words would pry loose the rusty lever of justice? Create a small public outcry in a state that executes men monthly? Change a judge’s mind about exhuming the bones and considering a new trial? Convince me once and for all to dial the phone?
The man in the suit suddenly pivots. I catch the flash of a priest’s collar before I duck behind the tree. My eyes sting for a second, struck by this furtive operation and the supreme effort to treat these girls with dignity and respect when no one has a clue who they are, when there is not a reporter in sight.
The girls rising out of the earth tonight were nothing but bones when they were transported to that old wheat field eighteen years ago. I was barely alive. They say that Merry had been dead at least thirty hours. By the time the cops got to us, Merry was pretty well scavenged. I tried to protect her, but at some point in the night I passed out. Sometimes, I can still hear the animated conversation of the field rats. I can’t tell anybody who loves me these things. It’s better if they think I don’t remember.
The doctors say my heart saved me. I was born with a heart genetically on the slow side to begin with. Add the fact that I was in peak running condition as one of the nation’s top high-school hurdlers. On a normal day, doing homework, eating a hamburger, or painting my nails, my pulse clicked along at a steady thirty-seven beats a minute and crawled as low as twenty-nine at night when I slept. The average heart rate for a teen-ager is about seventy. Daddy had a habit of waking up at two every morning and checking to see if I was breathing, even though a famous Houston cardiologist had told him to relax. For sure, my heart was a bit of a phenomenon, as was my speed. People whispered about the Olympics. Called me the Little Fireball because of my hair and my temper when I ran a bad time or a girl nudged me off a hurdle.
While I fought for life in that grave, the doctors say my heart wound down to around eighteen. An EMT at the scene even mistook me for dead.
The district attorney told the jury that I surprised the Black-Eyed Susan killer, not the other way around. Set off a panic in him, prompted him to get rid of the evidence. That the large bruise on Terrell Darcy Goodwin’s gut in the blown-up exhibit photograph, blue and green and yellow tie-dye, was my artwork. People appreciate pretty fantasies like this, where there is a feisty hero, even when there is no factual basis for it.
A dark van is slowly backing up to the tent. O. J. Simpson got off the same year I testified, and he massacred his wife and left his blood behind on her gate. There was no solid DNA evidence against Terrell Darcy Goodwin, except a tattered jacket mired in the mud a mile away with his blood type on the right cuff. The spot of blood was so tiny and degraded they couldn’t tackle DNA, still fairly new in criminal court. It was enough for me to hold on to back then, but not anymore. I pray that Joanna will work her high priestess magic, and we will finally know who these two girls are. I’m counting on them to lead all of us to peace.
I turn to go, and my toe catches the edge of something. I pitch forward, instantly breathless, palms out, onto an old broken gravestone. The roots have bullied the marker until it toppled over and broke in half.
Did anyone hear? I glance around quickly. The tent is half-down. Someone is laughing. Shadows moving, none of them my way. I push myself up, hands stinging, brushing off the death and grit clinging to my jeans. I tug my cell phone out of my back pocket, and it casts its friendly light when I press the button. I shine it over the gravestone. A red smear from my hands marks the sleeping lamb guarding over Christina Driskill.
Christina entered the world, and escaped it, on the same day. March 3, 1872.
My mind burrows into the rocky dirt, fighting its way to the small wooden box that rests under my feet, tilted, cracked open, strangled by roots.
I’m thinking of Lydia.
Tessie, 1995
“Do you cry often?” First question. Gentle.
“No,” I say. So much for Lydia’s beauty fix of sticking two frozen spoons under my eyes after my little jags.
“Tessie, I want you to tell me the very last thing you saw, before you went blind.” No lingering on my puffy face. Taking up right where we left off last time. Smart tactic, I think grudgingly. He actually used the word blind, which no one else would dare say to my face except Lydia, who also told me three days ago to get up and wash my hair because it looked like stale cotton candy.
This doctor has already figured out that a warm-up act with me was a complete waste of time.
I saw my mother’s face. Beautiful, kind, loving. That’s the last perfectly clear image that hung before me, except that my mother has been dead since I was eight, and my eyes were wide open. My mother’s face, and then nothing but a shimmering gray ocean. I often think it was kind of God to introduce me to blindness that way.
I clear my throat, determined to say something in today’s session, to appear more cooperative, so he will tell Daddy that I am making progress. Daddy, who takes off from his job every Tuesday morning to bring me here. For whatever reason, I don’t think this doctor will lie to him, like most of the others. The way this doctor asks his questions is not the same. Neither are my answers, and I’m not sure why.
“There were a bunch of cards on the windowsill in my hospital room,” I say casually. “One of them had a picture of a pig on the front. Wearing a bow tie and a top hat. It said, ‘I hope you squeal better soon.’ The pig-that’s the last thing I saw.”
“An unfortunate choice of wording on the card.”
“Ya think?”
“Did anything else bother you about that greeting card?”
“No one could read the signature.” An illegible squiggle, like a wire spring.
“So you didn’t know who it was from.”
“A lot of strangers sent cards from all over. And flowers and stuffed animals. There were so many, my father asked them to be sent on to the children’s cancer floor.” Eventually, the FBI got a clue and swept everything to a lab. I later worried about what they might have ripped out of a dying kid’s hands in return for not a scrap of useful evidence.
The pig held a daisy in his pink hoof. I had left that part out. At sixteen, drugged up in a hospital bed and scared out of my mind, I didn’t know the difference between a yellow daisy and a black-eyed Susan.
My cast is itching like crazy, and I reach into the slim gap between my calf and the cast with two fingers. Can’t get to the spot on my ankle. Oscar licks my leg with a sandpaper tongue, trying to help.
“OK, maybe that card was the trigger,” the doctor says. “Maybe not. It’s a start. Here’s my thinking. We’re going to talk about your conversion disorder before we move on to preparing you for court. In the interest of time, there was hope by… others… that I could work around it. But it is in the way.”