Ya think?
“As far as I’m concerned, time stands still in this room.” He’s telling me no pressure. That we’re sailing together in my gray ocean, and I control the wind. This is the first lie I know he’s told me.
Conversion disorder. The nice, fancy name for it.
Freud called it hysterical blindness.
All those expensive tests and nothing physically wrong.
All in her head.
Poor thing doesn’t want to see the world.
She will never be the same.
Why do people think I can’t hear them?
I tune back in to his voice. I’ve decided he sounds like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. Rough Texas drawl. Smart as hell, and knows it.
… it’s not that uncommon in young females who have endured a trauma like this. What is uncommon is that it’s lasted this long. Eleven months.”
Three hundred and twenty-six days, doctor. But I don’t correct him.
A slight squeak as he shifts in his chair, and Oscar rises up protectively. “There are exceptions,” he says. “I once treated a boy, a virtuoso pianist, who had practiced eight hours a day since he was five. He woke up one morning and his hands were frozen. Paralyzed. Couldn’t even hold a glass of milk. Doctors couldn’t find a cause. He began to wiggle his fingers exactly two years later, to the day.”
The doctor’s voice is closer. At my side. Oscar bangs my arm with his nose, to let me know. The doctor is sliding something thin and cool and smooth into my hand. “Try this,” he says.
A pencil. I grasp it. Dig it deep into the side of my cast. Feel intense, gratifying relief. A slight breeze as the doctor moves away, maybe the flap of his jacket. I’m certain he looks nothing like Tommy Lee Jones. But I can picture Oscar. White as fresh snow. Blue eyes that see everything. Red collar. Sharp little teeth if you bother me.
“Does this piano player know that you talk about him to other patients?” I ask. I can’t help myself. The sarcasm is a horsewhip I can’t put away. But on our third Tuesday morning together, I have to admit this doctor is starting to get to me. I’m feeling the first pinch of guilt. Like I need to try harder.
“As a matter of fact, yes. I was interviewed for a Cliburn documentary about him. The point is: I believe you will see again.”
“I’m not worried.” I blurt it out.
“That is often a symptom of conversion disorder. A lack of caring about whether you’ll ever go back to normal. But, in your case, I don’t think that’s true.”
His first direct confrontation. He waits silently. I feel my temper flare.
“I know the real reason why you made an exception to see me.” My voice cracks a little when I want it to sound defiant. “What you have in common with my father. I know you had a daughter who disappeared.”
Tessa, present day
Angie’s utilitarian metal desk looks exactly the way I remember, buried in mountains of paper and file folders. Shoved into a corner of an expansive, open basement room at St. Stephen’s, the stone-and-brick Catholic church that sits defiantly in the 2nd Avenue and Hatcher Street corridor of hell. Smack in the center of a Dallas neighborhood that made a Top 25 FBI list for most dangerous in the nation.
It is high Texas noon outside, but not in here. In here, it is gloomy and timeless, colored by the stains of a violent history, when this church was abandoned for eight years and this room was used as an execution factory for drug dealers.
The first and only time I’d been here, Angie told me that the hopeful young priest who rented her the space whitewashed the walls four times himself. The indentations and bullet holes in the walls, he told her, were going to be permanent, like the nails in the cross. Never forget.
Her desk lamp is the single thing glowing, casting faint light on the unframed print tacked above it. The Stoning of Saint Stephen. Rembrandt’s first known work, painted at nineteen. I had learned about the chiaroscuro technique in another basement, with my grandfather bent over his easel. Strong lights and heavy shadows. Rembrandt was a master of it. He made sure the brilliance of heaven was opening up for Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, murdered by a mob because evil people told lies about him. Three priests huddle in the upper corner. Watching him die. Doing nothing.
I wonder which came first to the basement: this print or Angie, who decided Saint Stephen’s fate was a most appropriate marker for her desk. The edges of the print are soft and furry. It is attached to the pockmarked wall by three scratched yellow thumbtacks and one red one. A small rip on the left side has been repaired with Scotch tape.
Two inches away is another vision of heaven. A drawing on lined notebook paper. Five stick figures with lopsided butterfly wings illuminated by a bright orange sunburst. A child’s crooked print tumbles across the sky: ANGIE’S ANGELS.
I learned in Angie’s obituary that this drawing was a long-ago gift from the six-year-old daughter of Dominicus Steele, an apprentice plumber accused of raping an SMU coed outside a Fort Worth bar in the ’80s. Dominicus was identified by the victim and two of her sorority sisters.
That night, he’d flirted with the victim up close. He was big and black, and a good dancer. The white college girls loved him until they decided he was the guy in the gray hooded sweatshirt running away from their drunk, crumpled friend in the alley. Dominicus was freed by DNA extracted from semen stored for twelve years in an evidence storage unit. Dominicus’s mother was the first to speak to reporters in terms of “Angie’s Angels,” and her sweet little moniker stuck.
I’d never describe Angie as an angel. She did whatever she had to. She was a very good liar when she needed to be. I know, because she had lied for Charlie and me.
I take a step, and the hollow sound of my boot echoes on the cheap yellow linoleum that covers up God knows what. The four other desks that are scattered around the floor, in similar states of paper chaos, are also empty. Where is everybody?
There’s a blue door on the far side of the room that’s impossible to miss. I venture over. Knock lightly. Nothing. Maybe I should just hunker down in Angie’s chair for a while. Swerve it around on the cranky roller wheels she complained about and stare into Rembrandt’s heaven. Ponder the role of the martyr.
Instead, I twist the knob and open the door a crack. Knock again. Hear animated voices. Push the door all the way. A long conference table. Blazing overhead lights. Bill’s startled face. Another woman, jumping out of her chair abruptly, knocking over her cup of coffee.
My eyes, traveling down the table, follow the river of amber liquid.
Head thrumming.
Copies of drawings, stretched edge to edge across the scratched surface.
Tessie’s drawings.
The real ones. And the ones that aren’t.
I am staring at the score, 12-28, scrawled in white chalk on a blackboard. A lopsided Little League game, maybe, or a bad day for the Dallas Cowboys. It is clear from the chart’s wording that these are the twelve men who have been freed over the years by Angie and her rotating legal crew, and the twenty-eight who have not.
The woman who tipped over the coffee, introduced to me as a third-year University of Texas law student named Sheila Dunning, has left us. William quickly swept up the copies of my drawings, tucked them out of the way, and set a fresh mug of hot coffee in front of me. He’s apologized multiple times, and I’ve said over and over, It’s OK, it’s OK, I have to see those drawings again sometime and I should have knocked louder.