Everyone is beaming. The doctor. My dad. I’m beaming back because otherwise I might explode. Almost free, almost free, almost free.
“I want to say again how brave you were to testify,” the doctor says. “You held your own. The bottom line: Because of you, a killer is on Death Row.”
“Yes. It’s a relief.” A lie. The only thing that’s a relief is the news that my doctor is moving to China.
He’s sitting there, so smug. I can’t let him get away with it. I won’t forgive myself.
“Dad, can you just give us one second alone to say goodbye?”
“Sure. Of course.” He plants a kiss on my head. Shakes the doctor’s hand.
Dad doesn’t pull the door shut hard enough when he leaves, so the doc gets up to close the two-inch gap. Click. Doctor-client confidentiality and all.
“Why wouldn’t you ever talk about Rebecca?” I ask, before he sits down.
“Tessie, it’s very painful. Surely you can understand that. And it would have been unprofessional of me to do so. I shouldn’t have even said what I did. You need to let this go. It can’t be a part of our professional relationship.”
“Which is ending. Right now.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. You are still my patient until you walk out that door.”
“I saw you with her.”
“You’re really beginning to worry me, Tessie.” And, in fact, his face does look worried. “You were right. My daughter is most likely dead. She isn’t… talking to you, is she? Like the Susans?”
“I’m not talking about your daughter.”
“Then I have no idea what you mean,” he says.
I don’t say it out loud, because what’s the point?
We both know he’s lying.
“See you around,” I say.
Part II: COUNTDOWN
“According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take ‘a harder stance’ on the death penalty. What’s a harder stance on the death penalty? We’re already killing the guy. How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair?”-Jay Leno
– Tessa, listening to The Tonight Show in bed, 2004
September 1995
MR. VEGA: I know that this has been a very difficult day of testifying, Tessie. I appreciate your willingness to speak for all of the victims and I know the jury does, too. I have just one more question for now. What was the worst part of lying in that grave?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Knowing that if I gave up and died, my father and little brother would have to live without knowing what happened. That they would think things were more horrible than they were. I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t that bad.
MR. VEGA: You were lying near-comatose with a shattered ankle in a grave with a dead girl and the bones of other victims-and you wanted to tell your family that it wasn’t that bad?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Well, it was bad. But imagining what happened for the rest of your life is worse. You know, letting your mind fill all that in, like, a million different ways. That’s what I thought about a lot… how they’d have to do that. When the rescuers came, I was, like, so relieved that I could tell my dad it wasn’t that bad.
29 days until the execution
In a month, Terrell’s coffin, black and shiny as a new Mustang, will be hitched on a wagon to the back of a John Deere tractor. He will sink into the ground with the bodies of thousands of rapists and killers rotting in the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery. Most of these men lived violently on the surface but they are interred on a pretty little hill in East Texas summoned out of Walt Whitman’s dreams. These were men officially unclaimed in death. In Terrell’s case, people claim him, love him-they just don’t have the money to bury him. The state of Texas will do that with $2,000 of taxpayer money and surprising grace.
Inmates will rumble that tractor. They will be his pallbearers and bow their heads. They will chisel out his stone. Stencil on his inmate number. Maybe misspell his name.
They will use a shovel like the one in my hand.
My stomach churns for Terrell as I stare at the patch of black earth that my grandfather used to till behind his fairy tale house. At the very place where, twelve years ago on a hot July day, I found a suspicious patch of black-eyed Susans. It is the last place I’d ever want to dig for a gift from my monster, and so that’s what I’ve done. Left it for last. My stomach boiled in a sick stew that day, too.
I was twenty-two. Aunt Hilda and I had banged a For Sale sign onto the front lawn a few hours earlier. Granny had died eight months before. She was buried beside her daughter and husband in a small country cemetery, eight miles down the road from their fantastical house.
That day, I’d gone outside to breathe after opening a drawer in Granny’s jewelry box and sucking in a powerful hit of her church perfume. Charlie was almost three, and she’d slammed the screen door to the back porch ahead of me a few minutes earlier. When I opened the door, my beaming daughter stood several feet from the bottom of the steps, hands behind her back. She thrust out the handful of black-eyed Susans that she was strangling in her sweaty fist. Behind her, a hundred feet away, their sisters danced in flouncy yellow skirts-pretty little bullies hanging out near a row of sickly beans and a bonsai-like fig tree.
I poured a pot of boiling water into their eyes while Charlie stared from the porch. When my aunt called out from the house and asked what I was doing, I told her I was getting rid of a vicious pile of fire ants, which was just a bonus. Don’t want Charlie to get stung. A few ants were already carting the dead away on their backs.
I’m jolted back to the present as Herb Wermuth lets the screen door slam behind him. It echoes like a tinny symbol. More than a decade later, it’s his castle, not my grandfather’s. He’s gone inside, abandoning Lucas and me with little instruction to the devious winter sun and the garden that he says his wife, Bessie, chews up with a tiller twice a year. Good luck finding anything. Herb has made it clear he couldn’t care less where we are digging as long as it is not for a dead body and the media isn’t involved. He did ask us to try to get our business done before his wife returned in a couple of hours from a session with her new personal trainer.
At first, when we showed up on his front porch, Herb hadn’t been so accommodating. “I listen to the news,” he’d said grimly. “After all this time, you’re not sure they got the right killer. You’re working with his lawyer.” His eyes had raked over the shovel hanging from my hand. “Do you actually think one of his girls is buried out back?”
“No, no, of course not.” I had rushed to reassure him while hiding my revulsion at the use of the pronoun. His. Like the monster owns us. Owns me. “The cops would be here if that was the case. As I said, I’ve just always thought that it was possible that the mon… killer buried… something for me in the garden.”
Herb couldn’t hide it on his face-he believes, like most people around here, that the Cartwright girl had never been right in the head again.
“You’ve got to promise,” he insisted. “No media. I got rid of some tabloid photographer yesterday asking to snap a picture of the room where the Black-Eyed Susan slept. And some guy called the other day from Texas Monthly wanting permission to get a portrait of you in front of the house. Said you hadn’t called him back. It’s so bad I’m taking Bessie to a condo in Florida until this execution thing passes over.”