Lucas nods toward the house. “Here she comes.”
Bessie is hauling an old U-Haul box across the yard, breathing with furious intention. Lucas jumps up and meets her halfway, relieving her of the box. He sets it in front of me, but I don’t reach. I’m mesmerized by Bessie’s large bold print, which says exactly what she declared it did, thereby assuring that this will be the one box her grieving, surely sentimental kids will never throw away no matter what.
“This holds all the odds and ends I’ve found on the outdoor property since we moved in.” Bessie pops open flaps. “Useless archaeology, really. Except the old bottles. I got those on the kitchen windowsill. But if it comes out of the earth and isn’t wriggling or biting me, I keep it in here. I don’t organize it by year or location. It’s all dumped together. So I have no idea what came out of the garden and what got kicked up by the mower.”
Lucas is bending over the box, pawing through it.
“Just dump it,” Bessie says. “Can’t hurt anything. Then Tessa can see, too.”
Before I can prepare, the contents are rolling recklessly across the table. Wire springs and rusty nails, an old, half-crushed yellow-and-red-striped Dr Pepper can, and a blue Matchbox car with no wheels. A tiny tin for Bayer aspirin, a chewed dog bone, a large white rock streaked with gold, a broken arrowhead, fossils of cephalopods that once skulked around with tentacles and eyes like cameras.
Lucas is fingering through pieces of broken red glass. He’s pushed aside a tiny brown object with a point.
“This is a tooth,” he says.
“That’s what I thought!” Bessie exclaims. “Herb told me it was a candy corn.”
But I’m staring at something that lies all alone at the edge of the table.
“I think that was Lydia’s.” The words catch in my throat.
“Spooky.” Bessie picks up the little pink barrette, frowns at it. I pull off my gloves and take it with unsteady fingers.
“What do you think it means?” she wants to know. “Do you figure it’s a clue?” Bessie isn’t breathing fast because she’s old, or because Lucas is a sweaty god. Bessie is a junkie. She’s probably devoured everything ever written on the Black-Eyed Susans. How could I not have seen this? She bought my grandfather’s house when no one else would. She apparently knows exactly who Lydia is without explanation.
Lucas has placed his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll borrow the tooth and the… hair thing, if that’s OK,” he tells Bessie.
“Of course, of course. Whatever Herb and I can do.”
I rub my finger absently over the yellow smiley face etched into the plastic. This means nothing, I scold myself. It was probably tugged out of Lydia’s hair by a cornstalk during a game of hide-and-seek back when we thought monsters were imaginary.
And yet. The pink barrette with the smiley face. The Victorian ring, the Poe book, the key. Why do I feel like Lydia is the one playing a game with me, planned cunningly in advance?
Lucas scans my face, and there’s no discussion of whether to sift through the rest of the dirt.
I look up. On the roof, the flash of two girls. One with fiery red hair. I blink, and they’re gone.
Lydia’s barrette is wrapped in a tissue in my purse. The tooth is in Lucas’s pocket. About fifteen miles down the road, Lucas clears his throat and breaks the silence. “Are you going to tell me what happened to that mermaid chick?”
My passenger window swims with blue and brown. The Texas sky, a bell of glass; the rolling farmland, once buried under an unfathomable sea. Sun so powerful that the mermaid was often obliged to dive under the water to cool her burning face.
I still my grandfather’s voice. Place my hands on burning cheeks. Turn to Lucas’s profile, a rock to cling to.
“The mermaid can’t bring herself to murder the prince,” I say. “She throws herself into the sea, sacrificing herself, and dissolves into sea foam. But a miracle happens-her spirit floats above the water. She has transformed into a daughter of the air. She can now earn her immortal soul and go to live with God.”
Daughters of the air. Like us, like us, like us, breathe the Susans.
“The Baptist in your grandfather must have loved that one,” Lucas says.
“Not really. Baptists believe you can’t earn heaven. The only way to save yourself is to repent. Then you’re good to go, even if you turn sweet mermaids to sea foam.”
Or girls to bones.
September 1995
MR. LINCOLN: Tessie, do you love your grandfather?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. Of course.
MR. LINCOLN: It would be very hard to think something terrible about him, right?
MR. VEGA: Objection.
JUDGE WATERS: I’ll give you a little leeway here, Mr. Lincoln, but not much.
MR. LINCOLN: Did the police search your grandfather’s house the day after you were found?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. But he let them.
MR. LINCOLN: Did they take anything away?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Some of his art. A shovel. His truck. But they gave it all back.
MR. LINCOLN: And the shovel had just been washed, correct?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes, my grandmother had run the hose over it the day before.
MR. LINCOLN: Where is your grandfather today?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: He’s home with my grandmother. He’s sick. He had a stroke.
MR. LINCOLN: He had a stroke about two weeks after you were found, right?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. He was very upset about… me. He wanted to hunt down whoever did this and kill him. He said the death penalty wasn’t good enough.
MR. LINCOLN: He told you that?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I overheard him talking to my aunt.
MR. LINCOLN: Interesting.
MS. CARTWRIGHT: No one thought I could hear while I was blind.
MR. LINCOLN: I’d like to get to your episode of blindness a little later. Did you ever think your grandfather was odd?
MR. VEGA: Objection. Tessie’s grandfather isn’t on trial here.
MR. LINCOLN: Judge, I’m almost done with this line of questioning.
JUDGE WATERS: You can answer the question, Ms. Cartwright.
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I’m not sure what he means.
MR. LINCOLN: Your grandfather painted some grisly images, didn’t he?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I mean, yes, when he was imitating Salvador Dalí or Picasso or something. He was an artist. He experimented all the time.
MR. LINCOLN: Did he ever tell you scary stories?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: He read fairy tales to me when I was little.
MR. LINCOLN: The Robber Bridegroom who kidnaps a girl, chops her up, and turns her to stew? The Girl Without Hands, whose own father cuts them off?
MR. VEGA: Oh, come on, your honor.
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Her hands grow back. Seven years later, her hands grow back.
26 days until the execution
I wonder if Jo is in a freezing lab scraping enamel off a tooth that looks like a candy corn while I fold and stack clothes still warm from the dryer. If Terrell is sitting on his rock hard cot, composing his last words, drinking water that tastes like raw turnips, while I sip my $12 pinot and decide to throw out Charlie’s pink socks with the hole in the left heel. If Lydia is out there somewhere laughing at me, or missing me, or up in heaven pestering dead authors while her body rots in a place only my monster knows about. I wonder if the tooth from the ground at Granddaddy’s could be hers.
For three days, I debated about whether to turn the tooth over to Jo. I couldn’t explain to Lucas why I waited. It made perfect sense to try every unlikely thing, to hold nothing back unless what I really wanted was not to know. Jo had met us in the parking lot of the North Texas Health Science Center a few hours ago. She was still wearing white shoe covers from the lab. She had listened in taut silence to my rambling about drowning Black-Eyed Susans in boiling water and a box of useless objects that no one cared about but Bessie. I didn’t mention Lydia’s pink barrette with the smiley face. Jo accepted the tooth from Lucas. Said little in return.