Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
– Lydia, age 15, reading the words of Sigmund Freud while lounging on her father’s boat, 1993
Tessa, present day
1:46 A.M.
Effie is standing on my front porch holding a lumpy brown package. Her flimsy robe is billowing out behind her. The neighborhood is dead asleep, except for us and a few streetlights. Before she knocked, I was wide awake trying to read The Goldfinch but thinking about Terrell.
Three days left.
“I forgot to give you this earlier.” Effie plops the package into my arms. “I saw some girl in a purple dress drop it off. Or maybe it was a handsome man in a suit. Anyway, I saw it on your front porch this afternoon. Or yesterday. Or maybe a week ago. I thought I should bring it in for you.”
“Thank you,” I say, distracted.
Tessie scrawled on the front. No stamp. No return address. It feels squishy, with something stiff in the middle.
Don’t open it. A Susan, warning me.
I cast my eyes past Effie, onto the dark lawn. I survey the lumps of bushes crouching between our property lines. The shadows dancing to a tuneless rhythm on the driveway.
Charlie is at a sleepover. Lucas is on an overnight date. Bill is at the Days Inn in Huntsville because Terrell begged him.
Effie is already floating back across the yard.
Lydia, age 16
43 HOURS AFTER THE ATTACK
This is not my best friend.
This is a thing, with a Bozo the Clown wig and a slack face and tubes running everywhere like an insane water park except the water is yellow and red.
I’m holding Tessie’s hand and squeezing it, timing every squeeze by my watch, because her Aunt Hilda told me to. About every minute, she said. We want her to know we’re here. I’m trying not to squeeze the part of her hand where the bandage is turning a little pink. I overheard a nurse say Tessie’s fingernails were ripped out, like she was trying to claw her way out of a grave. They had to pick yellow flower petals out of the gash in her head.
“It can take like eighteen months for toenails to grow back,” I say loudly, because Aunt Hilda said to keep talking because we don’t know what she can hear and because I’d already reassured Tessie that her fingernails will only take six months.
As soon as I heard Tessie was missing, I threw up. After twelve hours, I knew for sure something evil got her. I started writing what I’d say at the funeral. I wrote how I wouldn’t ever again feel her fingers braiding my hair or see her draw a lovely thing in about thirty seconds or watch her face go animal when she runs. People would have cried when they heard it.
I was going to quote Chaucer and Jesus and promise I’d devote my entire life to looking for her killer. I was going to stand at that pulpit in the Baptist church and throw out a warning to the killer in case he was listening because killers usually are. Instead of saying Peace be with you, people were going to flip around in their pews and give each other jumpy stares and wonder from now on what exactly was living next door to them. There’s a knife in every kitchen drawer, pillows on every bed, anti-freeze in every garage. Weapons everywhere, people, and we’re ready to blow. That would be my message.
Tessie thinks humans are basically good. I don’t. I’m dying to ask if she thinks evil is an aberration now, but I don’t want her to think I’m rubbing it in.
The monitor over the bed is screeching for the hundredth time, and I jump, but Tessie doesn’t move. I feel like my hand is squeezing a piece of mozzarella cheese. It hits me full blast for like the tenth time that she’ll never be the same. There’s a bandage on her face that’s hiding something. She might not be pretty anymore, or funny, or get all my literary references, or be the only person on earth who doesn’t think I’m a total ghoul. Even my dad calls me Morticia sometimes.
The beeping won’t stop. I punch the call button again. A nurse swings open the door, asking me if an adult is coming back in soon. Like I’m a problem.
I don’t want to be dispatched to the waiting room again. There are a million people in there. And Tessie’s track coach was driving me crazy. Repeating how lucky it is that the calvary got to Tessie in time. Calvary is where Jesus died on the cross, you moron. I tell the story to Tessie again, even though I already did a few minutes ago.
Tessie’s eyelids flutter. Except her Aunt Hilda warned me her eyes do that regularly. It doesn’t mean she’s waking up.
I picked out Tessie in second grade, the instant I sat down at the desk next to hers.
I squeeze her hand. “It’s OK to come back. I won’t let him get you.”
Tessa, present day
1:51 A.M.
I close the door. Finger in the security code.
Turn around and almost stop breathing.
Merry’s face is pressed into the mirror’s reflection on the wall.
She’s trapped on the other side of the glass, just like the night she pressed her face against the car window in the drugstore parking lot. How much effort it must have taken for her to throw herself up from the backseat, half-dead, half-drugged, gagged with a blue scarf, one last-ditch effort to hope that someone like me would happen along to rescue her. Of all the Susans in my head, Merry’s the least needy, the least accusing. The most guilty.
It’s OK, I say softly, walking toward her. It is not your fault. I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have saved you.
By the time I press my palm flat against the glass, Merry’s already gone, replaced by a pale woman with messy red hair, green eyes, and a gold squiggly charm in the hollow of her throat. My breath fogs the mirror, and I disappear, too.
Merry has shown up twice before. She appeared in the doctor’s office window when I was seventeen, five days after I got my sight back. Four years ago, she sang “I’ll Fly Away” in the back row of the church choir at my father’s funeral.
I walk over to the kitchen drawer, pull out a knife, and slice it across the package.
The Susans, a rising hum in my head.
Lydia, age 16
6 MONTHS BEFORE THE TRIAL
I’m pounding on the door and yelling Tessie’s name.
She’s locked me out. I’m stuck in her stupid pink fairy tale bedroom that was fine when we were ten. I woke up and she wasn’t in bed and now I can’t get the door to the terrace open. I told her I didn’t want her out there alone tonight because she’s blind and it’s dangerous and I’ve been left in charge. But, really, it’s because I think she might jump off her grandfather’s roof.
Today was another Sad Day. She’s had twenty-six in a row. I mark a smiley face on my calendar every day she smiles once. No one else is marking smiley faces on a calendar and yet if Tessie kills herself tonight, it will be the fault of Lydia Frances Bell.
Lydia was never a good influence. Lydia’s morbid. Lydia might have given Tessie a little push.
I put my ear on the door. Still alive. She’s playing something dirge-y on her flute. It takes a lot of breath to blow a flute. I wouldn’t want to stand too close and get a whiff. She hasn’t brushed her teeth for six days. No one but me is counting that number, either. One life lesson of the Tessie thing is that it’s harder to love people when they smell. Of course, there are a lot of good parts, too. It’s cool to be called her fairy tale friend by People magazine. And I feel a secret, tickly thrill all the time now, the same as when I’m staring into the ocean and thinking about how deep and black it goes, and what lurks on the bottom. I like walking around inside a terrible novel, living it, getting up every day to write a new page, even if people always see Tessie as the main character.