Read Online Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Julia Heaberlin
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Each one represents
the same thing. A family, waiting.”
Admonished. All of us.
“Why are there three bones?”
Bill shifts the conversation abruptly. “For two unidentified skeletons? I thought
you only tried one bone from a victim at a time.”
“Now, there’s the question
I’ve been waiting for.” Still an edge to Jo’s voice. “The
girls’ skeletons were ransacked by critters over time. Moved by their killer at
least once. The old case file documents foreign soil along with the red clay mixture in
that field. So, of course, not every bone was there. Our forensic anthropologist laid
out what was exhumed from the two caskets, and counted. He counted three right
femurs.”
I hear someone suck in a strangled breath.
It takes a second to realize it’s me.
“Three skeletons, not two,” Bill
whispers, as if I can’t do the math.
Five Susans in all, not four. One dead girl
named Merry, three gnawed-on nobodies, and me. Another member of my tribe. Another
family, waiting.
I’m the one,
a Susan says
conspiratorially.
I’m the one with the answers.
Jo shoots me an odd look, even though I know
I am the only one who can hear.
Tessie, 1995
I wonder what he is looking at first.
The girl without a mouth. The girl with a
red blindfold. The spider’s web with the trapped swallowtail. The faceless runner
on the beach. The roaring bear, my personal favorite. I’d worked hard on the
teeth.
“Did you remember to bring your
drawings today?” he had asked first thing.
Anything was preferable to talking about the
day of my mother’s death. Last time, he might as well have taken a hot poker and
stuck it in my belly button.
And what did he learn? That I heard nothing.
Saw nothing. That all I remember is a vague image of blood, but that was dead wrong,
because the police told me there was no blood. All of it seemed so freakin’ off
point. Another way to clutter up my head.
So, yes, I brought drawings today. As soon
as he asked, I handed Doc a white cardboard poster-mailing tube. It once held the
Pulp Fiction
poster now hanging over Lydia’s bed. Lydia had rolled up
my drawings carefully after our three-hour session sprawled on the rough Berber of her
bedroom floor surrounded by a kindergarten chaos of paper and crayons and markers.
She didn’t like my idea when I sprang
it on her two days ago, butI begged. More than anyone else, she
understood my fear—that someone else would find out my secrets before I did.
So she’d ridden the bus back to the
TCU library. Skimmed
The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. The Childhood
Hand That Disturbs.
And, because she was Lydia:
L’Imagination dans la
Folie,
which translates to
Imagination in Madness,
some random tome
that studied the drawings of insane people in 1846. She had educated me on the principle
of the House-Tree-Person test. House, how I see my family. Tree, how I see my world.
Person, how I see myself.
When it was all over, the black crayon worn
to a flat nub, I thought we’d faked it pretty well. Lydia was even inspired to
draw a picture herself, which she described to me as an army of giant black-and-yellow
flowers with angry faces.
The doctor is sitting directly across from
me, not saying a word. I can hear the crisp rustle of paper as he flips from one sheet
to the next.
The silence has to be something they teach
all these manipulative bastards.
Finally, he clears his throat.
“Technically excellent, especially since you have no vision. But, mostly,
cliché.” No emotion in his words, just a statement of fact.
My scars begin to thrum. Thank God, I
didn’t give him my real drawings.
“This is why I don’t like
you.” I speak stiffly.
“I didn’t know you didn’t
like me.”
“You don’t
know
?
You’re like all of the others. You don’t give a flip.”
“I give a flip, Tessie. I care very
much about what happens to you. So much
the same thing. A family, waiting.”
Admonished. All of us.
“Why are there three bones?”
Bill shifts the conversation abruptly. “For two unidentified skeletons? I thought
you only tried one bone from a victim at a time.”
“Now, there’s the question
I’ve been waiting for.” Still an edge to Jo’s voice. “The
girls’ skeletons were ransacked by critters over time. Moved by their killer at
least once. The old case file documents foreign soil along with the red clay mixture in
that field. So, of course, not every bone was there. Our forensic anthropologist laid
out what was exhumed from the two caskets, and counted. He counted three right
femurs.”
I hear someone suck in a strangled breath.
It takes a second to realize it’s me.
“Three skeletons, not two,” Bill
whispers, as if I can’t do the math.
Five Susans in all, not four. One dead girl
named Merry, three gnawed-on nobodies, and me. Another member of my tribe. Another
family, waiting.
I’m the one,
a Susan says
conspiratorially.
I’m the one with the answers.
Jo shoots me an odd look, even though I know
I am the only one who can hear.
Tessie, 1995
I wonder what he is looking at first.
The girl without a mouth. The girl with a
red blindfold. The spider’s web with the trapped swallowtail. The faceless runner
on the beach. The roaring bear, my personal favorite. I’d worked hard on the
teeth.
“Did you remember to bring your
drawings today?” he had asked first thing.
Anything was preferable to talking about the
day of my mother’s death. Last time, he might as well have taken a hot poker and
stuck it in my belly button.
And what did he learn? That I heard nothing.
Saw nothing. That all I remember is a vague image of blood, but that was dead wrong,
because the police told me there was no blood. All of it seemed so freakin’ off
point. Another way to clutter up my head.
So, yes, I brought drawings today. As soon
as he asked, I handed Doc a white cardboard poster-mailing tube. It once held the
Pulp Fiction
poster now hanging over Lydia’s bed. Lydia had rolled up
my drawings carefully after our three-hour session sprawled on the rough Berber of her
bedroom floor surrounded by a kindergarten chaos of paper and crayons and markers.
She didn’t like my idea when I sprang
it on her two days ago, butI begged. More than anyone else, she
understood my fear—that someone else would find out my secrets before I did.
So she’d ridden the bus back to the
TCU library. Skimmed
The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. The Childhood
Hand That Disturbs.
And, because she was Lydia:
L’Imagination dans la
Folie,
which translates to
Imagination in Madness,
some random tome
that studied the drawings of insane people in 1846. She had educated me on the principle
of the House-Tree-Person test. House, how I see my family. Tree, how I see my world.
Person, how I see myself.
When it was all over, the black crayon worn
to a flat nub, I thought we’d faked it pretty well. Lydia was even inspired to
draw a picture herself, which she described to me as an army of giant black-and-yellow
flowers with angry faces.
The doctor is sitting directly across from
me, not saying a word. I can hear the crisp rustle of paper as he flips from one sheet
to the next.
The silence has to be something they teach
all these manipulative bastards.
Finally, he clears his throat.
“Technically excellent, especially since you have no vision. But, mostly,
cliché.” No emotion in his words, just a statement of fact.
My scars begin to thrum. Thank God, I
didn’t give him my real drawings.
“This is why I don’t like
you.” I speak stiffly.
“I didn’t know you didn’t
like me.”
“You don’t
know
?
You’re like all of the others. You don’t give a flip.”
“I give a flip, Tessie. I care very
much about what happens to you. So much
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