Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin Read Free Book Online Page B

was black. I had dug into his desk drawer for the No. 2 pencil eraser that I
     used to swirl a chaotic nest of hair around her head. My fingernail carefully scratched
     out big eyes, delicate cheekbones and nose, full lips rounded into a frightened O.
    I thought about
the edges.
No neck
     anchored her in the blackness. She floated in outer space, a silent, screaming
     constellation. I had drawn a face, but not the one he wanted.
    “It’s your daughter.” Why
     I felt the urge to torture him, I do not know. I could have said it was Lydia. Or my
     mother. Or me. But I didn’t.
    I feel a slight whoosh of air as he abruptly
     draws back. I wonder whether he wants to strike me. Oscar is whining way back in his
     throat.
    “It looks nothing like her.”
     There is a slight crack in his voice. A picture forms in my head of a perfect black egg
     with a white hairline fracture.
    I know that his reply is inappropriate, even
     silly. I am a skilled artist at seventeen, but this drawing is surely distorted, even
     childish.
Of course
it looks nothing like her. I’ve never met her.
I’m blind.
    He’s a doctor. He shouldn’t
     allow me to make any of this personal for him.
    When did I become capable of such cruelty?

Tessa, present day
    I’m thinking of Lydia as I shove a
     digger deep into the loose soil under my windowsill, pulling out the poisoned Susans,
     stacking them in a neat, weedy pile beside me. The metal of the digger is stained with
     traces of bloody rust, but the shiny part glints in the light filtering out the screen
     of my bedroom window.
    The yellow curtains blow white in the
     moonlight, billowing and retracting. While I’d waited for Charlie to conk out, I
     plopped on the couch, flipped on
Jimmy Kimmel Live,
and scratched out a list on
     the back of a grocery slip, as if that somehow made the contents more harmless.
    I wanted to see them neatly written down.
     Every single place I’d found a patch of black-eyed Susans in the years since the
     trial. The big question, which I already knew the answer to:
Should I go back to
     each one of them alone? With Bill? With Joanna?
Wouldn’t it just waste their time, make them think I was even crazier than
     they already did?
    It seemed highly unlikely that I’d be
     able to find things he might have buried for me in the ground all these years later, or
     that I’d hit the right spot to dig, even with the photographs. Rain gushes, the
     earth moves.
    Now, down on my hands and knees in the inky
     night, sifting myhand through the dirt, I wonder if I am wrong. I find
     an errant screw dropped from a worker’s hand when the windows were replaced two
     years ago. A scrap of paper. The stubborn roots of a vine that appeared like a white
     bone.
    Lydia always knew what to do in these
     situations. She was the one with the scientific and logical mind, able to shove aside
     emotion and examine everything with the clinical detachment I didn’t possess. The
     summer we were eight, she stayed inside the lines of her coloring books, while I tried
     to invent a new color by melting crayons together on the sidewalk in the brutal Texas
     sun.
    In elementary school, I liked to run against
     the wind for the battle of it; Lydia waited for me cross-legged on a blanket, reading
     something way too old for her.
The Great Gatsby. Hamlet.
1984.
Afterward, as I lay panting on the ground, she pressed cool fingers to my
     wrist and counted the beats of my pulse.
    I knew that I would not die on Lydia’s
     watch. She’s the one who whispered in my ear while I stared at a waxy yellow
     version of my mother in the casket.
She is not in there.
She was unusually
     drawn to death, from the beginning.
    When we were assigned a world history
     project on “a fascinating moment in British history,” two-thirds of Mrs.
     Baker’s freshman class wrote about the Beatles. I carefully etched a replica of
     the medieval London Bridge and pondered the miracle of God that kept the shops and
     houses