Black-Eyed Susans Read Free Page A

you, Jo.” Bill is
     moving deliberately, shutting his briefcase, gingerly picking up the bag, in no apparent
     hurry. His hands grow still when she shuts the door. “You’ve just met
     greatness. Joanna is a mitochondrial DNA genius. She can work goddamn miracles with
     degraded bones. She rushed to 9/11 and didn’t leave for four years. Made history,
     helping identify thousands of victims out of charred bits. Lived at the YMCA at first.
     Took communal showers with the homeless. Worked fourteen-hour days. She didn’t
     have to, it wasn’t her job, but whenever she could, she sat down and explained the
     science to grieving families so they could be as sure as she was. She learned a
     smattering of Spanish so she could try to talk to the families of the Mexican
     dishwashers and waiters who worked in restaurants in the North Tower. She is one of the
     best forensic scientists on the planet, who happens to be one of the kindest human
     beings I’ve ever met, and she is giving Terrell a chance. I want you to understand
     the kind of people on our side. Tell me, Tessa, why are you? Why are you suddenly on our
     side?”
    A slight edge has crept into his voice. He
     is gently telling me not to screw them.
    “There are several reasons,” I
     say unsteadily. “I can show you one of them.”
    “Tessa, I want to know
     everything.”
    “It’s better if you see
     it.”
    I lead him down our narrow hall without
     speaking, past Charlie’s messy purple womb, usually pulsing with music, and throw
     open the door at the end. This wasn’t in my plan, not today anyway.
    Bill looms like a giant in my bedroom, his
     head knocking into theantique chandelier dangling with sea glass that
     Charlie and I scavenged last summer on the gray beaches of Galveston. He ducks away and
     brushes against the curve of my breast by accident. Apologizes. Embarrassed. For a
     second, I see this stranger’s legs tangled in my sheets. I can’t remember a
     time that I let a man in here.
    I watch painfully as Bill absorbs intimate
     details about me: the cartoonish portrait of Granddaddy’s house, gold and silver
     jewelry littered across my dresser, the close-up of Charlie staring out of lavender
     eyes, a neat pile of freshly laundered white lace panties on the chair, which I wish to
     God were tucked in a drawer.
    He is already edging himself backward,
     toward the door, clearly wondering what the hell he has gotten himself into. Whether he
     has pinned his hopes for poor Terrell Darcy Goodwin on a crazy woman who has led him
     straight to her bedroom. Bill’s expression makes me want to laugh out loud, even
     though I am not above entertaining a fantasy about an all-American guy with two degrees,
     when my type runs the opposite direction.
    Even though what I’m about to show him
     keeps me up at night, reading the same paragraph of
Anna Karenina
over and
     over, listening to every creak of the house and finger of wind, every barefoot midnight
     step of my daughter, every sweet sleep sound that floats out of her mouth and down the
     hall.
    “Don’t worry.” I force
     lightness into my voice. “I like my men rich and less altruistic. And you know
     … old enough to grow facial hair. Come over here. Please.”
    “Cute.” But I can hear relief.
     He makes it in two strides. His eyes follow my finger, out the window.
    I am not pointing to the sky, but to the
     dirt, where a nest of black-eyed Susans is still half-alive under the windowsill,
     teasing me with beady black eyes.
    “It is February,” I say quietly.
     “Black-eyed Susans only bloom like this in summer.” I pause for this to sink
     in. “They were planted three days ago, on my birthday. Someone grew them
     especially for me, and put them under the window where I sleep.”
    The abandoned field on the Jenkins property
     was licked to death by fire about two years before the Black-Eyed Susans were dumped
     there. A reckless match tossed by a lost car on a lonely dirt road