The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  But this time she puts down the serving spoon and looks around the table at us.

  How she starts—the words she uses—are lost to me. My father is both the ballast and the break of the house, the jagged rock and the wave that cracks over it, and as a child I am attuned only to what he says and his mood, and never to my steady mother. The dinner table is his to command—his court to teach us about the world, to talk of politics and countries and the values he wants to instill. My mother is quiet. Years will pass before I realize, with the jolt of my own world snapping into view, how smart she is.

  “Are you listening?” she says to me that night. “Your father and I have something to tell you.”

  Such a grave sentence. It wears its seriousness like an alert flag. Something in her voice tells me that whatever she has to say, I don’t want it. The air is thick with unspoken words already, I am all full up with my own secret. A clot forms in my throat. Can’t she see that the night is a light one, the breeze soft and the setting sun aglow? Vivaldi’s violins waft from the speakers my father has strung up in the trees. No one is fighting, my father is not yelling, and my grandparents are far away across the bridge in New York.

  Don’t ruin this, I think.

  “I need a sweater,” I say. I snap onto this answer like a prize, my voice triumphant.

  “You need it right now?” she says.

  “I’m cold.”

  She sighs. “Hurry up, then.”

  “I’m cold, too,” my baby sister, Elize, says.

  “Get your sister a sweater,” my mother tells me. “Take whichever ones you see first; it doesn’t matter.” Her voice is clipped and forced—the strain, I will think later, of trying to hold one more minute when it has already held too long.

  The house mushrooms around me into a shadow. In the dark, all I can hear is the same old empty ghost-creaks the walls always make, the sound of them settling down into time, and the constant whir of the attic fan, its metal shutters opening and closing at the top of the stairs. I never go up those stairs alone in the dark. I make sure of that. Nights that we have dinner in the kitchen and one of the other kids is using the bathroom there and my mother tells me to go use the one upstairs, I walk out of the kitchen and stand quietly in the dark in the dining room, count slowly to forty, and then come back in. Sometimes I stomp my feet louder and then softer and then louder again, to mimic the coming and going. Sometimes when I return to the white kitchen table, she looks at me and says, “That was quick.” Then I wait longer the next time. I just can’t tell her why I can’t go upstairs.

  A few years from now, in fifth grade, I will sit in the school counselor’s room. It will be a routine meeting, one done in pairs arranged by the alphabet, and with me in the room will be one of the popular boys: tall, lithe, and tan, able to whip his foot just right into a soccer ball, sending it soaring.

  “Are you excited to move to the middle school next year?” the counselor will ask.

  The boy will look at her like she’s crazy. He already knows he’s in his most popular place.

  “I’m excited,” I pipe up. “There will be so many kids.”

  She smiles at me.

  “I’ll be able to disappear,” I say.

  To disappear is what I dream whenever my grandfather sits down at the edge of my bed. His brown eyes look into mine, then he contorts his face to spit his teeth into the palm of his hand. He holds them out to me. The teeth glisten like a sea creature. He grins, his mouth suddenly a rim of wet pink with a black sopped hole in the middle. “See,” he says, though he has shown me this so many times before, “I’m a witch. Don’t forget. If you tell I’ll always come find you. Always. Even after I’m dead.”

  I turn my head away and fix my eyes on the yellow skirt of a doll that is also a lamp. Its body illuminates the skirt, dissolving it into a glow of radiant yellow. It burns in the dark room, and as he puts the false teeth on my nightstand, brings his hand to the edge of my nightgown, and lifts the cloth from my suddenly cold legs, I stare into the yellow and will myself into flame, into dissolution. His hand travels up my leg. His other hand undoes his zipper. I stare at the light so hard that around me the air splinters. I feel him tug my underwear down. I feel his fingers. The air splits into molecules. It is cold between my legs again—his hand has moved—and then his hand is back, gripping a thick part of him. He holds my legs apart. He rubs himself against me.

  Around me, the molecules spin. I feel myself break apart with them.

  I still hate the color yellow.

  * * *

  But as a child, standing barefoot in the dark dining room as, outside, the summer night slowly loses its glow, I am more afraid of what my mother will say. So I go.

  I rush up the steps, trying to tune my ears away from the creaks of my climb. I will myself to listen to the fan instead of the stairs. The fan’s shutters mouth a slow roar, its breath a cold vacuum beneath. My little sister’s bedroom has the feel of an attic, the ceiling slanted; it’s really a hallway. I’ll have to go through hers to reach mine. The same way my grandfather does when he comes upstairs at night. On her dresser there’s a fuzzy sweater of baby-chick yellow, its arms folded behind it like wings. I stop. The feeling of staring at it—its pale yellow in the dark, my willing my body to be still and empty—will last forever. Then I decide: I’ll tell my mother I didn’t see a sweater at first. I’ll tell her I had to search. Behind me is Elize’s toddler bed. I can feel the idea of that bed pressing against my back. The knowledge that he, too, stands here. The times I’ve walked into my sister’s room and seen him standing over her. I struggle with my mind to go blank.

  Then I’ve got to run.

  From my own bedroom, I snatch a blue sweater, my favorite color. Back through her bedroom, under the fan, down the steps. I fly. I come to a halt in the dark dining room, the wood-slat floor cool and smooth beneath my feet. My body still. In the quiet my breath thuds as loud as the fan.

  Stalling, still stalling.

  Then I walk outside.

  When I step onto the side porch my mother spots me and waves. “What took you so long?” she calls. “Come sit down!” After the smooth floor the grass feels sharp. It prickles against my feet, the bright outside light coming at me from a place far away. I slide onto the splintered wood of the bench and hand my sister the soft fluff of her sweater. I am in my body but not here, not really.

  “Your father and I have something to tell you all,” she says.

  This can’t be about my grandfather. She can’t know about that. There’s another secret?

  “You all had a sister,” she says. “Her name was Jacqueline. She was Andrew and Alexandria’s triplet.” My mother never uses our full first names—my brother is Andy, and I, though I hate it, am Ali—and the words she chooses as much as their meaning tells me how much is wrong. “Do you remember how we said that Andrew and Alexandria were sick when they were born?” Nicola, looking at her as wide-eyed as a student, nods. That’s what they tell us when my brother faints: that he was sick when he was little, and that this is just the aftereffect. It’s what they tell us when the neighbor suddenly appears to look after us, and my mother pulls the packed blue duffel bag from the closet. “Well, Jacqueline was, too, but she was too sick. Too little. She died when she was five months old.”

  The strangest feeling comes. I already knew.

  * * *

  Later that night, after my parents have tucked us into bed, I lie awake in the dark in the room I share with Nicola.

  “Ali?” she says. Tonight I let her call me that. “Are we going to die, too?”

  “No,” I say. “Shh, just go to sleep. We aren’t going to die.”

  “But she died.”

  I consider this. “Yes, but we aren’t going to. That’s a kind of dying you only do when you’re little. We’re big now.” I am seven and she is five. “We aren’t going to die.”

  As I say this, I realize suddenly that I am lying. That we will, one day. I hope she doesn’t know thi
s. I hope she doesn’t know about forever.

  “Promise?” she says.

  “Promise,” I say. And my sister is quiet after that. But I lie awake in the dark for a long time. How did I know about the girl?

  Nine

  Louisiana, 1992

  Lorilei’s the one who leads the police to Ricky Langley, finally. Early Monday morning, her son still missing, the sheriff calls her up at Melissa’s house and asks her to come down to the station for questioning. He’s kind but firm. They need her to take a lie detector test.

  Let’s put her in a small room at the police station for this. From the ceiling hangs an overhead cone light like the one my parents had in their kitchen while I was growing up, the cone light that’s in every interrogation scene in the movies and that must hover over Ricky Langley when he finally gives his videotaped confession. Lorilei’s not a suspect—“No, ma’am, we’re not suggesting anything,” the taller, burlier cop keeps saying to her—but the truth is they don’t have any suspects. Not yet.

  The men introduce themselves as Don Dixon, from the FBI field office, and Donald DeLouche, from the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office. “But you can call me ‘Lucky,’” the tall man says, taking off his hat and shaking her hand. “Everyone else does.”

  Some kind of luck, she must think. Where’s her boy?

  At the table the men’s voices are a mixture of gentle and tense. She can’t tell if they think she had something to do with Jeremy’s disappearance. Likely she’s too tired to care what they think. Just bring her back her boy.

  “Now, ma’am, I need you to remember everything as careful as possible.”

  She sighs. “I told the investigators already. I went next door, and then second thing I went to the Lawson house. There’s a boy and a girl live over there; Jeremy plays with them sometimes. A man answered the door and he let me use the phone to call my brother.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  It’s the first time anyone’s asked her that. She didn’t then, but she does now. “Ricky Langley,” she says.

  Lucky stands up, picks his hat up off the table, and walks out. Dixon follows him.

  A minute or so later, another cop walks into the room. He’s younger than the other two, clean-shaven. He sits down on the chair Lucky left and pulls it up to the table. “Don’t you worry about them,” he says. “They’re just going to check on something. My name’s Officer Roberts. Now. You were telling them about the man who answered the door?”

  Roberts keeps her there for hours more, going over the day in detail. Sometimes another cop comes in and joins him. Together they retrace every step she took. Finally, they have her go sit in the sheriff’s office.

  That’s where they tell her they’ve found her boy. He’s dead.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours before, that name, Ricky Langley, wouldn’t have meant anything to Lucky and Dixon. But on the morning of Sunday the ninth, as the search continued, the two of them had gone into the woods together to hunt geese. Later, maybe, there’d be hell to pay for their going hunting with a child still missing. Later maybe the whole thing would look a little funny. But the white-fronted geese passed overhead only twice a year, and anyway, the boy was most likely drowned and dead.

  Early in the morning, they’d set decoys on flat slab boats they floated slowly forward until they heard the soft squawking of the flock cooing out to the decoys. Then they’d tethered the flats where they were—within good range of where the geese were headed—and dug two chest-high pits into the soft silt on the side of the bank. Now, as they squatted side by side in their pits, both of them with their hands on their rifles, a Thermos of hot coffee set between them, Dixon stared into the blue-gray vacant sky and said to Lucky, “What do you make of that boy still being missing? You going to keep on with the search?”

  The pits were bone-cold. The air too quiet. “Through the day at least,” said Lucky. “But they don’t need me there.” He poured coffee into the plastic top of the Thermos, took a sip. “They’re dredging the canal today. The sheriff’s office has got it.”

  “I know it ain’t my case,” Dixon said, “but I don’t think he’s in the woods. If he were they’d have found him by now.”

  “He drowned, I’ll bet. Lots of kids drown out that way.”

  “They’d have found him then, too.”

  “Maybe,” Lucky said. He didn’t seem inclined to say more.

  Dixon waited a long moment, choosing his words carefully. Then he said, “If y’all don’t find his body by morning, the FBI’s gonna have to get more involved.” Under the Federal Kidnapping Act, adopted after the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, after twenty-four hours a presumption kicked in that a missing child had been taken across state lines. Jeremy had been missing thirty-six.

  Soon, it wouldn’t be Lucky’s case anymore.

  “I know that,” Lucky said.

  “They’ll take over.”

  “I know.” Lucky fiddled with his gun. Flipped the safety, brought it up to his eyes. No geese yet. He sighted on the target not yet there. “All right. I’ll bring the mother in tomorrow.”

  That night, after Dixon and Lucky had packed in, the long hours in the pits having yielded them nothing, Lucky stopped off at the sheriff’s building on his way home. He’d finish some paperwork, he thought. Get ready for the mother in the morning. He was seated at his desk, the single light of his desk lamp illuminating the sheets of paper in a warm yellow glow, when the phone rang. On the line was a probation officer. “Heard about your missing boy,” she said. Her voice had a strong twang. “There’s a man you should know about out on parole from child molestation in Georgia. Not my case, really—Georgia never sent the papers—and the last time I saw him was in December. Then he disappeared.”

  Plenty of men skipped out on parole. She meant well, he knew, but this was probably nothing. “What’s the last address you have?”

  “Let me check,” she said. Lucky heard the sound of papers rustling. “He was living with his parents in Iowa.” She repeated, “Iowa. Y’all pronounce it funny, don’t you? Says here he’s got a preference for boys six years old or so. How old’s your missing boy?”

  Lucky’s heart started to pound. “Six.”

  “You might try to find him,” she said. “His name is Ricky Langley.”

  * * *

  When Lucky and Dixon pull into the Fuel Stop parking lot, it’s a little past ten in the morning Monday, the sky a clear, weightless blue. They’ve got a warrant for Ricky Langley’s arrest for skipping out on parole in Georgia, the judge’s signature barely dry. Dixon gets out of the car. There’s a young man with jug ears riding a tractor, spreading crushed shell across the ground. Dixon waves at him and motions with his arm to shut off the tractor.

  “Get down,” he says. He squints at the man. Brown hair, kind of scrawny, glasses. “I’m Agent Dixon and this is Detective DeLouche. Are you Ricky Langley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lucky hasn’t said anything yet, but now he starts walking straight at Ricky. “You have the right to remain silent,” he says. The dust from the shell kicks up as he walks. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford to hire an attorney, one will be provided for you.” Ricky doesn’t respond and Lucky doesn’t stop. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?” He’s next to Ricky now.

  “Yessir.”

  “We’re going to ask you some questions,” Lucky says. “You’re going to come with us.”

  Ricky goes still as prey caught in a hunting sight. Then he looks down—which, Dixon will later say, helps him know they’ve got the right guy. Guilty people, when they’re getting ready to admit it, look down.

  Finally Ricky says, “I got a coat in there.”

  “Inside the gas station?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, we’ll get it.”

  Lucky walks back toward the station for the coat and to pull the time cards, which will show what hours Ricky wo
rked the day Jeremy disappeared. Dixon takes Ricky to the cruiser. He’d cuff him right there if he had to, but Ricky comes willingly, a few steps in front of Dixon. The men walk stiffly, each body both sprung and cocked, alert for different reasons. The February air is as cold and dry as an empty room. When they reach the car, Dixon leans down and opens the back passenger seat of the car, motioning for Ricky to slide in. Ricky does. Dixon fixes the seat belt and says, again, “You have the right to remain silent.” His voice is hard. Ricky’s head pops down again. “You have the right to an attorney.” Dixon goes through the whole thing a second time. He needs this arrest to be airtight. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

  “Yes,” Ricky says. He sounds miserable.

  Dixon sits down in the driver’s seat. Through the rearview mirror, he looks at Ricky. Dixon takes note, as he’s been trained to, of the way Ricky’s jugular vein pulses light and fast beneath his lowered chin. The tension in the muscle cords at the sides of the neck. Ricky’s hands are balled into fists. He looks like a man holding something in. He looks like a man desperately wishing the moment were not real.

  It’s time, Dixon decides.

  He twists backward in his seat. “Now, Ricky,” he says. He can’t see Ricky’s face, just the top of his head, the mat of his dark hair. “I want you to look me in the eye, man to man.”

  Ricky doesn’t move.

  “Man to man, Ricky.” Dixon levels his voice, no bullshit. Someone like Ricky, someone who’s been thought weird his whole life, an outcast, a guy no one respects, Dixon knows the way to do it is to sound even. Sound like you’re taking him serious. “Look me in the eye, Ricky.”