The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  Francis, Darlene, Judy, and Ricky follow her into her bedroom. Darlene’s nine and I imagine her as overly responsible, a little grown-up, the one who’ll shape the family’s story. Slightly plump for her age, she takes after Bessie. Judy is eight and so stubborn she sleeps in the living room rather than share with her sister. For Judy I see both my sister’s tomboy gait and my own scowl—in the way forty years from now she’ll keep her answers curt on the stand at the trial. Francis is eleven and she trails behind, already one foot out of the door.

  Then there’s Ricky.

  Bessie gestures into the closet. “Darlene, why don’t you see if you can pull on that handle there?”

  Darlene’s awed. She’s seen the trunk her mother gestures toward, but only by peeking through her mother’s hung-up dresses while Bessie gets ready in the mornings. It’s always been a shadow in the dark recesses of the closet. She kneels down in front of the trunk and tugs and tugs but can’t move it. Judy kneels beside her and together the sisters wedge and wheedle the trunk forward as Bessie watches. When they have it almost to the door of the closet, Bessie says, “Well, that’s all right then,” and the children let go the metal brackets and step back, watching.

  Bessie settles herself to the floor. It’s a complicated procedure but a familiar one. First Darlene takes the crutch from Bessie, holding it in front of her as if a guardsman with a rifle, her face turned away and nose wrinkled up, trying to avoid the smell of the washcloth that’s been rolled and rubber-banded to the top to cushion Bessie’s armpit. Francis stands on the other side of Bessie, and as Bessie starts to bend her knees Francis positions herself so her mother can balance herself on Judy’s shoulder. Then it’s a turn and a catch from Francis, with Judy helping, and Bessie is lowered to the floor. The girls settle beside her. Ricky, always a little shy, sinks to the carpet a ways back.

  The catch on the trunk is rusted but lifts easily in Bessie’s palm. The children watch, transfixed. They know their mama goes into the trunk. They know it the way children know what goes on behind closed doors. But they’ve never been permitted to watch.

  Inside the trunk is a jam of paper. Photographs, dozens of them, black and white and sienna and even a few of the new Polaroids. Some in cellophane envelopes. Who are these strange faces, the children must wonder, these faces in black and white and with the funny dark clothes?

  Darlene pops her thumb in her mouth and sucks, an old habit. Francis is sitting on one of her knees, the other leg splayed in front of her, and she shifts now, trying to get a clearer view. No one speaks. There is something about Bessie’s quiet right now, her methodical movements, that sparks an undercurrent in the children. They are waiting, even if they don’t know what for.

  Bessie’s hands know where to go. She slides her right hand along the far edge of the trunk, toward the back corner by the hinge, and withdraws two photographs. Then she settles back and lays them right-side up on her lap.

  The children cluster closer. One photograph is of a baby in a white christening bonnet on a layette. The photograph is in black and white, but the baby’s cheeks and lips have been tinted pink. It looks like a doll.

  “That’s your sister, Vicky.”

  The other photograph is of a little boy with a brown bowl cut grinning at the camera, his front tooth missing.

  Ricky recognizes him immediately. “That’s me!” he says, delighted, and pops off the floor to pluck the photograph from Bessie’s hand.

  She doesn’t give it. “No, baby,” she says. “That’s your brother Oscar Lee.”

  Brother. The word must bloom dizzyingly around Ricky, this lonely boy, this boy whose only brother is a baby too young to play with and who spends day after day with Bessie and the girls. This boy who will always be hungry. Brother. “Where is he?” Ricky asks, but as soon as he says those words, he knows. He recognizes him. The brown hair, the eyes, the smile. He’s the boy in the dream.

  “He died, baby. He and Vicky both did. Before you were born.”

  There must be a flicker in Francis’s mind, in Darlene’s and in Judy’s. They were four, three, and two that day in the car. The tires’ screech as Alcide awoke into the moment, the sun’s slant through the windows, then the bright hot slam. Pain. No one has spoken of Oscar since he died. Or the baby. But the memory must be there, living inside Darlene: her hands under the baby’s armpits, holding her upright, the baby’s ribcage as tiny as a fledging bird’s. Darlene’s knees pressed against Francis’s as they bounced Vicky between them, coaxing her to laugh. Then the car flew forward. The jolt. She let go.

  Three decades from now, when Darlene’s an adult on the witness stand at Ricky’s trial, she’ll tell about the afternoon with the trunk simply this way: “That’s when Mama told us about the crash.”

  * * *

  Ricky returns to the trunk again and again to study the photo of the little boy. At five Ricky is still small for his age, bucktoothed and scrawny. He stutters and he wets his pants when he gets nervous. He has no friends. Oscar becomes his friend. One day Ricky steals the photo, and from then on it’s his. When he plays in the woods, he props it up against the roots of a tree and has long conversations with it. He carries it in his pocket to school, patting it with jelly-crusted fingers when there is no one else to eat lunch with. Sometimes one of his sisters hears him talking in a room that otherwise looks empty, and when they ask him whom he’s talking to he answers, “Oscar.” Sometimes Darlene asks him to close the window next to his bed—she’s cold—and he says he can’t. Doesn’t she see Oscar sitting there in the trees? He doesn’t want Oscar to be lonely. The family decides Oscar is harmless, an imaginary friend for the boy who doesn’t have any friends.

  Then the crying starts. Bessie finds Ricky sitting on the carpet in front of the television set. They keep a framed picture of praying hands on top of the set, but he’s knocked it facedown, as though to keep the image away. Ricky’s rocking on his knees, clawing at his head. “Make him stop!” he says. “Make Oscar not see me!” When she tells him there’s nobody there, he only cries harder.

  STATEMENTS BY REPORTERS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS, 2003

  Ricky said he had been visited in a dream by a ghost who took him to the scene of the car accident. After this dream, he began asking questions and found out about the car accident and his brother. He claimed that his brother was his “tormentor/best friend.” He said the brother would torment Ricky about taking his place in the family.

  The brother died in a car crash before Ricky was born. He said his brother was a thorn in his side and Ricky wanted to get rid of him.

  He said he had to get Oscar Lee out of his life.

  Then, one afternoon when Ricky is in sixth grade, Bessie answers the phone, and it’s his teacher. “Ma’am, who’s Oscar Lee?” she asks. When Bessie, shaken, asks why, the woman tells her. Ricky walked to the chalkboard at the front of the classroom and, in front of the whole class, wrote I AM OSCAR LEE LANGLEY. Adult Ricky, looking back, will say this is when he began to molest children younger than himself. He did it starting at the age of nine or ten, he will say. It was easy; the adults were always sending the children off to play together. Luann took in kids as if they were stray cats. There were always plenty around.

  Darlene will tell it differently. Ricky was so skinny with those big, thick glasses and jug ears, jittery and uneasy in his skin. Friendless. That everything was fine—that Ricky wasn’t weird—was something the family colluded in to protect him. “He was just our Ricky, you know,” she’ll say on the stand when the defense attorney asks her if Ricky seemed sick and maybe she wants to say, Well, he wasn’t normal, but—. Yes it’s true that Bessie drank, and yes it’s true that Bessie’s cousin showed up some days while the kids were at school with a bottle of whiskey in her purse for Bessie because Bessie couldn’t walk well enough to go get it herself, and yes it’s true that sometimes when the kids got home Bessie would already be drunk and Alcide already angry. But who could blame her? That leg would be infected again an
d again before the doctors finally amputated it. They did their best with what they had. Luann and Lyle meant that Ricky had four parents. Not two. The children were looked after, Darlene will say. They were happy.

  But the chalkboard writing—so public—demands their attention. Alcide doesn’t believe in therapists, thinks the only thing wrong with Ricky is that he’s weird and probably “queer,” he says, and definitely not right in the head, but while Bessie follows him on most things, she insists here. Picture Ricky, a small boy sitting on a couch, confused why they’re at the doctor but there’s no examination table and the doctor isn’t wearing a white coat. The doctor explains to Ricky that Oscar is dead. “So your talking about him is hurting your mama, son. You’re going to be a good boy now, right? You’re going to give your mama a break?”

  Maybe Ricky understands him. Or maybe he just gets the message that if he wants to be thought normal he should stop talking about Oscar. Either way, the doctor’s words work, and Ricky doesn’t mention Oscar again. The family thinks it’s over.

  It’s not over. Just not spoken. At eighteen, Ricky is out drinking one night with two other boys: Three friends in a borrowed pickup truck, getting buzzed on the single bottle of peppermint schnapps they pooled their money to buy and now pass back and forth in the cab of that truck. The Louisiana night is thick with cicadas, with stars, with a silencing of the man-made that can make possibility stretch out before you. The cab of the truck’s the kind of closed-in space that’s made Ricky feel safe his whole life. His friends are beside him. He has friends. When the bottle comes back to him, when he feels the sticky sweetness on his lips, he gets brave. He doesn’t know his friends will have the same problem with children he does. He can’t articulate the mark that draws them together, what hidden knowledge. He has to let the booze do its work.

  He says, “I been thinking thoughts I don’t want to think.” He says, “I think I might need some help.”

  A night-shift counselor at the mental health center answers the receptionist’s page. Picture what he sees. Standing in the linoleum-tiled corridor, under the fluorescent lights, is a buzzed-up teenage boy, the cowlick of his hair sticking up, his glasses thick as jelly, undersized and twisty in his body, with a face half-cocked in a protective sneer. Ricky must look like he’s mocking when he says, “I’m here for help.” Behind him, through the plate-glass doors, the counselor can see a rusted-up pickup with two more boys inside, the windows down, the headlights cutting recklessly through the dark, country music coming out loud. This is somebody’s idea of a joyride. The teenagers’ pranking. It’s sick what these boys think is funny. The counselor boots Ricky out of there faster than the time it took Ricky to say those words.

  When these boys have grown into men, one of them will testify at Ricky’s trial. Ricky was serious that night, he’ll say. Ricky wanted help.

  But the prosecutor, assistant district attorney Wayne Frey, will point out that the friend’s word is hardly good—he’s a convicted pedophile himself, convicted by Frey. “So what was this y’all were having?” Frey will sneer. “Just a little molesting society here or what?”

  At eighteen, in the cab of the truck, Ricky’s not talking about Oscar anymore. The same way no one’s talking about Bessie’s alcoholism or Alcide’s silence. But something’s wormed its way inside of him. Something’s lying in wait.

  Fourteen

  New Jersey, 1990–1994

  A lonely child, I grow into a lonely teen. The summer before I enter seventh grade, we again rent a house on Nantucket, and there ticks infested with Lyme disease bite me and my sisters—but we don’t know it yet. Nicola and Elize both develop chest infections that summer, and the antibiotics they’re given wipe out the Lyme, before it’s even discovered. I am healthy all that summer, in love with long walks around the center of town, holding a book in front of me to read while I walk. I spend hours curled in the back booth of the ice cream and coffee shop, watching the Irish boys who work there. Trying out the idea of having crushes on them.

  Only when we’re back in the gray Victorian house and school has started does it become clear something’s wrong. I’ve been playing sports for a few years now, joining Nicola on the town basketball team, binding my hair back for soccer. Nicola’s a natural, but I’ve never been the fastest on the team, that’s never been my kind of energy. Now when I try to run my knees fold in on themselves, as if to force my body to conserve what little energy I do have. I am tired and my body aches from a place deep within. Lying in my bed each night in the yellow light of the doll lamp, I am alone but feel my grandfather’s hands crawl over me. So it seems right that my body hurts. There’s no way to escape the memories, not when they’re coming from inside me.

  The sleep I tumble into is deep and unrelenting. When my mother comes to wake me for school I turn my mouth to breathe in the starchy cotton of the pillow. I fight not to wake up, to hold on to the darkness. I miss a day, then a week, then a month. Test after test for mono comes back negative, to my relief—in school, the kids call that the “kissing disease,” and I know I haven’t kissed anyone, except the times I don’t want to think about—but I’m not curious about what’s causing my sleeping. I want only to rest.

  Eventually my parents find a specialist and, in a rare move, take me to see him together. The doctor’s face is stern over his white coat, his hand cold as it grips my calf and bends and unbends my knee. He peers at my kneecap, then prods it, then prods my hip. He gestures to my parents to step outside the room with him.

  When they come back, my mother stands beside the examination table and slips my right hand into hers. Her hand is warm; my hands are always cold and her hands will always feel warm to me. I look up at her, but she turns away. She gives my hand a squeeze.

  Lyme disease is new then, barely known. The doctor hasn’t tested me for it. We can see only what we have a name for. Now he crouches in front of the table. His eyes are ice blue, too bright. “There is nothing wrong with you,” he says, and his voice is artificially high, like he is talking to a child. “Not physically. Sometimes, when a person’s very sad…”

  Something inside me rings. I hate him. I hate him instantly.

  Outside, in the parking lot, my parents walk brusquely ahead. I am aswirl with rage and grief, trying not to cry. What did he see when he looked at me? “My knees hurt!” I say. “That’s not in my head!” My eyes are hot and stinging by the time we reach the car. I fight to keep the tears from escaping. “You don’t believe him, do you?”

  My father starts the car up, eases the wheel. It falls to my mother to answer me. For a minute there’s only silence and my father’s driving. Then my mother twists back in the seat. She still won’t look me in the eyes. “Sweetie,” she says, “we can’t rule anything out.”

  To try to remember that year now is to slip from image to image, all with the faraway quality of a dream. The bustling sounds of my siblings’ leaving for school in the morning, my mother’s lips on my forehead kissing me goodbye, the hours of sleep with the sun warm through the window. Dragging the pink wool afghan my grandmother crocheted at my birth down to the living room couch, where I spend my day with its scratchy itchiness spread over me. The glass stein I fill with cinnamon tea I brew strong, so I can sip in the warmth. On that gray couch I slip-slide between wakefulness and sleep, between a blissful kind of nothingness and the cold bone boredom that I am still in this house, that time is not moving quickly enough. Even when I sleep it away.

  My parents find a new specialist, who diagnoses the Lyme and prescribes intravenous antibiotics. Now, in the afternoon after school lets out, there’s almost always a visitor on the doorstep, a classmate the school has sent with a thick manila envelope stuffed with mimeographed assignments from my classes. The front door my parents have put on the house is thick oak with stained glass lilies at its center, and my first glimpse of one of these girls always comes through the lily, its leaves fragmenting her face like a Picasso. I open the door. She’s in tights, her skirt from
school, her hair pulled back into a neat brush-gleaming ponytail. She smiles and thrusts the envelope at me. “These are for you,” she says.

  I glimpse myself as if from the outside. The dark sweatpants and oversize sweatshirt I live in, once kept for cool summer nights on the beach in Nantucket, but now what I want to disappear into. The hair I haven’t washed for days, which sticks out from my head in fins of frizz. Plastic lines from my home IV crawl from the veins in my hand and coil taped around my arm. Do I see the awkwardness in her eyes, the way even a child can sense who’s sick and has stopped fighting? I feel it. I feel exposed.

  But strangely, I am all right. The world I belong to now is the one in the books I read. When I am awake, I am reading. My English textbook has an early Fitzgerald story in it, and I read that and then his others and only then Gatsby, tracing the development of Fitzgerald’s spun-out dream. My mother, I know, loved Zelda, and the books let me imagine my mother as a younger woman in her studio apartment in New York, the sparkling brunch parties she’s told me of. On my father’s shelf I find Michener, and in those thousands of pages the wider world of exploration he hungered for. Both my parents I come to know better and differently through their books. In the books I find the thrum of everything unsayable. The characters weep the way I want to, love the way I want to, cry, die, beat their breasts, and bray with life. My days are webbed and sticky with the cotton of sleep.

  * * *

  When summer comes again, my father decides he’s sick of going only to Nantucket. They’ve taken us to France—an idyllic month spent in a stone cottage on a mountain road just down from the cottage that still bears my maternal grandmother’s maiden name over the door, ZANNE—but we have not seen, my father declares, America. He is in love again, with the West again, and Garth Brooks is back on our speakers and my father’s jeans flare out over his boots again. For months, he spreads atlases across the Formica kitchen table and gathers the two-and-a-half-by-four-inch perforated cards that for my entire childhood he keeps in his shirt pocket with a fountain pen for notes, cards that will never run out and I’ll never see him buy and I won’t know to miss until suddenly, when he is an old man and his shirt style changes, they are gone.