The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  “Please.”

  So she does it. Dresses in a hurry, pulling on her white tights in the pitch dark. Skips the coffee. Gets in her car and turns on the headlights and drives half an hour through vacant streets to the filling station he’s described, wondering the whole way how he’s turned up here and whether her sister knows. Last she telephoned with Bessie, Ricky was in Georgia visiting his sister Francis. The buses don’t leave off at the filling station. Did he hitchhike all the way here? But she must remind herself not to wonder too hard. Wondering is how you get mixed up in other people’s troubles. When she reaches him, I see him huddled under the station overhang, his gray hooded sweatshirt dripping wet from the rain, carrying only a single small duffel bag. He opens the car door and starts to get in.

  “Wait,” she says.

  He pauses.

  “You got a towel?”

  He doesn’t, so she makes him take a T-shirt from his bag and spread it across the seat first. They don’t kiss hello, they don’t embrace. She doesn’t ask what he’s doing here. She stops in front of her apartment and gives him the key. “I’ll be back at eight,” she says. If she hurries, she’ll still be on time for work.

  * * *

  He stays with her for a couple of months. She and Bessie may not be close, but that doesn’t mean she can turn family away. At first, he’s just sitting in the house, staring at the television and running up her electric, but then he finds a gig at the racetrack for the Indy 500. It’s temporary—three weeks, tops—but soon it’s all he can talk about, the race cars and the guys at the track. He’s so proud of his polo shirt and assigned cap you’d think it was a military uniform. Maybe she starts getting up a few extra minutes early to iron the shirt for him, just to see the delight on his face. He can be like a child, so proud and excited so easily. Like her, he’s a night owl, doesn’t seem to sleep, so he’s still up sometimes when she gets in from her shift. He makes her a cup of coffee, sits with her, and they chat about the coming day.

  She likes him. That’s what surprises her most, maybe. How much she likes having him around.

  Which is why she gets so nervous when, after he’s been there only a few weeks, one afternoon he hands her an envelope addressed to Bessie. At first she doesn’t think anything of it, just says, “Sure, I’ll mail this,” and slides it into her purse. It’s a good reminder to pay her rent, and she fishes her checkbook out of her dresser drawer, makes out a check at the kitchen table, and stamps it. Today the old lady she’ll be looking after lives on the other side of town.

  She’s in her car, driving on the highway, when the letter starts to bother her from inside her purse. Something about the way he looked, his eyes darting away as he handed it to her. She’s tried to ask him before what he’s doing here, and he’s been vague—he just needed a change, something new. Now she realizes he’s never really answered. And then the simple fact that he’s never given her a letter for Bessie before. It’s not so unusual that he wouldn’t mail an envelope himself. He’s holding down a job, but things like the laundry, bills, basic planning he still seems to need someone to take care of. She minds less than she’d have imagined she would. It’s nice to be needed.

  But the letter. Something’s wrong; she just knows it is.

  She pulls over into a gas station, telling herself it’s nothing, telling herself she’s being silly. The letter in her hands, the engine still idling in park, she pauses. She doesn’t read other people’s mail. Never. She’s not a nosy person. And she needs to get to work.

  She slits the letter open with her forefinger. She can tape it up before she mails it to Bessie, and Bessie will never know Ricky wasn’t the one to tape it. Inside is a single sheet of loose-leaf with Ricky’s cramped handwriting that she recognizes from the grocery notes he leaves her. I’m sorry, I know this will hurt you and Dad but I just couldn’t do it anymore.

  The drive back to her apartment is half an hour but she does it in twenty, never mind the speed limit. At every red light she prays under her breath and her head fills with awful pictures of what she’ll come home to.

  But when she opens the door, her heart thudding with what she might find, he’s still alive. He’s still alive. Standing at the kitchen counter, clutching the telephone with one hand, the other holding her butcher knife to his wrist.

  * * *

  “I didn’t want to tell you,” he says later. This is after she’s made him hang up the phone and after she’s taken the knife, all the knives, into her bedroom and after she’s made him get in the car and come to work with her at the old lady’s house; she didn’t trust him to be alone. I see him as he sits in the lady’s easy chair, flipping through her Sewing Circle magazines, her Bible. I see Ruth as she watches him peer at the Bible, his finger pressed to the page and his mouth hanging open as he sounds the words. Every time Ruth goes from the lady’s bedroom into the kitchen to refill a glass of water, or get her dinner, or carry the sheets into the laundry room after the lady has soiled herself, Ruth must find herself checking up on him. Just checking that he’s still there, really. That he’s all right. Now they’re back at the kitchen table, two cups of coffee he’s made growing cold in front of them, Ricky staring down at the table hangdog-style instead of looking at her. “I like little boys,” he says. “I try hard not to, but—sexually.”

  She swallows. Her feeling in this moment must be peculiar. Like a vacuum opens up in the air around her, like someone’s hit a pause button deep inside. What he’s saying isn’t possible.

  “I didn’t want you to know,” he continues.

  It’s not that she recovers herself, and not only that she doesn’t know what to say. She can do nothing with his words but take them in. She must make the decision even before she realizes she’s making one: she isn’t going to ask him if he’s done anything. She isn’t. She doesn’t want to know.

  Instead, she gets up and crosses around the table. She leans over him and gathers his bony shoulders in her arms, hugging him awkwardly. “Shh, it’s all right, Ricky.” It’s the first time they’ve touched.

  The next morning, she wakes before the alarm, her mind racing. He needs help. He should talk to someone. She knows without asking that he doesn’t have health insurance. And she doesn’t have money to spare. But there are charity hospitals, and if she calls enough times, she’ll get him an appointment. She’ll get him help.

  TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 1994

  Prosecutor: Now, you took him down to the hospital. And were you with him when he was speaking to the therapist?

  Witness: No.

  Prosecutor: So you wouldn’t have known that he told the therapist that he called the police himself that morning [he held the knife], to let them know where he was. Or that he told the therapist he’d planned to pull a knife on them.

  Defense attorney: Your Honor, we need to approach the bench.

  [Conference]

  Defense attorney: She doesn’t know about this. So I don’t know how she could respond to it.

  Prosecutor: You see, that’s one of the problems with letting all this hearsay testimony in. Obviously he’s given a different story to somebody else. And if I’m not allowed to bring that out, then the jury gets the wrong impression about what was going on there that day. I mean, she’s given her opinion that she believed he was going to commit suicide in her kitchen.

  For the next month or so—later she won’t be able to say exactly how long—she drives him to the charity hospital once a week for therapy. They don’t talk about why he’s going. She just takes him.

  And then one day, when she’s been at a funeral for a cousin she grew up with, and her eyes and her head are blurry from crying, she comes home and the house is empty. He’s not on the couch. He’s not in the kitchen. Instead, on the table, there’s a scrap of paper torn from a grocery bag, the note on it scrawled in his hasty writing: The police came and arrested him at her house to take him back to Georgia. He’s being charged there. All the stress of the past few weeks, all the stress of what she�
��s known and not allowed herself to know, all the stress of worrying after him and not wanting to have to and worrying all the same, comes to her like a deep sickening and she’s suddenly so tired. She doesn’t make any calls. She doesn’t try to find anything more out. She just accepts that he’s slipped from her life just as suddenly as he came into it. I see her wet a paper towel into a cold compress. She takes it to bed and she sleeps the dawn away, and when she wakes the next day, the sun blaring in through the windows and her head heavy and her heart heavy with the memory of her cousin’s funeral the day before, it must be almost like she’s wakened into her old life, the life before him. She must expect the loneliness so much she doesn’t even notice it. Not for weeks does she have the energy to call Bessie and ask what happened. He had been arrested for touching a young girl in Georgia—his second molestation arrest, after the boy in Louisiana he threatened to shoot—and for grand theft auto. When she’d picked him up at the filling station, he was on the run from the girl’s house. He’d just ditched her mother’s Chevy.

  When she walks into the courtroom in Baton Rouge in 1994, her eyes must go first to the back of the head of the man in the defense seat. All these years later, and something inside her still flies out to him. Grown-up Ricky. Dark brown hair cut jailhouse-short, glasses hooked over the backs of his ears. She prepares herself to meet his eyes, but he doesn’t turn around. Instead, a woman with a round face and brown bangs waves to her from the left—his sister Darlene, full-grown, she realizes with a start—so she takes the seat next to Darlene and, to her surprise, finds herself reaching for Darlene’s hand. She squeezes it.

  Then she notices the photographs of the little blond boy blown up poster-size in front of the jury. Ricky is accused of killing him. She must remember the hush of Ricky’s voice at the table, those awful words he said. “I like little boys.” She must remember her choice in that moment, not to ask. As she sits in the courtroom, the bench beneath her sturdy as a pew, I see her close her eyes for a moment. Then she makes herself open them. She looks at the eyes of the boy in the photograph. What happened to him?

  But even as she wonders, it must be Ricky’s eyes that come back to her. She sped home the whole way that afternoon. She opened the kitchen door so frightened. First the cold shine of the knife in his hand, then above the knife his eyes as big and round as a raccoon’s. Wide like he was trapped, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to do. He needed her to save him from it.

  She loved him then, she understands that now. The years have taught her that. Living with him, taking care of him, changed her. When she remembers his eyes, yes, she remembers the fear and the guilt in them—but how can she explain that what has stayed with her, what has opened her heart and what breaks her heart still, was that she saw relief? His relief at having been found by her. At having been saved by her. Relief that someone might finally make him stay.

  “The defense calls Ruth McClary.” She rises and smooths her skirt over her hips. From the witness stand, she answers the attorney’s questions. Yes, Ricky came to live with her. No, at the time she didn’t know why. But he was polite and helpful, a hard worker. “I love Ricky,” she hears herself say. “He’s a very fine boy.” Her body turned to the jury; she speaks into the transcript microphone for the court reporter; her presence here today is for everyone else. But inside herself it must be him she watches. Her words are for him. With his head bent down she can see the spot where the hair at the top of his head grows in a whorl, like a boy’s. His hands are pressed together so tightly that his shoulders threaten to shake. She says, softly, “I got very attached to him. Like he was my own son.”

  * * *

  When, in 1986, the police take Ricky back to Conyers, Georgia, there’s no trial. Instead he pleads guilty to committing an unspecified sexual offense with a minor—now the second sexual offense on his record—and, at twenty years old, is sent to the Georgia Youthful Defendant Correctional Institution.

  In Georgia, by all accounts, Ricky is a model prisoner. He’s learned something living with Ruth and learned something working at the racetrack those few weeks. There’s something satisfying about being told what to do and meeting those demands. It gives him pride. In May 1987, at the age of twenty-two, he earns his GED. “Ricky Langley was an excellent student and I would like to have him as my aide,” the teacher writes in his postclass evaluation. “I really need one.” One year later, he becomes eligible for parole.

  The morning of his hearing, he must neaten down his hair with water and he must wipe his glasses clean and straighten his prison-issue shirt so that it hangs unwrinkled on his skinny torso. He wants parole. He’s been dreaming of it. Dreaming of getting back to the Calcasieu River, back to spending his afternoons fishing and his nights sleeping next to the bubbling sound of water over the creek bed. He didn’t know what prison would be like. And it turns out he likes it here all right, but it’s still prison. It’s too loud, all the yelling and the moans and the guys who have no other way to make themselves heard so they bang on the bars night and day. Sometimes it’s like the noise in the prison mixes up with the noise in his head and it all becomes one vast incomprehensible yelling, the inside of him and the outside, and then it’s like he blows apart in the noise. Being confined makes it impossible to get away from himself, from the self that’s always too loud inside.

  And besides, that pride he has? He wants others to see it. He doesn’t want to be a prisoner anymore. He wants to be thought of as free.

  But the board denies his parole.

  Ricky’s furious. At first his fury is just anger. Then it curdles into indignation. Since they arrested him, he’s done everything right. What more should he have to do? “He feels,” a counselor records in his file, “that his past should not have anything to do with his parole.” Ricky complains and he complains and finally one of the other inmates, sick of hearing him complain, says, “Don’t matter if you’d gotten out, you’d be back in here within a year.”

  At first Ricky reacts to the guy the way he always does, quick-twitch anger. But he likes the guy, even maybe trusts him a little, and the words make him curious. He’d expect shit like that from the guards. But from another inmate? A guy who should be on his side?

  So he reacts in a new way. He says, “Why?”

  The inmate explains to Ricky that that’s what pedophiles are known for. That Ricky isn’t the only one who’s struggled his whole life. Pedophilia is known to be something you can’t just quit.

  Maybe Ricky asks for more therapy, maybe the system recognizes his need for it finally, but for the next two years in Georgia, as Ricky is shuttled among three different jails, the doctors give him something he’s never had before: a way to understand who he is. In his therapy sessions, he learns about pedophilia. He learns that what he has is considered a disorder, and he learns, again, that abusing children harms them. At night, he dreams. Not the dreams of before, not dreams in which the children’s skin glowed like alabaster moonlight and when he awoke he was panting and sweaty and knew he’d touched them. Now in his dreams he walks to a clearing in the woods. Sunlight suffuses the air around him, the smell of green so thick it clots his throat. A carpet of dried pine needles cushions his footsteps. When he reaches the center of the clearing he stands and waits. A child appears. He recognizes the child and his heart beats faster. One by one, the children he’s molested enter the clearing. They walk hesitantly at first, their eyes widening when they see him, but then they see the other children and are suddenly confident. Each child takes the hand of the one before him until they are all holding hands, they are linked in a circle, every boy and every girl, and at the center of the circle is him. He turns and he turns—but he is surrounded.

  Why, one child asks. Why? Why did you do it? Then another. Why to me? Why to us? He opens his mouth to answer them, but in his mouth there is only air. He doesn’t know how to tell them why. He doesn’t know how to tell himself why. They ask until the sound drums in his ears like the blood thrums in h
is veins. He trembles.

  Then he bolts. He tears a boy by the hand from the circle and runs, pulling the boy behind him deeper into the woods, until they are alone and no one can see them. There is only one way to stop his trembling. He palms the back of the boy’s head, feels the cool brush of the boy’s hair. He unzips his pants. He pushes the boy’s head to him.

  When he wakes, he is sweaty and sick and shaking, but he writes down the dream in a notebook. He brings the notebook to his therapy sessions and hands it to the therapist. “Don’t let me out of here,” he says.

  “If you want your life to be something different, Ricky,” she says, “you have to make it something different.”

  His GED teacher is a lay minister, and now Ricky joins his evening Bible study class. He is shy at first, quiet. Sometimes, the teacher notes, he arrives in class with his clothing askew, his hair rumpled and deep bags under his eyes. Ricky, the teacher will later remember, seems like a man wrestling with something. But over time he starts speaking up in class. When Ricky is transferred to another jail, he writes letters to the minister, asking him questions about spiritual matters that vex him. Mostly they have to do with the problem of guilt. The minister takes his questions seriously, even researches them, spending two or three weeks on each letter and composing lengthy replies that Ricky pores over in his new cell. The questions are general and the answers are doctrinal, but both Ricky and the minister know they are talking about Ricky’s soul.

  He asks to be placed in the sexual offender treatment program at the adult prison in Valdosta. Two and a half years after receiving his GED, he earns a diploma from the success-skills course offered there. A month later, he earns a certificate from the appliance repair program, attesting that he’s completed 863 hours of training and can now install household appliances as an electrical appliance apprentice. On his inmate evaluation sheet, relationship to coworkers is marked “above average.” For the first time in Ricky’s life, every category is marked above average.