The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  I drove past the sign as if in a dream. I’d looked at the motel’s address. How had I made this mistake? Wanting to book away from the murder, how had I instead booked into its heart? There on my right was the counter where Pearl had worked, the pumps Lanelle had turned on for the drivers, and the window through which she had watched Ricky one long day and wondered whether he was the kind of strange that could kill a child. There on my right was the asphalt that had been laid down where crushed shell used to be.

  My motel was one block away and across the street. From its entrance I could still see the green CASH MAGIC sign. At the front desk I gave the clerk my name, I must have, and my credit card and I made the kind of small talk one makes and then I took my room key and went to my room. I fell onto the bed. I fell into thirteen hours of blank dark memory-sleep.

  I am pulled to this story by absences. Strange blacknesses, strange forgettings, that overtake me at times. They reveal what is still unresolved inside me. They plunge me toward what I most want to avoid.

  Ricky brought me to this story. He’s the one I keep thinking about and chasing after, trying to understand. But being here, and what happened the other night in bed with Janna in Massachusetts, makes me realize I have to start with Jeremy. He’s who carried Ricky’s crime in his body.

  * * *

  I hear the birds first. Where I live, they are drowned out by passing cars, by pedestrians on cell phones, by scraps of music that float through car windows and the beep of horns and the artificial chirp of street signs indicating it’s safe to walk, by the chatter of my own thoughts as I go through my day. City noise. To reach Consolata Cemetery, where Jeremy is buried, I have driven fifteen minutes west from the Cash Magic, hooking south of the high buildings of Lake Charles and south of the lake. Now, on the western outskirts of the city, what is man-made struggles while the natural world gasps: run-down farm-equipment-repair shops and Laundromat signs, the grass on both sides of the road crushed by rusted trailers. Birdsong bursts through, like the way the line of a melody flits over the undertones below, counterpoint and lightness.

  The trees must draw so many birds. Consolata Cemetery appears through the concrete like an oasis of arranged beauty, wide oaks with bright fluttering leaves and steady brown boughs. An artificial calm. No upright gravestones here like I’m used to from the Northeast—less than fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico and surrounded by lakes, the water table would topple them—and without them there’s little to disrupt the land’s flatness. One stone bench stands vacant under a lone oak tree, waiting.

  I step to the grass. From this angle, I can see what the sun and my angle of vision obscured: dark metal plaques dot the lawn, flush against it. The dead. That their markers are so low and unobtrusive reinforces the quiet. Yet the birds keep chirping. In them, at least, Jeremy has company.

  “Can I help you?” a man calls out to me from behind the spoked wheel of a golf cart.

  “Thanks.” I walk toward him. “I’m looking for a grave.”

  “What’s the lot number?”

  The question catches me off guard. “I don’t know.” I’ve carried his story with me for so long that part of me expected intuition would lead me there, that I would just walk around until I recognized his name. But the plaques are so flat there’s no way to read them until you’re hovering right over the dead. “His name was Jeremy Guillory.”

  The man’s face registers nothing.

  What did I think—that while I had been driven here by this mystery, he, too, would have the name of a boy dead two decades on his tongue?

  “I’ll call it in,” he says. The location crackles back over the speaker and he starts the motor and motions for me to get in. “When did he die?”

  “Ninety-two.”

  “An old man?” This must be cemetery small talk. To our left, an expanse of graves appears, rows and rows of little black plaques dotting the earth. The cemetery is larger than I realized, and for a minute its size stills my chest. I’ve come here in search of one person. One story. But there are so many buried around us.

  “No,” I say. “A child.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  We drive along in silence. The sky has become a more concentrated gray, the birdsong become more urgent, spiked with shrieks, and I wonder whether the birds are heralding something. Graves keep coming at us, rows and rows of metal plaques, rows and rows of unseen names and the buried bodies beneath them. Suddenly I want the man to know a little more of the story. To know whom he’s keeping watch over. “Jeremy was murdered.”

  He whistles low. “What year did you say?”

  “Ninety-two.”

  “That’s a shame,” he says again. “A real shame. Around here?”

  “Iowa.”

  He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t remember it, then.” The cart stops. “This row, down on the left. Want me to show you?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got it.”

  He drives off.

  Which leaves me and Jeremy alone. The silence comes shockingly strong once the engine is gone. It’s the birds, I realize. They’ve fallen quiet. The spot the worker pointed to lies against a curb, in the first row of this section of the cemetery. Beneath my feet, the grass is damp and spongy. The concrete curb juts up against the grass and picks up again across the street, a paved lot over which a big red gas station sign announces the mundane world of the living. The entrance to the cemetery was lush and green, but with the concrete all around, this patch of grass feels tucked away.

  JEREMY JAMES GUILLORY. He’s a plaque like all the others, set into the grass. I step closer. In the left corner, a child engraved into the metal reaches his hand up. From the top, two larger hands reach down. THE LORD REACHED DOWN FOR JEREMY’S HAND. Then that date: FEBRUARY 7, 1992.

  No words for everything that date ended. No words for everything that date began. I stand here, where Lorilei once did in her blue blouse, and it starts to rain.

  Twenty-Four

  The day Lorilei buries her son, it rains. The rain begins in the early morning, when the Hixon Funeral Home in Lake Charles is open only to the family. The rain sops the wide lawn into a marsh; it slicks the white railing and the white columns and darkens the red brick of the building; it jewels the leaves of the tall trees. The rain is still falling as the reporters arrive, and they pop their wide black umbrellas open. Assistants hold tarps over the cameras while the on-air talent crouch to freshen their lipstick and straighten their ties. A week has passed since Jeremy’s body was found. The community is still in shock. One of their own, taken. For the cameras, the reporters pull their faces into solemn masks and intone that one hundred people have shown up, that the mother is here. Later the newspapers will raise the number to 250. The day has the feel of a quiet conclusion. They’ve been reporting on the missing boy every night for two weeks now.

  Lorilei steps out to acknowledge the reporters. In the rain her heels sink into the sponge of the grass and the blue blouse that the newspapers note dampens, even through the coat her brother, Richard, must have hung over her shoulders. He stands beside her with an umbrella. All day Richard will use his body to shield her, any trouble between them forgotten.

  She looks up at the reporters. Her glasses must fog a little. “I knew it was gonna rain,” she tells them. “But I’m kind of glad, because it’s like the angels in heaven are crying.”

  The funeral parlor is thronged with people she doesn’t know, people she hasn’t seen in years, people she sees every day. Their arms come at her, their cheeks, she must feel herself wrapped into their hugs and held nervously at a distance between their palms. She is surrounded by a buzzing, like she’s wandered into a colony of bees.

  She folds her arms around herself. “I couldn’t bury him in a suit,” she tells her neighbor. She says it again to Jeremy’s classmate’s mother. Then to a reporter. “I just couldn’t. It wouldn’t look right. He likes his jeans and his sneakers.” All of them keep saying how sorry they are. She keeps talking. If she stops
talking, she’ll have to take in what they’re sorry for.

  At the head of the room sits a small white casket, its lid propped open. In the casket lies her son. The mortician has folded Jeremy’s hands across his chest and nested a small bouquet of red carnations between his palms. He is wearing his favorite jeans and a burgundy sweater, and part of her—the part that can still forget—must be glad for the sweater. He’ll be warm against the February damp. Tucked at his sides are a toy Batman and a Batmobile, Christmas gifts from his cousin Bubba. “He should have his BB gun,” Lorilei says. “He loves that thing. But the sheriff’s got it as evidence.”

  Richard appears and pulls her to his shoulder. The service is about to begin.

  People crowd the aisles, the back of the room, its sides. The benches are all packed. Two preachers will speak, the first an old friend of Lorilei’s from her wilder days. The years have changed them both. “Life is but a passing episode,” he says. Jeremy called him Grandpa. “Jeremy’s was awful short. The wicked one took him from us.”

  The revival preacher is younger, with more energy, more bluster. I see him with wavy hair and a wiry build, a crackle of energy running through his body like the smiting hand of God. Though they are sad, he entreats them, they should rejoice. “In the Bible, when David saw that God had taken his child, he took a bath and he cleaned up and he called for something to eat. Then he said, ‘That child can’t come back to me, but I can go back to him.’ He knew that the only way to see his son again was to make of his life something the Lord would approve of.” The preacher stares intently out at the crowd, his eyes ablaze. “We can meet Jeremy again if we can only be as humble as he was.”

  Lorilei’s father slowly reaches his hand toward the ceiling and waves back and forth to his grandson. The reporters scribble it down.

  After the service, people come to put their hands on the coffin. They cross themselves as they stand over Jeremy. Some lean down to kiss the boy’s forehead. His face is as bloodless as porcelain, no marks. But under the sweater, bruises from Ricky’s forearm cover his chest. Two days ago, the coroner held a ruler to the dark ligature marks on his neck and photographed them. Four times the flashbulb went off, four times capturing the deep bruised score around his neck, from four different angles. The bulb captured the red pinpricks that bloomed across his neck from capillaries that burst from pressure, where he’d bled into his skin. The spots are called petechiae. Later, after the developing fluid works on the film and the images mist into view, the photographs will be marked as evidence. In the years ahead they will be photocopied and then photocopied again for the case files. Twenty years into the future, when the three trials mean that even the photocopies have been copied yet again and again, the wounds on Jeremy’s neck will have blurred into the dark undifferentiated blotch of time.

  But now, with the sweater collar pulled up over his neck, you could almost believe he was sleeping. If he weren’t quite so pale. If he weren’t quite so still. If the dead stink of flowers wasn’t quite so heavy in the air.

  Outside, on the steps, a boy weeps freely, his small shoulders shuddering under the jacket his mother must have made him wear. A woman wraps her arms around him. “Shh, baby. I know, I know.” She rocks him, cooing into his hair—“Shh, baby, Shh”—but the boy only sobs harder. “Y’all had some good times together.” A few feet away, a reporter writes down her words.

  Six miles away, Ricky Langley sits in an isolation cell at the Calcasieu Correctional Center. He yells out to the guard, “Won’t anybody come talk to me?”

  The coffin is so light that the five pallbearers must each just barely feel it. Richard stands at the front. He is a big man with a bushy beard and a stomach that swells top to bottom. He is a hunter and a fisherman who poses in camouflage for snapshots with his trophies. He is a man used to the death of animals—but nothing has readied him for this. I see him there, his hand hooked under the casket, and I try to fill in the black-and-white news photo that ran of this moment with the color of real time. The red that flushes up his cheeks. The red that lines the rims of his eyes. For Richard the coffin must be as light as carrying a baby. Light as the first time he picked up his son, the first time he held his daughter. Light as the first time he held the newborn Jeremy, and marveled at this familiar stranger his sister had produced. When my sisters gave birth to their children, each time it seemed a miracle that someone I had known for so many years had made something so new, so a part of them and at once so different. We’d grown up together but we’d had such different lives, such different troubles. The differences had long driven us apart, the way it had once been for Richard and Lorilei. But there, in each new baby, was a chance at a new beginning.

  At the grave site, with the wide oak trees in the distance, the red gleam of the gas station across the gray concrete corner, and the sharp song of the birds above, Lorilei stands over the hole in the ground that is her son’s and reads a poem written by Jeremy’s kindergarten classmates, copied out in the kindergarten teacher’s careful cursive. “It’s so hard to say goodbye.” The tears start before she can finish. She allows Richard to pull her back from the grave.

  Then she watches as her father and Richard throw in handfuls of dirt. She waits, I imagine, until almost everyone is gone. Until she’s almost alone with her baby.

  The grave digger gives his signal, and the coffin is lowered gently into the earth.

  Lorilei is four months pregnant with Jeremy’s half brother. The nausea must have woken her this morning. She must have felt the dull twinges of the pregnancy in her stomach, the twinges that meant the baby was alive.

  But as she watches the coffin bump to a gentle stop in the earth, I can only imagine she feels hollow, the pain a scythe that’s carved her out. She’ll wake from this week soon. She will. She’ll wake and Jeremy will be tugging at the blanket at the foot of her bed, telling her to get up now, come on, come play. She’ll see him and the fog of this horrible dream will lift.

  * * *

  The day they buried Jeremy, the rain cleared after the funeral. The rain bookends the news reports: first Lorilei’s saying that the angels were crying, then the way the angels stopped when the boy had been laid to rest in the earth. In the time I’ve been standing at Jeremy’s grave, the rain has only started to come down harder. I look at his name on the plaque and I try to make myself understand that he’s below me. His autopsy report is in the file I read before coming here. I have held in my hand the grim weighing out of each of his organs. The rest of the records from this case are in the court archive. Somewhere in the court archive are the pictures of his body. Once he wasn’t only a name in the files, a school picture flashed on the evening news, a cautionary tale. Once he was a boy.

  * * *

  The week after the funeral, twenty-five people gather to march from the local state senator’s office to the Lake Charles Civic Center in protest. They should have been warned about Ricky. “He was around children all day,” says a neighbor. Perhaps she was one of the searchers gathered on the porch of the Lawson house, comparing their routes and trying to cheer each other up in the long stretches of finding nothing, and perhaps she is remembering Ricky’s bringing them out Styrofoam cups of coffee. She took that coffee from Ricky’s hands, they all did, and she thanked him. Perhaps now she is remembering sending her children up to his bedroom to play with the others. She feels the horror of having trusted. “People got a right to know if Jeffrey Dahmer’s moving into their neighborhood,” she says. Before Jeremy’s disappearance, the Dahmer trial consumed the media for weeks. The people of Iowa and Lake Charles saw updates on the front pages of their newspapers and in clips on the evening news. The week Dahmer was sentenced to life, Ricky killed Jeremy. No longer does it seem just a spectacle.

  Lorilei stands at the head of the march, her leather motorcycle jacket open over her T-shirt and jeans. The marchers carry signs all with the same black-markered handwriting, the same white poster board. The sign lettered for her says: SAVE YOUR CHILD FROM B
EING A VICTIM. “I believe this is what my baby’s death was meant for,” she tells a reporter. “This is what my baby was born for.”

  Everybody’s watching her in this moment. Thrusting their microphones in her face. Flashing their camera bulbs. The sheriff made her go through two lie detector tests before Ricky confessed. Soon the defense attorney will have things to say about her mothering. Soon the prosecutors will, too. Here, at the head of the march, she is a symbol of loss. The woman no one wants to be.

  When the marchers reach the state senator’s office, he comes to the door and listens to their chanting. Then he joins them. The senator knows a movement when he sees one. They’ll get their law, he promises the group. “I don’t want to see another Jeremy Guillory case ever happen again.”

  As the marchers raise their signs—as they chant, as they demand what they believe will keep them safe—I understand their need. It is the way I feel when I look at the forms Ricky filled out in the mid-1980s at the Lake Charles Mental Health Center, when he said he was afraid he’d molest a child again and asked to be locked up, or when I read that Lanelle turned away when Ricky blocked her on the stairs. Why didn’t she force her way upstairs? Why didn’t she go tell a cop what had happened?

  But even if there had been such a law when Jeremy knocked on the Lawson house door—or before that, when Lorilei first went to stay with Melissa, or before that, when she couldn’t keep the heat on and she realized that she and Jeremy would have to find somewhere else to sleep—that law likely wouldn’t have saved Jeremy. No one in law enforcement knew where Ricky was; the last place they’d kept track of him was his parents’ house. There were at least ten known sex offenders living around Iowa, ten whose names I will find in the records. Ten whose names the Louisiana parole officer actually gave Lucky and Dixon before she gave them Ricky’s name. It wasn’t as neat as the story was told. Of course it wasn’t. One of the ten actually showed up to help search for Jeremy. The cops turned him away—and meanwhile Ricky served coffee to the searchers and watched the children play in his bedroom, shooing them away from the closet door.