The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  The marchers, they get their law. But six months later the newspaper runs an editorial pointing out that it just hasn’t worked. Thanks to the law, eighteen sex offenders have been identified in the area—but for only three of them has community notification happened.

  All across the nation it is like this. Laws passed in blusters of well-meaning. Laws failing, because so rarely do the notifications work and so much of the burden falls on already burdened parents. You could make yourself sick worrying about who was on the registry and who’d moved into your town, you could drum those people out of your town or under a highway overpass, and half the time you’d be worrying about someone who had gay sex a few years before it was legalized in an area, or someone who slept with his underage girlfriend when he was barely of age himself, or someone who did something awful thirty years ago and had been all right since. In some places even prepubescent children will end up on the registries, gone too far in schoolyard games of doctor. And even then you’d only be worrying about the people you knew to worry about. About those someone had called the law on. Not the coach, the best friend, the babysitter, the stepfather, the uncle. The grandfather.

  Twenty years after these laws begin, sexual abuse rates won’t have dropped at all.

  But in 1994, in Louisiana, the marchers get their law. Every news article about its passage refers to an unnamed “Iowa boy”—Jeremy, now turned into a symbol. By the time of the trial, Lorilei’s drinking again. She’s using drugs again. She’s suicidal. Her son’s killer is convicted and sentenced to die and when her brother Richard tells her the news she thinks, Good riddance. She gives birth again and names this son Cole. Jeremy’s father is long gone, never once mentioned in the files, but this baby will have his father’s last name.

  Then, a few months later, she and Cole’s father split up. Lorilei’s alone with her son again. So she tries to give Cole another new beginning. She says goodbye to Jeremy where he lies in the earth, and she moves to South Carolina. She’ll raise Cole far away from this place.

  * * *

  After I leave Jeremy’s grave, I drive into downtown Lake Charles. It could be any small southern city, the road wider than the roads of the Northeast, the buildings lower, with more space between them—but the lake sets it apart. All roads draw to the lake—including the road the funeral parlor was on, which now curves around it and settles at the court-records archives division. Lorilei said goodbye to Jeremy—and his story came here.

  When I called ahead from Cambridge, I was told that fifteen file boxes were waiting for me. But I’m still caught off guard when the clerk appears, pushing a dolly loaded with four banker’s boxes. Each box is about three feet long and two feet wide and high. I lift the lid of the box marked #1. A row of packed-in folders, each folder maybe three hundred pages thick. I calculate quickly, my heart sinking and soaring at once. Fifteen boxes—maybe thirty thousand pages? There is so much here. There is so much here.

  I understood, of course, what I was told on the phone. Fifteen boxes. But I didn’t understand at all.

  “Let me know when you’re ready for the next batch!” the clerk says.

  Nothing to do but begin.

  In the first box, I find the years after the 1994 trial: Ricky sentenced, Ricky on death row. In the second, his lawyer Clive files briefs to earn Ricky a new trial. Thousands of pages, all focusing on Ricky.

  Then suddenly, eight years later, Lorilei appears.

  Twenty-Five

  June 7, 2002. A pretrial-hearing transcript. Clive and the prosecutor Wayne Frey argue about the white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt Jeremy wore when he died. For ten years it has sat yellowing in an evidence room at the archives division, behind two locked doors that require two separate keys. Will the jury see the T-shirt at the retrial? Clive and the prosecutor Cynthia Killingsworth argue over how much of the prosecution’s evidence—such as the testing on that T-shirt—the defense is entitled to discover. Lucky takes the witness stand and describes finding Jeremy in that T-shirt. Then a technician from the evidence lab describes having cut small holes around stains in the T-shirt to test them for semen.

  A man rises from the benches in the back of the courtroom. No one knows him. It’s one thirty in the afternoon. Ricky was there for the beginning of the hearing, but is now back at the correctional center. The lawyers have been gathered in the windowless room since nine thirty, with only a break for lunch. Strangers are rare after ten years on this case. Even rarer are ones dressed as I imagine this man is, in jeans and a work shirt.

  “May I address the court?” The man walks to the front and stands in front of Judge Alcide Gray, looking up at Gray in his black robe. The suited lawyers all stare at the man.

  “Yeah,” Gray says. He’s bored with this hearing. He’s been bored for hours.

  “I’m—I’m King Alexander Jr., and I’m not attired for court today,” he begins. “But I represent the—the—”

  His voice falters. This request he’s about to make? He knows it’s unusual. “I represent the mother of the victim, of the crime in the Langley matter. And she wishes to address the court regarding matters that the district attorney has declined to respond to. It has to do with her feelings on the death penalty.”

  Frey, the assistant district attorney, must whip his head around long enough to recognize the blond woman seated in the back of the room. This woman he and his office have been forcibly ignoring, not returning her calls, not responding to letters. This seems to be the first anyone takes note of her. She is thirty-eight now. No one’s seen her in eight years. People have been going in and out of the courtroom all morning: cops, detectives, technicians, court personnel. No one has noticed her.

  “I thought we were finished with Langley for today, Judge,” says Frey. They were ready to move on to the next case.

  Gray cuts him off. “I’ll hear from her.”

  Lorilei doesn’t walk to the witness stand. Instead she walks up the center aisle between the benches until she’s standing in front of Gray, looking up at him like a supplicant. He wasn’t the judge on the first trial—that was a white man. Gray’s black, a rare sight in the Louisiana judiciary. Lorilei has never met him before. But he holds her fate in his hands. “I am the mother of Jeremy Guillory,” she says.

  “I know who you are.” Gray’s voice is kind.

  Lorilei is no longer the young woman in the news photographs: Shorten her hair, scrub off some of the eyeliner and the hairspray, remove the jean jacket she wore when Richard sat with her to talk to the press. The years have thickened her body, but she dressed carefully this morning in a skirt the lady from the Victims Assistance Fund helped her pick out. This plea has to work. “I am here today,” she begins, but the strangeness of what she’s about to say gets to her, too. Her throat goes dry. This will be the most directly Lorilei has ever asked anyone for anything on this case. When her boy went missing the cops did the searching and while they searched only rumors reached her. All she could do was wait. When they found her baby’s body, she let Richard arrange the funeral. When they tried his killer, her name wasn’t on the case. The state’s was. Louisiana v. Ricky Langley. Like that was whom he’d harmed. At the trial the prosecutors told her where to sit, and she sat there. They practiced with her what to say, and she said it. Your own son dies and it becomes the community’s tragedy, as though it’s the system’s tragedy. Public.

  But ten years have passed since they told her that her boy was dead. And Lorilei could tell them all how private grief really is, how constant. She could tell them about the quiet. All the noise a six-year-old boy makes and then how loud the silence is when he’s gone. She carried Cole inside her, and every kick she felt in her sternum, every flutter of new life against her heart, must have been an echo of what she’d felt with Jeremy. Her longing for him was sometimes a balm, sometimes an endless ache. Then the early weeks of Cole’s infancy, being grateful for how bone-tired she was because having to just survive took the echo briefly away.

  Now Cole’
s reaching ages Jeremy never did, and it’s a new kind of pain, the endless accumulation of what-ifs. When she got pregnant a third time she named the baby Rowan and gave Rowan up for adoption. Then one morning two years ago when Jeremy had been gone for eight years, another morning when she’d shaken one child awake for the school bus instead of two, and she was standing in the kitchen packing one school lunch instead of two, her phone rang. On the line was an assistant from Clive’s office, telling her that there would be another trial. Telling her she’d have to relive her son’s loss again.

  Now she’s desperate. The lawyers have been talking for hours as if what matters is only whether they kill Ricky. They don’t understand what loss is. Her boy’s gone. Killing his killer won’t change that.

  “I am here today, Your Honor, to ask your mercy for Ricky Langley’s life.”

  Maybe there’s an intake of breath. Maybe the room is as quiet as a tomb.

  “Your Honor,” she continues, “I beg you to please put this to rest.”

  The clock on the wall ticks forward. Judge Gray looks at her. He takes in, he must, how carefully she’s dressed, the bags that must be under her eyes, how dignified she is holding herself erect in the small room. Maybe he considers that word she’s said, “mercy.” It must sound so strange, so lofty, in this room. They have been talking about hearing dates. They have been talking about filing deadlines. The procedural bureaucracies of the law. Not mercy. Gently, Gray says, “Believe me, ma’am, I take no pleasure in trying this case.”

  For a minute the only sound is the tap of the court reporter’s fingers on her keyboard. The words must sound hollow even to Gray. The room waits. He tries again. “I can tell you, on the record, it doesn’t matter to me if the DA knows it, if everybody knows it—I don’t believe in the death penalty. I take no pleasure in five or six years from now, or ten years from now, looking at the television and Mr. Langley is placed in the chair and being executed and I know I signed the death warrant. I don’t know how I’d react to that, if that happens. Fortunately for me it hasn’t happened yet. But I know it happened to one judge in the court a couple of weeks ago and he caught—I mean he feels it. He feels it. It’s something.”

  Oh, Gray should be careful. He should watch what he says. Patricia Hicks, the court reporter, is sitting to his right and she is touch-typing her way through every word that he utters, recording it in shorthand she will transcribe later. When it has been transcribed it will become a document, and that document, years from now, when Clive is trying again to get yet another trial for Ricky, will be excerpted and entered into evidence. Gray shouldn’t, as he soon will, tell the jurors that he doesn’t believe in the death penalty. A judge is supposed to be neutral. A judge is not supposed to influence the jury. He shouldn’t tell the jury, as he will, that the trial is driving him to drink. That his wife is angry at him for coming home so worked up, from what he has to watch, from what he has to learn, from looking at Ricky day after day and knowing that they are voting on this young man’s life but also that this young man strangled a boy. Gray is fifty-five years old. He used to be a lawyer. At least once, he was the defense attorney in a death penalty trial. He fought for a man’s life.

  Gray tried to get off this case. Ten years ago, he succeeded. But this time he lost the judicial lottery. It’s his case now. His courtroom. He is the one who must preside over the evidence—but today, as Lorilei stands in front of him and makes her plea, something inside him begins to break. When the lawyers talk about Ricky’s hands on Jeremy’s neck, he will comment that this case is tormenting him. When the lawyers question prospective jurors about whether they’ll be able to listen to testimony about pedophilia and keep an open mind, Gray will get up and leave. And then again, during closing arguments, as the lawyers talk about Ricky’s semen on Jeremy’s shirt, Gray will stand in his long black robe, lay the gavel carefully on its side, and walk out.

  Later, some will speculate that his behavior is a sign of early dementia. His mother has Alzheimer’s; maybe the disease is beginning in Gray. Maybe he just has no judgment—though he’s had a long, distinguished career until now, a career that has required him to rise above what people expected of him, and there’s never been an issue like this. Maybe it’s just that growing up where he did, growing up black where he did, he has a deep respect for struggle. His father was in the Army and his mother was a maid and it took him nine years to finish college. He is on the bench now in a state that at this time has few black lawyers and fewer black judges, he knows what it’s like to be discounted and dismissed the way Ricky has been, but the grief he feels when he considers Lorilei’s son is real, and this case is killing him from the inside.

  The humanity that leaks out of Gray and spills into words all over the transcripts—it will be the reason the verdict from this trial is overturned. Gray will be the reason Lorilei has to suffer not only through this trial but another. He’ll die an early death just a few years from now, this trial the last major event in his judicial career. Before he does, he’ll recuse himself from all death penalty cases.

  People think the robe protects you. It doesn’t protect you. Not from the stories.

  “I can tell you you’re not alone,” Gray says to Lorilei now. “But I can’t help you. It’s the prosecutors’ decision.”

  The way Lorilei looks at Frey right now, she is drowning.

  “We will pursue our seeking of the death penalty in this case,” Frey says.

  * * *

  In the file box, after the transcript, there’s a contract. I stop short to see it, a contract amid the Miranda forms, search consents, subpoena receipts—documents you’d expect to see in a criminal court record. But the language is unmistakable: “Waiver & Agreement,” signed by both Ricky and Lorilei. Ricky, through Clive, indicates his understanding that Lorilei would like him held not in a mental institution (as would happen with an insanity verdict) but in a prison, and states that, having caused her such pain, he “wishes to do as she wishes.” He promises never to seek commutation or lessening of any life sentence—something an insanity verdict would allow—and never to seek release from confinement. In return, Lorilei promises to visit him in prison. The contract makes it sound as if Ricky, through Clive, is promising not to seek an insanity verdict.

  But an insanity verdict is exactly what Clive will push for.

  Lorilei, after the hearing, as she sits on the hard hallway bench of her future, can’t know this yet. She has a chance to lay this story to rest. She signs. She met Ricky once when she came to the door of the Lawson house, when he let her in to use the phone. Her boy was upstairs dead and she never knew. According to at least one account, she met him again that night as the searchers combed the woods. He brought her a drink and she took it from his hands, never knowing what those hands had done. Now she’ll meet him once more. And this time, she’ll know.

  But though Lorilei either doesn’t remember or never realized, she and Ricky met long ago. Long before he killed her son.

  Twenty-Six

  My second morning in Louisiana I wake to the sound of the air conditioner’s dull buzz. The motel room is stiflingly hot, the air trapped by the heavy drapes. My eyes still closed, I can feel sweat bead on my skin, the scratchy dampness of the sheets. In the parking lot below, a man and a woman call out to each other while cars pass on the highway. Some must be pulling into the old Fuel Stop, the drivers getting out to pump gas and buy their morning coffee. I can picture the blue sky above, with its clear blaze of light. It’s morning; the world is fresh; I should get up and start my day.

  But my body won’t move.

  All right, I think. I’ll just stay here. I’ll keep my eyes shut, and the world will stay black and there won’t be anything to flee. I don’t have to face the files. I can decide that coming here was a mistake, that I can live with both Ricky’s story and my past staying unresolved inside me. I can live with the fear that flares through me too often when Janna touches me and the anger and grief I feel in my heart when I�
�m in my parents’ house. I can live with anything; I can hold all of it. Just as long as it stays down.

  Then what? Be just as stuck as before?

  I sigh. I shove myself out of bed, kicking my body upright, and feel the rough slip of the sheets away from me. I yank open the drapes, and the weakest light steals in. The coffee I brew in the motel coffeemaker is tepid and weak, the faint taste of burn, but I suck down two cups of it. The past already has its hold on me. There’s nothing to do but face it.

  * * *

  Downtown Iowa is one street: a public library tucked behind the broad face of a bank, the post office and the fire department, the quilting store and the hardware store. It looks like a movie set of small-town America, but on the drive here I passed welfare motels and payday-check-cashing outlets with blinking neon signs. I passed long fields that abutted straggled woods. Between the fields were a few houses, spaced like outposts, each with rusted car parts on their lawns and plastic chairs that had long ago turned from white to gray. A plastic Jesus was glued to a mailbox. Every pickup had a gun rack. Now, downtown, I am on the dividing line that separates the cluster of commerce from the miles and miles of pretty, rusted, run-down landscape that stretch across the horizon. Here is Iowa. But where Ricky lived, where he grew up, was out in that great flat in-between expanse. Where Lake Charles, Iowa, and LeBleu could all hear about a missing boy and all, at first, decide it was some other place’s problem.

  The library walls are plastered with colorful posters that exhort the value of reading. One corner of the one-room space has most of the posters and there the wooden chairs are miniature, their colors red and blue and yellow. The chairs are empty today—no children in sight—and I look at them hard for a moment. The newspaper photograph of Lorilei standing over two-year-old Jeremy as he was fitted for his first bike, her hands resting on his hard little shoulders, was taken in a parking lot near here. Did she read to him here? Did Jeremy ever sit in one of these chairs, or its precursor?