The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  I’ve already been through the online archives of the main paper. That yielded scanned articles about the long-ago crash, Oscar and Vicky’s burial, even an announcement of Bessie and Alcide’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, with their children listed—Ricky’s home given as “West Feliciana Parish,” where the state penitentiary is. But the library has folders of old news clippings, so maybe there’s more here. Inside the green cardboard folders are clips from yellowed newspaper, each hemmed in scissor lines from someone’s long-ago careful hand. I read of bake sales, of car washes, of local citizens’ good deeds. A lot about flowers. On one page the much younger face of District Attorney Rick Bryant grins out at me from before he was the DA, before he was the man who would push three times to get the death penalty for Ricky. Nothing mentions Jeremy or Ricky, not even in the folder marked CRIME, which is nearly empty of anything dated after the 1950s. A small town’s history, curated by a small town. Nothing included that anyone wants to forget. The books in the local history section are a bust, too, Iowa so small that local really means the region.

  “Do you have any yearbooks?” I ask the librarian.

  “A few,” she says, and leads me to a shelf. My first thought is disappointment—though the shelf holds a row of yellow-and-purple spines for the Iowa High School Yellowjackets, the years stamped on them are from the fifties and sixties. Next, the nineties. Bessie and Alcide didn’t go to school here, only their children. These books won’t help me.

  Then I notice one—only one—tucked in the middle of those decades, 1981 on its spine.

  My heart races: 1981. I pull the book off the shelf and thumb its pages rapidly, calculating. Ricky was born in 1965. He would have been a sophomore. The girls are fresh-faced young with their bangs teased and sprayed high, the boys’ hair is hacked into mullets. Faces are splotched with acne and meet the camera in the broad grin beam of the confident, or look down in the sink of the resigned.

  Ricky isn’t among them.

  Then I see him.

  A freshman. At fifteen, he looks younger than his age. His face is small and his chin weak, his skin clear as a preteen’s. The wave in his hair that will develop into a high cowlick is already there, his eyebrows already unruly. He doesn’t wear glasses. He does not smile and he does not frown. His mouth hangs open. He looks straight into the camera, but he isn’t staring. His eyes are vacant. This is the boy who grew into the man who killed Jeremy.

  I sit down on the carpet and page through the yearbook. High schoolers sitting seriously for portraits, mugging in candids for the camera, goosing one another or busting into laughter as the shutter clicks. Their faces ripple across 140 pages, repeating. A small school. A small town. On the bright yellow inside cover, Ricky’s classmates have scribbled messages to the yearbook’s original owner, a girl named Cindy. “You can get everything out of life that you put into it!” I flip through all the pages, but Ricky is only in this one place. One photo.

  This, then, was Ricky at fifteen: scrawny and unwritten, the future seeming as blank as the expression on his face.

  But no, his future is there. Ten pages away, captured together in this moment. Her name catches me off guard. I wasn’t looking for her. Her brother went to school in Lake Charles and I thought she did, too. But she’s here: Lorilei Guillory. A senior, her face unmistakably the broad one that appears, older, in news clips; her light brown hair winged like Farrah Fawcett’s; her eyeliner already heavy in the style she’ll wear for years. A graduation cap on her head—she’s done it, she’s graduating. And she’s there again in the photograph of the school newspaper staff, her arms crossed and one leg cocked over the other, with her jeans rolled up over hiking boots, a fleece sweatshirt. She’s left her sunglasses on, and she stares at the camera through a mask of black. The thick, oversize clothing, the dark glasses—she looks like she’s hiding, but not out of shyness. Out of armor.

  The future is coming, eleven years ahead. It sends its long low warning signal over the pages of this story.

  Behind me, the librarian coughs once, signaling politely. Somehow it is 5:00 p.m. The day has passed and the library is closing. I slide the book back onto the shelf and stand and stretch. “Thanks,” I say.

  Outside, in the parking lot, I sit in my rental car for a long time. It’s still clear and sunny out—beautiful, really—but I keep the windows up and the engine off, the key in my hand. The car is stiflingly hot, but my body is suddenly immovable, heavy as the air. I’ve found something. Evidence, as much as the files are. Of the boy, when he was still a boy and not the murderer. Of the girl, when she was still a girl and not the victim’s mother. The future was waiting for them, unknown and unseen.

  Twenty-Seven

  I know almost nothing about my grandfather before he became my grandfather. When I was growing up, my mother didn’t talk about his childhood—or about hers. My father was always telling us stories of the upside-down pineapple cake his mother baked for special occasions, or the floppy-eared Great Dane he had as a boy, who tugged the doghouse all the way to my father’s schoolyard gate. Compared with his, my mother’s life before us was a void—and so, too, was my grandfather. I know I played checkers with him often as a child, and that he was the one to teach me to draw, but those memories have been blotted mainly to black—by his hand as it draws the soft cloth of my nightgown away from my legs, by the cool brush of air against my stomach and the dread that crawled my thigh. By what came next.

  When I first got Ricky’s treatment records from Lake Charles Mental Health Center in the mid-1980s and I read about his struggling in the years before he killed Jeremy, he started to become a person to me. Which made me wonder about my grandfather. I wrote my mother a letter, the first and only letter I’ve written to her. Please tell me about Grandpa. I have realized that all I know about him is what he did. For months, the letter went unanswered. I asked her about it by telephone and she ignored the question. I e-mailed her and got no response. I asked again. I feel for my mother. With her determination not to talk about the past, I must sometimes seem to her a walking time bomb. A bomb made of time.

  Then one morning, six months after I sent the letter, I woke to a long e-mail of stories. Each was just a sentence or two, dashed off and tentative in tone, but together they formed a trickle. The next day another e-mail arrived, lengthier. Then another, and another.

  My grandfather, Vincent Jimmy Marzano, was one of nine children born to an Italian immigrant couple. He and my grandmother Emily were childhood sweethearts who met when both families moved to Queens. In the summers, the siblings all went to Coney Island together, and soon Emily’s older sister married my grandfather’s older brother. After the second grade, my grandfather left school to help support his younger siblings by working as a newsboy. He taught himself to read by studying the papers he hawked, calling out their headlines on street corners. That he could read helped him find work as a film cutter. When he and Emily married, my grandfather was working for Paramount Pictures.

  He worked nights and my grandmother worked days as a telephone operator, so he took care of my mother and her two older brothers when they came home from school. (Here I think of Ricky looking after June and Joey, and of the neighborhood parents sending their children up to play in his bedroom while they searched.) He was always the fun parent, my mother wrote. He liked to arrange little surprises. He would unwind a roll of toilet paper, hide a dollar bill in it, then roll it up again for one of his unsuspecting children to find. Each night he would cook them dinner (I remember my grandfather’s red sauce bubbling on the stove in the Queens house when I was a child, needling into my nose, making my belly growl), and when evening arrived he would turn off the stove and cover the food, so that it would keep for my grandmother to feed them later. Then he would bundle the children for the walk to the bus stop. So that the children would not complain of the length of the walk, or of the cold in winter, he would hide small toys and candies in his pocket that he doled out along the way: a piece of Chiclets gum fo
r my uncle from a two-cent pack he’d bought at the subway station; the wooden spool from a skein of thread that he’d had the shoemaker hammer four nails into, so my mother could knit on it. At the bus station, he would hand the children off to my grandmother and continue on to the night shift at Paramount. There he’d spend hours wearing jeweler’s glasses, hunched over strips of film. I can see him as he presses his blade to the images: the way he touches his tongue to his lips in concentration, the bushy eyebrows I remember so well furrowing. My grandfather is a surgeon of stories. He splices them together to make something new.

  And no, to the obvious question, no, my mother wrote—though I hadn’t dared to ask her directly. She had no memory of his ever having abused her or her brothers.

  Five e-mails came. Then, as suddenly as they began, the e-mails stopped.

  That’s all. That’s all I have. Only those e-mails, my memories like a filmstrip burned black at the center, and her silence. No archive from a trial I can search, no thousands of pages to pore over, and no answers. Because in addition to whatever else is true about my grandfather, there is also this: He got away with it.

  * * *

  The walls in the prison visiting room where Lorilei meets with Ricky must be gray paint—nothing that would show dirt as easily as white—over large bricks and shine-rimmed with the faint stink of bleach. I see an old soda machine sitting in the far corner, its light emitting a barely audible hum. The chairs are plastic molded primary colors, red and blue and yellow, somebody’s idea of cheer but a little too small. She comes in the morning, but inside the room’s cast of gray it could as easily be night. The guard shows her to a small round table where she sits and folds her hands in her lap, so she can’t fidget too much. The door in the corner has a small rectangle of glass. Every few minutes she glances up at it, checking. The next time she tries to make herself wait longer. But then she checks again.

  She recognizes the back of his head first. Brush-bristled hair cut short, the orange rim of a jumpsuit at his neck. It should just look like the back of any prisoner’s head, she shouldn’t be able to recognize him, but she does.

  He turns, and yes, it’s him. Those eyes. The thick glasses. The door opens and he shuffles through it without looking at her. He puts his hands out and the guard unlocks his cuffs.

  She stands. She’s not thinking now; she’s gone blank, her whole body watching his, and her hands find their way to her hair and smooth it. Ten years have passed since she last saw him. Entering his late thirties, he’s no longer young, and his hair has started to pepper with Bessie’s gray. Off death row, his body has slackened and settled. He was in prison here before the first trial and has been here again for several months now. This is where he lives.

  He reaches the table, and she realizes she has no idea what to say. For a minute she just looks at him.

  “Do you want a soda?” The lawyers told her she could offer this. They gave her a few bills to bring.

  He nods, so quickly it’s as if he needs the motion to be over as soon as he starts it. “Coke.”

  She must be grateful for the few steps to the machine, the chance to look away. She doesn’t let herself think. She just holds herself, like she holds the dollar, and when the machine spits the soda out she cups the cold can in her hand, faintly wet with condensation. The wetness is like a reminder of the world beyond this place. Of water, of the way the water crawls through the bushes of Henderson Swamp and how it will stretch beneath the overpass on her way back to her motel. When she reaches him she holds the can out without saying anything.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  Such small talk they make with each other first. Lorilei does all the asking. How’s it to be back here? All right. You must be glad to be off death row. Yeah. He’s shy with her. He looks down a lot.

  His shyness makes her bold. She’s in charge here, as if Ricky’s one of ten-year-old Cole’s friends after he’s nicked a piece of candy from her cupboard, a guilty schoolboy mumbling into his hands who can’t look her in the eye. She coaxes him. “You must have a lot of time to think.”

  “You know my mama was in that crash,” he begins, and his voice trails off.

  “Yes,” she says, encouraging, and waits. She must feel the idea settle inside her. Ricky as a boy. Ricky as a small boy, confused, not knowing what haunts his parents, only seeing Bessie’s pain. Lorilei chooses her words carefully. “That must have been so hard.”

  This is a mother who lost the son she mothered. And this is a man who has two mothers, but one, the defense attorneys say, was sick or drunk his whole childhood and the other, the social workers say, was so harsh with discipline that none of the children under her care ever bonded. (Not true, Darlene and Francis say on the stand. They were loved. They were happy.)

  Neither Bessie nor Luann testified for Ricky at any of his three trials. They don’t even seem to have attended the trials. The prosecutor brought this up pointedly when the defense presented evidence of Bessie’s pregnancy in the cast. “This case isn’t about Bessie Langley,” he said. “I don’t know Bessie Langley. I’ve never met Bessie Langley. I’ve never seen Bessie Langley.” So did the defense. “If you were sitting where Ricky was, wouldn’t someone be there for you? Your mother?” (But in the files, Bessie often sits beside him in counseling appointments. So who is telling the story correctly?) Almost every counselor who comes into contact with Ricky notes that he seems much younger than his actual age. He seems twelve, they say: right on the cusp of puberty, not yet grown into his own skin. Twelve not intellectually—Ricky’s IQ tests as normal, and in prison in Georgia he took some college classes—but emotionally. If Ricky as a child was shunned by his peers, Ricky as an adult seems to make at least some people want to take care of him. (“Would you remember me to Ricky?” one social worker said, interviewed by a defense investigator for the trial. “I was unusually fond of him. Of all of them, I remember him the most.”) Ricky in his adult body sometimes seems like a child caught in a permanent game of dress-up. The child inside him needs looking after. And is it too much to say that, in this moment, Lorilei needs to be soft, needs to be tender toward someone? Is it too much to say that Ricky, in this moment, needs someone to be soft to him?

  Lorilei must watch his face closely. The way his eyebrow twitches when he gets nervous. The way he looks down at his hands. Ricky is a killer. He killed her son. At times, he is boastful about this. At times, he is angry.

  But right now he must seem, somehow, fragile.

  She has one more question. “Ricky, did you molest my son?”

  “No,” he says.

  Then she does something that must startle even herself. She reaches her hand across the table and takes his. The hand that killed her child.

  His hand is skinny, light as a frightened animal. But she waits, and it settles. “Ricky,” she says, “I’ll fight for you.”

  * * *

  Those words. That promise. Those are the words I had such trouble with when I learned about this case. He killed her son. He was a pedophile. He molested children. But she fought for him?

  The defense lawyers and the news media told this story as a story of the power of a mother’s forgiveness. But that’s too simple. Lorilei herself has said she doesn’t forgive him. Instead, she has said that she now believes that Ricky did not molest her child. When she visited him in prison, she asked him whether he molested Jeremy. He said no and she believes him. That was part of what made her feelings change between the first trial and the second.

  But I’ve read what wasn’t admitted at court. It isn’t that simple, either. For that first trial, the jury saw some of the evidence of Ricky’s past pedophilia. They saw his diary, in which the descriptions of molestation he gave were either recollections or fantasies; no one knows which, or how many, of those stories were true. The Georgia girl who was five when he touched her took the stand at the trial, and, at age fourteen, described what he’d done. A Georgia inmate described hearing him say his big mistake was leaving the girl
alive. A great deal of time was spent on the tests showing Ricky’s semen on Jeremy’s white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt.

  And Ricky told investigators he’d hurt hundreds of children. I don’t think that’s true—I think he was inflating things. I think a pedophile was what he knew he was now, what he’d always be, and because that’s who he was he wanted to make that identity bigger. He didn’t have anything else to be. But I do think he must have molested more children than those for whom he was caught. I know my grandfather molested at least one child outside my immediate family, but only years after he died did it occur to me that there might have been more. That five years of molesting us was not a one-time thing, and perhaps, in its length, implied more. The silence my parents kept may have allowed more children to be hurt. Ricky struggled with pedophilia for decades. At Ricky’s second trial, none of the evidence of Ricky’s prior “bad acts” was admitted. The test results were barely mentioned. The prosecution implied many times that Ricky had molested Jeremy, even accused him of it—but they could present little of the circumstantial evidence that he might have. There are reasons for that, good ones. The trial was about the murder, not the whole story. But is an act ever really only about itself? Does any element of this story occur in isolation?

  I can see why Lorilei shuts the door on the whole question behind her, opts to believe that her son was not molested and leave it at that. How can I fault her for wanting something easier to live with? How can I fault her for choosing a neater narrative?

  But the determination to turn away from the past isn’t benign. The morning after the Christmas party when I overheard my father telling people that I was writing about something that only I recalled, I confronted him. My sister Nicola backed me up, and told him that was nonsense. Of course she remembered the abuse. We all did. But two years later, she said to me, “I’ve decided to think of myself as someone who wasn’t abused.” This was brutally hard for me to hear. We’d shared a room. I’d watched my grandfather touch her. He’d pulled me from my bed and taken me to the bathroom where she stood, waiting. He unzipped his pants and made us put our hands on him. She can’t just pretend none of that happened. She can’t.