But of course—she can. I have changed my sister’s name in this book, out of respect for her choice, and as much as possible I have changed my other family members’ names and the names of some of the people in Ricky’s life. But I can’t bring myself to write a narrative that puts my experience alone in my family again. I won’t do on the page what was done in life.
Twenty-Eight
I couldn’t find any real information on the cemetery in Hecker where Bessie and Alcide are buried, near where the house Lyle and Alcide built once stood. When I called the cemetery caretaker, he told me to meet him at his house and he’d drive me out there. Nobody new would be able to find the cemetery alone.
“Who did you want to see, again?” the elderly caretaker asks, once I’m seated in his living room, his wife beside me on the couch and he sitting in an armchair across the room. Both the couch and the armchair are covered in hand-knit doilies.
“Desier Langley.” Alcide’s father, who’s buried next to them. Oscar’s at his feet. It feels too close, somehow, to say I want to see Oscar or Bessie. Then I remember that the caretaker corrected my pronunciation on the phone. “Dezzy-ch.”
“You’re not from Iowa,” the caretaker’s wife says. She peers at me.
“No,” I admit. “I live in Massachusetts.”
“Not kin, then.”
“No. I’m not.”
She waits, clearly wanting more of an answer. Her eyes are like pale blue marbles.
I feel myself let go of the pretense that I’m here to see Desier. I am thinking too much about my grandmother lying on the sofa bed at the foot of the stairs, and my father as he hoisted my grandfather into the car to bring him home to us. I am thinking too much about Bessie and what she knew about her son. About how much loss Bessie had to live with, and about Lorilei’s walking away from her baby’s grave, another baby inside her. About the missing birth certificate on my childhood wall and about all the silence in my family. The caretaker and his wife are being so kind, having me here in their living room. I owe them something. “You know about the crash?” I ask. “My parents lost a child. I think the death kind of—” I pause, searching for the word. “I think it haunted my parents.”
The road into Hebert Cemetery is long and winding, made of packed dirt that cuts between tall leafy trees that blot out the sun. I follow the caretaker and his wife as they drive ahead in a white pickup truck. Around us, the woods thicken into a snarl. Nothing else could be out on this road, the cemetery’s location even more desolate than I thought. Great dust clouds rise up behind their truck and soon the only things I can see ahead are the white bay of the truck, the high, twined trees on my sides, and the haze I am driving into.
Then, up ahead, there is suddenly sunshine. A clearing. The trees fall away and light floods in. At the center of the clearing is a waist-high wrought-iron fence, perhaps forty feet long on one edge, around a rectangle of cement graves. The caretaker sidles his pickup next to the fence and I pull in alongside him. The cemetery is so small, so tucked within the trees, that it strikes me immediately how many times he’s pulled in here. How well he must know this drive. How intimate it must be to spend decades caring for just this patch of graves.
His wife stays by the truck while the caretaker and I walk to the fence. At the gate, he clears his throat. “So how did you get interested in the Langleys?” he asks. Something about the way he asks makes me realize they’ve been talking.
For a minute I let his question rest. The sun is brilliant and strong, the light stark white around me. To walk I have to place my feet carefully between the graves. Here, just a few miles from Lake Charles, the water table is different. The dead can’t be buried beneath the ground. The dug grave would fill with water. The body might rise up. So they’re entombed. In the famous New Orleans cemeteries I’ve visited, that means structures as ornate as tiny houses. But those were families that had money. In the woods, in this hidden clearing, the graves are burial vaults, half-submerged in the ground, so that the tops rise inches above the grass. They look like coffins. Their shape suggests bodies.
* * *
As a child I never thought about my sister’s having had a body. I never wondered where she was buried. She wasn’t a baby to me. She was absence. The absence of a birth announcement on my childhood bedroom wall, when Elize’s and Nicola’s announcements were framed over their beds. The absence of any stories from right after we were born. The absence of any explanation the day my mother ran barefoot sobbing and screaming across the lawn, or once when she had too much to drink on a family vacation and was suddenly the one flung facedown on my parents’ hotel bed, swearing she was too sad to live.
When I was lonely as a child I would sometimes go to the small bathroom right off the kitchen. My two sisters were into dolls and sports and my brother loved movies and baseball and I loved books and quiet and there was never anyone it felt right to play with. That would get worse, later, when I was angry and the others either weren’t or couldn’t show it, while I was always, helplessly, loud as a spouting fountain with my feelings. But the bathroom was always peaceful. It was the size of a closet. The ceiling was wallpapered in a midnight sky with white stars and the walls in white with pastel stars, so that standing in the bathroom with the door closed was like being inside an impossible mash-up of the dark of night and the light of day while the infinite stars swirled around you.
I stood in front of the cabinet mirror and studied my brown curly hair. I studied my green eyes. I looked at myself, looking for her. Her eyes I knew, from the medical chart I’d found once in the white filing cabinet, were blue. But maybe they’d have darkened with age. And her hair was brown like mine. Andy and I weren’t identical, obviously—though strangers, befuddlingly, sometimes asked, even if we were standing right in front of them—but wasn’t it possible that she and I were? That somehow I had been robbed of a true twin? In my mind, I grew her up. I made her my age; I gave her my curls. I made her shy. I made her love books.
It never quite worked. I could never get hold of the idea of her. She was gone, unimaginably gone. I was alone in my family. I couldn’t imagine myself being otherwise.
But in Ricky’s story, I started to see her everywhere. In Cole’s growing up in Jeremy’s absence. In the trunk Bessie kept in her closet. In the photograph of Oscar that Ricky carried, making the boy into his imaginary friend.
Oscar wasn’t imaginary. He has a grave.
The fact of a body. But where? I decided I had to ask. I’d gone to visit my parents on Nantucket, where they were staying for a month, as they did every year. I waited until the end of the weekend, until the house we were all staying in—my parents and my siblings and I—came to feel like a too-tight shirt over sunburned skin, scratchy and congested. The island had changed over the years, the backpackers playing guitar and the dogs roaming free on the beaches now replaced by men with sweaters knotted over their shoulders and women in Lilly Pulitzer dresses whose hair stayed perfectly blow-dried even in the humidity. The old five-and-dime was now an antiques shop. It was too much to hear all our voices piled on top of one another, all crammed into the same spaces we’d occupied as children. For how many more years could we gather this way? For how many more years would we be able to find a house that held us all? Would we never talk about everything that had happened? I waited until just before I had to leave or I would miss my ferry. Then I went through the house to find my mother. She was dressing in the bedroom, her hair curled onto hot rollers. She’d dabbed a strong floral perfume on her wrists, and though she hadn’t brought pantyhose to the summer island there was the same half-closed bathrobe. The perfume filled my throat. Time buckled.
“Where was Jacqueline buried?” I said.
My mother froze, her mouth a little round O. She’d moved on to applying lipstick and now the top half of the O was a raisin brown, the bottom her bare lips. Her hand suddenly trembling, she finished painting her lips. Then she straightened her back, carefully screwed shut the tube, placed
it down on the vanity, and walked out.
The next morning, when I was back in Boston, my cell phone rang. I saw it was my father. My father has called me perhaps twice in my life. This time when I answered he did not say hello. “I hear you’ve been asking your mother some questions.”
I grabbed a pad off my desk, and a pen. I knew I wouldn’t get another chance.
“Jacqueline’s buried in a mass grave,” my father said. “I don’t know where. Somewhere by the hospital, probably. The Catholic Charities took care of it.” When the three of us were five months old, and Andy and I were home and Jacqueline was still in the hospital, my father had taken my exhausted mother to Puerto Rico for a much-needed vacation. They’d landed at the airport, he said, and he’d heard his name over the public address system. Jacqueline had died. Standing with the emergency phone in his hand—I imagine the porters all around him, the vacationing families overburdened with colorful luggage, the honeymooners holding each other’s hands and leaning into each other to steal kisses—he made an instant decision. “Could you bury her?” he asked.
They couldn’t, they said. Only the Catholic Charities did that.
My parents are atheists. He told them to baptize her.
“It was simplest,” he told me on the phone, his voice gruff against tears. My parents never asked where Jacqueline was buried. Later my aunt would tell me they asked never to be told. “It was the right thing. She only lived in the hospital. She belonged there.” He sounded as though he was pleading. Not with me. With the past. We hung up, and never spoke about it again.
* * *
The caretaker has stopped walking and is watching me, waiting for me to answer his question. The grave to my left has a coffee cup cemented to its slab, the flowers in the cup crumbling and long dead. The cement at the bottom of the cup is unevenly applied, clearly a job done by a mourner rather than a professional. The mug says DADDY. I choose my words carefully. “I heard about the Langley family and I suppose their story just stayed with me. I had a sister, a triplet sister. She died when we were babies.”
“But how did you hear about them?”
It’s brutally hot in the clearing, the air stilled by the wall of the trees. The caretaker’s wife is waiting at the gate. But the caretaker just looks at me. In the long silence I feel keenly just how strange it is that I know so much about this family. How strange it is that I’ve come here at all. I want to tell him something that will make it all make sense for him, but how can I explain that I am trying to chase down the origin of this story because I can’t find the origin in my own life? That I need to understand how Bessie buried her children—because in her is Lorilei, and in her is my mother? That I need to understand the way that love warped what Bessie could see—because in her son is my grandfather, in Bessie is my grandmother, and in all of this is the click that Lorilei’s heels make as she walks up the courtroom aisle to argue for Ricky’s life and the strong grip of my father’s hand as he hoists my grandfather into the car, to bring him over the bridge to us? We are standing in a graveyard. But the past isn’t in the ground for me. The past is in my body. “I was doing some legal work and came across the story,” I finally muster.
We walk a few steps farther in silence, the sun strong. Then I almost cry out, because I see what we’ve come to. LANGLEY.
Twenty-Nine
I’ve never been to my grandparents’ grave. Not since my grandfather was laid to rest beside my grandmother. Before that—not since the stone went in, long before he died. The stone is rose-colored, engraved with a rose, and inlaid with their wedding portrait. My grandmother loved roses. So do I. I have the outline of a rose tattooed on the nape of my neck for the Marianne Moore poem “Roses Only” that I painted on my wall as a teenager. When my grandmother lay dying in the hospital, I sang “The Rose” to her. Some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed. Some say love, it is a razor that leaves the heart to bleed. I sang it to her, too, a few years before she died, when she came to stay with us alone while my grandfather was in the hospital. I had never seen her so restless, so plagued with fearful energy—I had, I realized, never seen her alone. The first night she stayed with us I went down the stairs to kiss her goodnight. My mother had made up the green pull-out sofa bed for her, but she wasn’t lying in it. She was sitting on its edge. When I walked into the room, she looked up. “More than fifty years we’ve been married,” she said. She had her mother’s prayer card in her palm and was worrying its edges with her fingers. “I’ve never gone to sleep without your grandfather. Not one night since.”
I was thirteen, maybe. I had never thought about the accumulation of all those nights. The way they added up to a life.
Who my grandfather was must have come to my grandmother like a pebble inside her: impossible to ignore one moment, impossible to admit the next. An awareness, then a vanishing. She must have willed herself not to feel him leave that bed at night. She knew who my grandfather was as a man. She couldn’t let herself see who he was as a molester.
Driving away from the cemetery, I am thinking about the Langley graves. The concrete over Alcide had darkened; the concrete over Bessie, still light. She died just a year before my visit. Someone put in markers for their children, with Oscar’s school portrait and Vicky’s christening one, and their concrete was the same color as Alcide’s. Bessie was probably alive when they were put in. The four graves together—the two big and the two little—looked unmistakably like what they were: a family. I am thinking about this, I am thinking about my grandmother lying in that bed, missing her husband, and the way she smelled of lavender when I leaned over her to kiss her papery cheek goodnight—when I see through the trees that the road ahead of me stops at an intersection. I see a yellow railroad crossing sign.
And then the name of the street I am coming to, which blows high and loud inside me like a whistle.
Packing House Road.
* * *
On the evening of May 27, 1992, eighty-two-year-old Della Thompson is sitting out on the patio at her house on Packing House Road, watching Wheel of Fortune through the patio door. The sun is setting over the wide flat grass of this part of Louisiana, the sky lit up in the fuschia bursts and golden streaks that are the gorgeous legacy of pollution in this part of the land, and out of the corner of her eye she notices a motorcycle going, she will later say, “real fast” down the road, so fast she cannot make out any passenger or driver. So fast she cannot make out Joey’s small arms clutching his father’s waist and Terry leaning forward to turn the throttle up faster, to make the motorcycle fly. Does Joey close his eyes against his father’s back? In this last moment, is what he feels the wind?
A train whistle pierces the air, loud and long, long enough to startle Della. You could see the train coming before that. It didn’t need the whistle. Then the train speeds past, the sunshine knifing off its silver body. After that, nothing. She goes back to watching her program.
But soon there’s a rumble of a pickup truck coming up the road. Della likes to watch passing cars. There aren’t many. So she watches the pickup stop near the crossing. She watches a woman get out and walk over to inspect something on the ground. She watches as the woman bends over and starts to pick it up.
Then Della hears screaming.
The woman runs toward Della’s house, yelling for Della to call the police.
* * *
On the diagram submitted with the police report is a figure eight drawn flipped on its side in front of the tracks. It looks like an infinity symbol. Above it, on the tracks, is noted “gouge marks.” This is where the train collided with the motorcycle, whose wheels form the loops of the symbol, and flipped it. Then the infinity symbol repeats again and again, tossing through the air before coming to rest. Airborne. The small outline of a body, marked “Victim #1,” lies parallel to the tracks—fifty-eight feet and eight inches, the diagram notes, from the point of impact. Terry Lawson. Between his body and the tracks are two carefully labeled circles representing the mot
orcycle’s gas tank and seat, and then the fender much farther away. The motorcycle blew apart in the impact. Closer in to the tracks lies the outline of a small body, apparently ejected much earlier than Terry. “Victim #2.” Joey, his son.
The train didn’t hit Terry. He hit it. He hit the second car, at such velocity that, the record notes, the train engineer never knew he’d hit anything at all and continued on toward Chicago. The report I found in the files said “accident.” The police never investigated it as anything else.
In all the briefs the defense filed in this case, the briefs with the unenforceable and strange requests, the brief that argued that though Jeremy was found dead and wrapped in blankets it might not have been murder, I found one in the boxes marked “Motion for Exhumation.” A hair sample was taken from Ricky Langley, Clive noted. But all that the sample proved was that the pubic hair found on Jeremy’s lip had not come from Ricky. Given that, wouldn’t it make sense to test whom the hair might belong to? “There is information that Mr. Lawson molested June Lawson, his daughter,” Clive wrote.
The motion does not specify what this information was.
Terry satisfied all the criteria they were looking for in a suspect. If not a suspect in the murder, then a suspect in—something. He had access to the bedroom where Jeremy’s body was found. He had access to Jeremy. In the time since Ricky had moved in with him and Pearl and the children, he had become a close friend of Ricky’s, and the two of them would go hunting together in the woods for hours. Ricky, the motion argued, was an easily influenced guy, and a very lonely one. A steady friendship would have been incredibly important to him.
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