The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  The videos from this morning are the bad dream, the unreal thing. Ricky’s leading Lucky through the dark, narrow staircase of the house. The toys on the floor of the bedroom, the beaten-up doll of June’s, that doll the last thing Jeremy ever played with. She has watched that video before, but when they showed it this morning she hadn’t seen it in years. Did her breath catch when Lucky touched the closet door? Inside the closet was her baby. The blond, downy hair she’d kissed and ruffled her palms through, smooth and cool. The lashes that had just brushed his cheeks, as they did when he slept. The horrible blue-black marks on his neck and the bloom of red spots around them, like freckles of blood.

  This morning, after that tape and another, they’d played one more. A third tape, one that had been excluded from the 1994 trial. In this tape, recorded two months after the murder, Ricky had changed his story. He’d described molesting Jeremy. Before Jeremy was dead.

  So she’d had to watch that. Her baby.

  “Take the jury out. Ms. Guillory?”

  “Yes, Your Honor?” The whole courtroom is looking at her, even the witness. She catches up suddenly. The witness is a scientist. He was explaining how they tested for semen on Jeremy.

  “Ms. Guillory, come see me a moment.”

  Beside her on the bench is ten-year-old Cole. She squeezes his hand, then stands and walks to the front of the room.

  “Good morning, Your Honor.”

  “Is that your child?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is the wrong place for a child. This is a murder trial. It’s awful enough—I don’t think this child needs to be in this courtroom listening to this.” Gray’s voice rises. “There’s—there’s stuff about what happened to his sibling and all that. I ain’t going for it.”

  “Not open for—”

  “You think a child should be in here?”

  The courtroom is perfectly quiet. Everyone watches her. Cole watches her.

  “Your Honor,” Lorilei says slowly, “my son has experienced everything I have. If I see that it’s emotionally disturbing to him, I will take him out.”

  Gray shakes his head. “All right. It’s your child.”

  “He still has questions that are unanswered as well as I do.”

  Then—all at once—Lorilei seems to sink. Her shoulders drop. Her voice sounds like a balloon with the air gone out. “I’m not really quite sure that this is the right—you know—but I really didn’t have any other alternatives for today for him and for me to be here as well.” Richard hasn’t spoken to her since he learned she planned to testify for Ricky.

  Gray takes his glasses off. “Talk to Clive and them and see if they can give you some relief. I have problems with this trial.” He rubs his forehead. “I know damned well a child would have problems with this trial.”

  An investigator for the defense comes and takes Cole’s hand to lead him from the courtroom. I think of Ricky as a child, talking to Oscar outside his bedroom window. I think of myself as a child, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to make up the sister I never knew. I think of Bessie with her trunk and my mother with her filing cabinet.

  Lorilei stays.

  Thirty-Five

  There is no known grave for my sister, no end for her story. When my father told me what had been done with Jacqueline’s body, I felt foolish almost. Foolish that I’d beaten my head against the past with my parents. For every fight we’d had when I asked why I never saw them get angry about the abuse. Well, if they could do that with a baby, I thought then.

  But they had two babies at home to take care of. We were both tiny, both premature. On my third day of life, my lungs collapsed and my heart stopped before the doctors revived me. My brother was born without his digestive system fully developed, and though he grew up to be healthy, in the years before the surgery he was in three comas and in and out of the hospital. Both of us needed bottles that had to be sterilized and diapers that had to be changed and to be burped and soothed and dressed and rocked to sleep at night. Both of us needed them. They needed to take care of their family.

  In a way, the choices my parents later faced—the choices that drew me to Ricky’s story—were the same. Burying my father’s rages and depression, burying the fact of my grandfather’s abuse, burying, even, my anger at what he’d done, my insistence that it wasn’t right and that we acknowledge it—to bury those threats must have seemed almost easier in comparison. They kept going. They threw away the baby book they’d started for Jacqueline; they threw or gave away every item their friends had made for them with her name on it; they dressed me, they must have, in some of the extra little girls’ clothes and gave away the rest. They stopped filling out the baby books for my brother and me, the ones with evidence of her, and left them in the white filing cabinet. “The twins,” they called my brother and me, and they taught us to call ourselves that, too. They built a happy home, and they made sure the neighborhood knew it. There were summers on the island and Christmases under the tree and there were the six of us around the dining table as my parents lifted their glasses and toasted their good fortune. I have come to believe that every family has its defining action, its defining belief. From childhood, I understood that my parents’ was this: Never look back.

  But a year after I asked my mother about Jacqueline’s body, I was sitting with her in a pizzeria in a small, desolate city in eastern Pennsylvania where I’d moved temporarily for a teaching job. Long ago, all the factories in the city had shuttered; it had never recovered, and now half the storefronts were empty. It was good to see her—I had missed her—and I could tell she was happy to see me. Still, we were being careful with each other, the ties between us always sinew-strong, but always, too, in danger of snapping. Until the words left my mouth I didn’t know I was going to say them. “I’m working on a project,” I said. I couldn’t yet bring myself to say book. “I’m going to have to write about Jacqueline in it.”

  I expected my mother to be angry. I had the sense that I was choosing to yank off a bandage, that maybe if I reopened the wound early it would have time to scab and settle. I loved her but I needed to do this. I loved her and I needed to this. I was daring her and daring myself and getting something over with, hoping that there’d be time to heal after. I braced.

  But she wasn’t angry. Her eyes brimmed quickly with tears. She started to speak. “At,” she said—but the tears spilled and her cheeks flushed. Gulping, she made a little waving motion in front of her mouth.

  Then she put her hand down. She swallowed. She took the paper napkin from the table, twisted it, and dabbed at her eyes. She sipped her water. Finally, she was ready. “At least now there will be a record she existed.”

  * * *

  For Ricky’s defense, what the witnesses and lawyers tussle over is how to understand his story. Which version will be written into the record and become fact. The DNA expert who was testifying when Judge Gray stopped the trial to remove Cole was the state’s last witness. The defense begins its case with a DNA expert of its own, who testifies that the pubic hair on Jeremy’s lip did not match Ricky. Ricky’s sixth-grade teacher testifies, then a friend who was with him that night under the stars when he tried to turn himself in. His sister Darlene refuses to say that Ricky was harmed by his childhood. He was loved, she says. They all were.

  The next day, a defense psychologist describes everything Alcide would say to Ricky when he was angry. That Ricky was worthless. That he was queer. That Ricky molests children, the psychologist says, may be a sign that he was molested himself. Most pedophiles were molested.

  That isn’t true. It’s repeated a lot, but it isn’t true. Most pedophiles, like most other people, weren’t molested. And there’s no indication that people who were molested become pedophiles. What is true is that among pedophiles, a greater percentage were molested than the percentage of people in general who were molested—but even then, it’s not a huge increase. I want to argue with this so badly—but I know why I do. Because I was moles
ted. How damned, how damaged, am I doomed to feel? My grandfather’s words come back to me: “When I was a child, it happened to me.”

  “I don’t know how you guys feel,” Gray interrupts. “Doc, here’s an expert on this. I’m all right during the trial, but the minute I finish I can feel that 500-pound gorilla on me. I’m sitting at happy hour and it slowly goes away. Every time I have a gin and tonic, one hundred pounds goes off, absolutely. My wife just closes the door and says, ‘All right, darling, see you in the morning.’”

  A psychologist for the defense argues that Ricky was legally insane—psychotic, even—at the time of the murder; on cross-examination, the prosecutor points out that he’s the only expert who thinks so. A doctor describes Bessie’s pregnancy, lingering over the alcohol and the drugs and all the X-rays. But there’s no proof that Ricky was harmed by any of it, says the prosecutor. Those are all just risk factors—and there are no records of Ricky right after he was born, nothing that would say whether he was normal or not. Then Ricky’s oldest sister, Francis, takes the stand. But she won’t budge in her story. Ricky was loved.

  “Your Honor,” Clive says. “The defense calls Lorilei Guillory.”

  * * *

  The jury must be so confused. They’ve already heard from her. They’ve seen the pictures of what Ricky did to her son. One juror broke down crying, looking at those pictures. Lorilei testified for the prosecution. So far, the defense seems to be focused on his past. Why is the defense calling her?

  Clive asks her if she has anything else to say.

  Yes. “Even though I can hear my child’s death cry, I, too, can hear Ricky Langley cry for help.”

  Lorilei has said that she came to empathize with Ricky because she saw herself in Bessie. She couldn’t take away another woman’s son.

  But it was when she heard Ricky’s story that she made that change. All this fighting about whether he was loved. All this fighting about the troubles he had. She is someone who has had to fight her whole life, who has been on her own her whole life, who has had to make her own way. It must take unimaginable strength to do what she did. It must take unimaginable drive.

  This is the moment with which I had such trouble when I first learned about it. The moment Clive and others described as her having forgiven him, even as she said no, she hadn’t. The moment that seemed a betrayal of her child, even as I admire her for it. Even as it made her a hero. But now I look at what she did, I look at what she said, I look at what she knew, and I realize.

  Did she see herself in Ricky, too?

  Thirty-Six

  The morning after I confronted my grandfather, I was home alone at my parents’ house, standing in the kitchen. Early summer light streamed in through the window over the sink. I could see the old tire swing, its rope now frayed and starting to rot.

  The phone rang.

  There were no words when I picked up, only his labored breathing. He’d done this before, calling the house and just breathing when he heard me pick up. “Hello?” I said. “Hello?” I was ready to hang up.

  But this time he spoke. “I’m an old man,” he said. “I’m going to be dead soon. I need your forgiveness to go to heaven. Do you forgive me?”

  I remember the phone ringing. I remember the light through the window and the black plastic receiver, smooth in my palm. I remember the sound of his voice, wavery and gruff and old, and the way my skin pricked and my heart thudded to hear it. I remember his question.

  I have no memory of how I answered him.

  * * *

  What I once loved about the law is that it doesn’t let questions go unanswered. It finds answers for them. In life we’d call what happened to Helen Palsgraf as she waited for the train to take her children to the beach a chain of events. It would be clear that one thing had led to another: the young man running late, the porter trying to be helpful by shoving him, the package falling, the explosion, the scales, and then finally Mrs. Palsgraf suing the railroad. All of these events, we would understand, were tangled together—no one cause, no one beginning. Each time we told the story we might tell it differently, choosing to emphasize the young man’s being late if we wanted to make a point about carelessness, or the explosion leading to the scales’ fall if we wanted to say you never can tell what will happen. No one meaning.

  But the law can’t leave it there. The law must determine what the story means. That’s what a trial’s for. The actual Palsgraf case was disposed of simply. The court found that the railroad wasn’t liable because the porter couldn’t have known that the wrapped package contained fireworks. What the case is remembered for now, though, and why I’m interested in it, is the dissent, which said that the railroad should have been liable, because the shove was the proximate cause of Mrs. Palsgraf’s injury. The question in Palsgraf, the dissenting judge said, isn’t really about knowledge of the fireworks. It’s where you want to start the causal chain. Once you decide that, you have decided the meaning of the whole story.

  Palsgraf is a civil case. Proximate cause, as a formal named concept, doesn’t exist in criminal law. Criminal law doesn’t care where the story began. But how you tell the story has everything to do with how you judge. Begin Ricky’s story with the murder—and it means one thing. Begin it with the crash—and it means another. Begin with what my grandfather did to me and my sister. Or begin when he was a boy, and someone did it to him.

  No one else can solve how to think about my grandfather. But with Ricky, at least, I hoped the jury would decide for me.

  * * *

  There will be four closing statements. Because the main burden of proof is on the state, it goes first and last. Wilson will speak for the state, with Mann rebutting her. Then Clive. Then Killingsworth.

  “You may begin,” Judge Gray says to Wilson.

  Then, the transcript notes, Gray stands and walks out of the courtroom.

  “May it please the Court,” Wilson starts. The room erupts in awkward laughter. The “Court”—the judge—is gone.

  She thanks the jury for their attention throughout the trial. There is really only one question they have to deliberate on, she says. When Ricky Langley killed Jeremy Guillory, did he know right from wrong? The evidence, she says, suggests he did. He started taking an anti-psychotic medication only when a defense expert gave it to him for the start of the trial. “He’s never had to be hospitalized for psychotic episodes. Friends around the time of this incident never noticed any odd behaviors. They never noticed anything. They just noticed someone who seemed normal to them.” The idea that Ricky has psychotic spells and was psychotic when he killed Jeremy is a concoction for this trial, she says. “I submit to you that there are people who do things that are just so horrible, and they know when they’re doing them that they’re so horrible, but at that particular time they choose to do them. Ricky Langley is one of those people. Those people simply aren’t mad. They’re bad.”

  While Wilson has been talking—the transcript does not note exactly when—Gray has returned to his bench. Now Mann signals she’s ready for her opening statement. “All right,” Gray says. “I’ll stay for ‘May it please the Court.’”

  “May it please the Court,” Mann begins.

  Again, Gray leaves.

  “It’s undisputed from the very beginning and continuing through today that Ricky Langley caused Jeremy Guillory’s death.” But what Mann wants to talk about, she tells the jury, is the burden of proof. She reminds them that during voir dire she and Clive asked them what “beyond a reasonable doubt” meant to them—and they answered “very high, even 99 percent.” The prosecutors must meet that burden of proof to make the murder first-degree. They have to prove specific intent to 99 percent. And, she says, they can’t.

  That they can’t is the only reason they’re claiming Ricky sexually abused Jeremy. In the absence of evidence of specific intent, they’re trying to move the jury with emotion. But pay attention, she tells the jurors: Ricky is a pedophile, but there’s no evidence he actually abused Jere
my in that way. Ricky told Lucky and others the story of the murder eleven times, she says, and only one of those times did he say he molested Jeremy. (She means eleven times the jury has heard reference to. It never hears about Ricky’s bragging to Jackson, or how he described it in Georgia. The story was told many more times than eleven. It has been told so many different ways.) The only other piece of evidence of molestation is that there was semen on the back of Jeremy’s shirt, semen that matched Ricky—but can the state prove that didn’t come from Ricky’s bedclothes?

  So they’re back to specific intent. For that, she says, the state must prove Ricky “actively desired” Jeremy’s death. “How do we determine whether a person has specific intent? We can’t open up their head and look inside. We can’t take a photograph of their brain right at that moment.” All we can do, she says, is look at the circumstantial evidence. Ricky says he doesn’t know why he killed Jeremy. He didn’t get rid of the body, like he presumably would have if he understood what he was doing. He’s never been able to give a reason for any of it. “It’s hard to have specific intent if there’s no reason at all. They ask, ‘Why did you do this?’ And he says, ‘I don’t know.’ If he had actively desired he would have known it. Heck, he would have told them that, too.

  “The state’s only theory is that he killed Jeremy to hide sexual abuse. There wasn’t any sexual abuse, so he didn’t kill him to hide it.” Please, she urges the jury, use your common sense. This isn’t a man who was capable of specific intent. And if they do find specific intent in the moment of Jeremy’s death, it’s only because Ricky didn’t know right from wrong then.