The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  But that’s an asterisk on history. To look at the reenactments law schools stage of the case, in which the scale crushes Helen, or the animations online to illustrate it for their study sessions, you’d never know that. Whatever happened in the past, the story wrote right over it. The story became the truth. What you see in Ricky killing Jeremy, I have come to believe, depends as much on who you are and the life you’ve had as on what he did. But the legal narrative erases that step. It erases where it came from.

  For years I thought the lesson in the jury’s second-degree verdict was that they didn’t want to face the question of whether Ricky should live or die. A first-degree conviction would have meant proceeding to the penalty phase of a death penalty trial, in which they’d have to directly confront the question of what should happen to him. A second-degree conviction allowed them to escape that. Ricky would automatically serve life.

  That was the only explanation I could think of. Otherwise, the verdict made no sense. Jeremy was under twelve. There was no debate that Ricky had killed him, so if the jury had found specific intent the murder would have to be first-degree. They’d been instructed that under Louisiana law, if Ricky understood the “reasonable consequences” of his actions he had specific intent. For someone not to understand that strangling a child would kill him, that a wire pulled tight around his neck would kill him, for someone to stuff a sock in a child’s throat and then pinch his nose closed against air—well, I thought, the only way someone wouldn’t understand death as a reasonable consequence was if they were legally insane. And the jury had turned that down.

  The verdict was a legal contradiction.

  So I thought that, faced with the question of whether Ricky should live or die, the jury had refused to decide. But I have realized that I am trying to rescue a place for the un-neatness of everything that happened. Lorilei didn’t forgive Ricky, but she still didn’t want him killed. My grandfather did everything he did, and he was still my grandfather. The law—with each side’s relentless pursuit of one story—has never known what to do with this complicated middle ground. But life is full of it.

  I see the jury’s verdict differently now. While the verdict the jury voted is legally incoherent, what strikes me now is its elegant, human beauty. It says what cannot be true in law, but can only be true in life: that Ricky is both responsible and not. The law the jurors were presented with didn’t have room for this middle ground. They created it, as though they opened up space in the law, inventing a category that doesn’t exist.

  Ricky.

  Thirty-Nine

  I make the trip to my parents’ house on an early August afternoon when they’re away on Nantucket. Only my parents’ two dogs are there, large mutts they adopted when I was in college. My girlfriend, Janna, has come with me, and when the two of us arrive at the door the dogs come slowly. They are great beasts with heads nearly as high as my waist and long fur that is losing its color. Once they had barreled chests of muscle, but now one is blind and deaf and the other so riddled with fatty tumors that his skin rolls and spreads like a loose sack of apples. They are a portrait of age and time and when I gather them in my arms I can feel how they used to squirm as puppies. They lick my face and arms in their simple, welcome love. I beam and look up at Janna. “Meet the boys,” I say. What is complicated about my relationship to my parents’ house is that it has never been uncomplicated. It’s always had pain. It’s always had love.

  While Janna settles in the kitchen to read, I work quickly. The white aluminum cabinet my mother kept when we were children, the one that reminds me of Bessie’s trunk, or Bessie’s trunk reminds me of it, is still in the long playroom we once played in. I have not seen my grandfather’s face since he died—I have no photographs of him—and the photographs must be in there.

  Instead I find pictures of my family. When my mother was pregnant, she wore her hair parted down the middle and tied into two low braids, so different from the stiffly sprayed style I’ve seen my whole life. She wears a green T-shirt, her hair parted and tied back and a smattering of freckles bridging her nose. My mother as a young woman is as distant to me as Bessie, as inconceivable and in need of being imagined. I can picture her giving birth to us only from the way I’ve been told the story. The doctors, worried that she can’t take anesthesia, have kept her awake for the cesarean and given her grain alcohol intravenously instead. She is draped in a blue cloth from the waist down, she can’t see what’s happening, but, drunk, she sings as the doctors pull first my brother, then Jacqueline, then me from her. She sings us into the world. Her voice is free, full-throated. We are unknown; we are so tiny; we are just beginning. There is no one for whom she must be self-conscious yet. No one for whose memory she must arrange the story. The scene is no more or less real to me than what Ricky believes he remembers of Alcide’s cradling Oscar’s head, singing to the boy on the side of the road.

  I find the chart I saw as a child, the one that listed Jacqueline’s eye color as blue. Then—a bright yellow piece of paper folded in half—my missing birth announcement. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” Our three names listed, “in order of appearance, between 8:03 and 8:06 p.m.” How tired my parents must have been and how sad, the two of them at home with Andy and me, boiling our bottles in aluminum pots on the stove, or trying not to be frightened when the hospital called with news of Jacqueline. I find a picture of my father, tanned and smiling on a beach—and think of him as he cradles the emergency phone in the airport. Alcide sitting in the truck stop with his coffee, then standing up and walking out and leaving the crumpled pamphlet of lots behind. It will be a long time before he gets his wife back. If he ever gets his wife back.

  In another photograph, we are all seated around a dinner table in Nantucket, our cheeks sunburned, our hair wet. My grandfather isn’t with us—I’m too old in the photograph for it to be the summer my grandparents came with us—but looking at the strangers who are my parents, I can only picture them as they lie in bed on another Nantucket night, the night they had just learned what my grandfather had done. They have just brought us to bed at the end of a long and frightening day, and they have smoothed the covers up over us. It’s summer, but the East Coast ocean air is chilled and now my parents find each other under their sheets. They listen for my grandfather, who has gone to bed with my grandmother down the hall. They listen to make sure he doesn’t rise again in the night. But the silence persists, and they settle. My father’s body is warm and my mother squirrels herself against his chest, listening to the drumbeat of his breath and heart. They’ve made it through years. They’ll make it through years. Everything has changed, but—nothing has.

  Outside their bedroom, the secret sits, to wait out the night like a ghost.

  I find love letters between my parents and fighting letters, reminders that we are all mysteries to one another. Once I was riding in a car alone with my mother, her driving, when our conversation turned to this house. She wanted to move, she said, but the finances had been difficult since all those dark raging years of my father’s. The house had fallen into disrepair; now only developers showed any interest. “Of course, they’ll only tear it down.”

  A moment, a hitch, a hiccup of time passed before I spoke. A moment I was only barely aware of, in which I made the decision not to remain silent. I have never been very good at remaining silent to spare her feelings.

  “My therapist says,” I began, but found I was out of words. Even to say this word, therapist, is a risk in my family. I tried again. “My therapist says that if the house is torn down I should get to drive the bulldozer.”

  She cut the engine. Wherever we were going, we’d arrived, but neither of us moved. The air in the car was suddenly thick, viscous with silence. When my mother spoke, her words came slowly. “I get to drive the bulldozer.”

  No one story is simple. No one story complete.

  After two hours of searching, it’s almost time for Janna and me to leave. We have to catch a train. But I cannot find a photog
raph of my grandfather. Hundreds of photographs in the cabinet, but not a single one of him. I keep wanting to think that when they told me it didn’t haunt them, it didn’t. I keep wanting to take the past, and my anger, at its word.

  Yet someone went through this cabinet. There are photographs of every cousin, every aunt and uncle, of both of my grandmothers. Of relatives who died before I was born, and some I even recognize as of my grandfather’s siblings, taken at the party for his and my grandmother’s fiftieth anniversary. Someone removed the photographs of him. Not to keep him from display—this cabinet hides its contents. But to scour him even from here, the left-behind part of the story. And I don’t believe, I realize, looking at all the photographs, that they did this scouring right after they found out about the abuse. Whoever did it, did it later. When they realized the hurt.

  In the doorway, Janna appears. We will miss the train if I don’t hurry.

  “Five more minutes,” I say.

  Then I realize. My parents’ wedding album. They keep it in the living room, on the bookcase opposite the couch that replaced the couch I lay on as a sick child. All the games of checkers I played there with my grandparents in the winter, when it was too cold to sit on the porch. All the Sundays and Christmases we spent here. As I sat cross-legged with the board on the floor, my grandfather would lean far forward on the couch to see where my checkers were landing. He’d laugh at the eager jokes I told, and ask me how school was. Above us the whole time, waiting, was the staircase.

  The album is what I’ve come to the room for. But next to it is something unexpected. Another album, broad-faced and slender, that was once white. I run my hands over its vinyl cover. From its bottom, half a rainbow blooms. It was meant for a child. I flip through the pages, expecting it to be empty. Most of the albums on my parents’ shelves are empty.

  But suddenly, there is my family. We stand behind the house, on the lush lawn, its green as vibrant as I remember from childhood, the green my father tended from his tractor. I can almost hear Vivaldi’s cellos and violins race from the speakers my father strung up. The photograph is labeled FATHER’S DAY. My siblings and I stand in a row, my sisters and me in dresses, my brother in a navy blazer and pants. Beside us, on a bench, sit my father’s mother and my mother’s mother. My parents stand behind them, and then—there. My grandfather.

  His sport coat is gray, as are his slacks. His shoulders slump, his lips are parted just slightly. He stares directly into the camera. He is younger than I remember him being, but what is age to a child? The unexpected thing is how much a stranger he is. I would pass him on the street and think only that there, with a head of gray curls and his pants high around his waist, goes an elderly Italian man.

  That’s what I think, at first. But as I hold the album and study the picture, I feel the tremors start in my body. The bristle of his hair prickles. The wet murk of his mouth. The deep nausea and the grief and the shock and the fear. No. I might not know, I might not know consciously who I passed on the street, why I recoiled. But my body would know. My body remembers.

  The girl in the photograph, standing to his left, is eight years old. She has brown curls brushed into gently waved frizz held back by a thin white headband. She loves Nancy Drew mysteries, and I know, looking at her, that right now though she holds her lips in a half smile she is off somewhere behind her eyes. She smells the grass; she hears the violins; she feels the weight of her family beside her. She feels everything she cannot yet understand. And she has escaped in her head, dreaming up a world that will live inside her, with characters who feel as real as her own.

  A memory comes: I sit cross-legged on the living room carpet, my grandfather on the couch above me. I am sketching an oval on a drawing pad—the shape of a face. “Good, good,” he says. He leans down to take my pencil. He shows me how to section the planes of the face into quadrants. He marks where the eyes go, the nose, the mouth.

  “I have to go to my grandfather’s grave.” I have found Janna in the kitchen, seated at the white Formica table, and I realize that I am telling her we are going to miss the train. But I have gone to Jeremy’s grave, I have gone to Bessie and Alcide’s and Oscar’s. “We have to go to his grave.”

  Forty

  I say goodbye to the boys, kneeling down next to them to bury my face in their fur. Then we drive through Tenafly, down the hill and past the old apartment building, over the railroad tracks. The cemetery is a ten-minute drive away, nestled on a street framed high by elms and oaks.

  Janna waits by the car while I walk toward the trees. “Marzano,” I say to the caretaker who sits in a small office at the entrance gate, and he points me up an embankment, to a deep gathering of graves. As I climb, I pass headstones of gray and glossy black. On one, an engraved sun hovers over water, setting or rising, there is no way to tell. Above, the canopy is thick with leaves. Fall is coming.

  I see the gravestone’s back first. Rose granite.

  I walk around to its front.

  My grandmother is a young woman. In her wedding portrait her face is round and unlined, a white veil of Spanish lace laid over her hair, a wide bouquet of flowers spilling over her arms. Beside her stands a young man. My grandfather’s hair is dark. He wears a crisp black suit, his white shirt collar starched into high points ringed by a black bowtie. He stands upright, no cane.

  I remember this photograph well. When I was a child it sat on my grandmother’s vanity table at their house, and I liked looking at it. How unimaginable the people in it had seemed then. But I see the picture differently now than I did as a child. Now I look at them and I see how young they were. I see love, and I see fear, and everything the years will take. They have so much ahead. They have no idea what is ahead.

  They were young, then they were old, now they are dead.

  The feeling strikes me unmistakably. The feeling strikes me as a surprise. Now they are dead. They are dead. I am alive.

  What I feel standing on the grass of their grave isn’t release, not exactly. It’s grief, but not a bad kind. I can hear the cars pass on the road below. Janna’s standing down there, likely watching the wind rustle the elms. She will wait as long as I need to stay, I know that without even asking, and when I am finished we will drive away from this place.

  But it’s not that action that will take me away, not the physical leaving. And not her, no matter what the future holds for us. I have learned that by now.

  Instead it’s all this. This telling of the story.

  My grandmother is buried next to a secret. My grandfather died with the fact of who he was. I can’t say that I forgive them. Only that forgiveness is too simple a word. They helped make me. They did such harm.

  “I have to go now.” My voice sounds strange, tremulous in the quiet. I have always found the dead in the stories they leave behind. Not in the stone-cold fact of the grave. But I never got to say goodbye while my grandparents were alive, because every goodbye I ever said was really just words that stood in place of all I couldn’t say.

  “I’m going to go finish telling this story.”

  There. Now they know. I am telling this story.

  I mean those words to be my last to them. That where there was silence, there will be speech. That where there were secrets, I will make way for the complicated truth.

  But I can’t move. I stand on the grass and I listen to the quiet, to the small animals making their way through the blades at my feet, a world of a scale I don’t know and can’t imagine, and above me in the branches of the trees, the world of the birds, the wind and the sky that never touch down. The late summer leaves are just starting their turn to color. The grass around me is a sprawl of lives, the earth beneath me holds the dead, and each one is marked by a name that means everything and nothing. A placeholder for the story.

  “I have to go now,” I say again, and I hear how my voice has risen in pitch. I am saying this as much to myself as to them, I am trying to get myself to go, but as I say it I feel in my stomach the inkling of an idea. T
he inkling of an emotion, of what it is that I really need to say. What the complicated truth requires, too. Why I am still standing here.

  The thought surprises me. I hold it inside me, wary, and study it. Can this be true? Must I really say this?

  Yes.

  “I love you.”

  * * *

  The day I met Ricky was bright and blue, as clear a morning as visits Louisiana. Hurricane season had begun, but if trouble was coming, it wasn’t visible yet. I was twenty-five. I had just watched his videotaped confession a few months before. You could say that the day I met Ricky was the real beginning of this story, its proximate cause. Or if the story began much earlier—in my childhood in the gray house—you could say that meeting him was a kind of end.

  When I left New Orleans the sky was dark, but on the drive light broke over the leafless trees of Lake Pontchartrain, the streaks of brown where mud had mixed with water and the clear teal where it had settled. The white tombs of Metairie Cemetery, in their orderly lanes of houses for the dead, gave way to tangled mangroves. Fields stretched long and languid in the morning sun. I drove as if encapsulated by a shadow only I could see. I could not remember the name of the man I was driving to meet, only what he had done. And the face of the blond boy he had killed, the boy as he smiled for his last school photograph.

  One road reaches the gates of Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the one road that is also the only road out. With thirty miles to go to the prison, the road splits off the highway at a sharp right angle. From there it is narrow and nearly unmarked, a path you take only if you know your destination. The town of St. Francisville, with its fast-food restaurants and its convenience marts, cedes to trailers set into the dirt. A single beauty parlor, housed in a shack with a hand-lettered sign. One kindergarten. Five churches.