The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  When he reaches California, he will stop. California is where the happy photographs come from, the photographs his mother kept hidden in the heavy trunk when he was a boy. From before what makes Bessie drink, before what makes Alcide angry. He’ll live with his uncle in California. He’ll make for himself a better life.

  * * *

  These notes from the caseworkers are some of the first I ever read of Ricky. The Christmas after I read them, I went back to my parents’ house. I drove there thinking of him, of his desire to get away and of his hope.

  Usually I see my family in neutral settings: hotels and restaurants. But at Christmas, I like going back to the gray house. My father and Andy tack lights up all over the gingerbread trim. Each year my family has lived in the house, they have added at least one lit plastic figurine, and now the front yard is a battalion of Santa Clauses and gingerbread men, toy soldiers and snowmen. Time has otherwise dragged the house into a shambles, the repairs Greg made so many years ago now failing, but the lights transform it into something both new and familiar.

  They were having a Christmas party and the whole neighborhood was invited. That night I was walking down the staircase, a glass of wine in one hand and the other gripping the banister. Around me, mingling with carols from the speakers, rose the voices of people I’ve known my whole life. And above them, holding court, a single voice: my father’s. I heard him tell a group of people that I was writing a book about something that happened in the past. “But if you ever hear about it, don’t worry,” he said, his words a little slurred by drink. “Alexandria’s the only one who remembers it.”

  On the stairs, I froze. My family had always been silent about the abuse. But no one had ever implied that it hadn’t happened.

  My father kept talking. This moment that had changed everything inside me had changed nothing for him.

  * * *

  Go home, Ricky’s uncle tells him. There will be no new life. He can’t stay in California. The uncle buys him a bus ticket, undoing the whole journey he’s just made. When Ricky gets to Louisiana, he calls his parole officer. The officer says, “Next time you’re going to leave, tell me first.”

  The thoughts start again. When he sleeps he sees a child. The child is naked, and he touches the young, unmarked skin, and not until afterward, after the touching, does he wake, the sheets twisted, his panting guilty. Which means he’s done it again, if only in the dream. When he tells the caseworker about these thoughts, he describes them as nightmares—not wishes, not fantasies. But once a week he masturbates. He can masturbate only by thinking about young children, he says. Ricky has never been on a date. He is a virgin. His only friend now is a sixteen-year-old girl and he says the friendship is platonic. Sometimes, he tells the caseworker, he’s made young children, boys and girls both, take off their clothing and perform fellatio on him. Then he’s removed his own clothing. He’s performed it on them. Last time the boy refused and he told the boy he’d shoot him. “I don’t know what I wanted to do that for.”

  But all of that is in the past, Ricky says; all of that is over. He is done with that life. (He must be. He is only nineteen. If he is not done, what will his life hold?) He would have a job now if he’d stayed in California, he tells the caseworker, he tells his mother, he tells anyone who will listen. “Long as I got something to do, I’m all right.”

  He begins a correspondence course in small-engine repair. He wants to acquire a trade, he says. He wants to move out of his parents’ trailer and live alone. It’s not right that a grown man should live with his parents and baby brother. His brother Jamie is sixteen years old and Jamie is normal. Ricky must know this the way he knows that he himself is not. Years from now, after the trials, when the state penitentiary prints a list of the nine names he has requested be allowed to visit him, Bessie, Alcide, Darlene, Judy, Francis, and even the sisters’ husbands will be on the list, but Jamie’s name won’t be. Nine is an odd number, short of the round numbers the prison system tends to prefer. Likely Ricky could have asked for more. But his brother’s name won’t be on the list.

  A month passes before his next appointment at the clinic. He has just turned twenty. He reports that he finally did take a job. It was at an auto dealership but then he quit it two weeks later. He tells the caseworker he doesn’t know why he quit; he just felt like quitting. The caseworker asks again, why. This time he tells her: Each day he walked to the job, he passed schoolchildren playing, then passed them again on his way home. He’d see the children and he’d want. He’d want. Ricky wants to stop wanting. He quit the job just to never walk by those children. Long as he’s got something to do, he’s all right—but now he does not have something to do. He is not all right.

  Bessie comes with him to the next appointment. I imagine she has on her good housedress, but, self-conscious, she’s wearing a coat open over it despite the heat. She’s glad her son’s home again, she tells the caseworker, but it’s draining to have him there. “I feel like if I leave him alone for a minute, he’s gonna go off and molest somebody.” She has forbidden him from running off to live by the river, but he’s an adult. What can she do? Alcide’s no help.

  Picture Ricky, as he sits next to Bessie. They’re in two hard metal chairs, the caseworker on an office chair turned catty-corner to them. It must be humiliating to sit here with his mama, she with the one leg and still carrying that old crutch ’cause they can’t afford anything better. It should be him accompanying her to the doctor, not the other way around. A person can be angry and still feel shame. A person can burn with hate at his mama and still love her enough to want to be something that will make her proud. A person can feel overwhelmed by all he wants to be and see no way to get there. “I been thinking about dying or getting someone else to kill me,” he blurts out now. He’s drinking more these days, living with Bessie and Alcide. Whole bottles of peppermint schnapps. Last week he drank fifty dollars’ worth. “I warned him that drinking might impair his judgment,” the caseworker writes.

  There is one last sheet in the file, titled “No Suicide No Homicide Contract.” I, the undersigned, do hereby voluntarily agree that I will not intentionally attempt to harm myself or anyone else during my therapy (treatment) at this center. Ricky signs. The agreement is standard—likely given to every patient—but looking at it now it is hard not to notice the word “during.” The last therapy session Ricky attends is October 1, 1985. On February 24, 1986, his case is recommended for closure. On May 16, 1986, it’s closed. Ricky leaves home again, for Georgia.

  Sixteen

  New Jersey, 1994–1996

  When I am sixteen, the boy I like is named Luke. He is twenty-two and lives in a Colorado suburb that, in the photographs he sends me, is lined with split-level ranch houses and pockmarked with churches. Across the Internet, in the AOL chat rooms that I have joined because I am still not going to school regularly, he writes to me that he loves his ex-girlfriend, Crystal, but that she wants nothing to do with him and that he needs to move on. He appears to be moving on with me. He is taking classes at a community college, trying to finish his degree. On my father’s shelves I have found Robert Heinlein books that spin out utopian, sci-fi worlds, and he knows those books and likes them, too. He wants to know me, he says. He wants me to know him. He sends me packets of photographs taken every few hours, each photograph numbered in pencil on the back, so that I will see the sequence of his days. The parking lot of the McDonald’s he manages, gray and boring in the afternoon sun. His grin as he holds the camera out in front of him. On his head perches a paper hat that reminds me of origami boats I made as a child.

  The next photo is his college parking lot—his Colorado, I am starting to understand, has a lot of asphalt. Then the ugly paisley couch in his parents’ living room. The black terrier mutt he grew up with, its mouth open, with a small pink tongue hanging out. There is a picture of Crystal. This I study. She is petite, with thin straight hair angled down her face in a mall haircut, a tiny gold cross at her neck. I permit mysel
f the realization that she looks ordinary, and not much older than I am. Then, that night, pictures of his bedroom, of his stereo, of the Pink Floyd posters on his wall. He must be living with his parents, I realize, and though he is six years older this makes him seem not so different from me. I have finally told my parents about my eating disorder, and they’ve found me a therapy program where I spend part of my days. I’m too uneasy in the program to make friends there, and I haven’t been in touch with anyone from school. Luke and I talk on the phone long-distance for eight-, nine-, ten-hour stretches, all night and into the day. Sometimes I fall asleep with the phone on the pillow next to me, listening to him breathe. His voice is low and dusky, and because it is all I know of him it seems to expand to encompass him, as though he is as steady and kind as his voice.

  The phone bills are monstrous, $700 one month. My father yells, but he pays them.

  Luke flies out to meet me. My parents have agreed that he will sleep at a friend’s house, but the first night he stays in my bedroom, and then that’s where he stays for the rest of the week. I don’t know if they’re just not paying attention or if they figure it’s too late to protect me, as I sometimes do. In person, Luke is shorter than I, with a spray of acne across his chin. To cover for this, perhaps, he says, “You’re lucky I don’t mind how tall you are. Some guys would mind, but not me.” When he says this we are standing under a streetlight at the center of my town. The ploy, the insecurity he is trying to cover, is so obvious that even at sixteen I can see it highlighted in the yellow from the lamp, and yet I also can’t object. I want him to love me. I want it like a prize and because it is what I am supposed to want and because it will save me. In the parking lot of the town duck pond he gives me my first kiss, and when his lips hit mine I can’t breathe. It’s not my first kiss at all. Before him, wet in my mouth, is the taste of my grandfather.

  When I am seventeen, the boy I like is named William. He’s in college in the Bronx on a football scholarship, flunking his classes now that he’s discovered Bob Marley and pot. He’s big and mellow, with a blond round Charlie Brown head—but sometimes the mornings after our dates I have bruises on my arms where he’s held me too tightly and sometimes when I see him my breath catches with a fear I can’t name. It’s as though I’m swimming through something I can’t see; I can’t even remember the hours when I’m living them.

  The boys’ attention frees me to feel loved. The boys are a threat. I don’t know how to recognize when love and hurt are mingled. It’s all I’ve known them to be. I can’t tell who’s safe and who’s not, can’t tell what safety even is. I only know I need someone to be.

  * * *

  Then, when I am eighteen, I find someone who really is safe. Dima is a cellist from the Ukraine. His family moved to New York from Kiev so he could apply to Juilliard. But when the time came, he bombed the audition. Now, at twenty-three, he’s a student at a community college in the city. His hands are pockmarked with angry red splotches where I know he’s put out cigarettes, his pale forearms snaked with carved white scars, but with me he’s nothing but gentle. At night, when we lie on his bed and kiss, he puts his hand low on my belly and before I understand what is happening he is not Dima anymore and I am panicked, gulping at his touch, I am breathless and shaking, the tears run out of me until my chest heaves and my eyes burn. I go beneath the crust of silence then, somewhere down beneath where I spend my days. I dissolve.

  He keeps his hand perfectly still on my body. He waits. His hand is warm, and below it I feel my body slowly settle. “Breathe,” he says then, and I do, and as I breathe my body comes back to me. Night by night, we move his hand lower on my body. Night by night, I tunnel my way up through the layers of memory, until I emerge and he is there. We sleep at the small apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he lives with his parents and younger brother. His bedroom walls are lined with cassette holders tacked up like wallpaper, the work of every musician he loves alphabetized. In the living room, there’s a big glass tank with carved mahogany braces that holds a single carp his father smuggled out of the Ukraine in a plastic bag full of water, hiding the fish through Romania, through Italy, across oceans and into the States. For the fish, and for Dima, his father has that kind of love. While Dima and I hide in his bedroom, and he plays me Alpha all the way to Yes, and all the time his hand goes lower and I gulp and breathe and am finally calm again, the carp swims lazy circles in its grand tank. I take Dima’s story as proof, blazing bright as a bonfire: He failed at what his family wanted, but they love him anyway.

  The week of our high school graduation, my parents throw my brother and me a party on the back deck they’re building. The pilings are only half-constructed, the beams still unsecured and uneven, and this gives the night a slanted feel.

  It’s an epic party, strung with white lights and loud music and a dance floor set up in the backyard. My brother is rangy-thin but healthy. While I’ve been trying to hide on the sidelines he’s found a home in the high school theater department and takes the center of any crowd he walks into, with his big gestures and his stage-lit laugh. He’s buzzed tonight and his friends are, too.

  So Dima and I hide away in the kitchen, talking our way around things. He’s got something he can’t say to me: that he wants me to stay close to home, to stay with him, to go to college in New York. I’ve got something I can’t say to him: that the reason I am smiling tonight, the reason the world seems to have lightened for me, is that I am alive with the knowledge that I finally, truly, get to leave.

  “Come here,” I tell him, and back myself up against the refrigerator.

  “Everyone’s outside,” he says.

  “I don’t care,” I say, and I don’t. For once, when his lips find mine, it’s like they’re blotting out the past, blotting out the memory of my grandfather’s slime-smack, and if I concentrate on the dark wet feeling of his tongue in my mouth I can make everything else go away. It’s like dancing, the way I wrangle the past that night—first the feeling of Dima, then the past, then I turn in his arms and it’s him again. Every me I’ve ever been is in the kitchen, pressed up against the cold hard smooth white surface of the fridge. The girl I was at six who would come down to the kitchen at night and talk to her father, knowing she couldn’t say the only thing she really needed to. Then the girl I am at nine, when I come to the kitchen to refill my grandmother’s glass of water. I take a plastic ice cube with a bug resined in it from the freezer—it’s a trick we’re playing, my siblings and I, in love with whoopee cushions and handshake buzzers and a squirting plastic flower pin that never fools anyone—and plop it into my grandmother’s glass. Suddenly my grandfather is behind me, his heavy breath, and I whirl around, not wanting him to see the glass and ruin the joke. But it’s not the glass he’s looking at but my body, staring frankly. Through the window, gliding over Dima and me as we move to the floor, come the voices of people I’ve known my whole life. For a moment I feel on a precipice between now and some future when this will all be over, when this house is no longer my world, when I create something new and unknown for myself and—I will, finally, I will—get away.

  The sex we have on the kitchen floor is exaltation. I should stop us, I know; I should care whether someone walks in and sees us there on the linoleum of my childhood, my dress hiked up around my waist, my teeth on Dima’s shoulder. But I am watching us as from above, the way our limbs splay against the floor as if we’re swimming, and I know, somehow know, that nothing will hurt us tonight. Not when so much has. This is me getting away, finally. This is me throwing off the past.

  Give me normalcy, that’s what I want. Anything else can burn.

  Seventeen

  Indiana, 1986

  Ruth’s phone rings just past eleven at night, when she’s already out of bed but still in her pajamas, not yet changed into her white nursing assistant uniform, and hasn’t yet started the coffeemaker. She must consider, briefly, not picking it up. No one calls casually this late. No one calls with good news. But the phone
’s rattling away in the kitchen, and she crosses the tile floor and makes her way to the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  “Aunt Ruth?”

  She doesn’t recognize Ricky’s voice at first. She and Bessie aren’t close. She’s barely met Bessie’s children. On the stand eight years from now, at his first trial, she’ll say she met Ricky only once before that night in 1986 he showed up by surprise, and then have to correct herself and say, why, yes, she guesses she must’ve met him when he was growing up, the few times she went to visit Bessie over the years. He must have been one of the children hanging around in the yard. But you have to understand, there were so many, with Luann always taking in kids. And Ruth was never one to notice children. Her sister Bessie was the one who wanted that life: a husband, kids. Ruth back then was just fine with living alone. Money was beyond tight, working midnight shifts at the hospital and moonlighting days when she could pick up a shift as a home health aide, but she made enough for her rent and the electric and even a car. She was good at working. She loved the feeling of supporting herself, only herself to look out for.

  “Yes?”

  “Aunt Ruth, it’s Ricky. Bessie’s son. I’m—” he sounds like he’s gulping, trying not to cry. “I’m in Indianapolis. At a filling station, downtown.” The boy—she can’t remember how old he’d be now, maybe twenty? My God, are she and Bessie old enough for that? “Could you come pick me up?”

  She’s so surprised the words just fly out of her mouth. “I’m due at work, Ricky.” She winces. She hadn’t meant to sound harsh.