The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  Gray comes back long enough to call for a ten-minute recess. Then it’s Clive’s turn.

  He begins—and Judge Gray walks out again.

  Reading the transcripts of this is incredibly frustrating. No one acknowledges the strangeness of what Gray is doing. No lawyer walks to the front and objects. I suppose they couldn’t—there was no one to object to, after all; Gray had left. But when he is in the courtroom, no one goes to his bench, requests a sidebar conference, asks for an explanation, reminds him that he’s presiding over a capital trial, demands he stay.

  And why is Gray gone? Does he just not want to hear this story again? He has said, over and over again on the record, in the lead-up to this day, that he does not want the judgment to be overturned. That he’s going to do it right so this trial is final. That’s why he had four alternate jurors chosen, not the usual two, and that’s why the alternates have been present for every day of the trial and have already been sworn in. He stopped the trial the day Ricky got ill from the new anti-psychotic drug the defense expert put him on. He waited for higher court rulings on minor questions in the case. He has proceeded with what anyone would call an abundance of caution.

  Except for the comments he’s made. Except for the jokes. Except for the times when, it seems in the transcripts, emotions have gotten the better of him. I look at him and I think of all the years I stayed away from the gray Victorian house. All the times I forgot Ricky’s name, even when I’d just read it. How much my body tried to keep me away from this story. Gray will never serve on a death penalty case again.

  But why don’t any of the lawyers object to his absence?

  About that last question, at least, I have a guess: The lawyers still don’t know how this trial will turn out. Better not to do anything to disturb it if it could still go their way. That he’s missing may be an escape valve at this point, one either side could use to appeal if it doesn’t like the verdict.

  “I’ve been doing this stuff for eighteen years,” Clive says. “This is all I’ve ever done in my life, is stand up in front of juries on capital cases. And the day I quit getting incredibly nervous about it is the day I’m gonna quit doing it. This sort of responsibility really terrifies me. I’m sure some of you folks didn’t sleep too well, and I hardly slept at all last night. And I hope you’ll forgive me. I know I’m not going to get through this without getting all emotional.”

  He chose these jury members because of their personal experience, he tells them. Many have family members or loved ones with mental illness. Others are nurses or teachers. When they look at Ricky, he wants them to remember the people they know who’ve struggled.

  Just as Clive remembers his father. His father is mentally ill, he tells the jury. “He’s ruined his whole life, he’s done some terrible things, some really terrible things.” And yet, Clive says, “it would be very hard for anyone to prove that my father actively intended to hurt me when he was doing what he was doing, because he didn’t. So they couldn’t prove that under any circumstance, and remember that, because without specific intent”—proved beyond a reasonable doubt—“you can’t find Ricky guilty of first degree murder.”

  “This is the poor child, Jeremy,” Clive says. He shows the jurors the picture they’ve seen before, Jeremy at school. “This is Oscar Lee Langley.” He shows them the portrait that’s on Oscar’s grave.

  Stop here. This is the strategy Clive tried at the seminar: Talking about his father. Now let Clive hold the photos up for a long moment, as he does for the jury. The jury will never hear about the seminar—not with how horrified everyone there was at what Ricky said. Clive got that excluded. But still, Clive sees his father in Ricky. He can’t not tell the story that way. So let him try to make the jurors do, in their minds, what he did with his father, and write the past onto the present. What he’s saying Ricky did in his mind. What I know I did in seeing my grandfather when I looked at Ricky. In the photographs, both boys—Oscar in 1964 and Jeremy in 1991—smile gap-toothed grins. They wear short-sleeved checked shirts. Their hair holds gleaming parts carefully combed by Bessie and Lorilei two long-ago mornings. “Is it coincidence or is it evidence of Ricky’s mental illness how similar these two pictures look?”

  If Lorilei Guillory can see that Ricky deserves mercy, Clive says, then who is the jury not to? “In whose name is this trial going on? It’s not the state of Louisiana, it’s not me, this is for Truth. This is for the truth, the truth for little Jeremy Guillory. If Lorilei can see it, then we can see it, too. And Ricky is not just plain mean, Ricky is mentally ill, like my dad. Far worse than my dad.”

  It is, finally, Killingsworth’s turn. One last time, Gray leaves the courtroom.

  “Mr. Smith’s father isn’t on trial in this case. Mental illness is not on trial in this case. And when somebody comes up here and tries to convince sixteen individuals, sixteen citizens of this country, of mental illness that was made up in this case for your benefit, it insults me. You know, everybody can sit around and talk about oh, poor, pitiful Ricky Langley. Well, what about poor pitiful Jeremy Guillory? That’s what we really need to focus on, Jeremy Guillory, this little boy whose life was taken away on February 7, 1992, by that man.

  “Pedophilia is a disease. I’m not going to sit here and try to fool you or tell you that I don’t think pedophilia is a terrible, terrible disease. It is. But pedophilia doesn’t rob a person of their ability to make a decision between what is right and wrong. And that’s what the issue is here.” Ricky’s choices in this case, she says, began when he first saw Jeremy. When he first realized that he wanted Jeremy. “He knew those choices were wrong. Because if he didn’t know those choices were wrong why in the world would he be having this conflict in his mind?” He molested Jeremy. All right, she’ll admit that they can’t prove exactly when it happened, she says, but it did. That semen on the back of Jeremy’s T-shirt—even if it transferred from the bedclothes, the stain would have had to be wet. “Use your common sense. What does that tell you?”

  Ricky begins to shake in his seat, muttering to himself.

  “That tells you exactly what you think it tells you. He had to ejaculate with that child.”

  Wilson, Clive, and an investigator rush to his side and try to calm him.

  “If that’s not molestation, I don’t know what is.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Gray has come back in the room just as Ricky, who is now shaking violently, begins to shout.

  “Unfortunately, what’s happened is that Ricky can’t deal with it,” Clive says.

  Of everything Ricky has heard in this trial, the semen is what finally sets him off. This evidence of who he is.

  Thirty-Seven

  After Killingsworth finishes, the trial ends.

  The jury never hears about Ricky’s prior convictions, as they did in the first trial. They never hear about the diary in which he described taking children into the woods. Were those stories dreams, or memories? They never hear about the classes he took in the Georgia prison; his struggles to understand religion and reconcile it with his life; that two social workers from the sex offender program paused the woman who came to interview them and said, their voices hesitant and nervous, “Remember us to Ricky. He touched our hearts, that boy.” The jury never hears that it was Ricky who got himself into that sex offender program, that he asked again and again before he was eligible. They never hear that in those years, he pleaded never to be released.

  They never hear that once he was released, and he killed Jeremy, he bragged to Jackson in that holding cell. They never hear him say he enjoyed killing Jeremy. Because they never hear about the seminar Clive held, they never hear about Ricky’s belief in the three kinds of pedophiles. They never hear him say that Jeremy was his true love. So much is cast out and slips away nearly unrecorded, consigned to dusty cardboard banker’s boxes kept in archive rooms out of view. It becomes the hidden thirty-thousand-page narrative of this case, the shadow narrative.

  And so much is left unresolved.
After the lawyers found Pearl Lawson and made her come back for the trial, they never asked where her husband and son were. No one asks her why, if a child was found dead in her house, and that child was her son’s best friend, she is so tight-lipped on the stand. Whose pubic hair was on Jeremy’s lip is never solved. What happened in that house will never be known.

  * * *

  Judge Gray sends the jury out to deliberate. After three and a half hours, they return. Lorilei is not there. “We the jury find the defendant Ricky Langley guilty of second-degree murder.”

  The death penalty is reserved for first-degree murder. Ricky receives a life sentence.

  But Clive appeals. Not the prosecution trying again for a death sentence, but Clive. He wants Ricky declared not guilty by reason of insanity. Citing Gray’s absence from the courtroom, he wins a new trial. The prosecutors do file for the death penalty again, but a higher court rules that because with this verdict Ricky has already escaped first-degree murder and a death sentence, they can charge him with only second-degree. The trial takes place in front of a judge, not a jury. Lorilei doesn’t testify. Again, Ricky is found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life. He is not found insane.

  * * *

  But none of that is what made me go to Iowa. None of that is what made me chase down the records of Ricky’s life, or try to understand how I’d read my own into it. Instead it’s what the jury foreman at the 2003 trial, the eighth-grade teacher, said later. After the verdict.

  Ever since, in 2003, I first watched Ricky’s confession and felt, in that moment, that I wanted him to die, I have always believed that it was Lorilei’s words that had made the jury spare Ricky’s life. That’s how the media told it: The story of Ricky is the story of the power of a mother’s forgiveness.

  In the records, I’ve found that the truth is more complicated: She doesn’t forgive him, but she doesn’t want him to die.

  But it’s even more complicated than that. Because in talking about the decision to spare Ricky’s life, the foreman never mentioned Lorilei. Instead he said: “I knew as soon as I saw him I wasn’t gonna let them kill that boy.”

  “That boy”—Ricky. “As soon as I saw him”—voir dire, which Ricky was present for. Meaning before the trial. Before the evidence, before the witnesses, before the facts, and before the story-spinning by the lawyers, too. Before the foreman heard Lorilei say anything at all.

  The foreman’s brother-in-law was schizophrenic. The brother-in-law died well before the trial, but he lived with the foreman and the foreman’s wife for years. They took care of him, and the foreman saw how much his brother-in-law struggled. He saw the pain that struggle caused his wife. He looked at Ricky. He saw his brother-in-law.

  * * *

  A few weeks after I see the photographs of Jeremy, I come back to Louisiana, because the archives division has found missing file boxes. Each day I look through more records, looking for answers. Each night I drive. I tell myself I’m driving to see the landscape: how the road stretches flat and faded in the sun, how the trees erupt in emerald profusions. But really I know I’m searching for the house.

  Three hours before my plane back to Massachusetts, with the airport a two-hour drive away, I’m still driving back and forth on Ardoin Road in Iowa, looking. The house isn’t here. I know that. I drove this road yesterday and the day before. It isn’t here, and yet nowhere else makes sense. I have to leave. But leaving means accepting that I never will find the house. That this story will always remain unfinished inside me.

  I pull my car to the side of the road, get out, and start to photograph the trees. Because I don’t know what else to do. Because at least then I’ll have that evidence of here. It’s an unusually clear day for this time of the year, no clouds threatening rain, just the bright blue sky and the flat green grass for miles. The road is empty. The fields are, too. There’s not a car I can see, not a person in sight. Not a bird in the sky. Before me, the blanketed fields; behind me, a thick wall of trees that abut a ravine, swallowing the horizon line. I lift the camera to my eyes and frame my shot: the long road that stretches the length of the viewfinder, the fields that stretch behind it like a memory. Maybe I never was meant to find the house.

  And then I laugh. I have to. Because in the right corner of the camera’s frame, at a spot I had passed at least twice before, is an entrance to an unmarked road. It is exactly where it was supposed to be, its placement exactly as it is on the aerial photograph. It is next to Ardoin Lane, which means I stood just yards from it on my last trip here and never once saw it. Something in my body kept me from realizing until now.

  On the road’s right is a one-story brick house with a purple foil pinwheel pitched in its yard. On the left, a white prefabricated house raised up on bare wooden stilts, a pickup truck parked beside it. Lumber and construction materials weigh down the pickup’s bed, but the cab is empty and both houses are dark. Farther down on the left, just before the road truncates at a thatch of woods, there’s one more house.

  But that’s it, nothing else. No more houses, only grass and then that mass of woods. The other lot is empty.

  I park my car by the pickup. The high grass tickles my ankles. I trespass over the yards with impunity, to the empty lot, where a small shed stands. Did it once hold the washing machine outside the Lawson house, where Ricky washed sheets late on the night he killed Jeremy?

  Behind it, the world falls off. The ravine. The one Jeremy liked to play in, propping up his gun as he lay on his belly in the soft earth, and the one the police dredged when he disappeared. It’s deeper than I imagined, a steep sheer drop maybe ten feet down into dense brush and dark mud. A place where you could expect a child might have died, and where you would send out the searchers with their flashlights and the dogs with their noses and the helicopters that whirled and the ATVs, while all along his body rested fifteen feet behind you in a white house, wrapped in Tweety Bird and Dick Tracy blankets.

  Fifteen feet. I turn and I walk to the spot. It’s just a patch of green now. The air clear and still and scented sweet from the grass.

  All this time, all this searching. I have finally found the scene of the crime.

  And it’s gone.

  Thirty-Eight

  When I get home to Boston, I climb the stairs to my apartment, open the door, and crouch to pet my cat when he runs to greet me. I push aside the mail the cat sitter has left on the floor, hang my keys on the rack, and walk through the entryway.

  Then I see them. Three white boxes, each four inches thick, stacked on my bed. The photographs.

  I drag them off. Before I do anything else, I drag them off. Each one weighs as much as a child.

  The next morning, armed with coffee, I sit at my desk and open them. Inside the boxes are the pages I marked. First, aerial photographs of the house. The woods I just stood beside, the thin lane I now recognize. Then Bessie, the one photograph that exists of her in the cast. She is a pale face in a sea of white: white hospital sheets, a white nightgown pulled over the white cast. She looks frightened, or maybe just tired. Around her, her girls have piled onto the bed, wearing their Sunday best. Only the youngest—only Judy—looks at ease. Her older sisters, Darlene and Francis, hold their shoulders stiffly, a little away from their mother, as though they are trying to keep this new reality at bay.

  But Judy? She is on her mama’s bed, she can hardly remember her differently. Her mama has always lain this way. Her mama has always been so still. It is not so difficult to reach around the cast and hug her. The next photograph is the cast alone, against a flat black background, its empty white carcass the shape of a ghost or a haunting.

  Then Jeremy.

  He sleeps. That’s what the first photograph looks like. I can’t not write it that way, as sleeping, and I can’t leave it that way. The flash of the long-ago camera lights up his blond hair. His eyes are closed, his lashes thick. His nose is the stub one of dolls.

  For the next photograph the camera has moved lower. From his mo
uth there comes a white tube sock with stripes, dirty at the bottom. Jeremy in this photo does not look dead, he still might only be sleeping. His skin is still plump, his mouth still the bow bud of a child.

  It’s the sock that looks limp, lifeless. The sock that means Jeremy is dead.

  The string around his neck has been removed for the next photograph. A ruler, a horrible basic wooden school ruler, presses to the gouge in Jeremy’s neck, measuring the bruising. Around the bruising bloom black splotches. That word, that word that now haunts me: petechiae.

  I steady my breath. I keep my pen moving. I try to describe each photograph. Through my open window, I hear music from a car radio. A woman laughs on the street below. When I finish one photograph, I move on to the next. I try not to feel. I just record.

  It is the gun that does me in. Jeremy’s BB gun. The photograph is of the open closet door. In the closet is a mound of blankets. I can’t look too directly at the blankets—I know this is really a photograph of Jeremy’s body, not of blankets—so I focus on a small dark shape in the blurry photocopy. The shape is a vertical bar. I can’t make out what it is.

  Then. The barrel of a gun, poking up from where Ricky tucked it. My own cry startles me. My sobs.

  * * *

  What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth.

  Helen Palsgraf was on a beach outing with her children when her life changed forever and became a parable for where stories start. But there’s something else about the case, something I didn’t find out until years after I left the law: No one knows whether she was actually injured. She claimed mental injury; there doesn’t appear to have been any evidence. The judges said they’d assume she’d been injured, so as to reach the more interesting legal question.