Ricky killed Jeremy; that we know for sure. And the pubic hair might have just fallen off a blanket. But those blankets don’t belong only to Ricky. There’s too many of them. They must be from Joey’s and June’s beds, too. Maybe the hair could have been transferred to them in the laundry.
But maybe not. Does the hair belong to Terry, who, right this moment, is still alive, has not taken his son for a ride, is out of the house at an unknown location while the police perform their search? Does the hair belong not to the convicted sex predator, the one people now know to fear, but to the father who may secretly be a predator, too?
Lucky keeps narrating. “You can observe a sock which appears to be in the mouth of the victim. Our victim is dressed in a white T-shirt, light blue or turquoise sweatpants with a yellow stripe around the bottom, white socks and the boots that the mother said he was dressed in were here.”
Teal. Lorilei describes those sweatpants as teal. Four days ago she lifted them from the dryer and folded them, matching the edges of their waistband together, creasing the small legs into a careful package. She stacked it with that T-shirt. She took the clothes to the dresser she and Jeremy were sharing at Melissa’s and she laid the pants down in the bottom drawer, the T-shirt in the drawer above. She laid them down carefully. As if she were laying down a child.
All these clothes Jeremy is wearing—all these pieces of evidence—have history. The evidence holds the life they had together. It holds her love.
“Also, in the corner of the closet,” Dixon continues, “you can see the BB gun. Which the mother described as belonging to the victim, Jeremy.”
Back in the station, Lorilei brings her head to her hands and sobs.
Ten
New Jersey, 1986
I have only the barest of retellings of this next story to work from—told to me once by my mother years afterward and never repeated—with little memory of my own to offer. So let me construct the story from these traces. It is the year after my mother told us about Jacqueline. Now we are on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, where we have rented a house for the summer and have brought my grandparents with us. Elize is four years old, a doll of a child, with long blond curls and a kewpie nose. Lately she’s been modeling for the British clothing company owned by friends of my parents, and she wears, now, one of the white flounced dresses the company favors. Perhaps she has on the one with the green satin sash that matches her eyes. It is early evening, and the house bustles with activity as the adults dress for dinner. My sister has wandered off, a rare moment alone, and she climbs up on one of the grand upholstered chairs of the house’s formal living room. It was a captain’s home in the island’s whaling days, and dark oil portraits of his long-dead daughters line the walls, each with a dour expression and a golden name placard screwed beneath her: PRUDENCE VIRTUE CHASTITY. My sister turns around to look at each of the funny faces and makes a face back at one of them. She tries to imagine what she’s been told: that each one was once a child, just like she is.
In her fist, she grips a prize recently acquired: a five-dollar bill.
My mother walks in from the kitchen, a glass of red wine in her hand, her hair still wound around white plastic rollers, her black dress still unfastened in the back. “There you are!” she says. She sips the wine distractedly. Then, noticing: “Sweetie, where did you get the money?” She must be thinking my sister took it from her open purse or from her dresser drawer. An innocent mistake, cause enough for a gentle lesson.
But: “Grandpa gave it to me” is what my sister says.
“Oh?” my mother asks. She still thinks this will be a sweet story. There is a penny candy store on the island where one cent will buy a single sticky Swedish Fish or a gummy bear, and already my grandfather has taken us there once, and paid a quarter each for us to fill white paper sacks. He indulges us, just as he did my mother and her brothers while they were growing up. He always had candies in his pockets for them. My sister is too little for the tooth fairy, but maybe, my mother reasons, she got the five dollars by fetching his cap for him, or his cane. My mother decides to play along. “And how did you earn that?” she says.
“I sat on his lap,” my sister answers.
The whispers that follow are sheathed knives, fierce contained urgency. Voices are not raised; doors stay closed. Behind one, I am questioned, and I know to keep my voice low, that my parents do not want my grandfather, grandmother, or brother to hear. I answer simply. Yes, my grandfather has touched me. Yes, it’s been happening for years. They ask more questions—where, what do I remember, what did I see around me—to determine how long. Five years is the answer. I begin to cry. Not because of what happened. But because now my mother knows. Some part of me has been waiting for this—but more of me is terrified. I am convinced that we will all be safe if she just does not know this about her father. I am convinced it is my job to save her from that. That to say out loud that a father is capable of this would be the most terrible thing.
They ask enough questions of me, then my sisters, to determine the loose outline. Then we all go to dinner.
*
Can this be? Can this be right? Can they lead us all to a big round restaurant table laid with a red-and-white-checked cotton tablecloth—the restaurant we go to in these years has my grandfather’s name, Vincent’s—and pull out a chair for the man about whom they have just learned this? Can they sit across from the woman, his wife, my grandmother, whom they will decide to keep this secret from to protect? How many times during that dinner do they see my grandfather’s hands, and wonder what those hands have done?
Or am I mistaking my own interest in the past for theirs? Can my parents sit across from him and never, never imagine the actions that lie behind the words they have been told, never see the story unspool before them?
I know only what happens next: My parents never tell my grandfather what they have learned. They never tell my grandmother, either. They give, somehow, no sign that anything is wrong. We finish the vacation. We go home to the gray Victorian house. My parents stop asking my grandparents to spend the night, and the abuse stops without anyone’s saying anything. They arrange the memory as carefully as a script.