In my memory there is a dark room that stands wide-mouthed as a cave, fluorescent bars weakly aglow in its center. On the walls, rows of leather-bound books stretch to the ceiling, the muted colors of their spines alternating the blue of an old flag, the green of the sea, the red of dried blood. The books are legal registers, the same books in every law firm library in the country that hold case decisions from decades before. Each of them contains countless stories, countless lives, who did what and who was made to pay.
Picture me there. In June of 2003, twenty-five years old. Last week I passed my days hunched in a library carrel that smelled of old wood, where I scribbled six-hour blue book exams to finish my first year of law school at Harvard. Yesterday, I boarded a plane that carried me south to New Orleans, then I disembarked into air that was a hot wet slap. I have come to the South to fight the death penalty by interning with a law firm that represents people accused of murder. I am proud of this work I want to do and also frightened. My knowledge of the law comes only from books, and from the client stories my parents, both lawyers, shared with me as I was growing up. Those were disputes over custody, medical errors or a slip and fall, once a murder, but—nothing like a death penalty case. Nothing like I have been imagining New Orleans, in the midst of a crime wave this summer, will be. On last night’s evening news, yellow caution tape stretched tight across a closed door. This morning on Baronne Street, newspaper boxes blasted black headlines of murder. On the library shelves, below the case registers, lie photocopied booklets, each one sheathed in plastic and bound with plastic rings. They detail the steps the state takes for an execution, I know. In this room, lives are defended.
I fidget in my metal folding chair. The brown suit I brought with me is too hot for New Orleans; I can feel the sweat already starting to bead on my forehead. This is where my attention is in this moment: on my clothes and how wrong I feel in them.
A woman strides to the head of the conference table and holds a videocassette up for me and the other interns to see. She is poised, confident, dressed in a simple black skirt and a white shirt that somehow stays crisp in the heat. “This is the taped confession of the man whose retrial we just finished, recorded in 1992,” she says. Her accent is thin and British, her hair upswept like a Bront? heroine’s. “Nine years ago he was condemned to death, but this time the jury gave him life. Could you please,” she says to another lawyer, “get the lights?”
*
Cause in fact, then: this tape. If I hadn’t seen the man’s face on the tape—if I hadn’t heard him describe what he’d done—he might have stayed just a name to me.
Cause in fact: her showing me the tape. Twelve years have now passed since this day at the law firm, and I want to reach back through the years and tell her no, he isn’t my client, he never will be my client, I don’t need to see this tape. The child he killed is already dead. The man has already been convicted of murder. Everything that happened has already been done. There’s no need for me to see the tape.
Or go back further. Cause in fact: I could have chosen not to come south to this office. I could have chosen never to confront, question, what I believed. I could have allowed my past to remain undisturbed.
What if I’d never gone to law school? What if I’d never found a book about law school on my father’s bookshelf one afternoon when I was home sick from school at thirteen? The month I read and reread that book, the month I dreamt my future, a little blond boy knocked on the door of his neighbor’s house in Louisiana. The man on the tape answered the door.
I have spent more than ten years now with his story, a story that, had facts gone slightly differently, I might never have found. I have read the transcript of this confession he gave so many times I have lost count, and the transcripts of his other confessions. I know his words better than words I have written. Working backward from the transcripts, I have found the place where he lived and where he killed the little blond boy, and the gas station where he worked and was later arrested. From the transcripts, and by visiting the places in Louisiana where events in the man’s life took place, I have imagined his mother, his sisters, the little boy’s mother, all the characters from the past. And I have driven the long, lonely road from New Orleans to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, called Angola. I have sat across from this man, the murderer, in a visiting booth, and have looked into the same eyes that are on this tape.
This tape brought me to reexamine everything I believed not only about the law but about my family and my past. I might have wished I’d never seen it. I might have wished that my life could stay in the simpler time before.
*
She pushes the cassette into the player and steps back. The screen on the old box television flickers. A seated man slowly comes into view. Pale skin, square jaw, jug ears. Thick, round Coke-bottle glasses. An orange jumpsuit. Hands bound in cuffs in his lap.
“State your name,” a deep offscreen voice instructs.
“Ricky Langley,” the man says.
Part One: Crime
One
Louisiana, 1992
The boy wears sweatpants the color of a Louisiana lake. Later, the police report will note them as blue, though in every description his mother gives thereafter she will always insist on calling them aqua or teal. On his feet are the muddy hiking boots every boy wears in this part of the state, perfect for playing in the woods. In one small fist, he grips a BB gun half as tall as he is. The BB gun is the Daisy brand, with a long, brown plastic barrel the boy keeps as shiny as if it were real metal. The only child of a single mother, Jeremy Guillory is used to moving often, sleeping in bedrooms that aren’t his. His mother’s friends all rent houses along the same dead-end street the landlord calls Watson Road whenever he wants to charge higher rent, though it doesn’t really have a name and even the town police department will need directions to find it. Settlers from Iowa named the town after their home state but, wanting a fresh start, pronounced the name Io-way, even as they kept the spelling. The town has always been a place people come for new starts, always been a place they can’t quite leave the past behind. There, the boy and his mother stay with whoever can pay the electricity bill one month, whoever can keep the gas on the next. Wherever the boy lands, he takes his BB gun with him. It is his most prized possession.
Now it is the first week in February. The leaves are green and lush on the trees, but the temperature dips at night. Lorilei, Jeremy’s mother, isn’t working. She rented a home just for the two of them—their first—but the electricity’s been turned off. Her brother Richard lives in a sprawling house up on the hill, but she isn’t staying with Richard. Instead, Lorilei and Jeremy are staying with Lorilei’s friend Melissa, Melissa’s boyfriend, Michael, and their baby. The baby is two years old, old enough that he wants to play with the boy and screams when he doesn’t get his way.