And from there, as before, my father drives the big gray Chevrolet across the George Washington Bridge and into the Queens neighborhood where my mother grew up. As before, he pulls in front of the burgundy-awning door of the brick row house where my mother was a child, where my grandfather waits, a newsboy cap on his head, a vinyl jacket pulled around him, ready for his outing. My father holds out his hand to my grandfather and accepts the wooden cane with the other. As before, my father gives the old man his shoulder to lean on, and they creep their way to the car. He hoists my grandfather up over the running boards, then tucks the cane beneath the seat. My father slams the chassis door, walks over to the driver’s side. He carries my grandfather back over the bridge to us.
The people in this story still want to believe they can control the past, wipe it clean just as a crime scene is scrubbed. They want to believe that that scene, scrubbed, becomes just a bedroom. My parents tell me now that they had consulted a psychologist who told them that the best thing they could do for their children was to model unaffectedness. Model that what happened had no impact.
It’s not that I don’t believe them. Not exactly. But I wonder about the neatness of this advice. It echoes so perfectly, too perfectly, the silences I already know of my parents. The silence about my father’s rages. The silence that followed for years about my missing sister. It echoes—but we are not there yet—what happened to my sister’s body.
For now, just understand this: They need to leave the past behind.
So in my memory my grandfather is there, sitting like a lump in my throat, in the living room chair at the foot of the stairs. He is there at Christmas, he is there at Easter, he is there when it is just Sunday and my grandmother sits beside him and asks me to play a game of checkers with her, and I do not say that I am too old for checkers. He is there when I am thirteen and wearing my first grown-up dress, black velvet with a deep V-neck halter. He is there when I rise onto my tiptoes and twirl to make the crinoline skirt float up around me. It is his hot breath that leans into my neck and whispers how grown-up I look, how nicely my body fills out the dress. He is there when I am fifteen, and just starting to be angry.
*
When we left Lorilei she was sitting on the police station bench, her head in her hands, sobbing. She’s pregnant with the next child inside her, the boy who’ll grow up in his brother’s wake.
In the months that follow Ricky’s arrest, she’ll walk a hard line between her grief and her rage. That one drink on the porch the first night the searchers were out for Jeremy—that will turn into months of drinking, months of drugs. She’ll fall back into her old ways and the past will flood out over the present. Inside her, the whole time, will grow the new life, but she won’t then be able to nurture it. It will just grow.
One year later there’s a newspaper clipping that matches Lorilei’s address. Reading it, I see a woman (she refuses to identify herself, but her hair must still be the light brown shade that is often a childhood blond) walk from a house to meet the cops as they step out of their cruiser. She cradles a baby in her arms.
“Y’all don’t need to come in,” she says.
“Ma’am, we’re responding to a suspected domestic incident,” the cop says. “A neighbor called.”
“Y’all don’t need to come in,” she repeats. She squints into the sun. Her left eye is already starting to swell. The baby in her arms begins to fuss and she shifts him tighter in to her chest. She’s named this boy Cole. He’ll have his father’s last name. “Look,” she says. “If he goes”—she nods back at the house—“I ain’t got no other way to pay my bills.”
She looks at the cop hard now, in the eyes. “You have a good day,” she says firmly. Then she walks back to the house, carrying the baby in her arms.
One more year later, when Ricky is finally sentenced for her son’s murder, she doesn’t go to the courtroom. She sits in a motel room across the road and waits. Her brother Richard is in the courtroom when the jury gives its decision. Three hours, they’ve deliberated. Ricky will die for Jeremy’s death.
Richard crosses the street back to Lorilei. It’s over, he tells her. It’s done.
*
When I began writing this story I thought it was because of the man on the tape. I thought it was because of Ricky. In him I saw my grandfather. I wanted to understand.
But I think now that I write because of Lorilei. Her story didn’t end the afternoon that Richard embraced her in the motel room while, across the road, Ricky was led away in handcuffs. Ten years after the first trial, Ricky’s death sentence was overturned. He was taken off death row and sent back to Calcasieu Parish to await another trial.
That trial was in 2003. It was the trial that had ended just before I came to Louisiana. That it had just ended was the reason the lawyer showed me the tape.
I have the transcript. Day two of the trial, the prosecution calls Lorilei to the stand. She tells the jury about handing Jeremy his BB gun. “That was the last time I saw him,” she says. She catches herself. “I mean—that was the last time I saw him alive.” She tells them about going to the Lawson house to search for him. About meeting Ricky. Using the phone.
The prosecutor thanks her. The judge excuses her. She returns to her seat. The trial continues.
But on day four, the defense calls her to the stand.
The jurors must be so confused at this moment. She’s the dead boy’s mother. She’s already testified. They’ve been looking at pictures of Jeremy’s body for days. At one point a juror has broken down crying at the photographs of the body, and the judge has had to stop the trial. Why is the defense calling her?
But she rises and walks to the stand. She knows all about Ricky’s life now. She’s spent years learning. She sits down in the wooden box, smooths her dress over her hips, and turns in her seat to look at the jury.
“Do you have anything you’d like to say to the jury?” the defense attorney asks. He’s a tall, slim Brit. He’s been defending Ricky for twenty years.
“Yes,” she says. Her voice steady. “I do.”
The room must be silent, everyone rapt. Lorilei readies herself. These are the words she’s practiced.
“Even though I can hear my child’s death cry, I, too, can hear Ricky Langley cry for help.”
It’s Ricky she testifies for. She tries to keep him alive.
I read her words in the courtroom, and what I see is my father, as he folds his fingers around my grandfather’s hand. He feels the weight of my grandfather’s hand in his. He lifts, and helps hoist the old man into the car so he can bring him across the bridge. So he can bring him home to us.
I want—I need—to understand.
Part Two: Consequence
Eleven