Then, one afternoon when Ricky is in sixth grade, Bessie answers the phone, and it’s his teacher. “Ma’am, who’s Oscar Lee?” she asks. When Bessie, shaken, asks why, the woman tells her. Ricky walked to the chalkboard at the front of the classroom and, in front of the whole class, wrote I AM OSCAR LEE LANGLEY. Adult Ricky, looking back, will say this is when he began to molest children younger than himself. He did it starting at the age of nine or ten, he will say. It was easy; the adults were always sending the children off to play together. Luann took in kids as if they were stray cats. There were always plenty around.
Darlene will tell it differently. Ricky was so skinny with those big, thick glasses and jug ears, jittery and uneasy in his skin. Friendless. That everything was fine—that Ricky wasn’t weird—was something the family colluded in to protect him. “He was just our Ricky, you know,” she’ll say on the stand when the defense attorney asks her if Ricky seemed sick and maybe she wants to say, Well, he wasn’t normal, but—. Yes it’s true that Bessie drank, and yes it’s true that Bessie’s cousin showed up some days while the kids were at school with a bottle of whiskey in her purse for Bessie because Bessie couldn’t walk well enough to go get it herself, and yes it’s true that sometimes when the kids got home Bessie would already be drunk and Alcide already angry. But who could blame her? That leg would be infected again and again before the doctors finally amputated it. They did their best with what they had. Luann and Lyle meant that Ricky had four parents. Not two. The children were looked after, Darlene will say. They were happy.
But the chalkboard writing—so public—demands their attention. Alcide doesn’t believe in therapists, thinks the only thing wrong with Ricky is that he’s weird and probably “queer,” he says, and definitely not right in the head, but while Bessie follows him on most things, she insists here. Picture Ricky, a small boy sitting on a couch, confused why they’re at the doctor but there’s no examination table and the doctor isn’t wearing a white coat. The doctor explains to Ricky that Oscar is dead. “So your talking about him is hurting your mama, son. You’re going to be a good boy now, right? You’re going to give your mama a break?”
Maybe Ricky understands him. Or maybe he just gets the message that if he wants to be thought normal he should stop talking about Oscar. Either way, the doctor’s words work, and Ricky doesn’t mention Oscar again. The family thinks it’s over.
It’s not over. Just not spoken. At eighteen, Ricky is out drinking one night with two other boys: Three friends in a borrowed pickup truck, getting buzzed on the single bottle of peppermint schnapps they pooled their money to buy and now pass back and forth in the cab of that truck. The Louisiana night is thick with cicadas, with stars, with a silencing of the man-made that can make possibility stretch out before you. The cab of the truck’s the kind of closed-in space that’s made Ricky feel safe his whole life. His friends are beside him. He has friends. When the bottle comes back to him, when he feels the sticky sweetness on his lips, he gets brave. He doesn’t know his friends will have the same problem with children he does. He can’t articulate the mark that draws them together, what hidden knowledge. He has to let the booze do its work.
He says, “I been thinking thoughts I don’t want to think.” He says, “I think I might need some help.”
A night-shift counselor at the mental health center answers the receptionist’s page. Picture what he sees. Standing in the linoleum-tiled corridor, under the fluorescent lights, is a buzzed-up teenage boy, the cowlick of his hair sticking up, his glasses thick as jelly, undersized and twisty in his body, with a face half-cocked in a protective sneer. Ricky must look like he’s mocking when he says, “I’m here for help.” Behind him, through the plate-glass doors, the counselor can see a rusted-up pickup with two more boys inside, the windows down, the headlights cutting recklessly through the dark, country music coming out loud. This is somebody’s idea of a joyride. The teenagers’ pranking. It’s sick what these boys think is funny. The counselor boots Ricky out of there faster than the time it took Ricky to say those words.
When these boys have grown into men, one of them will testify at Ricky’s trial. Ricky was serious that night, he’ll say. Ricky wanted help.
But the prosecutor, assistant district attorney Wayne Frey, will point out that the friend’s word is hardly good—he’s a convicted pedophile himself, convicted by Frey. “So what was this y’all were having?” Frey will sneer. “Just a little molesting society here or what?”
At eighteen, in the cab of the truck, Ricky’s not talking about Oscar anymore. The same way no one’s talking about Bessie’s alcoholism or Alcide’s silence. But something’s wormed its way inside of him. Something’s lying in wait.
Fourteen
New Jersey, 1990–1994
A lonely child, I grow into a lonely teen. The summer before I enter seventh grade, we again rent a house on Nantucket, and there ticks infested with Lyme disease bite me and my sisters—but we don’t know it yet. Nicola and Elize both develop chest infections that summer, and the antibiotics they’re given wipe out the Lyme, before it’s even discovered. I am healthy all that summer, in love with long walks around the center of town, holding a book in front of me to read while I walk. I spend hours curled in the back booth of the ice cream and coffee shop, watching the Irish boys who work there. Trying out the idea of having crushes on them.
Only when we’re back in the gray Victorian house and school has started does it become clear something’s wrong. I’ve been playing sports for a few years now, joining Nicola on the town basketball team, binding my hair back for soccer. Nicola’s a natural, but I’ve never been the fastest on the team, that’s never been my kind of energy. Now when I try to run my knees fold in on themselves, as if to force my body to conserve what little energy I do have. I am tired and my body aches from a place deep within. Lying in my bed each night in the yellow light of the doll lamp, I am alone but feel my grandfather’s hands crawl over me. So it seems right that my body hurts. There’s no way to escape the memories, not when they’re coming from inside me.
The sleep I tumble into is deep and unrelenting. When my mother comes to wake me for school I turn my mouth to breathe in the starchy cotton of the pillow. I fight not to wake up, to hold on to the darkness. I miss a day, then a week, then a month. Test after test for mono comes back negative, to my relief—in school, the kids call that the “kissing disease,” and I know I haven’t kissed anyone, except the times I don’t want to think about—but I’m not curious about what’s causing my sleeping. I want only to rest.
Eventually my parents find a specialist and, in a rare move, take me to see him together. The doctor’s face is stern over his white coat, his hand cold as it grips my calf and bends and unbends my knee. He peers at my kneecap, then prods it, then prods my hip. He gestures to my parents to step outside the room with him.