And then one day, when she’s been at a funeral for a cousin she grew up with, and her eyes and her head are blurry from crying, she comes home and the house is empty. He’s not on the couch. He’s not in the kitchen. Instead, on the table, there’s a scrap of paper torn from a grocery bag, the note on it scrawled in his hasty writing: The police came and arrested him at her house to take him back to Georgia. He’s being charged there. All the stress of the past few weeks, all the stress of what she’s known and not allowed herself to know, all the stress of worrying after him and not wanting to have to and worrying all the same, comes to her like a deep sickening and she’s suddenly so tired. She doesn’t make any calls. She doesn’t try to find anything more out. She just accepts that he’s slipped from her life just as suddenly as he came into it. I see her wet a paper towel into a cold compress. She takes it to bed and she sleeps the dawn away, and when she wakes the next day, the sun blaring in through the windows and her head heavy and her heart heavy with the memory of her cousin’s funeral the day before, it must be almost like she’s wakened into her old life, the life before him. She must expect the loneliness so much she doesn’t even notice it. Not for weeks does she have the energy to call Bessie and ask what happened. He had been arrested for touching a young girl in Georgia—his second molestation arrest, after the boy in Louisiana he threatened to shoot—and for grand theft auto. When she’d picked him up at the filling station, he was on the run from the girl’s house. He’d just ditched her mother’s Chevy.
When she walks into the courtroom in Baton Rouge in 1994, her eyes must go first to the back of the head of the man in the defense seat. All these years later, and something inside her still flies out to him. Grown-up Ricky. Dark brown hair cut jailhouse-short, glasses hooked over the backs of his ears. She prepares herself to meet his eyes, but he doesn’t turn around. Instead, a woman with a round face and brown bangs waves to her from the left—his sister Darlene, full-grown, she realizes with a start—so she takes the seat next to Darlene and, to her surprise, finds herself reaching for Darlene’s hand. She squeezes it.
Then she notices the photographs of the little blond boy blown up poster-size in front of the jury. Ricky is accused of killing him. She must remember the hush of Ricky’s voice at the table, those awful words he said. “I like little boys.” She must remember her choice in that moment, not to ask. As she sits in the courtroom, the bench beneath her sturdy as a pew, I see her close her eyes for a moment. Then she makes herself open them. She looks at the eyes of the boy in the photograph. What happened to him?
But even as she wonders, it must be Ricky’s eyes that come back to her. She sped home the whole way that afternoon. She opened the kitchen door so frightened. First the cold shine of the knife in his hand, then above the knife his eyes as big and round as a raccoon’s. Wide like he was trapped, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to do. He needed her to save him from it.
She loved him then, she understands that now. The years have taught her that. Living with him, taking care of him, changed her. When she remembers his eyes, yes, she remembers the fear and the guilt in them—but how can she explain that what has stayed with her, what has opened her heart and what breaks her heart still, was that she saw relief? His relief at having been found by her. At having been saved by her. Relief that someone might finally make him stay.
“The defense calls Ruth McClary.” She rises and smooths her skirt over her hips. From the witness stand, she answers the attorney’s questions. Yes, Ricky came to live with her. No, at the time she didn’t know why. But he was polite and helpful, a hard worker. “I love Ricky,” she hears herself say. “He’s a very fine boy.” Her body turned to the jury; she speaks into the transcript microphone for the court reporter; her presence here today is for everyone else. But inside herself it must be him she watches. Her words are for him. With his head bent down she can see the spot where the hair at the top of his head grows in a whorl, like a boy’s. His hands are pressed together so tightly that his shoulders threaten to shake. She says, softly, “I got very attached to him. Like he was my own son.”
*
When, in 1986, the police take Ricky back to Conyers, Georgia, there’s no trial. Instead he pleads guilty to committing an unspecified sexual offense with a minor—now the second sexual offense on his record—and, at twenty years old, is sent to the Georgia Youthful Defendant Correctional Institution.
In Georgia, by all accounts, Ricky is a model prisoner. He’s learned something living with Ruth and learned something working at the racetrack those few weeks. There’s something satisfying about being told what to do and meeting those demands. It gives him pride. In May 1987, at the age of twenty-two, he earns his GED. “Ricky Langley was an excellent student and I would like to have him as my aide,” the teacher writes in his postclass evaluation. “I really need one.” One year later, he becomes eligible for parole.
The morning of his hearing, he must neaten down his hair with water and he must wipe his glasses clean and straighten his prison-issue shirt so that it hangs unwrinkled on his skinny torso. He wants parole. He’s been dreaming of it. Dreaming of getting back to the Calcasieu River, back to spending his afternoons fishing and his nights sleeping next to the bubbling sound of water over the creek bed. He didn’t know what prison would be like. And it turns out he likes it here all right, but it’s still prison. It’s too loud, all the yelling and the moans and the guys who have no other way to make themselves heard so they bang on the bars night and day. Sometimes it’s like the noise in the prison mixes up with the noise in his head and it all becomes one vast incomprehensible yelling, the inside of him and the outside, and then it’s like he blows apart in the noise. Being confined makes it impossible to get away from himself, from the self that’s always too loud inside.
And besides, that pride he has? He wants others to see it. He doesn’t want to be a prisoner anymore. He wants to be thought of as free.
But the board denies his parole.
Ricky’s furious. At first his fury is just anger. Then it curdles into indignation. Since they arrested him, he’s done everything right. What more should he have to do? “He feels,” a counselor records in his file, “that his past should not have anything to do with his parole.” Ricky complains and he complains and finally one of the other inmates, sick of hearing him complain, says, “Don’t matter if you’d gotten out, you’d be back in here within a year.”
At first Ricky reacts to the guy the way he always does, quick-twitch anger. But he likes the guy, even maybe trusts him a little, and the words make him curious. He’d expect shit like that from the guards. But from another inmate? A guy who should be on his side?
So he reacts in a new way. He says, “Why?”