The inmate explains to Ricky that that’s what pedophiles are known for. That Ricky isn’t the only one who’s struggled his whole life. Pedophilia is known to be something you can’t just quit.
Maybe Ricky asks for more therapy, maybe the system recognizes his need for it finally, but for the next two years in Georgia, as Ricky is shuttled among three different jails, the doctors give him something he’s never had before: a way to understand who he is. In his therapy sessions, he learns about pedophilia. He learns that what he has is considered a disorder, and he learns, again, that abusing children harms them. At night, he dreams. Not the dreams of before, not dreams in which the children’s skin glowed like alabaster moonlight and when he awoke he was panting and sweaty and knew he’d touched them. Now in his dreams he walks to a clearing in the woods. Sunlight suffuses the air around him, the smell of green so thick it clots his throat. A carpet of dried pine needles cushions his footsteps. When he reaches the center of the clearing he stands and waits. A child appears. He recognizes the child and his heart beats faster. One by one, the children he’s molested enter the clearing. They walk hesitantly at first, their eyes widening when they see him, but then they see the other children and are suddenly confident. Each child takes the hand of the one before him until they are all holding hands, they are linked in a circle, every boy and every girl, and at the center of the circle is him. He turns and he turns—but he is surrounded.
Why, one child asks. Why? Why did you do it? Then another. Why to me? Why to us? He opens his mouth to answer them, but in his mouth there is only air. He doesn’t know how to tell them why. He doesn’t know how to tell himself why. They ask until the sound drums in his ears like the blood thrums in his veins. He trembles.
Then he bolts. He tears a boy by the hand from the circle and runs, pulling the boy behind him deeper into the woods, until they are alone and no one can see them. There is only one way to stop his trembling. He palms the back of the boy’s head, feels the cool brush of the boy’s hair. He unzips his pants. He pushes the boy’s head to him.
When he wakes, he is sweaty and sick and shaking, but he writes down the dream in a notebook. He brings the notebook to his therapy sessions and hands it to the therapist. “Don’t let me out of here,” he says.
“If you want your life to be something different, Ricky,” she says, “you have to make it something different.”
His GED teacher is a lay minister, and now Ricky joins his evening Bible study class. He is shy at first, quiet. Sometimes, the teacher notes, he arrives in class with his clothing askew, his hair rumpled and deep bags under his eyes. Ricky, the teacher will later remember, seems like a man wrestling with something. But over time he starts speaking up in class. When Ricky is transferred to another jail, he writes letters to the minister, asking him questions about spiritual matters that vex him. Mostly they have to do with the problem of guilt. The minister takes his questions seriously, even researches them, spending two or three weeks on each letter and composing lengthy replies that Ricky pores over in his new cell. The questions are general and the answers are doctrinal, but both Ricky and the minister know they are talking about Ricky’s soul.
He asks to be placed in the sexual offender treatment program at the adult prison in Valdosta. Two and a half years after receiving his GED, he earns a diploma from the success-skills course offered there. A month later, he earns a certificate from the appliance repair program, attesting that he’s completed 863 hours of training and can now install household appliances as an electrical appliance apprentice. On his inmate evaluation sheet, relationship to coworkers is marked “above average.” For the first time in Ricky’s life, every category is marked above average.
In September 1990, Ricky Langley, the reformed prisoner, receives parole.
*
When the defense experts look back on this time, they’re impressed by how much he learned during his Georgia prison term. When the prosecutors do, they sneer at it. One year and five months after being released from Georgia, he murdered Jeremy. So how much can you say he learned? An inmate in Georgia, after all, recalls him saying that his mistake there was leaving the girl alive. Next time, he would make sure she was dead. But that’s not fair, the defense experts point out. Surely the inmate has his own reasons for saying this. And besides, child molesters are targeted in prison. Ricky may have had to try to appear threatening to be safe.
Like so much else, these years before the murder come down to what it always comes down to with Ricky: What do you see in him? Do you believe that he’s trying? Is his the story of a man who tries over and over again to get treatment, trying to change and take his changed self back into the world and live a new life, who tries and tries but is ultimately undone by the bulwark fact of who he is? Or is his the story of a man who leaves treatment over and over again, who never really tries but always runs? In the trial transcripts, the prosecutors and the defense psychiatric witnesses battle over this:
Prosecutor: So while he was on probation [in 1984] and ordered to Lake Charles Mental Health, he leaves the state and stops his health treatment, is that right?
Defense psychiatrist: That’s correct.
Q: He chose to do that, didn’t he?
A: Yes, he did that.
Q: He chose to do that, didn’t he?
A: As much as it was his choice, yes, he chose to do that.
Q: Are you trying to say he didn’t have the ability to choose?
And:
Prosecutor: So he didn’t go to Indianapolis and [try to] see anybody [himself]?
Defense psychiatrist: No.
Q: Georgia?
A: He did not see anyone.
Q: He did not seek any kind of treatment whatsoever?
A: No.
Q: But he knew and had an insight into his behavior, that’s what you said.
A: He had some insight into his behavior, yes.
Q: He understood that he was supposed to do it, didn’t he, Doctor?
A: I believe he understood that.
Q: And he chose not to?
A: That’s correct.
Q: Was he seeing anybody during the week before Jeremy Guillory’s death?
A: No.
Q: So he knows enough to go to the doctor when he has bronchitis, but when he starts struggling with his sexual feelings towards Jeremy, it doesn’t clue him in that maybe he needs help?
A: I think he knew he needed help. I think there’s a real different situation, between going for bronchitis and going for your mental health. I’m sorry, I wish it wasn’t, but it is.
Q: Why? Why is that different?