And I thought of Colorado Luke.
Luke, who at twenty-two must have had his own reasons for having courted a sixteen-year-old on the Internet. For having assembled for her careful packages of photographs and curated mixtapes, for having flown across the country to see her while she was still in high school, a life he’d left behind years ago—except that he hadn’t really, still living in his childhood bedroom, still as lost as a teen. Luke, who, no matter where I am in the country, still finds me online every few years and sends me an e-mail telling me we had a special connection, one he hasn’t found since, and can we please, please get in touch.
I never write back.
I was sixteen. I didn’t know I was too young for him. I just thought his attention meant that I was worthy of love, could be loved, and that I wasn’t broken. When a lifeline comes, you don’t evaluate whether it’s the right one. You just grab for it, and hold on.
So I wondered, when in the files I reached the story of the Georgia girl, if this was what had happened. If that was who the girl was. If, when he took her mother’s ’69 Chevy to escape to Indianapolis, it was possible that maybe she hadn’t known. If, when he described her telling him that she liked when he touched his tongue to her and could he please, please do it again, maybe there could be some truth to that. If at least for this one moment in Ricky’s life maybe the relationship had been inappropriate, ill-advised, ill-chosen, unwise—but something short of my grandfather. Something more like Luke.
I let myself think that, because it made it possible to read the files. It made it possible to spend this time with him. To try, as I must try, to understand.
Not until I got the transcript from Ricky’s first trial, at which the Georgia girl testified, did I realize my mistake.
She was fourteen when she testified at the trial. In 1986, she was five.
Nineteen
California, 1990–1991
California greets Ricky with seemingly unbound potential. He’s free out here, free from Georgia, free from Iowa, free to invent his own life. A life that’s new but that also makes good on the unfulfilled promise of Bessie and Alcide’s move so many years before, and of his own attempt to stay as a teenager. He likes the open landscape, likes the palm trees, likes that the long coastline’s always nearby even if he’s not technically living on it. The stories Bessie used to tell him about the wildflowers, and how the Hollywood sign up on a hill was there for anyone to see it, even her, come back to him now, and the city seems all possibility. The shiny new cars on the boulevards! Everywhere he looks, people making money! Los Angeles is a city of people from elsewhere, come to make their fortunes. Just like him.
He finds work as a handyman with a contractor named Mike. Mike’s girlfriend’s name is Ellen, and the three of them take to spending their free time together, sharing a few beers and a couple of jokes after the day’s work is done. Mike seems familiar to Ricky—he’s from a barely-hanging-on working-class background like Ricky—but Ellen’s people have money, and Ricky must find himself watching her. Not because she’s pretty, though she is, but to learn. When she calls him up and asks him if he’d like to join Mike and her at one of her parents’ parties, he knows enough to ask her what he should wear.
“Just wear something appropriate,” she says. “No need to get fancy.”
“Like what?” he asks.
“Oh, you know, just something appropriate.” She’s distracted, he can hear it, and for an instant he thinks it must be Mike distracting her and he feels something approaching jealousy. He’s too embarrassed to ask her again. He doesn’t know what she means by “appropriate.”
I see him standing under a grove of palm trees. Someone has strung a strand of white lights off the slatted leaves, and the rays bounce off Ricky’s hair. He’s slicked it back with a can of Dep gel from the dollar store. He’s not smiling—he’s too nervous—but in his eyes and the tightness of his fingertips as he checks and straightens and checks again the powder-blue polyester suit Ellen Smith will describe four years from now at his first trial, when everything has changed, you can see he’s thrilled to be here. The lights glint and his hair gleams and the black dress shoes he bought at Payless (“It’s a California shoe chain,” Ellen Smith says helpfully, the chain not having yet reached Louisiana in 1994 when she’s testifying at the first murder trial) glow where he polished them. Even the black leather vest he got from Goodwill and is wearing now, incongruously, under his powder-blue polyester suit—even that vest shines. He’s polished it, too. He’s too skinny, the suit too big for him, a kid playing dress-up. Underneath the suit he vibrates with nerves. He’s twenty-six but he’s never been to a party like this before: little round tables dotted over a spacious yard, crisp white tablecloths over them. Somebody has ironed the tablecloths, he can tell. Even the grass looks like someone manicured it, the bright green so even it shouldn’t be real. Ellen’s parents are smiling big, real, relaxed smiles and pinching long-stemmed wineglasses. They clutch their guests’ hands to their chests heartily and say how good it is to see them, how good. When they said it to him he froze like a possum playing dead. So now he’s hiding out under the grove, watching.