But Ellen’s in her element. She flits among the guests, answering questions. No, she and Mike have no plans to get married. No, they’re not ready to have children just yet. She loves that her parents will invite anyone to parties like this. Would invite anyone. She’s sure of it. That’s why she brought Ricky. She hasn’t told them Ricky was convicted of a sex crime. That’s all he’s told her: a “sex crime”—and what, she privately thinks, could be so bad about sex? But even after he’s accused of murder a few years from now, she’ll swear on the witness stand that if her parents had known what he was guilty of, they’d still have wanted him there. They’re that kind of people, California people. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what the past is; it matters who you are now. And Rick—what Ellen calls Ricky, the name he’s adopted since coming out here, loving the cool hardness of that k at the end, how it says he’s finally grown up—Rick is a hard worker. Like her Mike.
Mike. At the party she must look for him, catch his eye, smile. He’s standing off to the side, not talking to her parents’ friends, a bottle of beer in his hand. Ricky’s with him, a bottle in his. The two of them angled in under the tree, keeping themselves out of the way of her parents’ friends. Like brothers, those two. She smiles again, then looks more appraisingly, noticing Ricky’s clothes. Noticing them so carefully she’ll be able to describe them years later. She must wonder about his life for a minute, about the life that has brought him to those clothes. What does she write in her head for him? What, in this instant, does she imagine and forgive?
*
Summer passes, then fall. One night, Ellen, Mike, and Ricky are sitting around a bar, and talk turns to what they’ll be buying for Christmas. Ellen says she’ll get her father a golf shirt. Mike will get his mother flowers.
“The real question,” Ellen must say, lowering her eyes at Mike over her drink, “is what this one’s getting me.”
Mike winks at Ricky. “Now Rick, you’re not going to tell her, are you? We’ve got our secrets.”
“No fair!” says Ellen. “He already knows what I’m getting you. He knows too much, I think.”
This moment here? Ricky would nail this moment up like a fishing trophy if he could, mount it on the wall where he could look at it every day. In this moment, he has friends.
“What are you going to buy, Rick?” Ellen asks.
He gulps his beer and the beer makes him brave. “I’ve been saving up money.” He doesn’t even think of everything they don’t know about him. About where he’s from. “My mama, they took off her leg fifteen years ago and she’s still on crutches.” He must think of Bessie slinging her body through the space of the trailer, trying not to catch the crutch against the couch or a table leg. Those crutches are bad enough at home. But to try to go anywhere else he knows she cringes inside. “I’m going,” he says, and he likes the taste of the word going in his mouth, how definitive it feels, “I’m going to buy her a wheelchair.” The words taste right. They taste true.
“All right, man!” Mike claps him on the back. “That’s a good son your mama’s got.” He raises his beer. “To your mama. What’s her name?”
“Bessie.”
“To Rick’s mama, Bessie,” Mike says, “and her wheelchair.” The three of them clink glasses.
For two weeks, this idea fuels him. When Friday payday comes, maybe he takes his check and cashes it and folds a couple of bills into a coffee can before he takes a bill to the liquor store and buys a smaller bottle than he did before. When he pushes the bills into the can, he feels proud. He can see the shiny chrome the wheelchair will have, the big easy wheels. The first week, he sees himself polishing the chrome before he presents Bessie with the chair. He’ll make it gleam. He’ll tie a big red ribbon around it into a bow, the way they do in the movies. By the second week, he’s got an even better idea. Maybe he could put a payment down on a wheelchair with one of those joystick things. Make Bessie’s life one of luxury, the first luxury she’s had. He pictures being with her in Iowa when she first sees it. How tentatively she’ll lower herself onto the seat. He’ll show her how to work the joystick and she’ll try and misjudge and crash the wheelchair into the couch and oh, they’ll laugh and laugh.
But by Christmas, his dreams have dissolved. Maybe work with Mike dries up, maybe he’s just so used to leaving that he doesn’t know how not to, or maybe something happens and Ellen and Mike don’t want him around anymore. He leaves and the records hold no reason why. Ellen, later, will not say why on the witness stand, only describe how badly he wanted to get the wheelchair for Bessie, and that he then left. He never sees Mike again. Sees Ellen only at the trial. Bessie never does get her wheelchair. He moves to a different part of California, but after a few months he’s back on the road. He returns to Georgia, to live with his sister Judy. There he goes to see a psychiatrist privately, as ordered by the Georgia court—but those records were never found, either because they were destroyed or because they never existed. In December 1991, he leaves Georgia and moves back in with his parents in Iowa, Louisiana.
*
A few months from now, Ricky will murder Jeremy. And after he does, his lawyers and the experts and Ricky himself will all talk about how he’s been good “for a year” now, that he has not molested anyone in a full year.
But he was released from the Georgia prison not a year ago, but a year and a half. And before his release, he was in prison for four years—where he presumably didn’t have the chance to molest a child. So the number could be five years, not one year. There’s something unaccounted for here, something the law can’t concern itself with because there is no evidence, no record. Are Ricky and his lawyers leaving something—someone—out? One year’s when he left Ellen and Mike’s. One year’s when he left California.
*
When Ricky moves in with Bessie and Alcide in Iowa one final time he is twenty-six. Still scrawny, not much bigger than a preteen, with the emotional maturity, the doctors say, of an eleven-or twelve-year-old—but enough grown-up smarts to understand how he’s perceived by others and to hate it. He understands he’s a pedophile now. At his exit interview for parole in Georgia, he satisfies the officer that yes, he can move to Louisiana and live with his parents. They’ll be responsible for him. Bessie attends and I picture her in one of the pastel day dresses my grandmother used to wear, this one nicer than the housedresses—Bessie would be a little nervous—with knitted lace around the collar and maybe the cuffs. She sits in a folding chair opposite the parole officer, her crutch leaning on the wall behind her and the stump of her missing leg angled in, so that her ankles, if she had both, would be crossed demurely.
“Ma’am, I want to make sure that you and your husband know what you’re getting into.”