She just looks at him. Thinks, maybe, of Ricky when he was a boy, the call she got from sixth grade when he said he saw Oscar. Thinks of the family reunions where he always headed off so willingly to look after the children. There is one note—only one—in the files that Ricky once molested a family member. It doesn’t say whom. She must know. Maybe she remembers telling the counselor at the Lake Charles Mental Health Center five years ago that looking after Ricky had become a burden, that she couldn’t leave him alone for five minutes without worrying that he was gonna go off and “molest somebody.” Now, five years later, after probation and a prison term for Ricky, she knows that to be even more true.
But Bessie believes in the crosses one bears in life, and Ricky is both her love and her cross. Would she take it back now, the decision not to end her pregnancy with him, now that he’s molested three children she knows of and who knows how many she doesn’t? You don’t think that way. She doesn’t think that way. Likely she can’t feel those children’s—those strangers’—hurt the way she feels Ricky’s presence beside her. Her son. You take family in.
So she looks the officer in the eye. “Yes, sir. His father and me, we understand.”
It’s in this interview that Ricky says, “I got me a preference for blond boys. Maybe six years old,” and he must be proud that he can describe it now, that he understands himself enough to know this. The officer records Ricky’s words but doesn’t write whether Bessie’s in the room then. Does she hear what Ricky says? Do his words pass over her with a chill? Does the officer’s pen pause on this harbinger, or does he not even notice, the appointment perfunctory? No one—not Bessie, not the parole officer, not even, by all accounts, Ricky—notes that just a few miles away from the trailer where Ricky will stay, a little blond boy lives. He is six years old, he loves his BB gun, and he stays with his mother in a house where they struggle to keep on the heat.
Twenty
Massachusetts, 2002
The night I’m accepted to law school, I break in.
Harvard Yard is a long, empty expanse of black now that it’s nearly midnight. The glow from the streetlamps in the Square pinpricks through the trees. Standing on an empty wooden porch, I shiver. The night is colder than I thought it would be, windless and clear and silent, the kind of Boston night that will always remind me that the city is on the water and that water becomes ice.
At twenty-three, finally graduated from college after a second try, I live in New Jersey with my boyfriend, Adam, and the dog we’ve adopted whom we’ve named Professor. We share the first floor of a house that’s tucked into the armpit of a highway exit ramp. The road from my parents’ house—an hour and a half north of ours—to the one Adam and I share is a snarl of factories that light up shiny and gray as the slick of fur on a rat’s back in the highway headlights, that Jersey Turnpike smell like it’s always summer in the city and you’re always standing over a sewer. Our house is pretty enough, with a slap of peach paint and even a picket fence that used to be white. But at night, lying on my back in bed while Adam sleeps next to me, l listen to the husband and wife next door yell at each other for hours. Their voices scare me. All that clabbered bitterness.
It’s too close to how I feel, still living in New Jersey. Still circling my parents’ house, around memories I don’t want inside me and can’t escape. After a year of being in their house I went back to college, this time in New York, at Columbia. I did well, making straight As, but before two years were up I’d moved back in with them to finish school, commuting over the bridge. Living in the gray house makes me depressed, but when I’m depressed, to live there feels right, like the walls are confirmation of the memories. After graduation I moved in with Adam, but that didn’t help, either. Then, in a Hail Mary pass to the future, I applied to law school. The old route that had worked for my parents. The old love from my childhood. And it turned out that all those afternoons I’d spent lying on my stomach on my parents’ office carpet as a kid, doing logic games in books from the newsstand downstairs, prepared me well for the LSAT: I got into Harvard.
Now, as we stand under the motion sensor light on the porch in Cambridge, there’s a bag at Adam’s feet that holds two matching sweatshirts from a newsstand in the Square, the only store that is open at this hour. The acceptance letter arrived this afternoon while Adam was at work. When he came home I was still sitting cross-legged on the carpet, staring at it in open-mouthed, catatonic disbelief. “Baby!” he said, and spun me around until my tears stopped and I laughed. “How do you want to celebrate?”
As soon as he asked, I knew. I wanted a sweatshirt. I wanted a school-colors maroon sweatshirt with HARVARD on it. When I was six years old, my father had called me to a conference at his bedside. He was propped up against pillows with his reading glasses on the covers beside him. He looked so serious that when I saw him I paused in the doorway. He motioned me in. I sat down on the edge of his bed and he reached over to the stack of newspapers that was next to his bedside all through my growing up—that is next to his bedside still—and withdrew an envelope. Then he put on his glasses, opened the envelope ceremoniously, and we discussed: Was my very first report card on track to go to Harvard? My father was from a New Jersey immigrant community and had gone to state schools. To him Harvard would mean we’d made it. By seven I had a maroon sweatshirt I wore everywhere, but by seventeen I wouldn’t have applied to Harvard even if there had been a chance that I, with all my cut classes and blank spots on my high school transcript, could have gotten in. For me Harvard means a time before things went wrong.
Adam drove us six hours up from Jersey right then. Now we stand at a building I’m pretty sure must be on the law school campus, though in the dark I can’t find a sign. It just looks like what I want a law school building to look like: large red and tan stone bricks, wooden columns, turrets that carve out from its sides. He blows on his hands and watches me, waiting for my lead. “Do you want to go home?” he asks. In eight hours I’m due at the bookstore where I work. “Or”—he draws the consonant out and arches his eyebrow at me—“do you want to go in?”
“In.” If we’re caught, I’ll pretend I’m a student. It will be true soon enough.
In the photograph of me Adam takes that night, I lie on my back on the maroon benches inside Austin Hall at Harvard Law School, my black wool coat still buttoned around my neck, the maroon turtleneck I’d worn without realizing peeking out of the coat’s collar, my hair spread around me and my eyes half-closed. I look how I feel: peaceful, finally secure.
An idea strikes. “Be my lookout?” I say.
Adam grins. “Anytime.”
I find a narrow staircase that looks like it goes up the full length of the building. The first floor is dark, but surely there’s a security guard somewhere. One more flight, to be safe. I try the first door I come to after the landing—open.
The classroom is surprisingly small, cloistered with only a single, postage-stamp window and fewer than a dozen chairs arranged into neat little rows. And a green chalkboard. With chalk. Can I? Yes. “Thanks for letting me in!” I write.
I mean, thanks for letting me in. Not just to law school, but to the law.