That day I stepped away from the conference table knowing exactly whose confession I’d seen. But an hour later, I no longer knew the man’s name. I couldn’t remember it. When I tried to, darkness licked at my field of vision and the name was suddenly gone. I never worked on the man’s case, but I worked on many others, and afterward, too, I felt myself changed. Now it was the victims whose names I noticed in cases, the victims I suddenly wondered about.
I knew it was strange that I couldn’t remember the man’s name. Something was happening inside me. I would read his file again and again to try to make myself remember it, my glance skidding short on those letters—why couldn’t I quite hold them? Always my vision would jolt just slightly, as though the focus on a camera had gone out. A high-alert flood washed over my body. Seconds later, I no longer remembered the name I’d just read. It was gone as neatly as if snipped from my consciousness, only the black mark of the excision left behind.
When summer ended, I returned to Boston. I finished law school. And then I left the law—how could I become a lawyer, after wanting the man to die? My opposition to the death penalty had helped drive me to law school. And I still opposed it—or thought I did. But how could I fight for what I believed when as soon as a crime was personal to me, my feelings changed? Every crime was personal to someone. I went back to school for writing instead. But still I thought often of the boy the man had killed, Jeremy, and of that boy’s mother, Lorilei. That she’d testified for his killer stirred complicated feelings in me: admiration but also anger. Yet I’d run from that complexity, I knew. I was a coward and I still couldn’t remember the man’s name.
Which is why, twelve years after that day in the law firm library, I am standing under a giant truck-stop sign. Because it is not possible to let the past remain a haunting. The sign says CASH MAGIC. There is no sun, so the sign gives no shade. It is August of 2015, ninety-five degrees with ninety-five percent humidity, and the sky looks like sludge poured from a contractor’s bucket. Westward of Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans’s exuberant purples and yellows, its neon and its billboards, have given way to reed-choked swamp. Two hundred miles outside New Orleans, as I-10 snakes its way across the lower half of Louisiana toward the town of Iowa, the road and sky bleed together on the horizon, oozing into one vast blank gray expanse. I got part of the man’s court record and read thousands of pages of files to get here. I read his name over and over, until the shaking subsided and I learned it.
Ricky Langley’s case didn’t end in 2003 with the retrial Clive fought for. It didn’t end when Lorilei told the jury she could hear his cry for help. The verdict from that trial was thrown out, and in 2009 Ricky was tried again and sentenced to life again. That brought the trial count to three. In 1994, a death sentence. In 2003, life. In 2009, life. Before the 2009 trial, the appellate court had held that since he’d escaped a death sentence once, he couldn’t be made to face another.
So it was the 2003 retrial—the one at which Lorilei had testified for Ricky, and that had concluded right before I arrived in Louisiana—that decided his fate. Why, then, had there been another trial after that, the third? He’d committed the murder. Who would have pushed for it? And how had Lorilei been able to fight for him when he’d killed her son—while I, despite my opposition to the death penalty, had been unable to? I hoped the court record would answer my questions. I hoped it would help me understand.
But reading it, I soon realized that what I needed was everything that hadn’t made it into the words of the record I’d read. The emotions. The memories. The story. The past.
*
The past. Which had happened here, in the parking lot of the Cash Magic, once the Fuel Stop. In the heat, the lot is nearly empty. It looks as though it could accommodate at least sixty cars and a dozen trucking rigs, but there’s only a dented burgundy four-by-four truck with a purple-and-gold LSU fleur-de-lis on the back and a muddy white sedan with rusted hubcaps. A lone black truck jackknifes across four spaces at the back of the lot. Nearby squat two Dumpsters, one green and one blue, both mottled orange with rust. The back door of the gas station has been blacked out and painted with white letters reading ADULTS ONLY. Later tonight the Cash Magic will become the local casino, and the locals will search for the jackpot to change their luck.
Sweat beads on my skin. My mouth feels like I’ve been sucking on a wet rag. I raise my camera and frame the green Cash Magic sign over the trees. There’s a glossy black hat on it, from which a magician’s gloved white hand extracts a rabbit. Click. The trees across the road seem to tremble in the heat, their branches snaking like arms, their tiny leaves like bejeweled fingers. Click. The leaves reach over the concrete, the land ready to reclaim itself. Click.
Through my camera I frame the red metal signs over the gas pumps. I frame the shiny silver pumps and the dark asphalt that stretches beneath them. Twenty-three years ago, this lot wasn’t paved. Twenty-three years ago, a pale, skinny twenty-six-year-old man with jug ears and glasses that swallowed half his face sat perched on a tractor, spreading crushed shell across the ground I now stand on. If I squint, I can almost make out Lucky, as he steps out of the police cruiser and removes his hat.
It’s all here. Just as it was twenty-three years ago. Just as it is in the files.
Then the feeling begins. The feeling that—as much as any of the rational reasons I tell myself—is still really why I’ve come back to Louisiana. Why I’ve had to. My skin flushes and grows tight and prickly, my heart pounds and the sound echoes in my head. I lower the camera from my eyes and without the shield of the viewfinder the image in front of me seems to warp and blur. Everything suspended. Like being hurtled back in time.
*