She folds her arms around herself. “I couldn’t bury him in a suit,” she tells her neighbor. She says it again to Jeremy’s classmate’s mother. Then to a reporter. “I just couldn’t. It wouldn’t look right. He likes his jeans and his sneakers.” All of them keep saying how sorry they are. She keeps talking. If she stops talking, she’ll have to take in what they’re sorry for.
At the head of the room sits a small white casket, its lid propped open. In the casket lies her son. The mortician has folded Jeremy’s hands across his chest and nested a small bouquet of red carnations between his palms. He is wearing his favorite jeans and a burgundy sweater, and part of her—the part that can still forget—must be glad for the sweater. He’ll be warm against the February damp. Tucked at his sides are a toy Batman and a Batmobile, Christmas gifts from his cousin Bubba. “He should have his BB gun,” Lorilei says. “He loves that thing. But the sheriff’s got it as evidence.”
Richard appears and pulls her to his shoulder. The service is about to begin.
People crowd the aisles, the back of the room, its sides. The benches are all packed. Two preachers will speak, the first an old friend of Lorilei’s from her wilder days. The years have changed them both. “Life is but a passing episode,” he says. Jeremy called him Grandpa. “Jeremy’s was awful short. The wicked one took him from us.”
The revival preacher is younger, with more energy, more bluster. I see him with wavy hair and a wiry build, a crackle of energy running through his body like the smiting hand of God. Though they are sad, he entreats them, they should rejoice. “In the Bible, when David saw that God had taken his child, he took a bath and he cleaned up and he called for something to eat. Then he said, ‘That child can’t come back to me, but I can go back to him.’ He knew that the only way to see his son again was to make of his life something the Lord would approve of.” The preacher stares intently out at the crowd, his eyes ablaze. “We can meet Jeremy again if we can only be as humble as he was.”
Lorilei’s father slowly reaches his hand toward the ceiling and waves back and forth to his grandson. The reporters scribble it down.
After the service, people come to put their hands on the coffin. They cross themselves as they stand over Jeremy. Some lean down to kiss the boy’s forehead. His face is as bloodless as porcelain, no marks. But under the sweater, bruises from Ricky’s forearm cover his chest. Two days ago, the coroner held a ruler to the dark ligature marks on his neck and photographed them. Four times the flashbulb went off, four times capturing the deep bruised score around his neck, from four different angles. The bulb captured the red pinpricks that bloomed across his neck from capillaries that burst from pressure, where he’d bled into his skin. The spots are called petechiae. Later, after the developing fluid works on the film and the images mist into view, the photographs will be marked as evidence. In the years ahead they will be photocopied and then photocopied again for the case files. Twenty years into the future, when the three trials mean that even the photocopies have been copied yet again and again, the wounds on Jeremy’s neck will have blurred into the dark undifferentiated blotch of time.
But now, with the sweater collar pulled up over his neck, you could almost believe he was sleeping. If he weren’t quite so pale. If he weren’t quite so still. If the dead stink of flowers wasn’t quite so heavy in the air.
Outside, on the steps, a boy weeps freely, his small shoulders shuddering under the jacket his mother must have made him wear. A woman wraps her arms around him. “Shh, baby. I know, I know.” She rocks him, cooing into his hair—“Shh, baby, Shh”—but the boy only sobs harder. “Y’all had some good times together.” A few feet away, a reporter writes down her words.
Six miles away, Ricky Langley sits in an isolation cell at the Calcasieu Correctional Center. He yells out to the guard, “Won’t anybody come talk to me?”
The coffin is so light that the five pallbearers must each just barely feel it. Richard stands at the front. He is a big man with a bushy beard and a stomach that swells top to bottom. He is a hunter and a fisherman who poses in camouflage for snapshots with his trophies. He is a man used to the death of animals—but nothing has readied him for this. I see him there, his hand hooked under the casket, and I try to fill in the black-and-white news photo that ran of this moment with the color of real time. The red that flushes up his cheeks. The red that lines the rims of his eyes. For Richard the coffin must be as light as carrying a baby. Light as the first time he picked up his son, the first time he held his daughter. Light as the first time he held the newborn Jeremy, and marveled at this familiar stranger his sister had produced. When my sisters gave birth to their children, each time it seemed a miracle that someone I had known for so many years had made something so new, so a part of them and at once so different. We’d grown up together but we’d had such different lives, such different troubles. The differences had long driven us apart, the way it had once been for Richard and Lorilei. But there, in each new baby, was a chance at a new beginning.
At the grave site, with the wide oak trees in the distance, the red gleam of the gas station across the gray concrete corner, and the sharp song of the birds above, Lorilei stands over the hole in the ground that is her son’s and reads a poem written by Jeremy’s kindergarten classmates, copied out in the kindergarten teacher’s careful cursive. “It’s so hard to say goodbye.” The tears start before she can finish. She allows Richard to pull her back from the grave.
Then she watches as her father and Richard throw in handfuls of dirt. She waits, I imagine, until almost everyone is gone. Until she’s almost alone with her baby.
The grave digger gives his signal, and the coffin is lowered gently into the earth.
Lorilei is four months pregnant with Jeremy’s half brother. The nausea must have woken her this morning. She must have felt the dull twinges of the pregnancy in her stomach, the twinges that meant the baby was alive.
But as she watches the coffin bump to a gentle stop in the earth, I can only imagine she feels hollow, the pain a scythe that’s carved her out. She’ll wake from this week soon. She will. She’ll wake and Jeremy will be tugging at the blanket at the foot of her bed, telling her to get up now, come on, come play. She’ll see him and the fog of this horrible dream will lift.