But my body won’t move.
All right, I think. I’ll just stay here. I’ll keep my eyes shut, and the world will stay black and there won’t be anything to flee. I don’t have to face the files. I can decide that coming here was a mistake, that I can live with both Ricky’s story and my past staying unresolved inside me. I can live with the fear that flares through me too often when Janna touches me and the anger and grief I feel in my heart when I’m in my parents’ house. I can live with anything; I can hold all of it. Just as long as it stays down.
Then what? Be just as stuck as before?
I sigh. I shove myself out of bed, kicking my body upright, and feel the rough slip of the sheets away from me. I yank open the drapes, and the weakest light steals in. The coffee I brew in the motel coffeemaker is tepid and weak, the faint taste of burn, but I suck down two cups of it. The past already has its hold on me. There’s nothing to do but face it.
*
Downtown Iowa is one street: a public library tucked behind the broad face of a bank, the post office and the fire department, the quilting store and the hardware store. It looks like a movie set of small-town America, but on the drive here I passed welfare motels and payday-check-cashing outlets with blinking neon signs. I passed long fields that abutted straggled woods. Between the fields were a few houses, spaced like outposts, each with rusted car parts on their lawns and plastic chairs that had long ago turned from white to gray. A plastic Jesus was glued to a mailbox. Every pickup had a gun rack. Now, downtown, I am on the dividing line that separates the cluster of commerce from the miles and miles of pretty, rusted, run-down landscape that stretch across the horizon. Here is Iowa. But where Ricky lived, where he grew up, was out in that great flat in-between expanse. Where Lake Charles, Iowa, and LeBleu could all hear about a missing boy and all, at first, decide it was some other place’s problem.
The library walls are plastered with colorful posters that exhort the value of reading. One corner of the one-room space has most of the posters and there the wooden chairs are miniature, their colors red and blue and yellow. The chairs are empty today—no children in sight—and I look at them hard for a moment. The newspaper photograph of Lorilei standing over two-year-old Jeremy as he was fitted for his first bike, her hands resting on his hard little shoulders, was taken in a parking lot near here. Did she read to him here? Did Jeremy ever sit in one of these chairs, or its precursor?
I’ve already been through the online archives of the main paper. That yielded scanned articles about the long-ago crash, Oscar and Vicky’s burial, even an announcement of Bessie and Alcide’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, with their children listed—Ricky’s home given as “West Feliciana Parish,” where the state penitentiary is. But the library has folders of old news clippings, so maybe there’s more here. Inside the green cardboard folders are clips from yellowed newspaper, each hemmed in scissor lines from someone’s long-ago careful hand. I read of bake sales, of car washes, of local citizens’ good deeds. A lot about flowers. On one page the much younger face of District Attorney Rick Bryant grins out at me from before he was the DA, before he was the man who would push three times to get the death penalty for Ricky. Nothing mentions Jeremy or Ricky, not even in the folder marked CRIME, which is nearly empty of anything dated after the 1950s. A small town’s history, curated by a small town. Nothing included that anyone wants to forget. The books in the local history section are a bust, too, Iowa so small that local really means the region.
“Do you have any yearbooks?” I ask the librarian.
“A few,” she says, and leads me to a shelf. My first thought is disappointment—though the shelf holds a row of yellow-and-purple spines for the Iowa High School Yellowjackets, the years stamped on them are from the fifties and sixties. Next, the nineties. Bessie and Alcide didn’t go to school here, only their children. These books won’t help me.
Then I notice one—only one—tucked in the middle of those decades, 1981 on its spine.
My heart races: 1981. I pull the book off the shelf and thumb its pages rapidly, calculating. Ricky was born in 1965. He would have been a sophomore. The girls are fresh-faced young with their bangs teased and sprayed high, the boys’ hair is hacked into mullets. Faces are splotched with acne and meet the camera in the broad grin beam of the confident, or look down in the sink of the resigned.
Ricky isn’t among them.
Then I see him.
A freshman. At fifteen, he looks younger than his age. His face is small and his chin weak, his skin clear as a preteen’s. The wave in his hair that will develop into a high cowlick is already there, his eyebrows already unruly. He doesn’t wear glasses. He does not smile and he does not frown. His mouth hangs open. He looks straight into the camera, but he isn’t staring. His eyes are vacant. This is the boy who grew into the man who killed Jeremy.
I sit down on the carpet and page through the yearbook. High schoolers sitting seriously for portraits, mugging in candids for the camera, goosing one another or busting into laughter as the shutter clicks. Their faces ripple across 140 pages, repeating. A small school. A small town. On the bright yellow inside cover, Ricky’s classmates have scribbled messages to the yearbook’s original owner, a girl named Cindy. “You can get everything out of life that you put into it!” I flip through all the pages, but Ricky is only in this one place. One photo.
This, then, was Ricky at fifteen: scrawny and unwritten, the future seeming as blank as the expression on his face.
But no, his future is there. Ten pages away, captured together in this moment. Her name catches me off guard. I wasn’t looking for her. Her brother went to school in Lake Charles and I thought she did, too. But she’s here: Lorilei Guillory. A senior, her face unmistakably the broad one that appears, older, in news clips; her light brown hair winged like Farrah Fawcett’s; her eyeliner already heavy in the style she’ll wear for years. A graduation cap on her head—she’s done it, she’s graduating. And she’s there again in the photograph of the school newspaper staff, her arms crossed and one leg cocked over the other, with her jeans rolled up over hiking boots, a fleece sweatshirt. She’s left her sunglasses on, and she stares at the camera through a mask of black. The thick, oversize clothing, the dark glasses—she looks like she’s hiding, but not out of shyness. Out of armor.
The future is coming, eleven years ahead. It sends its long low warning signal over the pages of this story.