Behind me, the librarian coughs once, signaling politely. Somehow it is 5:00 p.m. The day has passed and the library is closing. I slide the book back onto the shelf and stand and stretch. “Thanks,” I say.
Outside, in the parking lot, I sit in my rental car for a long time. It’s still clear and sunny out—beautiful, really—but I keep the windows up and the engine off, the key in my hand. The car is stiflingly hot, but my body is suddenly immovable, heavy as the air. I’ve found something. Evidence, as much as the files are. Of the boy, when he was still a boy and not the murderer. Of the girl, when she was still a girl and not the victim’s mother. The future was waiting for them, unknown and unseen.
Twenty-Seven
I know almost nothing about my grandfather before he became my grandfather. When I was growing up, my mother didn’t talk about his childhood—or about hers. My father was always telling us stories of the upside-down pineapple cake his mother baked for special occasions, or the floppy-eared Great Dane he had as a boy, who tugged the doghouse all the way to my father’s schoolyard gate. Compared with his, my mother’s life before us was a void—and so, too, was my grandfather. I know I played checkers with him often as a child, and that he was the one to teach me to draw, but those memories have been blotted mainly to black—by his hand as it draws the soft cloth of my nightgown away from my legs, by the cool brush of air against my stomach and the dread that crawled my thigh. By what came next.
When I first got Ricky’s treatment records from Lake Charles Mental Health Center in the mid-1980s and I read about his struggling in the years before he killed Jeremy, he started to become a person to me. Which made me wonder about my grandfather. I wrote my mother a letter, the first and only letter I’ve written to her. Please tell me about Grandpa. I have realized that all I know about him is what he did. For months, the letter went unanswered. I asked her about it by telephone and she ignored the question. I e-mailed her and got no response. I asked again. I feel for my mother. With her determination not to talk about the past, I must sometimes seem to her a walking time bomb. A bomb made of time.
Then one morning, six months after I sent the letter, I woke to a long e-mail of stories. Each was just a sentence or two, dashed off and tentative in tone, but together they formed a trickle. The next day another e-mail arrived, lengthier. Then another, and another.
My grandfather, Vincent Jimmy Marzano, was one of nine children born to an Italian immigrant couple. He and my grandmother Emily were childhood sweethearts who met when both families moved to Queens. In the summers, the siblings all went to Coney Island together, and soon Emily’s older sister married my grandfather’s older brother. After the second grade, my grandfather left school to help support his younger siblings by working as a newsboy. He taught himself to read by studying the papers he hawked, calling out their headlines on street corners. That he could read helped him find work as a film cutter. When he and Emily married, my grandfather was working for Paramount Pictures.
He worked nights and my grandmother worked days as a telephone operator, so he took care of my mother and her two older brothers when they came home from school. (Here I think of Ricky looking after June and Joey, and of the neighborhood parents sending their children up to play in his bedroom while they searched.) He was always the fun parent, my mother wrote. He liked to arrange little surprises. He would unwind a roll of toilet paper, hide a dollar bill in it, then roll it up again for one of his unsuspecting children to find. Each night he would cook them dinner (I remember my grandfather’s red sauce bubbling on the stove in the Queens house when I was a child, needling into my nose, making my belly growl), and when evening arrived he would turn off the stove and cover the food, so that it would keep for my grandmother to feed them later. Then he would bundle the children for the walk to the bus stop. So that the children would not complain of the length of the walk, or of the cold in winter, he would hide small toys and candies in his pocket that he doled out along the way: a piece of Chiclets gum for my uncle from a two-cent pack he’d bought at the subway station; the wooden spool from a skein of thread that he’d had the shoemaker hammer four nails into, so my mother could knit on it. At the bus station, he would hand the children off to my grandmother and continue on to the night shift at Paramount. There he’d spend hours wearing jeweler’s glasses, hunched over strips of film. I can see him as he presses his blade to the images: the way he touches his tongue to his lips in concentration, the bushy eyebrows I remember so well furrowing. My grandfather is a surgeon of stories. He splices them together to make something new.
And no, to the obvious question, no, my mother wrote—though I hadn’t dared to ask her directly. She had no memory of his ever having abused her or her brothers.
Five e-mails came. Then, as suddenly as they began, the e-mails stopped.
That’s all. That’s all I have. Only those e-mails, my memories like a filmstrip burned black at the center, and her silence. No archive from a trial I can search, no thousands of pages to pore over, and no answers. Because in addition to whatever else is true about my grandfather, there is also this: He got away with it.
*
The walls in the prison visiting room where Lorilei meets with Ricky must be gray paint—nothing that would show dirt as easily as white—over large bricks and shine-rimmed with the faint stink of bleach. I see an old soda machine sitting in the far corner, its light emitting a barely audible hum. The chairs are plastic molded primary colors, red and blue and yellow, somebody’s idea of cheer but a little too small. She comes in the morning, but inside the room’s cast of gray it could as easily be night. The guard shows her to a small round table where she sits and folds her hands in her lap, so she can’t fidget too much. The door in the corner has a small rectangle of glass. Every few minutes she glances up at it, checking. The next time she tries to make herself wait longer. But then she checks again.
She recognizes the back of his head first. Brush-bristled hair cut short, the orange rim of a jumpsuit at his neck. It should just look like the back of any prisoner’s head, she shouldn’t be able to recognize him, but she does.
He turns, and yes, it’s him. Those eyes. The thick glasses. The door opens and he shuffles through it without looking at her. He puts his hands out and the guard unlocks his cuffs.