She stands. She’s not thinking now; she’s gone blank, her whole body watching his, and her hands find their way to her hair and smooth it. Ten years have passed since she last saw him. Entering his late thirties, he’s no longer young, and his hair has started to pepper with Bessie’s gray. Off death row, his body has slackened and settled. He was in prison here before the first trial and has been here again for several months now. This is where he lives.
He reaches the table, and she realizes she has no idea what to say. For a minute she just looks at him.
“Do you want a soda?” The lawyers told her she could offer this. They gave her a few bills to bring.
He nods, so quickly it’s as if he needs the motion to be over as soon as he starts it. “Coke.”
She must be grateful for the few steps to the machine, the chance to look away. She doesn’t let herself think. She just holds herself, like she holds the dollar, and when the machine spits the soda out she cups the cold can in her hand, faintly wet with condensation. The wetness is like a reminder of the world beyond this place. Of water, of the way the water crawls through the bushes of Henderson Swamp and how it will stretch beneath the overpass on her way back to her motel. When she reaches him she holds the can out without saying anything.
“Thanks,” he says.
Such small talk they make with each other first. Lorilei does all the asking. How’s it to be back here? All right. You must be glad to be off death row. Yeah. He’s shy with her. He looks down a lot.
His shyness makes her bold. She’s in charge here, as if Ricky’s one of ten-year-old Cole’s friends after he’s nicked a piece of candy from her cupboard, a guilty schoolboy mumbling into his hands who can’t look her in the eye. She coaxes him. “You must have a lot of time to think.”
“You know my mama was in that crash,” he begins, and his voice trails off.
“Yes,” she says, encouraging, and waits. She must feel the idea settle inside her. Ricky as a boy. Ricky as a small boy, confused, not knowing what haunts his parents, only seeing Bessie’s pain. Lorilei chooses her words carefully. “That must have been so hard.”
This is a mother who lost the son she mothered. And this is a man who has two mothers, but one, the defense attorneys say, was sick or drunk his whole childhood and the other, the social workers say, was so harsh with discipline that none of the children under her care ever bonded. (Not true, Darlene and Francis say on the stand. They were loved. They were happy.)
Neither Bessie nor Luann testified for Ricky at any of his three trials. They don’t even seem to have attended the trials. The prosecutor brought this up pointedly when the defense presented evidence of Bessie’s pregnancy in the cast. “This case isn’t about Bessie Langley,” he said. “I don’t know Bessie Langley. I’ve never met Bessie Langley. I’ve never seen Bessie Langley.” So did the defense. “If you were sitting where Ricky was, wouldn’t someone be there for you? Your mother?” (But in the files, Bessie often sits beside him in counseling appointments. So who is telling the story correctly?) Almost every counselor who comes into contact with Ricky notes that he seems much younger than his actual age. He seems twelve, they say: right on the cusp of puberty, not yet grown into his own skin. Twelve not intellectually—Ricky’s IQ tests as normal, and in prison in Georgia he took some college classes—but emotionally. If Ricky as a child was shunned by his peers, Ricky as an adult seems to make at least some people want to take care of him. (“Would you remember me to Ricky?” one social worker said, interviewed by a defense investigator for the trial. “I was unusually fond of him. Of all of them, I remember him the most.”) Ricky in his adult body sometimes seems like a child caught in a permanent game of dress-up. The child inside him needs looking after. And is it too much to say that, in this moment, Lorilei needs to be soft, needs to be tender toward someone? Is it too much to say that Ricky, in this moment, needs someone to be soft to him?
Lorilei must watch his face closely. The way his eyebrow twitches when he gets nervous. The way he looks down at his hands. Ricky is a killer. He killed her son. At times, he is boastful about this. At times, he is angry.
But right now he must seem, somehow, fragile.
She has one more question. “Ricky, did you molest my son?”
“No,” he says.
Then she does something that must startle even herself. She reaches her hand across the table and takes his. The hand that killed her child.
His hand is skinny, light as a frightened animal. But she waits, and it settles. “Ricky,” she says, “I’ll fight for you.”
*
Those words. That promise. Those are the words I had such trouble with when I learned about this case. He killed her son. He was a pedophile. He molested children. But she fought for him?
The defense lawyers and the news media told this story as a story of the power of a mother’s forgiveness. But that’s too simple. Lorilei herself has said she doesn’t forgive him. Instead, she has said that she now believes that Ricky did not molest her child. When she visited him in prison, she asked him whether he molested Jeremy. He said no and she believes him. That was part of what made her feelings change between the first trial and the second.
But I’ve read what wasn’t admitted at court. It isn’t that simple, either. For that first trial, the jury saw some of the evidence of Ricky’s past pedophilia. They saw his diary, in which the descriptions of molestation he gave were either recollections or fantasies; no one knows which, or how many, of those stories were true. The Georgia girl who was five when he touched her took the stand at the trial, and, at age fourteen, described what he’d done. A Georgia inmate described hearing him say his big mistake was leaving the girl alive. A great deal of time was spent on the tests showing Ricky’s semen on Jeremy’s white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt.