And Ricky told investigators he’d hurt hundreds of children. I don’t think that’s true—I think he was inflating things. I think a pedophile was what he knew he was now, what he’d always be, and because that’s who he was he wanted to make that identity bigger. He didn’t have anything else to be. But I do think he must have molested more children than those for whom he was caught. I know my grandfather molested at least one child outside my immediate family, but only years after he died did it occur to me that there might have been more. That five years of molesting us was not a one-time thing, and perhaps, in its length, implied more. The silence my parents kept may have allowed more children to be hurt. Ricky struggled with pedophilia for decades. At Ricky’s second trial, none of the evidence of Ricky’s prior “bad acts” was admitted. The test results were barely mentioned. The prosecution implied many times that Ricky had molested Jeremy, even accused him of it—but they could present little of the circumstantial evidence that he might have. There are reasons for that, good ones. The trial was about the murder, not the whole story. But is an act ever really only about itself? Does any element of this story occur in isolation?
I can see why Lorilei shuts the door on the whole question behind her, opts to believe that her son was not molested and leave it at that. How can I fault her for wanting something easier to live with? How can I fault her for choosing a neater narrative?
But the determination to turn away from the past isn’t benign. The morning after the Christmas party when I overheard my father telling people that I was writing about something that only I recalled, I confronted him. My sister Nicola backed me up, and told him that was nonsense. Of course she remembered the abuse. We all did. But two years later, she said to me, “I’ve decided to think of myself as someone who wasn’t abused.” This was brutally hard for me to hear. We’d shared a room. I’d watched my grandfather touch her. He’d pulled me from my bed and taken me to the bathroom where she stood, waiting. He unzipped his pants and made us put our hands on him. She can’t just pretend none of that happened. She can’t.
But of course—she can. I have changed my sister’s name in this book, out of respect for her choice, and as much as possible I have changed my other family members’ names and the names of some of the people in Ricky’s life. But I can’t bring myself to write a narrative that puts my experience alone in my family again. I won’t do on the page what was done in life.
Twenty-Eight
I couldn’t find any real information on the cemetery in Hecker where Bessie and Alcide are buried, near where the house Lyle and Alcide built once stood. When I called the cemetery caretaker, he told me to meet him at his house and he’d drive me out there. Nobody new would be able to find the cemetery alone.
“Who did you want to see, again?” the elderly caretaker asks, once I’m seated in his living room, his wife beside me on the couch and he sitting in an armchair across the room. Both the couch and the armchair are covered in hand-knit doilies.
“Desier Langley.” Alcide’s father, who’s buried next to them. Oscar’s at his feet. It feels too close, somehow, to say I want to see Oscar or Bessie. Then I remember that the caretaker corrected my pronunciation on the phone. “Dezzy-ch.”
“You’re not from Iowa,” the caretaker’s wife says. She peers at me.
“No,” I admit. “I live in Massachusetts.”
“Not kin, then.”
“No. I’m not.”
She waits, clearly wanting more of an answer. Her eyes are like pale blue marbles.
I feel myself let go of the pretense that I’m here to see Desier. I am thinking too much about my grandmother lying on the sofa bed at the foot of the stairs, and my father as he hoisted my grandfather into the car to bring him home to us. I am thinking too much about Bessie and what she knew about her son. About how much loss Bessie had to live with, and about Lorilei’s walking away from her baby’s grave, another baby inside her. About the missing birth certificate on my childhood wall and about all the silence in my family. The caretaker and his wife are being so kind, having me here in their living room. I owe them something. “You know about the crash?” I ask. “My parents lost a child. I think the death kind of—” I pause, searching for the word. “I think it haunted my parents.”
The road into Hebert Cemetery is long and winding, made of packed dirt that cuts between tall leafy trees that blot out the sun. I follow the caretaker and his wife as they drive ahead in a white pickup truck. Around us, the woods thicken into a snarl. Nothing else could be out on this road, the cemetery’s location even more desolate than I thought. Great dust clouds rise up behind their truck and soon the only things I can see ahead are the white bay of the truck, the high, twined trees on my sides, and the haze I am driving into.
Then, up ahead, there is suddenly sunshine. A clearing. The trees fall away and light floods in. At the center of the clearing is a waist-high wrought-iron fence, perhaps forty feet long on one edge, around a rectangle of cement graves. The caretaker sidles his pickup next to the fence and I pull in alongside him. The cemetery is so small, so tucked within the trees, that it strikes me immediately how many times he’s pulled in here. How well he must know this drive. How intimate it must be to spend decades caring for just this patch of graves.
His wife stays by the truck while the caretaker and I walk to the fence. At the gate, he clears his throat. “So how did you get interested in the Langleys?” he asks. Something about the way he asks makes me realize they’ve been talking.
For a minute I let his question rest. The sun is brilliant and strong, the light stark white around me. To walk I have to place my feet carefully between the graves. Here, just a few miles from Lake Charles, the water table is different. The dead can’t be buried beneath the ground. The dug grave would fill with water. The body might rise up. So they’re entombed. In the famous New Orleans cemeteries I’ve visited, that means structures as ornate as tiny houses. But those were families that had money. In the woods, in this hidden clearing, the graves are burial vaults, half-submerged in the ground, so that the tops rise inches above the grass. They look like coffins. Their shape suggests bodies.
*
As a child I never thought about my sister’s having had a body. I never wondered where she was buried. She wasn’t a baby to me. She was absence. The absence of a birth announcement on my childhood bedroom wall, when Elize’s and Nicola’s announcements were framed over their beds. The absence of any stories from right after we were born. The absence of any explanation the day my mother ran barefoot sobbing and screaming across the lawn, or once when she had too much to drink on a family vacation and was suddenly the one flung facedown on my parents’ hotel bed, swearing she was too sad to live.