Terry satisfied all the criteria they were looking for in a suspect. If not a suspect in the murder, then a suspect in—something. He had access to the bedroom where Jeremy’s body was found. He had access to Jeremy. In the time since Ricky had moved in with him and Pearl and the children, he had become a close friend of Ricky’s, and the two of them would go hunting together in the woods for hours. Ricky, the motion argued, was an easily influenced guy, and a very lonely one. A steady friendship would have been incredibly important to him.
And—the motion went further—Ricky wanted to die. Ricky, who had been suicidal for years, knew that if he was found to have molested Jeremy Guillory he would be more likely to be executed. He wrote notes to Lucky in jail. “I still think we should push for the death penalty.” He wrote notes to the newspaper. “Jeremy was sacrificed for reasons you will never understand.” But what if Jeremy had been molested—but it wasn’t Ricky who’d done it, or Ricky wasn’t the only one? The semen on Jeremy’s shirt was from Ricky. The pubic hair on his lip was not. What if Ricky was covering for his friend, the father no one suspected?
Three months later, Terry drove himself and his son into the second car of an Amtrak train. “Anyone who knows the railroad crossing on Packing House Road will recognize that the presence of an oncoming train would be obvious to anyone from a mile away,” Clive wrote.
So rather than rushing to convict Ricky without understanding the whole story, wouldn’t it make sense to exhume the body? Terry was dead. He didn’t have a constitutional right against search and seizure. Your rights expire when you die. Clive was careful to note at the hearing that the presence of the pubic hair on Jeremy’s lip didn’t necessarily mean he’d been molested. There were other ways the hair could have gotten there, with the blankets piled on him. But the blankets were from Ricky’s bed and, so many of them printed with cartoon characters, likely from the children’s. And the pubic hair wasn’t Ricky’s. So—wouldn’t it make sense?
The motion was filed December 3, 1993. Jeremy had been dead for a year and ten months. Terry and Joey, a year and six months. The motion struck people as ghoulish. There was briefly talk of filing a disciplinary complaint against Clive with the state bar association. The motion was denied. Pearl took the stand tight-lipped and no one ever asked her what happened after they found Jeremy’s body in her house, or where her husband and son were now. The whole thing was wiped from the trial.
*
But there is still the problem of the body. The problem of Jeremy’s dead body in the upstairs closet of the Lawson house for three days. The problem of Pearl and Terry living alongside it. Waking their children up in the morning. Tucking their children into bed at night. When I found the accident report in the files I called a friend of mine who runs a medical school cadaver lab in Boston and asked her how long a body would last before it started to stink. Could someone really not notice that there was a dead body in the house for three days?
“What was the weather?” she asked.
“Louisiana in winter. The house probably wasn’t heated very well. The family had little money and there were all these blankets out.”
She thought for a minute. “Borderline,” she said.
“Borderline?” The word came out as a cry. How could I tell her how much I needed to understand what had happened in that house? “I need to figure this out.”
“Borderline.”
Thirty
When I was eighteen years old, I confronted my grandfather. It was June of 1996 and I was about to graduate from high school. August rose on the horizon, flooding my vision with the promise of escape. In Chicago, a dorm room waited for me. A bedroom I’d never once slept in, in which I’d never had a nightmare’s visit. A whole campus—a whole city—full of buildings full of rooms in which not a day of the past had unfolded.
But I was starting to understand just how solid the silence was. That if I didn’t say anything no one in my family ever would, and my grandfather would never have to answer for what he’d done. I wanted him to answer. I wanted him to hear me say the words for what he was. For those words to become as solid as the memories I carry in my body.
That morning the magnolia tree outside his apartment was in full white bloom. Inside, the hallways were the silent, functional beige of space that belongs to no one. As I neared his door my nose began to burn with the ammonia stink of old urine. His body was failing him; that thought made me strong. I wonder now how it is that I didn’t pause, how I could have just kept going. But in my memory my stride is quick and unflinching. Through his door I could hear the television priest saying Mass, the long tones of the Latinate vowels. My grandfather watched this same program every Sunday morning he stayed over to babysit when I was a child. Every Saturday night, his hands. Every Sunday morning, a priest’s voice.
He came to the door slowly. He was dressed in slacks and a tucked-in shirt, his glasses on straight. My grandfather was never like my grandmother, she in her housedresses. He was always prepared to meet the world. I’d never been to see him alone before, but when he opened the door and saw me he didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t fuss, or hug me, or ask why I’d come, or do whatever it is that grandfathers do when they see their granddaughters. He was silent. He watched me. He stood there, waiting.
I stepped past him. The smell of the room hit me first. Then the photos. Every surface was crowded with knickknacks from my grandparents’ house: their wedding portrait in a silver frame; salt-and-pepper-shaker sets; tiny teacups and tinier thimbles. An orange clay bust my grandfather had sculpted of himself and that I used to like touching when I was a child, the hair looped into curls like mine. There were framed photographs of my mother and her brothers as children, then us as children. Across the shelves, I grew up. From the television came the priest’s voice.
I turned to my grandfather. “You molested me,” I said. Such simple words and they’d never been spoken. “I remember.”
I told him what I remembered. That when I was three I stood in the musty dining room in the Astoria house, the house my mother grew up in, wearing a dress. The room was darkened, my parents off somewhere. My grandfather and I were alone. I was looking at a painting that hung on the opposite wall. The painting showed a young Italian peasant girl’s face framed in a kerchief, her head turned to the side, a double cherry looped over her ear so that the bulbs of the fruit hung, glistening like earrings. Suddenly my grandfather’s hand was over my mouth, stifling my startled cry, and another rough hand up my dress. He shoved his fingers under my tights and panties.