I told him about the doll lamp on my childhood dresser. About the doll’s yellow gauze dress, and how it had tinted his face yellow in the light. How he’d pulled out his false teeth and grinned at me. “I’m a witch,” he’d said, and scared me to silence. I stared into that yellow light as he pulled up my nightgown and pulled down my panties. He unzipped his pants. He pushed himself against me.
I couldn’t tell him then what I didn’t yet know. That years after this day—eighteen years after he died—there’d come an afternoon when I sat in my gynecologist’s exam room and she said, “There’s scarring inside you.” I’d been told this before, but I’d always avoided it.
This time I didn’t. “What could cause that?”
The doctor didn’t answer. She looked at me.
“I was abused as a child,” I said. I tried to keep my voice level. “By my grandfather. Could it be from that?”
She nodded.
My face was already wet from tears. During the exam she’d taken a biopsy. When the scalpel scraped inside me it had burned sharply and I’d begun to shake. I’d had no feelings—no fear or sadness or even consciousness of pain—just the shaking and a profound sense of absence, like the shaking was happening to someone who wasn’t me. Then the shaking rose up from inside me and came out in gulping, ragged sobs.
I sobbed for a long time. The doctor rolled her little stool away from me, pulled the thin paper cover over my legs, and handed me a tissue.
“Are you all right?” she’d asked.
I nodded through my sobs. I tried to speak, but no words came out.
What I wanted to say was this: I recognized the feeling. My body recognized the feeling of pain inside me. My memories had always ended with my grandfather rubbing himself against me, then the nothing of black. I’d always thought that where the memory ended the fact of the past did, too.
But: the scarring. Is the scarring evidence of what happened after the pain, after the black? What happened after my memory ends? What fact does my body hold? I don’t know. I will never know.
In my grandfather’s apartment, I made no demands. I laid out my memories calmly. I still wanted to be a lawyer someday. This was my first case.
My grandfather listened. He didn’t turn away, he didn’t argue or dismiss me. He listened, his face impassive. Behind him, the priest droned.
When I was finished, it was his turn.
“What do you want?” The words had built up force inside him while he waited. Maybe through all the years. Now he spat them at me. “I know I did. But what do you want?”
A part of me may always be eighteen, standing in that room with him. The old-man, wet rot of his breath and the stench of urine, the face I loved and the face I feared. That question.
And the way he seized on this answer.
“Do you want me to kill myself?” he said. “I’ll do it, if you want me to. I’ll kill myself.” He was taunting me now. He’d seen the fear on my face. “Is that what you want? I’m an old man. I’ll be dead soon. But I’ll do it if you want me to. I’ll kill myself.”
Then he added, “Besides, what happened to you is not such a big thing. When I was a child, it happened to me.”
Thirty-One
I am running out of time in Louisiana, spending my hours in the cave of the file room and driving across the same flat vistas Ricky crossed, back and forth between Iowa and Lake Charles. Past the high school, past the Friendly Home Center, where Ricky worked briefly as a teenager, past the banks of the Calcasieu River, where he once dreamt of a life that would belong to him. Everywhere I look, I see traces of the people in the files. Alcide with his cap curled in his fist, standing on a dirt road in Hecker, his girls at his feet. Bessie adjusting the crutch that bit into her armpit, then bending to make the children’s beds before they came home from school. And now Bessie and Alcide under concrete, in the ground. The heat has strangled the fields and driven everyone indoors. The land has the feel of a ghost town, a place a story passed over and blew through.
But I still have not found the house where Jeremy died. A simple, almost maddening problem: The addresses in the records contradict themselves. The police reports list the address as Route 1, Box 204. That’s what Ricky gave the police, but no one referred to it that way; they called it Watson Road. “But it don’t really got a name,” said Ricky, and the police had so much trouble finding it. Sometimes the landlord is referred to as Watson, sometimes Ardoin, but the man named Ardoin quoted in the newspaper didn’t mention being the landlord. The paper never gives the Route 1 address; instead it sometimes says the house was on Ardoin Road. That’s definitely a mistake; Ardoin Road is much larger. Sometimes the paper says Ardoin Lane. But Ardoin Lane curves the wrong way. I’ve asked at the post office, the town hall, the fire department, the genealogical society, and the police station. No one knows.
It’s maddening that there wouldn’t simply be a map that shows the old route numbers—and there may be out there somewhere still, but if so the parish press office couldn’t help me with it and the maps office swore there wasn’t and I never found it—but over time it starts to feel appropriate, somehow, that I can’t find the house. The feeling is like chasing a memory that slips from your mind just as soon as you start to grasp it. Sure, it’s dangerous to read metaphor into life; sure, it smacks of a desire to read meaning into cold fact, but doesn’t all of this? All the facts in this case slip away from me the minute I try to grasp them. In the files Ricky is sometimes referred to as blond, yet I have sat across from him—we are not there yet—and can assure you that his hair is dark brown. Lorilei once wrote a frustrated letter to the American Press newspaper complaining that the DA had constantly said that Jeremy had blond hair and blue eyes, when his eyes were brown. Alcide wanted Bessie to have an abortion when the doctors said the baby would be so damaged, but Bessie, sick with grief, wouldn’t do it. Or Bessie wanted the abortion, and Alcide was cruel and wouldn’t let her. Alcide was a loving father, or he beat them. Lyle was a loving replacement for a father, the one Ricky was truly close to, or he once beat Ricky so hard that Judy had to pull a gun on him to make him stop. My sister Nicola decides to think of herself as someone who was never abused, when I remember the shadow my grandfather made as he leaned over her bed, the rustle of the bedclothes under his hands. I have a scar inside me but I can’t remember its cause. Ricky molested Jeremy before killing him; Ricky didn’t molest Jeremy but killed him; Ricky killed Jeremy and then molested him afterwards; Ricky killed Jeremy in an effort not to molest him.
Three trials and even that would never be nailed down into fact. It seems right that a house would move, shift, vanish.