A: It’s just, I can’t explain. I guess that’s my destiny, okay, it’s true.)
That’s when Mann talks about Ricky’s beginning to see Oscar as a child. He’s the form the psychosis takes. In the story Mann tells, Ricky talks about the car wreck as though he were there. He talks about Oscar and Vicky’s funeral: how pretty the children looked laid out in the caskets, the white ruffles on Vicky’s dress and the brush of Oscar’s eyelashes against his cheeks.
(Has Mann forgotten that Oscar was decapitated, decapitated even in Ricky’s dream? The story is being told a different way now.)
The way Mann tells it, Bessie and Alcide once took Ricky to a therapist when he was a child, but they didn’t want him diagnosed with anything that could trail him throughout his life. They wanted their son to be normal. So they did their best to pretend that he was.
It was Ricky who realized something was wrong. Ricky tried to get help, but was turned away. He tried to kill himself, but failed or secretly wanted just the help attention would bring, not really to die. By the time Ricky killed Jeremy, Mann says, he was in a long psychosis brought on by stress, the stress of being back living with his family, the family that was so difficult for him, the family with whom the past resided. He strangled Jeremy thinking he was ridding himself of Oscar. Thinking he was getting rid of the past. Only when the child was dead did he look down and realize whom he’d killed.
Two stories. Two different meanings.
This is how the choice has been framed for the jury: Is Ricky a bad person, an evil person who brutally murdered an innocent child? Or has Ricky battled demons his whole life, battled who he is, a battle that has left him psychotic and has resulted in the tragic death of a child?
The prosecution calls its witnesses, including the 911 dispatcher who took Ricky’s phone calls; Calton Pitre, for whom Ricky drew the search diagram; and the photographer who took aerial photographs of the scene.
“The state’s next witness, please,” Gray says.
“Lorilei Guillory.”
Thirty-Four
The jurors must tense in their seats. Five of them are mothers. The prosecution hopes they’ll see themselves in Lorilei. The defense hopes they’ll see themselves in Bessie and be horrified by what she endured during her pregnancy. Overhead, the fluorescent lights buzz. The jurors’ hearts quicken.
The mother has light brown hair, like the light hair of her son in his picture. She looks like any mother, not someone you would notice if her name hadn’t been called. She’s older than they were imagining, perhaps. Listening to the officers who searched for him, they have forgotten that the murder was more than ten years ago. So the lines around her eyes lend a new gravity. Ten years she’s lived without her son. All their children, they told the lawyers during jury selection, are living.
Lorilei settles herself into the witness chair. The jurors stare.
Under their stares, she must look down at her hands, she must brace her shoulders. Eleven years have passed. She’s been living out of state. She’d forgotten about the stares.
“Ms. Guillory,” Killingsworth begins. Maybe her voice has a note of sympathy that wasn’t there before. It’s careful, a little mournful. Lorilei must have forgotten about this, too. The being handled with gloves. Of course the prosecution has Killingsworth doing the direct examination. A mother, talking to a mother. “Can you tell me the name of your children?”
“My first child’s name is Jeremy James Guillory. I have a second son, Cole Innis Landry.” She shifts in her seat. “I have a third child that I gave up at birth named Rowan Lovell, as far as I know.”
“Jeremy Guillory, the little boy who was killed in this case, that’s your son, yes?”
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you saw your son?”
“The last time I saw my son was that Friday afternoon when he went outside to play.”
“OK. And what was…?”
“Alive.” Lorilei’s voice rises. “That was the last time I saw him alive.” She describes going to the Lawson house and using the phone. She describes standing at the edge of the woods and yelling out Jeremy’s name and the silence, the terrible silence in response. Then the police, the searchers, the dogs, and the boats.
“How long did the search continue?”
“Three days.” There is again in the transcript the problem of the enormity of what Lorilei must convey. She tries again. “To me it was three days and three nights. Friday, Friday night. Saturday, Saturday night. Sunday, Sunday night.” Likely she wasn’t told to continue on past this point in the story. But she can’t help herself. This is how it ends. “And then on Monday, sometime Monday, they told me they’d found my son. And I said, where is he? And they said he was dead.”
*
Cole is the reason Lorilei never has to wonder how long Jeremy has been dead. How old Cole is, plus half a year: That’s how long his brother’s been gone. Cole’s age, plus six and a half: That’s how old Jeremy would have been.
Seventeen now, as Lorilei sits on the hard pew bench in the gallery. Two days have passed since she testified. On that first day after Lorilei spoke, the state called Pearl Lawson, who described meeting Ricky. Nothing about her son or her husband, nothing about whether she knew Ricky was a pedophile. Then Lanelle Trahan, Pearl’s supervisor at the Fuel Stop, who described Ricky’s blocking her way on the stairs, his face turning beet red. The next morning, the state began with the FBI agent Don Dixon, now chief of police for the parish. (“I got a ticket, Chief,” Gray said. “I ain’t too happy.”) In the middle of Dixon’s testimony, Ricky felt light-headed, and Gray adjourned for the day. He wasn’t going to have a mistrial, he said. The next morning, Dixon finished testifying about the search and Ricky’s confession, then Lucky led the jury through the photographs of Jeremy. By the time he got to the close-up of Jeremy’s body in the closet, wrapped in blankets, his boots and his BB gun tucked at his feet, Lucky was crying.
Now it is day four, and they are just back from lunch after a very long morning. First the lawyers fought, and though they fought in whispers in front of the judge’s bench, their suited backs turned to the audience like the hard shells of beetles, Lorilei knows part of what they were fighting about was her. Her here. How she went and talked to Ricky. What she wants to say about how she feels.