At the first trial, in 1994, when her grief was fresh and full of anger, the prosecutors were eager to have her in the courtroom. But now that she’s met with Ricky, they’ve called her an unfit mother. A fit mother, they say, would never support her son’s killer. And they have evidence on her, she knows. All those years of alcohol and drugs, of trying to find her way before Jeremy came and gave her a purpose. Then more alcohol and drugs after Jeremy was taken from her.
But she has a purpose again. Mothering Cole, yes, but also, somehow, this trial. What this trial has become. The prosecutors paid to bring her and Cole here from South Carolina for the trial—they had to—but now they say that since they don’t want her testifying in the penalty phase if there is one, not if she won’t say she wants Ricky killed, they won’t pay to keep her and Cole here anymore. Like she’d go home before the trial’s over. And Cole’s started the school term.
Then there’s the evidence they’re fighting over. The judge has up at his bench a letter from Ricky to Lucky written in 1992 from his cell at the correctional center, offering to sit down with Lucky and an atlas and mark everywhere Ricky has traveled to so he can tell Lucky about all the children he says he molested along the way. Those stories come to Lorilei like the silk and seed a dandelion sheds in the wind. Only the hard knot reaches her. Though the courtroom is the neutral temperature of still air, the stillness feels too hot and tight around her, and perhaps she feels a headache coming on. She rests her head back against the bench and closes her eyes for a minute. How many children were there? Did they meet ends like her Jeremy?
Jeremy. Maybe she lets herself imagine him. Jeremy at seventeen like he would be now. Finding somebody with an ATV he could sweet-talk them out of or jack out of their yard when they weren’t looking, and riding it out over the reedy swamp grass on the long, empty weekend afternoons, maybe running it too quick and jumping off—wouldn’t matter how many times she told him it is was dangerous, in this story he wouldn’t know what dead was—until he and his buddies were thick-covered with mud, laughing, alive. That BB gun he’d loved would be an air rifle, the walks in the woods longer. He’d be sweet on a girl at the high school by now, and when she asked him about her he’d redden from his chin to his ears. She knows his smile so well that her heart aches. Jeremy under the Christmas tree at six, wearing a red sweater, his blond hair gleaming in the lights, grinning so hard his cheeks bulged. That was two months before he died. Don’t think about the way they ran that picture on the evening news; don’t think about the way they’re running that picture on the evening news all over town now. Think of his smile. She transposes it. Grows it up. Subtracts the roundness from the jaw, makes stubble appear above his lip. Seventeen.
The videos from this morning are the bad dream, the unreal thing. Ricky’s leading Lucky through the dark, narrow staircase of the house. The toys on the floor of the bedroom, the beaten-up doll of June’s, that doll the last thing Jeremy ever played with. She has watched that video before, but when they showed it this morning she hadn’t seen it in years. Did her breath catch when Lucky touched the closet door? Inside the closet was her baby. The blond, downy hair she’d kissed and ruffled her palms through, smooth and cool. The lashes that had just brushed his cheeks, as they did when he slept. The horrible blue-black marks on his neck and the bloom of red spots around them, like freckles of blood.
This morning, after that tape and another, they’d played one more. A third tape, one that had been excluded from the 1994 trial. In this tape, recorded two months after the murder, Ricky had changed his story. He’d described molesting Jeremy. Before Jeremy was dead.
So she’d had to watch that. Her baby.
“Take the jury out. Ms. Guillory?”
“Yes, Your Honor?” The whole courtroom is looking at her, even the witness. She catches up suddenly. The witness is a scientist. He was explaining how they tested for semen on Jeremy.
“Ms. Guillory, come see me a moment.”
Beside her on the bench is ten-year-old Cole. She squeezes his hand, then stands and walks to the front of the room.
“Good morning, Your Honor.”
“Is that your child?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is the wrong place for a child. This is a murder trial. It’s awful enough—I don’t think this child needs to be in this courtroom listening to this.” Gray’s voice rises. “There’s—there’s stuff about what happened to his sibling and all that. I ain’t going for it.”
“Not open for—”
“You think a child should be in here?”
The courtroom is perfectly quiet. Everyone watches her. Cole watches her.
“Your Honor,” Lorilei says slowly, “my son has experienced everything I have. If I see that it’s emotionally disturbing to him, I will take him out.”
Gray shakes his head. “All right. It’s your child.”
“He still has questions that are unanswered as well as I do.”
Then—all at once—Lorilei seems to sink. Her shoulders drop. Her voice sounds like a balloon with the air gone out. “I’m not really quite sure that this is the right—you know—but I really didn’t have any other alternatives for today for him and for me to be here as well.” Richard hasn’t spoken to her since he learned she planned to testify for Ricky.
Gray takes his glasses off. “Talk to Clive and them and see if they can give you some relief. I have problems with this trial.” He rubs his forehead. “I know damned well a child would have problems with this trial.”
An investigator for the defense comes and takes Cole’s hand to lead him from the courtroom. I think of Ricky as a child, talking to Oscar outside his bedroom window. I think of myself as a child, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to make up the sister I never knew. I think of Bessie with her trunk and my mother with her filing cabinet.
Lorilei stays.
Thirty-Five
There is no known grave for my sister, no end for her story. When my father told me what had been done with Jacqueline’s body, I felt foolish almost. Foolish that I’d beaten my head against the past with my parents. For every fight we’d had when I asked why I never saw them get angry about the abuse. Well, if they could do that with a baby, I thought then.