But they had two babies at home to take care of. We were both tiny, both premature. On my third day of life, my lungs collapsed and my heart stopped before the doctors revived me. My brother was born without his digestive system fully developed, and though he grew up to be healthy, in the years before the surgery he was in three comas and in and out of the hospital. Both of us needed bottles that had to be sterilized and diapers that had to be changed and to be burped and soothed and dressed and rocked to sleep at night. Both of us needed them. They needed to take care of their family.
In a way, the choices my parents later faced—the choices that drew me to Ricky’s story—were the same. Burying my father’s rages and depression, burying the fact of my grandfather’s abuse, burying, even, my anger at what he’d done, my insistence that it wasn’t right and that we acknowledge it—to bury those threats must have seemed almost easier in comparison. They kept going. They threw away the baby book they’d started for Jacqueline; they threw or gave away every item their friends had made for them with her name on it; they dressed me, they must have, in some of the extra little girls’ clothes and gave away the rest. They stopped filling out the baby books for my brother and me, the ones with evidence of her, and left them in the white filing cabinet. “The twins,” they called my brother and me, and they taught us to call ourselves that, too. They built a happy home, and they made sure the neighborhood knew it. There were summers on the island and Christmases under the tree and there were the six of us around the dining table as my parents lifted their glasses and toasted their good fortune. I have come to believe that every family has its defining action, its defining belief. From childhood, I understood that my parents’ was this: Never look back.
But a year after I asked my mother about Jacqueline’s body, I was sitting with her in a pizzeria in a small, desolate city in eastern Pennsylvania where I’d moved temporarily for a teaching job. Long ago, all the factories in the city had shuttered; it had never recovered, and now half the storefronts were empty. It was good to see her—I had missed her—and I could tell she was happy to see me. Still, we were being careful with each other, the ties between us always sinew-strong, but always, too, in danger of snapping. Until the words left my mouth I didn’t know I was going to say them. “I’m working on a project,” I said. I couldn’t yet bring myself to say book. “I’m going to have to write about Jacqueline in it.”
I expected my mother to be angry. I had the sense that I was choosing to yank off a bandage, that maybe if I reopened the wound early it would have time to scab and settle. I loved her but I needed to do this. I loved her and I needed to this. I was daring her and daring myself and getting something over with, hoping that there’d be time to heal after. I braced.
But she wasn’t angry. Her eyes brimmed quickly with tears. She started to speak. “At,” she said—but the tears spilled and her cheeks flushed. Gulping, she made a little waving motion in front of her mouth.
Then she put her hand down. She swallowed. She took the paper napkin from the table, twisted it, and dabbed at her eyes. She sipped her water. Finally, she was ready. “At least now there will be a record she existed.”
*
For Ricky’s defense, what the witnesses and lawyers tussle over is how to understand his story. Which version will be written into the record and become fact. The DNA expert who was testifying when Judge Gray stopped the trial to remove Cole was the state’s last witness. The defense begins its case with a DNA expert of its own, who testifies that the pubic hair on Jeremy’s lip did not match Ricky. Ricky’s sixth-grade teacher testifies, then a friend who was with him that night under the stars when he tried to turn himself in. His sister Darlene refuses to say that Ricky was harmed by his childhood. He was loved, she says. They all were.
The next day, a defense psychologist describes everything Alcide would say to Ricky when he was angry. That Ricky was worthless. That he was queer. That Ricky molests children, the psychologist says, may be a sign that he was molested himself. Most pedophiles were molested.
That isn’t true. It’s repeated a lot, but it isn’t true. Most pedophiles, like most other people, weren’t molested. And there’s no indication that people who were molested become pedophiles. What is true is that among pedophiles, a greater percentage were molested than the percentage of people in general who were molested—but even then, it’s not a huge increase. I want to argue with this so badly—but I know why I do. Because I was molested. How damned, how damaged, am I doomed to feel? My grandfather’s words come back to me: “When I was a child, it happened to me.”
“I don’t know how you guys feel,” Gray interrupts. “Doc, here’s an expert on this. I’m all right during the trial, but the minute I finish I can feel that 500-pound gorilla on me. I’m sitting at happy hour and it slowly goes away. Every time I have a gin and tonic, one hundred pounds goes off, absolutely. My wife just closes the door and says, ‘All right, darling, see you in the morning.’”
A psychologist for the defense argues that Ricky was legally insane—psychotic, even—at the time of the murder; on cross-examination, the prosecutor points out that he’s the only expert who thinks so. A doctor describes Bessie’s pregnancy, lingering over the alcohol and the drugs and all the X-rays. But there’s no proof that Ricky was harmed by any of it, says the prosecutor. Those are all just risk factors—and there are no records of Ricky right after he was born, nothing that would say whether he was normal or not. Then Ricky’s oldest sister, Francis, takes the stand. But she won’t budge in her story. Ricky was loved.
“Your Honor,” Clive says. “The defense calls Lorilei Guillory.”
*
The jury must be so confused. They’ve already heard from her. They’ve seen the pictures of what Ricky did to her son. One juror broke down crying, looking at those pictures. Lorilei testified for the prosecution. So far, the defense seems to be focused on his past. Why is the defense calling her?
Clive asks her if she has anything else to say.
Yes. “Even though I can hear my child’s death cry, I, too, can hear Ricky Langley cry for help.”
Lorilei has said that she came to empathize with Ricky because she saw herself in Bessie. She couldn’t take away another woman’s son.
But it was when she heard Ricky’s story that she made that change. All this fighting about whether he was loved. All this fighting about the troubles he had. She is someone who has had to fight her whole life, who has been on her own her whole life, who has had to make her own way. It must take unimaginable strength to do what she did. It must take unimaginable drive.
This is the moment with which I had such trouble when I first learned about it. The moment Clive and others described as her having forgiven him, even as she said no, she hadn’t. The moment that seemed a betrayal of her child, even as I admire her for it. Even as it made her a hero. But now I look at what she did, I look at what she said, I look at what she knew, and I realize.
Did she see herself in Ricky, too?