For years I thought the lesson in the jury’s second-degree verdict was that they didn’t want to face the question of whether Ricky should live or die. A first-degree conviction would have meant proceeding to the penalty phase of a death penalty trial, in which they’d have to directly confront the question of what should happen to him. A second-degree conviction allowed them to escape that. Ricky would automatically serve life.
That was the only explanation I could think of. Otherwise, the verdict made no sense. Jeremy was under twelve. There was no debate that Ricky had killed him, so if the jury had found specific intent the murder would have to be first-degree. They’d been instructed that under Louisiana law, if Ricky understood the “reasonable consequences” of his actions he had specific intent. For someone not to understand that strangling a child would kill him, that a wire pulled tight around his neck would kill him, for someone to stuff a sock in a child’s throat and then pinch his nose closed against air—well, I thought, the only way someone wouldn’t understand death as a reasonable consequence was if they were legally insane. And the jury had turned that down.
The verdict was a legal contradiction.
So I thought that, faced with the question of whether Ricky should live or die, the jury had refused to decide. But I have realized that I am trying to rescue a place for the un-neatness of everything that happened. Lorilei didn’t forgive Ricky, but she still didn’t want him killed. My grandfather did everything he did, and he was still my grandfather. The law—with each side’s relentless pursuit of one story—has never known what to do with this complicated middle ground. But life is full of it.
I see the jury’s verdict differently now. While the verdict the jury voted is legally incoherent, what strikes me now is its elegant, human beauty. It says what cannot be true in law, but can only be true in life: that Ricky is both responsible and not. The law the jurors were presented with didn’t have room for this middle ground. They created it, as though they opened up space in the law, inventing a category that doesn’t exist.
Ricky.
Thirty-Nine
I make the trip to my parents’ house on an early August afternoon when they’re away on Nantucket. Only my parents’ two dogs are there, large mutts they adopted when I was in college. My girlfriend, Janna, has come with me, and when the two of us arrive at the door the dogs come slowly. They are great beasts with heads nearly as high as my waist and long fur that is losing its color. Once they had barreled chests of muscle, but now one is blind and deaf and the other so riddled with fatty tumors that his skin rolls and spreads like a loose sack of apples. They are a portrait of age and time and when I gather them in my arms I can feel how they used to squirm as puppies. They lick my face and arms in their simple, welcome love. I beam and look up at Janna. “Meet the boys,” I say. What is complicated about my relationship to my parents’ house is that it has never been uncomplicated. It’s always had pain. It’s always had love.
While Janna settles in the kitchen to read, I work quickly. The white aluminum cabinet my mother kept when we were children, the one that reminds me of Bessie’s trunk, or Bessie’s trunk reminds me of it, is still in the long playroom we once played in. I have not seen my grandfather’s face since he died—I have no photographs of him—and the photographs must be in there.
Instead I find pictures of my family. When my mother was pregnant, she wore her hair parted down the middle and tied into two low braids, so different from the stiffly sprayed style I’ve seen my whole life. She wears a green T-shirt, her hair parted and tied back and a smattering of freckles bridging her nose. My mother as a young woman is as distant to me as Bessie, as inconceivable and in need of being imagined. I can picture her giving birth to us only from the way I’ve been told the story. The doctors, worried that she can’t take anesthesia, have kept her awake for the cesarean and given her grain alcohol intravenously instead. She is draped in a blue cloth from the waist down, she can’t see what’s happening, but, drunk, she sings as the doctors pull first my brother, then Jacqueline, then me from her. She sings us into the world. Her voice is free, full-throated. We are unknown; we are so tiny; we are just beginning. There is no one for whom she must be self-conscious yet. No one for whose memory she must arrange the story. The scene is no more or less real to me than what Ricky believes he remembers of Alcide’s cradling Oscar’s head, singing to the boy on the side of the road.
I find the chart I saw as a child, the one that listed Jacqueline’s eye color as blue. Then—a bright yellow piece of paper folded in half—my missing birth announcement. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” Our three names listed, “in order of appearance, between 8:03 and 8:06 p.m.” How tired my parents must have been and how sad, the two of them at home with Andy and me, boiling our bottles in aluminum pots on the stove, or trying not to be frightened when the hospital called with news of Jacqueline. I find a picture of my father, tanned and smiling on a beach—and think of him as he cradles the emergency phone in the airport. Alcide sitting in the truck stop with his coffee, then standing up and walking out and leaving the crumpled pamphlet of lots behind. It will be a long time before he gets his wife back. If he ever gets his wife back.
In another photograph, we are all seated around a dinner table in Nantucket, our cheeks sunburned, our hair wet. My grandfather isn’t with us—I’m too old in the photograph for it to be the summer my grandparents came with us—but looking at the strangers who are my parents, I can only picture them as they lie in bed on another Nantucket night, the night they had just learned what my grandfather had done. They have just brought us to bed at the end of a long and frightening day, and they have smoothed the covers up over us. It’s summer, but the East Coast ocean air is chilled and now my parents find each other under their sheets. They listen for my grandfather, who has gone to bed with my grandmother down the hall. They listen to make sure he doesn’t rise again in the night. But the silence persists, and they settle. My father’s body is warm and my mother squirrels herself against his chest, listening to the drumbeat of his breath and heart. They’ve made it through years. They’ll make it through years. Everything has changed, but—nothing has.
Outside their bedroom, the secret sits, to wait out the night like a ghost.
I find love letters between my parents and fighting letters, reminders that we are all mysteries to one another. Once I was riding in a car alone with my mother, her driving, when our conversation turned to this house. She wanted to move, she said, but the finances had been difficult since all those dark raging years of my father’s. The house had fallen into disrepair; now only developers showed any interest. “Of course, they’ll only tear it down.”