The feeling strikes me unmistakably. The feeling strikes me as a surprise. Now they are dead. They are dead. I am alive.
What I feel standing on the grass of their grave isn’t release, not exactly. It’s grief, but not a bad kind. I can hear the cars pass on the road below. Janna’s standing down there, likely watching the wind rustle the elms. She will wait as long as I need to stay, I know that without even asking, and when I am finished we will drive away from this place.
But it’s not that action that will take me away, not the physical leaving. And not her, no matter what the future holds for us. I have learned that by now.
Instead it’s all this. This telling of the story.
My grandmother is buried next to a secret. My grandfather died with the fact of who he was. I can’t say that I forgive them. Only that forgiveness is too simple a word. They helped make me. They did such harm.
“I have to go now.” My voice sounds strange, tremulous in the quiet. I have always found the dead in the stories they leave behind. Not in the stone-cold fact of the grave. But I never got to say goodbye while my grandparents were alive, because every goodbye I ever said was really just words that stood in place of all I couldn’t say.
“I’m going to go finish telling this story.”
There. Now they know. I am telling this story.
I mean those words to be my last to them. That where there was silence, there will be speech. That where there were secrets, I will make way for the complicated truth.
But I can’t move. I stand on the grass and I listen to the quiet, to the small animals making their way through the blades at my feet, a world of a scale I don’t know and can’t imagine, and above me in the branches of the trees, the world of the birds, the wind and the sky that never touch down. The late summer leaves are just starting their turn to color. The grass around me is a sprawl of lives, the earth beneath me holds the dead, and each one is marked by a name that means everything and nothing. A placeholder for the story.
“I have to go now,” I say again, and I hear how my voice has risen in pitch. I am saying this as much to myself as to them, I am trying to get myself to go, but as I say it I feel in my stomach the inkling of an idea. The inkling of an emotion, of what it is that I really need to say. What the complicated truth requires, too. Why I am still standing here.
The thought surprises me. I hold it inside me, wary, and study it. Can this be true? Must I really say this?
Yes.
“I love you.”
*
The day I met Ricky was bright and blue, as clear a morning as visits Louisiana. Hurricane season had begun, but if trouble was coming, it wasn’t visible yet. I was twenty-five. I had just watched his videotaped confession a few months before. You could say that the day I met Ricky was the real beginning of this story, its proximate cause. Or if the story began much earlier—in my childhood in the gray house—you could say that meeting him was a kind of end.
When I left New Orleans the sky was dark, but on the drive light broke over the leafless trees of Lake Pontchartrain, the streaks of brown where mud had mixed with water and the clear teal where it had settled. The white tombs of Metairie Cemetery, in their orderly lanes of houses for the dead, gave way to tangled mangroves. Fields stretched long and languid in the morning sun. I drove as if encapsulated by a shadow only I could see. I could not remember the name of the man I was driving to meet, only what he had done. And the face of the blond boy he had killed, the boy as he smiled for his last school photograph.
One road reaches the gates of Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the one road that is also the only road out. With thirty miles to go to the prison, the road splits off the highway at a sharp right angle. From there it is narrow and nearly unmarked, a path you take only if you know your destination. The town of St. Francisville, with its fast-food restaurants and its convenience marts, cedes to trailers set into the dirt. A single beauty parlor, housed in a shack with a hand-lettered sign. One kindergarten. Five churches.
The road dead-ended at the prison gates. Just beyond them, yards away, stood the white octagonal building that was once death row, before it was moved deeper into the prison grounds. I got out of my car and stood in the heat, watching the light strike its high walls. Dragonflies circled me, the sun knifing off the brilliant blues and yellows of their bodies. The prison grounds, once stitched together from old plantations, are larger than the island of Manhattan. Angola has lush fields and streams that burble down embankments. It has thick woods and thicketed bushes; wild pigs, rattlesnakes, and bears. Named for the homeland of the slaves who once worked its fields, for decades it was so violent that the federal government took it over from the state. With its size, its terrible beauty, and its terrible history, comes inmate rumor that a moat rings the prison, stocked with hungry alligators ready to eat anyone who tries to escape. Never mind that every inmate who arrives here does so through the gates I stood in front of, and is then driven through the fields. Never mind that they’d have seen there was no moat. The myth blotted the memory out.
At security, a guard patted me down, and I boarded one of the old school buses the prison uses for transport, white with ANGOLA STATE PENITENTIARY stenciled on its side. We drove through fields of long, swaying grass, to a building painted peach. Then another guard led me down a corridor of fencing to a door. Through the door was a gray-walled room with small, round tables and plastic chairs. Along one side of the room ran a series of Plexiglas partitions to which chairs had been pulled up. “Sit,” the guard said, and pointed to a chair.