The Fact of a Body Read online

  * * *

  No one answers the door at the white house. Ricky and Pearl Lawson, his landlady, have already gotten into Pearl’s car. He’s due for his shift out at the Fuel Stop, and on the mornings she’s scheduled there, too, she drives him. Pearl is a supervisor, sometimes works cashier for the trucks. She’s trusted to handle the cash. Ricky does maintenance. Usually there’s easy chatter between them, but they’re quiet this morning. The morning air is chilly, shrouded in a faint gray mist, and Ricky rubbed his hands as he waited for her to unlock the car. He slid in. He tossed the bag of laundry he has with him into the backseat, and now he stares down at his lap. Pearl won’t look at him, either, the two of them like a warring couple this morning.

  Last night, as word spread through the neighborhood that a child was missing, and the mothers arrived for the first time, they stood in the street in front of the Lawson house and decided that while they searched, the Lawsons’ lodger Ricky would look after their children, like he often looked after Pearl and her husband Terry’s two. The children had watched television with Ricky in the living room, and then later gone up to his bedroom to play.

  But late last night, after the last child had been collected by her mother and even the police had gone home, only one patrol car still parked in front of the house, periodically lighting up the sky through the windows with its beams, Ricky came downstairs and found Pearl sitting at the kitchen table. He was carrying a plastic basket of laundry. The washer was out in the yard, hooked to the side of the house by a hose. But she looked at him so gravely he stopped and put the basket down. She was in her nightdress already, a cup of tea in front of her. She and Terry slept on a mattress in the living room since Ricky had come to stay. They’d rented him the bedroom.

  “You know, Ricky,” she said, her voice even and her eyes down, studying her tea, as though she was trying to make her words sound casual, “maybe you’d better leave town for a few days. Just until this blows over.”

  Pearl knew, Ricky would later swear, that he’d served time for child molestation. She took him in when he was on parole from his sentence in Georgia. They’d met when they were both living in a run-down motel out by the Fuel Stop, paying by the week. Pearl, Terry, and their two kids were all in one room. Ricky didn’t know anybody, so he was trying to pay for another all on his own. Pearl and Ricky saw each other on breaks at the Fuel Stop, at the laundry and the ice machines at the motel, and when paying the man at the front desk. One night, as Pearl and Ricky stood in the parking lot just outside the motel doors, she had an idea. She and her husband wanted to rent a house in Iowa. But affording it meant working more, with no one to look after June and Joey. Maybe they could team up.

  That was two months ago. And Ricky’s never molested the Lawson children. That’s a promise he made to himself. A promise he’s kept.

  Now she’s asked him to leave.

  So Ricky has a duffel of clean clothes with him this morning, and the laundry sack, too, with the clothes he was wearing the day before, which he’d meant to wash during the night. They pull into the street, and Pearl rolls down her window to nod at Pitre before they drive past the police barricade.

  Pitre nods back. He recognizes Pearl. Last night, she’d shown him the phone and coordinated the coffee the Fuel Stop had donated. He recognizes Ricky as the young man who drew the map now pinned to Pitre’s clipboard. The sun’s still climbing in the sky, tired parents still trickling in, but when enough parents arrive today, Pitre will use the young man’s map to organize them into teams. He’ll check off sections of the woods as they search. They’ll find the child. He’s sure of it.

  * * *

  Later, in the evening, when Ricky’s finished with his shift at the Fuel Stop, for the first night since he moved in with the Lawsons he doesn’t go back to the white house he’s so proud to be living in. The first room he feels he can really call his own. The room where now, in the closet, Jeremy Guillory’s body stands rigid, wedged in, wrapped in the blue blanket from Ricky’s bed, a white trash bag covering his head and shoulders. The hiking boots that fell off while Ricky was strangling him tucked neatly at his feet. The BB gun placed beside him. Ricky had him in there and shut the closet door before the children came into the room. The boy has a sock in his mouth now, a piece of trout line around his neck that Ricky pulled tight. He’d kept making gurgling sounds.

  Instead, Ricky gets a ride from his father out to his parents’ trailer in another part of Iowa. The trailer park is a wide, flat place, the grass between the lots trampled low. His parents live in a white single-wide. When he was growing up they had a home in the nearby town of Hecker that his father, Alcide, had built, but in the years since, his mother, Bessie’s, medical bills had made holding on to that land impossible, and they’d moved into this trailer when Ricky and his younger brother, Jamie, were still living at home. He knocks on the ivory door.

  Bessie answers, moving slowly. Twenty years have passed since the doctors amputated her leg, and still she’s on one beaten-up crutch. Hard to maneuver around the small space. He nods at her, a quick, stiff acknowledgment, and walks right to the washer and dryer stacked in the far corner of the trailer. Opens the laundry bag. Turns on the washer and stuffs his khakis down into the bottom. The khakis he wore yesterday when he strangled Jeremy. Pours the detergent right on them. They may, or may not, have semen on them. At least until the water hits them.

  Only then does Ricky turn back and say hello to Bessie.

  It’s evening. Bessie’s already been drinking for hours. She hoists her body through the tight space to the dining table. She lands heavily, her pink housedress with the little blue flowers puffing out from her ample lap. Alcide clears the bills off the table, then sits, too.

  Ricky looks around the dark, dingy little room. He takes in the bills. He takes in the grime crusted on the kitchenette counters, the dishes left in the sink. The lightbulb over the stove that has burned out but has not been replaced. The air smells stale and astringent, a faint sour whiff of Bessie’s alcohol. He hates it. He hates it all. He hated it when he lived here and he hates it even more now that he can see what he left.

  In the corner is a small television set, placed so it can be seen from both the kitchen table and the brown couch that sits against one wall. It’s off but still hot to the touch. Bessie and Alcide watched it all day, knowing Ricky was coming. They have seen the white house where he lives flooded stark and ghostly in the camera lights, have seen the makeshift search headquarters in front. They’ve heard the reporter say a boy is missing, have seen the child’s school photo projected on the screen. When the camera showed the child’s mother, she was crying.

  Bessie knows Alcide won’t say anything about what they’ve seen. He’s not one for words, even less so where his oldest son is concerned. So Bessie will have to be the one to do it. She reaches across the table and takes her son’s hand in hers. His hand is cool, slack. He doesn’t return her grip. “Ricky,” she says, and then pauses.

  Ricky waits.

  “You didn’t have anything to do with that little boy going missing, did you?”

  The moment before a mother asks that question, what goes through her mind? Her son has arrived at the trailer door, the son whom, now that he’s grown and moved away, she rarely sees anymore. She loves her son. She’s loved him since before he was born, since she fought the doctors so he could be born, this child who has had so many problems. This child who has tried to kill himself more times than she can count and has already served two sentences for child molestation. Bessie once told a caseworker she felt she couldn’t leave him alone for five minutes without his going and molesting somebody.

  Ricky is an adult now. He lives beyond her reach. A boy is missing from the street where he lives.

  She asks.

  “No,” he answers.

  The silence she falls into then, is it the sweet and grateful silence of belief? Or is it as black and treacherous as the night now falling outside the trailer door, cloaking the
end of the second day of the search in failure and cloaking the dark wet woods and their absence of a body? Does the silence hide as much as the darkness does?

  “Betcha the boy’s out in the woods,” Ricky adds. “They’ll find him,” he says, and the three of them, the man and woman and the child they conceived, sit together as the second night falls.

  Six

  New Jersey, 1984

  The housedress I have borrowed for Bessie in this scene—pink with tiny blue flowers, a smocked polyester collar with lace appliquéd on it, the dress that puffs out from her lap as she lands heavily in the chair and turns to face her son—is not recorded in any transcript or file. It is my grandmother’s dress. When I picture Bessie I imagine my grandmother, these two women will turn out to be linked by so much. In my memory my grandmother wears the dress as she sits on a white wicker bench on the porch of our Victorian house, my grandfather beside her. It is late afternoon on a spring Saturday, the sun still thinking about beginning its descent, the light a shade off from brightness. The gray porch paint glows with the gentle luminescence of a cloudy sky.

  We are playing checkers, and it is my turn. I sit on a wicker armchair across from my grandparents, the game board on a table between us. I am red; they are black, and next to me is a small stack of black checkers, the prize for all my kings. Whenever my grandfather moves a piece, my grandmother clucks softly before he can even take his hand off the plastic. “Jimmy—” she says. My grandfather sighs and moves the piece to where I can get it. I wish she’d stop, but I’m also proud I’m winning.

  More and more often, my father drives into the city to pick up my grandparents and bring them back to Tenafly to look after us. His law practice is taking off, and suddenly there is a calendar on the wall of my parents’ bedroom with dates circled in black Sharpie, and a corkboard with dance and opera tickets pinned to it. While my grandparents and I play checkers, my mother dresses upstairs. Tonight they will see Tosca, and from the speakers my father has strung through the house baritone voices swell and bray.

  As the sun sets I tire of sitting with my grandparents and leave the porch to walk up the old staircase to my mother’s bedroom. My chest is tight; I don’t want her to go, don’t want to be left with my grandparents for the night. My parents are running late—they’re always running late—and my father stands in the hallway outside the bedroom in his white briefs, selecting a tie from the closet rack. In the bedroom my middle sister, Nicola, lies facedown on my parents’ bed, watching my mother dress. She shimmies control-top pantyhose up her legs. Never a bra—my mother, flat-chested like I will be, hates bras. Her hair still has rollers in it from the white plastic case on the dresser. Though my mother spent her teenage years taking the train out to Coney Island with a bag containing baby oil she slathered on her skin and a homemade aluminum foil sun reflector to sit behind, and she and Andy both turn nugget-brown as soon as summer begins, my mother’s face is unlined. By the time I’m twenty-five I’ll have more wrinkles than she will in her fifties. This is the gift of her Italian genes, she says. The gift, she says, that came with the curse of her hair.

  Every morning of my childhood she hot-rollers her dark brown hair into the Jackie O. bouffant she adopted as a teenager, the only hairstyle, she swears, that suits her hair’s texture. My father is in charge of packing the roller set for trips. My mother claims she ruined her hair with lye as a teenager, trying to get the kink out. Once, on a family trip to Jamaica, I’ll sit with her in a beauty shop and see two women laughing to themselves under dryers, looking at us. One of them will come over. “Your mama must’ve slept with a black man,” she’ll say to my mother, nodding her head for emphasis.

  My mother will laugh. “My father’s Italian,” she’ll say. “Vincent Jimmy Marzano from Astoria, Queens.” How much more Italian could you get than that?

  The woman will raise her eyebrows and look pointedly at my dark curls. “Well, then you must’ve slept with a black man!” Again my mother will laugh.

  Now she stands in front of the chest my father had custom-made for her, its drawers still mostly empty but its size a kind of promise, and selects a necklace he gave her, strings of ebony-black and quartz-pink beads that meet in a large flower at the knot of her throat. She beckons to me, and I come stand behind her. She lifts her hair from her neck and I reach up to hook the necklace’s clasp. I am almost as tall as she is. I have her hair, her love of books, her smile. I will grow into her hips, her nose, her determination, her height. When I finish securing the necklace, she turns to me, her eyes shining.

  This is a rare night, a magic night. Other nights she dresses alone, without my father in the hall, and my father is off somewhere in the dark, having taken the car and sped squealing out of our gravel driveway. On one of those nights my brother will come into the room and watch her silently while my sister and I lie on the bed. “Who do you love more?” he’ll suddenly say. “Daddy or us?” His words will come perilously close to acknowledging what never can be: that there is a choice to be made.

  But not tonight. Tonight is beautiful. My mother blots her lipstick. My father knots his tie and smooths his jacket up over his shoulders, then takes her hand. The two of them leave in one breath, a cloud of perfume and aftershave trailing them like a memory.

  * * *

  Later that night now, perhaps ten o’clock. The dark as dark as it will become, the world outside hushed, only the flash of an occasional car’s headlights as it passes by the playroom window on its way to a far, unknowable somewhere. My grandmother lies a few feet from the window, on a nubby green sofa bed. At the other side of the doorway to the playroom is the staircase she has just climbed down, after she and my grandfather tucked us into our beds. Now the house is quiet, only the box attic fan whirring in the air and the faint yellow glow of nightlights that line the hallways. The fan must stay on—my father’s rule—but in the long wooden room with buckets of our wooden blocks and shelves of comic books, my grandmother shivers. She pulls an afghan around her, pink wool she crocheted for my birth. She and my grandfather went to bed together. But now she’s alone.

  The stairs groan, the sound of a single step.

  The afghan is knitted loosely, the cold air coming through the spaces between its knots and the wool scratchy against her skin. She turns and pulls it tighter. She cannot get warm without my grandfather’s body beside her. Every night since they married, they have lain together. Six years from now, my parents will throw them a fiftieth-anniversary party at a restaurant in the city and we will gather to celebrate the sheer accomplishment of the days, of all those accumulated nights. Now she reaches for the Virgin Mary prayer card she keeps tucked near her pillow. The card shows the Blessed Mother’s eyes half-closed in peace, her hands pressed together in constancy. On the back of the card is my grandmother’s mother’s name. Every night since her mother died, decades ago, she has kept this card next to her head. She touches its cool, laminated surface, tells her mother good night. My grandmother knows where she’ll go when she dies. She calls that place her truest home.

  The stairs groan again, the sound of a body climbing them.

  My grandfather wears the hearing aid, not my grandmother. She must hear the stairs, must hear my grandfather’s heavy pant as he stands on the step. Does she know where he is going? Does she know what he will do there?

  * * *

  The staircase is still my father’s pride. He tells every visitor of its history and keeps the banister at a hard shine. On the wall opposite the banister hang framed photographs of our family, arranged in reverse so that a climb up the stairs is also a climb backward through time: First we smile for the school-day camera in stiff collars and too-tight braids, then we coo on our backs as babies. Then comes my mother, young in pearls and her bouffant, and my father as a little blond-haired boy with his nose pressed to a fence, gazing hungrily beyond the camera’s frame. Beneath the pictures, stapled to the steps, is a slice of burgundy carpet that serves as a runner, but it slips perilously whil
e the old wood protests.

  The staircase was so loud I could hear its creaks from the back of the house, in the room I shared with Nicola. Listening I pictured my grandfather as he climbed: the way he had to turn his back to the wall of photographs, grip the banister with both hands, and side-shuffle up. How his thick fingers gripped the wood, then the angina that pressed his mouth into a grim line of surprise, his fingers tightening and his arms locked as he breathed into the pain. If he could just bear this one attack, it might be the last. He endures the fact of his old age the same way: by bracing against time’s press, always seeming to half-hope that someday he will be returned to himself as a young man with all possibilities ahead.

  My grandmother wears housedresses and each night coils her short gray curls onto tight foam rollers she sometimes doesn’t bother to remove in the morning. But my grandfather still irons his trousers into a sharp front crease and dons a tweed newsboy cap to match. He keeps his cane polished and ready by the front door for his daily constitutionals. Another year or two from now, still a year before I will walk out of a room whenever my grandfather comes into it, I will wait until they are alone together in my parents’ kitchen. Then I will ask them if, old as they are, they have gotten used to the idea of dying.

  When I ask this question I am a very serious eight-year-old. I think often of death. I have started to understand that my mother’s silence, my father’s fits—all of it means that there is something wrong, something about the blue duffel bag they still keep packed for my brother, something the way my sisters’ birth announcements hang framed on the wall and the one for me and my brother does not. At times I have the strange, sure feeling that someone is missing.