The Fact of a Body Read online

  That can’t be right—there are four of us, there have always been four of us. But at times, the thought—death—takes my breath away.

  So I ask. Are they used to it yet?

  At my question, my grandmother will flinch and flutter her hands in front of her face, as though trying to shoo the thought out of me. But my grandfather meets my eyes, his gaze the same deep brown as my mother’s. “No,” he will say, calmly. “The fear never goes away.”

  My grandmother will gasp. She will push her hands on my shoulders, as though by turning me away from him she can turn me away from the knowledge that what he says is true. But I will feel my chest go still, not in fright but in sharp, sudden gratitude to him. The gratitude for having been recognized for who I am, for how seriously I ask the question.

  So before my grandfather gets any higher on the staircase, before he climbs his way to our bedrooms, know this: He was not all bad. He was a man who delighted in the power of stories, who when my mother and her brothers were young would take home a projector from his film-cutting job and thrill them by turning their living room into a theater. He knew how to make children laugh and he always had a candy sucker in his pockets or a tin windup dog from the dime store. He was the first artist I ever knew, a painter and a sculptor. He taught me to draw. He taught me what it was to look inward, to be quiet and thoughtful amid the world’s clamor. We were alike in this way, he and I. We were alone together in my family in this way. I loved him. In that family way of love, the way that is unquestioned.

  * * *

  As my grandmother lies in her half-empty bed in 1984, and my grandfather pauses on the stairs, there still remains a chance. Maybe tonight, unlike every night that has come before, my grandfather will turn around. He will climb back down the staircase and he will leave my grandmother to a story of her marriage—to a story of her life—that does not include hearing his climb. He will leave me to my childhood bed, and my sister in hers, where we each now lie silent, listening. We both know what we listen for, but we have never said the words out loud.

  Or maybe tonight, unlike every other night that has come before, my grandmother will let go of her prayer card, open her eyes, and rise from the bed to walk toward the sound she cannot help but hear—

  But no. The stair.

  My grandmother in her bed, my sister in hers, me in mine, we listen.

  Seven

  Louisiana, 1992

  Later, Lanelle Trahan, Pearl and Ricky’s supervisor at the Fuel Stop, will say that she’d known the night Jeremy disappeared that Ricky was the one who’d done it. She’d been working the register that night, ringing up the extra-large coffees and the scratch tickets and flipping on the diesel pumps for the truckers who climbed down from their cabs to pay in cash, walking a little bowlegged across the station pavement after so many hours on the road. A volunteer firefighter had come in, and as he handed her a crumpled five for a pack of cigarettes and a coffee said, “Got a long night ahead.”

  “Yeah?” Lanelle said, being friendly.

  And the man said yeah, a little boy was missing over on Watson Road in Iowa, and his fire department and another had been called in. Parents from all over the parish were turning up to help, having heard about it on the evening news. “Big search,” the man said. “Big. They’re bringing in dogs.”

  Pearl’s son, Joey. That’s who Lanelle thought of first thing. Whom she assumed was missing. Joey was always playing out in the woods and sometimes Pearl would come in for her shift complaining that he’d gotten himself hurt or lost or worse. God, Lanelle thought, she must be so scared. When time came for her cigarette break Lanelle called up the owner of the Fuel Stop and asked him if she could take some Thermoses of coffee and a couple of sleeves of cups out to the searchers. “I s’pose that’d be all right,” he’d said. “Once your shift’s over.”

  So it was ten o’clock, full dark, before Lanelle made it out to Pearl’s. A line of patrol cars, their headlights like a sentinel string, blocked the road, but she sidled up to one and rolled down her window—the February night air coming in an uneasy chill—and told the crew-cutted officer inside, barely out of boyhood himself, about the coffee. He let her by.

  In the headlights, the paint of the house lit up ghostly white, the places where the paint was dingy and ragged giving it an ominous shape, as if the house were just a skin worn by a creature who lurked underneath. Its back disappeared into the dark woods.

  The front door was unlocked, and Lanelle let herself in. Ricky was sweeping the kitchen. “Hi, Ricky,” she said, but he just kept up his swift, short strokes. The two of them never did get on. She could hear the television blaring from the living room as she set the Thermoses down on the kitchen table. In the living room, Pearl sat slumped on the worn brown couch, watching television. The white house was on the TV screen, all lit up. Looking at it unsettled Lanelle, as if she were up high looking down at herself on the ground. She sat down next to Pearl. “Pearl,” she said gently. “Have they found Joey yet?”

  “Joey’s not missing,” Pearl said. “He’s upstairs. Ricky’s been looking after the kids. It’s a little boy from down the street. Joey’s friend.”

  She went back to staring at the television. Lanelle waited a long moment, but it didn’t seem like she was going to say anything more.

  If it had been Lanelle’s street all lit up with searchlights, you can bet Lanelle would’ve been out in the street with the others. But Pearl was acting like there was nothing much happening. Lanelle said, “I brought some coffee for the people searching. Boss said we could have it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Well,” Lanelle said. “Well, why don’t I go take a look upstairs? Check in on Joey and June.” Maybe, she thought, the missing boy was just hiding up there. Maybe they were just having themselves a game. Kids that age, when they found a good hide-and-seek spot, sometimes you couldn’t get them out.

  “That’s fine,” Pearl said.

  So Lanelle got up and did it. The house was laid out kind of funny, Lanelle knew, and to get to the stairs you had to first walk through the bathroom off the kitchen.

  TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003

  Q: What happened?

  A: I went toward where the stairs were and Ricky made a b-line in front of me.

  Q: Okay.

  A: Made a b-line and got in front of me and would not let me go up the stairs. He told me I could not go up the stairs. He didn’t want me up the stairs. And he got mad. When Ricky got mad, you knew when he got mad. I’ve made him mad before. He would turn beet red and daggers would come out his eyes.

  Stop the moment there. Ricky’s on the staircase, his eyes blazing, the vein in his forehead sticking out and his face a crimson flare. He spreads his arms to block her, holding the broom straight across, one hand curled around the end like a fist. Lanelle’s on the step below him, still in her green Fuel Stop polo, her makeup end-of-the-day tired and her hair smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and diesel fumes.

  It’s been a long day. She’s worked a long shift. She should be at home right now, her feet up, not here at poor Pearl’s.

  This is when, Lanelle will later say, she knew. Something was off about Ricky. Something had been off this whole time. Even if no one would say it.

  Lanelle turned around and went to tell Pearl that Ricky wouldn’t let her up.

  “Aw, that’s just Ricky,” Pearl said. “He already searched upstairs. He don’t mean nothing. Just Ricky being Ricky.”

  Lanelle knew what she meant. A lifetime of being thought strange could make a man strange. But something didn’t sit right.

  So Lanelle walked out to the street and tapped on the window of the first patrol car she saw. No command post yet; the cops were doing everything out of the front seats of their cruisers. “Did y’all search Pearl’s house?” she said.

  “Ma’am?” the officer said.

  “This white house,” she said. “Right here. Did y’all search it?”

  The officer checked his clipboa
rd. “Lady of the house said a Ricky searched it.”

  “And y’all are satisfied with that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Later she’d never be able to explain it quite right to herself, why she hadn’t just turned around and shoved her way past Ricky and marched upstairs and looked. Sure, later they’d say it would have been too late by then, anyway, that the boy had died immediately, and all there was in that closet—all that Ricky was keeping her from finding—was a body.

  But she’d still think about it. For years she’d think about it.

  Instead, she told the cops she was there to help and she’d do anything they wanted. They sent her into the woods with the LeBleu fire department, where she stayed late into the night, shining a flashlight on mud-brown leaves that turned reflective in the damp, watching the gleam that came back at her, looking for a color that didn’t belong. She walked the edges of the ravine, leaning to peer into it, not really expecting to find a boy, but looking, still looking.

  Come morning she was back at the Fuel Stop, cleaning out the Thermoses she’d borrowed. And Ricky was there. All day long, as she passed change back to the truckers and nodded at them, she kept catching herself looking up through the plate-glass windows at the front of the truck stop, watching Ricky as he crossed the lot. It was his face she was looking at. That squinted-up face like a small dog. Did he look normal? Normal, that is, for Ricky? Or did he look like a man with something to hide? And those hands of his—did they look like hands that could hurt a child? It wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell anyone about, what she was feeling, but something just didn’t sit right.

  TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003

  A: I, myself, when I have company that I don’t quite trust, I keep my jewelry in my room. I will lock my door to my room so they don’t go into it.

  Q: So you’re suspicious?

  A: Right. Because I don’t want them going in there, you know, for some reason. I’m hiding my jewelry.

  Q: Okay.

  A: So that set me suspicious to Ricky, him not letting me go upstairs.

  She knew what it meant. Ricky had something to hide.

  There is no way to know, now, as Lanelle passes back the bills to the truckers, and Pearl wipes down the counters at the Fuel Stop, and Ricky hoists his laundry bag over his shoulder to carry to his folks’, that in three months, after Jeremy’s body has been found in the closet, after Ricky has been handcuffed and locked up in the parish jail, after the front pages of newspapers all over the state have run the same black-and-white photograph of the bogeyman sex offender who’s murdered a little boy, and after the Lawson home has become command central for the police, who have taped the closet and Ricky’s bedroom in yellow tape, and, after all of Ricky’s belongings from the room have been placed in sealed plastic bags marked EVIDENCE and Jeremy’s body has been sealed up and carried off to the morgue, that Terry Lawson—Pearl’s husband, Joey and June’s father—will take his son, Joey, out for an afternoon motorcycle ride.

  No record exists of what Terry Lawson says that afternoon. Maybe he says, “Let’s go out to the lake, Son.” Maybe “Why don’t you come to the store with me, come for a ride?” Maybe “You feeling like ice cream?” He gives the boy his hand and helps him climb up, gets his little legs situated around the bike’s body.

  Then that motorcycle flies right into the second car of an Amtrak train, killing them both.

  The second car.

  Terry Lawson was steering. His son behind him, hanging on to his waist. Witnesses say that the area was clear—that the train could be seen “for a mile”—and that it blew a loud whistle just before impact. How do you hit the second car of a train? Maybe the first car you don’t see coming, and it hits you. But how do you hit the second car?

  * * *

  There is so much the people in this story cannot know yet, so much that hovers in the court records still to come. Through the pages of the transcript I watch as Lanelle flips on the pump for another truck and stares at Ricky through the window. I watch as Pearl moves on to refilling the creamers. I watch as Ricky tries to flag down a ride in a passing car.

  For three days more, Jeremy’s body will stay wedged in the closet as Joey and June play in the hallway across from it. For three days more, Pearl and Terry Lawson will tuck the children into their beds at night and wake them up in the morning and ready them for school, and all the while, Jeremy’s body will be there across the hall, standing wrapped in the blue blanket printed with Dick Tracy, his boots and his BB gun placed neatly at his feet.

  The grown-ups drink their coffee, the children their morning milk at the table, and in three months’ time the father, Terry, will be dead. The boy, Joey, too.

  Later, there will be allegations that Terry was molesting June. Nothing ever proved.

  I try to study the past, try to read between the lines of its text—to see Terry as he pours himself more coffee and sits down beside the bowls Ricky set out for the children’s cereal. Where were his hands last night? He and Pearl gave up their bedroom.

  And Pearl, look at her there now, as she opens the refrigerator door and reminds Joey to finish his breakfast. What does she see? What does she see, or what is she able to see? What does she look away from? Did she not know Jeremy’s body was there? Three days.

  Then Terry and Joey die. And Pearl takes June, and disappears.

  Eight

  New Jersey, 1985

  Weeks pass, months, a year. The memory of that strange backward afternoon my mother ran across the lawn crying, and the sound of my grandfather up the stairs at night both sit inside me like a summer cocoon, sheltered up tight against the heat. I’m holding my breath from the inside, trying to keep what’s there from igniting.

  Each Easter, just before we go to my grandparents’ house and sit around their big wooden table for the manicotti my grandfather has made and the thin sheets of beef he’s rolled and tied twine around like presents, my parents give us baskets that each have an egg inside. Their shells are white and made of sugar, the sugar along the seams colored and piped like frosting. Inside, they shelter tiny scenes made of sugar, too: a baby chick, cheeping in its nest, or a bunny with a basket. Each scene is a delicate, worked thing. But the shell, though sugar, is not fragile. It’s dense and hard.

  The silence works like that. It’s not fragile. It shields the glittering moments and the confusing ones, too. Such as the times my throat gets parched in the middle of the night and I brave the dark stairs to go down to the kitchen for a glass of water. There, I find my father at the white table. He’s got a big glass bowl of potato chips beside him. An empty bottle of wine with another started. Ice cream wrappers litter the ground near his feet. The television blares a news program. He smiles wryly as I enter the room.

  “You OK, sweetheart?” he says then.

  This is the softest he ever is, so sometimes I tell him. “I had a nightmare,” I say. I have been dreaming about witches that come to me in my sleep.

  “Go back to bed,” he says. “I love you. Come here,” he says, and I go to him and kiss his cheek.

  He’s best like this, sweeter than at any other moments during the day. But I know he won’t remember any of it in the morning. In the morning these moments will have blurred and faded into a distant, unreal dream.

  The bright solid morning. The morning is the time for action. He buys a new speaker set and wires it through the house so the kitchen’s on one control, the living room another, all from a central console. He shines his shoes upstairs and refuses to answer the phone calls from creditors and blares his opera music through the house, sometimes so loudly my ears ache. He and my mother sit at the kitchen table and plan parties, parties that will help people know my father’s name in this new town, and my mother teaches me to separate the leaves on a stalk of endive and smear Brie into the center of each, mound sour cream onto a cracker and place a perfect dollop of caviar in the middle. At the parties the grins are toothy and hard and everyone’s breath smells like wine
.

  That summer, my father decides to run for town council. They have T-shirts made for us for the Fourth of July parade: matching red with fuzzy white iron-on lettering that says MY DADDY FOR TOWN COUNCIL. My mother’s matches, too, but says DREW. In the picture taken of us at the parade, we stand squinting into the sunlight, our red T-shirts tucked into high-waisted shorts. My sister Nicola waves a tiny American flag. I stand a few feet apart from the family, the sun’s sheen off my glasses hiding my eyes. My curls have been cut too short; they frizz around my head. One arm cocked across my chest, I’m not smiling. I cup my arm with my other hand, holding myself together.

  I am still and taut as a chrysalis this summer. Do I sense that the silence can’t last? Is that what I wait for? Afternoons my father mows the lawn, the air is suddenly thick with fresh green dust from the clippings, the smell pungent and musty, alive and heavy. The waiting feels like that. It crams my lungs. It weighs on my chest.

  Then summer swerves and starts its long descent. In the vegetable garden my father has made on the side of the lawn, the basil bolts, tall and tough. The trellises of beans slump pregnant with heavy pods, and the neat rows of lettuce heads swell fat and round. The corn stands straight while the sunflowers bow. From the sunflowers we lop off a head at a time and my mother roasts it flat in the oven until the seeds fill the kitchen with their nutty smell. Each night now what we eat together comes from the garden as we race with bounty, trying to keep ahead of the coming spoilage.

  On one of those nights, my mother sits at the end of the picnic table in a white sleeveless shell sweater, her arms tanned. I burn as a kid, but someday when I hit thirty my skin will suddenly tan easily no matter how many times a day I slather on sunscreen, as if claiming itself to her. My father sits opposite her, in a chair we’ve pulled up to the table. My siblings and I are on the benches, two to each side. The six of us fit neatly around the table. I have started to note this: how we fit perfectly around our belongings, everything spaced for six, and how there is never any extra room. My mother dishes the pasta onto our plates, the pesto sauce, the zucchini spears sprinkled with Parmesan and oregano. The tastes, sweet and bright and sharp, are as steady as devotion: the tastes of last summer, and the summer before that, and the summers to come.