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.