The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Something was off about Ricky. Something had been off this whole time.

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.

“Even though I can hear my child’s death cry, I, too, can hear Ricky Langley cry for help.” It’s Ricky she testifies for. She tries to keep him alive.

The victim’s mom testified on behalf of his killer, for life instead of death sentence.

Now he tells the caseworker he wants to be hospitalized so he can’t molest anyone. “It seems like the harder I try not to do it, the more I do it.” But they won’t hospitalize him. He is clean and kempt, the caseworker checks off. He acts appropriately. He is not that sick. Rather than being hospitalized, he is assigned to outpatient therapy.

When Ricky dreams, he doesn’t dream friends. He dreams a place where he can be who he is and where there won’t be anyone around to look that other damning thing, normal. Where it’s just him and he’s normal. True, a man living by the river, talking to no one, would be an object of fun or bogeyman stories among the neighborhood kids. But he kind of likes that idea. Because maybe there’ll be some kid like he was who doesn’t fit in, who just wants to get away, and he’ll hear about Ricky and he’ll know it’s possible.

A part of me may always be eighteen, standing in that room with him. The old-man, wet rot of his breath and the stench of urine, the face I loved and the face I feared. That question.

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 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.”

Across from me, Ricky sits down. The problem of this day, the problem of this meeting, the problem that starts this story inside me and the only way it can end it is this: The man who sits down across from me is a man. He’ll never be all one thing or the other. Only a story can be that. Never a person.