Remember Me Like This (12 page)

How long since Eric had thought of that day trip to San Patricio County? The egg-toss contest, the diamondback hatbands and belts and boots, the cotton candy and beer in plastic cups, and the picture he’d snapped of Laura between the boys, holding their hands, as they watched the races. Justin had been afraid, hadn’t wanted to stand too close, and Cecil had said it was okay to be scared, said he wished he’d been afraid as a boy and saved himself a nasty water moccasin bite. That Eric could access the same memory as Justin did was exhilarating. He wanted to gather his son in his arms, but he didn’t want to call attention to the moment, didn’t want to jeopardize how their pasts were fitting back together.

Rainbow loped onto the patio, her tail wagging. She pressed her wet nose to Eric’s feet, tickling him, and he scratched the scruff of her neck. Her fur was soaked with dew. He wanted Justin to turn around, but he stayed staring into the yard.

“I’ll do better on sleeping,” he said. “On waking up earlier, I mean.”

“You’re doing fine.”

Another wind kicked up, the warm smell of the bay floating over them. Eric didn’t know what time it was, which struck him as odd. Nothing felt familiar. Laura had sometimes taken late-night walks when she couldn’t sleep—she’d go ride the ferry or sit on the beach—
but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d stood outside under a silent moon.

“I remember the rattlesnake races,” Eric said. “You and Griff had a good showing in the egg toss.”

“I still think those other kids were using a hard-boiled egg.”

“You’re probably right.”

Rainbow jumped onto the back porch, circled herself, and lay down with a sigh.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“He’ll plead not guilty.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Tomorrow, he’s going to plead not guilty. He told me he would, if he ever got caught.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “That’s okay.”

“I guess I just wanted you to know,” he said.

“Thank you,” Eric said. He was feeling turned around and trapped, like the wreckage he’d been swimming through was collapsing around him. He said, “No, I appreciate it. No, this is good. This is really good to hear.”

T
HE PLEA DIDN
’
T SHOCK
L
AURA
. N
OR DID THE NEWS THAT
Dwight Buford had retained a well-heeled lawyer from Houston, a French cuff–wearing man named Edward Livingstone who was donating his services. “Publicity hound,” Garcia had said. Unless Livingstone successfully petitioned to have it moved, the trial would begin in Corpus in late September. Eric acted furious—which meant he was terrified—and Laura had pantomimed anger, too, but it was relatively baseless. She wanted Buford to pay, to suffer and die and rot, but now that Justin was home, she cared precious little about what happened in court. Times had even come when a nauseating wave of gratitude had surged through her, as if Buford had intentionally—graciously, apologetically—returned her son.

Her ambivalence surprised her. She’d long believed that the meridian that would define and divide her life would be Justin’s disappearance. Before, after. Light, darkness. But no, the true division was his homecoming. Every previous experience grew formless, irrelevant. It was as if everything she’d known before had been covered in heavy black cloth. Her childhood in the Panhandle? Gone. The lives and deaths of her parents? Vanished. The tender ways Eric had courted her, the inexplicable pleasure she’d found in pregnancy, the stash of holiday and birthday cards by which she could trace her sons’ penmanship (Justin’s backward
G
’s, Griff’s
R
’s that looked
more like
A
’s), the summer when Justin refused to wear anything except the orange astronaut costume she’d sewn for him from a pattern in a magazine—all of it as insubstantial as puffs of air. Even volunteering at Marine Lab, even an experience as recent as Alice swimming to the side of the pool, breaching and then gently resting her beak in Laura’s palm seemed no more real than fragments of a story she’d heard secondhand. If anything, thinking of all the hours she’d logged in that damp warehouse was discomforting. How transparent she must have appeared: the sad woman trying to save lost animals because she couldn’t save her son. She hadn’t been to Marine Lab since last Wednesday, the day Justin came home. She didn’t know if she’d ever go back.

To spend any time away from him seemed duplicitous. And now, on the opposite side of the meridian, there seemed so much time. Every hour—every minute—contained new pockets of capacity. She made lists of things to do and meals to cook: Monopoly and Frito pies, charades and omelets, rented movies and homemade pizza. She felt reborn. Filled with vigor and mirth. With bottomless optimism. Watching the press conference, she’d remembered how some of the reporters and police officers in the room had maintained that Justin had drowned. Fuck you, she’d thought. Just fuck you now. The irony was that she felt as if
she
had drowned, as if she’d stayed conscious only long enough to watch her old haggard life blur and dissolve away. How shallow her existence had been, how selfish and lax and ungrateful. Behold the frigid wife, repulsed and repellent. Behold the bereaved mother, continuing to buy her missing son’s favorite cereal, practically daring his brother and father not to eat it. Then, regardless of what she deserved, she’d been brought to the surface and resuscitated, revived into a benevolent world. Her elder son, the scaffolding of her heart, the blood within its soft chambers.

Part of Laura knew she was being idealistic. Knew the past was anything but vanquished. Knew the sham of her confidence would crumble beneath her and she’d plunge into the pit of guilt, of shame
and despair, that came with having failed her son. Knew she should be more disgusted by the images of Dwight Buford standing before a judge and pleading not guilty. They watched it online, then on the newscasts. His patchy stubble and sallow skin and the girth packed like dough into his orange prison jumpsuit. Eric had watched the video clip countless times on the computer; he’d
studied
it. Laura took care to avert her eyes or leave the room. No, the past couldn’t be ignored, but she had to believe that it could be controlled, quarantined. She wanted to focus on the future. Now that Justin was home, now that she’d been offered a reprieve—despite how ungrateful she’d been, despite how she’d deserved to have her heart cut out of her chest with a spoon—her sole concern was making good on the implicit oath of motherhood: I will keep you safe. Had Justin said he wanted to leave Texas, she would have packed their bags and made sandwiches for the drive. They would have left within the hour. Had he said he wanted Buford to die, she would have found a way to claw out the man’s wet throat.

S
HE TOOK
J
USTIN TO HAVE HIS CAVITY FILLED
. H
E WASN
’
T READY
to run into anyone yet, so Dr. McKemie was meeting them at his office at ten of seven on Tuesday morning. Justin hadn’t slept at all yet. His eyes were heavy.

Justin said, “The treasure chest.”

“You remember.”

“He’ll probably say I’m too old now.”

“I bet he’ll give you a one-time pass,” she said.

McKemie was a wiry, mustachioed man who’d outfitted his waiting room with the mounted heads of a twelve-point buck and a pink-tongued javelina. He kept an old footlocker filled with cheap toys for kids to riffle through after appointments; they got one toy just for showing up and two if they were cavity-free. Laura didn’t know if other kids called it the treasure chest, but hers always had. She was excited to see McKemie’s face when he laid eyes on Justin.
Every time she saw her son now, Laura brightened—she felt it—and she remembered how it was in the early days after Eric proposed, how her eyes were drawn to her engagement ring, how possessing such a beautiful thing could convince her that she deserved it.

“He still lets Griff,” she said now, carefully avoiding his brother’s nickname. The other night, she and Eric had called him Lobster in unison when he surprised them with an answer during Trivial Pursuit. “Lobster!” they’d said and looked at each other with delighted surprise, but Laura had also seen a brief look of confusion—of
exclusion
—passing over Justin’s face. Immediately, she knew the nickname drew too much attention to the years Justin had missed. Later, in bed, she told Eric they needed to start calling Griff by his real name. He wouldn’t care. Laura had long suspected he tolerated the nickname only as a courtesy to his grieving parents. Oh, the mystery of what your children know, the scope and terrifying beauty of their perception. Now she said, “I think last time he got a Slinky.”

Justin nodded, his head against the window. His eyebrows had thickened. His jaw had become more pronounced. She had to stop herself from stroking his hair.

Seagulls wheeled overhead. The streets and yards and roofs were dew-darkened, glistening and quiet. Shrimpers were heading out of the bay. When they arrived at the dentist’s office, the parking lot was empty.

“I fed the mice some bread while you were in the shower,” she said. She just wanted to get him talking. Being alone with him felt like a gift. She said, “They really love the crusts.”

“Griff feeds them popcorn. He put some quartz from his rock collection in their tank.”

Laura had wondered about those rocks, though she should’ve known they were Griff’s. Since Justin had come home, Griff had deferred to his brother in every way. He seemed to be constantly ceding something, striving to make him more comfortable; it was as if Justin were in a wheelchair and Griff was always running ahead
to move furniture and open doors for him. Griff, who’d gotten in those fights, whose friends had dwindled, who was fearless on his skateboard but so intimidated by most everything else. Then a memory buffeted her: Both of her sons had, for a time, been afraid of the dentist’s chair in Dr. McKemie’s office. They didn’t like the hydraulic hiss the chair made when they were raised and lowered.

“The barbecue will be sick,” Justin said.

The barbecue. Eric’s project. Saturday would be the Fourth of July, so he wanted to have Cecil over and grill in the backyard. He’d bought sparklers, patriotically colored paper plates and napkins and streamers. Their freezer was overrun with meat. He liked the symbolism of Independence Day.

“We’ll be eating ribs for weeks,” Laura said. “Your father’s eyes are bigger than our stomachs.”

“The yard’s looking good.”

“It is,” she said. Over the years, she’d watched the backyard succumb to dirt and choking weeds. Not only had she not minded the decline, but she could almost remember admiring it, how pure and undeniable the loss of essence. Now she said, “He wants to find someone to come and lay down new sod. It’s too hot, and it’ll be expensive, but his mind is made up.”

“He doesn’t have to.”

“He just wants everything to be perfect.”

Justin nodded. He seemed about to say something more, but turned to face the window. The morning was opening up around them. Laura hoped McKemie was running late or stuck in traffic. She even considered throwing the car in reverse and taking Justin someplace where he could further unburden himself. She longed to ask him questions: Did he hurt you? Were you here the whole time? Do you know how much we missed you, how desperately we tried to find you? Did you miss us? Do you miss him?

Instead, she said, “Lots of nights your father would go out looking for you in the truck. He’d take Rainbow. He’d say, ‘Let’s go find
that boy.’ And he always sounded so optimistic. He was convinced that would be the night, like he’d thought of a simple and obvious place where we’d all forgotten to look.”

Justin was listening, fingering the hem of his new shorts.

“Some nights I think he’d just go off and cry. He’d come home, putting on a hopeful face, but his eyes would be swollen. A lot of times he slept in his clothes. His boots, too. He was too wrung out to change, but I think he also wanted to be ready if a call came to pick you up.”

Justin nodded. It meant she should keep talking. He wanted to hear what she had to say.

“I don’t think he really believes you’re home,” Laura said. “Probably none of us do.”

“The yard and barbecue don’t matter to me. I don’t want him to think he has to do that stuff,” he said.

“Just give him some time. He’ll come around. And if there’s anything you want to talk about, he’s there to listen. So am I.”

“It’s cool that you kept getting presents for me. And that you kept my mail. Thank you,” he said.

“Honey, you never have to thank me.”

“I’ve been going through my mail at night and opening the presents. I wanted to tell you that.”

“I probably won’t remember buying any of it,” she said. “And I like your hair.”

She thought she misheard him. “What? You what?”

“Your hair’s pretty when it’s long,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that, too.”

“Thank you,” she said, drunk on love.

T
HAT NIGHT
,
SHE COULDN
’
T SLEEP
. S
HE LAY IN BED
,
EYES CLOSED
, and breathed the air, which seemed sweetened. There was a potted azalea on her vanity, a vase of lilies of the valley on the dresser. Eric dreamed beside her, his legs occasionally twitching. Eventually, she
realized her eyes were open and she was staring at the dark acoustic ceiling he and Cecil had blown in years ago. It reminded her of moonscape, and for a while she whimsically tried to imagine an inverted world, a world without gravity, where she was floating above the ceiling and looking down on the pebbled surface. The illusion never took hold, though, and finally she was more awake than before.

Two weeks ago, Laura would’ve cast off the thin sheets and sneaked out of the house and ridden the ferry back and forth across the ship channel. She would have searched the sky for the nine stars that constituted Delphinus, staying out until the sun rose and brassed the fog as the shrimping fleets went out. How heavy the salted air had been on her skin; how satisfying to feel the ferry push through the choppy water. Even now, sleepless beside Eric, she had the feeling of being lifted and dropped. And, like that, she was awash in time. The past and present were parting around her like currents, drawing her in the same direction, and the heavy cloth that had draped everything before was brazenly cast off. She remembered the first time Griff went to a sleepover party after Justin disappeared, a year after, how after days of deliberation, she and Eric had both consented, and how furious their agreeing had made her, how she’d been banking on one of them saying,
No, I’m sorry,
and how she’d desperately wanted it to be him. How Justin had called fried chicken legs “handles,” and how he’d called carbonation “sparkles,” and how Griff had, too, and how he’d stopped. How she could hardly remember a day since this began when she hadn’t considered getting in her car and driving until she reached some place where she could assume a different name, a landlocked place with no memory of her so that her own memory might be bleached clean. How, once your son vanishes, you can’t ignore how easy it would be to follow him into nothingness. How when she was clutching Justin in that cinder-block room at the police station, she wished she’d worn something prettier for him, wished she’d done
her makeup, how she should have, every morning for four years, been dressed as if she were expecting him to return home that afternoon. How people avoided her in grocery store aisles. How she both resented and understood them not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see the hurt on her. How she hardly glanced at herself in the mirror anymore. How every afternoon of the school year she saw the kids walking home after class and their reliable presence mocked her. How Griff had called them from the sleepover and said he was sick and needed to be picked up, and how only just this moment, as she fell into sleep, as Eric rolled onto his back and the air conditioner cycled on, only now did she understand that Griff had been lying. He’d come home to spare them the shock of waking up to another son missing.