Remember Me Like This (30 page)

“Probably,” Laura said.

“It was. I’m positive,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“You know what’s crazy? I knew about him being found before I showed up for that shift. If the news had been public yet, I would have mentioned it.”

“You knew then? You knew before I did?”

Rudy kept nodding. He seemed to be getting worked up. Laura expected him to stand and pace, but he stayed where he was, nodding and nodding. He said, “I always listen to the radio when I’m driving, even when I’m off duty, and I remember the dispatcher saying he’d been found. She didn’t give any more details, but I remember that coming through the speakers. I remember knowing it was true, but not believing it. If that makes sense.”

“I think I will sit down,” Laura said. Rudy stood and arranged the folding chair beside his, angled it toward the pool so she could see Alice. Presently, the dolphin was poking at a pink ball that Laura hadn’t noticed before, nudging it along the tank’s wall. Laura saw this, but she also understood that none of what she perceived at that moment was fully registering. Not the drone of the pool pump, the smell of chlorine or salt or heat trapped in the thick air, not the inflatable alligator in the corner by the life jackets. She was incapable of taking in anything else.

“Paul’s not coming back for another couple of hours, if that helps,” Rudy said. “He went home to nap.”

“Okay. Okay, that’s good to know,” Laura said. “Five years?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’ve been a cop for five years?”

“Almost five, yes.”

“You started just a little before he went missing.”

“I remember hearing about the case in briefings, and I remember seeing the age-progressed images.”

“He hated the pictures we used.”

Alice nudged the pink ball again, then submerged herself, which Rudy noted on his log sheet. He said, “How’s he doing? If it’s okay to ask.”

She could have told him what she told everyone—
Justin’s doing very well, better than anyone could have hoped, more progress each day
—but instead she said, “I don’t know.”

He offered a small, kind smile. It made Laura feel as though she’d gotten the answer right. He said, “Well, he’s doing miles better than he was.”

“It’s like we were all on a sinking ship and now we’re each in our own lifeboat, floating away from each other. Every few days I’ll catch sight of one of them, or maybe they’ll see me, but then we roll over the horizon and disappear again.”

“Y’all have another son, right?”

“Griffin,” she said. “He’s currently avoiding his girlfriend, which makes zero sense to me. Eric, my husband, tries to act like everything is hunky-dory normal. Justin sleeps all day and watches television all night with a snake draped around his neck. The other night I dropped a skillet and scared him half to death.”

“And what about you?”

“Me?” she said. “I’m here, watching a sick dolphin swim in circles in a humid warehouse.”

“My wife and I have kept you in our prayers.”

Laura averted her eyes to Alice. Whatever part of her was starting to open up to Rudy closed a little when he mentioned praying. When she’d gone to the support groups in the church basement, people were always advising her to pray. They made it sound as if the frequency and intensity of her prayers correlated to whether her son would be found alive. Once, after a woman said Justin’s life was in God’s hands and Laura only needed to trust His wisdom, she’d looked the woman in the eye and said, “Fuck God.”

Maybe Rudy sensed her hesitation because he added, “And we’ve talked about you a lot, especially with the baby coming. We just can’t imagine. And now, with the alleged abductor out, I don’t want to think about what I’d do.”

“Alleged?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Force of habit.”

Alice swung herself around and reversed her direction. The surface
of the water had calmed and was only slightly disturbed when she breached to exhale and draw breath.

Rudy said, “I’d been wondering if you’d keep volunteering, if I’d see you again.”

“I’ve been wondering how much any of us can take.”

“The worst is behind y’all,” he said.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Really, once the worst happens, it’s always happening. It’s never not happening.”

Rudy sat quietly, watching Alice swim, then said, “Maybe talking to someone would help.”

“Justin sees a social worker. She’s a nice woman who will probably always know more about my son than I do.”

“What about the rest of y’all? You and your husband and Griffin?”

She’d been wondering if Griff should see a therapist, maybe even Letty. Maybe, she’d thought, at least one of us can survive this. She hadn’t broached the subject with anyone. She was afraid—afraid he would need therapy, afraid he wouldn’t and bringing it up would make matters worse. As for Eric, she suspected he believed what she did: that they deserved all of the pain and sadness and guilt that was constantly marauding them. They deserved it for as long as it lasted and to seek any kind of relief would be craven and gutless.

Now she said, “You’re right. It might not be a bad idea for us.”

“There’s no shame in—”

“Does anyone else here know?” she said. “Does anyone else know who I am? Paul or any of the other volunteers?”

“I think he’s too wrapped up in Alice to notice much of anything,” he said.

“I use my maiden name. I don’t know why.”

“It is what it is,” Rudy said.

“What would you do?”

“Say again?” Rudy said.

“You said you don’t want to think about what you’d do if it happened to your family. What would you do?”

The pool pump chugged. Alice glided against the rope. Laura thought Rudy was about to confide something private and true, but his only response was to shake his head, the motion slow and tight as if he were just then in great pain.

O
UTSIDE THE WAREHOUSE
,
IN THE MILKY PREDAWN LIGHT
, P
AUL
Perez tried to make sense of Laura Campbell’s car being parked next to Officer Treviño’s truck. He was still groggy from his too-short nap—despite having driven from his house since waking up—so he wondered if he was dreaming her car. He knew he wasn’t, but that didn’t clear anything up.

In the sky, clouds were stepped like cliffs.

Laura Campbell, that depleted woman. He’d recognized her the first time she’d volunteered, didn’t doubt himself for a second even when she wrote
Wallace
in the info box. Like she was checking into a seedy motel, using a made-up name. He’d never expected her to stick around as long as she had, never expected her to devour so many books on cetaceans. No question she knew more than he did. She reminded him a little of a drug addict who quit using and got hooked on jogging. There was a level of desperation to her care, an urgency; there was something compelling her that every other volunteer—including Paul—was lucky enough to lack. She never mentioned anything about her struggles; she wasn’t the proud kind of addict, not one to share war stories. She hardly mentioned anything about herself at all—most of what Paul knew had come from articles and news reports—and although he never pressed her, he could always sense a barely muted pain in her voice. How hard she worked to conceal it was as obvious as her long hair.

Who could blame her?

More than once he’d thought: If Alice dies, so does Laura.

If he had to guess, he’d say she used a different name to spare others the burden of offering sympathy. A kind of selflessness that saved her a little, too. Or would have if people didn’t recognize her. But they did, almost always. How many times had new volunteers asked him—sheepishly, perversely, illicitly—if she was who they thought she was? Because he felt protective of her, because he saw how desperately she wanted to hide, he never outed her, but they still knew. Their stricken looks, their somber shaking heads, their conspicuous reaching for their phones to text their friends: “Guess who I just saw at Marine Lab.” It made him hate them a little. Whenever possible, Paul arranged the schedule so that Laura only overlapped with the kindest volunteers—the shy honor students, the barefoot hippies, and the lonely women whose clothes were covered in cat hair. And, of course, the mothers or mothers-to-be, like Officer Treviño’s wife. In fact, the only volunteer he’d talked about Laura with was Officer Treviño. He’d started volunteering right around the time when the Campbell boy had been found, and he was a cop in Refugio, so sometimes he and Paul would sit on the observation deck, watching Alice and talking about Laura. “What I’m hearing at the office,” Treviño had once said, “is that the boy was raped practically every day. He was beaten with rolled-up newspapers until the ink smudged on his skin.”

When Paul called him this morning and asked him to fill in for Laura, Treviño had said, “Copy that. I’m on my way.”

Early light serrated the clouds. Gulls and sparrows and grackles were waking up, landing on the rails above the hatchery. Paul couldn’t decide if he should go into the warehouse. He didn’t know if he’d be welcome. It was what happened when you spent time near someone who’d suffered the way Laura had: You felt the stranger. You saw the void surrounding her, stranding and diminishing her, and you saw her seeing it, too. Undoubtedly, what everyone experienced around Laura was what she experienced around her poor, ruined son. You saw only the wounds. You couldn’t ignore how
their bodies betrayed the pain they’d suffered. They were, Paul thought as he eased his car into gear and pulled out of the parking lot, like dolphins. In the water, you could only tell them apart by their scars, the places they’d been hit by outboard motors or sliced by commercial fishing line or bitten by sharks. The gashes defined them.

Paul had thirty minutes before Treviño’s shift ended. He pulled into the abandoned motel lot and closed his eyes, hoping to sleep in the truck for a few minutes. Around him, the morning was slowly rising. There were fragments of a dream—a girl from his youth, pigtailed Esmeralda, and woods strung with oak wilt, and someone welding, someone he knew but didn’t know, the sparks from the torch as blue as ice. Sleep never came, not completely; he was already moored in the waking world. The sun was bearing down, heavy and molten even that early, and the bay was choppy and frothed, insinuating itself, offering up its countless wounded creatures.

“T
HEN BREAK UP WITH HER
,” J
USTIN SAID
.

Griff had just helped him rearrange his room for what seemed the hundredth time. They were taking a break, assessing the layout, talking about Fiona. Sasha was on Justin’s bed. She was inching under his comforter. Griff could see only her tail now, which bothered him. He thought it would be easy to lose track of her if she went all the way under. He thought she would disappear, for days or weeks, only to reemerge later where they least expected. He was scared of her scaring him.

“Sasha’s going under the covers,” Griff said.

“And?”

“And I don’t want her to get too hot,” Griff said.

“She’s cold-blooded. If she doesn’t get enough heat, she’ll freeze to death.”

Griff wasn’t used to the room looking different. His parents had been so adamant that the room should stay how Justin left it that it had, Griff realized now, seemed fossilized, as permanent as a concrete memorial. He was afraid to ask why Justin kept changing it. Maybe the social worker had suggested it, or maybe the idea was all Justin’s, something that would confound Letty as well. Maybe changing up the room was meant to signal a new beginning. Or
maybe there was nothing to be read into it at all. Now, with Justin, there always seemed to be the promise—or threat—of a sign, a symbol that required decoding. Griff found it exhausting.

It was early evening on Monday. Their father was running errands and their mother was closing up at the cleaner’s. Rainbow was under the house, lying in the cool earth; every once in a while they could hear her digging, kicking clumps of dirt against the floorboards beneath their feet. “Just think,” Justin said. “That dirt hasn’t been touched by the sun since the house was built.” Griff didn’t know how to respond when Justin said things like this, so he just nodded, trying to appear unaffected, like he’d thought the same thing before. He felt simultaneously older and younger around his brother, unsure whom their parents had left in charge. It was how he felt in general lately: clueless as to who meant what to whom.

Sasha was completely under the covers now, slithering in the furrows of the sheets. Justin wasn’t paying attention and Griff stayed quiet. He looked around the room, pretending to ponder the best place for his brother’s desk.

When Justin had asked him to help move his furniture again, Griff hadn’t expected to talk about Fiona. If anything, he thought they’d talk about Dwight Buford or where Justin had been going on his midnight drives. Griff no longer thought he’d be invited along, but sometimes Justin shared things he’d seen. “Two people were definitely fucking on the beach. They were old, like in their fifties, probably having an affair,” he’d said. Another time, he’d seen a group of kids they used to know shooting bottle rockets at each other’s feet, the fireworks hissing and skittering across the pavement. But tonight, while Griff and Justin were pushing the dresser toward the wall near the closet, Justin had asked why Fiona hadn’t been coming around. To his surprise, Griff admitted that he’d been avoiding her. He said he didn’t know why, but being around her made him lonely and afraid. He didn’t say that all of this had started
after Dwight Buford had been released, but he sensed that Justin understood. That was something that hadn’t changed, the feeling that his older brother was putting things together ahead of him.

Justin said, “Don’t do it on the phone. And don’t wait around for her to break up with you. That’s what pussies do.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Griff said, though he suspected it probably was.

“And, anyway, I don’t think she’s the leaving kind.”

“She’s left a lot of guys. Like, a whole lot.”

“Says who?”

“She does,” Griff said.