Remember Me Like This (35 page)

Since his youth, Eric had associated the festival with the end of summer and the beginning of the school year, which always started the following week. It was a threshold. A line of demarcation. He always felt a little older on the other side of it, as if what had come before was suddenly unreachable. This year’s festival was also imbued with a kind of providence. If it happened, if the weather stayed clear and the town could put the pieces together by late this evening, then he could believe that his father’s plan would work. That it was just. That it was not simply right, but solely and absolutely right, that there were no other options. If the Shrimporee fell apart because some remnant of the storm came ashore or workers couldn’t complete the job in such torpid heat, then he’d take it as a sign that the plan should be aborted and Dwight Buford should stand trial. Whether he hoped the festival would be canceled changed every half hour. Every fifteen minutes. Every five.

Laura had been distant and surly with him since they’d talked on the patio. With the boys, she was the opposite; she seemed relaxed, taking Griff shopping for school clothes and mapping out Justin’s private studies. Having something to work toward had always grounded and invigorated her. For weeks she’d been wearing her dolphin pendant, earrings, and bangles that clacked together as she watered the remaining plants. She carried herself like a woman who’d gotten a raise, but when Eric tried to engage her, her affect flattened out. She went silent. Last week, she’d had coffee at the Castaway Café with Tracy Robichaud to discuss plans for the Shrimporee, but with Eric she would relay only that Justin’s event would be short and sweet. Her reticence scared Eric, left him feeling vulnerable and paranoid. Their longest exchange had been her saying she didn’t want him keeping the gun in the truck. She’d been adamant, confoundingly so. “Put it in the garage or under the house
or in your sock drawer, I don’t care, just get it out of the truck,” she said. They were cleaning up after supper one night, and although he’d promised to remove the pistol after the boys went to bed, she wasn’t satisfied. She said, “Now, please.” So he’d wrapped it in an old bath towel and shoved it behind his dress boots high in the closet.

She didn’t approve or understand, but he hoped she would eventually forgive him. Or he hoped she would eventually relent enough to see the decision from the perspective he was trying to convince himself was his. He had an opportunity to make their lives better, to restore some semblance of comfort and safety, an opportunity to prove—to his family and to himself—how much he longed for their happiness and what he was willing to sacrifice to ensure it. Had she given him the chance at any point in the past three weeks, he would have told her what had been going through his mind lately, the refrain of Texan soldiers leaving their families to fight at the Alamo: It’s better for a son to grow up in a country without a father than to grow up with a father and no country. He wanted Laura to perceive his fear and watch him press on, to watch him carry it with him. So last night, when she returned from a late shift at Marine Lab, when the house was loud with the last of the rain on the roof and wind slammed against the siding, and she had, without a word, straddled Eric, he was stunned. And worried. Worried that his reaction should be less grateful, less shocked. Worried that he was being duped in some way. Worried, finally, that what had happened with Tracy would happen again, that his mind would fill with thoughts of Justin and Dwight Buford and guilt, and his body would fail, but soon Laura was guiding him inside her, and he could only hear their breathing and the storm. Her skin tasted of salt water and smelled of rain, of the violent clouds that had opened over her.

“You don’t have to do it,” she said, her head on his chest.

“I should’ve done it as soon as he was released,” he said. “It should already be over.”

J
USTIN HAD BEEN DOING WELL WITH HIS DRIVING
. P
ARALLEL
parking, driving over the Harbor Bridge, the rules-of-the-road quizzes—nothing fazed him anymore. He’d also settled on a layout for his room, a layout that seemed to Eric very similar, if not identical, to the original. His sleep schedule was starting to even out. Lonesomeness still surrounded him like a moat.

Griff’s stitches had dissolved the week before, and he seemed more himself. Or he seemed himself, but a little older and more jaded, as if he’d emerged from a long sleep whose dreams had hardened him. His younger son, looming larger. Last Monday, Eric had peeked into Griff’s room and glimpsed him holding Sasha, letting the snake convey from one hand to the next, and though he wasn’t as confident as Justin, he no longer looked afraid. Curious, Eric thought. He looked curious. Then, on Wednesday night, when they were all playing a board game Fiona had brought over and lightning was scratching the sky and a clap of thunder rattled the windows and shook the house with such force that the girl jumped in her seat, Griff had impulsively reached for her hand to comfort her. There’d been no hesitation, no concern for who would see or what they’d think. Once the thunder had passed, he brought her wrist to his lips and kissed her pale skin. Eric and Laura and Justin exchanged quick, saucer-eyed glances—each of them thinking,
Well, look at that
—and they were bound furtively together by the sweet surprise of it all.

That Friday, the last day of summer school, Eric dismissed his students early. They wanted to link up with their parents and friends pitching in with the Shrimporee preparations. Eric usually made an end-of-the-term speech, encouraging them to pay attention to history as they moved into the future, but today he was distracted, thinking about the pistol on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. Thinking of all that it presaged, all that it might bring to bear by tomorrow. So he simply told the students to enjoy the Shrimporee
and to get ready for the new school year. They left the room single file, hooting and hollering and high-fiving him. A few of the more sentimental students hugged him. As if they were sending him off to war.

When Eric got home, Griff was downing a glass of cranberry juice in the kitchen. He and his brother had spent the morning working in the yard, collecting fallen branches, while Laura went grocery shopping. “She wanted to go before the Shrimporee to avoid the lines,” Griff said, rinsing out his glass. “Now she’s taking a nap. Justin is, too.”

“What say we take a drive?” Eric said. The idea hadn’t occurred to him before that moment, and yet now he wanted it more than anything.

“Am I in trouble?”

“Of course not,” Eric said. “We just haven’t spent much time together lately.”

“Oh,” Griff said. “Okay, sure, yeah.”

In the truck, Griff asked if they could go to the Teepee pool. He wanted to see if the rest of the coping was gone. To avoid the Shrimporee detours and stalled traffic, they tacked through back streets strewn with branches and toppled garbage cans. Eric watched for Mayne’s Mercedes and Tracy’s Volvo, and he tried to remember the last time he’d ridden with just Griff in the truck. He seemed to take up more space in the cab. He also seemed diffident, like he still thought the drive would end with his father accusing him of something, grounding him. The streets got worse closer to the water. On Beechwood, one of the snapped trees cut off the route completely, so Eric had to twist and look through the rear window as he reversed down the block. He turned onto Mary Street with its canopy of mesquite that he’d always loved, then onto Jackson and eventually Coral Road.

“Papaw used to like to drive around after storms, looking at
what had gotten hit and what had been left untouched,” Eric said. “My mother called those drives ‘expeditions.’ ‘We’re going on one of Daddy’s expeditions,’ she’d say. He liked to go through people’s garbage, too. If he saw something he could use, he’d take it.”

“That’s probably why he works at Loan Star. Because it’s full of things people don’t want anymore.”

“I bet you’re right,” Eric said. “I bet you’re absolutely right.”

They curved onto Sand Dollar Street, which ran parallel to Station. People were in the soggy yards, clearing debris.

Eric said, “The Shrimporee used to make me sad. I used to think of it as the official end of summer.”

“I hope they have the rubber duck race again this year.”

At the Teepee, Griff bounded from the truck before Eric had even shifted into park. Eric hadn’t set foot on the Teepee grounds since it had been shut down. He remembered how the boys used to like to visit the place, how they’d chase each other around making Indian noises. The motel had been built shortly before he and Laura started dating; they’d stayed here one night, just as a goof. Now most of the teepees lay in chunks. Everything dusty, everything broken to pieces. Weeds grew through the seams in the cement, bearded the bottoms of the few teepees still standing.

The pool was half-full of brown water. A layer of chalky dust and yellow pollen filmed the surface, like powdered sugar. The walls were tagged with graffiti—some of it in bubble letters, some in cryptic single-line flourishes, some of it crude and crudely painted. He could read the words
STEAM
and
EYE LEVEL
and
SKATE OR DIE
,
DIE
,
DIE
,
MY DARLING
! There was an image of a rat with X’s for eyes, and two large spheres that were either targets or breasts. A thin leafy mesquite branch floated on the surface, along with a couple of Styrofoam cups and a plastic bag, a palm frond that looked like a ruined fan. Eric found everything about the property depressing, not least the knowledge that it was where Griff had spent so much
time in the last few years. It seemed exactly the kind of place where a boy would get pummeled. He wanted to leave, to forbid Griff from ever coming back.

Griff looked dejected, walking the perimeter of the pool. He reminded Eric of a lifeguard. “It’s gone,” he said. “They must have come back for the rest.”

“The coping, you mean?”

“They took everything.”

“Once the trial is over, we’ll take a trip somewhere,” Eric said. “You and your brother can pick the best place to skate in the country and we’ll make it a vacation. We could all use a break.”

Griff came around the shallow end of the pool. The sounds of the high school band practicing were in the air, a far-off cacophony of horns and drums.

“The bowl will still be skateable once it drains, but not like before. I probably won’t come here again. It would just make me sad.”

“I’m sorry, bud,” Eric said.

Griff picked up a few rocks from the ground, inspected them, then lobbed one into the deep end. The plunk sent waves of concentric circles through the pool, small shivering ripples that folded back on themselves upon reaching the cement walls. Then he threw another rock, then another and another. The chalky skim dispersed into tiny concentrated islands that floated away from where the rocks hit, as if in retreat, and collected around the palm frond, the cups and mesquite branch. It made Eric want to toss rocks into the water as well, to start up some kind of game with Griff.

“Did you get in a lot of fights when you were a kid?” Griff asked.

“A few,” Eric lied. “Not too many.”

Actually, he’d been in only one fight, an awkward affair in junior high. There were more palms than fists, more taunts than blows, a lot of wrestling and very little pain. At one point, the other boy, Robbie Kuykendall, had taken off his shoes and thrown them
at him. Eric had spent his life avoiding trouble, taking the high road, turning the other cheek. Not because it was the right thing to do, but because he was afraid. He’d long hoped no one recognized that about him. Even now, he’d lied to his son to throw him off his father’s cowardly scent.

“They recognized me,” Griff said. “They knew me. They were taking the coping, too, but one guy started saying these ugly things. About Justin, you know? They knew I was his brother, knew what happened.”

“And that’s why it started? You were trying to defend him?”

“It would’ve happened anyway,” Griff said. “They were wasted.”

“Well, I think—”

“I guess it’s always going to be like that. With people recognizing him, saying things.”

“It sounds like they were looking to stir something up. Not everyone’s like that. Most people won’t be,” Eric said. It was a relief, a shock, to sound calm and sensible. To hear what Griff had endured was to feel small and inconsequential. His throat went stiff. He glimpsed a future where his sons, and Laura, and certainly Eric himself, were assailed by the past, and he was powerless in the face of it. The threat was brutal, but his powerlessness was worse; it was, he saw and then fought not to see, what he’d been staving off for four years, the sense that his best efforts would never be enough. He could protect none of them.

“Okay,” Griff said.

“And once this all dies down,” Eric said, hating the sound of his voice, the accent creeping in, the lie he was forming, “people will see him for who he is, not what happened to him. People have short memories. Trust me, I teach history.”

Griff threw his last rock and dusted off his hands. He milled around the pool, kicked a long tube of beer cans bound together with duct tape. He said, “Don’t tell, okay? Don’t tell Mom or Justin.
I don’t want him to think people are talking about him, even though they are.”