He’d been eleven, almost twelve, excited to start middle school. He’d been a skateboarder, a boy who loved the Blue Angels and hated the beach.
Now Eric said, “I also need to swing by the marina and pick up some shrimp for supper.”
“Your famous recipe,” Tracy said.
“Griff hasn’t been eating. I think he’s in a dustup with his girl.”
“The one who’s a little older.”
“If she heads for the hills, he’ll be one lonely cowboy. Most of his other friends have gone AWOL.”
“I remember,” she said.
“He does okay during the school year. He gets invited to birthday parties and little camping trips. Summers are tougher.”
“At least he’s not getting in fights anymore,” Tracy said.
“At least,” Eric said.
She let the blinds snap shut. As she turned from the window and crawled back into bed, Eric saw that she’d been crying. His throat closed. He looked at his boots.
“Sorry,” she said.
And then this familiar thought: How did I get here? The pieces that made up his life seemed pulled from another man’s existence—the berth he and Laura afforded each other, these bleak and sweaty afternoons with Tracy. Even that he was in his forty-fourth year confounded him; most mornings, he woke feeling like the boy whose thin arm could inexplicably send a tight, perfect spiral seventy yards. And, of course, Justin. Sometimes he’d pass the closed door of Justin’s room and forget for a beautiful moment that he was gone. How often in the last four years had he almost knocked? Then, when his thoughts fitted themselves to reality, he felt cored out and drugged, groping awkwardly through his days as if he’d lost a limb in an accident, an arm or leg whose weight he still anticipated. He recognized its absence, and yet he could still feel the arteries as they dilated, the nerves as they burned.
Tracy rustled under the sheets, bunched a pillow under her head. She was fingering her hair, twisting it, looking for split ends. He smiled so she could see. Maybe she smiled back a little, furtively. His phone started buzzing in his pocket. It was loud against his keys.
Tracy said, “It rang while you were in the shower, too. If you want privacy, I can take the sheets to the washer.”
“It’s Griff saying he’s going to skate,” he said without checking. “I’ll call him when I leave.”
“I wasn’t crying about you.”
“I’m glad,” he said.
“I do cry about you, but I usually hold those pity parties after you’ve left. They’re very exclusive.”
“I’m not worth—”
“I’m in Alaska this month,” Tracy said. She wrote articles for a travel magazine, though she never visited the destinations. Each month, her editor sent a manila envelope pregnant with statistics and featured attractions that Tracy shaped into a story. “I’m in São Paulo,” she’d say. Or “I’m in Sag Harbor.” Now she said, “And watching the sisters fan themselves, I started thinking about polar bears, how the whole world’s melting around them.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Alaska sounds like a mighty fine place to spend the summer.”
“North to the Future,” she said.
“North to the Future?”
“State motto.”
He averted his eyes to the window, the blinds laddering light across the bed. The air conditioner droned. Tracy was still studying her hair.
He said, “I should get going.”
“Leave the garage door open. I’ll close it when I put the sheets in the wash.”
“Sure thing.”
“You’re a good father, Eric,” she said. “You think you’re not because of what we’re doing, but you are. You’re a good husband, too.”
Tracy said such things occasionally, and Eric always suspected she was trying to convince herself as much as him. They’d been sleeping together for a year. More and more Eric had the sorry sense that he and Laura were both just treading water, trying to stay afloat until Griff graduated high school. A good husband. A good father. He only knew he’d filled those roles at one time, though he could hardly recall it now. He watched shafts of lurid sunlight slant through the blinds, the dust motes eddying like galaxies.
“It’s the pads of their feet,” Tracy said.
“Do what now?”
“Polar bears,” she said. “Something about those black pads on their white feet makes me really sad.”
He leaned across the bed, pressed his lips to her cheek. As always when he was leaving her, he felt at once restored and ashamed. This can’t be my life. This isn’t my life. The feeling he had was one of erasure, as if their time together diminished him, stripped him down to some essence he could concentrate on rebuilding. He would do better from here on out. He’d check the flyers, run by the fireworks stand and the marina, fry shrimp. After dinner, he’d run a hot bath for Laura. They were both off tomorrow, so maybe they’d take Griff to the skate park in Corpus, get his mind off his doomed heart. Eric passed through the condo and into the garage like a man who was late, a man who’d kept his family waiting too long. As he was backing his truck out of the garage, his phone started up again.
Years later, he would remember very little about that afternoon. Not how he’d parked on the street to dig the phone from his pocket, or how he’d assumed Tracy was calling to elaborate on the polar bears, or how the disparate parts of an idea about taking Laura and Griff to Alaska were crystallizing in his mind. North to the future. The light that afternoon washed everything out; the asphalt looked chalky under tremors of heat. Eric could feel eyes on him—maybe Tracy was peeking through the blinds and calling to say he’d forgotten something on the nightstand—but when he reached his phone, the caller ID showed a Corpus prefix, so he assumed Laura was calling from Marine Lab. He thought she’d tell him she was staying late so he and Griff should go ahead and eat. He thought her voice would drip with grief, and despite his earlier resolve, he didn’t want to hear her just then. What Eric would remember for the rest of his life was how he almost didn’t answer.
ACROSS THE STREET, RUTH AND BEVERLY WILCOX WERE STILL fanning themselves, waiting for their air conditioner to kick in. Bev had woken up worried about money again, so they’d left the air off until Ruth finally said phooey and lowered the thermostat. Now they were watching Justin Campbell’s father in his truck. They thought his engine had stalled again, but eventually realized he was taking a phone call. Ruth called his afternoons with the married gal “The Soap.” “Time for The Soap,” she’d say, and Bev would break out the Lorna Doones. They knew what he’d endured, what he and his poor wife had lost. Everyone knew. Sipping their midday coffee, Ruth and Beverly wondered silently how you’d go on, how you wouldn’t just up and die. They were both widows, Ruth to cancer and Beverly to Korea, but to lose a child was an altogether worse kind of hurt, a scar that would absolve all manner of sins. And they did think of him as scarred. Grief had disfigured him. He looked slackened. Each week there seemed a little less of him. Ruth had been the one to notice how, all these years later, some folks at church still stole pitiful and sadistic glances at him, like he’d been burned, like his face was mottled and waxy with misfortune. She had also noticed how his wife had stopped coming to services. So let him diddle, she thought. So let him find some respite.
“Who’s he talking to?” she asked now.
“How in the world should I know?” Bev said.
Ruth hadn’t meant to speak the words, or if she had, she’d meant them rhetorically. The truth was she’d been curious about the young man’s life even before he started parking his little Toyota truck in the garage across the street. Maybe he reminded Ruth of her own son, maybe she was a little sweet on him, maybe his sadness mystified her the way it did Tracy Robichaud. Once, before his son went missing, he’d held a door open for her and Bev at the Castaway Café by the marina. (His father drank coffee there every morning, Ruth knew. Cecil was a tall man with hard, sad eyes. There were stories that he’d known violence. O
h, she’d like to sop him up with a biscuit.) After she and her sister stepped inside the café, his wife and two sons followed; the boys were rambunctious, slicing around her legs like trout. One of them knocked into her—Ruth believed it had been Justin, but Bev maintained it was the younger brother—and she’d almost toppled. Justin Campbell’s father made the boy come back and apologize. It was embarrassing. She could feel her cheeks turning to apples. But Ruth remembered how he kept his palm on the boy’s back, how he’d been trying not to smile as his son made amends. After supper, the boy came over to the table and shyly placed a piece of flint in her hand. “I found this for you,” he said. She’d made an excited face and told him how pretty it was—he grinned, looked at his feet, then back at his family’s booth—then she made a big production of letting Bev see the rock before slipping it in her purse. Today, as the missing boy’s father’s truck suddenly rocketed up the street and around the corner (“Wife must be coming home early,” Bev said and cackled), Ruth wished she knew what had become of that small stone. She’d like to give it to him some Sunday at church, tell him she remembered how he’d been trying to raise a good boy. Or maybe that would only wound him more. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t seen the stone since they moved into Villa Del Sol. No, you don’t think to keep an eye on a little thing like that.
2
SHE WAS A YOUNG BOTTLENOSE, MAYBE FIVE YEARS OLD. ON an unseasonably cool morning in April, Eddie Cavazos, a park employee on sea turtle patrol, had found her stranded near Mile Marker 18 on the Padre Island National Seashore. He believed the dolphin was dead until he stepped closer and she slapped her tail on the sand. He jumped. He looked around for help, but the beach was deserted. He knew not to push her back into the water, knew she’d either drown or strand herself farther up the coast, but his knowledge of beached dolphins ended there. He radioed the ranger station, and the dispatcher paged Marine Lab. Eddie waited. He kept hearing phantom trucks that never approached. He called the station again, then again. Two hours passed, endless and harrowing hours in which he continually doused the dolphin with water, stroked her sides and pectoral fins, even sang songs his grandmother used to sing because the melodies seemed to calm the animal’s breathing. Then the crew arrived, trucked her to the converted warehouse, lowered her into a four-foot-deep, forty-thousand-gallon aboveground pool. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, severe dehydration, an intestinal infection. And, most distressingly, she wouldn’t swim. Unassisted, she would sink to the bottom of the rehab tank, water folding over her like thick cloth. She weighed almost three hundred pounds, so keeping her afloat took four, sometimes five, volunteers. They wore wet suits and surgical masks while cradling her in the water. When she refused to eat, they gave her fish gruel through gastric tubes. No one expected her to live.
Then, a week later, in the middle of an overnight shift—murder shifts, they were called—the dolphin bucked and broke free from the volunteers’ arms and went slicing around the pool. She swam along the bottom, breached for air, dove low again. The volunteers—including Laura Campbell—vacated the tank, then stood watching from the observation deck. Swimming on her own, the dolphin looked sleek and ethereal, like the shadow of a cloud gliding on the water. Within days she was eating solid food, fatty herring and capelin injected with antibiotics. She gained weight. She played with balls, a hula hoop, even an inflatable alligator that Laura had found wadded up in her garage. The dolphin clapped her jaw and chuffed when angry, and skyhopped when she wanted attention, extending her head from the water like a periscope. Laura had a picture of her magneted on the fridge among coupons and Eric’s summer teaching schedule and the postcard from California. In the photo, the dolphin peered out of the water with her mouth open. Her teeth looked like a string of small, perfect pearls.
Pinning down why she’d stranded was impossible. Blood work ruled out morbillivirus and meningitis. Maybe an algae bloom or red tide was floating somewhere in the Gulf, or maybe she’d been fleeing a shark. Or she may have just gotten lost, exhausted. Her body mass was too small for a far offshore pod, but some of the barnacles she’d brought in were found only in deep water. The barnacles would, in fact, make returning her to open water a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare—Fish and Wildlife would require a battery of tests to determine where she’d come from and where she might safely be released—but those were distant, possibly moot concerns. She’d stay at Marine Lab for six months, maybe a year, depending on her progress. More pressing was the need for extra volunteers, donations, a name. The tradition at Marine Lab was that naming rights fell to whoever found the animal, so once the rescue director felt confident the dolphin would live, he tracked down Eddie Cavazos. Eddie’s first instinct was to name her after his daughter, but he quickly reconsidered: If the dolphin took a turn for the worse, the name might seem an omen. Instead, he chose Alice. It was his grandmother’s name, the name of a sturdy and stubborn woman who’d died in her sleep twenty years before.
Volunteering at Marine Lab consisted mostly of taking notes. Some twelve volunteers a day systematically logged how many breaths Alice took, when and what she ate, what direction she swam in, when she vocalized or played with a toy or moved her bowels. It was tedious work—“Your job is to pay attention,” Paul Perez, the rescue director, always told new volunteers—but the monotony comforted Laura. Before she started volunteering, she could feel too pent-up and find herself doing things she’d never imagined. Once, she’d been detained for pocketing some nail polish at the drugstore in Southport. Both the police officer and the store manager knew her—meaning, they knew about Justin—so they let her off with a warning. How to explain she’d never actually wanted the nail polish and that not being arrested had been a disappointment? That it had left her livid? Over the years, she’d purposely slammed her fingers in a desk drawer; she’d thrown sweet tea in a fat woman’s face at the Castaway after the woman said, I’m still just so broken up about your boy. And then there were the times when she locked the bathroom door and sat in the empty bathtub, watching the day succumb to night. Twice she’d come so unglued in public that someone had to call Eric at school to come get her. “Maybe we should think about seeing someone,” he’d said, and she’d nodded to appease him, thinking, Maybe the world is too much for me. Maybe I’m too small for this place now.
But the hours at Marine Lab calmed her, stoked her optimism in ways that nothing else did—certainly not the church-basement support groups: Beyond Grief. Comforting Other Parents Who Have Experienced Sorrow (COPES). Anger Management. Bereaved Families. Work could occasionally prove distracting if a customer brought in a challenging stain, a blotch that would take time and ingenuity to remove, some soiling that seemed impossibly permanent, but she mostly saw shirts that needed laundering, slacks that required pressing. Only Marine Lab brought her any peace. Eric, she knew, believed she volunteered to clear her mind, but it was the opposite: She went to nourish herself, to absorb and metabolize that which would sustain her outside the warehouse. “Like blubber,” she’d once said, trying to make him understand, or at least laugh. He did neither. Occasionally, she’d felt obligated to invite him to volunteer with her—maybe it would help to repair the countless fissures in their marriage—and yet she was always shamefully pleased when he declined. It was like getting away with something. In the warehouse, no one knew who she was. When she first filled out her volunteer paperwork, she used her maiden name.
ON THE LAST WEDNESDAY IN JUNE, LAURA STOOD BESIDE THE pool and watched Alice swim in silent, lazy circles. Her shift had ended twenty minutes earlier, but she’d lingered after the next volunteer arrived. The air in the warehouse was clammy, salted; much of the space lay in shadows with only a grainy, diffused light canting through random fiberglass panels on the roof. Marine Lab was just over the Harbor Bridge and the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, an hour’s drive from Southport. If she left right away, she’d get home by six-thirty or seven, depending on traffic. She wasn’t ready to head out, though. Alice had been running a fever th
e last few days, and the vet was due to stop by with an update. Five more minutes, she thought. Her back ached from sitting on the pool’s wooden observation deck, and her veins thrummed with exhaustion. She hadn’t slept well the night before—she rarely did, unless she allowed herself an Ambien—and then she’d worked the early shift at the dry cleaner’s. Thinking of it made her yawn. She snapped a rubber band off her wrist and pulled her long hair into a loose ponytail. A sparrow bounced around the warehouse rafters, then landed on a beam and started chirping. Laura wondered if Alice could hear the bird underwater, if she was whistling back. Last night, when Laura couldn’t sleep, she’d done the dishes and then stayed up reading about dolphins’ acoustic signatures.
She was about to leave when she saw that the current volunteer had missed something crucial. He’d been texting. On principle, Laura always left her phone in the car, and it riled her when volunteers checked messages or took calls on the observation deck. It happened a lot. What, she sometimes wondered, had volunteers been too distracted to see when they’d been looking for Justin? No way to know. The police rarely allowed her or Eric to participate; the parents of the missing child were themselves a distraction. This volunteer looked to be in his mid-thirties. He was Mexican with a thick neck and arms. He reminded Laura of an army recruiter.
“Excuse me,” Laura said. “We’re supposed to make a note of that.”
“Of what?”
She pointed toward the loose black swirl dispersing in the water. The volunteer looked, but didn’t see.
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