Laura said, “She pooped.”
“Crap,” he said.
The man checked his watch, then jotted the note on his data sheet. Overhead, the sparrow started batting around again, knocking into walls. Alice swam counterclockwise. Laura hoped she’d roll onto her side and make eye contact as she passed, but she stayed beneath the surface.
“I’m covering for my wife. She’s sick today,” the man said, his gaze following Alice. “She just texted. She wants jalapeño corn bread and a milk shake. She’s pregnant.”
Oh, Laura thought. She peered into the drab, cloudy water; the pool needed more chlorine. She said, “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” He sounded sheepish, like he hadn’t yet cottoned to the idea of fatherhood.
Alice rubbed her back and dorsal fin on the stiff orange rope stretched across the water. She glided against it slowly, then turned around to work her other side. The volunteer made a note. By the end of his shift, the log sheet would be dark with thatches marking how many times she’d gone to the rope.
Laura glanced at the clock above the grease board that outlined Alice’s med schedule. Maybe the vet had gotten delayed at his clinic, but more likely he was stuck on the Harbor Bridge. Traffic always backed up in June, so no telling when he’d finally pull into the parking lot. Now, suddenly, she just wanted to get the drive home behind her. She thought to stop at the grocery store and see if a new skateboard magazine was on the newsstand. Griff had been having a hard week. Girl trouble. Her gentle, radiant son. They called him Lobster, a nickname they loved more than he did. When he entered a room, her heart rose, like a sweet old dog, to greet him.
She was stepping away from the pool when the volunteer said, “My wife has a dolphin tattoo on her ankle.”
“Cute,” Laura said.
“She got it in Cancún on our honeymoon. We went swimming with a few dolphins in a little cove, then next thing I know we’re at a tattoo parlor. I almost passed out. I’m a tough hombre, but needles get to me.”
Laura could’ve told him about the dolphin pendant Eric and Griff had given her, but she didn’t. She knew she should wear it more often, knew they worried they’d picked out the wrong gift. She actually loved it. She just preferred to look at it in her jewelry box. Jewelry had lost its appeal; anything that drew attention had.
Alice made another pass, hugging the side of the pool, then returned to the rope. Small waves rippled the surface, catching and throwing the overhead light, then petered out. Tonight Laura would tell Eric about meeting the volunteer, about the couple’s honeymoon. It felt refreshing to have something to share. He’d get quietly excited about Cancún, start imagining a vacation. Maybe she’d wear the necklace. Her husband, so beautifully and intimidatingly stalwart in his dreams. When he entered a room, something inside her receded.
“Man,” the volunteer said, “she really loves that rope.”
“She’s exfoliating,” Laura said.
In the back office, Paul Perez was on the phone, negotiating for more bags of salt to be donated. His voice rose and fell, rose again.
The volunteer swiped his brow with his forearm. He said, “We hit a hundred today and still didn’t break the rec—”
“Was your wife pregnant on your honeymoon?” Laura asked.
“Depends on who’s asking,” he said, then laughed.
Overhead, a wispy commotion: the sparrow darting around, bonking into corners, looking for a way out.
“Well,” Laura said, “the dolphins in the cove knew. They would’ve been doing sonograms while you were swimming. They like pregnant women, and people with metal in their bodies. They see through us.”
“Wait, I know this: the clicking stuff?”
“Bingo,” she said. Probably his wife had told him about echolocation. Maybe her nightstand, like Laura’s, was cluttered with overdue library books on cetaceans. Some of Laura’s books had been checked out for over a year and never renewed. She had yet to receive a late-return notice, though. When the librarians saw the books had been borrowed by Justin Campbell’s mother, a woman who used to be pretty and capable, they likely just marked them LOST.
The pool pump chugged, a quick deviation in its rhythm that reminded Laura she’d been hearing it all afternoon. Her mind was dull, gummed up, and she had a sense of being on a precipice, precariously balancing between reason and collapse. Time to go, she thought. Eric was frying shrimp tonight. Laura couldn’t remember if she’d eaten anything since breakfast. Actually, she couldn’t remember if she’d eaten anything since yesterday.
The sparrow flew to another rafter, started chirping. Alice exhaled a mist that hung in the air, a silvery cloud. The volunteer marked the breath, and Laura realized that he’d been talking.
“I’m sorry?” she said.
“I asked how long you’d been working here.”
“I’m just a volunteer,” she said, flattered. Then she added, “And a mother. That’s all I am.”
BEFORE LEAVING THE WAREHOUSE, LAURA SIGNED UP FOR TWO more shifts over the weekend. She also left a note on the grease board about the chlorine—Are the tablets fully dissolving?—and put a bag of frozen herring in the sink to thaw, ran warm water over it. She washed her hands and dried her palms on her shirt, one of Eric’s old button-ups she kept in her car to wear at Marine Lab. The shirt had come from the dry cleaner’s. She’d brought it home after the customer failed to pick up his order. She got a lot of Eric’s clothes that way. Hers, too. Alice exhaled, and Laura watched the volunteer mark the breath on his sheet. She waved goodbye to Paul in the office—he was still on the phone and made a show of rolling his eyes at the conversation—then stepped out of the warehouse and into the brilliant sun.
The sky was alabaster, the sun swamping and wet-wool-heavy on her skin. She shelved her hand over her eyes, and the depth of her fatigue hit her. She stood still, mindful of her body’s emptiness. The feeling wasn’t unpleasant. When she and Eric first started dating, he used to take her floundering at midnight. She never actually fished, but she loved pulling on the waders and walking into the brackish, moonlit water, then feeling herself sink a little as the sand slipped beneath her heels. They wouldn’t come home until dawn, her skin tight with dried salt water, her hair matted with sand, her every cell vibrating with fatigue. He would fry flounder for breakfast while she showered. They ate it with lemon and Tabasco sauce. When they finally went to bed, the waves were still rolling in her stomach.
She heard a car pull into the driveway from the road. The driveway, a long stretch of caliche that ran alongside Marine Lab’s redfish hatchery, was on the opposite side of the warehouse, and although she couldn’t see the car, she knew it was Dr. Frye. A pair of seagulls banked around the building, scared from their perches when the vet steered into the lot. Pebbles pinged against the car’s undercarriage. He was going faster than she liked. Bad news, she thought. Maybe there were signs of infection in Alice’s blood, or another intestinal parasite. Now that he was here, she couldn’t leave without hearing what he had found. Five more minutes, she thought again, and turned back toward the warehouse. One of the gulls landed in the blond grass edging the parking lot, the other on the dumpster where volunteers disposed of unused capelin. A raised 4×4 truck was parked near the dumpster, probably the volunteer’s. A breeze kicked up, pulling in the soily smell of the ship channel, and gently lifting and spreading the branches of a nearby red mulberry.
Maybe Laura recognized the sound of her husband’s truck as he pulled up beside her, but maybe not. She would never be sure. Even when he was upon her, when she was looking into his wild eyes and he seemed to be saying, Get to Corpus. We need to get to Corpus, she wasn’t positive that she understood whom she was seeing. She knew only that nothing good could come of it. Light was narrowing, dimming; it was as if the sun were being hastily put away. He was lowering his window, or it was already down. His face was flushed and bloated, the way it sometimes was when he came in from the garage and refused to admit his sadness. Seein
g him—seeing him there—dizzied her. She dropped her keys. She heard a garage door in the warehouse rolling up: A pallet of salt bags would be delivered soon. Inexplicably, she remembered Griffin dressing as a sheep one Halloween, a costume they’d made by gluing pillow stuffing to a wet suit his grandfather had brought over from the pawnshop. The garage door rose, the chains clattering. The tickle of dust in her nose, the slow and distinct feeling of her knees buckling, her ankles going to mud. Her stomach turned. The truck was idling. She wanted to speak, but her mouth might as well have been full of sand. She knew no words. Language itself had atrophied. She was suddenly—fiercely, wholly—grateful that her own parents were dead, grateful that they wouldn’t have to live through this, wouldn’t have to watch their daughter live through it.
Eric opened his door, came toward her, called her name as her vision was smearing and blurring and exploding into countless specks of light. Had she been thinking clearly, she might have recalled the sick beauty of those early night searches for Justin in the dunes, all of the flashlights playing over the sand like a single fluid body, bright as a bloom of luminescent algae. Or she might have thought of the night sky, how she sometimes sought in vain the dolphin-shaped constellation Delphinus. But there was no clarity to her thoughts. Nothing made sense. She was detaching from herself, rising and rising until she was peering down on everything. She saw a man gathering his wife in his arms, the glint of dropped keys in the sun, the water in the ship channel as gray and still as a lithograph. Then, just before the world went black, she saw a tiny sparrow swoop through the warehouse’s garage door, a flutter of wings that caught a current of wind and was carried skyward.
3
CECIL CAMPBELL WAS NOT SOMEONE WHO RUSHED. HE WAS sixty-seven, a widower and grandfather, a pawnbroker with a felony gambling conviction, and what he’d learned of the world was that impatience might as well be called arrogance. Smugness. Vanity. So when Ivan Martinez handed him Eric’s phone message—written in Martinez’s clean print, on the back of a triplicate pawn ticket—Cecil read the few words deliberately, as if translating them into a new language: Pick up Griff. No TV, radio, computer.
Okay, he thought. Okay. I can do that.
This was behind the jewelry showcase at Loan Star Pawnshop, amidst the whir of various fans oscillating around the shop. The air felt so cool and clean Cecil wanted to close his eyes. Ivan was talking in a hurried and apologizing way, saying he’d asked Eric to hold the line so he could run and grab his father—Cecil had been in the parking lot buying the Cadillac from a sailor fixing to go AWOL—but Eric couldn’t wait; he got another call and hung up. Cecil nodded. Someone had tied tinselly ribbons to the fans; he was noticing them now for the first time. He lingered a moment longer, then slid the keys to the Caddy across the counter to Ivan and rapped his knuckles against the glass and started for the door. His Ford pickup was parked beside the arrow marquee: WE BUY WINDOW UNITS! When he pulled out of the parking lot, there was no spray of dust behind his tires. He eased onto the road slowly.
Cecil drove the speed limit. He considered backtracking to his house to pick up his cell phone, but decided it wasn’t worth the time. Patience wasn’t procrastination. It wasn’t lollygagging. Still, he wished he’d brought the phone to work. When everything had first started, they’d all carried the phones everywhere, but now Cecil mostly left his at home. People knew where to find him. The grooves of his life were deep and rigid. He drank black coffee every morning at the Castaway Café, then went to Loan Star, then home for supper after work; he usually ate tamales, or beans and rice, or steak in a bag, but occasionally a shrimper would swap swordfish or shark meat for something in pawn, and Cecil would drag out his hibachi. Some evenings he’d piddle in the garage or play solitaire or go floundering, but most often he’d drive around checking the flyers at the filling stations and rest stops. On those nights, he took the phone with him in case something turned up. The phones had been donated, the unlimited minutes too, and early on, Cecil thought they’d make a difference. You clung to what you could. His hadn’t rung in years, though. He wasn’t sure he knew the phone’s number anymore. He stopped carrying it because the weight of the thing in his pocket reminded him of what they’d all lost.
The Ford’s steering wheel was baking, so he drove with a handkerchief cupped under his palm. Sweat tracked down from his armpits; the thin cotton of his shirt went damp and sticky between his back and the vinyl seat. He scanned radio stations, but found only music and commercials and a preacher from Corpus. The station he liked most was doing the surf and fishing report, which was sometimes followed by news, so he left the dial there. He was heading toward his son’s house on Suntide Road. Griff, he knew, played videogames on summer afternoons, and with the heat still coming on, he could easily imagine the boy sprawled on the couch, working his thumbs on the controller. He should have stopped in the office before leaving Loan Star; over the weekend, a man had pawned a couple of videogames and he’d stashed them away for Griff. Probably Griff already had them—mostly people hocked the same ones—but Cecil would have liked to have been holding something when he knocked on the front door, something to distract the boy from the miserable randomness of his grandfather’s visit.
Traffic lurched on Station Street. He thought of being in a funeral procession, not something that had come into his mind before, and he wished it hadn’t now. According to the radio, the surf was flat and the drum weren’t biting. The mercury had crossed the century mark. No other news. Cecil was idling behind a beach buggy, its chrome tailpipe rattling and angled toward the sky like a rooster tail. The ferries were running slow with folks leaving the island. In his mirror was an RV towing a boat trailer, and behind that a Jeep with surfboards stacked on its roof like warped pallets. He scrolled back through the radio stations. On any other day, he would’ve been listening to one of the classical CDs he took from Loan Star. He liked unaccompanied pieces, the calming austerity of the notes—his favorite was the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1—but now he didn’t want to associate the music with whatever was coming down the pike. He cracked his knuckles, one at a time, with his thumb. He wiped his forehead and slid his handkerchief back into his pocket. A gull was balancing on the Shrimporee banner strung over the road, raising and lowering its wings, but it soon wheeled off toward the marina.
He glanced at his watch, the gold nugget band refracting light. A group of tourists walked along the road with umbrellas to block the sun; a truck full of shirtless young men was trying to nose into the line up ahead. He should’ve anticipated the traffic and taken a different route.
“Goddamn,” he said.
A horn bleated a few cars behind Cecil’s truck, and then others started sounding. Like dogs, he thought. When the brake lights began blinking off ahead of him, he was leaning forward and reaching beneath his seat. He felt his spotlight, some paper trash, the cool and heavy links of a tow chain. Then, the waxy leather of the holster. The pistol was a Smith & Wesson .44, loaded with Short Colts, unregistered. It had come through the shop a few years back, and Cecil had paid for it with cash money from his own pocket without filling out a pawn ticket. No one knew it existed, certainly not Eric or Laura or Griff. This was another thing he’d learned over the years: Sometimes a man’s obligation was to tell his family what he knew of life, but more often his duty was to keep it to himself.
Every surface seemed flattened by the strong sun, as if a thin white sheet had been laid over the landscape. Cecil lowered his visor, looking for his sunglasses. They weren’t there. Nor were they in his shirt pocket or on the seat or in the glove box. He squinted at the road ahead, remembering the countless times Connie had lost her sunglasses and how he’d let it annoy him.
He tried to imagine where Eric was right now, what he was enduring. Cecil worried about him. Not merely because he was his son, but because, of everyone affected—save Justin, of course—Eric seemed the most vulnerable. Laura was tougher than she let on, and Griff took after her; you could see ye
ars in their eyes, the conviction to persevere. With Eric, Cecil didn’t know. His son carried himself stoically enough, and he’d done the hard, right thing of buckling down in these last years, but Cecil wasn’t convinced the façade would hold up. There was some softness in him, a naïveté, a capaciousness of the heart that Cecil wanted to admire but could only see as liability. Before his mother died—Eric was seventeen when the Corpus doctor found the tumors lighting Connie’s X-rays—they’d been raising him toward a life opposite of theirs, an uncomplicated life of college and vacations and starting a family outside of Texas. After she was gone, Cecil understood how they’d cheated him: His son was a smart man, a kind man, not quite a strong one.
At Eric’s house, Cecil expected Griff to answer the door right away, but he stood on the porch for a few minutes without a response. He knocked again on the screen, then opened it and rapped on the door itself. Nothing. He pushed the doorbell, knowing full well it hadn’t worked in years, then knocked again, louder.
“Griffin,” he called. “Son, it’s Papaw.”
He turned to look out into the yellowed front yard, then up and down Suntide. Across the street, the Daweses’ driveway was empty and he wondered if there was anything to read into that. Some people believed that Ronnie Dawes, the retarded man who lived there with his mother, might be at fault. Cecil hoped not. He listened for noise inside the house, but heard nothing beyond the wind soughing through the leaves. Maybe Griff had gone back to sleep. Maybe with school out, he’d stayed up all night and hadn’t woken yet, or maybe he and his mordant girlfriend were holed up in his room, giggling at the old man sweating on the porch. Cecil had never seen the girl wear a stitch that wasn’t black. She came into Loan Star occasionally and shyly flipped through the CD bin. He knocked again, hard and fast and serious. Come on, boy. He squinted through the door’s small, leaded window. His son’s house lay in darkness; the couch and recliner and coffee table were just darker patches of dark. He turned around again, as something put him in the mind of being watched. He tried the knob, then stepped off the porch and crossed the dry lawn.
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