The gate to the backyard was tethered with a looped piece of rusted wire. He unhooked it and walked along the western side of the house. The air conditioner wasn’t running, which likely meant the boy had raised the thermostat before leaving. Cecil hadn’t entertained the possibility of his grandson being anywhere but at the house, though he should have. Stupid, he thought. Just flat-out stupid. When he came to Griff’s window, blacked out with foil, he knocked on it and called out again, then moved into the backyard itself. There was good shade, a nice canopy of tallow and chinaberry and retama, but the grass was knee-high in places, overrun and tangled with weeds that snagged at his boots. Walking took concentration, as if he were fording a river. Twigs popped underfoot. The yard looked tired. It made him tired. The odor of dry dirt, dog shit. Under the faucet, Rainbow’s water bowl looked recently filled, but not cleaned. It was rimmed with green-black algae.
Beside the three steps that rose to the kitchen door, the lattice had been jigsawed so Rainbow could steal under the house and stay cool when she wasn’t inside; after Justin went missing, Eric and Laura had allowed the dog back in the house to sleep with Griff. Cecil pressed his forehead to the glass in the door, knocked, peered inside. The countertop had been wiped down, plates and bowls and glasses drying in the dish rack. Washing dishes, he believed, was Griff’s chore. On the fridge hung the picture of Laura’s dolphin and the arrowhead postcard that had raised everyone’s hopes. It had arrived two years earlier, shortly after the second anniversary of Justin’s disappearance. The face showed nine arrowheads, and on the back, in handwriting everyone strained to see as Justin’s, were the words Don’t Stop Looking. A red light was blinking on the answering machine under the cordless phone. Cecil believed—hoped—that meant the messages hadn’t been played, but he could certainly envision his grandson standing next to the machine, listening as the call was being recorded. Maybe he’d heard something, gone to pieces, run off.
“Griff,” he called, knocking on the door. “Lobster, you in there?”
The glass was smudged with sweat from his face when he pulled away. He tracked back through the yard the way he’d come.
Before he relatched the gate, he stood with his hand on the sun-grayed cedar fence, trying to figure his next move. You’re wasting time, he thought. The air felt dense with humidity and smelled of a trapped, particulate heat. Think, old man, think. A breeze swelled, tallow branches scraped against the side of the house. A yellow jacket bobbed over the dog’s water bowl. Cecil tried to remember when he’d last seen the backyard, but he couldn’t recall stepping through the gate in months, maybe a year. Then, at once, he understood that wasn’t by chance: Eric hadn’t wanted him to see the state of the backyard. After a moment, he slipped his thumb and forefinger under his tongue and let fly with a whistle as sharp as glass.
He was walking toward the truck when Rainbow bounded around the house and broadsided his legs. She was panting and clueless and excited. Her fur smelled of the cool, moist air between the house and earth.
“Let’s go,” he said, opening the driver’s-side door.
She jumped onto the bench seat and sat down. Her tail went to thumping. The gate to the backyard was wide open when they left; Cecil checked it in his mirror.
HE DROVE BACK TOWARD TOWN, DIALING THE RADIO. THE SURF report was unchanged, the temperature had risen a degree. Rainbow sat upright, looking out the window, still panting. The cab smelled of her mucky breath, a scent some folks hated but one Cecil had always found reassuring. He pointed one of the vents toward her. She sniffed the air with her dark, wet nose.
Traffic had lightened. Heat waved over the asphalt. Cecil pulled into the Whataburger parking lot, cruising slowly around the A-frame restaurant to see inside the windows. Condensation, dripping and streaked, blurred the glass, but he could still make out who was eating. Some people he knew, some he didn’t, but none was Griff. He moved on. He passed behind the H-E-B grocery, where the kids rode their skateboards off the loading docks, then drove over to the junior high, then past the Lazy Acres trailer park and into the neighborhood of bungalows south of the school. The lousy, familiar sense of how wide open the world was. And a constant, dreamlike readjustment: He was looking for Griff, not Justin. Cecil tried to pop his knuckles again, but they were still limber. Rainbow circled herself, dropped to the seat. He watched for movement outside the truck, anticipating how he’d brake or accelerate or swing a U-turn when he caught sight of the boy. The feeling he had was one of false calm, a fleeting sense of lassitude. It was like the eye of a hurricane. The last four years had been the first wall and soon, after this current stillness collapsed, they’d get hit with the storm’s second, harsher side. The dirty wall, it was called. The one that uprooted trees and twisted off roofs and turned cement foundations to mud.
Briefly, it occurred to Cecil that whatever was happening might have nothing to do with Justin. Maybe something had gone horridly wrong at summer school. People regularly told Cecil what a fine teacher his son was, and Eric had won a teaching prize from the school district, so maybe there was a crisis they needed his help to sort out. Maybe the dolphin in Corpus had died, and Laura had lost herself again. But these possibilities lacked ballast. Cecil had known this day would come; he assumed they all had, though they seemed to have a tacit agreement not to give voice to such inevitability. And he’d known the day would come when they’d lower their guards, when they’d begin to allow themselves to believe the draining heat was their worst trouble. That was the inconceivable and debilitating shock: You could grow accustomed to what had once seemed so miserable and alien. You could feel a foreign presence in your body, endure the pain and deep threat of it, and not notice as it turned to bone.
And he knew that most everyone believed Justin was dead. For some, the belief had taken hold four years ago when word of an unaccompanied minor going missing first spread—when they saw the initial flyers posted in shop windows, when the call for search party volunteers was first broadcast, when the vanished boy’s mother fell apart on the evening news. For others, the resignation came gradually, insidiously, like a slow leak. Cecil watched it happen. As each year passed, the town’s awareness of the vanished Campbell boy grew more and more faint, thinning into nothingness, until people remembered only that they’d forgotten about him. Yes, the memory surfaced every year when the Southport Sun marked the anniversary of his disappearance. And yes, people would recall him when they happened upon one of his broken parents wearing a shirt with Justin’s picture on it—HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—and when they glimpsed Griff skateboarding alone in the drained pool at the Teepee Motel, but Cecil knew the jolts of memory only preceded the inevitable assumption that Justin had died. Some felt sure he’d drowned, and some thought he’d been killed—by a stranger or a family member or Ronnie Dawes. All of it sickened Cecil. Worse still, he suspected people found a peculiar relief in thinking Justin was gone for good. He hated them for it.
He was out by the rut roads and stilt houses when the hourly news update came through the radio. Cecil braked in the middle of the two-lane road, then pulled onto the shell shoulder and turned up the volume. His heart was rubbery in his chest, thick and heavy as a hot water bottle. He closed his eyes and concentrated until he got an image of Connie, his habit when he was afraid. His version of prayer.
There was a report of backed-up northbound traffic on the Harbor Bridge in Corpus, and the National Weather Service had issued a drought warning. Tomorrow the heat index would reach 108.
When the music started up again, he whipped the truck around to head back toward the marina. Rainbow raised her eyes to him, but not her head.
“We’re not thinking,” he said, accelerating.
4
LAURA SAT SIDEWAYS ON THE BENCH SEAT IN THEIR TRUCK. She’d taken off her seat belt, or she’d never put it on, and she watched her husband drive. The truck was vibrating, shaking, the speedometer needle tilting toward eighty, eighty-five. Eric had both hands on the top of the wheel. He looked like
a man begging for food. They were descending the Harbor Bridge, dropping down into Corpus. The windows were open. The cab was full of wind and noise and the cloying odor of the ship channel below. Some of her hair had come out of her ponytail. It was swirling around, blinding her, whipping into her mouth. She couldn’t tell if she’d stopped crying.
“You need to wear your seat belt,” he said. His voice was weighted with the drawling accent that emerged only when he was nervous. He’d always hated his accent. She’d always loved it.
Then the truck was swerving around a sedan—it seemed they were on ice, seemed they were in free fall—and Eric was laying on the horn. Laura grabbed the seat and dashboard; she felt the tendons stiffen in her wrists. The truck jostled. She thought she would vomit.
“Do you think this—”
“Please,” he said. “Your seat belt. Please.”
She twisted to face forward, reached awkwardly over her shoulder for the seat belt, buckled it. A scattered feeling in her arms, a rattling along her nerves. Her thoughts still couldn’t gain purchase in her mind. She had the sense that she couldn’t be trusted, that she was going to come unglued and let everyone down. She couldn’t remember what she’d already asked, what he’d already answered. Her hair, like sand lashing her face.
“Should I call someone?” she asked.
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Your father?”
“I left a message at Loan Star. He’ll pick up Griff. I said no computer or TV or radio.”
Griff. Lobster. She’d forgotten about her younger son, completely and ruthlessly, and hearing his name stopped her heart. Occasionally, to punish herself over the years, to exact a new pain that would distract and focus her, she’d tried to imagine that it was Griff, not Justin, who had gone missing. She tried to imagine how she would answer if she’d been forced to choose which child to lose. There was no answer, of course, no redeeming logic to any of it. Now, in the truck, she was freezing, shivering under her skin, a hard coil of ice between her eyes, dripping into her throat.
“I don’t know what to do right now,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing to prepare.”
“Stay calm. We don’t know the lay of the land.”
He honked the horn again, hit the brakes and then accelerated. A car had come into their lane.
“Tell me again what he said,” Laura said. “I want to know everything. It was the DA this time?”
“He said we needed to get to Corpus. He said things were happening. He said there’d be more to know when we got there. Remember, they won’t—”
“I know,” she said.
They’d been summoned to Corpus before. Early on, the trips had been frequent, and seemingly replete with promise, though they never knew what awaited them. The sheriff’s office wouldn’t betray any vital information on the phone, and neither would the district attorney’s; they worried about litigation, worried there’d be an accident and the city would be held liable. It was infuriating, demoralizing. On one occasion, Eric and Laura had been asked to meet with a runaway who somewhat matched Justin’s description. Two other times, they’d had to view the bodies of adolescent boys—one had overdosed and the other had been hit by a car—and make sure neither was Justin.
Now she said, “Did he sound upset? Sad? Did he sound happy? Remember, that one time you could tell it wasn’t good news. The time with the boy who’d been hit—”
“He sounded rushed, just rushed. We lost the connection, got cut off. Then a few minutes later he called back and told me to park in the back.”
“It might be another body. Or a runaway. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“We just need to keep our heads. We need to stay composed.”
“Where were you?”
Eric checked his mirror, then his blind spot. He swerved into the passing lane without signaling. He said, “Do what?”
“When he called, where were you?”
“School. I was just leaving school.”
“Okay,” she said. “That makes sense.”
They were off the bridge now, slowing down and curving into Corpus. The world was quieting. The sense Laura had was that they’d crossed a threshold and they’d soon cross another. This is when it happens, she thought, on a Wednesday afternoon when you’re wearing a button-down shirt that smells of dead fish. She smoothed her hair. It was wild, sticky, and blown out. She wanted to retie her ponytail before they reached the police station—they were just blocks away, she knew from all the previous trips—but Eric reached for her hand, took it into his. He was trembling a little, like he’d been straining too hard, like they were in an airplane that was about to take off or go down.
5
GRIFF DIDN’T KNOW IF FIONA MOORE WAS HIS GIRLFRIEND. Last Saturday night, while he was skating the curb at Whataburger on Station Street, she’d sauntered across the parking lot and said, “I need your help with matters of the heart.” Then she led him by the hand around the building and, without a word, kissed him hard and long against the dumpster. He didn’t understand what was happening; she almost seemed angry with him. His eyes closed. The dumpster smelled of old food, acrid and rotting and metallic. Her mouth was sugary, but also tasted of something sharper; maybe she’d spiked her Coke with rum again. Then the ugly food odor fell away and he inhaled the faint and familiar scent of her perfume, the sweat in her hair. He thought he could hear the sounds of the marina a mile away: the heave and slosh of the waves against the pylons, the hollow clanging of cables hitting the masts of docked sailboats. When she was finished, Fiona bit the tip of his nose and skipped back into the restaurant. Griff stayed where he was, trembling. His first kiss.
That night, he had gone home and stared at her class photo for an hour, thinking You just kissed me. Now the school annual lay like a dirty magazine between his mattress and box spring. Most everything she wore was black. She’d covered the windows in her room with tinfoil to block out the sun, and then the next day she’d done the same to Griff’s. She was a member of the National Honor Society who’d gotten a week of detention after a teacher caught her writing I PUT THE SENSUAL IN NONCONSENSUAL on the bathroom wall. She loved Halloween, hated Christmas. Fiona was old enough to drive, two years older than Griff and a few months older than Justin would have been, but she rode her bicycle everywhere. The bike reminded him of the kind characters rode in black-and-white movies—wicker basket behind her seat, squeeze horn on the handlebars. When Griff had asked why she didn’t take her driving test and get a car, she said, “Because I like to smell the world.” Ever since, he’d been helpless with love.
Until Saturday night, they’d just been friends. She towed him on his skateboard with her bike. They went to the beach to make fun of the sunbathers and catch hermit crabs; they’d let the crabs crawl over their backs until the chills were too much to bear. They closed themselves off in one or the other’s blacked-out room and talked about how much they hated Southport, about strange or sad things their parents had done, about Justin. Fiona had been in his grade. She’d once admitted to having had a crush on Justin, and Griff felt not jealousy but a pulse of embarrassing recognition. He realized that ever since his brother had been gone he’d nursed something of a crush on him, too. He pined for him. He both avoided and invoked his name, sometimes in the same conversation; Fiona, he’d noticed, did the same thing. They filled up shopping carts with odd combinations of items at H-E-B grocery, then abandoned them, and they sneaked into the pool at Villa Del Sol. They spent so much time together that everyone already assumed they were hooking up. One bright afternoon, riding her bike past the Teepee Motel, where he and some other skaters were carving around the drained pool, she shouted Griff’s name and when everyone looked, she lifted her shirt and flashed her lacy black bra.
But the guys she went out with were older—college kids from Corpus, a pilot from the air base in Kingsville, a Coast Guard cadet who rode his motorcycle around Southport and whose tattooed arms were roped
with muscle. She called them her “lovers,” a word Griff had never heard anyone else use. Fiona grew tired of them quickly, then acted put-upon until someone else swept her up. She confided everything to Griff in her room. He listened, nodded, tried to offer advice that both was sound and made him appear desirable. She cried. She chewed her nails. A month ago, after she’d broken up with the cadet, she’d asked Griff why she couldn’t just have him as her boyfriend and when he said she could, she rolled her eyes and said, “In my wet dreams.” Then she went to swipe rum from her parents’ liquor cabinet and left him alone in her room. Immediately, he peeled off his socks, doused them with her perfume, then stuffed them in his backpack. Smell you later, he thought. The socks had mostly stayed in the back of his closet, in a Ziploc bag behind the two fishbowls housing his old rock collection. Now they were with his yearbook under his mattress. His room was starting to smell like a girl’s.
And yet they’d barely talked since she’d kissed him on Saturday night. His calls had gone unreturned. He’d floated through the first part of the week in a fog of ecstasy and paranoia. His foot seemed to constantly be tapping against the floor, and moments came when he felt like he’d concocted the whole fantasy. When he felt like he was dissolving. When he felt like he could run full tilt for miles. His parents thought he was coming down with something, so finally, on Tuesday evening, he said his stomach hurt. Not a complete lie. For days, he’d felt ravenous but lost his appetite when he started to eat. He’d tried to distract himself with skating and videogames, but nothing worked. He would remember how she’d moaned, how right before the kiss ended, she’d gently touched their mouths with her fingers, traced the inside of his lips. How she could do that and not want to talk with him every waking moment—for that matter, how she could sleep at all—baffled him. He worried she’d done it because she was drunk or had lost a bet with her girlfriends. He worried he’d botched the whole thing with poor technique. He’d always assumed he’d be a bad kisser.
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