In those first days, Eric was stunned. There seemed a hallucinatory quality to such abiding relief. Moments came when he was so unburdened as to feel weightless: when he saw that Justin still cut pancakes with his fork rather than a knife; when he overheard his boys staging a burping contest in Griff’s room; when Laura took his hand and quietly led him down the hall to show him something private. She nudged Justin’s door open, but Eric didn’t immediately grasp what he was supposed to see. “The bed,” she whispered. Then he understood. The comforter was wadded at the footboard, the top sheet twisted tight and draping to the floor, the feather pillow wedged between the headboard and mattress. The bed hadn’t been used in four years, so to see it now in such beautiful disarray was to gaze on the meaning of their lives, the scope of love itself. Laura said, “I’ll get the camera.”
There were changes, of course. Justin’s voice was deepening, barnacled with the raspy climb from youth to adolescence. He was taller, more filled out; he took up more space. The house felt smaller, gorgeously contracted and compressed, with him home. If he was coming down the hall, Eric leaned back into a doorway to let him pass. (He also reached to touch some part of him—his shoulder or hair or forearm. Laura did, too. They were incapable of not reaching for him.) He’d become lactose-intolerant, developed a taste for black coffee. Although nothing had been moved since he’d been gone—to scoot the couch three inches would have been blasphemous—Justin had to ask where they kept the towels, the garbage bags, the cereal that he liked to eat straight from the box now. He was more courteous, deferential. Before, he could be lazy with his chores; more than once he’d had his television and videogame privileges suspended for not washing the dishes; he’d had his skateboard taken away for not changing Rainbow’s water. Now he offered, without fail, to help clean the kitchen after meals. He carried himself like a grateful guest, someone hoping to make a good impression and be invited back. (Griff almost immediately started following his brother’s lead, straightening his room and taking out the trash without being told.) Justin squinted a lot, which made Eric wonder if he needed glasses. It also recalled for him how, as a child, Justin couldn’t wink. He’d close both eyes. Suddenly, in Eric’s memory, his son was always trying to wink. He limped occasionally, or he walked in a pigeon-toed way, so his gait could be slightly slow, slightly awkward, as if he were walking with his shoelaces knotted together. Nothing about the limp had come up in his medical exam; he was in surprisingly good condition, though he’d complained about a toothache, which the doctor could clearly identify as a cavity. If Justin really liked something, he deemed it sick. “These are sick,” he’d said the night Eric made everyone silver dollar pancakes for supper. “They’re the sickest thing I’ve ever tasted.”
His sleep schedule was upended. He had yet to fall asleep before the tops of the trees were dappled with morning sun, and then he slept until late afternoon or early evening. Twice he’d stepped bleary-eyed from his room just as the three of them were finishing supper. He apologized, and although Eric and Laura assured him there was no need, he promised to do better. But each night, lying in bed, Eric and Laura listened to him move through the house. They heard Rainbow padding behind him, heard the toilet flush and the faucet run, heard the television buzzing on and the volume being hastily lowered. For the first couple of nights they crept sheepishly into the living room and asked if he needed anything, but ever since, worried that he’d feel undue pressure, they stayed in bed, pretending to sleep. Eric remembered the strain he’d felt those first nights when, as a toddler, Justin first began sleeping alone in the nursery. He remembered how not going to his son when he was awake and crying seemed as inconceivable as not drawing breath.
“Is it still insomnia if he sleeps during the day?” Laura asked in bed on Saturday night. Eric lay behind her, his hand lightly on her hip. They were listening to Justin make a sandwich in the kitchen. The knife swirling in the mayo jar was like music.
“His schedule will even out soon enough,” Eric said.
“Insomnia can come from fear. Our minds won’t shut off. We’re reduced to our animal selves, too alert to sleep. We’re afraid we’ll be eaten. I read about it in one of my books.”
“He’ll get back on track.”
“He must’ve been so scared.”
“He’s safe now. We all are.”
A cupboard door squeaked in the kitchen. For a year, Eric had meant to WD-40 the hinges; now he knew he’d been right to neglect them. The sound confirmed that his son was alive, a healthy boy looking for a glass for juice.
Laura said, “Dolphins never sleep, not fully. They’re always at least half awake. Each side of their brain sleeps at different times.”
“Because they’re afraid?”
“No,” she said sweetly, proudly, taking his hand and rolling into his arm like a blanket. “Because they’re smart.”
The next day, Eric drove the boys by the Teepee Motel—Griff wanted to show Justin the drained pool and to make sure the coping hadn’t been stolen—and then they went to pick up Whataburgers. In the drive-thru, the cashier gave them their order for free. It was something that had been happening to Eric: When he’d gone to the wireless store to buy Justin a cell phone, the manager gave Eric two high-end phones for free (the second was for Griff, so he wouldn’t be jealous) and waived the activation charges. When Eric went through the checkout at H-E-B, the old couple behind him insisted on buying his groceries. When he returned Laura’s library books, the librarian cleared all of her late fees. He tried to decline the offers, but it was clear his refusal would have been an affront. “We appreciate you thinking of us,” he’d finally say. At Whataburger, he was about to thank the cashier when she glanced over her shoulder and passed a paper napkin and pen through the window: Justin’s autograph. Eric thought she was joking, but then when he saw she wasn’t, he was appalled. He was about to pull forward, park, and complain to the manager, but Justin calmly took the napkin and signed his name, using the pickup’s dashboard as a desk.
“Dad, it’s fine,” he said, sounding more annoyed with Eric than with the cashier. His signature was spiky, like the logo of a heavy metal band. It wasn’t handwriting Eric recognized.
As they pulled forward and turned onto Station Street, Griff said, “You’re famous. That’s so sick.”
Justin shrugged, then pushed his straw through the plastic lid on his Coke. Eric steered into the sun. He drove slowly, carefully, as if he’d just avoided an accident.
HIS NAME WAS DWIGHT BUFORD. HE HAD BEEN BORN AND raised outside Dallas, and he’d lived for some five years in Flour Bluff, a stripped-down stilt-house section of Corpus Christi. He was unmarried and had no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. So far, he’d been charged with one count of the Class A felony of kidnapping, though more charges were expected. He was being held on a one-million-dollar bond.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Garcia had told Eric and Laura. “Not on my watch.”
They didn’t know what he looked like, and for Eric, not being able to fix an image of him in his mind was menacing. Sometimes he pictured him as obese and towering. Sometimes he appeared gaunt and wiry, his face made up of gruesome angles, concave cheeks and eyes. The first time they’d see him would be Friday morning when Buford’s arraignment was broadcast on television and streamed on the Internet. The proceeding weighed on Eric; it seemed a cliff toward which his family was being inevitably—powerlessly—borne. A search of Buford’s apartment in Flour Bluff had yielded weapons—pistols and rifles and knives. There were duct tape and a saggy cardboard box of pornographic VHS movies and rope and a pair of handcuffs. Cases of generic soda and shelves of empty aquariums with algae-smudged glass. Videogame consoles, a karaoke machine, a miniature foosball table. When Eric imagined the apartment, the light was soupy and dust-heavy. The air smelled of turpentine.
Garcia had shared what he knew with Eric and Laura, but he betrayed considerably less at the press conference. It took place in Corpus on the steps of
the Nueces County Courthouse; Eric, Laura, Griff, and Cecil watched on television at home while Justin was still asleep. Just then his lopsided sleep schedule seemed a blessing; they could watch without fear of burdening or hurting him. When reporters asked pointed questions, Garcia claimed Texas rules of ethics prohibited him from discussing specific details of an open investigation. Good, Eric thought. Very good. The discrepancy of information, the void between what Garcia offered the public and what he’d confided to Eric and Laura, seemed vital. Empowering. Hopeful. Eric could imagine teams of detectives and lawyers being deployed, gathering unassailable evidence, devising legal traps and strategies; the mechanisms of the law, the relentless logic of the process by which justice is meted out, were inspiring. Even innocuous information seemed damaging if Garcia withheld it from reporters. Buford’s parents were retired and living just outside Southport; they docked a boat, a thirty-two-footer named Oil-n-Water, at the marina; Buford was a registered Republican; he was a few credits shy of an associate’s degree in business—all of this weakened Buford in Eric’s mind. Knowing what Buford didn’t know they knew was fortifying. Even that Garcia was the only person to appear on camera at the press conference, that he’d denied everyone but the family the opportunity to gaze upon Justin, seemed a sign of strength and confidence. It seemed something they were lording over Buford. When a reporter asked when they might glimpse Justin, Garcia said, “Our office’s primary objective is a successful prosecution. Yours is to grant that boy some privacy. They’ve all been through enough.”
Eric was nodding emphatically, as if at church.
AT SCHOOL ON MONDAY, ERIC’S STUDENTS PRESENTED HIM with a WELCOME HOME poster for Justin: a lime green background and a pasted newspaper photo of Justin’s billboard with the word FOUND spray-painted across his image. Above the clipping were the words TEXAS HISTORY IS MADE! and around them were the kids’ signatures. Some of the students brought cards and presents from their parents—gift certificates to the Castaway Café, plates of cookies, bags of tamales. He tried to act professional, lecturing on Santa Anna and Sam Houston and assigning a chapter on the Battle of San Jacinto for the next class, but it was no use; his every thought veered back to Justin. He started to feel that beautiful weightlessness again. “You should just let us go early, Mr. Campbell,” Clarence Ogden said. “Justin probably wants to see you more than we do.” So he did. In the hallways, teachers went out of their way to shake his hand, clap his back.
When he wasn’t teaching, and while Justin slept in, Eric ran errands. He swung by the pawnshop and brought home a bigger aquarium for the mice Laura had decided to keep as pets; she’d named them Willie and Waylon. Eric and Cecil drove to Marine Lab and retrieved Laura’s car, then stopped in Portland for fruit cups dusted in chili powder—a treat the boys had always loved. The running around afforded him a feeling of usefulness, just as hanging the flyers had before, and whenever he returned home there always seemed a new development. (Again, those early days of fatherhood came back, days when his sons seemed to grow an inch in an hour, learn five new words in the time it took him to mow the yard.) The governor’s office sent a small palm tree and a signed card, welcoming Justin home. Another five bouquets of flowers and balloons arrived, another ten. Another slew of stuffed animals. A producer from CNN called, and Laura had kindly asked the woman where the fuck she’d been four years ago when they’d begged in vain for airtime. She made a dentist appointment for Justin and set up his counseling with a social worker in Corpus named Letty Villarreal. He’d have two sessions next week, and then they’d meet once a week indefinitely. On Wednesday afternoon, an animal control officer from Corpus dropped off Justin’s gray rat snake. She was four feet long with slate-colored patches running down her back. When Justin woke that evening, he set up her aquarium and heat lamp on his dresser, adjacent to the mice. He outfitted the tank with pieces from his old rock collection. The snake’s name was Sasha. Laura took a picture of her slithering into Justin’s shirt, his face gorgeously scrunched, as if someone was tickling him.
To Eric’s surprise, the press respected Garcia’s request and largely left the family alone. He and Laura had both seen a photographer circling the block, each on separate occasions, and a handful of reporters left messages and sent emails requesting interviews, but that was all. Laura said she remembered reading about photographers posing as deliverymen, how they would come inside the house with packages and floral arrangements and then take pictures with cameras shaped like pens, but they were spared any such intrusion. If anyone was being hounded, it seemed to be Buford’s parents, the district manager of his newspaper route, and his neighbors at the Bay Breeze Suites in Flour Bluff. They said he was quiet and distant. They said they were horrified. They slammed doors in the reporters’ faces, covered the camera lenses with their palms.
Laura was staying home from work. She’d also canceled her shifts at Marine Lab. Maternity leave, she called it. She worked around the house, dusting and waxing, opening windows to air out the rooms. She packed away the excess flyers, the MISSING buttons and T-shirts, the postcard from California that had been magneted to the refrigerator door. She returned calls and wrote thank-you notes, cards she left out for Eric and Justin to sign after supper. Griff filled Hefty bags with the stuffed animals people sent. When enough time had passed, Eric would deliver them to the children’s hospital in Corpus. Laura fried chicken and baked casseroles so Justin would have food to nibble on during the night. She called Eric to say Justin was still sleeping—something she’d also done when the boys were infants, when sleep was a scarce commodity—so she and Griff were going to wash her car in the driveway. Another time, they did a jigsaw puzzle together. Another, they tried to tie-dye some shirts, but everything just came out purple. They did anything they could to pass the long hours until he stepped out of his room, rubbing his eyes, smiling.
Once Justin emerged, it was as if all the lights in the house had been thrown on. Eric wasn’t yet accustomed to seeing him again, and everything that his son came into contact with seemed to radiate, to shine in new and pure ways. What he understood now was that a stillness had crept into the house over the years—the tamped-down carpet, the scrim of dust that blurred the television screen—and he noticed it now because the stillness was gone, supplanted by a fresh energy. His vision was keen, his mind precise. If Justin recognized how he restored his father, he didn’t let on. He cupped his hands around his coffee mug, asked what everyone had been doing while he slept. He would also ask about things he’d remembered overnight: What ever happened with Mrs. Harrison, the fourth-grade teacher who ate chalk? What about Tommy Benavides, the bully from grade school? When did the Teepee go under? His reactions were measured and opaque, but not uninvested. Even when they told him that Johnny and Jason Holland, his old best friends, had moved from Southport three years ago, Justin was unfazed. It was simply that nothing seemed to surprise him now.
“Keeps his cards close to the vest,” Cecil had said. He’d always valued reticence, the strong contours of silence, and because his father could, Eric tried to find respite in his son’s polite shyness. Most evenings, Cecil stopped by after work. He brought videogames and DVDs the boys might like from the pawnshop. One night they had to help him in with a thirty-gallon aquarium, an upgrade for Sasha. Fiona, her hair now shockingly green, would usually arrive as they were clearing the dinner table. Each night she brought some kind of present with her. A lemon pie, a book on sharks for Laura, a jug of Miracle-Gro for the plants that were overtaking the rooms. There was hardly a flat surface in the house that didn’t host a vase or pot. “It’s like living in the Amazon,” Justin had said.
On Wednesday, two days before the arraignment, Fiona brought a Trivial Pursuit board game and set it up on the kitchen table to play after eating. Eric couldn’t remember a time when the house had felt so full, so refreshingly loud with familiar voices. Fiona usually stayed until nine or so, when Griff would walk her home. They always invited Justin, but he was yet to accompany
them.
“It’s weird to see him with a girlfriend,” Justin said after they left. “I guess a lot’s changed.”
“Not the important things,” Laura said. “No one touched the things that matter. No one.”
EXACTLY WHEN THE FIRST TREMORS OF INSECURITY SEIZED HIM, Eric couldn’t say. Most likely they’d been dormant in his blood since he’d first seen Justin in the police station, but now he’d started noticing the porosity of his relief. Maybe the first symptoms had come when Laura offhandedly said, “You know who we haven’t heard from yet? That nice Tracy Robichaud. Do you ever run into her anymore?” Or when she said, “I just wonder what was happening in the world. I want to know what everyone was doing. Somewhere, someone was washing his car. Someone else was making some horrible mistake.” Maybe it was knowing that Dwight Buford would enter his plea on Friday morning. Or maybe as Eric grew more accustomed to seeing Justin, he grew less capable of ignoring what his son had suffered through. The pain Justin had endured, the fear and neglect and ruining shame, shadowed Eric’s every thought. It was a kind of quicksand, a constant threat that emptied every promise from the bottom up. How disgusting, how humiliating, to realize that he was afraid to be alone with his son. They had, he saw now, hardly spent more than a few moments by themselves, and shamefully, Eric understood he’d always been the one to ensure that someone else was around—Laura or Griff or Cecil. He didn’t know what scared him, but he felt the fear between them like an electric current.
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