It had been different with Griff. When he and Fiona had started closing themselves in his room, she’d been nothing but proud. Laura assumed better mothers would have been concerned or offended, but it was all she could do not to congratulate him. Either she or Eric would have The Talk with him soon, and the prospect left her giddy. Not so with Justin. She felt preoccupied, slighted, taken aback. Threatened? Maybe threatened. Probably she was just being petty, enduring some hurt because Justin had confided in his brother rather than her. Hadn’t there been a time when he told her everything—how he and Shane Rutherford found a toad on the playground, how he wished he had blue eyes, how lemons didn’t taste the way he wanted them to? The idea had ballast in her mind, but it was also lacking. Something else bothered her. Then, on Monday morning while everyone was getting ready for the day in Corpus, she realized what it was: When she’d last seen Justin, girls were strange, prissy creatures to be avoided—a flash of memory: hadn’t he, one evening, asked her to marry him?—so the fact that he’d returned having had a girlfriend was the sorriest, most irrefutable proof of how long he’d been gone.
She had thought she understood this. Those four years—the six inches he’d grown, the forty extra pounds—were the reason his old clothes no longer fit, the reason they were going to the mall to replace them. Those four years had gutted her family. How could she not understand such hideous gravity? Everywhere she looked, the absolute and crushing weight of the past. At times, she’d been bloated with sadness, leaden and unmovable. Other times, she would have sworn she was a sieve. Some days she’d felt swaddled in burlap so that every sight and sound came to her blurred and muffled and diluted by loss, and then, without warning, the tiniest sound would tear at her eardrums and the softest light would singe her eyes. This had been her life, wrestling with hope and hell until she’d come to think they were one and the same. Whoever believed hope was a gift had never lost a son. For four years, she was sure she’d known the emptiness of pretending, of feigning faith, the masquerade of appearing whole, and yet now she felt blindsided. And, yes, fine, she felt jealous, too—jealous of the girl, whoever she was, and jealous of Dwight Buford, who’d seen her son fall in love for the first time, who’d seen him blush and snicker when the girl started coming around. Did the three of them watch television together? Did Justin hold the girl’s hand on the couch? (Laura had been waiting to spy on Griff and Fiona holding hands or pecking each other goodbye on the cheek. It was thrilling, like watching for a rare bird.) On his birthdays, did she bake him cakes, write him poems, ask Buford to snap pictures of them? A girlfriend, she thought. Of all things.
What else didn’t she yet know? What would she never know? There seemed too much, and the depth of her ignorance, the force and expanse of it, made her want to rip her hair out in bloody clumps. Now that she knew he’d had a girlfriend, Laura knew she’d failed him there, too, having never once conceived of the possibility on her own. Just as she’d failed to find him when he’d been so close all along. If I were him, she thought, I’d slap me across the face. I’d turn and walk away, leaving me alone again. That’s what I deserve. She wanted to scream, to break every plate in the cupboard, to kneel at Justin’s feet and beg for forgiveness.
On Monday, after they left him at Garcia’s office, Laura spent too much money at the mall. She bought Justin a new wardrobe, and Griff picked out a better skateboard for him. Each time she checked out at a store, Eric leered at the cash register total; she told him they’d return what Justin didn’t want, but he probably knew better. Eventually, he went to roam the mall with Griff. “Call me when we’re broke,” he’d joked, then kissed her on the lips, which she took as license to spend more. She bought a bed-in-a-bag set for Justin, backpacks for him and his brother, and eel-skin billfolds for Eric and Cecil. She bought a heated rock for Sasha. She bought and bought and bought. At one point, a cashier ran her credit card and before the charge could be approved, she had to call Visa so Laura could assure the bank that her card hadn’t been stolen and she was responsible for the shopping spree. On the way home, everyone rode with bags on their laps.
“Did y’all win the lottery while I was gone?” Justin asked, sounding half-serious.
“You needed new clothes,” Laura said.
He adjusted the bag on his lap.
“Different things for different occasions,” she said. “I wanted you to have plenty of options.”
“Mission accomplished,” he said, and Laura saw Eric and Griff trying not to smile.
“I just thought it would feel nice to put on fresh clothes, things that fit,” she said. “Whatever you don’t like, we can return. I saved the receipts.”
“No,” he said. “Everything looks cool. Thanks, Mom.”
Maybe he was placating her, or maybe how much she’d spent would become a joke among the three of them in her absence. She didn’t know. She’d thought buying as much as she had was unassailably right, and she was trying to hold on to such thinking, but Justin’s reaction was undermining her. She wondered if he’d ever gone clothes shopping with his girlfriend.
After another mile, Justin opened a bag of clothes and stuck his face inside. He looked like someone bobbing for apples. Laura and Eric exchanged glances, then looked at Griff, but none of them understood what was happening. Justin took his head out of the bag, as if he were coming up for breath, then went in again.
Griff said, “What are you doing?”
“Inhaling,” Justin said. “I’d forgotten how things could smell so new.”
JUSTIN MET WITH GARCIA AGAIN ON WEDNESDAY, AND WITH Letty Villarreal, the social worker, on Tuesday and Thursday. Both the attorney and the social worker said spending more time with him early in the process was imperative. The goal was to have him tell the entirety of his story multiple times, to multiple people, and then once they had a sense of its scope, they could direct him to delve into the minutiae, the wrenching details. It repulsed Laura, as did her own dreadful curiosity about what he was sharing. She and Eric would meet with Letty on Friday, and eventually they would also be deposed, though possibly that wouldn’t happen until much closer to the trial. “Right now,” Garcia said, “your job is just to sit tight and get him to these appointments on time.” After each meeting, Garcia’s sleeves were rolled to his elbows and his collar was unbuttoned. He looked winded.
What words, she wondered, did her son have to utter in these meetings? What language formed in his mind? What vile combination of letters was he forced to hold in his mouth and then spit out? She worried it was all too intense, too draining and agonizing, and she watched Justin for signs that she should step in and call off the whole business, but each afternoon he emerged from the offices undaunted, almost more refreshed than before. Like he’d been swimming. Like he’d jumped off the high dive. Maybe he found the unburdening cathartic. Maybe, bless his heart, he understood that his efforts, however difficult, however taxing, could make a difference not just for his case but for others in the future. Or maybe it was all a sweet and stoic disguise, a courtesy to them. (Did you wear disguises when you went to play bingo? When you went fishing?) She had no idea. Every day there seemed more she didn’t know. There seemed pieces of her son that would be lost to her forever, irrecoverable, and their absence was galling. What a peculiar and dislocating feeling to realize your teenage son knew what you never would.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, she and Eric picked Justin up together, and then Eric had a faculty meeting on Thursday, so Laura chauffeured him alone. The opportunity felt like a reward that she’d earned, that shouldn’t be squandered. She wore a butter-colored sundress and a lavender cardigan, hoping to appear sunny. Before she left, Griff had said she looked like an Easter egg; he’d meant it to flatter her. Despite the heat, she wore her hair down. She arrived early and paced the hallways, readying herself to appear upbeat when Letty’s door opened. Smile, she thought. Exude optimism. She brainstormed things to do before returning to Southport—throw pennies in the arcing fountains at the Water
Gardens, or tour the USS Lexington or the Columbus ships in the harbor. They could stop at the tamale truck under the Harbor Bridge. They could go to Cole Park or walk along the seawall. They could just drive and talk. No denying the anticipation that Justin might confide or explain some unknown piece of his life, that he might grant her some private access to his tortured heart, but Laura believed there was also a selflessness motivating her. She hoped so.
Justin wanted to go to a pet store. He needed a mouse for Sasha. It was going on a month since she’d eaten. “And now that we’re keeping the other ones as pets,” he said flatly in the car. Laura was trying to find her way to Shoreline Boulevard or Ocean Drive, navigating various one-way streets that all seemed to send her in the wrong direction. She was feeling turned around and rushed. And she thought he sounded upset with her, critical of her having grown attached to the mice. She was trying to remember a pet store in Corpus that might sell mice; it wasn’t something she’d ever considered. Of course the first place that occurred to her was the flea market where he’d been found, but it wasn’t open on Thursdays. Immediately she recognized this as a blessing. Nothing good could come of him returning there.
Once they were out of downtown—she’d been driving parallel to Shoreline all along, and eventually found a residential street that conveyed them onto Ocean Drive—she remembered Pampered Pets on the south side of Corpus. “Would they have them?” she asked Justin.
“They usually do,” he said.
She followed the lazy S curve, watched the lean palms stream by. Later, the implications of Justin’s answer would fester in her mind: He’d been there before. The snippy old women who ran the store would have interacted with them, would have taken his or Buford’s money in exchange for feeder mice without understanding that he was in trouble. Later, she would try to remember why they hadn’t posted a flyer in the store, and she would decide for no good reason that the fault had been hers and it would feel like countless fishhooks piercing her lungs. But driving along Ocean now, she was safe, enjoying a swell of pride because she’d suggested a viable store.
The palm trees gave way to condominiums and sprawling homes behind brick fences. She said, “Was today okay?”
He nodded. He was wearing the sunglasses she’d bought for him at the mall, a shirt and cargo shorts, too. He said, “They’re saying they might go after the death penalty.”
There had been speculation about this on the news and in the paper, but she hadn’t given it much consideration. She knew Eric hoped they’d turn it into a capital case. Cecil, too. Laura was ambivalent. Whether Buford lived or died didn’t matter to her. She’d already gotten the only end result she needed.
They passed Cole Park and the fishing pier. She said, “Do you have feelings about that?”
“Him getting the death penalty? I think it’d be sweet. It’d be sick.”
Laura turned right onto Everhart Road. She knew there was something to say here, but didn’t know what it was. The subject seemed treacherous, not one she wanted to burden either of them with this afternoon. She wanted levity and sweet confessions; she wanted him to compliment her hair again, and she wanted to say she loved him and to hear him say it back. She wanted to hear about his girlfriend.
Pampered Pets was out of feeder mice, and so were PetSmart and Petco. None of the workers could explain the shortage, but each of them told her to check back in a couple of weeks after their next shipment. Justin stayed in the car at each stop, and Laura never went any deeper into the stores than she had to; she always kept the car in view. Not finding a mouse felt like a personal failure, and her head started to pound as she tried to think of another pet store to try.
“We can go to Aransas Pass. I think there’s a pet store out there. Maybe Rockport,” she said. They were outside of Corpus, heading home. “I remember we hung flyers in a place called Barks and More.”
“It’s okay. She’ll be fine for a while longer. Snakes can go months without eating.”
“We’ll go to Pampered next week. We can make an afternoon of it. I’ll make us a picnic lunch. We can eat by the Water Gardens.”
Justin said, “Garcia doesn’t think it will be a hard sell. He thinks a judge will go for it.”
“The death penalty?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“He’ll get what he deserves. There’s no doubting that. Either way, he won’t hurt anyone ever again.”
Justin’s eyes were fixed on something well beyond his window, the opaque bay or the sun-hazed outline of the Harbor Bridge. He stayed quiet as she drove. Then, without looking at her, he said, “Sometimes you have to thin the herd.”
“What’s that, honey?”
“It’s something he used to say when he’d read about someone getting executed. He’d always laugh.”
“Oh,” she said, her skin tensing. “Well, he’s probably not laughing now.”
“He might be,” Justin said, still looking away. “He might see all of this as one big joke.”
THAT NIGHT, SHE LAY AWAKE IN BED AGAIN. ERIC WAS ON HIS stomach, breathing evenly. He’d been more himself since the barbecue, and though she could still sense his nerves around Justin, he was doing a better job of masking it. She both admired and resented his progress. He seemed to have transcended what she’d suddenly found herself mired in, a bog of doubt. (Had he gotten himself out as a result of her getting pulled in? Exhausted, hovering between sleep and waking, she wondered.) The house was quiet, save for the air conditioner and ceiling fans, the constant hum that she could so easily mistake for silence.
Then, as if continuing a conversation they’d already started, she said, “I wonder where she was when they found him.”
“What’s that?” Eric said, his voice startled and sleep-heavy.
“His girlfriend. I wonder where she was when she learned the truth, learned he’d been rescued.”
“What time is it?” Eric said, rolling onto his back, deciding whether he needed to swing his feet onto the floor, if he’d overslept.
“Was she happy for him, do you think? Or was she just disappointed, so disappointed she couldn’t—”
“It’s two in the morning. Let’s talk about it tomorrow with the social worker.”
“She must have felt like we did. Like the world just opened up and swallowed him whole.”
Eric had already drifted off again, still on his back.
“The poor thing,” Laura said. “That poor brokenhearted thing.”
LETICIA “LETTY” VILLARREAL SPECIALIZED IN ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY. She didn’t have a Ph.D., but Laura had to stifle urges to call her Dr. Villarreal. Letty was a pear-shaped woman with a penchant for floral-print blouses and tightly curled bangs. Ivies and ferns crowded the windowsills in her office. Thick white binders bowed the bookshelves. She kept a jar of candy on her desk, suckers and jelly beans and gumballs, and a wicker basket in the corner of the room filled with toys and stuffed animals. Laura liked her. Letty laid her palms flat on her desk when she had something serious to say—Family reunification is a process, not a product, or Has either of you heard the term “Stockholm syndrome”? Traumatic bonding?—and she steepled her fingers while others spoke. She seemed smitten with Justin, devoted to caring for him in a genuine way. She seemed to hold in her mind both the pain he’d endured and the courage that such endurance required. Laura regularly wanted to hug her.
And that Letty was now in their lives made the extent of Justin’s abuse impossible to ignore. Sometimes the knowledge lit a scalding flare of anger behind her eyes. Other times, she was struck mute, no more capable of forming sentences than a woman who’d bitten off her own tongue. She was weak in the face of his suffering and weakened further by the necessity, the blood duty, of summoning strength. But it was as if her bones had been pulled through her skin, slid from her flesh one by one, until she was reduced to a formless puddle of herself. She was constantly shocked that no one seemed to notice how she’d diminished, how what remained of her was of no use.
On Friday, they dropped Justin at Garcia’s office for his appointment, then walked two blocks from the county courthouse to the social services building. Eric had polished his boots and tucked in his shirt before they left for Corpus, and Laura wore her dolphin pendant. She put her hair up in a bun. She carried a Moleskine notebook the way she used to carry her textbooks walking to school, clutched to her chest. The heat was sluggish, torpid. Humidity dragged on her skin. Her purse hung from her shoulder, bounced against her hip as she walked. She had to keep stopping so Eric could catch up.
Letty was misting a fern when they arrived. Laura said, “Mine always die. You’ll have to give me your secret.”
“Turner’s nursery,” Letty said, putting the water bottle in her desk drawer. She motioned for Laura and Eric to sit, then lowered herself into her chair. She said, “I buy a new one after I’ve drowned or starved the previous one. Same pots, different plants—that’s my secret.”
Laura liked the answer, liked how the candor put her at ease. She wondered if Justin felt a similar relaxing. She also wondered if any of the white binders on Letty’s shelves contained information about her son. Immediately, she had a fantasy of being left alone in the office and scouring the pages for an analysis of her son’s psyche, his symptoms and prognosis.
“So,” she said, “how’s the little man today? I imagine this week’s been a bear.”
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