Remember Me Like This

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  If Fiona wasn’t around and Eric and Justin were on a drive, Griff slipped off to skate the Teepee pool. He left soon after they did, skated for a half hour or so, then returned to shower and change before supper. When Justin and Eric got home, Griff was usually playing videogames or running with Rainbow in the backyard. (The backyard still pleased Eric. He could gaze at the grass and recall the smell of burning sparklers and hamburgers, the sound of everyone saying “Chickenshit.”) It was Laura who pointed out that Griff seemed to want to keep the skate sessions a secret from his brother. “Justin’s not ready for the pool yet,” she said. “Griff doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.” She was proud of Griff, a light timbre of satisfaction in her words, and hearing it, Eric experienced a lift, too. Griff’s discretion seemed evidence of how capable they had been as parents. Such sensitivity restored their confidence not just in their parenting but in an abiding decency that would see everyone through. Eric made sure Justin avoided the Teepee when they were out practicing.

  At school, the students and faculty had largely moved past Justin’s return. They still asked after him, but the kids were more concerned with tests being passed back and the teachers were focused on lesson plans for the following week, committees for the fall. Eric taught his students about Texas joining the Union, the King Ranch and the oil depression, and Judge Roy Bean. He assigned group projects that entailed students’ developing election campaigns for previous Texas governors based on what they knew of the politicians’ beliefs, policies, and events that happened during their tenures. It was an assignment he’d cooked up last summer, and as he distributed the handouts at the end of his Friday class, he was hit with how much life had changed in a year’s time. The notion was suddenly incomprehensible. Eric felt seized by something so inevitable, so mysterious and unexpected that it seemed almost divine. For a moment, he thought he would collapse. His vision started to tunnel. Don’t pass out, he thought, then worried he’d said it aloud. When the bell rang, the room came abruptly alive: Kids slid their chairs back from their desks and swung backpacks over their shoulders and moved toward the door in a long and loose huddle, squeezing into the hall, merging into the stream of students exiting the building. The door to Eric’s classroom closed behind the last student. The quiet was immediate and immense, interrupted only by the rapid squeak of sneakers on the tile floor—someone running to catch up with the others—and the distant echoed voices of a few teachers making for the parking lot.

  Eric usually walked out with the rest of the faculty, but today he took a seat behind his desk. His heart was racing and he’d broken out in a sweat. It was as though he’d outrun something and, now safe, needed to catch his breath. The poster his students had made him—TEXAS HISTORY IS MADE!—hung on the opposite wall. Even without Laura saying it, Eric knew she wanted the poster, knew she intended to laminate it and add it to her collection of cards and newspaper articles. A year ago, around the time he was devising the gubernatorial campaign assignment, she’d been hiding Valium and Xanax in her closet. One day when Laura was volunteering at Marine Lab, he’d gone to hang up a pair of jeans that had been draped over a chair for a week. When his elbow knocked one of her old purses down, the pill bottles came out of the bag like roaches. He’d been surprised at how unsurprised he was. He left a few pills in each bottle—not enough to do any damage—but flushed most of them down the toilet. For months, he’d been braced against the threat of her confronting him, but she never did. The purse had eventually disappeared from the closet.

  Footsteps in the hallway, the click of heels approaching and then passing his door, the murmur of voices rising and falling, people talking over each other. A woman laughed, maybe Mrs. Norrell, the typing teacher, or Ms. Vasquez, the girls’ basketball coach. Eric would leave once they were settled in the teachers’ lounge. He didn’t want to make small talk. The sun was bright through the classroom window. If Justin was still asleep, his head would be buried under the pillow to block the light; if he was awake, he would be drinking coffee and paging through the newspaper like an old man. Griff would be talking on the phone with Fiona, and Laura would be puzzling over homeschool requirements. They were all expecting him. They might already be wondering what was keeping him. It was flattering, astoundingly so, and as he started gathering the papers he’d need to grade before the next class, he wanted to repay his family’s kindness. He would suggest they all go for a drive in Laura’s car. Justin would drive and they would grab some sandwiches and have a picnic at the rest area just outside Corpus. He would tell them he’d been thinking of how everything had changed, how lucky he was to call them his family.

  The door to his classroom inched open. A woman said, “Knock, knock?”

  He expected it to be Mrs. Norrell, trying to enlist his support for one of her various projects—the ice cream social, the basketball booster club, the fall rummage sale to raise funds for new computers in the library. He was preparing to brush her off—I’ll get back to you after the dust settles on the trial—when Tracy Robichaud stepped into his classroom.

  “Tracy,” he said. His voice sounded meek.

  “Stranger.”

  He stayed behind his desk, his mind immediately calculating who might have seen her come into his room and how he could explain away her visit if asked. She wore a khaki blazer and white slacks, not clothes he recognized. Adrenaline poured into his veins. He steeled himself against whatever she’d come to say or ask or accuse, but also against the unhelpful and complicated tenderness he felt toward her. He should have called her. He should have thanked her for every kindness she’d shown him. He was about to apologize—for anything, for everything—when she gave him a little smirk, a private and sleepy-eyed expression he recalled with wonder and regret. Then she turned to shut the door, to lock it behind her.

  “Stranger,” she said again. “Howdy.”

  13

  WHEN JUSTIN SHOOK HIM AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF A TUESDAY night near the end of July, Griff didn’t understand what was happening. At first, he thought Justin might be freeing him from a nightmare. He had no memory of dreaming, but it seemed possible that his brother would have heard him calling out in his sleep. Then he worried that some new calamity had befallen their family. He’d harbored fears that Papaw would die for as long as he could remember, and for a moment, he could imagine nothing else. But the house was dark and he knew that if there was trouble, there’d be light in the hallway and Justin wouldn’t be whispering. “Get dressed,” he said. “Meet me out front.” Griff rubbed his eyes. His thoughts slowed and narrowed to an idea that surprised him with its force: Justin was running away. Griff didn’t know whether his brother had woken him to say goodbye or to enlist him in the journey. Either way, he had the feeling he was about to do something reckless. He was flattered Justin had thought to wake him.

  Outside, Justin waited behind the wheel of their father’s truck. Griff climbed in without a word. As he eased his door closed, his brother shifted into neutral and the truck rolled backward down the driveway. On the street, he cranked the ignition and they drove down Suntide in the dark. Justin didn’t turn on the headlights until the end of the block.

  They tacked their way through the neighborhood and eventually got to Station Street. They passed houses that Griff had seen all his life, some of which he’d been inside, but at that early hour, the lurid moonlight transformed them into unfamiliar shapes. Neither he nor Justin said anything, and illogical as it seemed, Griff thought they were still worried their parents might somehow hear them. There was the sound of the engine, of the tires on the road and the squeaking rattle of the truck’s old struts. The streetlamps shone their amber glow, june bugs bouncing against the bulbs. A brown pelican was perched on a pylon. The bird watched the truck, its great head moving like a turret.

  After they passed the anchor monument that read WELCOME ABOARD and entered the marina, Griff realized he’d expected Justin to park in one of the diagonal spaces along the seawall. That they’d kept driving opened countl
ess possibilities. And a sense of liberation. When they’d been heading toward the port, he was—he realized suddenly—afraid that Justin intended to set fire to the Bufords’ boat. Griff was also afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop him, and afraid he’d run away and Justin would write him off as a coward. Now he assumed Justin was heading to the ferry and they’d cross onto Mustang Island. It seemed important not to ask where they were going. It seemed a sign of maturity, of trust. In front of the souvenir shops, they turned onto a side street and continued toward the water. Maybe he was simply practicing for his driving test, planning to have Griff stand outside and direct him toward the curb while he parallel parked. The speedometer needle hovered at just over twenty miles per hour. The cab started smelling of exhaust, so Griff lowered his window and the balmy air curved around the windshield and slipped inside.

  Justin slowed alongside the walkway near the ferry landing and eventually stopped in front of a waist-high hedge that hugged the concrete leading down to the docks. In the distance, the ferry horn bellowed. There was fog over the water, fat and low, and the night’s humidity was glazing the windows. The truck idled, and occasionally the RPMs spiked loudly. Everything else was still.

  “I’d been trying to ollie it,” Justin said. “I could get the speed and the height, and I was clearing it, but I couldn’t keep the board on my feet.”

  “You were trying to ollie what?”

  “That hedge.”

  At first, Griff assumed Justin was talking about something he’d tried to do recently, maybe earlier that night after their parents had gone to sleep, and the prospect thrilled him. It meant Justin was taking skating seriously again; it meant they could go to the Teepee together soon and Griff wouldn’t have to sneak sessions while Justin was out driving with their father. It meant things were getting back to normal. But, no. Justin was referring to another time altogether. Griff looked at the hedge, a dense boxwood that everyone passed when they came off the ferry. He’d never thought to try ollieing it; the thing was too high. His heart surged and fluttered, as if a thousand small birds had jumped into flight, all at once, inside his chest.

  “I’d been trying for an hour or so,” Justin continued. “The sun was blazing. My shirt was drenched. When I tried it the last time, some sweat ran into my eyes and for a second I couldn’t see. I ollied too late and my wheels clipped the top of the hedge. I landed with my ankle folded between my board and the ground. It sounded like a balloon popping. I remember getting really cold. Like, I was shivering.”

  “I got really cold when I broke my wrists,” Griff said.

  “I was just in a ball on the ground, holding my ankle, rocking back and forth, trying not to cry. It was stupid. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stand up, so I was imagining rolling myself home, sitting on my board or lying on my stomach. I figured it would take an hour or two. I kept expecting someone we knew to see me, offer me a ride. Dad had gone to school that day to set up his classroom, and even though it wasn’t on his way home, I thought I might get lucky. But I don’t remember anyone driving by at all. It seemed like I was on the ground for a long time. I kept shivering. I felt like I was going to throw up. My ankle was swelling. I thought of a football being aired up. My shoe was getting tighter.”

  “Maybe the ferry was stuck on the island,” Griff said. “You know how it sometimes—”

  “He had a white SUV,” Justin said flatly. “He never said so, but I assumed he was a paramedic, maybe in the Coast Guard. Just because his truck was white. He was parked right here, exactly where we are.”

  “Oh,” Griff said. “Oh, wow.”

  “The engine was running. His hazards were on. He had these small scissors, and he cut the laces in my shoe, then slid it off. Then he cut my sock, and he started pressing on my ankle with his thumbs, asking if it hurt. He seemed to know what he was doing, but I couldn’t feel anything, just numbness.”

  “That’s why you limp.”

  “It gets really stiff sometimes. It didn’t heal right. I never went to the doctor.”

  Griff wanted to say something more, for his sake and for Justin’s, but he didn’t know what. He also wanted to ask why he was telling him this. He looked out over the water. The moon had come through some clouds, giving the bay a metallic sheen.

  “I don’t remember how I got into his truck, whether he lifted me or whether I hopped over on my good foot. There were bundles of old newspapers. Everything smelled of paper and ink. He had me lay down in the back and he looked at my ankle. He said I’d probably broken it, maybe in more than one place, and he’d take me to the infirmary. ‘Infirmary.’ That was the word he used. We never went, of course. At his place, he cranked my ankle again. He made it where I couldn’t walk at all. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized we’d left my board by the hedge, but by that time I had bigger problems. I guess that kid found it shortly after we drove off.”

  “The shrimper’s son,” Griff said.

  “The shrimper’s son,” Justin said. He cracked his neck. “I read the article in the paper, the shrimper trying to pawn it at Loan Star.”

  It had happened almost a year after Justin disappeared. The shrimper brought the board and a few other things into Loan Star, hoping to trade them for an air compressor. When Cecil saw Justin’s name graffitied on the grip tape, he told the shrimper that he expected they’d be able to work out a swap, but he’d have to check in the back to see how many compressors he had left. In the meantime, he took the shrimper’s driver’s license and had him fill out a pawn ticket. He excused himself into the back room and photocopied the license; he found Ivan and told him to call the police in fifteen minutes, but not one second sooner. When he returned to the front counter, he invited the shrimper to follow him out to his truck. Cecil said he wanted to show him a compressor he’d planned on keeping for himself. It was there in the parking lot behind Loan Star, just as the shrimper was saying Where’s the compressor, that Cecil took the pistol out from under the bench seat and pressed the barrel into the man’s left eye, right into the socket and against the weak bridge of his nose, pinning him between the gun and the truck. The shrimper pleaded innocence, quivering and saying his son had found the board months earlier, maybe as long as a year, but the boy kept getting hurt, so his wife was making him get rid of the thing. When the police arrived, Cecil walked the man back into the shop and made him tell the story again. The shrimper had an alibi—he’d been out on a monthlong haul the Sunday Justin disappeared—and like the postcard that would arrive a year later, the board had been handled so many times that they couldn’t pull any workable prints. When the police returned the board to Justin’s family, Laura slid it under his bed. She said, “He’ll want it when he comes home.”

  In the truck, Griff sat quietly, trying to figure how to respond. There were countless things he wanted to tell Justin, but he didn’t know what to say. A sense of awe had overtaken him, the expansive feeling of a long wait coming to an end, and he couldn’t yet apprehend the implications of what he’d heard, how or if it changed the past, present, or future. The night sky was brightening from the bottom, the first slashes of cobalt and lavender. It was incredible to Griff that people were sleeping as Justin was laying all of this out in their father’s truck. His foot was tapping on the truck’s floorboard. I might be dreaming right now, he thought. This could all be in my head. He had the urge to step outside and walk down to the black water and splash handfuls of it on his face. He felt starstruck. He understood why people would want his brother’s autograph.

  And then, just like that, his foot stopped moving. The thousand small birds that had leapt into flight in his chest dropped, all at once, from the air.

  “It’s my fault,” Griff said.

  “Do what?”

  “It’s my fault,” he said again, louder. He’d been feeling this way for years, had stopped himself from uttering the words countless times. “If I’d gone with you that morning, I could have—”

  “If you’d gone with me, he
would’ve taken us both.”

  “I could’ve called Dad when you fell. I could’ve run for help. I could’ve gotten his license plate number.”

  “And if I’d ollied higher, I would’ve come home ten minutes later to rub your face in it. There are a million ways things could’ve gone differently. None of them matter.”

  “We’d gotten in a fight that morning.”

  “I’d dumped salt in your Coke and you were going to tell Mom and Dad. I kicked you in the nuts.”

  “I never told anyone. Not even the cops when they questioned me.”

  “The cops questioned you?”

  “All of us,” Griff said. “All the time, especially at first. They took Mom and Dad in separate rooms. They questioned me and Papaw, Ronnie and his parents, everyone. They came up with a list of registered sex offenders. They had me go into your room to look for anything unusual.”

  “Really?” Justin said, a light wistfulness in his voice. “That’s pretty sick.”

  “That’s nothing,” Griff said and launched into a breathless catalog of what Justin had missed. He told him how some three hundred volunteers had done shoulder-to-shoulder searches in the dunes, and how the Texas Rangers had patrolled on horseback. He told him how the state police had, for a month, taken over the Southport VFW, and how the Coast Guard went out in boats and helicopters. He told him how aside from the volunteers and police, the town seemed deserted, like on Christmas, and how days would pass before you saw another kid in a yard or on the sidewalk because everyone’s parents were keeping them inside. How entire blocks in Southport left their porch lights on so he could find his way home. How various people had tried to say that Justin had drowned, but Griff always knew they were wrong. How their mother had gone to psychics, how she’d been hypnotized and how she had, a few times, come into Griff’s room and lay down in his bed while he slept and woke him up with her weeping. He didn’t tell him how sad that made him, how neither he nor their mother ever gathered the nerve to discuss it. He told him how they’d all been given lie detector tests, how even when you told the truth it felt like lying, and how people seemed to suspect their father had something to do with his disappearance. How the police said Justin might have run away, how Griff wondered if he had, maybe because of their fight, and how they went around checking his friends’ houses. He didn’t tell him about their parents’ fights or the fights he’d had with Juan Herrera and Toby Provost, nor did he admit he’d only tried to slide the marina rail because, with Justin gone, it seemed he didn’t have anything to lose and when he broke his wrists, he’d felt something like gratitude. He told Justin how his friends had been kind and present at first, but then they started keeping their distance, as though Griff were contagious. How Griff, like an idiot, used to worry that it was somehow contagious, how he used to worry that he’d be taken, too. How, legally, parents had to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing-person report, but their mother had come so unglued that an exception to the law was made. How there’d been an Amber Alert. How the city council passed a curfew in Justin’s name. How there’d been vigils on the anniversaries of his disappearance. How they celebrated his birthday every year, how it was Griff’s job to blow out the candles on the cake. How their parents had taken out a second mortgage on the house to put up a reward. How, one evening last year, an insurance agent had called the house and tried to convince their father to list Justin as “deceased” so that they could access the money for the policy and use it as part of the reward, and how their father smashed the phone against the wall, shattering it, and they had to pick up the pieces before Rainbow tried to eat them. How Papaw had brought over a new phone from Loan Star, the one that was still in their kitchen now.