Remember Me Like This

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  Which, in a sleight of association, reminded her of the photos she used to send to the detectives, to the police officers and sheriff’s deputies, to the reporters and television stations when their investment in her son’s disappearance ebbed. She chose photos of Justin as a toddler and young boy—Justin wearing a pair of underwear on his head (as a superhero mask), Justin asleep and using Rainbow as a pillow, Justin practicing the recorder, his eyes closed like a jazzman. Her aim had been for the new images to snap everyone back to attention, to refocus their anger, shake them out of their apathy. He was a baby once, the pictures asserted. He was a boy who could almost play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Don’t give up. Find him. Please. The postcard from California had done the same thing for her, concentrating and repurposing her emotions, and that, she realized, was what she needed to do for herself now. She resolved to give herself a little jolt of perspective each day. She would remind herself of how far they’d come, how happy she should be, how grateful.

  It worked. A shift inside her, one she could trust. Things that had previously isolated and wounded her—Eric’s nightly drives with Justin, the fact that he’d had a girlfriend—were circumvented with relatively little effort. To consider Justin’s options for his schooling was to consider the future. To fix a meal he liked enough to ask for seconds was to fill a void as only a mother could. It awoke in her a love of cooking, a desire to invent new recipes and buy new cookware. If either of the boys especially liked a meal, she immediately started planning when she could prepare it again. (No need to track Eric’s tastes. He loved everything—sweetly, genuinely. If she warmed up fish sticks, he lavished praise on her like she’d toiled all day at the stove.) If the boys seemed lukewarm about a recipe, she fed the leftovers to Rainbow. When she wasn’t cooking, she sorted through the articles and other ephemera she’d collected since Justin’s return and started a scrapbook.

  Life started to feel—what? Not normal. Not familiar. Inhabitable. Navigable. With time and effort, with patience and selflessness, she could find her way back to the vicinity of the familiar. She watered the plants. She plucked yellow leaves. She fed the mice, Willie and Waylon, let them sniff her closed eyes with their pink noses, and delicately scratched their necks until their heartbeats calmed in her hand. She was, she guessed, a week or so away from teaching Waylon to stand on his hind legs and twirl like a ballerina. She checked Marine Lab’s website for news on Alice and took comfort in what little information there was; Paul was notoriously lazy about updating the online “Progress” page, but he was vigilant about listing any rescue deaths. That it was so easy for Laura to imagine Alice thriving seemed a promise unto itself. She read her library books, washed Griff’s kneepads when they started to reek of their vinegar stink. She jotted ideas for Christmas gifts: a new lawn mower for Eric, kneepads for Griff, another snake for Justin.

  On a Friday night in early August, for the first time in years, she woke Eric by twisting her fingers through his hair. In the soft moonlight, she recognized how gray he’d gone around his temples and above his ears. As he stirred, she felt an almost unbearable gratitude for him, for all the weight he’d carried, for his adamant refusal to let her slip away.

  “Laura?”

  “It’s me,” she said. “I’m here. I’m back now.”

  EVER SINCE TRACY ROBICHAUD HAD VISITED HIS CLASSROOM A week ago, Eric had expected her again. He felt on edge thinking of it, a fraught confusion. They’d done nothing more than embrace that Friday and she’d left his room within minutes. It had been a bolstering relief, like losing control of a car and then swerving safely back onto the road. He wasn’t convinced they could manage such control again, though. He’d been leaving school right after each class to minimize the chance of another encounter. Time, he thought, would help.

  She’d come for a meeting in the school’s cafeteria about the Shrimporee; Tracy was on the board of directors. Her husband was, too, but he skipped the meetings. In Eric’s classroom, she said the board members were encouraging her to head up the committee organizing Justin’s celebration at the Shrimporee, and because he couldn’t bring himself to object, couldn’t focus clearly on the variables her participation would involve because he was still focusing on who’d seen her enter his classroom and who would see her leave, he gave his blessing.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think we’ll be able to put together something terrific for him.”

  “I can’t think of anyone better to be in charge.”

  “Careful,” she said, smiling. “Now that I know where to find you, I might be tempted to stop by more often.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your calls. With everything happening, I’ve just been—”

  “I just want you to know I’m still here.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “Nothing has changed. Not a thing.”

  But he hadn’t seen her again, and with each passing day, it was easier to believe they could leave their old habits behind. To believe she knew his life had changed the moment he laid eyes on Justin again. To believe she knew he was afraid of pushing his luck—their luck—because he’d gotten so lucky with Justin. He briefly thought of this when Laura unexpectedly woke him up in the middle of the night, but soon he’d been unable to think of anything. Laura was ravenous, so consumed and consuming, that she seemed to be dreaming, loosed from who she’d always been. Eric was sore the next day—he felt like he’d been in a fight, one he’d likely lost—and when they tangled into each other again, his muscles and flesh ached a lovely ache. Laura was more herself the second time, more familiar, and he saw how shallow, how desperate and futile his afternoons with Tracy had been. Afterward, she lay on her stomach and he propped himself on his elbow, lightly grazing his fingers over her back. It was something he used to do every time, something he’d intentionally never done with Tracy, but he couldn’t remember how many years had passed since he’d last touched his wife this way.

  “Write something,” she said. “Write something back there.”

  With his finger he wrote: I love you.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  He swept his palm over her skin as if erasing a blackboard, then wrote: I’m hungry.

  “Me, too.”

  He wrote: Justin’s home.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  He wrote: I’m sorry.

  “I didn’t get it,” she said. “Write it again.”

  He did.

  She smiled into the pillow, then shifted to look at him, light in her eyes. She said, “I’ve missed you, too.”

  LAURA READ A BOOK EVERY TWO DAYS. SHORTER ONES SHE SOMETIMES finished in a single sitting. It seemed another good sign, like her renewed appetite and sex drive. She had a sense of reclamation. Of becoming or re-becoming. She’d always loved to read, loved it the way her childhood friends had loved riding their bikes. Her mother had assembled a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias with weekly coupons from the supermarket (she’d done the same with a set of dishes), and when a new volume arrived (usually on Thursday), Laura could spend hours reading random entries. Had she gone to college, she would have majored in literature; in fact, she knew people often assumed she had gone to college because she usually carried a book with her, something to read in waiting rooms or between customers at the dry cleaner’s. Before Justin went missing, she’d mostly devoured true crime—what Eric and the boys had called “Mom’s death books”—but of course she later avoided the genre completely. Once she started volunteering at Marine Lab, she’d read almost exclusively about cetaceans. Really, though, what she read hardly mattered. Books on war and royalty, books on science and anthropology and politics, novels and story collections and Texana, even the occasional volume of poetry (though the poems always made her feel dense)—she just reveled in the act of running her eyes over lines of text, the feeling of dabbing her finger to her tongue and turning a page, the near-transformative sensation of reaching an end.

  Lately, she’d gone on a t
ear with books about Stockholm syndrome. Some of the books she ordered online and others Eric checked out (and returned) for her at the library. She took notes on the books, made lists of things she wanted to monitor with Justin: his eating habits, any aversion to specific TV shows, any tendencies to grow angry or clam up around certain topics of conversation. Eric, she knew, worried she might read something that would pull the rug out from under her again. She could feel him studying her, silent and skeptical and beseeching, waiting for her to deliver terrible news, as if her reading about something would coax it into reality. As if she were tempting fate by what she chose to read, as if she’d be doing everyone a favor if she’d just stop. But the more she read, the better she felt. More at ease. Empowered, even. Lucky. The sheer mind-boggling luck of her life made her want to try harder.

  So, when she finished her last library book late on Monday morning, instead of stacking her returns on the counter for Eric to take back, she decided to deliver them herself. The decision was immediately gratifying, the rush of accepting responsibility, and then the feeling redoubled when she decided against inviting Justin to drive her. That he was still sleeping and would have to be woken up wasn’t the issue. If Laura invited him, she knew she’d be infringing on Eric’s turf, elbowing her way into a province that wasn’t hers. Eric’s feelings would be hurt, and in sparing them, Laura was galvanized. When she poked her head into Griff’s room, she found him on his stomach on his bed, talking on the phone to Fiona and flipping through a skate magazine. “I’m going to the library,” she mouthed, and his face scrunched into an expression of sweet befuddlement. Then he gave her a thumbs-up. She saw in it more than simple acknowledgment. He was endorsing her, rooting for her. Her younger son, who knew how long it had been.

  The interior of her car was sweltering, the trapped air still tinged with old chlorine. The seat burned, even through her jeans. If her car hadn’t been parked under the chinaberry tree by their curb, the glue affixing her rearview mirror would have certainly melted, given way, and dropped it to the floorboard. That happened once or twice a summer. Not today, though, and as she turned onto Station Street, cool air started flowing through the vents. The perspiration dried on her skin, a film she’d enjoy washing off later that night in the shower. She’d think of how she’d ventured out on her own, running errands early on a stifling day. How she’d left her two teenage sons home alone, how nothing had happened, how happy they’d been to see her when she returned, the pride in their eyes like light reflected in a jewel.

  Traffic wasn’t bad for August. There were likely two, maybe three, ferries running, so the stream of people coming and going from the island was steady. Clusters of tourists waited at the crosswalks. They wore wide, floppy hats, sunglasses with coaster-sized lenses, and white zinc frosting their noses. Some surfers in a Jeep honked at a gaggle of bikinied girls, one of whom theatrically blew the boys a kiss and sent the others into a laughing fit. It made Laura want to slip out of her shoes and drive barefoot like a teenager. She felt that way now, young and liberated, living in a world that expanded outward with each mile she drove. Why not drive out to see Justin’s billboard? Or back to Pampered Pets to see if the shipment of feeder mice had arrived? She could go anywhere and her family would be at home when she returned.

  The line at the Whataburger drive-thru was ten cars deep. Laura thought to swing by after the library; she’d take lunch home. Maybe she’d go by the school first, surprise Eric with her being out and about, and then surprise him again by suggesting they eat lunch by themselves before taking burgers home for the boys. Hadn’t Letty said they needed to do things together and without the boys? If she timed it right, he’d just be finishing up with class. She used to love watching him interact with his students at the annual assemblies or football games, and while she’d been derelict in her teacher’s wife’s duties for some time—she couldn’t remember when she’d last rallied herself for a school function—stepping unannounced into his classroom would illustrate her commitment to improve. She’d see where he’d hung the poster the kids had made for Justin, and she’d see her husband seeing her try. At first he would be alarmed, but she would defuse his fear. Everything’s fine, she’d say. I was just out running errands and thought I’d say hey.

  Hey, she’d say. Hey.

  SOUTHPORT’S LIBRARY WAS A LOW-SLUNG BUILDING COMPRISING three rooms. It boasted nice collections of Texana, naval history, and marine biology, and it was fiercely air-conditioned. Fresh- and saltwater aquariums lined the foyer and—Laura had forgotten this—there were a few terrariums mixed in as well, tanks housing turtles, lizards, and snakes. Seeing them was jarring in a way, given Justin’s recent interest. Her first thought was that once he felt comfortable enough, she’d bring him here, but she quickly second-guessed herself and in doing so, she felt precariously balanced on the edge of anxiety: The D.A. had mentioned that a room in Dwight Buford’s apartment had been crowded with empty aquariums. A wave of disgust rippled into Laura’s throat. Would all aquariums recall what he longed to forget? Would an aquarium ever just be an aquarium again? The world seemed suddenly and acutely dangerous, booby-trapped and inhospitable. She had an urge to flee home, but she told herself to stay. She told herself Justin had aquariums in his room at home and he loved them. She told herself to breathe. To put one foot in front of the other.

  And then the air deeper inside the library smelled of Saturday storytime, of puppet shows, of Halloween costume contests and cardboard Christmas tree workshops; it smelled of her sons’ childhoods, of nothing less than happiness itself, and she relaxed. She slid her books through the return slot, recalling Justin’s astronaut costume and Griff’s attempts to re-create the puppet shows by putting socks on his hands and acting them out once they returned home. Changing his bed last week, she’d found a pair of socks sandwiched between the mattress and the box spring. They smelled of Fiona’s soft lavender perfume and kept Laura smiling for half an hour. And she was smiling a little now, returning her books. She took her time, depositing them one by one, both to savor the experience and to survey the library. To her surprise, she recognized no one—not the librarian or the few patrons browsing the stacks, not the old men reading the paper or the women waiting in line at the circulation desk—and none of them seemed to recognize her. The anonymity was a relief, proof that life might return to what it had been. It was also, to her surprise, disappointing. She realized she wanted to run into someone she knew. She would’ve liked for someone to notice her brushed hair and clean clothes. She would’ve liked to brag about Justin, to leave the person struck by the transformation her family had undergone. She would’ve liked to think about people talking about her later, knowing how wrong they’d been.

  So when she stepped into the parking lot—the heat as thick as wet plaster—and saw two old women waiting by her car, Laura felt something like satisfaction. They were snowbirds, dressed in ice cream–colored pants and long-sleeved polyester blouses. You must be so hot, Laura thought. As she approached, the women straightened their postures (as best they could) and arranged smiles on their faces. One of the women, the shorter of the two, was holding a package of Lorna Doone cookies.

  “We wanted you to have these,” the woman said, handing Laura the cookies. “We figured you’d be swallowed up by flowers about now, but we still wanted to give you a little something.”

  “Aren’t you sweet?” Laura said. She thought she knew the women from the dry cleaner’s. She might have laundered the bright outfits they were currently wearing. She said, “And yes, we’re up to our necks in flowers. The house feels like a nursery.”

  “We were coming back from the store and saw you go in the library. We waited out here. We didn’t want to pester you inside,” the woman said.

  “We’d rather fire from ambush,” the other said, and Laura remembered. They were sisters, Beverly and Ruth Wilcox. Ruth, the one who’d pushed the cookies on her, was nicer, but Laura had always felt an affinity for Bev, as if she were the woman Laura mig
ht become. They’d aged considerably since she’d last seen them. Maybe the sisters were noticing the same thing about her.

  “Y’all must be over the moon over there,” Ruth said. “Y’all just must be walking on clouds.”

  “We are. We have to stop ourselves from smothering him with affection,” Laura said, thinking she sounded like a little girl. Then, lifting the cookies: “Justin will love these.”

  “Some folks don’t,” Bev said. “But we have a couple each afternoon when we’re watching the soaps. Sometimes I’ll eat a handful for breakfast. They’re sweet but not too sweet.”

  “Your boy gave me a rock one time, a little piece of flint,” Ruth said. It sounded like she’d been gearing up to say it, waiting until she couldn’t wait any longer. “We were eating at the Castaway, and your husband walked him over and he handed me the prettiest little rock. I remember showing it to Bev at the table. We both thought it was the prettiest little rock we’d ever seen.”

  Gauzy strands of memory, like she’d walked through a spiderweb: Justin had almost knocked Ruth down, rushing into the restaurant because he wanted to be the one to ask the hostess for a table by the window. Before giving Ruth the flint, he and Griff had various rocks arranged on the table. Eric had been adamant that Justin apologize, though Laura was less convinced, and she’d expected them to fight about it later, once the boys were in bed. It had been Justin’s idea to offer the flint, his way of punishing himself.

  “Thank you for remembering us,” Laura said now. “I’ll tell Justin when I get home. He’ll be flattered you kept it all these years.”

  “It sounds like there’s going to be a nice celebration at the Shrimporee,” Bev said. “It sounds like they’re taking it real serious over there.”