“I haven’t really heard anything yet, but I’m sure they’ll do something special. We want to honor everyone who helped these past years, not just Justin,” Laura said. “We’re indebted to everyone.”
“You don’t owe anyone anything, not a lick of anything.”
“We’re just so happy he’s home,” Ruth said. “Oh, we’re walking on clouds just like you are.”
“Thank you.”
“And we hope they put that dirty man in front of a firing squad for what he put y’all through,” Bev said. “We hope he’s real popular in the jail cells.”
“He’ll get what he deserves,” Laura said. “Sometimes you have to thin the herd.”
“Thatta girl,” Bev said, nodding. “Amen to that.”
“We’re just walking on clouds,” Ruth said. “We’re just dancing in the air. We surely are.”
GRIFF COULDN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME HE’D HAD THE house to himself. Justin was sleeping, so he wasn’t completely alone, but with both of his parents gone, the rooms seemed cavernous. When his mother left, he’d been on the phone with Fiona. He’d invited her over, thinking they might be able to fool around in his room instead of at the elementary school, but her father was making her go to lunch at the yacht club. (Griff didn’t entirely understand what the yacht club was, couldn’t surmise if it was an organization or a physical building, but he didn’t want to embarrass himself by asking.) Since then, he’d been walking from one room to another, trying to imagine how Justin viewed their house now. After they went for their drive that night, Griff had decided to be more vigilant, more aware. He wanted to perceive the world as his brother did. He wanted to look at something—their furniture, the hedge near the marina, Rainbow and their parents—and understand what Justin would see. He didn’t want him to have to spell everything out if they took the truck again.
So far, though, Justin hadn’t invited him on any more of his drives. It made Griff think he’d failed a test. He felt antsy and over-eager, the way Rainbow got just before feeding time, the way the mice got when someone unlatched the lid on their aquarium. They ran around like crazy, stopping to stand on their hind legs and sniff the air, trying to find the crumbs that were about to be dropped, then if nothing materialized, they started running again. “They’re such little spazzes,” Justin had said one night. He was holding Sasha, letting her slide from one hand to the other. She writhed like a hose with too much pressure, and Griff realized he was a little afraid of her. It was disillusioning, for being afraid of her was like being afraid of Justin. Griff wanted to change that, too.
He was standing by the sink eating a handful of cereal when Justin limped into the kitchen. Griff nodded at him coolly, as if they were passing on the street. He offered him the cereal box, but Justin declined and took a coffee mug down from the cabinet. He was wearing the bathrobe their mother had bought him at the mall. Griff had helped pick it out, and seeing him in it was always gratifying. Justin poured what was left in the pot and took a loud sip. He said, “What’s Dad’s deal?”
“He’s at school. Mom went to the library. We’re by ourselves.”
“Dad’s pacing in the driveway, talking on the phone. He looks pissed.”
“He must have just got here,” Griff said, sounding inane. “Do you think he knows we took the truck?”
“If he does, it’s because you told him.”
“I didn’t,” Griff said.
“I’m just fucking with you, Lobster. No, I don’t think he knows.”
“Me either,” he said.
“I went to the island last night. I watched a coyote bark at the waves for an hour.”
“You took the ferry? Someone could’ve recognized you.”
Justin took another drink, shrugged his shoulders. He said, “Maybe that’s who Dad’s arguing with now.”
“You can say I was with you last night. You can say it was my idea to sneak out.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“And if you ever need me to go again, if you ever want company or something, just let me know.”
“You want to go find the coyote tonight?”
“That’d be sick,” Griff said.
Justin drained his coffee. He rinsed the mug in the sink, then stayed there for a moment, peering into the backyard.
Griff didn’t want to say anything until Justin did, but finally he couldn’t wait any longer and so he said, “Do you think he’ll be in the same place? The coyote?”
“Maybe,” he said, his back still to Griff. “They’re creatures of habit. They’re just like us.”
ERIC’S TRUCK WASN’T IN THE FACULTY PARKING LOT WHEN SHE drove by the school. Laura wasn’t disappointed; she was content to keep driving. She also decided against stopping at Whataburger. Part of it was the line in the drive-thru—now twelve cars deep—but another part was her wanting to live a little longer inside the memory of talking with Bev and Ruth. Of everything that had been sent to the house—the lush plants and gorgeous flowers, the stuffed animals and letters and balloons—she couldn’t at that moment think of anything that meant as much to her as the Lorna Doones riding beside her on the passenger seat. Nor could she say exactly what, but something about the gesture floored her. Its innocence? Its practicality? The fact that no one else but two old ladies would think to offer those cookies, or that Laura understood they’d not been meant for her at all and were simply the only thing Bev and Ruth had in their grocery bags that they could feasibly cast as a gift? She didn’t know if she’d ever open the package. If she did, she’d save the wrapping. She’d devote a page to it in the scrapbook.
When she pulled into the driveway, Eric was sitting on the front steps. It excited her to see him. She knew he would commend her getting out, knew he would be proud of her. She wanted to wrap herself around him, to tell him about the sisters, to hear his elaborate vacation plans.
“Guess who returned her library books all by herself,” Laura said, sitting beside him. She could smell his sweat, a grassy scent she loved. “Before you know it, I’ll be buying groceries and picking up take-out.”
“Crazy talk,” he said. The right words, the wrong tone. He was distracted, stewing.
“Who knows, there might even be a job in my future.”
Eric smiled at her, snaked his arm behind her back and pulled her against him. Her head on his shoulder, her hair falling over her face, filtering the sun. She thought he would say something, but they sat in silence. Sweat beaded on her neck.
“Is Justin awake yet?” she asked.
“I haven’t been inside.”
“You were waiting on me?”
He kissed the top of her head.
“I ran into those two old sisters, the Wilcoxes. They gave us Lorna Doones.”
“Big spenders,” he said.
“They said Justin gave them a rock at the Castaway. I have a vague memory of it. You walked him over to the booth.”
“He’s getting out,” Eric said.
She thought he was talking about Justin, but she didn’t understand what he was saying. “Do what now?”
“Buford,” he said. “His parents are putting their house up as collateral, as a bail. He’ll be out within two days, maybe three.”
She pulled back, sat up. She studied his face, watched as he looked away. She told herself not to cry, but her eyes were already wet.
“Garcia called,” Eric said. “He’s looking into ways to stall, but he doesn’t know what recourse there is. I guess Buford’s mother is dying. Maybe that has something to do with it.”
“What happened to ‘He’s not getting out on my watch’?”
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “I don’t know what’s happening with anything.”
“The boys haven’t heard?”
“Not yet.”
She knew it made no sense, knew she couldn’t explain or defend it, but what Laura felt was punished. Punished for venturing out of the house. For leaving the boys alone. For courting attention and the façade of
normalcy. For having once been so ambivalent about what became of Buford so long as Justin was home. Her pulse quickened. She wondered if Eric could feel it when he took her hand, wondered if he’d laced his fingers with hers because he’d sensed her urges to run screaming down the street, to slink back to her car, to drive into the bay. They sat without speaking, listening to cowbirds twittering in the trees. The air smelled of high tide and the sun was bearing down and Laura thought she remembered something menacing about cowbirds, but just then she couldn’t recall what it was. She bit the inside of her cheek, bit down harder and harder, until the coppery taste of blood tinged her mouth. The pain neither distracted nor centered her. She spit a mouthful of blood into the yard. Her mind was scattered and numb. She could only focus on what she knew would happen next. Eric would squeeze her hand. He would stand and pull her up. He would lead her inside and they would deliver the news to their sons. They would sound strong, almost cavalier, as if they’d always anticipated such a development, as if they were brazenly pleased that Buford and his lawyers would make such a glaring tactical error. “It’s actually a good thing,” Eric would say. They would wear confident masks and go through the motions of hopefulness, and in turn, their sweet boys would rally, acting compliant and consoled and unafraid, and none of them would believe any of it.
16
THEY WERE AWAKE ALL NIGHT. THEY WERE DRAINED BY THE news and the effort of trying to sleep. The air was damp, bloated with gritty heat. The temperature barely dropped below eighty degrees, and the wind did little more than remind them of how stifling the rooms were. A sagging branch from the tallow tree in the backyard scratched against the house when a breeze swirled, a low and mournful creaking that would have woken each of them had they ever been able to drift off. But they hadn’t. They twisted on the mattresses, cast off the sheets, tried to keep their eyes from adjusting to the darkness.
Laura wanted to think of the old women who’d given her the cookies, of Justin complimenting her hair, of Griff’s socks under his mattress, but her mind found no traction on anything except Buford’s release. It seemed another failure, like she’d incorrectly filled out a form and he was getting out because of a clerical error she, and she alone, had made. She imagined how people in town would again regard her with pity and gloom in their eyes, but now, for the first time, she also recognized something else in their gazes: blame. Yes, there had always been a poorly masked judgment, an indicting superiority and countless silent accusations of guilt, and she couldn’t not see them anymore. It would have never happened to my child, their expressions said, and now they would say it again. And Laura imagined seeing Buford in Southport, glimpsing him driving toward his parents’ house or browsing the shelves at H-E-B.
Beside her, Eric was trying to figure how to move his family three hours north to San Antonio. He was certified to teach anywhere in Texas, so it was just a matter of finding a position that hadn’t yet been filled so late in the summer. If they sold the house and his truck, and if he found steady work substituting, they might be able to eke out a living through Christmas break. Maybe Houston or Austin, he thought. Maybe Dallas. His mind was trapped in a vise, and with each place he thought to run, it tightened. And he was thinking—helplessly, wretchedly, with a sense of having finally been cornered by something he’d long been eluding—of what Buford had done to his son. The man’s weight on Justin’s small frame, the vile odor of his body, the noise and force, the shame and terror, the degradation of being so close to home and never being found. Why shouldn’t Justin be angry? Why shouldn’t he hate them? Eric turned his face into the pillow and wept. He fought to stay still and quiet. Outside, the wind picked up and the branch scraped against the house, a sound like someone trying to push open a door.
Griff couldn’t remember if his father had a handsaw in the garage, but he planned to look in the morning. He planned to climb the tallow and not come down until the limb was on the ground. Just then, the sensation of sawing held a powerful appeal. So did breaking glass. So did setting fire to something and watching it turn to smoke. Earlier, when he’d given up on sleep, he texted Fiona the news and she’d written back, “I found out where his parents dock their boat.” The message had awakened in him the dangerous and disappointing feeling that he couldn’t be trusted, and he’d lain in bed wondering if Justin felt the same way. Another gust of wind, another swipe of the branch. What he hated most about the noise was that every time he heard it, he thought it was his brother. He thought Justin was sneaking into his room, coming to collect him.
Rainbow lay in the hallway. Her tail thumped the carpet when Griff stepped over her, but once he was in front of Justin’s door, she just groaned and stretched her legs. A seam of light under the door, a flutter in Griff’s chest. He hadn’t known what he was going to say to his brother, but the light meant Justin was awake too and his being awake meant Griff was right to come to him. He knocked lightly. He waited, then knocked again a little harder. Rainbow moaned, opened and closed her mouth. Griff whispered his brother’s name, then opened the door, slipped inside and closed it behind him. The motion felt fluid and efficient, and he was suddenly proud, eager to hear how Justin would praise such stealth.
Laura thought she’d seen a flash of light in the hall, but convinced herself she was being paranoid and it was nothing more than fatigue playing tricks with her vision. Eric was calculating their monthly expenses in his head, trying to make the numbers work for the move, and when it seemed a small, quick light came into the hall, he thought not of Independence Day, not of fireworks and tiki torches, but of his mother. Near the end of her life, after the cancer reached her brain and she forgot his name, after she forgot how to walk and chew and swallow, she claimed to see pinwheels of color in her peripheral vision. Eric remembered that his father had lied and claimed to see them too, so she wouldn’t feel alone. At that moment, across town, Cecil was in his kitchen, spinning a wire brush into the barrel of his pistol. He cleaned the chamber. The hammer. The trigger. He rubbed fine oil into the steel and wiped it down with a dark swatch of cloth. He looked at the clock on his stove. He had less than two hours before dawn broke.
Griff hadn’t expected Justin to be in his room, not really. The bed was made and the desk lamp was on. His window was open, so the room smelled of the muggy night. At first, Griff thought all of those things were what made the room feel unusual. The untouched bed, the glow of the lamp, the raised window. But it was something else—a vacancy, a stillness he didn’t recognize. Every time Griff came into Justin’s room, even late at night, the mice would start skittering around their aquarium, kicking up cedar chips. Now, there was no soft noise, no wild spray of cedar. He kneeled in front of the glass. They weren’t in the paper towel tubes his mother had arranged in their tank, and they weren’t behind any of Griff’s quartz or under their plastic cave. Briefly it seemed clear that Justin was out looking for them. But when Griff looked in on Sasha—he was momentarily convinced she’d escaped, too—he found her coiled on her heat rock and he understood. Even in the dim light, he could make out two bulges in the snake’s body. He had no choice but to see the sad and inevitable outlines of the past.
17
IN 1836, NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE NAVASOTA RIVER IN Central Texas, a single Comanche Indian approached Fort Parker. He was unarmed, waving a white rag in surrender. No one inside the fort’s walls trusted the gesture, nor did they believe the Indian was alone, but Benjamin Parker went out to negotiate. Or, knowing he would die, he went out to stall an attack long enough for the fort’s few men to take up their weapons and for the women and children to flee through the back gate into the sagebrush. But there was no time. Instantly the fields were thronged with Comanche, their bodies slathered in mud and soot and bright berry juice, their war cries fevered and keening. They scaled the walls and dropped into the fort like spiders. Within minutes, all of the Parker men were scalped. Their genitals cut off with dull blades. Their throats slit. The women who hadn’t escaped were stabbed and beaten,
left for dead. Patches of the dirt were soggy with blood, a dark and mealy mire. Three Parker children were captured, two girls and a boy. They were spirited away on horses with shards of glass braided into their manes, sharp slivers that refracted the afternoon sun.
Two of the children were quickly ransomed back to an uncle who’d been away during the attack. The third child, Cynthia Ann Parker, spent twenty-five years in the tribe before Texas Rangers reclaimed her at the Battle of Pease River. She no longer knew her name, no longer spoke English. She’d married a Comanche chief and borne three children; one of her sons was himself a chieftain, and her infant daughter—Prairie Flower—was in her arms when the Rangers found her. Cynthia Ann denied having been abducted at all. The Rangers might have believed her if not for her blue eyes. They relocated her to Camp Cooper and then to Birdville, Texas, where everyone expected her to open up. She didn’t. Living among the Texans, among people who seemed barbaric and gluttonous, made no sense to her. Again and again, she tried to return to the Comanche—once she disguised herself as a man, stole a horse, and rode through the night into Indian territory—but the Parkers thwarted her. They dragged her back. They watched her like a prisoner, set traps to snare her, and shackled her ankles. In 1864, Prairie Flower died of influenza. The loss proved too much for Cynthia Ann and she stopped eating. Eventually, she starved herself to death.
For a time, early into Justin’s disappearance, Eric had worked the Fort Parker Massacre into his Texas history classes. He mentioned how Cynthia Ann’s first son became the famed Comanche chief Quanah and how, after her rescue, the Texas legislature granted her a league of land; he offered extra credit to anyone who wrote a report on The Searchers, the John Wayne movie based on the Parker ordeal. Privately, at home, he plugged Cynthia Ann’s name into Internet search engines. Whenever a new entry appeared, he got a rush of illicit, intoxicating resilience. The simple and galvanizing satisfaction of discovery, of efforts rewarded. He shared none of this with Laura.
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