Then, one evening he found her reading an article about Parker online; he hadn’t cleared his Web history.
“What if he forgets about us?” Laura asked in bed that night. “The way that girl did? They were about the same age.”
“She was missing for over twenty years. The world was different then.”
“Different how?” she said.
“Technology,” he said, trying to console her. “We have infrared lenses and forensics and billboards. We have missing-children databases and Amber Alerts—”
“He’s been gone a year. Nothing helps.”
“We’ll find him,” Eric said quickly, resolutely, trying to will belief. “I just posted another bunch of flyers around—”
“I liked one part of the article,” Laura interrupted. She turned away from him and, despite the humid night, tugged the comforter under her chin.
“That they found her.”
“Something else,” she said.
“That her family kept looking. That they refused to give up.”
“No,” she said.
“What then?”
“That she starved herself after her daughter died. I understood that.”
The next day at school, between fourth and fifth periods, Eric took a call from Kirk Bradshaw, who owned a souvenir shop on Station Street. Bradshaw, a kind man with a heavy Arkansas accent, said Eric needed to come to the store right away: Laura was on her knees beside the display of seashell wind chimes, sobbing. When Eric arrived, his wife was clutching a small broken conch, her eyes wild, brazen, unseeing. Blood was smeared on her hands, bright as paint. He thought she’d been holding the shell so tightly it had shattered and punctured her flesh, but he was wrong. She’d broken it and torn jagged gouges into her palms and forearms. For the rest of his life he’d wonder why she hadn’t cut at her wrists, though he’d never muster the courage to ask.
ERIC RECALLED ALL OF THIS LATE ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON THREE weeks after Dwight Buford’s release. The sun was high and the sky pale, as if the color had been burnished away. He was parked in a fill-sand lot two hundred yards south of Buford’s parents’ house on the island.
He had binoculars, a solid pair of Pentax that a sailor had hocked at Loan Star and Cecil had passed along to Griff. Eric had been borrowing them without his son’s knowledge. He wore sunglasses, a baseball cap. He’d been parking here for ten days. Despite the D.A.’s objections, the judge hadn’t imposed house arrest. As long as Buford didn’t travel more than twenty miles from his parents’ home on Mustang Island or come near the Campbells, he was abiding by the law.
“He’s free to go to an elementary school?” Eric had asked. “A children’s museum?”
“I’m working on this,” Garcia said.
Sometimes Eric watched the house for only a few minutes; sometimes he stayed for an hour. He staggered the times he watched, just as he switched up the vehicles he drove. Today he was in his truck. Yesterday, Laura’s car. On Wednesday, after his class, he’d borrowed Tracy Robichaud’s Volvo. He hadn’t yet glimpsed Dwight. The longer he went without seeing him, the more he dreaded the moment he would. A sharp, agonizing worry squeezed his temples. His heart throbbed so fast that times came when he was short of breath. He felt pinned down by fear; it was a boulder on his chest. One careless move and he’d be crushed.
Mayne had emerged a few times—his arm in a sling, which made rolling the garbage cans to the curb difficult—and there was a Mexican woman, probably Mrs. Buford’s hospice nurse, who regularly stepped outside to smoke under the chinaberry tree. A doctor had also visited the house. “I hope his mother dies in front of him,” Laura had taken to saying lately. “I hope he sees her cough up blood and wet chunks of lung.” Edward Livingstone, Dwight’s attorney, had picked up an overstuffed accordion folder yesterday, and reporters had been taping spots for evening broadcasts. The news had said the family was receiving death threats, so Eric always expected to find police officers stationed on the property, but he never did. Maybe they were parked nearby, surveilling the house the way he was. Maybe they had their binoculars trained on him.
Why had he recalled the Parker story? Because the Buford house looked like a small fort? Because each time Mayne or the nurse ventured outside, his pulse spiked and he was shot through with the urge to attack? Because he wanted to wave his own white flag? He felt all of this, all at once. But if the memory was rooted anywhere, it was likely with Laura. After Buford’s release, Eric had watched his wife withdraw. She seemed a shell of herself, brittle as old glass, moving through her days in a trance. She had started taking a few shifts at the dry cleaner’s and volunteering again at Marine Lab, developments that should have been encouraging, but Eric suspected such initiative was all show. It worried him. Years before, when he’d approached her in Bradshaw’s souvenir shop, the amount of blood was like nothing he’d seen. Patches of her jeans were soaked through, almost black. On the drive to the emergency clinic, she’d disinterestedly explained that to remove blood from fabric you had to soak it in cold water with salt and then try to draw it out with a steam pen. Usually, though, the stain was already set. Permanent. Ruinous.
The morning after they received news of Buford’s release, Laura went through the rooms throwing out most of the plants that had been sent in the previous weeks. Two days later, Justin and Griff lugged the mice’s empty aquarium into the garage. No one spoke of how disappointed they were, or how easily and often they were startled, how unexpected movements spooked them like horses, but the changes couldn’t be ignored. There were sudden voids in the house, silences, cruel and conspicuous vacancies that had recently, beautifully, been full and alive. Eric stepped into them like cobwebs, like gorges. He continued taking Justin for his driving lessons in the evenings, but he was increasingly worried that they would pass Buford or his parents on the road.
“You don’t feel like he’s everywhere?” Laura had asked Eric after they returned one evening.
“Not at all,” Eric lied. “I bet he’s holed up with his parents. I bet he’s terrified.”
“I hope she dies in his arms,” she said. “I hope he sees that bitch in grave pain.”
ONLY TRACY KNEW ABOUT ERIC GOING TO THE BUFORD HOUSE. She was also the only one he’d told about the possibility of leaving Southport, but as soon as he’d given voice to the idea, he’d understood it would never happen. Perhaps he brought up watching the Buford house hoping that too would sound ill-conceived and futile. Instead, he felt emboldened. They were lying in her bed, and after he explained what he’d been doing, he asked to borrow her car. The room was bright, smelling of their bodies. Tracy said, “Keys are in my purse.”
“I won’t stay long,” he said.
“You stay until you see what you need to see,” she said.
It was the first time they’d slept together since Justin had been home. He knew he should feel guilty, and he did, but the emotion was distant, moldering in some locked-down place he couldn’t access. Before, these afternoons had felt parallel to his real life, a base and shadowed rut he’d selfishly stepped into. Now, Eric was numb, barely present. In the moments before he took a shower and drove to the Buford house, his only thoughts of Laura were worries that she’d hurt herself while he was with Tracy. Maybe she’d torn at her palms again or swallowed a handful of pills or driven her car off the ferry. That he could even conceive of such grotesque possibilities was punishing. And yet not unfamiliar. Once when Justin was missing, Eric hadn’t been able to stop himself from thinking how much cheaper it would be to put one son through college than two. Another time, while idling at a railroad crossing with Laura and Griff in the car, he’d considered accelerating onto the tracks just before the train hurtled by. It had seemed a way to save everyone. For a brief and hideous moment, it seemed the only way.
Parked in the fill-sand lot, he called Laura and she said, “I’m flipping through recipes, deciding what’s for supper.”
“I vote for the famous Laura Campbell pork chops.”
“The kids are gearing up for the final projects,” he said. “I have to stay a little late.”
He didn’t know what he hoped to see at the Buford house. Being near it, near Dwight, brought him both agony and a fleeting, confounding comfort. Eric entertained fantasies of knocking on the front door, pulling Buford into the yard and cracking him open, but there were also fears that, given the opportunity, he would falter. He worried he’d reveal himself as a coward. Maybe he wanted to see Dwight Buford acting kindly toward Mayne or the nurse in hopes that it would allow him to believe the man had been, at times, kind to Justin. Or maybe if he saw him puttering around his parents’ yard, saw him pushing his mother’s wheelchair around the driveway so the dying woman could feel the sun, Eric would experience such rage that he’d be transformed, emancipated from fear and logic and hesitation. Maybe, and this seemed most likely to Eric, he watched the house in hopes that watching the house would change him.
ACROSS THE LAGUNA MADRE, A MILE INLAND FROM THE FERRY dock, a new crew of skaters had claimed the Teepee. Griff assumed they were from Corpus, but they could’ve been from anywhere. They camped on the island at night, sleeping in tents and in the back of their rusted van, then skated all day. They were older, with patchy beards and six-packs of beer. Their clothes smelled of put-out cigarettes, a dank, melancholy odor that Griff tried not to inhale. They punched holes in the bottom of beer cans with ice picks, then duct-taped them one atop the other and drank from three and four at a time. The goal seemed to be to drain a whole six-pack that way, all at once, and if someone could do it, he would reach what the crew called “wizard status.” Griff didn’t understand. They skated the pool like surfers, slashing at the coping with too much torque and carving the walls with a lunging, herky-jerky motion. One of the skaters, a rangy kid they called Baby Snot, rode barefoot. It was hard to watch.
They were cool enough. They always nodded their glassy-eyed greetings to Griff, and once Baby Snot offered him a beer. But their presence wore on him, oppressed him. For the first few days after Griff started heading back to the Teepee, he expected skaters he recognized to arrive. None did. He wondered if someone had found a better skate spot. He rode the pool halfheartedly, uninspired to try new tricks and bored with old ones, so eventually he would just sit on his board in the shade of a remaining teepee. He pretended to text on his phone. The crew got louder the more they drank. They fell more. They laughed at each other, peed in the rubble of demolished teepees, poured jugs of water over their heads and shook out their hair the way Rainbow did after a bath. Baby Snot spoke in bad fake accents—German, British, French. Griff felt no affinity with them, or even with the Teepee itself anymore. Soon, despite what he told his parents and Justin, he stopped going there at all.
He went to the marina sometimes, to the hedge Justin had pointed out. He tried to ollie it without coming close, and yet he had the flattering feeling he could clear it if he really tried. The desire just wasn’t there. He watched boats leave and return to their moorings, noticing for the first time that their wakes looked like fans of boiling water. The ferry slid across the channel, its horn bellowing, the engine coughing to a stop as the captain steered toward the landing. Minnows swam in skittish patterns near the docks. A few brown ducks paddled around, hesitant and hungry. Griff found the Bufords’ boat easily, but after seeing the Oil-n-Water once, he avoided it. He worried that Dwight Buford or one of his parents would emerge from the cabin. He worried that something would happen to the boat and he’d be blamed.
After classes let out and his father’s truck was gone from the faculty parking lot, he skated the curb in front of Southport High. He went to Whataburger to sit in the air-conditioning and drink free refills of Coke. Once, he skated out to Loan Star and visited with Papaw, but they had nothing to talk about except Justin and Buford, so being there felt too freighted. He read magazines and comic books at the grocery store, paid for one matinee and stayed for two, and played shuffleboard alone by the seawall. He combed the beach and found a striped horn shell, a tight cream-and-magenta spiral that he put in his pocket, but later threw away. He browsed souvenir shops. He tried to pretend he was a tourist, a kid from Chicago or Wyoming, but he felt sure everyone who saw him knew his whole crappy life story. He passed his old friends’ houses: Jerry, whose father had a stash of Hustlers in their Airstream trailer; Felipe, who had a crossbow; Bill, who kids only liked because his older sister, Laura, a cheerleader, walked around the house in panties and half-shirts. Griff knocked on no doors. Had anyone come outside and called his name, he would’ve broken into a full run to get away.
On the days his mother worked at the dry cleaner’s, he was tempted to visit her. Since Dwight Buford’s release, she’d seemed both to have too much energy and to be in a constant daze. Every time Griff saw her, he wanted to hug her. When he did, she seemed to come apart in his arms and he had to take care that she was back in one piece before he let go. But if he went to the cleaner’s, his mother would ask why he wasn’t with Fiona, and he didn’t have a good answer. He thought about her all the time. He missed her, but lately, as soon as they were together, he longed for solitude. “Is something up?” she’d asked earlier this week, and last week, and the week before. Each time, he’d said no and rallied himself and they both pretended he wasn’t lying. He invented excuses for not being around: His stomach hurt, his parents wanted him to spend more time with his brother, he’d let the battery in his phone die, he was grounded for having forgotten to feed Rainbow. (He had forgotten to feed Rainbow one night, but no one noticed and he fed her double once he remembered. He also gave her some banana bread his mother had baked.) He tried to occupy his mind with memories of how Fiona had first kissed him by the dumpster, how her perfume smelled on his socks, on her neck and chest. Nothing took.
The last time they’d hung out, she said, “You’re going to ruin this.”
“I know,” he said.
“Then don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.”
Roaming Southport on those grueling afternoons, his shirts sweat-heavy and his eyes squinting against the sun’s raw glare, his mind eddying with Fiona and Justin, and with his parents and the trial, Griff felt bloated. But with what? Fear? Sadness? Ever since they’d found out Buford was being released, a kind of pall had fallen over his family. It made him want to scream, to never say another word. He kept expecting his mother to sneak into his room and explain things, kept hoping Justin would take him on another midnight drive and open up again, kept thinking his father would gather everyone in the living room and give one of his coach-y speeches or suggest an idea for a crazy vacation. But, no. His mother talked about being back at work, about Alice the dolphin. His father talked about the heat and how his students were struggling with their final projects. Justin asked about Griff’s skating, if their father had taught this or that kid that he used to know, if his mother ever saw so-and-so’s parents at the dry cleaner’s. They never talked about anything real, certainly not about Dwight Buford. In that way, he was always there, watching and listening like a new member of the family.
Griff was walking on the wharf when his phone started vibrating. It was Fiona. He let it ring. I love you, he wanted to say. I’m sorry. I’m scared. But he couldn’t make himself answer. The sky was the color of bone, depthless. The wind came in sour-smelling sheets. The sun was pounding, so hot it felt like there was a layer of thick, sweltering cotton under his skin. When his phone stopped vibrating, he waited to see if she’d left a message. She hadn’t. There was only the sound of a far-off seagull, its cries plaintive and surreal and so familiar that Griff barely heard them.
18
A DREAM WITHIN A NIGHTMARE WITHIN A NIGHTMARE. A FURLOUGH from grief. From a pain so deep and dense you wanted to cut your veins to let some blood out, thinking it would relieve the pressure. A pain so deep and dense you had cut your veins, but without relief. This was how Laura came to think of the weeks with Justin bef
ore Dwight Buford was released. They had been a gift, a reprieve, a short remission before the cancer metastasized.
She saw him everywhere. Everywhere. Even though he wasn’t there, she saw him.
She saw him while she waited for deli meat in H-E-B, saw him taking free samples of toothpicked sausage. She saw him in the car next to hers on Station Street. He was riding the ferry, lobbing crumbs to seagulls. He was sunbathing on the beach. He mowed his parents’ yard and washed their white Mercedes. She saw him at the library’s circulation desk and leaning close to the reptile cages in the library foyer, watching the somnolent snakes and lizards, tapping the glass you weren’t supposed to tap. She saw him strolling along the seawall with fishing rods over his shoulder and a bucket of bait. He was eating at the Castaway Café and shuffling his feet in the dust beside the Teepee Motel pool. He stood outside the D.A.’s office, wearing sunglasses, looking smug, smiling in the washed-out light.
Justin acted unfazed by the news and Griff followed his lead. Laura noticed changes, though. Griff was quieter, more deferential. Justin started picking at his fingernails and cracking his neck more. One night when Laura was washing dishes, a skillet slipped from her hand and clattered to the ground, and the noise was so startling to Justin that he jumped back and knocked a potted plant from the counter. The pot busted and scared him again. He almost slipped in the soil on the floor. He held on to the counter, pressed his back against the wall. His eyes were wide and madly roving. She could see his chest heaving with breath. She approached him slowly—her own heart going frantic—as she would a feral cat. “We’re okay,” she kept saying. “We’re okay.”
Eric claimed not to worry about Dwight Buford’s new freedom, not to feel threatened or debased, but Laura knew he was lying. Or he was deluded, willing himself not to see. She looked for the man continuously. It struck her as perverse and revolting and about as fucked up an irony as she could conjure: She was now searching for Dwight Buford the way she used to search for Justin. She scanned every face for his eyes, every passerby for his gait. She expected him to round every corner and stand behind every door. Yes, it was precisely how she recalled the four years Justin was gone. The drain of constant awareness. The abiding sense that you’d always just missed him. How clearly she remembered walking into rooms, opening closets and drawers, only to realize she’d forgotten what she’d come to find. “Do you think you’re looking for your son? Subconsciously, perhaps?” the therapist had once asked. Laura had gone as a favor to Eric—See? I’m trying—but she’d been so flummoxed by the triteness of it all that she left without a word mid-session. The difference now was that when she looked in a cupboard expecting to find Dwight Buford, he was there. He was always, always there.
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