Remember Me Like This

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  JUSTIN WANTED TO LEARN TO DRIVE ON HIGH BRIDGES, SO ONE Friday evening Eric took him into Corpus. Eric drove over the Harbor Bridge the first time, then they switched seats at a filling station. A long breeze, gulls crying and floating on vectors like choppy water. Eric tried to make out Marine Lab across the ship channel, but the screen of spruce around the warehouse obscured his view. A man in camouflage pumped gas into his dually truck; a woman leaned against the building with a cigarette in one hand and a Styrofoam cup in the other; cars idled in queue for the next available pump. Eric thought he and Justin would get back on the road right away, but Justin sat behind the wheel for a full minute without shifting into gear. At one point the truck’s RPMs plummeted and Eric worried the engine would die.

  “I guess I’m a little scared,” Justin said. He picked at the bed of his thumbnail.

  “It’s no different than driving on the highway. Take it slow.”

  “I don’t want to hold anyone up. I don’t want people to be waiting on me.”

  “If they want to pass, they’ll pass. You just go at whatever speed feels right. Keep your eyes on the road and it’ll hardly feel like a bridge.”

  Justin cracked his neck. He drew a deep breath, then accelerated onto the street. The traffic had diminished, so he merged onto the bridge easily and settled into the middle lane. A flutter of pride in Eric’s chest. He stopped himself from tousling his son’s hair; Justin was concentrating so hard that the last thing the boy needed was his doting father distracting him. The car pulled against the bridge, gathering moderate speed as the girders overhead cast a lattice of shadows. Justin tapped the brakes often. More and more distance opened between their truck and the cars ahead. When a sedan passed too close on the left, Justin cut his eyes to Eric and then back to the road. Eric said, “You’re fine.” As they coasted down the bridge, a few more cars whooshed by, but Justin maintained his speed and steered toward the off-ramp.

  “If that wasn’t a successful maiden voyage, I wouldn’t know what was,” Eric said. It sounded like something Cecil would say, which pleased him, made him feel fatherly.

  “It feels higher when you’re the driver.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Eric said. “You’ll get to where you don’t even notice.”

  They were stopped at an underpass. Justin was looking at the bridge in the rearview mirror. He was proud of himself, Eric could tell, and energized, the way he used to get when he found an unusual shell for his collection. Eric hadn’t seen him like this since he’d been back. He wished Laura and Griff were in the car with them, and Cecil. He wished Tracy were there, too, and Letty the social worker and everyone who’d ever worried about Justin. Seeing him this way was a reminder and a reward, evidence of his son’s capacity to recover.

  “I’m proud of you, bud,” Eric said.

  “I bet the causeway is even easier than this was,” Justin said. “It’s not as high or steep, right?”

  “It’ll be a piece of cake,” Eric said.

  When Justin had asked about driving on bridges, the causeway entered Eric’s mind first. The bridge there was about half as high—the waters under it were open only to small watercraft—and the traffic out there was always lighter. To get to it, though, they’d have to pass the Buford house. If Justin had put that together, he didn’t let on. Eric would have welcomed the opportunity to see what was happening at the house—he’d never been out there at this late hour—but he didn’t want to risk Justin seeing anyone. Earlier that afternoon, Eric had watched the house through his binoculars for almost two hours, his longest session yet. (The truck’s RPMs had plummeted then, too, and for a moment Eric was paralyzed with fear that he’d be stranded there and have to call for help.) Ultimately, he’d seen nothing more than the hospice nurse on her smoke breaks. He already wanted to go back.

  In the sky, a perishing light. Drivers coming off the Harbor Bridge were clicking their headlamps on. Eric could see the corrugated roof of Marine Lab. He said, “If you hurry, I bet you can make it over the bridge and back again before it gets full dark.”

  “Really?”

  “We’ll just tell your mother we hit traffic.”

  “Sick,” Justin said.

  “She probably won’t ask. She’ll probably just be excited to see us.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” he said, dropping the truck into gear. “I’m good with a secret.”

  BUT WHEN THEY RETURNED HOME, LAURA WAS ALREADY IN BED. Griff was watching skate videos on the computer. He came into the kitchen and ate cereal from the box with his brother. Justin told Griff about having driven over the Harbor Bridge, portraying himself as more nervous than he’d actually been to amuse his brother. Rainbow trotted in and the boys fed her some cereal, then started trying to teach her to sit or raise her paw to shake.

  Griff said Laura had gone to bed with a headache. Maybe that was true. She sometimes got migraines. Usually she could isolate herself in a cool, dark room and sleep them off, but occasionally Eric had to take her to the emergency clinic for shots of Demerol. She hadn’t suffered one in months, though, maybe over a year, so Eric worried that something else had driven her to bed that early on a Friday night. She could’ve seen Dwight Buford or his parents. The district attorney could’ve called the house with news or questions that unraveled her. Or something might have happened with the dolphin. Or with Tracy Robichaud. Eric hadn’t seen Tracy in a week, but Laura could have easily run into her; Tracy was mired in planning the event at the Shrimporee, and she might have contacted Laura with questions. That Eric hadn’t yet mentioned Tracy’s involvement to Laura put him in a sweat. As he crept into their bedroom, he’d half expected the bed to be empty and their back window open. But Laura lay under the covers, her breathing deep and even. He went to sleep listening to her feather-soft snoring.

  She rose in the middle of the night. Eric heard her and assumed she was going to the bathroom. He drifted off again. Two hours later, a little before dawn, he woke from a stiff, draining sleep to find she hadn’t returned, so he pushed himself up out of bed. It occurred to him that she might have gone for one of her midnight walks down to the marina—he had a fuzzy memory of having been afraid of something before bed—but he mostly expected to find her sick in the bathroom. Migraines sometimes nauseated her.

  She was in the kitchen, scribbling in her Moleskine at the table. She’d made coffee and iced sweet rolls; the smells made Eric think of winter, of Christmas, and for a moment it seemed he’d slept for months. He was also struck, in a way he hadn’t been in weeks, by the absence of the plants and flowers in the kitchen, by how empty the room was.

  “I had a bad dream,” she said. “I didn’t completely remember it until five minutes ago. I want to write it out. One of my books said that can help.”

  Eric nodded, dragged his hand over his face. He had to yawn, but stifled it. He debated whether to pour a cup of coffee or to go back to sleep. He couldn’t tell if Laura wanted him there. Outside, the night was eliding, splitting into the first soft rays of morning light.

  “Is your head still hurting?” Eric asked. “Do you need a shot?”

  “Did y’all have a good driving lesson?” Laura asked. She was still writing, not looking at him. Had there been an accusation in her tone? Eric wasn’t sure. Just then he remembered Justin saying he was good with a secret, and the room spun a little. The window over the sink was open, which didn’t make sense. Laura said, “I tried to stay up, but my head got too bad. I thought going to bed might stop it from turning into a migraine. I think it worked.”

  “Good. I’m glad,” he said. She turned the page in her Moleskine—the sound was close and loud in the kitchen—and continued writing. Her pen moved so fast across the page that it put Eric in mind of his students when they took in-class exams. No—he thought of the student Laura had surely been, a smart girl who wouldn’t have put her pen down until the bell rang. He could make out only one sentence at the top of the page: If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it
. Eric said, “We would’ve been home sooner, but he wanted to drive across a bridge, so we went out to Corpus.”

  “The Harbor Bridge?”

  “He was scared at first, but he got over it.”

  “Clever,” she said. “ ‘Got over it.’ ”

  “I don’t—oh,” he said.

  “We’ll have to set boundaries when he gets his license. A certain distance he can’t go without permission,” Laura said.

  She’d stopped writing, but sat looking at the Moleskine. Again, Eric could see her as a student, checking her work for errors. He hadn’t thought of setting boundaries, hadn’t even really grasped that teaching Justin to drive meant that he’d ever be driving without Eric in the passenger seat.

  “We can write up one of those contracts,” Eric said, remembering. “My parents did one with me. A piece of paper that says if he drinks or does drugs, he won’t drive. The agreement is that he’ll call us to pick him up wherever he is and we won’t get angry. We all sign it.”

  “You think he’s going to start doing drugs? Or drinking?”

  “I was just saying we could do that along with the boundary rules.”

  Laura flipped a page in her Moleskine and wrote: Parent/child contract. Drugs? Drinking?

  Morning was coming. The new light showed how tired Laura looked—her bagged eyes, her sallow skin. Crumpled tissues dotted the table. Eric hadn’t noticed them before, but now he understood: She’d been crying before he got up. Crying while she baked the sweet rolls and brewed the coffee, crying while she tried to remember the dream that had woken her. He was overcome with deep affection for her, a sorrowful warmth.

  “Can you get someone else to work today?” he asked. “If you can switch shifts, you might be able to get a little more rest.”

  “If Justin’s still sleeping when I get home, I’ll nap,” she said.

  “You ought to let him take you over the bridge.”

  “It was about him,” she said. “About Dwight Buford. He’d come to deliver some salt to Marine Lab while I was volunteering. Nothing more than that, but it was terrifying.”

  “Sure. That makes—”

  “I just feel like I see him everywhere. Absolutely everywhere.”

  “It’ll ease up. And after the trial, he’ll be in pris—”

  “It wasn’t the dream that woke me up, though. It was that I understood something, something I haven’t understood since Justin came back.”

  “What?”

  “Why he’d stay. I understand why he didn’t try to run. Or call the cops or us or anyone. I get it now.”

  Eric didn’t know what was happening, didn’t entirely know where he was. Everything was funneling and intensifying, as if the world was about to turn all of its attention on him. He said, “Why?”

  “Because you feel like he’s always with you. You feel like he’s always watching you, hovering, always close enough to touch you. You feel like there’s no getting away.”

  “You feel that way now? Right here, in the kitchen? You’re worried he’s that close this morning?”

  She looked at him with equal parts pity and confusion. She said, “Isn’t he?”

  AFTER LAURA LEFT FOR WORK, ERIC DROVE OUT AND PARKED near the Buford house. He’d never been there that early, so he hoped to see something new—Dwight Buford taking his coffee on the porch or watering the lawn before it got too hot. There was nothing of the kind. The sun came up bright and molten—and fast, it seemed to Eric—and traffic clogged as the ferry made its way across the Laguna Madre. Soon the light was so bright that the glare obscured the quiet house. When the traffic thinned, he took the ferry back to Southport and picked up a bag of breakfast tacos. The boys would still be sleeping, but he wanted to have an excuse in case they’d woken and found both their parents gone. Later, after Laura returned home from the dry cleaner’s, he said he wanted to visit his father at the shop, but drove out to the house again. He thought Mayne’s Mercedes was parked a few feet farther back on the driveway, but nothing else had changed. The property might as well have been vacant.

  Over the next week, the possibility that Dwight Buford wasn’t in the house at all started taking hold. It was like catching the flu. The symptoms worsened each day, and the more aggressively they asserted themselves, the more he fought to downplay them. He spent two, sometimes three hours watching the house through the binoculars. His eyes grew tired. The bridge of his nose hurt. If he didn’t have time to stop, he went out of his way to drive past the house, hoping to glimpse anything that would confirm Dwight Buford’s presence. Nothing did. He saw only the hospice nurse and Mayne and the doctor. Edward Livingstone had visited just that once to pick up the accordion folder, and soon the lawyer’s absence seemed to evidence Buford’s absence. Eric wanted to alert Garcia or the police. He wanted them to assure him he was wrong or to start the manhunt for the fugitive. If he reported his suspicions, however, he’d have to admit he’d been watching the house.

  He alerted no one. It would have worried Laura, irrefutably galvanizing her fears and breeding a new and desperate paranoia. Eric aimed to spare her that as long as he could. The same with the boys. He might have told Tracy, but almost two weeks had passed since he’d last seen her. They had slept together the once after Dwight Buford had been released, but when they tried again, it was empty and dismal and ultimately unsuccessful. It wasn’t a problem he’d ever had before. He tried to lose himself in her eyes and body, in her scent and motion and breath, but nothing helped. He couldn’t ward off images of Buford and Justin, couldn’t help but imagine how impossibly difficult and fraught intimacy would be for his son in the future, how he would always feel soiled. From there, his thoughts went to Laura and the boys. He missed them with a raw and shaming force. He longed to be near them, to atone, to accept his punishment. As he showered, Tracy dressed and threw the sheets in the washer. She’d been kind about the trouble he’d had, but Eric knew she felt the same emptiness, maybe the same guilt, that he did. They parted as quickly as strangers.

  And he didn’t tell his father because he was afraid of what Cecil would do. Since Dwight Buford had been released, Cecil had been distant, beleaguered. He had hardly visited the house. Twice Eric and Justin had stopped by on their nightly drives, and although Justin didn’t pick up on it, Eric had the sense that his father was eager for them to leave. He stood on his porch, blocking the door. On the next visit, he loaded them up with a couple of boxes of Eric’s mother’s things—ceramic figurines and photo albums and some of her clothes. “I’ve got roaches,” he’d said. Cecil looked older each time they saw him, more haggard. He also seemed cornered, dangerously resigned, like a man whose choices had winnowed to a perilous degree and who had made his peace with the sad way matters would play out. There had even been a moment when Eric had thought the reason Cecil wasn’t allowing them into his house was because he had Dwight Buford in there, strapped to a chair or bound to the stove. It was absurd, of course, but the notion had reinforced his feeling that he shouldn’t share his concerns about Buford’s possible absence. He was afraid Cecil would waltz up to the Bufords’ door and demand to see Dwight. He was afraid to find out that although he couldn’t do what needed to be done, his father could.

  ON MONDAY EVENING, A FULL MONTH AFTER BUFORD’S release, Eric stood in the backyard watering the grass. Overwatering, perhaps, trying to make up for prior negligence. Laura was at work and Griff was skating at the Teepee. Eric had planned to take Justin driving, but when he woke up, Justin had only wanted to rearrange his room. Eric didn’t mind. They moved the bed to the opposite wall, slid the dresser with Sasha’s tank and the television to where the bed had been. So it wasn’t so much rearranged as reversed, a mirror image of what it had been. The room looked odd, unfinished. Eric thought they would keep working, keep sliding one piece here and another there until they found the perfect layout, but Justin seemed content. It almost seemed like the setup for a practical joke, where Justin would invite his brother or mother into the room and pr
etend nothing had changed. But there was no hint of mischief in the air. Then, with the furniture situated, it became clear that Eric’s services were no longer necessary. He told Justin that he’d be in the backyard and closed the door behind him.

  The yard was saturated, the air thick with heat and mist from the hose and the coming night. A dust of pale stars hung in the sky. Gnats and mosquitoes were hovering. A few wasps. They were attracted by the spray of the hose. He looked at the yard obliquely, squinting his eyes to see it as it had been in its prime. After just a few weeks, the grass had yellowed in places, browned in others, and weeds had pushed up, started spreading. Eric didn’t regret laying down the new lawn—the Fourth of July picture alone had been worth the money—but seeing it succumb to the sun dismayed him. He felt guilty, rash. In the last angled light of the day, everything looked slightly sloped. It was as if the yard had taken on more weight and was tilting forward and soon everything would slide down the pitched surface into darkness. He shut off the water and coiled the hose, then went inside to find something to fix for supper. Laura and Griff would be home soon.

  Justin was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and munching on cereal like popcorn. He extended his arm to let Eric grab a handful of corn flakes. The gesture seemed sweet and inclusive, affectionate in its way. How could he resist? For a moment there was only the sound of their crunching.

  Then Justin said, “Do I need to tell Mom I’m sorry?”

  “About your room?”

  “About the mice.”

  “Oh,” he said. He had to recalibrate his thinking, recall that night that seemed so long ago. Laura had been upset about the mice, no question. He remembered that she seemed to have taken it personally, but Eric was surprised it had made such an impression on Justin.

  “I mean,” Justin said, “Sasha needed to eat, but I could’ve waited. I could’ve ordered frozen mice online. I’ve done it before.”

  Before. The word was barbed. Behind and within it was every last thing Eric was trying to stave off. He turned toward the window over the sink, letting the word, the idea, sift away. He could still see the dense shapes of the yard, the odd angles of the little palm tree and the jagged fence line. An image of Laura came into his mind, his wife sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling in her Moleskine. Because you feel like he’s always with you.