But he was already in front of the Teepee, and Baby Snot was doffing an imaginary hat, saying, “Top of the evening to you, young Griffin. Unfortunately, the pool is closed for the night. No lifeguard on duty.”
“It’s cool,” he said, thinking he was missing part of a joke. The pool wasn’t closed at all. There were two skaters in the shallow end, and another was carving the round wall. Griff said, “I’m meeting my girlfriend.”
“Ah,” Baby Snot said. “The siren song of the snatch should never be ignored, should ye be lucky enough to receive it.”
He was shirtless, sheened with sweat, aping a bad Irish accent. There was a crude black tattoo of a koi on his stomach. Behind him, the skaters in the shallow end waited to roll in. One of them looked familiar to Griff, but the others were new. They were older, maybe by ten or fifteen years, with stubble and bellies. Their van was parked close to the bowl. The dull banging started up again, louder.
Baby Snot said, “You enjoy yourself, laddie. And remember, when in the company of a lovely lass, always put a helmet on thy jimmy lest ye—”
“What’s that noise?” Griff interrupted.
“It’s Baby Snot sounding like an Irish pirate,” one of the new skaters said from the pool. He had a graveled voice and rangy, board-straight posture, like he’d been in the army. He drained a beer and tossed the empty onto the deck of the pool, then said, “Do Irish pirates even exist? Is that a thing?”
“I thought he was a leprechaun,” another skater said. Then more of the dull banging. It was coming from behind the van.
“No,” Griff said. “That noise. What is it?”
“ ’Tis none of your business,” Baby Snot said. “ ’Tis time you run and find the lass with the golden chali—”
“Shut the fuck up, Snot,” the skater said. Then the sound of steel hitting steel hitting concrete.
Griff started toward the van. All of the skaters trained their eyes on him, like he’d dropped a tray of dishes. He said, “What’s going on?”
“ ’Tis nothing to see here,” Baby Snot said, stepping in front of Griff, blocking his path.
But Griff had already seen: Half of the pool’s coping had been removed. The cement blocks were stacked like sandbags inside the van; they were so heavy that the back end sat lower than the front, the rear shocks depressed. Griff went cold. Everything seemed immediately fraught, changed, dangerous. Two skaters from Baby Snot’s crew were working to pry the next block loose. They had crowbars and hammers. The banging was less dull now, more resonant and hollow. It was the same sound Griff’s heart was making in his ears.
“Like I said, Mr. Griffin, it’s best if you run along,” Baby Snot said. His fake accent was gone, and his chest was inches from Griff’s. His sweat reeked of pot and beer, a thin and desolate odor that scared Griff. He said, “This is a carnival ride you’re not tall enough for.”
Griff couldn’t take his eyes off the skaters sliding their crowbars under the block of coping, wedging them under and knocking them in with hammers, and then wrenching the piece off.
“Just get out of here,” Baby Snot whispered. His tone was conspiratorial, like he was trying to help.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Dude,” he said, “just split, okay?”
“Just leave the coping and skate here whenever you want. You’re ruining the pool.”
Baby Snot nodded, a glazed and dopey gesture, like he’d just taken a bong hit. In his accent again, and louder, he said, “The coping needed its freedom, and like the Pied Piper, we have come to liberate the—”
“Snot!” the old skater said. “Shut the fuck up and send the cocksucker’s brother on his way.”
“Oh shit,” someone said from behind the van and stifled a laugh. Then everyone’s gaze was back on Griff, boring into him. The guys working on the coping went still, crouched with their hands on their tools. Baby Snot seemed confused by what was happening. A car passed on Station Street. No one moved.
“What did you say?” Griff asked. “What did he say about my brother?”
“Mike’s drunk,” Baby Snot said. “Go find your girl. She’s waiting on you.”
“I said”—Mike, the older skater, was climbing out of the pool now, crossing the lot toward Griff—“I said you need to spend some quality time with your faggot brother. Let him teach you how to suck dick and then hurry back and show us what you’ve got.”
“Ease up now, Mike. Be cool now,” Baby Snot said.
“There’s nothing wrong with going fag,” Mike said. “And big brother must have liked it, right? Why else would he stay put for so long unless he liked a hard dick up his—”
Baby Snot tried to stay between them. He tried, Griff thought, to wrap his arms around Mike and keep him off Griff, but it was as if a cord had broken to turn everyone loose and they were all instantly tangled—Griff trying to get to Mike, and Mike trying to get to Griff. They were tripping forward, hitting the ground. Then the others were in the mix too, cinching in, constricting. The rubber sole of a shoe, sandy and somehow wet, on Griff’s mouth, pinning him to the cement, maybe by accident. The sudden thick taste of blood, his mouth full of it. Someone’s elbow in his eye socket and his nose running. He scratched at Mike’s face with his nails, rammed his knee into his ribs, a heaving motion that released him from under the shoe. Blood and mucus and spit, now slick on his face, in his hair, and then he was down again, from behind, and someone was pulling at his arms, angling them up and behind him. The smell of beer and concrete dust. His face on the ground again, burning and twisting; he could feel every grain of sand against his cheek and forehead. More blood in his mouth. He could picture the wound perfectly, a dark gash between his teeth and bottom lip, deep enough that blood pooled in it. I’ll need stitches. A sound like an animal in pain that Griff didn’t know he was making. He thought, Is this what I deserve? He thought, My parents will know I snuck out. He thought, This is what they’ll remember. He thought, I shouldn’t give up Fiona. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all of it. Weight on him, so much weight that he couldn’t breathe, and then his palm on someone’s face. Then it was on a nose, and he hoped it was Mike’s, and he pushed against his septum, feeling the head tilt back and hit the concrete, thinking of driving a stake into wet, hard earth, a pin into a stubborn cushion, and then he was on his stomach, his legs almost over his head like a scorpion, and everyone was rolling, and then a hand in front of him, and he bit at the wrist, tasted beer and salty sweat and gritty dirt and his own blood, and dug his teeth in, clamping down and down and down, trying to tear the skin until he heard the banging again, closer, behind his ear, and all at once the world was silent and black and gone.
25
AFTER FOUR YEARS, AFTER THE COUNTLESS TIMES THE NUMBER had been called, Laura hadn’t grown accustomed to the sound of the 800 line ringing. It still startled her. The ringtone was modern-sounding—futuristic and mellow compared to the clanging rattle of the other phone—and her heart always throbbed when she heard it. She’d never inoculated herself against the crazies who called, the pranksters or heavy breathers or wishful thinkers or the sadists who laid out horrifically plausible accounts of what they’d done to her boy; she listened to everyone with hope and terror, believing that life would be changed (not necessarily for the better) at the end of each call. One of the chores she’d assigned herself in the recent weeks was to cancel the phone line or surrender the number to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it, though. She hadn’t known why she’d been stalling until, near the end of the movie on Monday night, the phone rang.
She’d been watching Justin sleep, thinking he must still be so exhausted from all of it. She wondered if Buford had ever watched her son while he slept. Her poisoned thoughts. Her bleak heart, sagging with regret and vulgar, selfish need. The ringing phone was a kind of small salvation.
She jumped up from the couch out of habit, as quickly as she would have had Justin still been gone
. Her movement, which reminded Eric of how she’d run to the boys when they started to cry as infants, had been so abrupt that she’d startled Sasha. Suddenly, Justin was fumbling to catch the snake, trying to keep her from slipping into the cushions, while Laura rushed to the kitchen. She answered before the second ring ended.
“Mrs. Campbell?”
Again, on blind memory, she’d flipped open her Moleskine and her pen was in her hand, hovering, ready to write down whatever information the caller offered.
Laura said, “This is she.”
“I have your son,” the caller said. It was a woman, maybe around Laura’s age, maybe younger. The connection was clean and clear, an encouraging relief, and the woman’s voice sounded urgent, but not crazy, not manipulative. For a fleeting moment, almost before the idea could gain purchase in Laura’s mind, she thought these past weeks with Justin were nothing but a fantasy; she thought he was still missing and they were still searching. That she couldn’t at that moment see or hear anything from the living room—probably Eric had muted the television to listen to Laura’s reaction, probably Justin was pulling Sasha out of the couch like a magician’s scarf—seemed to confirm that the woman was telling the truth.
Before Laura could think of what to say or ask, before she could ground herself in the proper moment, the woman said, “Your other son. Griffin. I have Griff.”
“Who is this?”
A near-silence on the line, a hissing that seemed so long and encompassing that Laura thought the woman had hung up and the call was about to drop. She had also somehow known it wouldn’t, had discerned from the meaningful quiet that the woman would speak again. Then, like that, the woman said, “It’s Tracy.”
“Tracy?”
“Tracy Robichaud. I volunteered on the searches for Justin. I’m in charge of the celebration at the Shrimporee.”
“You have long brown hair,” Laura said, feeling dizzy. “You’re a surgeon.”
“My husband is,” she said. “But right now, Griff’s hurt. He’s been beaten up. We’re at the emergency clinic on Station.”
Griff’s in his room, she almost said, but as soon as she opened her mouth, she knew she was wrong. At that moment, and as she was bringing Eric and Justin up to speed on the drive to the clinic, she was trying to remember when she’d last seen Griff. The most recent time she could recall was when they’d worked in Justin’s room before she went to pick up Eric. That was days ago. The knowledge hollowed her. He could’ve been gone all along, could’ve been lying broken and afraid in the dark, waiting for his mother to come looking for him, waiting for her to at least notice that he too had gone missing.
26
STITCHES. SIX OF THEM ALONG HIS SON’S HAIRLINE. GRIFF also had a blackened left eye, bloody swollen knuckles on both hands, and bruises on his back, legs, and ribs. He looked like a kid who’d jumped out of a moving car. He looked the way Eric and Laura felt.
Tracy Robichaud had been driving home when she saw the commotion at the Teepee. “My stomach has been upset,” she’d said in the waiting room while Griff was in the back getting patched up. “So I’d gone out for a Sprite. We didn’t have any at the condo.” (We. The word seemed deliberate, but Eric wasn’t sure if she said it for Laura’s sake or his.) Tracy hadn’t known that Griff was under the chaos of bodies, hadn’t known he was bearing the brunt of the violence, but she knew there was trouble. She slammed her brakes and jumped the curb on Station Street. She threw her door open and ran toward the fight, screaming for them to stop. Everyone scattered, then converged at the van, jumped inside and sped away. Everyone except the boy lying on his back on the ground. Everyone except Griff.
“I remembered the 800 number from the searches and the billboard,” Tracy said.
“Thank you,” Eric said. There was a dispiriting drawl in his voice. His palms were sweating.
“I’ve been meaning to cancel that number for weeks,” Laura said, as if she were talking to herself. She seemed in a mild state of shock.
Eric wanted to take her hand, wanted to say, Everything happens for a reason, but he didn’t trust the notion any more than he trusted himself. He didn’t want her to feel his sweaty palms, didn’t want Tracy to see him holding his wife’s hand.
“Thank you,” Laura said. “Thank you for stopping. Thank you for calling us.”
“Anyone would have done the same thing,” Tracy said. Her voice was consoling but still rasped, dry-sounding, from having yelled at the Teepee; Eric wanted to get her some water. She never met his eyes, but stared at her hands clasped in her lap. Eric had learned that she did this when she was gearing up to say something that scared her. Moments later, leaning toward Justin, Tracy said, “I’m sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances, but I wanted to say how happy I am that you’re home. I’ve wanted to make your acquaintance for years.”
“Thanks,” Justin said shyly. Aside from his time with Letty and Garcia, this was the first occasion Eric had seen his son interact with someone outside the house. And, despite Tracy’s kindness, despite what she’d just done for Griff and the safe harbor she’d so often granted Eric, a current of sad anger passed through him. How long would Justin have to abide strangers approaching him, congratulating and complimenting him? How long would he feel their stares? Hear their whispers? Justin appeared unaffected, but Eric thought otherwise: He thought his son was already resigned to the fate of people always thinking they knew him, seeing his pain as an invitation. Justin looked around the empty waiting room. There was a television with a cartoon playing, posters bleached pale by the sun, a few crinkled and coverless magazines. The fluorescent lights turned the glass on the automatic doors to mirrors. Eric took care not to gaze on who was being reflected.
Laura said, “You mentioned you’re in charge of the Shrimporee event?”
“For better or worse,” Tracy said.
“We’re so grateful, just so grateful,” Laura said. “We thought he was in his room.”
“Boys will be boys,” Tracy said, smiling. Then, after a beat, she said, “If there’s anything you’d want or not want as part of the celebration, just say the word.”
“It’s great that you’re in charge,” Eric said. “You’re perfect.”
“I know people who’d fight you on that, but the event should be nice, something we can all look back on happily,” Tracy said. It was her version of goodbye. She gave Justin an awkward hug and shook his hand, then Eric’s. Then Laura rose and embraced her. Eric couldn’t watch. He turned to Justin—just then he wanted desperately to tell him Griff would be fine, to assure him that despite every hurt they’d experienced, things would work out—but his son’s eyes were locked on the cartoon. Two UFOs were bobbing through a starry universe, racing to a lumpy purple planet; Eric wished he recognized the show, wished he could share something about it with Justin. Then the automatic door was sliding open with a pneumatic whoosh, and Tracy was walking briskly to her Volvo. The soggy night rolled into the room.
“What would we have done if she hadn’t called?” Laura said after a while, sounding mystified. Eric could tell the words had been scrolling through her mind for some time. “What would’ve happened if whoever found him hadn’t known who he was, hadn’t known about the 800 line?”
“We got lucky, no question,” Eric said. “It’s a small world, and things could have been far worse.”
“For some people,” Justin said. He was still watching the cartoon.
“Do what, honey?” Laura said.
“It’s a small world for some people,” he said. “Not for everyone.”
GRIFF SAID HE HAD BEEN TRYING TO STOP THEM FROM STEALING the coping. Eric believed this, but he also thought his son’s account sounded incomplete. Laura agreed. They didn’t push, didn’t ask why he’d sneaked out or why he’d take on five or six bigger guys. They were terrified by what had happened—to Griff, of course, but also by what Justin had said. It’s a small world for some people. Fear blunted anger. There was the brief obligatory talk of gro
unding Griff, which they’d done in the past, but what would it accomplish? As it was, he did little more than move between his bed and the living room couch, watching television and sipping soup and eating ice cream. What his demeanor recalled for Eric was the period, shortly after Justin first disappeared, when Griff, only nine at the time, started wetting the sheets. How he walked around listlessly while his sheets tumbled in the dryer.
Justin doted on Griff. He woke up earlier and let Rainbow in and out of Griff’s room when she scratched at the door. Justin never mentioned anything else about what he’d said in the waiting room, but his attention to Griff seemed a kind of apology, an effort to strike his words from the record. Why wouldn’t he view the world as smaller for other people? Wouldn’t his life have been better if someone had recognized him sooner, if it had been harder for him to move beyond his parents’ reach? Again, Eric thought of how Justin had been angry at them, how he had no choice but to believe they’d failed him and how they couldn’t dispute it. So, then, maybe another reason he was doting on Griff was because he didn’t trust them to take care of his younger brother. Through it all, Griff remained sullen. Eric couldn’t tell if he was feeling embarrassed about having been beaten up or if his glumness was the result of whatever he wasn’t telling them. It could’ve been a side effect of his pain medication. When Eric asked him what was wrong, Griff just said, “The coping was perfect. It was what made the pool worth skating.”
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