Remember Me Like This

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  Neither Eric nor Laura had heard from Tracy. The silence made him nervous, though he knew he should see it as a good thing. Laura wrote her a thank-you card, had everyone sign it, and went back through the volunteer records to find her address.

  “They have two houses, one in Corpus and one here, at Villa Del Sol,” Laura said.

  “Is that right?” Eric said.

  “Where should I send the card?”

  “I’m sure either place will work,” he said.

  “I’ll do Corpus,” she said. “I bet they’re spending more time there now.”

  Laura worked her shifts at the dry cleaner’s, but arranged for someone to cover at Marine Lab through the weekend. Cecil brought over tamales, and showed Griff how to play double solitaire. Griff played the game with Justin a few times, both boys sitting on his bed, looking young. Eric taught his class on Monday, then again on Wednesday, and when he could break away from school and the house, he parked in the fill-sand lot and watched the Buford place. Nothing changed. No one emerged. With each passing hour, there was a slow constricting in his throat, like he’d been crawling through a tight tunnel and gotten stuck, his arms trapped under his body. He couldn’t decide if he should try to push forward or inch backward, if he should call for help or save his breath. At any moment, it seemed the walls would collapse.

  “SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PLAN TO BREAK UP WITH ME?” Fiona said. She was sitting cross-legged at the foot of Griff’s bed. He didn’t know how long she’d been there.

  He thought it was late afternoon, but it might’ve been later. Or earlier. The tinfoiled windows kept time out. So did his pain pills. Fiona wore perfume, and even in the half dark, he could see she’d put on makeup. His mouth tasted dry, medicinal. He patted his hair down, worried it looked bad from sleep. His stitches burned.

  “What time is it?” Griff asked.

  “Time for you to understand I’m not a chick to trifle with.”

  “Are my parents home?”

  “Your mom’s with the dolphin and your dad took the truck to the shop. Justin called me over.”

  “Justin called you?”

  “What I want to say is that I’m sorry you got your ass kicked, I really am, and I hope whoever did it gets syphilis, but I’m still pissed at you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Griff said. And he was. He was suddenly shocked at how sorry he was.

  “You’re forgiven,” Fiona said. “But I’m still pissed. I will be for a while. Get psyched.”

  Griff’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. He could see that Fiona had brought two milk shakes. They sat on his desk, beading with sweat, straws already in the lids. The thought of her inserting the straws before she’d come into his room, that she’d taken such pains to keep from waking him, was shattering. And now that he’d seen the milk shakes, he could smell them, too. Chocolaty, cold. It was a summer scent, not from this summer or any of the recent ones, but a scent from when he was much younger. He watched Fiona. She was worrying a loose thread from his comforter.

  “I wasn’t going to break up with you,” he said.

  “Yes, you were,” she said, tugging on the thread. “But it’s okay. You’ve had a lot going on. Abducted brother returns, asshole pervert kidnapper goes free, first official girlfriend. It’s a big year.”

  “And they stole the coping from the Teepee.”

  “And you got the shit beaten out of you. Like I said, you’re absolved.”

  “But you’re going to be mad for a long time,” Griff said.

  “I am,” she said. She was rooting under the comforter for his foot. She brought it into her lap and started to massage his sole with her thumbs. She clasped her fingers over the arch of his foot, then lifted his leg and scooted closer and closer, until his toes reached her shirt, the underside of her breast. Her hands were warm, soft. She’d never done this before, and her touch was much gentler than he would have guessed, like she was rubbing a baby’s feet, taking care not to pinch or tickle him.

  “Why?” Griff said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why forgive me?”

  “The same reason I’m going to be pissed for, like, years,” she said. “Because, against all odds, I’m probably falling into some low-grade version of love with you.”

  “You are?”

  “Unfortunately,” she said, smiling. “And here’s some breaking news: you love me, too.”

  “I do?”

  “Clearly. Irrefutably. Immeasurably,” she said.

  “This is maybe the best day of my life,” he said.

  After a moment, Rainbow pawed at Griff’s door from the hallway and almost immediately Justin was snapping his fingers and calling her name, luring her away.

  “Did it hurt when you were in the fight? Or when you got your stitches? Were you scared?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes to which?”

  “To all of them,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, reaching for his other foot and bringing it into her lap. “Good, that’s nice to hear.”

  HE KNEW HIS PARENTS DIDN’T BELIEVE HIM, AND PROBABLY JUStin didn’t either, but the truth was he didn’t remember what had happened. Not exactly. He remembered Baby Snot’s accent and the force of everyone’s weight; he remembered the older skater—Mark? Mike? Mick?—insulting Justin and half of the coping being gone and the woman with the dark hair taking him to the clinic. He remembered not wanting to bleed on her car’s upholstery, remembered thinking it was the nicest car he’d ever ridden in, remembered apologizing to her. He remembered feeling like he owed everyone an apology. But there were things that didn’t fit, too: He thought the woman, on the drive to the clinic, had called him Lobster. He thought she’d said, “Y’all just can’t catch a break, can you?” And on the way home, with his parents and Justin in the car, his mother had said, “You’re right. The world is a lot smaller for some people. That’s a smart way to put it.”

  Days later, every part of his body still ached. Fiona and Justin tended to him, as did his parents, but he sensed that they—his parents—were being pulled in different directions. Griff didn’t know what was happening with Dwight Buford or the lawyers or his father’s students or the dolphin at Marine Lab. No one talked to him about anything other than how he was feeling and what he wanted to do or eat. Griff knew he shouldn’t, but he reveled in their attention. A better person would have rallied and told them not to pamper him. He did the opposite. When Justin was around, he acted more dismal. With Fiona, he exaggerated his pain. Stop milking it, he told himself, but he never did.

  On Thursday night, Justin said, “It was really about the coping?”

  “What?”

  “You took on a gang of thugs just because they were stealing the coping. It wasn’t because of anything else? It didn’t have anything to do with me?”

  “The coping was unbelievable,” Griff said. “And it wasn’t a gang. It was just a few guys.”

  “I would have helped them pry it loose. I would have helped them carry it away. Skating doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.”

  “You just need to get back into it,” Griff said, hearing how false the words were. He’d known for a while that Justin wasn’t a skater anymore, but he didn’t want him to admit it.

  “I told Dad I liked football now, but I was lying. I made it sound like I lived for it. I wanted him to think I had a hobby. It seemed important at the time.”

  “Football’s cool,” Griff said. He hated football. Then he said, “Do you want to play cards? Or go work in your room? We can try a different arrangement.”

  “I hate football and I hate my room.”

  “That’s why you keep changing it.”

  “And that’s why it always feels the same.”

  “You can have mine,” Griff said. “We can trade.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Griff expected Justin to leave then, but he stayed. He looked around the room, studied the torn-out skate magazine pages tacked to the wall, the print o
f the potato car he’d done years before.

  “Fiona said she loves me,” Griff said. “She said you called her to come visit.”

  “Both of those are true.”

  “I thought you wanted me to break up with her.”

  “No, I told you how to break up with her and not be a pussy,” Justin said. “I think she’s a cool girl.”

  “You called her? You knew her number?”

  “We went to school together, remember? I just looked her up in the junior high directory. I didn’t want you to be alone.”

  “I’m not alone. You’re here. We’ve hung out more in the last week than we have since you’ve been back.”

  “Trust me,” Justin said, still looking at the skate photos, “you’re alone. We all are.”

  ACROSS THE LAGUNA MADRE, CECIL WAS PASSING THE BUFORD house for the fifth or sixth time. He’d seen Eric’s truck parked in the fill-sand lot after he’d departed the ferry, and he’d been driving in long loops for the better part of an hour. State Highway 361 was four lanes. Cecil drove a few miles to the south, then hooked a U-turn, passed the Buford house and Eric, then turned around to start again. On each pass, he hoped Eric would have driven away, but he stayed put. It was disappointing. Cecil hadn’t ventured out on 361 since he’d gone into Flour Bluff, which just now struck him as strange. A betting man would have pegged Cecil as the one watching the property with an eye toward reprisal. Maybe he’d been staving himself off. Maybe he’d known better than to tempt himself, than to put Dwight Buford within reach. Even now, when he had other business to tend to, when the day was bright and people were out and his son was peering through his binoculars, Cecil could feel the draw.

  He knew Buford had nothing to do with what happened to Griff, but nonetheless he held him responsible. It made Cecil feel old again, the full weight of his sixty-seven years bearing down. He was tired, just so tired, and he was tired of being tired. That was something else he blamed on Dwight Buford, the deep fatigue in his bones, the steady leaching at his marrow.

  The sun fired off windshields. Loose curls of sand eddied on the pavement between the cars and then dispersed. The shoulders of the road sloped steeply, lowering into the scrub on the east and toward the narrow beach on the west. Cecil had his windows down. The air smelled of the dry, brittle seaweed strewn about the shore, of creosote and salt water. His shirt was damp between his back and the bench seat; the floorboards vibrated. He was thinking only about his son, how unfortunate the whole business was, how rotten and cruel, and how he’d soon be yoked to something else. For days Cecil had been trying to figure a different path out, some way not to involve Eric, but everything led back to where he was now.

  When he came upon the fill-sand lot again, he steered the truck into the entrance. He slowed but never stopped. Eric saw him immediately; his expression went flat with humiliation, like a child caught stealing. Cecil raised his chin—follow me—and eased back onto the road. Sand kicked up behind his wheels and his son merged into traffic behind him, and like that, it had started.

  HIS MOTHER HAD COME INTO HIS ROOM UNDER THE PRETENSE of putting away clothes, but Griff knew she wanted to talk. And as she placed his folded T-shirts in his drawer, saying that what he’d been wearing the night of the fight had been sent to the main dry-cleaning plant in hopes of getting the bloodstains out, he realized he’d been expecting her all along. He was happy to see her, almost relieved. She took the hem of her shirt, stood on her toes, and tried to wipe something off the top of his dresser.

  “Fiona brings milk shakes over. We always forget to use coasters,” he said.

  “She’s a sweet girl,” Laura said. “She and Justin have really been looking after you.”

  “I feel guilty.”

  “Why in the world should you feel guilty?”

  “I feel like they’d rather be doing something else.”

  “They wouldn’t, trust me,” his mother said. She smoothed his comforter and sat at the foot of the bed, Fiona’s spot. “Justin’s glad not to be the center of attention for once. You’re doing him a favor.”

  “I’ll try to get beat up more often.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said. Some of her hair came loose from her ponytail and hung around her face. “A mother’s heart can only take so much.”

  “Maybe I should take karate.”

  “I’d rather you never leave the house. I’d rather cover you in bubble wrap.”

  Rainbow ambled into the room, glanced at Griff and his mother, then circled herself and lay down with a sigh.

  His mother said, “How does he seem to you? Justin, I mean.”

  “Lonesome,” Griff said. It wasn’t a word he could remember ever having used.

  “There’s a lot of that going around. I think we’ve all caught the lonesome bug,” she said. Then, after a moment: “You know, honey, if you ever want to talk with Letty or anyone else, if you ever feel the need to sort through your feelings with someone, we can arrange it right away.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

  “We know this is as hard for you as it is for anyone,” she said.

  What Griff remembered just then was how Baby Snot had dropped his accent and urged him to leave, how he’d seemed kind for a moment. He remembered how Mike had called him the cocksucker’s brother, how Tracy Robichaud had said his family couldn’t catch a break. All of this somehow proved his mother’s point: He could see how lonesome everyone was.

  Then Griff said, “Justin and I had a fight. That morning.”

  “That morning?”

  “I was a jerk. Sometimes I think that if we hadn’t argued, none of this would have happened.”

  “We all feel that way, honey. We each wish we’d done something differently. We’re just being hard on oursel—”

  “He’d put salt in my Coke,” Griff said. “We were in the kitchen and I went to get something from my room. When I came back and took a drink, I gagged. He’d poured the whole salt shaker into the can. I got really mad, and we had a fight, and I wouldn’t let him apologize. So he left and then it happened.”

  Laura’s heart stopped. For a second, maybe two. She felt a tender but intense pain when it started again. If she had believed she could run out of the room without traumatizing her son, if she could make it into the backyard or out to her car without going to pieces in front of Justin—he was on the couch with Sasha, watching a football analysis show—she would have already bolted. But she was rooted to the bed, trying to stay composed, trying to keep herself from screaming or doubling over or slamming her head against the wall. She worried she’d vomit on his comforter, worried he’d assume her reaction meant she thought he was to blame. Say something, she thought. Tell him you love him or it’s not his fault. Tell him he’s being silly. But she couldn’t open her mouth. She’d always suspected she was to blame for what had happened with Justin, and now she had proof.

  The salt prank was hers. The week before Justin went missing, she’d taken him to the Castaway Café. Eric was off somewhere with Griff—she couldn’t remember where. Justin had gone to the men’s room and suddenly she had the idea to empty the salt shaker into his Coke. It wasn’t something she’d done before, nor would anyone have expected it of her. Eric liked practical jokes, and he was cultivating that in the boys, but she’d never understood the appeal. She had always felt left out. When he came back and took a drink—how she had to fight not to smirk, not to cackle! How all at once she knew what she’d been missing all those humorless years!—he spit out a mouthful and then they were both laughing so hard they started to cry. She’d never felt closer to him, never felt more a part of a family, never felt more like a mother. A good mother. She’d told the detectives about the incident time and again, and Eric, too. He liked the joke, and seemed proud of her for making it. Over the years, she’d thought to do it again, to Eric, to Griff; she’d even once considered pulling it on Cecil, but no. It was hers and Justin’s, theirs alone, and thinking of it now, in Griff’s dark room, wi
th her poor son waiting for her to speak, she realized she’d been waiting to ask Justin if he remembered the prank, if maybe he’d thought about it while he was in Corpus, if it had been a source of comfort for him. For her, it had been both a comfort and a torment. Now it was the noose with which she wanted to hang herself.

  “Mom?” Griff said. “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think you’re crying,” he said, as if he was alerting her to a nosebleed.

  “I just don’t want you to blame yourself. That’s something that’s really important to me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “Promise?”

  “It’s like you said, we’re all just looking for—”

  “I want you to hear me very clearly, okay? Listen to your mother, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s one person at fault here. There’s one person who’s responsible for hurting Justin, and it’s not you.”

  “It’s Dwight Buford,” Griff said.

  “It’s just not you,” she said. “That’s what you have to understand. It was never you.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, ERIC SLIPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE TO WATER the backyard. It was just something to do. He’d hardly gotten any rest the night before, waking for hours at a stretch in the dark, unable to shut down his thoughts long enough to sink back into sleep. He was worn out now, more from his efforts to will sleep than a lack of it, but an exhausted calm had descended. A feeling like surrender. It was, he imagined, the kind of resignation that someone on death row would feel just before the needle broke the skin, before the poison washed into your veins.

  A few cowbirds lined the fence. An iridescent rainbow in the spray of the hose, the wet grass glistening in the early sun, as if bejeweled. The palm tree the governor’s office had sent looked sturdy and good; Eric could easily imagine it growing to ten or fifteen feet in the future, casting a long, top-heavy shadow against the house. What he couldn’t predict was who’d be living here then. Maybe they would, or maybe just Laura and the boys, or maybe a family of strangers. He wasn’t upset thinking this, not exactly, but curious in a detached way. It approached nostalgia, as if he were considering a visit to a place where he’d once lived. The sky was high, not yet its full color. A few contrails from jets looked recent and close, like they were falling toward the earth, slow as feathers.