Remember Me Like This

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  When she came out of the bathroom, Eric was changing into a black sweatshirt by the window. The shade was drawn. She said, “You’ll burn up in that.”

  “It’s the only long-sleeved black shirt I have. Cecil said to wear all black.”

  Laura started brushing out her hair. She said, “Did the boys go to bed?”

  “Griff’s on the phone and Justin’s got Rainbow in his room.”

  “I thought you might try to sleep a little. Just get whatever rest you could before he came to get you.”

  “I’m too wound up,” he said. “I can barely sit still.”

  Laura tugged the brush through her wet hair, pulling the tangles apart one at a time until she could comb through in a series of straight, fluid swipes.

  After a while, she said, “I don’t want you to do this, and if the boys knew, they wouldn’t want it either.”

  Eric didn’t respond. Laura rubbed lotion onto her legs and feet. Her hair kept falling wet and heavy over her face, so she wrapped it into a loose bun. Eric was patting his pockets the way he always did before leaving, checking for his keys and wallet. Look at us, she thought. A married couple getting ready for a date.

  “There’s nothing you need to make up for,” Laura said. “There’s nothing you’ve done or haven’t done that will fix this.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t care about the past. None of us do. Whatever’s happened is behind us, and we need to get on with our lives, and I don’t want you doing something like this because you think you need to redeem yourself.”

  Eric dug in his pockets, as if patting them hadn’t been enough. When he didn’t say anything, Laura said, “What if we left? What if we put everything we could fit in the car and truck, and the four of us just got out of Texas? That’s something I keep thinking about. You’ve always wanted to go on exciting vacations, so let’s just drive until we find a place we like.”

  “It doesn’t feel like enough anymore. Like you said, he’ll always be with us.”

  “We could start over. The boys could start fresh and we—”

  “I used to go to the dump,” Eric said. He leaned against the wall in his black shirt, not looking at her, and his voice was low, hardly more than a whisper. “Sometimes when I said I was going to hang flyers, I’d drive out there and dig through the garbage, looking for him. For his body.”

  “That’s okay. We were all worried. We were all afraid of—”

  “I’d follow the garbage trucks from one dumpster to the next, then out to the landfill. I wanted to get there before he was buried too deep to find. I’d shower at school so you wouldn’t smell the trash on me. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Yes, I hear you.”

  “I’m saying I thought he was dead.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’m saying I gave up on him.”

  “What happens if you don’t come home? What happens when it’s a cop knocking on the door tomorrow morning because you’ve been caught? Or worse? How do I explain that to Justin?”

  “I’ll come home,” he said.

  “We can’t take any more, Eric. I can’t take any more.”

  “It’ll be done by morning.”

  “I feel like it’s just starting over. I feel like I’m fixin’ to get another call that will tear my world down.”

  “I’ll come home,” he said again.

  “Do you know what I prayed for at the table?”

  “No,” he said.

  “That I’d undercooked the pork chops or the meat was bad. I prayed that you’d get so sick that you would have to spend the night in the bathroom or the hospital.”

  “That’s sweet of you in a way.”

  “I should have ground up a handful of my nerve pills and mixed them into your potatoes. I should have stirred them into your tea like salt.”

  “You mean sugar,” he said.

  “What’s the difference?” she said. “What difference does any of it make?”

  GRIFF CLIMBED THROUGH HIS WINDOW, WALKED DOWN SUNTIDE, and once he was out of earshot, he dropped his board and started skating. He avoided the Teepee. He wasn’t worried about Baby Snot and his crew, not really, but he didn’t want to see the pool again, stripped of its coping. He hoped the property would get demolished soon, hoped the pool would be filled and paved over and he’d forget it had ever existed at all.

  Fiona’s house was frigid, and loud. She had the air conditioner turned to fifty-eight degrees, and music blared from the recessed speakers in the ceiling. She wore sweatpants and a zipped-up hoodie and thick socks. Her mother’s two cats were snuggled together on the love seat, trying to keep warm. Candles burned on the wet bar and end tables. The room waved with soft, warping light. Shadows kept changing. The air smelled of candied flowers. “My parents are at the yacht club,” Fiona said. “They’re schmoozing it up at a pre-Shrimporee soiree.” Griff thought they’d stay in the front room, but Fiona started blowing out candles and lowering the stereo’s volume. Then she disappeared into the hallway and he followed.

  Her bed was piled with stuffed animals, plush bears and hearts and dogs that guys had given her over the years. He’d forgotten about the collection since he’d last been in her room, and now, even more than before, he hoped the rubber duck race would still be at the Shrimporee. It was the only game where he’d ever won anything—a stuffed flamingo, two years ago, while his parents passed out flyers—and giving her something she could add to her menagerie suddenly seemed necessary.

  Fiona lay on her back on her bed, using various teddy bears like pillows; they reminded him of all the stuffed animals people had sent after Justin was found, the ones that were in Hefty bags in the garage, waiting to be donated to a children’s hospital.

  She said, “So you’re a Bible-thumper now, praying before meals and all? Does that mean we have to stay chaste on the one night when George and Louise decide to vacate the premises?”

  “I don’t think it means anything,” Griff said.

  “Heresy is very hard to resist in a man.”

  Griff walked around her room, looking at her knickknacks. Porcelain figures of babies and animals with teardrop eyes, photos in heavy frames, a trophy she’d won for selling raffle tickets, and a stein full of spare change. He’d never paid attention to these things before and, noticing them now, he tried to read what they said about a girl who dressed in all black and dyed her hair green. It seemed the kind of thing Justin would be able to do, but Griff had no idea. Fiona was still on her back on the bed. She was tossing a stuffed banana into the air. As soon as she caught it, she tossed it again. She might have been trying to hit the ceiling.

  When Griff couldn’t wait any longer, he said, “Justin told my mom he didn’t send the postcard.”

  She tossed the banana again, unfazed. She did it twice more, flipping it end over end, then said, “That probably wasn’t the feel-good hit of the summer.”

  “After he said it, she locked herself in the bathroom.”

  Fiona held the banana to her chest. Her eyes stayed on the ceiling. Every few seconds she blinked slowly. She said, “I did the best I could. With his handwriting, I mean.”

  “It was perfect,” Griff said. “You did it perfectly.”

  The whole scheme had been Griff’s idea. It wasn’t so much an effort to help Justin, though of course he hoped it would, but rather an effort to give his parents a reason to stay together, to stay alive. Fiona’s family was going to California for vacation, and while he worried the out-of-state postmark would send detectives in the wrong direction, the investigation seemed to have gone so dormant that the risk felt justified. Griff stole the arrowhead postcard from the rack at Sharky’s Souvenirs and gave Fiona a folder of Justin’s old school papers, full of his handwriting. They decided the message she’d write would be up to her. Her parents, in addition to visiting Hollywood and Disneyland, wanted to see Bakersfield Sound Museum and so when they drove out there, Fiona
dropped the card in a curbside mailbox. When Griff saw the words she’d chosen—Don’t Stop Looking—his eyes had filled with tears. He’d briefly allowed himself to forget who’d sent it.

  In her room, she started tossing the banana toward the ceiling again. She said, “Are you going to fess up?”

  “Should I?”

  “Would it help her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet she already knows. Even if she doesn’t know it yet. And I bet she’ll never say anything because she’ll realize we were trying to do something good. Ladies pick up on things that hairy-legged boys don’t.”

  “The way you knew I was coming to break up with you.”

  “So you admit it,” Fiona said.

  “I thought it was the right thing to do. Justin said I should.”

  “He was wrong,” Fiona said.

  “He also doesn’t think you’ve had a bunch of lovers. He thinks I’m your first boyfriend.”

  “So he gets kidnapped and comes back as, what, an all-knowing love guru?”

  “It’s okay if it’s true. You’re my first girlfriend, even though I used to tell people I’d made out with Melissa Uno and Kathryn Grosso.”

  She caught the banana and brought it to her chest again. She turned onto her side and met his eyes. Griff couldn’t read her expression, which seemed both sorrowful and affectionate. He didn’t know if it meant Justin was right or wrong. She stared at him for a long, quiet moment, then said, “You’re a sweet boy, Griffin Campbell.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means come here,” she said, extending her hand languidly off the bed. “It means come here and I’ll show you what I have or haven’t learned from all my imaginary lovers.”

  CECIL STARTED PACKING UP HIS TRUCK A LITTLE AFTER MIDNIGHT. The suitcase full of clothes and an envelope of cash, two thermoses of coffee, a sleeping bag and Coleman stove and a tarp and a couple bags of canned food. The jugs of water and two gas cans were still in the truck bed, and the pistol was under the seat until he stashed it in the glove box. He passed through the house one last time, watering all of the plants Laura had given him and checking for things he’d want later. Don’t be sentimental, he told himself. Don’t go down that road. In the bathroom, he grabbed some old, thin sheets and frayed towels and balled them together, tucked them under his arm. Then he opened the medicine cabinet and retrieved his wedding ring and the gold nugget watch. He should have put them in the safe-deposit box at the bank; he understood that now, but he didn’t feel right leaving them behind. If need be, he could toss them out of the truck window. He could drop them into the dark bay.

  Outside, the cicadas were thrumming in the trees. Years ago, Ivan had told him that they sounded different in Mexico, that the cicadas down there sang in a different register. It was something he’d been curious about ever since. The night was thick and deep, draped with fog. Cecil stood on the porch for a while, breathing it in, accepting it. Then he locked the door to his house, checked the knob to make sure, and got into the truck. There was no more wasting time.

  LAURA DRIFTED IN AND OUT OF SLEEP, FEELING HELPLESS. SHE remembered—or almost remembered, or dreamed or half-dreamed—those first weeks four years ago when she’d stay awake for days at a time until sleep insidiously claimed her. She never woke feeling refreshed or charged with renewed hope. No, she always opened her eyes to a world that had been further transfigured by guilt, knowing she’d failed her missing son, knowing everything would be different had she stayed awake just a little longer. Tonight, she trembled under the comforter and the trembling became a dream: She was a child, shivering and not necessarily herself. Her teeth chattered. She was naked and huddling in the dark. There was a cantilevered bridge. There was an ocean that looked like molten silver with birds skimming over it. No, the ocean looked like hammered metal. The moon beamed down in a cone of light like something she would draw with a yellow crayon. Her hair was soaked, dripping onto her bare shoulders, and long, cold winds passed over her, chafing her, whipping her. Then the ground was giving way, it had become the bridge and was now buckling, and she was tumbling and somersaulting through the dark until she landed back in her bed, gasping and sweating on the night before the Shrimporee.

  Her heart quaked. Her eyes were wide and dry and stinging, stinging so much that she wondered if she’d slept with them open. The house seemed quiet. She didn’t know if Eric had left yet. He’d taken the pistol down from the closet shelf. That, she remembered. Her mouth was sour and her head ached and she needed to push herself out of bed. She wanted to see if Cecil had come for Eric, but she also wanted to check on Justin, wanted to find him in his room or in front of the television, wanted to find that he’d kept his promise about not going on a drive tonight. Please, she thought. Please. But she only pulled the comforter up higher, bunched it under her chin. She could feel herself drifting off again. Her consciousness was thinning and dissipating, the way froth from waves soaks into the sand when the tide is pulled back into the ocean. She thought: After Eric leaves, load the boys in the car and go. She thought: Won’t Mayne show up with a gun of his own? Isn’t he a father, too? She thought: Call the police, or Garcia, and confess everything. She thought: The inflatable alligator I brought to Marine Lab, the one I took from the garage years ago, might have been blown up by Justin before he was taken; it might still have his breath inside it. She thought: I used to be a little girl who wore dresses with lace sleeves and now I’m something else, someone else, somewhere else, and once a stain sets, you’ll never get it out, especially blood, and do I know anyone from California, didn’t the handwriting on the postcard look familiar, and dolphins are descended from wolves, somehow that’s true, and they rape each other, and kill each other, and when they beach, it’s because they’re sick or hurt or lost or just too tired to go on. Then she gave in, knowing it wouldn’t be very long at all.

  CECIL HAD WORRIED THAT WITH STATION STREET CORDONED off for the Shrimporee he’d have trouble getting his truck down to the marina, but the route was open. The barricades had been moved off to the side. He parked in a diagonal slot with a clear view of the Oil-n-Water, then clicked off his lights. He was hours early, but it was a relief to see the boat still tied to the moorings. The Bach Prelude undulated in the speakers, and as it played, the night stretched out. The moon was dull. The tide was in. Boats swayed in their slips, rising and falling on slowly lapping water. In his mirrors, the buildings that made up downtown Southport reminded him of what you’d see in an old Western, squat structures with high false fronts overlooking a wide street. He wouldn’t have been surprised if a tumbleweed rolled by. There was no movement except for the boats gently knocking against the docks in front of him and the wind lifting the palm fronds and letting them down again. At some point, the Bach ended. He had no memory of the world going quiet.

  Half an hour before he thought the Bufords would show, the moon slid behind a wide wall of clouds and he took out his cell phone to call Eric. His son answered after the first ring. Before Cecil could say anything, Eric said, “Where are you? We’re late.”

  “I’m at the house,” Cecil said, his eyes on the boats in front of him. “I’m going to get some rest.”

  “Rest? What does that mean?”

  “I’m calling it off.”

  “Why?” Eric said, confused, angry. “I’m outside on the porch, like we planned. I’ve been waiting for you to pick me up.”

  “Laura came by the shop today. She talked sense into me. It’s not worth the risk. I’m too old and you’ve got too much to lose.”

  “You have to be kidding,” Eric said.

  “Go inside and get in bed beside your wife. She’s a good woman who’s terrified of losing you. We need to let this thing run its course.”

  “You were so adamant. We had the whole thing worked out. I’ve been going over the variables in my head, feeling better about it. Setting him up with Rick in Mexico and—”

  “Bring the pistol to the shop next week a
nd I’ll enter it back in inventory.”

  “I could go alone. I could do it myself.”

  “I’d ask that you not,” Cecil said. “I’d ask you not to do that to your boys.”

  “For the boys. I’d do it for the boys.”

  “Someone could call the police. Someone could alert them where you’re going, what you’re planning. At best you’d be looking at possession of an unregistered firearm. That’s half a year in County right there.”

  “You wouldn’t call them.”

  “No, but I can’t speak for Laura.”

  The moon came out from behind the clouds. The smell of the bay drifted in through the vents. Boats moved here and there along the docks, reminding Cecil of antsy horses in their stalls.

  Cecil said, “Go to bed, Eric. It’ll turn out all right.”

  “This feels wrong,” he said. “This feels like we’re rolling over. I was ready for whatever it took.”

  “Things will work out,” Cecil said. “Trust me. Everything’ll look different tomorrow.”

  HOW MANY TIMES HAD GRIFF IMAGINED LYING NAKED WITH Fiona? How many scenarios had he entertained over the years, how many strategies had he devised with this as his singular and ultimate goal? The number was unknowable, and yet now that her beautiful weight was pressing down on him, now that she was enfolding him in a warmth he’d never imagined, a warmth that somehow cooled his sunburn, he remembered every last thought he’d had about her. The distant smell of the candles, the seams of pale light framing her foiled windows, the fear that her parents would come home. She raised herself, straddling him, and brought both of his hands to her mouth. She massaged his fingers, gently kissed his knuckles and gently bit his thumbs and gently closed her soft lips around them. With her eyes closing, she said, “I like these thumbs.”

  But he also felt disconnected, off to the side, tethered only by the places where their bodies touched. The soft skin on the underside of her arm, the arch of her foot fitting itself over his ankle, sliding up and down over his shin, her fingers laced into his. He was thinking about his mother and the postcard, about the Shrimporee and the ruined Teepee pool and the woman who’d driven him to the clinic and Fiona, and Fiona, and Fiona, and about how he’d thought he’d probably always be a virgin, but now that he wouldn’t be, the whole business seemed easy, fated. He thought about Justin and what he’d said at supper and what he’d said about Fiona. Who knew if he was right? Who cared? As she crushed into Griff, dragging her tongue up his neck and into his hair, as she traced her finger over his lips and slid it into his mouth so that he could feel the ridges of her fingerprint on his tongue, he wondered if Justin had ever had an experience like this. To his surprise, he was positive Justin hadn’t. He was almost as positive that Justin had embellished his relationship with Marcy, that he was guilty of the same lies he’d accused Fiona of telling. It made him acutely and intensely sad, and he wondered what else he knew that his older brother didn’t, what else Justin was withholding. For a long and bleak moment, he imagined their lives unfurling before him like a carpet and while Griff proceeded ahead, he was leaving Justin behind.