Or, if it happened on Thursday night, the last night of the storm, the night Laura came home trembling and wet and smelling of rain, then the weather’s noise would have muffled Buford’s hollering. When Rudy placed Dwight Buford in the back of his squad car, they would have been drenched. Ferry service was suspended that night, so they would have driven over the Kennedy Causeway and through Flour Bluff, where Dwight Buford had kept Justin those years, and then into Corpus. Maybe Buford started crying. Maybe he said, “You don’t have to do this.” Maybe Rudy turned on his flashing lights, maybe not. Maybe the only sounds were the windshield wipers and the tires on the rain-sheeted road and the wind buffeting the car.
Or maybe Laura said, “You’ve taken a piece of every last thing I love.”
And was Eric mistaken or had she been overly interested in the autopsy? Maybe when the report came back, it would show Valium and Ambien in his system. Maybe Laura had started stockpiling pills again. Was it impossible to imagine after everything she’d endured? Was it impossible to imagine her and Rudy pulling over in the middle of the night in the middle of a storm to give the pills to the accused? Could anyone conceive of a scenario in which Dwight Buford would take them of his own volition? Maybe to keep from feeling the inevitable? To make it easier on himself? Or maybe he fought. Maybe Buford clenched his teeth and locked his jaw so that Rudy had to pinch his nose until his mouth opened. Maybe Buford started to get drowsy immediately, or maybe they had to drive somewhere and wait for his eyes to close. Maybe Laura told Rudy, who would soon be a father himself, how she and Eric sometimes used to drive Justin around the neighborhood to lull him to sleep when he was young. Maybe Rudy idled in the parking lot of a filling station, maybe the one at the foot of the Harbor Bridge where Justin and Eric had switched seats before he drove over that first time. Maybe he went to Marine Lab, where they’d rendezvoused hours earlier, where both Eric and Rudy’s pregnant wife thought their spouses had been all night.
And then maybe, once Buford was out, they drove back to the summit of the Harbor Bridge and, with the storm keening, worked together to drag his unconscious weight from the backseat and pitch his body over the rail. Imagine the unyielding wind up that high. Imagine the sting of the rain and how your hands would tremble and how to anyone else there would still seem the option of turning back, but for you the option had never existed. Or maybe Buford had been only partially sedated and he walked with them, convinced he was being led to safety, somewhere dry and familiar. Or maybe they hadn’t gone to the bridge at all, but rather to the docks along the ship channel. Maybe his body had started floating toward the bridge while Rudy dropped Laura off at Marine Lab and she drove home, passing Justin’s billboard, and then crawled into bed with Eric, shivering and scared and longing to forget everything that had happened before that moment, longing to start anew. Hadn’t he known then that something had changed inside her, that she was a different woman than just hours earlier?
Now, in the car, Laura was still talking about the dolphin. Her voice remained so light and airy that all of Eric’s previous thinking atrophied. Buford had just jumped. Or someone had made good on the death threats the news had been reporting. Eric knew only that his own family had nothing to do with it, and Buford’s hold on them was lessening.
“I have binoculars,” Griff said. “They’re somewhere in my room. Papaw gave them to me.”
“Do what now?” Eric asked.
“Mom wants to be an astronomer, but she’s not very good at it,” Justin said. His tone was kind, approving.
“We can try tonight before you have to leave for Marine Lab,” Griff said.
“Let me guess,” Eric said. “Delphinus?”
“I just want to see it once,” she said.
“Or maybe you’ve seen it but you didn’t recognize it. Constellations never look right to me.”
“Delphinus?” Justin said. “I thought it was named Arion.”
“Arion was the musician,” she said, then elaborated. Arion, the greatest lyrist Greece had ever known, had found passage on a merchant ship to Ionia for a music competition. Then, in the middle of the sea, the crew revealed themselves as pirates, robbed Arion of his silver, and started preparing to throw him overboard. He didn’t beg for his life. Instead, he begged to play one last song. His foolishness amused the pirates, but because they knew of his talent, they agreed. Soon after he began playing, the pirates who’d been laughing at his frivolity were weeping at the beauty of the music. He improvised and elongated the song. He strung bridges of notes from one measure to the next. The longer the song stretched, the more the pirates wept. Eventually a pod of dolphins appeared in the water, drawn to the boat by his playing, and Arion jumped onto their backs to escape. The dolphins delivered him safely back to Corinth, where the king gave him a hero’s welcome. The gods so loved Arion’s music and were so grateful for his safe return that they staked a piece of sky with Delphinus, the dolphin-shaped constellation that guides lost sailors home.
“Sick,” Justin said.
“I bet we can see it with the binoculars,” Griff said. “I’ll see if Fiona wants to come over, too.”
“The binoculars are in my truck,” Eric said. “I took them—”
“For one of the searches,” Laura interrupted. “You thought they might help out in the dunes, remember?”
“It’s a clear sky,” Justin said, peering up through the window. “The storm pushed all the clouds away.”
Above them, the sky was stitched with stars. Eric couldn’t guess where to look for Delphinus, but he could imagine standing in the backyard with the boys and Laura, searching for what she needed everyone to see. A comforting order imposed on randomness. A pattern that arbitrarily shaped the darkness, made it bearable. He could imagine how they would pass the binoculars around and how they would try to coax the image out of hiding. Their minds would be teeming with secrets, with regrets and grave, unrelenting fears, and their bodies would be exhausted and corded with scars, and their gazes would be clouded by loss, permanently obscured. But they would be seeking the same thing, and in that, there seemed some small victory. The image was supposed to deliver them home, and yet Eric had a feeling of liberation, as if they were about to depart, as if they were soon to set out on a path lit by stars that would never fall. The prospect was buoying, sustaining. In the car, he reached for Laura’s hand and braided his fingers with hers. He found his sons in the rearview mirror, their eyes still fixed on the sky, looking for signs and heroes. Eric gave the engine more gas, and they accelerated toward the half-known and desperate history that bound them together.
For
Jay Anthony and Donna Leah Johnston.
I remember.
Acknowledgments
The working title of this novel was The Unaccompanied, but it’s benefited from a lot of companionship along the way. So have I. I’m deeply grateful to the following people for everything they’ve given: Jennifer. Bill. Michelle, Camryn, Julian. Brie, Brad, Nathan, Austen. Joseph. Ivan. Jacob Rosenberg. Rodney Mullen. Julie Barer (and by proxy Beckett). Kendra Harpster. Susan Kamil. Gina Centrello. Avideh Bashirrad. Kaela Myers. Sally Marvin. Karen Fink. Leigh Marchant. Selby McRae. Joelle Dieu. Ron Koltnow. Toby Ernst. Rachel Kind. Steve Messina. Noah Eaker. Heidi Pitlor. Christopher Castellani. Ladette Randolph. Josh Emmons. Jorie Graham, Peter Sacks, Amy Hempel, Diana Sorensen, and my colleagues at Harvard University. John Irving. Jill McCorkle. Andre Dubus III. Tom Perrotta. Alice Sebold. Jenny Hopa. Mike Anzaldua. Cheryl Pfoff. Vanessa Jackson. Joe Wilson, Jan Williams, and everyone at the Corpus Christi Literary Reading Series. Steven Bauer, Eric Goodman, Kay Sloan, Constance Pierce, Tim Melley, and the creative writing program at Miami University. Ethan Canin, Connie Brothers, Chris Offutt, Marilynne Robinson, Deb West, Jan Z, and everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the James A. Michener–Copernicus Society of America, and the Blackwood Residency. Michelle Kuo. Michelle Kim Hall. Eleanor Boudreau.
Sorrel Westbrook Nielsen. Lea Walker and the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Dan Menaker. Nina Collins. Sam Douglas. Judy Sternlight. Rob Torres. Paul Yoon. Ben Percy. Carol Campbell. William Boggess. Gemma Purdy. Anna Geller. Anna Wiener. Paul Buttenwieser. Sven Birkerts, Victoria Clausi, and my family from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
BY BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON
Remember Me Like This
Naming the World: And Other Exercises
for the Creative Writer (editor)
Corpus Christi: Stories
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author of the award-winning Corpus Christi: Stories, which was named a best book of the year by The Independent (London) and The Irish Times, and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is the director of creative writing.
www.bretanthonyjohnston.com
www.facebook.com/bajbooks
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