Remember Me Like This

T
HE
H
ARBOR
B
RIDGE CROSSED OVER THE
P
ORT OF
C
ORPUS
Christi. It was a high steel arc, tall enough to grant barges and freighters access to the ship channel, and stood where the old drawbridge once did. The city had hosted a contest to name the bridge, and the winner, a housewife who lived out by the oil refineries, was given the honor of riding in the first car to drive across. That was in 1959. She wore a pillbox hat and white satin gloves. She posed for pictures with the mayor. Years later, when she died, her family walked to the top of the bridge and scattered her ashes over the lilting water.

The structure was long and mellow, like a downturned crescent blade. A lattice of girders rose above the bridge’s suspended deck, and the crisscrossing beams threw complex shadows on the lanes. After decades of sustained wind and salt from the bay, the joints were starting to erode and loosen. Rust flaked the girders. Each year, if the city could scrape together the money during the holidays, the bridge was strung with Christmas lights. An image of its illuminated reflection on the water had long commanded the cover of the Corpus phone book. A handful of couples had been married at the top, delinquent teenagers stole bowling balls to roll down the lanes or lob off the side, and a small group of citizens met on the first weekend of every month to walk the mile that the structure spanned.
The walkers started on the south side and crossed over to North Beach on the railed walkway that edged the bridge. At the foot of the walkway hung an engraved sign from the Coastal Bend Church of Christ:
FEELING DESPERATE
? “
EVERYONE WHO CALLS ON THE NAME OF THE LORD WILL BE SAVED
.”
ROMANS 10:13
.

So, on the first weekend of September, it was the group of walkers who saw the body in the bay before anyone else. They didn’t immediately comprehend the sight. The water was ragged and dirty from the previous week’s storm, and the body floated facedown; it looked like a person snorkeling, except an arm and leg were bent at odd, harsh angles. One of the walkers retched and kneeled on the walkway. Another started praying. Another dug in her pocket for her phone. The rest of the group stared and speculated and tried to trick themselves into thinking the person might have survived the fall. No one could tell if it was a male or female, or how old, and none of them thought of Justin Campbell, the boy who’d gone missing years before. They knew only that the broken-up body was part of them now, that the memory would insinuate itself for the rest of their lives. Two Coast Guard cutters were soon speeding toward the ship channel, and police cruisers were parking on both sides of the port. A few of the walkers stood at the top of the bridge to watch, but most descended without a word. They walked single file, knowing they wouldn’t return to the bridge, and held on to the rail as tightly as possible.

M
ONTHS EARLIER
,
THE
J
UNE HEAT ON
M
USTANG
I
SLAND WAS
gauzy and glomming. The sky hung close, pale as caliche, and the small played-out waves were dragging in the briny, pungent scent of seaweed. On the beach, people tried holding out for a breeze from the Gulf, but when the gusts blew ashore, they were humid and harsh, kicking up sand that stung like wasps. By midday, everyone surrendered. Fishermen cut bait, surfers packed in their boards. Even the notoriously dogged sunbathers shook out their long towels and draped them over the seats in their cars, the leather and vinyl scalding. Lines for the ferry stretched for half an hour, though it could seem days before the dashboard vents were pushing in cool air. Porpoises wheeled in the boats’ wakes, their bellies pink and glistening.

After the short pass across the Laguna Madre, the ferry docked on the north jetty and drivers moved onto the mainland through the small, flat town of Southport, Texas. They passed an anchor-shaped monument embossed with the words
WELCOME ABOARD
, then the tackle shops and bait stands and the old rust-pocked pickups where men sold shrimp from ice chests. To the west, behind the leaning palm trees with their husks as dry and brown as parchment, the soapy bay fanned into the horizon. There was the public boat ramp and marina and the half-razed Teepee Motel, now nothing more
than a cluster of concrete teepees hemming a drained kidney-shaped pool. A faded vinyl banner for the upcoming Shrimporee sagged over the diagonal parking places on Main Street, then popped and opened up in the wind; the Shrimporee was in September. On the asphalt, puddles of heat appeared, shimmered, evaporated. The seafood restaurants and a spate of garishly painted souvenir shops lined Station Street, then just before the town yielded to the blacktop highway came the Whataburger and H-E-B grocery and Loan Star Pawnshop, whose rusted arrow marquee sign announced,
WE BUY WINDOW UNITS
! The pawnshop’s crushed-shell parking lot was crowded this time of year—shrimpers hocking tools between good hauls, surfers hunting for wet suits, men from the Coast Guard quibbling over fishing rods. Today, the last Wednesday of the month, a man was trying to sell one of the pawnbrokers an old Cadillac, a cream-colored Fleetwood Brougham. The hood was raised and the ragtop was lowered, and the men stood in the pale sun—squinting, haggling, appearing stranded to everyone who passed.

A
CROSS TOWN
,
IN THE
V
ILLA
D
EL
S
OL CONDOMINIUM COMPLEX
, Eric Campbell stood under a cool shower, listening. He thought he’d heard his phone buzzing, but either it had stopped or he’d been mistaken. He’d left the phone next to his watch and wedding band on the nightstand. He opened the shower curtain, leaned out, waited. The only sounds were the water pulsing through the showerhead and the air-conditioning unit whirring outside, so he drew the curtain and rinsed off. The afternoon sun slanted in through the bathroom’s skylight. He wondered if they’d break a hundred degrees today, if they hadn’t already. He was glad to have parked his truck in the garage.

The condo belonged to Kent Robichaud. He was a surgeon, and although he and his wife, Tracy, lived on Ocean Drive in Corpus, they’d bought the condo in Southport to be closer to the marina on
weekends. They were in their late thirties, originally from the Midwest; they owned a twenty-footer named
Thistle Dew.
Eric liked Kent. He tried not to think about him when he spent afternoons with Tracy. With summer school in session, they’d gotten into the routine of him coming over after his Wednesday class. Tracy would drive in from Corpus and read the weekly
Southport Sun
in her breakfast nook until Eric’s truck appeared on the street. Then she’d click open the garage door and make her way to the bedroom, undressing.

Eric always checked messages before stepping out of his truck. Usually there weren’t any. At home, Griffin would still be sleeping, or he’d be playing videogames and waiting for the afternoon to cool off enough to go skateboarding. If Griff wanted to leave the house, he had to call his mother or father for permission; when Eric had thought he heard his phone in the shower, he assumed it was his son. His younger son. Griff had just turned fourteen. Of course, Eric worried it was his wife calling, but he also knew better. Laura rarely dialed his number anymore. Wednesdays were her early shift at the dry cleaner’s, but she had, for the last few months, been driving to Marine Lab in Corpus after work. She volunteered a few times a week, stayed out there until dinner. Later, sometimes. When she came home, she was dog-tired and smelled of frozen herring. She wore an expression, so transparent to Eric (and, he feared, to Griff), of practiced contentment. She would update them on Marine Lab—currently, they were rehabbing a bottlenose dolphin that had beached on the National Seashore—then listen to Griff and Eric talk about their days; Griff usually told them about his skateboarding, and Eric spoke of his seventh graders or other faculty members. If there was nothing to report, he’d invent a sweet or comic story to buoy their spirits. On Wednesdays, he always steeled himself for the question of what he’d done after class, but Laura never asked. It was just another thing they didn’t discuss. Eventually she would
excuse herself from the table, kiss Griff on his head, then retire to the bedroom. More often than not, the sun was still in the sky, syrupy and molten, coppering the early-evening surfaces.