Remember Me Like This (10 page)

Justin said, “It’s like when I got sick at camp and you had to come get me in the middle of the night.”

“Camp Bandera,” Eric said, as if he were on a game show. “We got lost coming and going.”

“You were covered in chiggers,” Laura said. “You found those arrowheads for Griff.”

He laughed a quick little laugh in the dark.

“What?” she said. Then Eric said it too: “What?” They were both smiling, eager and hungry for whatever piece of himself he’d offer.

“I bought them at the cantina. Three for a dollar. I told him I found them, but really I just had dimes I didn’t want to carry around.”

“It’s still sweet you thought of him,” Laura said. “He still has them. They’re in his rock collection.”

Justin sat up. Laura’s arm had fallen asleep under his weight, so when he moved, it felt needled. She wanted to ask about the postcard from California, when he’d stopped being afraid of snakes, whether or not he still collected his rocks. She wanted to ask if she’d been right in thinking he walked with a limp, and if so, what had happened. Justin yawned, then his father did, then finally she did. How to explain that this set a star of joy ablaze in her chest?

“I wondered if you’d still have the truck,” Justin said.

“Of course we still have it,” Eric said.

“Rainbow?”

“I can’t imagine what she’s going to do when you walk in.”

“Sometimes I’d see a dog and it would have gray fur around its mouth and nose, and I’d worry.”

“She’s doing mighty fine,” Eric said. “I’d watch your shoes, though. She still pees when she gets excited.”

“Your room is just the way you left it,” Laura said.

“Really?” he said.

“We wouldn’t have changed it for the world.”

“Sick,” he said. “Awesome.”

They passed Alamo Fireworks, then a long row of lantana bushes and dense stands of live oak that resembled giant sleeping animals on the roadside. A few cars were heading toward Corpus, probably people who’d spent the late afternoon at the beach. Shortly, those drivers would pass the billboard with Justin’s face on it, and the knowledge dizzied Laura. She wondered when it would be taken down. Ahead, Southport was coming into view. The lights shimmered like buoys on the horizon. Justin’s face was reflected on the inside of the windshield. What Laura hoped to see in his reflection, she couldn’t say. A simple smile? His eyes lidded, his face peaceful and relaxed? Or maybe his gaze trained on the town ahead, his pupils lit with excitement now that he was finally coming home? In the coming weeks she would think of that moment in the truck and try to reconcile what she’d seen with everything that was yet to be learned, yet to happen. His face was just blank, expressionless in a way she thought he was allowing only because he believed no one would see. He was staring not at the road ahead but into his side mirror. He rode that way for miles, his attention focused on nothing except whatever lay behind them in the tight, whorling darkness.

S
OME SAW IT ON TELEVISION
. T
HE PRESS CONFERENCE BROKE
in on each of the three network affiliates that came in from Corpus, interrupting regularly scheduled programming. “It’s a good day in South Texas,” the D.A. said into a bouquet of microphones. The news ran briefly on the CNN ticker. People watched with their mouths agape, with their hands over their mouths, with an abrupt and complete stillness in their bodies. Others heard the news on car radios. They rolled down their windows and hollered into the sun. They laid on their horns, they flashed headlights. Disc jockeys played “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” “Home Sweet Home.” “Amazing Grace.” Word spread through intercoms at H-E-B, Walmart, and McCoy’s lumber. Customers looked to one another in the aisles, dumbfounded. They asked strangers if they’d heard right. Found? That Campbell boy? Alive? Just over in Corpus? Then they cheered. They embraced. They closed their eyes and cried and thanked Jesus. They bought cake mix and congratulatory cards, white shoe polish to write messages on their windshields. Camera crews fanned out through the town and reporters taped interviews with jubilant, wet-eyed residents. They gathered footage of merchants ripping down the flyers in their shop windows, and of teenagers spray-painting
FOUND
over Justin’s face on the billboard outside town. Drinks were on the house at the Black Diamond Bar, and dessert came free
at the Castaway Café. Emails were sent, copied, forwarded. Parents drove their children to the Alamo Fireworks stand outside the town limits and bought Roman candles to launch into the bay that night. Bonfires dotted Mustang Island. Plans had already begun for a celebration at the Shrimporee in September. The letters on the rusted arrow marquee outside Loan Star, instead of advertising window units, read
HE
’
S BACK
!

In those first days, Eric was stunned. There seemed a hallucinatory quality to such abiding relief. Moments came when he was so unburdened as to feel weightless: when he saw that Justin still cut pancakes with his fork rather than a knife; when he overheard his boys staging a burping contest in Griff’s room; when Laura took his hand and quietly led him down the hall to show him something private. She nudged Justin’s door open, but Eric didn’t immediately grasp what he was supposed to see. “The bed,” she whispered. Then he understood. The comforter was wadded at the footboard, the top sheet twisted tight and draping to the floor, the feather pillow wedged between the headboard and mattress. The bed hadn’t been used in four years, so to see it now in such beautiful disarray was to gaze on the meaning of their lives, the scope of love itself. Laura said, “I’ll get the camera.”

There were changes, of course. Justin’s voice was deepening, barnacled with the raspy climb from youth to adolescence. He was taller, more filled out; he took up more space. The house felt smaller, gorgeously contracted and compressed, with him home. If he was coming down the hall, Eric leaned back into a doorway to let him pass. (He also reached to touch some part of him—his shoulder or hair or forearm. Laura did, too. They were incapable of not reaching for him.) He’d become lactose-intolerant, developed a taste for black coffee. Although nothing had been moved since he’d been gone—to scoot the couch three inches would have been blasphemous—Justin had to ask where they kept the towels, the garbage bags, the cereal that he liked to eat straight from the box now. He was more courteous,
deferential. Before, he could be lazy with his chores; more than once he’d had his television and videogame privileges suspended for not washing the dishes; he’d had his skateboard taken away for not changing Rainbow’s water. Now he offered, without fail, to help clean the kitchen after meals. He carried himself like a grateful guest, someone hoping to make a good impression and be invited back. (Griff almost immediately started following his brother’s lead, straightening his room and taking out the trash without being told.) Justin squinted a lot, which made Eric wonder if he needed glasses. It also recalled for him how, as a child, Justin couldn’t wink. He’d close both eyes. Suddenly, in Eric’s memory, his son was always trying to wink. He limped occasionally, or he walked in a pigeon-toed way, so his gait could be slightly slow, slightly awkward, as if he were walking with his shoelaces knotted together. Nothing about the limp had come up in his medical exam; he was in surprisingly good condition, though he’d complained about a toothache, which the doctor could clearly identify as a cavity. If Justin really liked something, he deemed it
sick.
“These are sick,” he’d said the night Eric made everyone silver dollar pancakes for supper. “They’re the sickest thing I’ve ever tasted.”

His sleep schedule was upended. He had yet to fall asleep before the tops of the trees were dappled with morning sun, and then he slept until late afternoon or early evening. Twice he’d stepped bleary-eyed from his room just as the three of them were finishing supper. He apologized, and although Eric and Laura assured him there was no need, he promised to do better. But each night, lying in bed, Eric and Laura listened to him move through the house. They heard Rainbow padding behind him, heard the toilet flush and the faucet run, heard the television buzzing on and the volume being hastily lowered. For the first couple of nights they crept sheepishly into the living room and asked if he needed anything, but ever since, worried that he’d feel undue pressure, they stayed in bed, pretending to sleep. Eric remembered the strain he’d felt those first nights
when, as a toddler, Justin first began sleeping alone in the nursery. He remembered how not going to his son when he was awake and crying seemed as inconceivable as not drawing breath.

“Is it still insomnia if he sleeps during the day?” Laura asked in bed on Saturday night. Eric lay behind her, his hand lightly on her hip. They were listening to Justin make a sandwich in the kitchen. The knife swirling in the mayo jar was like music.

“His schedule will even out soon enough,” Eric said.

“Insomnia can come from fear. Our minds won’t shut off. We’re reduced to our animal selves, too alert to sleep. We’re afraid we’ll be eaten. I read about it in one of my books.”

“He’ll get back on track.”

“He must’ve been so scared.”

“He’s safe now. We all are.”

A cupboard door squeaked in the kitchen. For a year, Eric had meant to WD-40 the hinges; now he knew he’d been right to neglect them. The sound confirmed that his son was alive, a healthy boy looking for a glass for juice.

Laura said, “Dolphins never sleep, not fully. They’re always at least half awake. Each side of their brain sleeps at different times.”

“Because they’re afraid?”

“No,” she said sweetly, proudly, taking his hand and rolling into his arm like a blanket. “Because they’re smart.”

The next day, Eric drove the boys by the Teepee Motel—Griff wanted to show Justin the drained pool and to make sure the coping hadn’t been stolen—and then they went to pick up Whataburgers. In the drive-thru, the cashier gave them their order for free. It was something that had been happening to Eric: When he’d gone to the wireless store to buy Justin a cell phone, the manager gave Eric two high-end phones for free (the second was for Griff, so he wouldn’t be jealous) and waived the activation charges. When Eric went through the checkout at H-E-B, the old couple behind him insisted on buying his groceries. When he returned Laura’s library books,
the librarian cleared all of her late fees. He tried to decline the offers, but it was clear his refusal would have been an affront. “We appreciate you thinking of us,” he’d finally say. At Whataburger, he was about to thank the cashier when she glanced over her shoulder and passed a paper napkin and pen through the window: Justin’s autograph. Eric thought she was joking, but then when he saw she wasn’t, he was appalled. He was about to pull forward, park, and complain to the manager, but Justin calmly took the napkin and signed his name, using the pickup’s dashboard as a desk.

“Dad, it’s fine,” he said, sounding more annoyed with Eric than with the cashier. His signature was spiky, like the logo of a heavy metal band. It wasn’t handwriting Eric recognized.

As they pulled forward and turned onto Station Street, Griff said, “You’re famous. That’s so sick.”

Justin shrugged, then pushed his straw through the plastic lid on his Coke. Eric steered into the sun. He drove slowly, carefully, as if he’d just avoided an accident.

H
IS NAME WAS
D
WIGHT
B
UFORD
. H
E HAD BEEN BORN AND
raised outside Dallas, and he’d lived for some five years in Flour Bluff, a stripped-down stilt-house section of Corpus Christi. He was unmarried and had no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. So far, he’d been charged with one count of the Class A felony of kidnapping, though more charges were expected. He was being held on a one-million-dollar bond.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Garcia had told Eric and Laura. “Not on my watch.”

They didn’t know what he looked like, and for Eric, not being able to fix an image of him in his mind was menacing. Sometimes he pictured him as obese and towering. Sometimes he appeared gaunt and wiry, his face made up of gruesome angles, concave cheeks and eyes. The first time they’d see him would be Friday morning when Buford’s arraignment was broadcast on television and streamed on
the Internet. The proceeding weighed on Eric; it seemed a cliff toward which his family was being inevitably—powerlessly—borne. A search of Buford’s apartment in Flour Bluff had yielded weapons—pistols and rifles and knives. There were duct tape and a saggy cardboard box of pornographic VHS movies and rope and a pair of handcuffs. Cases of generic soda and shelves of empty aquariums with algae-smudged glass. Videogame consoles, a karaoke machine, a miniature foosball table. When Eric imagined the apartment, the light was soupy and dust-heavy. The air smelled of turpentine.

Garcia had shared what he knew with Eric and Laura, but he betrayed considerably less at the press conference. It took place in Corpus on the steps of the Nueces County Courthouse; Eric, Laura, Griff, and Cecil watched on television at home while Justin was still asleep. Just then his lopsided sleep schedule seemed a blessing; they could watch without fear of burdening or hurting him. When reporters asked pointed questions, Garcia claimed Texas rules of ethics prohibited him from discussing specific details of an open investigation. Good, Eric thought. Very good. The discrepancy of information, the void between what Garcia offered the public and what he’d confided to Eric and Laura, seemed vital. Empowering. Hopeful. Eric could imagine teams of detectives and lawyers being deployed, gathering unassailable evidence, devising legal traps and strategies; the mechanisms of the law, the relentless logic of the process by which justice is meted out, were inspiring. Even innocuous information seemed damaging if Garcia withheld it from reporters. Buford’s parents were retired and living just outside Southport; they docked a boat, a thirty-two-footer named
Oil-n-Water,
at the marina; Buford was a registered Republican; he was a few credits shy of an associate’s degree in business—all of this weakened Buford in Eric’s mind. Knowing what Buford didn’t know they knew was fortifying. Even that Garcia was the only person to appear on camera at the press conference, that he’d denied everyone but the family the opportunity to gaze upon Justin, seemed a sign of strength and confidence.
It seemed something they were lording over Buford. When a reporter asked when they might glimpse Justin, Garcia said, “Our office’s primary objective is a successful prosecution. Yours is to grant that boy some privacy. They’ve all been through enough.”