Remember Me Like This (11 page)

Eric was nodding emphatically, as if at church.

A
T SCHOOL ON
M
ONDAY
, E
RIC
’
S STUDENTS PRESENTED HIM
with a
WELCOME HOME
poster for Justin: a lime green background and a pasted newspaper photo of Justin’s billboard with the word
FOUND
spray-painted across his image. Above the clipping were the words
TEXAS HISTORY IS MADE
! and around them were the kids’ signatures. Some of the students brought cards and presents from their parents—gift certificates to the Castaway Café, plates of cookies, bags of tamales. He tried to act professional, lecturing on Santa Anna and Sam Houston and assigning a chapter on the Battle of San Jacinto for the next class, but it was no use; his every thought veered back to Justin. He started to feel that beautiful weightlessness again. “You should just let us go early, Mr. Campbell,” Clarence Ogden said. “Justin probably wants to see you more than we do.” So he did. In the hallways, teachers went out of their way to shake his hand, clap his back.

When he wasn’t teaching, and while Justin slept in, Eric ran errands. He swung by the pawnshop and brought home a bigger aquarium for the mice Laura had decided to keep as pets; she’d named them Willie and Waylon. Eric and Cecil drove to Marine Lab and retrieved Laura’s car, then stopped in Portland for fruit cups dusted in chili powder—a treat the boys had always loved. The running around afforded him a feeling of usefulness, just as hanging the flyers had before, and whenever he returned home there always seemed a new development. (Again, those early days of fatherhood came back, days when his sons seemed to grow an inch in an hour, learn five new words in the time it took him to mow the yard.) The governor’s office sent a small palm tree and a signed card, welcoming
Justin home. Another five bouquets of flowers and balloons arrived, another ten. Another slew of stuffed animals. A producer from CNN called, and Laura had kindly asked the woman where the fuck she’d been four years ago when they’d begged in vain for airtime. She made a dentist appointment for Justin and set up his counseling with a social worker in Corpus named Letty Villarreal. He’d have two sessions next week, and then they’d meet once a week indefinitely. On Wednesday afternoon, an animal control officer from Corpus dropped off Justin’s gray rat snake. She was four feet long with slate-colored patches running down her back. When Justin woke that evening, he set up her aquarium and heat lamp on his dresser, adjacent to the mice. He outfitted the tank with pieces from his old rock collection. The snake’s name was Sasha. Laura took a picture of her slithering into Justin’s shirt, his face gorgeously scrunched, as if someone was tickling him.

To Eric’s surprise, the press respected Garcia’s request and largely left the family alone. He and Laura had both seen a photographer circling the block, each on separate occasions, and a handful of reporters left messages and sent emails requesting interviews, but that was all. Laura said she remembered reading about photographers posing as deliverymen, how they would come inside the house with packages and floral arrangements and then take pictures with cameras shaped like pens, but they were spared any such intrusion. If anyone was being hounded, it seemed to be Buford’s parents, the district manager of his newspaper route, and his neighbors at the Bay Breeze Suites in Flour Bluff. They said he was quiet and distant. They said they were horrified. They slammed doors in the reporters’ faces, covered the camera lenses with their palms.

Laura was staying home from work. She’d also canceled her shifts at Marine Lab. Maternity leave, she called it. She worked around the house, dusting and waxing, opening windows to air out the rooms. She packed away the excess flyers, the
MISSING
buttons and T-shirts, the postcard from California that had been magneted
to the refrigerator door. She returned calls and wrote thank-you notes, cards she left out for Eric and Justin to sign after supper. Griff filled Hefty bags with the stuffed animals people sent. When enough time had passed, Eric would deliver them to the children’s hospital in Corpus. Laura fried chicken and baked casseroles so Justin would have food to nibble on during the night. She called Eric to say Justin was still sleeping—something she’d also done when the boys were infants, when sleep was a scarce commodity—so she and Griff were going to wash her car in the driveway. Another time, they did a jigsaw puzzle together. Another, they tried to tie-dye some shirts, but everything just came out purple. They did anything they could to pass the long hours until he stepped out of his room, rubbing his eyes, smiling.

Once Justin emerged, it was as if all the lights in the house had been thrown on. Eric wasn’t yet accustomed to seeing him again, and everything that his son came into contact with seemed to radiate, to shine in new and pure ways. What he understood now was that a stillness had crept into the house over the years—the tamped-down carpet, the scrim of dust that blurred the television screen—and he noticed it now because the stillness was gone, supplanted by a fresh energy. His vision was keen, his mind precise. If Justin recognized how he restored his father, he didn’t let on. He cupped his hands around his coffee mug, asked what everyone had been doing while he slept. He would also ask about things he’d remembered overnight: What ever happened with Mrs. Harrison, the fourth-grade teacher who ate chalk? What about Tommy Benavides, the bully from grade school? When did the Teepee go under? His reactions were measured and opaque, but not uninvested. Even when they told him that Johnny and Jason Holland, his old best friends, had moved from Southport three years ago, Justin was unfazed. It was simply that nothing seemed to surprise him now.

“Keeps his cards close to the vest,” Cecil had said. He’d always valued reticence, the strong contours of silence, and because his father
could, Eric tried to find respite in his son’s polite shyness. Most evenings, Cecil stopped by after work. He brought videogames and DVDs the boys might like from the pawnshop. One night they had to help him in with a thirty-gallon aquarium, an upgrade for Sasha. Fiona, her hair now shockingly green, would usually arrive as they were clearing the dinner table. Each night she brought some kind of present with her. A lemon pie, a book on sharks for Laura, a jug of Miracle-Gro for the plants that were overtaking the rooms. There was hardly a flat surface in the house that didn’t host a vase or pot. “It’s like living in the Amazon,” Justin had said.

On Wednesday, two days before the arraignment, Fiona brought a Trivial Pursuit board game and set it up on the kitchen table to play after eating. Eric couldn’t remember a time when the house had felt so full, so refreshingly loud with familiar voices. Fiona usually stayed until nine or so, when Griff would walk her home. They always invited Justin, but he was yet to accompany them.

“It’s weird to see him with a girlfriend,” Justin said after they left. “I guess a lot’s changed.”

“Not the important things,” Laura said. “No one touched the things that matter. No one.”

E
XACTLY WHEN THE FIRST TREMORS OF INSECURITY SEIZED HIM
, Eric couldn’t say. Most likely they’d been dormant in his blood since he’d first seen Justin in the police station, but now he’d started noticing the porosity of his relief. Maybe the first symptoms had come when Laura offhandedly said, “You know who we haven’t heard from yet? That nice Tracy Robichaud. Do you ever run into her anymore?” Or when she said, “I just wonder what was happening in the world. I want to know what everyone was doing. Somewhere, someone was washing his car. Someone else was making some horrible mistake.” Maybe it was knowing that Dwight Buford would enter his plea on Friday morning. Or maybe as Eric grew more accustomed to seeing Justin, he grew less capable of ignoring what his
son had suffered through. The pain Justin had endured, the fear and neglect and ruining shame, shadowed Eric’s every thought. It was a kind of quicksand, a constant threat that emptied every promise from the bottom up. How disgusting, how humiliating, to realize that he was afraid to be alone with his son. They had, he saw now, hardly spent more than a few moments by themselves, and shamefully, Eric understood he’d always been the one to ensure that someone else was around—Laura or Griff or Cecil. He didn’t know what scared him, but he felt the fear between them like an electric current.

When Justin had first gone missing, Eric had fantasies of a swift return, an absence so insignificant that his son would come home unaffected. Nothing more than a sleepover, he thought. A week at camp. He never stopped expecting to see Justin around every corner, never stopped scanning the faces of children for his son’s eyes and mouth and cheekbones, but the fantasies of him emerging from the ordeal unchanged fell away. If they ever found him alive, Eric knew Justin would be so altered by the trauma that he’d bear no resemblance to the boy who’d disappeared. Of course they would accept the changed boy; they’d adopt him, offer up Justin’s room, lend him their son’s name. But Eric also knew there’d be a chasm between them. He’d never mentioned his lowered expectations—voicing them would have cast them in iron and he longed to be proven wrong—but they persisted. Now that Justin was home, now that he seemed so disorientingly himself, Eric was realizing that he hardly felt rinsed of doubt. Walking his father out on Thursday night, Eric confided this and Cecil said, “It’s early yet. You’ll cotton to it soon enough.” Eric tried to believe him. He tried to accept that such profound relief was something that took getting used to.

That night, before Laura drifted off, they’d been whispering about the arraignment. If Buford pleaded not guilty the following morning, Justin would start meeting with Garcia a few times a week to prepare the state’s case. Justin had agreed to this as casually as
agreeing to buckle his seat belt, but the thought of requiring any more of him was abhorrent.

In bed, Eric’s mind was surging. He sniffled. Years before, it had been how he and Laura would check to see if the other was awake. Sometimes they’d talk. Others, they’d make love. He sniffled again, louder. Nothing. He slipped out of the bed and crept into the house.

He expected his son to be watching television, but the living room was dark, the kitchen empty. He had a sense of having marshaled his nerve too late; he was, at once, absolved and a coward. The air conditioner hummed in the walls. The house smelled of potpourri. The air was cloying, dank. Eric felt seasick. Moving toward Justin’s room gave him a jumpy, underwater feeling, as if he were swimming through the wreckage of a sunken ship, paddling from one ruined space to another. When he eased the door open, he saw that Justin’s bed was still made. Moonlight reflected off the aquariums. The mice were skittering in their cedar chips. His heart constricted in his chest, pumping heavily. He peeked into Griff’s room—maybe they’d stayed up talking or playing videogames, or maybe Justin had gotten scared and wanted to sleep with his brother—but he only saw Griff, balled under his blanket. Eric ran his hand over his face, leaned back against the wall.

Jesus, he thought. Jesus, no.

Then he heard Rainbow’s tags in the backyard. He went through the door in the kitchen, stepped down to the porch and onto the patio. Humidity swamped him.

“She had to pee,” Justin said, his back to Eric. He stood on the edge of the cement as if it were a pier.

“Me, too,” Eric said, going for a joke. Justin made no response. Rainbow was invisible in the distance, but Eric could hear her parting the tall weeds and padding over the knotty grass. Even at night, the yard was an embarrassment. He said, “I let the yard go.”

Justin shrugged, a gesture at once innocent and, Eric worried, judgmental. An easy wind came through the trees. Rainbow trotted
along the fence line. Coils of gray clouds hung in front of the yellow moon, a gauze of light that deepened the darkness. It was as if parts of the sky were wet, blacker than usual.

“Are you hungry?” Eric said. “I can fix silver dollars again.”

“I’m good,” Justin said.

In the dark sky, the gray clouds were unspooling, fraying, giving up. Eric wished he hadn’t asked about the pancakes, for now he suspected that Justin hadn’t loved them as much as he’d claimed. He wished, too, that he’d stayed in bed. Maybe he’d always had such trouble connecting with Justin and he’d idealized their old relationship. There was an odd prospect of comfort in such thinking, but Eric couldn’t remember the old life just then. Sweat pilled on his neck, glazed his chest. The seasickness returned. A tightening in his throat, desperate and dry.

Eric said, “Did you ever learn how to wink?”

Justin stayed quiet, maybe trying to wink. Rainbow trotted in the far corner of the yard. She sniffed hard at something, then moved away, swishing through the grass. A twig popped, then another. Justin said, “No, I still close both eyes.”

“That’s okay,” Eric said. “It took me years—”

“I delivered papers with him,” Justin said. “If you were wondering.”

Eric became exquisitely aware of his bare feet on the patio. He remembered reading how there are some seven thousand nerve endings in the soles of your feet, and presently he could feel every one of them. He felt as if he’d drunk a gallon of ice water; he fought not to tremble. Justin said, “Our schedules were flipped. We slept all day, then went to throw the route at night. Right now feels like midafternoon to me.”

“That’s no fault of yours.”

Justin picked up a stick and whipped it into the dark yard.

“I got to where I could sleep for twelve hours a day. More sometimes. Time speeds up when you’re asleep, or it doesn’t matter.”

“You felt safer that way. It makes sense,” Eric said, sounding lame. He wished they weren’t alone, wished Laura would step outside. He said, “Dolphins never really sleep. Their brains stay awake. They’re smart.”

“That’s pretty sick,” he said. “Snakes sleep a lot, but you can’t ever really tell. They don’t have eyelids.”

“Papaw got bit by a cottonmouth when he was about your age,” Eric said.

“I think I remember him telling me that. Maybe when we went to the rattlesnake races that year.”