Remember Me Like This (2 page)

When Eric shut off the shower, there was only the steady hum of the air conditioner. Tracy might still be lying across the bed, her eyes closed and her dark hair wild on the pillows, or she might have already stripped the sheets and taken them to the washer. He dried himself with a thick towel, stepped too carefully from the tub. For years, he’d had an unfounded fear of falling in the bathroom, of cracking his skull on porcelain. He’d known no one who’d suffered such a fall, and yet the risk felt familiar and menacing, as if he’d suddenly grown ancient and infirm in the shower. In Tracy’s bathroom, the vanity was marble-topped, sharp-edged and expensive. The whole condo brimmed with upgrades—Saltillo tile, a Viking range, one air-conditioning system for the first floor and another for the second. Every week, the lavishness sullied him; he wouldn’t let his gaze settle on anything. Now, pulling on his boots, he wished he’d already left.

V
ILLA
D
EL
S
OL HAD BEEN BUILT AFTER
S
OUTHPORT LOST ITS BID
for the naval station. Most of the sandstone condos were owned by people from Corpus or by snowbirds, silver-haired retirees who wintered on the coast and caned their way through the souvenir shops on Station Street. “It’s snowing,” Laura used to say when they’d get stuck behind an elderly driver. They lived in a three-bedroom ranch, a few blocks from the house where Eric had grown up and where his father still lived. Their house was drafty, in need of a new roof, double-mortgaged to put up the reward money. Every couple of years he had to raise the foundation with bottle jacks.

But when Villa Del Sol first opened, Eric had driven Laura and the boys to an open house. Justin was nine, Griff was seven. Everyone wore church clothes.

“Who can afford one of these?” Laura said in the living room of the model unit. “No one we know.”

“We’re not that far off,” Eric said, trying to sound assured. “Besides, no charge for looking.”

The boys were in the courtyard, hunting rocks. Griff had recently started collecting them, because Justin did. Laura watched them through the bay window. She said, “Guess what Justin asked me last night.”

“If Rainbow could sleep inside?” he said. Rainbow was their black Lab, a dog Eric had bought from a man selling puppies out of his truck bed on Station Street. Rainbow was a good, affable dog, but she’d recently been relegated to the backyard after Eric woke to find her chewing one of his boots.

“Yes, but something else,” Laura said.

“About cusswords? The other day he asked me if there were any he could say without getting in trouble.”

“He asked me to marry him.”

“Oh,” Eric said. “Smart boy.”

“You don’t think it’s weird?”

“He’s got good taste in women, is what I think.”

Laura paced across the room with her hands clasped in front of her. She looked like a woman in a museum, taking care not to bump into exhibits. Were she a stranger, Eric would’ve been struck with longing as he watched her languid movements. His wife—it still shocked him—was beautiful. She returned to the window to watch the boys.

“What are we doing here, honey? We’re not—”

“I thought it’d be fun,” he said. He crouched in front of the fireplace, trying to figure if it worked. Just for show, he thought.

“I don’t want to live anywhere else. Neither do the boys. We love our house.”

“It was just something to do.”

“Sometimes I worry you feel like you need to give us more.”

He couldn’t remember
not
feeling that way. Though he hadn’t yet told Laura, he’d just agreed to teach summer school. His plan was to surprise everyone with a vacation over Christmas break. The boys had never left Texas.

“We have everything we need,” she said. Outside, Griff was trying to show Justin a piece of limestone he’d found.

“What did you tell him?” Eric asked, pushing himself up from the fireplace.

“Who?”

“Your suitor.”

She smiled as if he’d paid her a compliment. Her eyes stayed on their sons. “I said I loved him very much, but I was already married.”

“He must’ve been heartbroken.”

“Crushed,” she said. “Utterly crushed. But then I helped him sneak Rainbow into his room and he seemed to recover.”

W
HEN
E
RIC STEPPED FROM THE BATHROOM
, T
RACY WAS STANDING
with her back to him. She peered through her bedroom blinds, watching the two sisters who owned the condo across the courtyard. The women were in their eighties, stooped and wire-haired. Tracy loved spying on them. She’d wrapped herself in a sheet that puddled around her ankles and exposed her back. The knuckles of her spine looked like shells in sand. Laura’s body, he thought, might resemble Tracy’s now; she’d lost weight over the last four years. Twenty pounds, maybe more. And ever since Justin had gone missing, she’d let her hair grow out, a protest of sorts, or a show of solidarity. She’d stopped shaving her legs and under her arms, too. Eric couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his wife naked.

“I think the sisters’ air conditioner’s busted,” Tracy said. “They’re just sitting at the kitchen table, fanning themselves.”

He was tempted to say he’d walk over and take a look, but
checked himself. He didn’t want to run into the sisters later. For old girls, they got around just fine. They drove a Lincoln Continental. Eric said, “After I leave, tell them to have someone check the Freon.”

“Sexy handyman,” she said. “I was just going to visit the pawnshop and see if your father had a window unit I could buy for them.”

“He had two yesterday. They’re marked at eighty, but he’s only got thirty into them. He’ll take sixty.”

“You’re just full of helpful information. Give me ten minutes to repay you?”

Eric slipped his phone into his pocket, clasped his watch around his wrist. He put his wedding band back on and said, “I need to head out.”

Tracy raked her fingers through her hair, then parted the blinds again. She said, “How’s the whale this week?”

“Dolphin,” he said, correcting her. “Running a fever, I think.”

“Poor thing.”

“I need to pick up some new flyers and make the rounds.”

“They don’t last long, I guess.”

The flyers hung in most storefronts in Southport, taped among the rummage sale notices and advertisements for windsurfing lessons. They were also posted from Corpus to Ingleside and all the way up the I-37 corridor into San Antonio; there were a few donated billboards, too, one standing just outside Southport. If the flyers went unchanged, the sun bleached the image and the words. Eric checked them vigilantly. In the last four years, he’d put forty thousand miles on his truck, most of them within a twenty-mile radius. Today he wanted to leave a stack of flyers at the Alamo Fireworks stand out on the highway. Early on, the flyers had generated a lot of leads; now, they were down to four or five a month, usually from crazies or pranks. They’d used Justin’s fifth-grade yearbook photo. In it, he wore a western shirt and his hair was too short. Eric had cut it in the garage the night before; then to make amends for
the botched job, he’d handed Justin the clippers and let him go to town on his father’s head. When they’d come inside, Laura had said,
Did y’all use the lawn mower instead of scissors?
and Griff had fussed until Eric and Justin took him into the garage and buzzed his head, too. For months, clippings from his sons’ hair would wisp onto the workbench like daddy longlegs. When the detective wanted a DNA sample, Eric spent hours on his hands and knees in the garage, but turned up nothing. It was Laura who’d simply pulled strands of hair from the brush on Justin’s dresser.

He’d been eleven, almost twelve, excited to start middle school. He’d been a skateboarder, a boy who loved the Blue Angels and hated the beach.

Now Eric said, “I also need to swing by the marina and pick up some shrimp for supper.”

“Your famous recipe,” Tracy said.

“Griff hasn’t been eating. I think he’s in a dustup with his girl.”

“The one who’s a little older.”

“If she heads for the hills, he’ll be one lonely cowboy. Most of his other friends have gone AWOL.”

“I remember,” she said.

“He does okay during the school year. He gets invited to birthday parties and little camping trips. Summers are tougher.”

“At least he’s not getting in fights anymore,” Tracy said.

“At least,” Eric said.

She let the blinds snap shut. As she turned from the window and crawled back into bed, Eric saw that she’d been crying. His throat closed. He looked at his boots.

“Sorry,” she said.

And then this familiar thought: How did I get here? The pieces that made up his life seemed pulled from another man’s existence—the berth he and Laura afforded each other, these bleak and sweaty afternoons with Tracy. Even that he was in his forty-fourth year confounded him; most mornings, he woke feeling like the boy
whose thin arm could inexplicably send a tight, perfect spiral seventy yards. And, of course, Justin. Sometimes he’d pass the closed door of Justin’s room and forget for a beautiful moment that he was gone. How often in the last four years had he almost knocked? Then, when his thoughts fitted themselves to reality, he felt cored out and drugged, groping awkwardly through his days as if he’d lost a limb in an accident, an arm or leg whose weight he still anticipated. He recognized its absence, and yet he could still feel the arteries as they dilated, the nerves as they burned.

Tracy rustled under the sheets, bunched a pillow under her head. She was fingering her hair, twisting it, looking for split ends. He smiled so she could see. Maybe she smiled back a little, furtively. His phone started buzzing in his pocket. It was loud against his keys.

Tracy said, “It rang while you were in the shower, too. If you want privacy, I can take the sheets to the washer.”

“It’s Griff saying he’s going to skate,” he said without checking. “I’ll call him when I leave.”

“I wasn’t crying about you.”

“I’m glad,” he said.

“I
do
cry about you, but I usually hold those pity parties after you’ve left. They’re very exclusive.”

“I’m not worth—”

“I’m in Alaska this month,” Tracy said. She wrote articles for a travel magazine, though she never visited the destinations. Each month, her editor sent a manila envelope pregnant with statistics and featured attractions that Tracy shaped into a story. “I’m in São Paulo,” she’d say. Or “I’m in Sag Harbor.” Now she said, “And watching the sisters fan themselves, I started thinking about polar bears, how the whole world’s melting around them.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Alaska sounds like a mighty fine place to spend the summer.”

“North to the Future,” she said.

“North to the Future?”

“State motto.”

He averted his eyes to the window, the blinds laddering light across the bed. The air conditioner droned. Tracy was still studying her hair.

He said, “I should get going.”

“Leave the garage door open. I’ll close it when I put the sheets in the wash.”

“Sure thing.”

“You’re a good father, Eric,” she said. “You think you’re not because of what we’re doing, but you are. You’re a good husband, too.”

Tracy said such things occasionally, and Eric always suspected she was trying to convince herself as much as him. They’d been sleeping together for a year. More and more Eric had the sorry sense that he and Laura were both just treading water, trying to stay afloat until Griff graduated high school. A good husband. A good father. He only knew he’d filled those roles at one time, though he could hardly recall it now. He watched shafts of lurid sunlight slant through the blinds, the dust motes eddying like galaxies.

“It’s the pads of their feet,” Tracy said.

“Do what now?”

“Polar bears,” she said. “Something about those black pads on their white feet makes me really sad.”

He leaned across the bed, pressed his lips to her cheek. As always when he was leaving her, he felt at once restored and ashamed.
This can’t be my life. This
isn’t
my life.
The feeling he had was one of erasure, as if their time together diminished him, stripped him down to some essence he could concentrate on rebuilding. He would do better from here on out. He’d check the flyers, run by the fireworks stand and the marina, fry shrimp. After dinner, he’d run a hot bath for Laura. They were both off tomorrow, so maybe they’d take Griff to the skate park in Corpus, get his mind off his doomed heart.
Eric passed through the condo and into the garage like a man who was late, a man who’d kept his family waiting too long. As he was backing his truck out of the garage, his phone started up again.

Years later, he would remember very little about that afternoon. Not how he’d parked on the street to dig the phone from his pocket, or how he’d assumed Tracy was calling to elaborate on the polar bears, or how the disparate parts of an idea about taking Laura and Griff to Alaska were crystallizing in his mind.
North to the future.
The light that afternoon washed everything out; the asphalt looked chalky under tremors of heat. Eric could feel eyes on him—maybe Tracy was peeking through the blinds and calling to say he’d forgotten something on the nightstand—but when he reached his phone, the caller ID showed a Corpus prefix, so he assumed Laura was calling from Marine Lab. He thought she’d tell him she was staying late so he and Griff should go ahead and eat. He thought her voice would drip with grief, and despite his earlier resolve, he didn’t want to hear her just then. What Eric would remember for the rest of his life was how he almost didn’t answer.

A
CROSS THE STREET
, R
UTH AND
B
EVERLY
W
ILCOX WERE STILL
fanning themselves, waiting for their air conditioner to kick in. Bev had woken up worried about money again, so they’d left the air off until Ruth finally said phooey and lowered the thermostat. Now they were watching Justin Campbell’s father in his truck. They thought his engine had stalled again, but eventually realized he was taking a phone call. Ruth called his afternoons with the married gal “The Soap.” “Time for The Soap,” she’d say, and Bev would break out the Lorna Doones. They knew what he’d endured, what he and his poor wife had lost. Everyone knew. Sipping their midday coffee, Ruth and Beverly wondered silently how you’d go on, how you wouldn’t just up and die. They were both widows, Ruth to cancer and Beverly to Korea, but to lose a child was an altogether worse kind of hurt, a scar that would absolve all manner of sins. And they
did think of him as scarred. Grief had disfigured him. He looked slackened. Each week there seemed a little less of him. Ruth had been the one to notice how, all these years later, some folks at church still stole pitiful and sadistic glances at him, like he’d been burned, like his face was mottled and waxy with misfortune. She had also noticed how his wife had stopped coming to services. So let him diddle, she thought. So let him find some respite.