Remember Me Like This (21 page)

He said, “Well, I had better be—”

“Here’s the thing,” the girl interrupted. “My mom’s pretty religious, right? She speaks in tongues at the drop of a hat—she did it for, like, an hour when we found out about Justin—and she’s given most of our money to various TV preachers.”

“You’re losing me.”

“So she’s also all about the Rapture. She’s convinced that the righteous are going to be taken up and the heathens are going to be left behind.”

“Okay.”

“I used to hide from her. I’d leave my shoes in the hallway so she’d think I’d been chosen.”

“I need to head out. I do appreciate your talking with—”

“She hated it. I’d scoot under my bed and listen to her running around the house, screaming my name,” she said. “It’s exactly how I feel about Justin. Like, I know he’s in a better place, but I really miss him. I keep thinking he’ll call or stop by, but the only people who come around are perverts and cops and reporters.”

“Not one shred of this is easy,” Cecil said.

The girl pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. She hadn’t started crying, but the threat existed. She said, “We’d been playing videogames before they went to the flea market. We had the game saved on my memory card and were going to pick it up again once he got back and fed Sasha.”

“But he never came back,” Cecil said.

“I worried they’d been in an accident. I was trying to figure out if I could somehow throw their paper route, so they wouldn’t get in trouble, you know? I wanted to help, you know? Then there were about a hundred cop cars in the parking lot,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Cecil said. He was again tempted to offer some consolation—
You helped him, I know you did
—but he curtailed the impulse. Behind them, an apartment door opened and a woman in a terry-cloth robe stepped outside. She lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke. She walked in a small circle, watching her feet.

“Not my mother,” the girl said. “That’s Ruby. She’s a substitute teacher and amateur alcoholic. Her son and Justin used to pass the football. I could watch them for hours.”

Ruby drew on her cigarette and swatted away the smoke. Cecil said, “I appreciate you making time to talk.”

“Tell him I said hey.”

“Beg pardon?” Cecil said.

“Just do it, okay?” she said. “Tell him Marcy says hey and she, you know, misses him. Tell him I still have the conch and the game is still saved.”

“Honey,” he said, feeling a spasm of alarm. He didn’t know how she’d picked up on his relationship with Justin, but he was suddenly certain that coming to the Bluff was a mistake. His heart was kicking in his chest. Sweat was running down his back. “Honey, I’m just here to take in the sights.”

“Just do it,” she said. “Please just do this one thing. Please.”

S
HE
’
D BEEN THINKING ABOUT THE MERIDIAN AGAIN
,
THE BEFORE
and after of her life. For years, she would have sworn she hadn’t imagined past the moment when Justin would be back in her arms. Had anyone accused her otherwise, she would have balked. Allowing herself to dream up how it would be to have him back home, how it would be to watch him grow and love and marry and prosper, or even to watch him rinse out a cereal bowl, would have been too risky, decadent in its presumption. If anything, she had bargained the other way. She had conceived of scenarios where he was located but remained largely disconnected from his family. In one, he talked with her on the phone, assured her that he was safe and happy, but for some reason would always live apart from them. In another, he met her in a secluded place—a park shaded by weeping willows and live oak, an isolated stretch of beach where the heavy slosh of the tide washed out their voices—and he told her that he was setting out on his own, but he would write letters. She had even pictured a situation similar to one she’d read on a missing-children website: A mother’s daughter had been kidnapped by the father, and when the police tracked the two of them down in another state, the mother flew out and sat in an unmarked van across the street, watching her daughter play in the yard through blacked-out windows. She watched her like that for almost a month while
the case was being built. Moments had come when Laura believed that was all she needed. Show me he’s okay, she’d think, and I’ll live.

But now she realized that she
had
granted herself more substantive fantasies. The realization was dousing to her spirits, for by denying herself such indulgence, by forcing herself to keep her expectations painfully low, she’d believed she was doing something right. She’d believed such restraint, such demeaning sacrifice, would pay off. A feeling of penance. Of fasting in her heart. But, no. She’d always envisioned Justin’s homecoming in such easy terms that they were almost vulgar in their simplicity. Her notions of his rejoining the family were hardly more nuanced than all of them bounding over a fence, hurdling from despair on one side to salvation on the other. It was ridiculous.

And it was unfair to everyone, especially Justin. This hit her one evening while Justin and Eric were practicing parallel parking and Griff was at the Teepee. Whether talking with Letty Villarreal had brought it on, or seeing Eric turn the corner from awkward reticence to sure-footed confidence around Justin, or whether Laura had been heading toward such a realization all along, she didn’t know. Nor did she care. She only knew she felt reanimated and clean, as if some sludge, some corrosive grime, had been inside her veins and now it had been purged. She vowed to think differently. She would see him as an animal in the ocean, a porpoise or whale or some sweet manatee, long submerged and scared, cautiously making his way to the surface. She would swim beside him, at his pace, rising as he did. The imagery had come from her time at Marine Lab, of course, the hours of watching Alice disappear and then come up for air, but Laura wondered if the image wasn’t also rooted in something else she hadn’t dared to think about for years: Justin’s first word. Not
Mama
or
Mommy.
Not
Daddy.
No, Justin had been strapped into his high chair, pushing Cheerios around his tray, when she and Eric heard him clearly and emphatically say “Fish.”

Which, in a sleight of association, reminded her of the photos
she used to send to the detectives, to the police officers and sheriff’s deputies, to the reporters and television stations when their investment in her son’s disappearance ebbed. She chose photos of Justin as a toddler and young boy—Justin wearing a pair of underwear on his head (as a superhero mask), Justin asleep and using Rainbow as a pillow, Justin practicing the recorder, his eyes closed like a jazzman. Her aim had been for the new images to snap everyone back to attention, to refocus their anger, shake them out of their apathy. He was a baby once, the pictures asserted. He was a boy who could almost play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Don’t give up. Find him. Please. The postcard from California had done the same thing for her, concentrating and repurposing her emotions, and that, she realized, was what she needed to do for herself now. She resolved to give herself a little jolt of perspective each day. She would remind herself of how far they’d come, how happy she should be, how grateful.

It worked. A shift inside her, one she could trust. Things that had previously isolated and wounded her—Eric’s nightly drives with Justin, the fact that he’d had a girlfriend—were circumvented with relatively little effort. To consider Justin’s options for his schooling was to consider the future. To fix a meal he liked enough to ask for seconds was to fill a void as only a mother could. It awoke in her a love of cooking, a desire to invent new recipes and buy new cookware. If either of the boys especially liked a meal, she immediately started planning when she could prepare it again. (No need to track Eric’s tastes. He loved everything—sweetly, genuinely. If she warmed up fish sticks, he lavished praise on her like she’d toiled all day at the stove.) If the boys seemed lukewarm about a recipe, she fed the leftovers to Rainbow. When she wasn’t cooking, she sorted through the articles and other ephemera she’d collected since Justin’s return and started a scrapbook.

Life started to feel—what? Not normal. Not familiar. Inhabitable. Navigable. With time and effort, with patience and selflessness,
she could find her way back to the vicinity of the familiar. She watered the plants. She plucked yellow leaves. She fed the mice, Willie and Waylon, let them sniff her closed eyes with their pink noses, and delicately scratched their necks until their heartbeats calmed in her hand. She was, she guessed, a week or so away from teaching Waylon to stand on his hind legs and twirl like a ballerina. She checked Marine Lab’s website for news on Alice and took comfort in what little information there was; Paul was notoriously lazy about updating the online “Progress” page, but he was vigilant about listing any rescue deaths. That it was so easy for Laura to imagine Alice thriving seemed a promise unto itself. She read her library books, washed Griff’s kneepads when they started to reek of their vinegar stink. She jotted ideas for Christmas gifts: a new lawn mower for Eric, kneepads for Griff, another snake for Justin.

On a Friday night in early August, for the first time in years, she woke Eric by twisting her fingers through his hair. In the soft moonlight, she recognized how gray he’d gone around his temples and above his ears. As he stirred, she felt an almost unbearable gratitude for him, for all the weight he’d carried, for his adamant refusal to let her slip away.

“Laura?”

“It’s me,” she said. “I’m here. I’m back now.”

E
VER SINCE
T
RACY
R
OBICHAUD HAD VISITED HIS CLASSROOM A
week ago, Eric had expected her again. He felt on edge thinking of it, a fraught confusion. They’d done nothing more than embrace that Friday and she’d left his room within minutes. It had been a bolstering relief, like losing control of a car and then swerving safely back onto the road. He wasn’t convinced they could manage such control again, though. He’d been leaving school right after each class to minimize the chance of another encounter. Time, he thought, would help.

She’d come for a meeting in the school’s cafeteria about the
Shrimporee; Tracy was on the board of directors. Her husband was, too, but he skipped the meetings. In Eric’s classroom, she said the board members were encouraging her to head up the committee organizing Justin’s celebration at the Shrimporee, and because he couldn’t bring himself to object, couldn’t focus clearly on the variables her participation would involve because he was still focusing on who’d seen her enter his classroom and who would see her leave, he gave his blessing.

“Thank you,” she said. “I think we’ll be able to put together something terrific for him.”

“I can’t think of anyone better to be in charge.”

“Careful,” she said, smiling. “Now that I know where to find you, I might be tempted to stop by more often.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t returned your calls. With everything happening, I’ve just been—”

“I just want you to know I’m still here.”

“I know that,” he said.

“Nothing has changed. Not a thing.”

But he hadn’t seen her again, and with each passing day, it was easier to believe they could leave their old habits behind. To believe she knew his life had changed the moment he laid eyes on Justin again. To believe she knew he was afraid of pushing his luck—their luck—because he’d gotten so lucky with Justin. He briefly thought of this when Laura unexpectedly woke him up in the middle of the night, but soon he’d been unable to think of anything. Laura was ravenous, so consumed and consuming, that she seemed to be dreaming, loosed from who she’d always been. Eric was sore the next day—he felt like he’d been in a fight, one he’d likely lost—and when they tangled into each other again, his muscles and flesh ached a lovely ache. Laura was more herself the second time, more familiar, and he saw how shallow, how desperate and futile his afternoons with Tracy had been. Afterward, she lay on her stomach and he propped himself on his elbow, lightly grazing his fingers over her
back. It was something he used to do every time, something he’d intentionally never done with Tracy, but he couldn’t remember how many years had passed since he’d last touched his wife this way.

“Write something,” she said. “Write something back there.”

With his finger he wrote:
I love you.

“I love you, too,” she said.

He swept his palm over her skin as if erasing a blackboard, then wrote:
I’m hungry.

“Me, too.”

He wrote:
Justin’s home.

“Perfect,” she said.

He wrote:
I’m sorry.

“I didn’t get it,” she said. “Write it again.”

He did.

She smiled into the pillow, then shifted to look at him, light in her eyes. She said, “I’ve missed you, too.”

L
AURA READ A BOOK EVERY TWO DAYS
. S
HORTER ONES SHE SOMETIMES
finished in a single sitting. It seemed another good sign, like her renewed appetite and sex drive. She had a sense of reclamation. Of becoming or re-becoming. She’d always loved to read, loved it the way her childhood friends had loved riding their bikes. Her mother had assembled a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias with weekly coupons from the supermarket (she’d done the same with a set of dishes), and when a new volume arrived (usually on Thursday), Laura could spend hours reading random entries. Had she gone to college, she would have majored in literature; in fact, she knew people often assumed she
had
gone to college because she usually carried a book with her, something to read in waiting rooms or between customers at the dry cleaner’s. Before Justin went missing, she’d mostly devoured true crime—what Eric and the boys had called “Mom’s death books”—but of course she later avoided the genre completely. Once she started volunteering at Marine Lab,
she’d read almost exclusively about cetaceans. Really, though, what she read hardly mattered. Books on war and royalty, books on science and anthropology and politics, novels and story collections and Texana, even the occasional volume of poetry (though the poems always made her feel dense)—she just reveled in the act of running her eyes over lines of text, the feeling of dabbing her finger to her tongue and turning a page, the near-transformative sensation of reaching an end.