Remember Me Like This (25 page)

The last time they’d hung out, she said, “You’re going to ruin this.”

“I know,” he said.

“Then don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.”

Roaming Southport on those grueling afternoons, his shirts sweat-heavy and his eyes squinting against the sun’s raw glare, his mind eddying with Fiona and Justin, and with his parents and the trial, Griff felt bloated. But with what? Fear? Sadness? Ever since they’d found out Buford was being released, a kind of pall had fallen over his family. It made him want to scream, to never say another word. He kept expecting his mother to sneak into his room and explain things, kept hoping Justin would take him on another midnight drive and open up again, kept thinking his father would gather everyone in the living room and give one of his coach-y speeches or suggest an idea for a crazy vacation. But, no. His mother talked about being back at work, about Alice the dolphin. His father talked about the heat and how his students were struggling with their final projects. Justin asked about Griff’s skating, if their father had taught this or that kid that he used to know, if his mother ever saw so-and-so’s parents at the dry cleaner’s. They never talked about anything real, certainly not about Dwight Buford. In that
way, he was always there, watching and listening like a new member of the family.

Griff was walking on the wharf when his phone started vibrating. It was Fiona. He let it ring.
I love you,
he wanted to say.
I’m sorry. I’m scared.
But he couldn’t make himself answer. The sky was the color of bone, depthless. The wind came in sour-smelling sheets. The sun was pounding, so hot it felt like there was a layer of thick, sweltering cotton under his skin. When his phone stopped vibrating, he waited to see if she’d left a message. She hadn’t. There was only the sound of a far-off seagull, its cries plaintive and surreal and so familiar that Griff barely heard them.

A
DREAM WITHIN A NIGHTMARE WITHIN A NIGHTMARE
. A
FURLOUGH
from grief. From a pain so deep and dense you wanted to cut your veins to let some blood out, thinking it would relieve the pressure. A pain so deep and dense you
had
cut your veins, but without relief. This was how Laura came to think of the weeks with Justin before Dwight Buford was released. They had been a gift, a reprieve, a short remission before the cancer metastasized.

She saw him everywhere. Everywhere. Even though he wasn’t there, she saw him.

She saw him while she waited for deli meat in H-E-B, saw him taking free samples of toothpicked sausage. She saw him in the car next to hers on Station Street. He was riding the ferry, lobbing crumbs to seagulls. He was sunbathing on the beach. He mowed his parents’ yard and washed their white Mercedes. She saw him at the library’s circulation desk and leaning close to the reptile cages in the library foyer, watching the somnolent snakes and lizards, tapping the glass you weren’t supposed to tap. She saw him strolling along the seawall with fishing rods over his shoulder and a bucket of bait. He was eating at the Castaway Café and shuffling his feet in the dust beside the Teepee Motel pool. He stood outside the D.A.’s office, wearing sunglasses, looking smug, smiling in the washed-out light.

Justin acted unfazed by the news and Griff followed his lead. Laura noticed changes, though. Griff was quieter, more deferential. Justin started picking at his fingernails and cracking his neck more. One night when Laura was washing dishes, a skillet slipped from her hand and clattered to the ground, and the noise was so startling to Justin that he jumped back and knocked a potted plant from the counter. The pot busted and scared him again. He almost slipped in the soil on the floor. He held on to the counter, pressed his back against the wall. His eyes were wide and madly roving. She could see his chest heaving with breath. She approached him slowly—her own heart going frantic—as she would a feral cat. “We’re okay,” she kept saying. “We’re okay.”

Eric claimed not to worry about Dwight Buford’s new freedom, not to feel threatened or debased, but Laura knew he was lying. Or he was deluded, willing himself not to see. She looked for the man continuously. It struck her as perverse and revolting and about as fucked up an irony as she could conjure: She was now searching for Dwight Buford the way she used to search for Justin. She scanned every face for his eyes, every passerby for his gait. She expected him to round every corner and stand behind every door. Yes, it was precisely how she recalled the four years Justin was gone. The drain of constant awareness. The abiding sense that you’d always just missed him. How clearly she remembered walking into rooms, opening closets and drawers, only to realize she’d forgotten what she’d come to find. “Do you think you’re looking for your son? Subconsciously, perhaps?” the therapist had once asked. Laura had gone as a favor to Eric—
See? I’m trying
—but she’d been so flummoxed by the triteness of it all that she left without a word mid-session. The difference now was that when she looked in a cupboard expecting to find Dwight Buford, he was there. He was always, always there.

Laura was also seeking out places to cry again. She wanted thick walls or open spaces. She wanted dark rooms and wide swaths of time. How many movies had she gone to in those four years? She
always sat in the back. She bought buttered popcorn out of gratitude for the service the theater provided. She cried in the shower, in the pews of empty churches, in public bathrooms. She cried on the drive to and from Marine Lab; if the sobbing got too bad, she steered onto the shoulder. (But she never clicked her hazard lights on, lest someone stop to help.) And, of course, there were the times she’d broken down in public. How to explain that she felt no embarrassment? How to convey that she
liked
not being able to contain herself,
liked
that others had to see what she’d been reduced to? But she’d gotten better over the years, more disciplined. When she could feel the fits coming on, she’d start planning a trip to the movies, a late-night ferry ride. She almost looked forward to them. They became a way of marking the days that otherwise blurred into each other like fog.

She thought things should be easier. Now. Things should be easier
now.
With Justin home. With everyone having survived his time away. She thought the past should throw the present into a stark, palliative relief. She tried to focus on the beautiful mess of Justin’s hair when he woke up, the way his shirts smelled before she washed them—woodsy, powdery, not unlike his father’s. But the fear and anger and confusion came back with new force, with an intensified, rumbling vigor. She’d tossed out as many of the welcome home plants as she could. They taunted her, reminded her of how gullible she’d been. Had she really been jealous of redheaded Marcy? Had Justin’s reticence really seemed so insulting? She appalled herself. Eric didn’t like her throwing out the plants. She knew that. Maybe she was trying to goad him into a confrontation. If so, he resisted the bait. She admired and resented his composure. His resolute faith that things would work out, make sense, become clear. For her, Dwight Buford’s being out in the world was incomprehensible. She couldn’t figure where to fit such knowledge to keep it from consuming her, and so it was everywhere. Like him.

She’d been worried that she wouldn’t be allowed to volunteer at
Marine Lab again. Worried that Paul, the rescue coordinator, would blacklist her for ditching the shifts she’d signed up for before Justin was found. Worried that Alice’s condition would have deteriorated to such a degree that she would have been transferred to the facility in Galveston. Worried—selfishly, unforgivably—that the dolphin would have recovered and been released. Laura felt fairly certain she would’ve read about such developments in the paper or on the website, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being left behind. This was the reality in which she now lived. An essential faith had been stripped away. The assumption that what had existed would continue to exist was itself gone. Her life—everyone’s life—seemed rigged with trapdoors and hidden, collapsible walls, panels that would open without warning and claim what had been yours, claim it only because you’d allow yourself to believe it couldn’t be claimed.

But Paul told her to sign up for as many shifts as she could handle, asking nothing about where she’d been. Most of what was available were murder shifts, so Laura would often go straight from Marine Lab to open the dry cleaner’s in the mornings. She didn’t mind. She liked those quiet hours, how each angle of light took on significance. The track of the moon reflecting on the water like a jeweled path and the rising sun gilding the corners of the morning in nameless color. She liked being back at Marine Lab, the smell of chlorine and frozen herring and water spilled from the pool. The inflatable alligator she’d brought from home so long ago was still standing on its tail in the corner beside the life jackets. Paul was still constantly on the phone, jockeying for donations of one kind or another. Each time she interacted with him, usually when she sterilized her hands at the sink or turned in her shift notes before leaving, she was compelled to explain herself.
My son,
she would say.
My son came home.
She kept quiet, though. She was still signing up for shifts under her maiden name.

Alice’s condition had worsened, though not to the point where
she needed to be trucked to Galveston. Her appetite was diminished. She likely had another intestinal infection. Because she wasn’t eating enough on her own, they tubed her twice a day, pumping a blended mixture of fish and liquid and antibiotics into her stomach. They wanted to keep her hydrated and make sure she had enough calories to maintain her strength. Laura took meticulous notes and watched for signs of distress, but Alice appeared strong. Maybe lethargic at times, and a little thinner, but healthy. She swam clockwise around the pool, occasionally rolling onto her side as she passed Laura on the observation deck. Sometimes she blew bubble rings that dispersed at the surface. Those were new. Alice gave no indication of recognizing Laura, but neither did she keep her distance the way she often did with unfamiliar volunteers. Laura clung to this, took it as evidence that she might be known again.

Every time Laura made a note on the log sheets she was reminded of how her handwriting had come to resemble her mother’s. She’d started noticing the similarities when she dug up her mother’s recipe box after Justin returned. It had been dislocating to see that the faded, ribbony script detailing how much celery to use in the potato salad so closely resembled the writing in Laura’s Moleskine. Her mother’d had a bawdy, wide-open laugh and a love of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. She’d died young, of a heart attack, and Laura didn’t think of her nearly as often as she believed she should. Nor did she believe she knew the details of her parents’ lives that children—especially grown children—were supposed to. She knew the dates they’d died, but would be hard-pressed to name their birthdays or anniversary or how they met. Before Justin went missing, one of Laura’s greatest fears was that the boys would ask about her own parents and she’d be forced to lie—to invent details of their grandparents’ lives—or admit her ignorance, willful as it was. Unlike Eric, for whom history provided solace and pattern, she’d always sought to leave the past behind. She was insecure in the face of it, shamed by all she’d forgotten or never known.

But since she’d been dipping into the recipe box, and especially since Buford had been released, her mother had been on her mind more. She wondered how Patricia Wallace would have reacted to everything that was happening, how she would have felt about the way Laura had reacted. There was no telling. Her mother seemed to always be holding parts of herself back from those around her. She was most open, most herself, in the late afternoons when she and their neighbor Joyce would sit on the porch. Toddy Time, they called it. They smoked cigarettes, sipped beer, and ate apple slices dusted in salt. They gossiped about neighbors and people from church, and traded ideas about what to fix for supper. Laura played with her dolls in the flower bed.

On the afternoon Laura remembered most clearly, the women had been drinking and talking about some trouble at the jewelry store where Laura’s mother worked. Laura was wearing a new dress, the first one she could remember picking out herself, one she had, in fact, chosen because it reminded her in some unidentifiable way of Joyce. (Joyce was prettier than Laura’s mother, a fact that felt shameful to notice.) The dress was lavender with long lace sleeves. Laura was playing in the flower bed, hunting for woolly worms and ladybugs. She crawled between the house and the rosebushes, taking care not to get dirty. She could hear the women whispering, giggling. She could hear the apple slices snapping between their teeth.

“Oh, he thinks he’s a smart cookie,” her mother said. “He thinks he’s God’s gift.”

When Laura stood up, the lace of her sleeve caught on a thorn and the fabric was ripping, loosening around her shoulder and armpit, before she recognized what the sound was.

Had she gasped or cried out? The thorn had pricked her, too. Her skin was dotted with blood, but she was focused on having ruined her dress, on trying to keep quiet to think of ways to explain herself. Then the women were off the porch and in the yard. Cigarettes
clenched in their lips, smoke rising into their eyes, and the branches of the rosebushes being gingerly pulled back so Laura could step out.

“Laura Leigh Wallace,” her mother said. Her voice was low, but sharp. She blew smoke over her shoulder. “We just bought this dress. Your daddy’ll have both our hides.”

“It’s not that bad,” she said. “We can fix it.”

The women stood her in the grass and studied her. Their hands were on her, dusting off her dress.

“Oh, baby girl,” Joyce said. “All the pretty lace is ripped clean through.”

Laura’s mother flicked her cigarette into the street. She said, “You know what your daddy’ll say? He’ll say, ‘If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it.’ We’re going to hear that for a month.”