Remember Me Like This (26 page)

“Can we sew it? Fix it up in a way he won’t notice?”

Joyce laughed and said, “Noticing isn’t a man’s strong suit, you got that right. Just ask Mr. Handsy over at the jewelry store.”

“Who’s Mr. Handsy?”

“She means Mr. Clark,” Laura’s mother said. “She means he needs to pay more attention to his inventory and less to his lady customers.”

“ ‘If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it.’ That’s rich,” Joyce said. “That’s richer than rich.”

What, Laura always wondered when that memory arose, had become of her pretty little dress? She had no recollection of what had happened to it, whether they tried to stitch the lace or just wadded the dress into a ball and tossed it in the wastebasket. Nor did she know what became of Joyce. She’d still been alive, still beautiful and smoking on her porch, when Laura left the Panhandle—this was the year after her mother died, when Laura went to live with her aunt in West Texas—but she was surely gone now. Everything about that time seemed cleaved from Laura’s current life. Her handwriting resembled her mother’s, yes, but even that seemed a kind of
happenstance. The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all.

O
N
F
RIDAY MORNING
,
THE EARLY SUN BROKE YELLOW ON THE
horizon. Murky light dappled the wetlands around Marine Lab. The smell of dew, a breeze already pitted with heat, every smooth surface streaked with condensation. As soon as she stepped out of the warehouse, she knew she’d have to let the air conditioner run to defog the windows before she could see well enough to drive. Crickets trilled, and frogs. They sounded far away. For a moment, to Laura, everything seemed distant, unknowable. It was as if she were at the bottom of a well.

As she made her way to her car, a man stepped out of a 4×4 truck parked on the opposite side of the lot. He cut a tall, broad silhouette against the rising sun; he left the driver’s-side door open as he crossed the lot. Laura’s heart sped up: Dwight Buford. His boots on the caliche sounded like tiny bones cracking. She didn’t want to be afraid, didn’t want to taste dread in her throat like bile. Sudden bursts of heat flared behind her knees. She kept her eyes on the ground, but knew the man was coming toward her rather than going to the Marine Lab door. The heat behind her knees had, like that, turned frigid, freezing, and yet sweat beaded all over her. She told herself it couldn’t be Buford, that she was being paranoid and Eric was right, nothing to worry about, that no one knew she volunteered here, that she had used her maiden name, Wallace, that Buford would have no reason to come for her, that—

“Mrs. Campbell?”

Campbell. Not Wallace. She was ready to scream. She gripped her keys between her fingers, like spikes, thinking she’d try to gouge his eyes. She thought to turn back, unsure if she was closer to the warehouse door or her car, unsure which would be safer. The caliche
cracked more quickly. He might have been jogging now. Her lungs felt shallow, seized up. She didn’t look back, just tried to make it to her car before the man reached for her.

“Mrs. Campbell?” he said again. Then he touched her shoulder.

She spun around, gripping the keys, wondering if she would survive, wondering if she’d go to jail. Then, even in the half dark, she recognized him. Almost recognized him.

“Hey,” the man said, looking remorseful. “It’s Rudy.”

She couldn’t speak. Her throat was closed. Her fingers hurt from clenching the keys. The sense of being in a well returned, but she was farther down now, trying to see this man, this Rudy, from a great depth.

“Did I scare you? I didn’t mean to,” Rudy said. When she didn’t answer, he continued, “We volunteered together a while back. I was filling in for my wife, remember? I told you about the tattoo on her ankle, a dolphin she had done in Cancún.”

“Y’all were pregnant,” Laura said.

“Still are,” Rudy said and looked toward the wetlands. The sun was higher, glinting on the rippled water. With the light and with her heart quieting, Laura had a hazy recollection of having seen Rudy during that shift. Could it have been the shift when Eric had come to get her? The day Justin came home? She wasn’t sure. It seemed years ago. Rudy said, “When you and I met, I think she was on a jalapeño corn bread kick. Now it’s pan dulce. All pan dulce, all the time. But it has to come from a specific bakery in Portland.”

“I liked anything lemon-flavored,” she said. “I used to make my husband go to Luby’s and buy three lemon meringue pies at a time.”

“After my shift, I’m heading to Portland for the second time in two days. We live in Refugio, so I’ll have an extra thousand miles on my truck before the end of the year.”

“Just wait until the baby comes,” Laura said, remembering other cravings she’d had when pregnant. With Justin, she’d had the urge to eat toothpaste straight from the tube. With Griff, she’d
loved the smell of charcoal and she couldn’t eat anything that wasn’t drenched in Tabasco sauce.

“I wasn’t on the schedule this morning,” Rudy said, “but I’m at the top of the call list when someone cancels. I guess the person after you got sick.”

I used to be that way,
Laura almost said, but changed her mind. She said, “Paul’s with her now. She’s had a good morning. She blew a lot of bubble rings.”

The sun was brightening, the crickets going quiet in the swamp grass. By the time she got to the dry cleaner’s, the temperature would be in the high eighties, if not the nineties. On those afternoons in her youth, her mother would say, “Oh, it’s hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch.”

“The bubble rings are new,” Laura said. “Today she popped a few with her beak.”

“She taught herself to blow them a couple weeks back. She’s always surprised when she pops them, I think. It’s like when a bubble-gum bubble bursts on a kid’s face.”

“Does she ever play with that inflatable alligator? The one that’s standing on its tail in the corner?”

Rudy thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. Mostly I’ve seen her play with the beach ball and those floaty noodles. That was before she stopped eating.”

“A girl has a right to go on a diet,” Laura said, surprising herself. Because this man had turned out not to be Dwight Buford and because he cared for Alice, she wanted to make him feel better. “She’s just trying to get her figure where she wants it. She’ll bounce back.”

“ ‘On a diet,’ ” Rudy repeated. “I’ll tell that to my wife. She’ll enjoy it.”

Something skittered in the grass—a lizard probably, though Laura couldn’t see.

“Well,” Laura said, “have a good shift.”

“Sorry if I scared you,” he said. “I just thought I recognized you and wanted to make sure.”

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

L
AURA DIDN
’
T CRY ON THE DRIVE TO WORK
,
NOR DID SHE DWELL
on the implications of Rudy calling her by her married name. Days would pass before she even remembered it. Instead, she thought of the way a mother dolphin will swim with her newborn calf beside her. Echelon swimming, it’s called. Until the calf develops enough strength and coordination, it will swim in its mother’s slipstream. The positioning allows the mother to monitor her calf’s breathing, and the slipstream pulls it along, preserving its energy and body heat. From there, Laura’s mind slid to the accounts she’d read of dolphins seeing others in respiratory distress and lifting them to the surface so they wouldn’t drown. There were reports of them saving other dolphins this way, but also dogs and seals and even humans. Pods would band together to take turns keeping the animal afloat, or they would swim so close to the shore that it could reach dry land on its own. How dolphins understood to do this, no one knew, and in her car, Laura found herself hoping it would always remain a mystery. The hour-long drive passed in an instant, the billboard with Justin’s picture on it and the Alamo Fireworks stand hardly registering, and the only time Dwight Buford entered her thoughts was in those moments when she recognized that he wasn’t encroaching. She knew he would, but briefly she felt as if she’d been buoyed, lifted to the surface where she could draw a breath before being pulled under again.

J
USTIN WANTED TO LEARN TO DRIVE ON HIGH BRIDGES
,
SO ONE
Friday evening Eric took him into Corpus. Eric drove over the Harbor Bridge the first time, then they switched seats at a filling station. A long breeze, gulls crying and floating on vectors like choppy water. Eric tried to make out Marine Lab across the ship channel, but the screen of spruce around the warehouse obscured his view. A man in camouflage pumped gas into his dually truck; a woman leaned against the building with a cigarette in one hand and a Styrofoam cup in the other; cars idled in queue for the next available pump. Eric thought he and Justin would get back on the road right away, but Justin sat behind the wheel for a full minute without shifting into gear. At one point the truck’s RPMs plummeted and Eric worried the engine would die.

“I guess I’m a little scared,” Justin said. He picked at the bed of his thumbnail.

“It’s no different than driving on the highway. Take it slow.”

“I don’t want to hold anyone up. I don’t want people to be waiting on me.”

“If they want to pass, they’ll pass. You just go at whatever speed feels right. Keep your eyes on the road and it’ll hardly feel like a bridge.”

Justin cracked his neck. He drew a deep breath, then accelerated
onto the street. The traffic had diminished, so he merged onto the bridge easily and settled into the middle lane. A flutter of pride in Eric’s chest. He stopped himself from tousling his son’s hair; Justin was concentrating so hard that the last thing the boy needed was his doting father distracting him. The car pulled against the bridge, gathering moderate speed as the girders overhead cast a lattice of shadows. Justin tapped the brakes often. More and more distance opened between their truck and the cars ahead. When a sedan passed too close on the left, Justin cut his eyes to Eric and then back to the road. Eric said, “You’re fine.” As they coasted down the bridge, a few more cars whooshed by, but Justin maintained his speed and steered toward the off-ramp.

“If that wasn’t a successful maiden voyage, I wouldn’t know what was,” Eric said. It sounded like something Cecil would say, which pleased him, made him feel fatherly.

“It feels higher when you’re the driver.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Eric said. “You’ll get to where you don’t even notice.”

They were stopped at an underpass. Justin was looking at the bridge in the rearview mirror. He was proud of himself, Eric could tell, and energized, the way he used to get when he found an unusual shell for his collection. Eric hadn’t seen him like this since he’d been back. He wished Laura and Griff were in the car with them, and Cecil. He wished Tracy were there, too, and Letty the social worker and everyone who’d ever worried about Justin. Seeing him this way was a reminder and a reward, evidence of his son’s capacity to recover.

“I’m proud of you, bud,” Eric said.

“I bet the causeway is even easier than this was,” Justin said. “It’s not as high or steep, right?”

“It’ll be a piece of cake,” Eric said.

When Justin had asked about driving on bridges, the causeway entered Eric’s mind first. The bridge there was about half as high—
the waters under it were open only to small watercraft—and the traffic out there was always lighter. To get to it, though, they’d have to pass the Buford house. If Justin had put that together, he didn’t let on. Eric would have welcomed the opportunity to see what was happening at the house—he’d never been out there at this late hour—but he didn’t want to risk Justin seeing anyone. Earlier that afternoon, Eric had watched the house through his binoculars for almost two hours, his longest session yet. (The truck’s RPMs had plummeted then, too, and for a moment Eric was paralyzed with fear that he’d be stranded there and have to call for help.) Ultimately, he’d seen nothing more than the hospice nurse on her smoke breaks. He already wanted to go back.

In the sky, a perishing light. Drivers coming off the Harbor Bridge were clicking their headlamps on. Eric could see the corrugated roof of Marine Lab. He said, “If you hurry, I bet you can make it over the bridge and back again before it gets full dark.”

“Really?”

“We’ll just tell your mother we hit traffic.”

“Sick,” Justin said.

“She probably won’t ask. She’ll probably just be excited to see us.”

“Don’t worry, Dad,” he said, dropping the truck into gear. “I’m good with a secret.”

B
UT WHEN THEY RETURNED HOME
, L
AURA WAS ALREADY IN BED
. Griff was watching skate videos on the computer. He came into the kitchen and ate cereal from the box with his brother. Justin told Griff about having driven over the Harbor Bridge, portraying himself as more nervous than he’d actually been to amuse his brother. Rainbow trotted in and the boys fed her some cereal, then started trying to teach her to sit or raise her paw to shake.

Griff said Laura had gone to bed with a headache. Maybe that was true. She sometimes got migraines. Usually she could isolate
herself in a cool, dark room and sleep them off, but occasionally Eric had to take her to the emergency clinic for shots of Demerol. She hadn’t suffered one in months, though, maybe over a year, so Eric worried that something else had driven her to bed that early on a Friday night. She could’ve seen Dwight Buford or his parents. The district attorney could’ve called the house with news or questions that unraveled her. Or something might have happened with the dolphin. Or with Tracy Robichaud. Eric hadn’t seen Tracy in a week, but Laura could have easily run into her; Tracy was mired in planning the event at the Shrimporee, and she might have contacted Laura with questions. That Eric hadn’t yet mentioned Tracy’s involvement to Laura put him in a sweat. As he crept into their bedroom, he’d half expected the bed to be empty and their back window open. But Laura lay under the covers, her breathing deep and even. He went to sleep listening to her feather-soft snoring.