Remember Me Like This (3 page)

“Who’s he talking to?” she asked now.

“How in the world should I know?” Bev said.

Ruth hadn’t meant to speak the words, or if she had, she’d meant them rhetorically. The truth was she’d been curious about the young man’s life even before he started parking his little Toyota truck in the garage across the street. Maybe he reminded Ruth of her own son, maybe she was a little sweet on him, maybe his sadness mystified her the way it did Tracy Robichaud. Once, before his son went missing, he’d held a door open for her and Bev at the Castaway Café by the marina. (His father drank coffee there every morning, Ruth knew. Cecil was a tall man with hard, sad eyes. There were stories that he’d known violence. Oh, she’d like to sop him up with a biscuit.) After she and her sister stepped inside the café, his wife and two sons followed; the boys were rambunctious, slicing around her legs like trout. One of them knocked into her—Ruth believed it had been Justin, but Bev maintained it was the younger brother—and she’d almost toppled. Justin Campbell’s father made the boy come back and apologize. It was embarrassing. She could feel her cheeks turning to apples. But Ruth remembered how he kept his palm on the boy’s back, how he’d been trying not to smile as his son made amends. After supper, the boy came over to the table and shyly placed a piece of flint in her hand. “I found this for you,” he said. She’d made an excited face and told him how pretty it was—he grinned, looked at his feet, then back at his family’s booth—then she made a big production of letting Bev see the rock before slipping it in her purse. Today, as the missing boy’s father’s truck suddenly
rocketed up the street and around the corner (“Wife must be coming home early,” Bev said and cackled), Ruth wished she knew what had become of that small stone. She’d like to give it to him some Sunday at church, tell him she remembered how he’d been trying to raise a good boy. Or maybe that would only wound him more. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t seen the stone since they moved into Villa Del Sol. No, you don’t think to keep an eye on a little thing like that.

S
HE WAS A YOUNG BOTTLENOSE
,
MAYBE FIVE YEARS OLD
. O
N
an unseasonably cool morning in April, Eddie Cavazos, a park employee on sea turtle patrol, had found her stranded near Mile Marker 18 on the Padre Island National Seashore. He believed the dolphin was dead until he stepped closer and she slapped her tail on the sand. He jumped. He looked around for help, but the beach was deserted. He knew not to push her back into the water, knew she’d either drown or strand herself farther up the coast, but his knowledge of beached dolphins ended there. He radioed the ranger station, and the dispatcher paged Marine Lab. Eddie waited. He kept hearing phantom trucks that never approached. He called the station again, then again. Two hours passed, endless and harrowing hours in which he continually doused the dolphin with water, stroked her sides and pectoral fins, even sang songs his grandmother used to sing because the melodies seemed to calm the animal’s breathing. Then the crew arrived, trucked her to the converted warehouse, lowered her into a four-foot-deep, forty-thousand-gallon aboveground pool. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, severe dehydration, an intestinal infection. And, most distressingly, she wouldn’t swim. Unassisted, she would sink to the bottom of the rehab tank, water folding over her like thick cloth. She weighed almost three hundred pounds, so keeping her afloat took four, sometimes
five, volunteers. They wore wet suits and surgical masks while cradling her in the water. When she refused to eat, they gave her fish gruel through gastric tubes. No one expected her to live.

Then, a week later, in the middle of an overnight shift—murder shifts, they were called—the dolphin bucked and broke free from the volunteers’ arms and went slicing around the pool. She swam along the bottom, breached for air, dove low again. The volunteers—including Laura Campbell—vacated the tank, then stood watching from the observation deck. Swimming on her own, the dolphin looked sleek and ethereal, like the shadow of a cloud gliding on the water. Within days she was eating solid food, fatty herring and capelin injected with antibiotics. She gained weight. She played with balls, a hula hoop, even an inflatable alligator that Laura had found wadded up in her garage. The dolphin clapped her jaw and chuffed when angry, and skyhopped when she wanted attention, extending her head from the water like a periscope. Laura had a picture of her magneted on the fridge among coupons and Eric’s summer teaching schedule and the postcard from California. In the photo, the dolphin peered out of the water with her mouth open. Her teeth looked like a string of small, perfect pearls.

Pinning down why she’d stranded was impossible. Blood work ruled out morbillivirus and meningitis. Maybe an algae bloom or red tide was floating somewhere in the Gulf, or maybe she’d been fleeing a shark. Or she may have just gotten lost, exhausted. Her body mass was too small for a far offshore pod, but some of the barnacles she’d brought in were found only in deep water. The barnacles would, in fact, make returning her to open water a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare—Fish and Wildlife would require a battery of tests to determine where she’d come from and where she might safely be released—but those were distant, possibly moot concerns. She’d stay at Marine Lab for six months, maybe a year, depending on her progress. More pressing was the need for extra volunteers, donations, a name. The tradition at Marine Lab was
that naming rights fell to whoever found the animal, so once the rescue director felt confident the dolphin would live, he tracked down Eddie Cavazos. Eddie’s first instinct was to name her after his daughter, but he quickly reconsidered: If the dolphin took a turn for the worse, the name might seem an omen. Instead, he chose Alice. It was his grandmother’s name, the name of a sturdy and stubborn woman who’d died in her sleep twenty years before.

Volunteering at Marine Lab consisted mostly of taking notes. Some twelve volunteers a day systematically logged how many breaths Alice took, when and what she ate, what direction she swam in, when she vocalized or played with a toy or moved her bowels. It was tedious work—“Your job is to pay attention,” Paul Perez, the rescue director, always told new volunteers—but the monotony comforted Laura. Before she started volunteering, she could feel too pent-up and find herself doing things she’d never imagined. Once, she’d been detained for pocketing some nail polish at the drugstore in Southport. Both the police officer and the store manager knew her—meaning, they knew about Justin—so they let her off with a warning. How to explain she’d never actually wanted the nail polish and that not being arrested had been a disappointment? That it had left her livid? Over the years, she’d purposely slammed her fingers in a desk drawer; she’d thrown sweet tea in a fat woman’s face at the Castaway after the woman said,
I’m still just so broken up about your boy.
And then there were the times when she locked the bathroom door and sat in the empty bathtub, watching the day succumb to night. Twice she’d come so unglued in public that someone had to call Eric at school to come get her. “Maybe we should think about seeing someone,” he’d said, and she’d nodded to appease him, thinking, Maybe the world is too much for me. Maybe I’m too small for this place now.

But the hours at Marine Lab calmed her, stoked her optimism in ways that nothing else did—certainly not the church-basement support groups: Beyond Grief. Comforting Other Parents Who Have
Experienced Sorrow (COPES). Anger Management. Bereaved Families. Work could occasionally prove distracting if a customer brought in a challenging stain, a blotch that would take time and ingenuity to remove, some soiling that seemed impossibly permanent, but she mostly saw shirts that needed laundering, slacks that required pressing. Only Marine Lab brought her any peace. Eric, she knew, believed she volunteered to clear her mind, but it was the opposite: She went to nourish herself, to absorb and metabolize that which would sustain her outside the warehouse. “Like blubber,” she’d once said, trying to make him understand, or at least laugh. He did neither. Occasionally, she’d felt obligated to invite him to volunteer with her—maybe it would help to repair the countless fissures in their marriage—and yet she was always shamefully pleased when he declined. It was like getting away with something. In the warehouse, no one knew who she was. When she first filled out her volunteer paperwork, she used her maiden name.

O
N THE LAST
W
EDNESDAY IN
J
UNE
, L
AURA STOOD BESIDE THE
pool and watched Alice swim in silent, lazy circles. Her shift had ended twenty minutes earlier, but she’d lingered after the next volunteer arrived. The air in the warehouse was clammy, salted; much of the space lay in shadows with only a grainy, diffused light canting through random fiberglass panels on the roof. Marine Lab was just over the Harbor Bridge and the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, an hour’s drive from Southport. If she left right away, she’d get home by six-thirty or seven, depending on traffic. She wasn’t ready to head out, though. Alice had been running a fever the last few days, and the vet was due to stop by with an update. Five more minutes, she thought. Her back ached from sitting on the pool’s wooden observation deck, and her veins thrummed with exhaustion. She hadn’t slept well the night before—she rarely did, unless she allowed herself an Ambien—and then she’d worked the early shift at the dry cleaner’s. Thinking of it made her yawn. She snapped a rubber band
off her wrist and pulled her long hair into a loose ponytail. A sparrow bounced around the warehouse rafters, then landed on a beam and started chirping. Laura wondered if Alice could hear the bird underwater, if she was whistling back. Last night, when Laura couldn’t sleep, she’d done the dishes and then stayed up reading about dolphins’ acoustic signatures.

She was about to leave when she saw that the current volunteer had missed something crucial. He’d been texting. On principle, Laura always left her phone in the car, and it riled her when volunteers checked messages or took calls on the observation deck. It happened a lot. What, she sometimes wondered, had volunteers been too distracted to see when they’d been looking for Justin? No way to know. The police rarely allowed her or Eric to participate; the parents of the missing child were themselves a distraction. This volunteer looked to be in his mid-thirties. He was Mexican with a thick neck and arms. He reminded Laura of an army recruiter.

“Excuse me,” Laura said. “We’re supposed to make a note of that.”

“Of what?”

She pointed toward the loose black swirl dispersing in the water. The volunteer looked, but didn’t see.

Laura said, “She pooped.”

“Crap,” he said.

The man checked his watch, then jotted the note on his data sheet. Overhead, the sparrow started batting around again, knocking into walls. Alice swam counterclockwise. Laura hoped she’d roll onto her side and make eye contact as she passed, but she stayed beneath the surface.

“I’m covering for my wife. She’s sick today,” the man said, his gaze following Alice. “She just texted. She wants jalapeño corn bread and a milk shake. She’s pregnant.”

Oh, Laura thought. She peered into the drab, cloudy water; the pool needed more chlorine. She said, “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” He sounded sheepish, like he hadn’t yet cottoned to the idea of fatherhood.

Alice rubbed her back and dorsal fin on the stiff orange rope stretched across the water. She glided against it slowly, then turned around to work her other side. The volunteer made a note. By the end of his shift, the log sheet would be dark with thatches marking how many times she’d gone to the rope.

Laura glanced at the clock above the grease board that outlined Alice’s med schedule. Maybe the vet had gotten delayed at his clinic, but more likely he was stuck on the Harbor Bridge. Traffic always backed up in June, so no telling when he’d finally pull into the parking lot. Now, suddenly, she just wanted to get the drive home behind her. She thought to stop at the grocery store and see if a new skateboard magazine was on the newsstand. Griff had been having a hard week. Girl trouble. Her gentle, radiant son. They called him Lobster, a nickname they loved more than he did. When he entered a room, her heart rose, like a sweet old dog, to greet him.

She was stepping away from the pool when the volunteer said, “My wife has a dolphin tattoo on her ankle.”

“Cute,” Laura said.

“She got it in Cancún on our honeymoon. We went swimming with a few dolphins in a little cove, then next thing I know we’re at a tattoo parlor. I almost passed out. I’m a tough hombre, but needles get to me.”

Laura could’ve told him about the dolphin pendant Eric and Griff had given her, but she didn’t. She knew she should wear it more often, knew they worried they’d picked out the wrong gift. She actually loved it. She just preferred to look at it in her jewelry box. Jewelry had lost its appeal; anything that drew attention had.

Alice made another pass, hugging the side of the pool, then returned to the rope. Small waves rippled the surface, catching and throwing the overhead light, then petered out. Tonight Laura would tell Eric about meeting the volunteer, about the couple’s honeymoon.
It felt refreshing to have something to share. He’d get quietly excited about Cancún, start imagining a vacation. Maybe she’d wear the necklace. Her husband, so beautifully and intimidatingly stalwart in his dreams. When he entered a room, something inside her receded.

“Man,” the volunteer said, “she really loves that rope.”

“She’s exfoliating,” Laura said.

In the back office, Paul Perez was on the phone, negotiating for more bags of salt to be donated. His voice rose and fell, rose again.

The volunteer swiped his brow with his forearm. He said, “We hit a hundred today and still didn’t break the rec—”

“Was your wife pregnant on your honeymoon?” Laura asked.

“Depends on who’s asking,” he said, then laughed.

Overhead, a wispy commotion: the sparrow darting around, bonking into corners, looking for a way out.