Remember Me Like This (33 page)

Justin doted on Griff. He woke up earlier and let Rainbow in and out of Griff’s room when she scratched at the door. Justin never mentioned anything else about what he’d said in the waiting room, but his attention to Griff seemed a kind of apology, an effort to strike his words from the record. Why wouldn’t he view the world as smaller for other people? Wouldn’t his life have been better if someone had recognized him sooner, if it had been harder for him to move beyond his parents’ reach? Again, Eric thought of how Justin had been angry at them, how he had no choice but to believe they’d failed him and how they couldn’t dispute it. So, then, maybe another reason he was doting on Griff was because he didn’t trust them to take care of his younger brother. Through it all, Griff remained sullen. Eric couldn’t tell if he was feeling embarrassed about having been beaten up or if his glumness was the result of whatever he wasn’t telling them. It could’ve been a side effect of his pain medication. When Eric asked him what was wrong, Griff just said, “The coping was perfect. It was what made the pool worth skating.”

Neither Eric nor Laura had heard from Tracy. The silence made him nervous, though he knew he should see it as a good thing. Laura wrote her a thank-you card, had everyone sign it, and went back through the volunteer records to find her address.

“They have two houses, one in Corpus and one here, at Villa Del Sol,” Laura said.

“Is that right?” Eric said.

“Where should I send the card?”

“I’m sure either place will work,” he said.

“I’ll do Corpus,” she said. “I bet they’re spending more time there now.”

Laura worked her shifts at the dry cleaner’s, but arranged for someone to cover at Marine Lab through the weekend. Cecil brought over tamales, and showed Griff how to play double solitaire. Griff played the game with Justin a few times, both boys sitting on his bed, looking young. Eric taught his class on Monday, then again on Wednesday, and when he could break away from school and the house, he parked in the fill-sand lot and watched the Buford place. Nothing changed. No one emerged. With each passing hour, there was a slow constricting in his throat, like he’d been crawling through a tight tunnel and gotten stuck, his arms trapped under his body. He couldn’t decide if he should try to push forward or inch backward, if he should call for help or save his breath. At any moment, it seemed the walls would collapse.

“S
EE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PLAN TO BREAK UP WITH ME
?” Fiona said. She was sitting cross-legged at the foot of Griff’s bed. He didn’t know how long she’d been there.

He thought it was late afternoon, but it might’ve been later. Or earlier. The tinfoiled windows kept time out. So did his pain pills. Fiona wore perfume, and even in the half dark, he could see she’d put on makeup. His mouth tasted dry, medicinal. He patted his hair down, worried it looked bad from sleep. His stitches burned.

“What time is it?” Griff asked.

“Time for you to understand I’m not a chick to trifle with.”

“Are my parents home?”

“Your mom’s with the dolphin and your dad took the truck to the shop. Justin called me over.”

“Justin called you?”

“What I want to say is that I’m sorry you got your ass kicked, I really am, and I hope whoever did it gets syphilis, but I’m still pissed at you.”

“I’m sorry,” Griff said. And he was. He was suddenly shocked at how sorry he was.

“You’re forgiven,” Fiona said. “But I’m still pissed. I will be for a while. Get psyched.”

Griff’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. He could see that Fiona had brought two milk shakes. They sat on his desk, beading with sweat, straws already in the lids. The thought of her inserting the straws before she’d come into his room, that she’d taken such pains to keep from waking him, was shattering. And now that he’d seen the milk shakes, he could smell them, too. Chocolaty, cold. It was a summer scent, not from this summer or any of the recent ones, but a scent from when he was much younger. He watched Fiona. She was worrying a loose thread from his comforter.

“I wasn’t going to break up with you,” he said.

“Yes, you were,” she said, tugging on the thread. “But it’s okay. You’ve had a lot going on. Abducted brother returns, asshole pervert kidnapper goes free, first official girlfriend. It’s a big year.”

“And they stole the coping from the Teepee.”

“And you got the shit beaten out of you. Like I said, you’re absolved.”

“But you’re going to be mad for a long time,” Griff said.

“I am,” she said. She was rooting under the comforter for his foot. She brought it into her lap and started to massage his sole with her thumbs. She clasped her fingers over the arch of his foot, then
lifted his leg and scooted closer and closer, until his toes reached her shirt, the underside of her breast. Her hands were warm, soft. She’d never done this before, and her touch was much gentler than he would have guessed, like she was rubbing a baby’s feet, taking care not to pinch or tickle him.

“Why?” Griff said.

“Why what?”

“Why forgive me?”

“The same reason I’m going to be pissed for, like, years,” she said. “Because, against all odds, I’m probably falling into some low-grade version of love with you.”

“You are?”

“Unfortunately,” she said, smiling. “And here’s some breaking news: you love me, too.”

“I do?”

“Clearly. Irrefutably. Immeasurably,” she said.

“This is maybe the best day of my life,” he said.

After a moment, Rainbow pawed at Griff’s door from the hallway and almost immediately Justin was snapping his fingers and calling her name, luring her away.

“Did it hurt when you were in the fight? Or when you got your stitches? Were you scared?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes to which?”

“To all of them,” he said.

“Good,” she said, reaching for his other foot and bringing it into her lap. “Good, that’s nice to hear.”

H
E KNEW HIS PARENTS DIDN
’
T BELIEVE HIM
,
AND PROBABLY
J
US
tin didn’t either, but the truth was he didn’t remember what had happened. Not exactly. He remembered Baby Snot’s accent and the force of everyone’s weight; he remembered the older skater—Mark? Mike? Mick?—insulting Justin and half of the coping being gone
and the woman with the dark hair taking him to the clinic. He remembered not wanting to bleed on her car’s upholstery, remembered thinking it was the nicest car he’d ever ridden in, remembered apologizing to her. He remembered feeling like he owed everyone an apology. But there were things that didn’t fit, too: He thought the woman, on the drive to the clinic, had called him Lobster. He thought she’d said, “Y’all just can’t catch a break, can you?” And on the way home, with his parents and Justin in the car, his mother had said, “You’re right. The world is a lot smaller for some people. That’s a smart way to put it.”

Days later, every part of his body still ached. Fiona and Justin tended to him, as did his parents, but he sensed that they—his parents—were being pulled in different directions. Griff didn’t know what was happening with Dwight Buford or the lawyers or his father’s students or the dolphin at Marine Lab. No one talked to him about anything other than how he was feeling and what he wanted to do or eat. Griff knew he shouldn’t, but he reveled in their attention. A better person would have rallied and told them not to pamper him. He did the opposite. When Justin was around, he acted more dismal. With Fiona, he exaggerated his pain.
Stop milking it,
he told himself, but he never did.

On Thursday night, Justin said, “It was really about the coping?”

“What?”

“You took on a gang of thugs just because they were stealing the coping. It wasn’t because of anything else? It didn’t have anything to do with me?”

“The coping was unbelievable,” Griff said. “And it wasn’t a gang. It was just a few guys.”

“I would have helped them pry it loose. I would have helped them carry it away. Skating doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.”

“You just need to get back into it,” Griff said, hearing how false
the words were. He’d known for a while that Justin wasn’t a skater anymore, but he didn’t want him to admit it.

“I told Dad I liked football now, but I was lying. I made it sound like I lived for it. I wanted him to think I had a hobby. It seemed important at the time.”

“Football’s cool,” Griff said. He hated football. Then he said, “Do you want to play cards? Or go work in your room? We can try a different arrangement.”

“I hate football and I hate my room.”

“That’s why you keep changing it.”

“And that’s why it always feels the same.”

“You can have mine,” Griff said. “We can trade.”

“We’ll see.”

Griff expected Justin to leave then, but he stayed. He looked around the room, studied the torn-out skate magazine pages tacked to the wall, the print of the potato car he’d done years before.

“Fiona said she loves me,” Griff said. “She said you called her to come visit.”

“Both of those are true.”

“I thought you wanted me to break up with her.”

“No, I told you
how
to break up with her and not be a pussy,” Justin said. “I think she’s a cool girl.”

“You called her? You knew her number?”

“We went to school together, remember? I just looked her up in the junior high directory. I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“I’m not alone. You’re here. We’ve hung out more in the last week than we have since you’ve been back.”

“Trust me,” Justin said, still looking at the skate photos, “you’re alone. We all are.”

A
CROSS THE
L
AGUNA
M
ADRE
, C
ECIL WAS PASSING THE
B
UFORD
house for the fifth or sixth time. He’d seen Eric’s truck parked in the
fill-sand lot after he’d departed the ferry, and he’d been driving in long loops for the better part of an hour. State Highway 361 was four lanes. Cecil drove a few miles to the south, then hooked a U-turn, passed the Buford house and Eric, then turned around to start again. On each pass, he hoped Eric would have driven away, but he stayed put. It was disappointing. Cecil hadn’t ventured out on 361 since he’d gone into Flour Bluff, which just now struck him as strange. A betting man would have pegged Cecil as the one watching the property with an eye toward reprisal. Maybe he’d been staving himself off. Maybe he’d known better than to tempt himself, than to put Dwight Buford within reach. Even now, when he had other business to tend to, when the day was bright and people were out and his son was peering through his binoculars, Cecil could feel the draw.

He knew Buford had nothing to do with what happened to Griff, but nonetheless he held him responsible. It made Cecil feel old again, the full weight of his sixty-seven years bearing down. He was tired, just so tired, and he was tired of being tired. That was something else he blamed on Dwight Buford, the deep fatigue in his bones, the steady leaching at his marrow.

The sun fired off windshields. Loose curls of sand eddied on the pavement between the cars and then dispersed. The shoulders of the road sloped steeply, lowering into the scrub on the east and toward the narrow beach on the west. Cecil had his windows down. The air smelled of the dry, brittle seaweed strewn about the shore, of creosote and salt water. His shirt was damp between his back and the bench seat; the floorboards vibrated. He was thinking only about his son, how unfortunate the whole business was, how rotten and cruel, and how he’d soon be yoked to something else. For days Cecil had been trying to figure a different path out, some way not to involve Eric, but everything led back to where he was now.

When he came upon the fill-sand lot again, he steered the truck into the entrance. He slowed but never stopped. Eric saw him immediately;
his expression went flat with humiliation, like a child caught stealing. Cecil raised his chin—
follow me
—and eased back onto the road. Sand kicked up behind his wheels and his son merged into traffic behind him, and like that, it had started.

H
IS MOTHER HAD COME INTO HIS ROOM UNDER THE PRETENSE
of putting away clothes, but Griff knew she wanted to talk. And as she placed his folded T-shirts in his drawer, saying that what he’d been wearing the night of the fight had been sent to the main dry-cleaning plant in hopes of getting the bloodstains out, he realized he’d been expecting her all along. He was happy to see her, almost relieved. She took the hem of her shirt, stood on her toes, and tried to wipe something off the top of his dresser.

“Fiona brings milk shakes over. We always forget to use coasters,” he said.

“She’s a sweet girl,” Laura said. “She and Justin have really been looking after you.”

“I feel guilty.”

“Why in the world should you feel guilty?”

“I feel like they’d rather be doing something else.”

“They wouldn’t, trust me,” his mother said. She smoothed his comforter and sat at the foot of the bed, Fiona’s spot. “Justin’s glad not to be the center of attention for once. You’re doing him a favor.”

“I’ll try to get beat up more often.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. Some of her hair came loose from her ponytail and hung around her face. “A mother’s heart can only take so much.”

“Maybe I should take karate.”

“I’d rather you never leave the house. I’d rather cover you in bubble wrap.”

Rainbow ambled into the room, glanced at Griff and his mother, then circled herself and lay down with a sigh.

His mother said, “How does he seem to you? Justin, I mean.”

“Lonesome,” Griff said. It wasn’t a word he could remember ever having used.

“There’s a lot of that going around. I think we’ve all caught the lonesome bug,” she said. Then, after a moment: “You know, honey, if you ever want to talk with Letty or anyone else, if you ever feel the need to sort through your feelings with someone, we can arrange it right away.”

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

“We know this is as hard for you as it is for anyone,” she said.

What Griff remembered just then was how Baby Snot had dropped his accent and urged him to leave, how he’d seemed kind for a moment. He remembered how Mike had called him
the cocksucker’s brother,
how Tracy Robichaud had said his family couldn’t catch a break. All of this somehow proved his mother’s point: He could see how lonesome everyone was.