Remember Me Like This (34 page)

Then Griff said, “Justin and I had a fight. That morning.”

“That morning?”

“I was a jerk. Sometimes I think that if we hadn’t argued, none of this would have happened.”

“We all feel that way, honey. We each wish we’d done something differently. We’re just being hard on oursel—”

“He’d put salt in my Coke,” Griff said. “We were in the kitchen and I went to get something from my room. When I came back and took a drink, I gagged. He’d poured the whole salt shaker into the can. I got really mad, and we had a fight, and I wouldn’t let him apologize. So he left and then it happened.”

Laura’s heart stopped. For a second, maybe two. She felt a tender but intense pain when it started again. If she had believed she could run out of the room without traumatizing her son, if she could make it into the backyard or out to her car without going to pieces in front of Justin—he was on the couch with Sasha, watching a football analysis show—she would have already bolted. But she
was rooted to the bed, trying to stay composed, trying to keep herself from screaming or doubling over or slamming her head against the wall. She worried she’d vomit on his comforter, worried he’d assume her reaction meant she thought he
was
to blame. Say something, she thought. Tell him you love him or it’s not his fault. Tell him he’s being silly. But she couldn’t open her mouth. She’d always suspected she was to blame for what had happened with Justin, and now she had proof.

The salt prank was hers. The week before Justin went missing, she’d taken him to the Castaway Café. Eric was off somewhere with Griff—she couldn’t remember where. Justin had gone to the men’s room and suddenly she had the idea to empty the salt shaker into his Coke. It wasn’t something she’d done before, nor would anyone have expected it of her. Eric liked practical jokes, and he was cultivating that in the boys, but she’d never understood the appeal. She had always felt left out. When he came back and took a drink—how she had to fight not to smirk, not to cackle! How all at once she knew what she’d been missing all those humorless years!—he spit out a mouthful and then they were both laughing so hard they started to cry. She’d never felt closer to him, never felt more a part of a family, never felt more like a mother. A
good
mother. She’d told the detectives about the incident time and again, and Eric, too. He liked the joke, and seemed proud of her for making it. Over the years, she’d thought to do it again, to Eric, to Griff; she’d even once considered pulling it on Cecil, but no. It was hers and Justin’s, theirs alone, and thinking of it now, in Griff’s dark room, with her poor son waiting for her to speak, she realized she’d been waiting to ask Justin if he remembered the prank, if maybe he’d thought about it while he was in Corpus, if it had been a source of comfort for him. For her, it had been both a comfort and a torment. Now it was the noose with which she wanted to hang herself.

“Mom?” Griff said. “Mom, are you okay?”

“Of course.”

“I think you’re crying,” he said, as if he was alerting her to a nosebleed.

“I just don’t want you to blame yourself. That’s something that’s really important to me.”

“Okay,” he said. “I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“It’s like you said, we’re all just looking for—”

“I want you to hear me very clearly, okay? Listen to your mother, okay?”

“Okay.”

“There’s one person at fault here. There’s one person who’s responsible for hurting Justin, and it’s not you.”

“It’s Dwight Buford,” Griff said.

“It’s just not you,” she said. “That’s what you have to understand. It was never you.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, E
RIC SLIPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE TO WATER
the backyard. It was just something to do. He’d hardly gotten any rest the night before, waking for hours at a stretch in the dark, unable to shut down his thoughts long enough to sink back into sleep. He was worn out now, more from his efforts to will sleep than a lack of it, but an exhausted calm had descended. A feeling like surrender. It was, he imagined, the kind of resignation that someone on death row would feel just before the needle broke the skin, before the poison washed into your veins.

A few cowbirds lined the fence. An iridescent rainbow in the spray of the hose, the wet grass glistening in the early sun, as if bejeweled. The palm tree the governor’s office had sent looked sturdy and good; Eric could easily imagine it growing to ten or fifteen feet in the future, casting a long, top-heavy shadow against the house. What he couldn’t predict was who’d be living here then. Maybe they would, or maybe just Laura and the boys, or maybe a family of
strangers. He wasn’t upset thinking this, not exactly, but curious in a detached way. It approached nostalgia, as if he were considering a visit to a place where he’d once lived. The sky was high, not yet its full color. A few contrails from jets looked recent and close, like they were falling toward the earth, slow as feathers.

He didn’t hear Laura come out. Nor did she say anything when she stood beside him on the patio. She just offered him a cup of coffee. He wasn’t surprised or disappointed to see her there—he thought she’d been awake most of the night, too, though neither tried to engage the other—but just accepted her presence as a given. Of course she would come out this morning. She was his wife, the mother of his two boys. The coffee steamed. It was too hot to drink, so he kinked the hose and dribbled some cool water into her mug, then his. Then he opened up the hose again and placed his thumb over the nozzle to arc water into the far part of the yard. The sun-grayed boards on the fence turned a pleasing brown when the water hit. Until they dried, they would look new.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Eric said.

“I talked with Griff yesterday.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He said Justin feels lonesome.”

“Lonesome.”

“His word,” she said.

Eric pivoted away from Laura to wet down the other side of the yard. He took care not to let any of the water spray the boys’ windows. He didn’t want to risk waking them. Then, before he thought better of it, before he realized he’d been marshaling his nerve to speak the words all night, he said, “I’ve been watching the Buford house.”

“The Buford house.”

“Ever since he made bail,” he said. “I park a little ways away. I’ve been telling you I was at school or running errands, but I’ve been watching their house. I’m sorry to have to admit that.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Not even once,” he said. “I was convincing myself he wasn’t there, but yesterday my father came and found me. I guess Mayne told him what I was doing. I guess he’d noticed me.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t call the cops.”

“I know,” Eric said.

“You could’ve gotten arrested.”

“Mayne wants to cut a deal. He wants me to stop parking out there and to let him take his wife and Dwight out on the water the day of the Shrimporee.”

“The Shrimporee that’s coming up? The one that’s hardly three weeks away?”

“In exchange, he thinks he can get Dwight to change his plea.”

“Cecil’s been negotiating with him? This doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. She turned and took a few distracted steps toward the house, then walked along the fence and stood near the edge of the yard with the new distance between them. She started crying a little. She said, “What happens after they have their lovely day on the water and he doesn’t plead guilty?”

Eric fanned the water over the grass. He said, “I don’t think we can take a trial. Garcia said Buford’s lawyer could tie this up for years with delays. I called him yesterday to ask his advice.”

“Why am I not part of any of these conversations? Conversations about my son’s life.”

“Our son,” he said.

“Why am I just hearing about this now?”

“I called from my father’s, just to ask if what Mayne was proposing would even work. If he could still change his plea. He can.”

“So it’s decided? It’s a done deal? They get to have their time on the water? A nice day celebrating what he’s getting away with? What he did to Justin? How he hurt
our
son?”

“Cecil called him last night.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning yes. Meaning it’s a done deal.”

“None of this adds up,” she said. She ran her fingers through her hair, crossed her arms, and she did, at that moment, seem more confused than angry. Quietly, she said, “I was coming outside to bring you coffee and to tell you what Griff had said and—”

“Cecil gave me a gun.”

“He what?”

“It’s a pistol he saw me looking at in Loan Star a while back. He gave it to me yesterday. It’s in our truck now.”

“You were looking at guns? I don’t know who I’m talking to right now. I don’t know what language you’re speaking.”

“Mayne wants to push off before sunrise that day. He wants to leave before people start gathering for the Shrimporee that morning,” he said. “We’ll be there before they are.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and my father.”

“And then what?” she asked.

“Then we drive to Mexico and drop him off. We tell him he’s lost his American citizenship.”

“Where does the gun come in?”

“To persuade him to get in the car.”

“Eric,” she said, but didn’t go on. Then she tried again, saying, “I don’t know … This doesn’t seem …” But what could she say? The only sound was the water pushing through the hose and pattering on the grass. The morning came up quickly, the sky filling with color that overtook the jet contrails.
Lonesome,
Eric thought. It seemed another failure, something else he needed to make right. He was already off to a poor start. His father had insisted that Eric not tell Laura, and he’d vowed he wouldn’t, but he wanted her to know what he was willing to do.
This is who I am,
he wanted to say.
Remember me like this.
He’d already said too much, though. He
thought she might say something, or maybe just take his hand and lay her head on his shoulder until he finished watering the yard. She didn’t. He couldn’t hear or see what she was doing. His back was still to her. She might have retreated into the house, leaving as silently as she had come. To his mind, he was already alone.

T
HE DAY BEFORE THE BODY WAS RECOVERED IN THE
C
ORPUS
Christi ship channel, the residents of Southport were scrambling to prepare for the Shrimporee. This was the first Friday in September. Blankets of heat, packed tight with humidity, lay over the town. Steam wafted from the still-damp asphalt. A ragged unnamed tropical depression had washed ashore earlier that week, and with it came days of rain. The storms were long and gray, messy at times, and loud, too, blurring and battering when wind got behind them. Station Street flooded for a few hours. Fences fell, and trees, snapping, exposed the blond wood inside the trunks, a color so raw it looked obscene. Tides rose. Ferry service was intermittent, then entirely suspended until the weather slacked off. A few boats in the marina got knocked around, bashed into the docks; one took on water and capsized. Lightning struck a tree out on the blacktop highway, and a driver swerved off the road, water sluicing and barreling over the car before it wound up in the ditch. The area needed the rain—lake levels were down and the fields were parched and the temperatures had been spiking day after day—but the weather had also halted the considerable work required before the mayor could ring the Shrimporee bell.

Now, on that boiling Friday, men were hustling to rig up the Ferris wheel and smaller carnival rides, to assemble the dunking booth
and hoist the stage for the musicians, beauty pageant, and shrimp-eating contest, and to erect the remaining sixty-odd vendor booths. They’d started early, laboring under generator-powered lights long before birds began calling for morning. They didn’t break for lunch, but ate sandwiches and tacos between hammer swings. They rubbed handfuls of crushed ice on the back of their necks, the inside of their elbows, and over their sun-ruddied faces. They soaked bandannas in thermos water, then tied them around their heads. They did everything they could to push through, to stand against the lost time.

When the storm had been at its worst, when it stalled just offshore and whipped the coast with one gritty band of rain after another, there was talk of scrapping the Shrimporee for the first time in four decades. (The festival was founded by the Chamber of Commerce and the Fraternal Order of Eagles to commemorate Southport’s centennial and to generate revenue for local merchants. That the Shrimporee had never been canceled was a point of pride in the community, a testament to its collective resolve.) But as the weather abated, talk turned to expediting the preparations. The Chamber called for volunteers—men with trucks and trailer hitches, bakers and electricians, anyone who was willing to sweep waterlogged debris from downtown sidewalks. Restaurants and families with kitchen space were asked to boil pots of shrimp for jambalaya and étouffée. Children were invited to blow up as many balloons as they could. Church groups pitched in, and members of the Coast Guard and VFW, the high school football team and booster club and 4-H club. By lunchtime on Friday, the prettiest stretch of Station was being cordoned off and lined with streamers and bunting and the children’s balloons. The high school band rehearsed in the mucky baseball field. The Junior League put finishing touches on parade floats; the Castaway Coffee Club brought coffee and kolaches to the volunteers. Everyone watched the sky and the bay—
now just smudged mirrors of each other—and tried to divine their future from the scroll of clouds.