Remember Me Like This (43 page)

In the car, she was talking with the boys. Justin had promised not to feed the new mice to Sasha, which led Griff to suggest setting up the cage for them in his room. The boys wanted Laura to name them. Griff asked if anyone had seen the booth with the rubber duck race, and both Laura and Justin said yes but couldn’t remember exactly where. Then the conversation turned to Alice the dolphin and Laura volunteering tonight. Eric hadn’t heard everything, but the gist was that Rudy Treviño, the cop she’d introduced them to when they came off the Shrimporee stage, had been scheduled to volunteer later that night, but his pregnant wife wasn’t feeling well after so much time in the heat, so Laura agreed to cover his shift. She expected it to be an easy, uneventful night. Eric thought she seemed proud, and serene, as if she’d relieved herself of a burden. His knowing wife, a woman who would never tell him she’d gone
to the pawnshop to save him from himself. Listening to her now, something inside him braced.

How many of the nights when she claimed to be at Marine Lab could she have gone to the Buford house instead? Maybe she would have seen light pouring out of the living room windows, or maybe the whole house would have been dark except for a small room in the back where the unmistakable glow of a television flickered. At night, she could have parked far closer than Eric could in the daylight. Maybe she’d even pulled into his driveway. Maybe she’d seen Buford step out onto the porch. Maybe she’d watched him inhale the night’s thick air or wipe crusty sleep from his eyes. Maybe when the morning paper arrived, he waved to the person throwing the route. Maybe he flipped the porch light on and read it outside. Maybe Laura was close enough to see him pausing over the pictures of Justin.

Or maybe Dwight Buford was as paranoid as they were, and getting him out of the house required more conviction. Maybe she would honk her horn from the driveway, or run up and ring the doorbell, or kick over the metal garbage cans, and because Buford didn’t want anything to disturb his dying mother, he’d venture outside. Or maybe Laura would have to find someone else to ring the doorbell, someone who would leave Dwight Buford no choice but to open the door. Eric’s first thought was Justin, but he knew better. Laura wouldn’t put her son through such distress. Then his mind went back to Cecil—maybe that was why he’d called everything off this morning, because they’d already handled it—and then he thought of a sheriff or a policeman, and finally, incrementally, like clouds converging before a storm, he again started to see Rudy Treviño. A man who seemed so at ease with Laura, a man she’d never once mentioned to Eric. So after Buford opened the door, maybe Rudy said there’d been complaints or, better, a threat against Buford’s own life, so his bail was being revoked for his safety. Maybe
Buford ducked into the cruiser willingly, gratefully. Or maybe he started to piece things together, just as Eric was doing now. Maybe when Buford caught sight of Laura in the passenger seat, he tried to run. Imagine Rudy taking him down, cuffing him, covering his mouth with a shirt Laura had taken from the cleaner’s.

Or, if it happened on Thursday night, the last night of the storm, the night Laura came home trembling and wet and smelling of rain, then the weather’s noise would have muffled Buford’s hollering. When Rudy placed Dwight Buford in the back of his squad car, they would have been drenched. Ferry service was suspended that night, so they would have driven over the Kennedy Causeway and through Flour Bluff, where Dwight Buford had kept Justin those years, and then into Corpus. Maybe Buford started crying. Maybe he said, “You don’t have to do this.” Maybe Rudy turned on his flashing lights, maybe not. Maybe the only sounds were the windshield wipers and the tires on the rain-sheeted road and the wind buffeting the car.

Or maybe Laura said, “You’ve taken a piece of every last thing I love.”

And was Eric mistaken or had she been overly interested in the autopsy? Maybe when the report came back, it would show Valium and Ambien in his system. Maybe Laura had started stockpiling pills again. Was it impossible to imagine after everything she’d endured? Was it impossible to imagine her and Rudy pulling over in the middle of the night in the middle of a storm to give the pills to the accused? Could anyone conceive of a scenario in which Dwight Buford would take them of his own volition? Maybe to keep from feeling the inevitable? To make it easier on himself? Or maybe he fought. Maybe Buford clenched his teeth and locked his jaw so that Rudy had to pinch his nose until his mouth opened. Maybe Buford started to get drowsy immediately, or maybe they had to drive somewhere and wait for his eyes to close. Maybe Laura told Rudy, who would soon be a father himself, how she and Eric sometimes
used to drive Justin around the neighborhood to lull him to sleep when he was young. Maybe Rudy idled in the parking lot of a filling station, maybe the one at the foot of the Harbor Bridge where Justin and Eric had switched seats before he drove over that first time. Maybe he went to Marine Lab, where they’d rendezvoused hours earlier, where both Eric and Rudy’s pregnant wife thought their spouses had been all night.

And then maybe, once Buford was out, they drove back to the summit of the Harbor Bridge and, with the storm keening, worked together to drag his unconscious weight from the backseat and pitch his body over the rail. Imagine the unyielding wind up that high. Imagine the sting of the rain and how your hands would tremble and how to anyone else there would still seem the option of turning back, but for you the option had never existed. Or maybe Buford had been only partially sedated and he walked with them, convinced he was being led to safety, somewhere dry and familiar. Or maybe they hadn’t gone to the bridge at all, but rather to the docks along the ship channel. Maybe his body had started floating toward the bridge while Rudy dropped Laura off at Marine Lab and she drove home, passing Justin’s billboard, and then crawled into bed with Eric, shivering and scared and longing to forget everything that had happened before that moment, longing to start anew. Hadn’t he known then that something had changed inside her, that she was a different woman than just hours earlier?

Now, in the car, Laura was still talking about the dolphin. Her voice remained so light and airy that all of Eric’s previous thinking atrophied. Buford had just jumped. Or someone had made good on the death threats the news had been reporting. Eric knew only that his own family had nothing to do with it, and Buford’s hold on them was lessening.

“I have binoculars,” Griff said. “They’re somewhere in my room. Papaw gave them to me.”

“Do what now?” Eric asked.

“Mom wants to be an astronomer, but she’s not very good at it,” Justin said. His tone was kind, approving.

“We can try tonight before you have to leave for Marine Lab,” Griff said.

“Let me guess,” Eric said. “Delphinus?”

“I just want to see it once,” she said.

“Or maybe you’ve seen it but you didn’t recognize it. Constellations never look right to me.”

“Delphinus?” Justin said. “I thought it was named Arion.”

“Arion was the musician,” she said, then elaborated. Arion, the greatest lyrist Greece had ever known, had found passage on a merchant ship to Ionia for a music competition. Then, in the middle of the sea, the crew revealed themselves as pirates, robbed Arion of his silver, and started preparing to throw him overboard. He didn’t beg for his life. Instead, he begged to play one last song. His foolishness amused the pirates, but because they knew of his talent, they agreed. Soon after he began playing, the pirates who’d been laughing at his frivolity were weeping at the beauty of the music. He improvised and elongated the song. He strung bridges of notes from one measure to the next. The longer the song stretched, the more the pirates wept. Eventually a pod of dolphins appeared in the water, drawn to the boat by his playing, and Arion jumped onto their backs to escape. The dolphins delivered him safely back to Corinth, where the king gave him a hero’s welcome. The gods so loved Arion’s music and were so grateful for his safe return that they staked a piece of sky with Delphinus, the dolphin-shaped constellation that guides lost sailors home.

“Sick,” Justin said.

“I bet we can see it with the binoculars,” Griff said. “I’ll see if Fiona wants to come over, too.”

“The binoculars are in my truck,” Eric said. “I took them—”

“For one of the searches,” Laura interrupted. “You thought they might help out in the dunes, remember?”

“It’s a clear sky,” Justin said, peering up through the window. “The storm pushed all the clouds away.”

Above them, the sky was stitched with stars. Eric couldn’t guess where to look for Delphinus, but he could imagine standing in the backyard with the boys and Laura, searching for what she needed everyone to see. A comforting order imposed on randomness. A pattern that arbitrarily shaped the darkness, made it bearable. He could imagine how they would pass the binoculars around and how they would try to coax the image out of hiding. Their minds would be teeming with secrets, with regrets and grave, unrelenting fears, and their bodies would be exhausted and corded with scars, and their gazes would be clouded by loss, permanently obscured. But they would be seeking the same thing, and in that, there seemed some small victory. The image was supposed to deliver them home, and yet Eric had a feeling of liberation, as if they were about to depart, as if they were soon to set out on a path lit by stars that would never fall. The prospect was buoying, sustaining. In the car, he reached for Laura’s hand and braided his fingers with hers. He found his sons in the rearview mirror, their eyes still fixed on the sky, looking for signs and heroes. Eric gave the engine more gas, and they accelerated toward the half-known and desperate history that bound them together.

The working title of this novel was
The Unaccompanied,
but it’s benefited from a lot of companionship along the way. So have I. I’m deeply grateful to the following people for everything they’ve given: Jennifer. Bill. Michelle, Camryn, Julian. Brie, Brad, Nathan, Austen. Joseph. Ivan. Jacob Rosenberg. Rodney Mullen. Julie Barer (and by proxy Beckett). Kendra Harpster. Susan Kamil. Gina Centrello. Avideh Bashirrad. Kaela Myers. Sally Marvin. Karen Fink. Leigh Marchant. Selby McRae. Joelle Dieu. Ron Koltnow. Toby Ernst. Rachel Kind. Steve Messina. Noah Eaker. Heidi Pitlor. Christopher Castellani. Ladette Randolph. Josh Emmons. Jorie Graham, Peter Sacks, Amy Hempel, Diana Sorensen, and my colleagues at Harvard University. John Irving. Jill McCorkle. Andre Dubus III. Tom Perrotta. Alice Sebold. Jenny Hopa. Mike Anzaldua. Cheryl Pfoff. Vanessa Jackson. Joe Wilson, Jan Williams, and everyone at the Corpus Christi Literary Reading Series. Steven Bauer, Eric Goodman, Kay Sloan, Constance Pierce, Tim Melley, and the creative writing program at Miami University. Ethan Canin, Connie Brothers, Chris Offutt, Marilynne Robinson, Deb West, Jan Z, and everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the James A. Michener–Copernicus Society of America, and the Blackwood Residency. Michelle Kuo. Michelle Kim Hall. Eleanor Boudreau. Sorrel
Westbrook Nielsen. Lea Walker and the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Dan Menaker. Nina Collins. Sam Douglas. Judy Sternlight. Rob Torres. Paul Yoon. Ben Percy. Carol Campbell. William Boggess. Gemma Purdy. Anna Geller. Anna Wiener. Paul Buttenwieser. Sven Birkerts, Victoria Clausi, and my family from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Remember Me Like This
Naming the World: And Other Exercises
for the Creative Writer
(editor)

Corpus Christi: Stories

B
RET
A
NTHONY
J
OHNSTON
is the author of the award-winning
Corpus Christi: Stories,
which was named a best book of the year by
The Independent
(London) and
The Irish Times,
and the editor of
Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer.
His work has appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
,
Esquire
,
The Paris Review
,
The Best American Short Stories
, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and a 5 Under 35 honor from the National Book Foundation. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is the director of creative writing.

www.​bretanthony​johnston.​com

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