Remember Me Like This (15 page)

“There’s never anything wrong with getting your appetite back,” Papaw said.

A breeze came along, lifting the edges of napkins. The smell of charcoal smoke and pork ribs, of new grass and layered heat.

“We should buy Justin a new skateboard when we go to Corpus,” Griff said. “His old one is lame.”

“The one with his name on it?” Papaw said. “The one that came through the pawnshop?”

“Of course we’ll get him a new one,” his mother said. “Whatever he wants.”

Papaw had started folding a napkin into triangles, concentrating on getting the edges straight and the corners tight. Once he finished, he said, “Is he all set to meet with the brass in city hall? Not too nervous?”

“Justin’s fine,” his mother said. “Eric and I can’t see straight, but Justin’s cool as a cucumber.”

Papaw said, “He’s due a long run of good luck.”

“He had a girlfriend,” Griff said.

Everyone looked at him, even his father at the grill. The world seemed to lean in around him.

“He told you that?” his mother said.

“His life could be pretty normal. He played bingo and went fishing. And he had a girlfriend. He hated the picture on the flyers.”

“A lot of bingo parlors will have cameras installed. Might be something to have one of Garcia’s boys look into,” Papaw said.

“A girlfriend? In Corpus?” his mother said. She didn’t sound pleased or displeased, but dazed.

Griff couldn’t tell if he’d been right to share the information, couldn’t tell if he’d said too much or too little. The day seemed fractured now, as if everyone was drifting away from each other in different directions. He wanted to say something that would pull them back, tether them together, but he couldn’t think of what.

And then Justin was stepping out of the kitchen, and everyone turned toward him. No one spoke. They were trying to reconcile what they’d just heard with the boy standing before them. Griff wanted to apologize to Justin, to all of them, but he stayed quiet. Justin rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes, then cracked his neck. He surveyed the yard and his stunned family.

After a moment, he said, “God bless America.”

T
HEY ATE AS THE SUN DROPPED BEHIND THE FENCE
,
AND A
heathered dusk fell over everything. Papaw went around the backyard, lighting the tiki torches, and soon the whistling and popping of small firecrackers started up. To Griff, the noises sounded like an expanding conversation, a complicated and widespread call and response that was happening all around them. His mother kissed the top of his head. Papaw squeezed his shoulder, and his father whispered, “Nice work, detective.” The celebration regained the momentum it had previously lost, and Griff allowed himself to believe he’d been right to share what he knew. Rainbow lay under the picnic table for a while, but when the real fireworks began, she crept under the house. The pink starbursts and hot blue pinwheels, booming and crackling and hissing, left brief imprints of themselves on
the sky, like the outlines of leaves on wet cement. Griff’s father made a toast to independence. His mother took pictures: Griff waving a sparkler. Justin hiding his face with his hamburger. Then Griff set up the timer on the camera and they stood by the fence for a family portrait. Right before the flash went off, they all said, “Chickenshit.” It was something they’d done for every family photo before Justin disappeared, but Griff was surprised when he heard their voices. Maybe they were all surprised, shocked by the muscle memory of love. In the picture, everyone was laughing and above their heads, the sky was ablaze with streaks of sharp, colored light.

A
GIRLFRIEND
. L
AURA KNEW SHE SHOULD FIND SOLACE IN THE
news, knew it should throw a shaft of warm light on her son’s time away. She knew it should evidence that someone had been kind to him when he so desperately needed kindness, but the knowledge that Justin’d had a girlfriend nettled her. For days—days when they ate leftover barbecue for lunch and dinner, days when she grew to hate its taste—the word would rise up in her mind. Girlfriend. Girlfriend. A wave of lethargy would overtake her. Girlfriend. Girlfriend. Try as she might, she couldn’t understand what the word meant. The letters started to seem unfamiliar and puzzling, like a part of speech from a language she would never learn.

It had been different with Griff. When he and Fiona had started closing themselves in his room, she’d been nothing but proud. Laura assumed better mothers would have been concerned or offended, but it was all she could do not to congratulate him. Either she or Eric would have The Talk with him soon, and the prospect left her giddy. Not so with Justin. She felt preoccupied, slighted, taken aback. Threatened? Maybe threatened. Probably she was just being petty, enduring some hurt because Justin had confided in his brother rather than her. Hadn’t there been a time when he told her everything—how he and Shane Rutherford found a toad on the playground, how he wished he had blue eyes, how lemons didn’t
taste the way he wanted them to? The idea had ballast in her mind, but it was also lacking. Something else bothered her. Then, on Monday morning while everyone was getting ready for the day in Corpus, she realized what it was: When she’d last seen Justin, girls were strange, prissy creatures to be avoided—a flash of memory: hadn’t he, one evening, asked her to marry him?—so the fact that he’d returned having had a girlfriend was the sorriest, most irrefutable proof of how long he’d been gone.

She had thought she understood this. Those four years—the six inches he’d grown, the forty extra pounds—were the reason his old clothes no longer fit, the reason they were going to the mall to replace them. Those four years had gutted her family. How could she not understand such hideous gravity? Everywhere she looked, the absolute and crushing weight of the past. At times, she’d been bloated with sadness, leaden and unmovable. Other times, she would have sworn she was a sieve. Some days she’d felt swaddled in burlap so that every sight and sound came to her blurred and muffled and diluted by loss, and then, without warning, the tiniest sound would tear at her eardrums and the softest light would singe her eyes. This had been her life, wrestling with hope and hell until she’d come to think they were one and the same. Whoever believed hope was a gift had never lost a son. For four years, she was sure she’d known the emptiness of pretending, of feigning faith, the masquerade of appearing whole, and yet now she felt blindsided. And, yes, fine, she felt jealous, too—jealous of the girl, whoever she was, and jealous of Dwight Buford, who’d seen her son fall in love for the first time, who’d seen him blush and snicker when the girl started coming around. Did the three of them watch television together? Did Justin hold the girl’s hand on the couch? (Laura had been waiting to spy on Griff and Fiona holding hands or pecking each other goodbye on the cheek. It was thrilling, like watching for a rare bird.) On his birthdays, did she bake him cakes, write him poems, ask Buford to snap pictures of them? A girlfriend, she thought. Of all things.

What else didn’t she yet know? What would she never know? There seemed too much, and the depth of her ignorance, the force and expanse of it, made her want to rip her hair out in bloody clumps. Now that she knew he’d had a girlfriend, Laura knew she’d failed him there, too, having never once conceived of the possibility on her own. Just as she’d failed to find him when he’d been so close all along. If I were him, she thought, I’d slap me across the face. I’d turn and walk away, leaving me alone again. That’s what I deserve. She wanted to scream, to break every plate in the cupboard, to kneel at Justin’s feet and beg for forgiveness.

On Monday, after they left him at Garcia’s office, Laura spent too much money at the mall. She bought Justin a new wardrobe, and Griff picked out a better skateboard for him. Each time she checked out at a store, Eric leered at the cash register total; she told him they’d return what Justin didn’t want, but he probably knew better. Eventually, he went to roam the mall with Griff. “Call me when we’re broke,” he’d joked, then kissed her on the lips, which she took as license to spend more. She bought a bed-in-a-bag set for Justin, backpacks for him and his brother, and eel-skin billfolds for Eric and Cecil. She bought a heated rock for Sasha. She bought and bought and bought. At one point, a cashier ran her credit card and before the charge could be approved, she had to call Visa so Laura could assure the bank that her card hadn’t been stolen and she was responsible for the shopping spree. On the way home, everyone rode with bags on their laps.

“Did y’all win the lottery while I was gone?” Justin asked, sounding half-serious.

“You needed new clothes,” Laura said.

He adjusted the bag on his lap.

“Different things for different occasions,” she said. “I wanted you to have plenty of options.”

“Mission accomplished,” he said, and Laura saw Eric and Griff trying not to smile.

“I just thought it would feel nice to put on fresh clothes, things that fit,” she said. “Whatever you don’t like, we can return. I saved the receipts.”

“No,” he said. “Everything looks cool. Thanks, Mom.”

Maybe he was placating her, or maybe how much she’d spent would become a joke among the three of them in her absence. She didn’t know. She’d thought buying as much as she had was unassailably right, and she was trying to hold on to such thinking, but Justin’s reaction was undermining her. She wondered if he’d ever gone clothes shopping with his girlfriend.

After another mile, Justin opened a bag of clothes and stuck his face inside. He looked like someone bobbing for apples. Laura and Eric exchanged glances, then looked at Griff, but none of them understood what was happening. Justin took his head out of the bag, as if he were coming up for breath, then went in again.

Griff said, “What are you doing?”

“Inhaling,” Justin said. “I’d forgotten how things could smell so new.”

J
USTIN MET WITH
G
ARCIA AGAIN ON
W
EDNESDAY
,
AND WITH
Letty Villarreal, the social worker, on Tuesday and Thursday. Both the attorney and the social worker said spending more time with him early in the process was imperative. The goal was to have him tell the entirety of his story multiple times, to multiple people, and then once they had a sense of its scope, they could direct him to delve into the minutiae, the wrenching details. It repulsed Laura, as did her own dreadful curiosity about what he was sharing. She and Eric would meet with Letty on Friday, and eventually they would also be deposed, though possibly that wouldn’t happen until much closer to the trial. “Right now,” Garcia said, “your job is just to sit tight and get him to these appointments on time.” After each meeting, Garcia’s sleeves were rolled to his elbows and his collar was unbuttoned. He looked winded.

What words, she wondered, did her son have to utter in these meetings? What language formed in his mind? What vile combination of letters was he forced to hold in his mouth and then spit out? She worried it was all too intense, too draining and agonizing, and she watched Justin for signs that she should step in and call off the whole business, but each afternoon he emerged from the offices undaunted, almost more refreshed than before. Like he’d been swimming. Like he’d jumped off the high dive. Maybe he found the unburdening cathartic. Maybe, bless his heart, he understood that his efforts, however difficult, however taxing, could make a difference not just for his case but for others in the future. Or maybe it was all a sweet and stoic disguise, a courtesy to them. (
Did you wear disguises when you went to play bingo? When you went fishing?
) She had no idea. Every day there seemed more she didn’t know. There seemed pieces of her son that would be lost to her forever, irrecoverable, and their absence was galling. What a peculiar and dislocating feeling to realize your teenage son knew what you never would.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, she and Eric picked Justin up together, and then Eric had a faculty meeting on Thursday, so Laura chauffeured him alone. The opportunity felt like a reward that she’d earned, that shouldn’t be squandered. She wore a butter-colored sundress and a lavender cardigan, hoping to appear sunny. Before she left, Griff had said she looked like an Easter egg; he’d meant it to flatter her. Despite the heat, she wore her hair down. She arrived early and paced the hallways, readying herself to appear upbeat when Letty’s door opened. Smile, she thought. Exude optimism. She brainstormed things to do before returning to Southport—throw pennies in the arcing fountains at the Water Gardens, or tour the USS
Lexington
or the Columbus ships in the harbor. They could stop at the tamale truck under the Harbor Bridge. They could go to Cole Park or walk along the seawall. They could just drive and talk. No denying the anticipation that Justin might confide or explain
some unknown piece of his life, that he might grant her some private access to his tortured heart, but Laura believed there was also a selflessness motivating her. She hoped so.

Justin wanted to go to a pet store. He needed a mouse for Sasha. It was going on a month since she’d eaten. “And now that we’re keeping the other ones as pets,” he said flatly in the car. Laura was trying to find her way to Shoreline Boulevard or Ocean Drive, navigating various one-way streets that all seemed to send her in the wrong direction. She was feeling turned around and rushed. And she thought he sounded upset with her, critical of her having grown attached to the mice. She was trying to remember a pet store in Corpus that might sell mice; it wasn’t something she’d ever considered. Of course the first place that occurred to her was the flea market where he’d been found, but it wasn’t open on Thursdays. Immediately she recognized this as a blessing. Nothing good could come of him returning there.

Once they were out of downtown—she’d been driving parallel to Shoreline all along, and eventually found a residential street that conveyed them onto Ocean Drive—she remembered Pampered Pets on the south side of Corpus. “Would they have them?” she asked Justin.