Remember Me Like This Read online

  The words came out in a rush. He could feel his heart beating in his neck, in his ears. He desperately wanted something to drink.

  Justin was resting his head against the driver’s-side window. His eyes were closed. He looked like he was listening to quiet music.

  Without moving, Justin said, “He said he’d kill you if I ran.”

  “Me?” Griff said.

  “You,” Justin said, his eyes still shut. “And Mom. And Dad. And Rainbow and Papaw.”

  “He knew about Rainbow?”

  “One of the first things he had me do was make a list of everyone in our family. He had me write down everything I knew—birthdays, hobbies, places y’all liked to visit. He told me to write down what kind of food Rainbow ate.”

  The colors at the bottom of the sky were rising, spreading like ink into paper. Griff felt light-headed knowing that Dwight Buford knew so much about their lives. His stomach roiled. It wasn’t like he was going to vomit, but like he already had. Buford, Griff realized, could be awake right now, lying in a cell just across the bay, thinking about their family. Griff imagined their parents, sleeping at home. He hoped they were asleep. If they were up, they’d be sick with worry and they probably would have already called the cops. The notion was sullying, but right then there was also no place he’d rather be in the world. Whatever punishment they’d mete out would be worth it.

  “What else did he have you do?” Griff said.

  “Is that a clever way of asking if he raped me?”

  “No,” Griff blurted. Then he said it again. “No. Not at all. I was just asking about other stuff like writing down our information.”

  “You don’t want to know? You haven’t been thinking about it every time you’ve seen me since I got back?”

  “No,” Griff said, hoping he sounded honest and comforting. His face was hot and panic was swirling in his chest, and he hated himself for wanting to know. “I want you to tell me whatever you feel like telling me.”

  “You sound like my therapist.”

  The RPMs spiked again, then came back down.

  Justin sat up straight and twisted his neck. It didn’t crack. His eyes were still closed. He swallowed. His movements were languid, like someone sleeping. After a moment, he opened his eyes wide and looked in the rearview mirror. He said, “You’re sure there’s nothing you want to know?”

  “Do you do this a lot? Take the truck out while we’re sleeping?”

  “Pretty much every night.”

  It made sense to Griff, though until just then he would never have suspected what Justin was doing. He said, “Do Mom and Dad know how you hurt your ankle, how everything started?”

  “Just you, Lobster.”

  “I won’t tell,” Griff said.

  “I know,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “I want to know what you wrote down about me.”

  Justin turned to him and held his gaze. Then he looked away. He put his hands on the steering wheel and squinted, as if they were driving through rain.

  “I said you were really into 4-H and junior rodeos, anything having to do with horses.”

  “Horses?”

  “And baseball. I said you loved baseball and had your heart set on playing for the Longhorns. I said your room was decked out in orange and white—your sheets and trash can and slippers. I said you loved fishing, especially floundering, and you hated Mexican food. I said you liked country-western music and were learning to play banjo, and your birthday was August twenty-eighth.”

  “But none of that’s true,” Griff said.

  “Mom was an accountant. Dad taught math and ran marathons. Rainbow was your pinto pony.”

  “None of that’s right either,” Griff said. When Justin didn’t respond, he said, “Weren’t you worried he’d find out? With the stories on the news and in the paper?”

  “I didn’t expect it to last four years.”

  “I don’t understand,” Griff said.

  “Good,” Justin said and cracked his neck.

  Griff was waiting for him to explain what he meant, but Justin just watched the bay through the windshield. Then he shifted the truck into gear and they moved into the abating dark.

  14

  COME THE LAST WEDNESDAY IN JULY, HIS DAY OFF, CECIL WAS tired. Dead tired. Bone-tired, his father would have said. That seemed accurate. Exhaustion had seeped into his marrow. And yet, tired as he was, he hadn’t slept past dawn. He never had been able to. With Connie, he’d always woken early and lay in bed trying not to disturb her. But as soon as his eyes opened, his muscles were bounding and he was fidgety and soon she’d say, “Well, go on, then, Mr. Early Bird.” Now walking to the kitchen in the morning’s smeared light was as slow as trudging through drying mud, and even after half a kettle of coffee, he didn’t have any more energy than when he’d woken. He stood under a cool shower, then swiped menthol-smelling shaving cream onto his face with a horsehair brush and scraped a straight razor over his skin. He drank another two cups of coffee, and ate scrambled eggs and baked beans with brown sugar and crisp buttered toast. Nothing roused him. The paper hadn’t even hit his porch yet, and yet he would’ve been happy to call it a day.

  No, not tired. Old.

  For the first time in his life, Cecil Campbell felt suddenly and profoundly old. It was in his flesh, in his eyes, in his joints and his concentration—the punishing accrual of age. There seemed an acute absence of some pull; whatever lateral gravity had been drawing him through the years was gone. Urgency was out with the tide. Another unbidden memory of his father: They were hunting dove near the King Ranch when, for reasons Cecil had never been able to discern, his father said, “Do you know the worst thing about being an old man?”

  “No, sir.”

  “People stop seeing you as dangerous.”

  Cecil didn’t know what people thought when they saw him. For the last few years, he’d been The Missing Boy’s Grandfather, or The Father of the Missing Boy’s Father, and so long as Justin was gone, there was no other way he wanted to be known. Maybe now anyone who looked at him saw just a tired old man, the widowed pawnbroker. It wasn’t lost on him that this abrupt lassitude, this compounding of time and the sapping it had visited upon him, was hitting so soon after Justin came back; Cecil had experienced a similar weariness after Connie died. Before, though, he’d been able to throw everything he had into raising Eric, and it seemed he’d still been raising him right up until the bright morning Justin went missing. Since then, he couldn’t remember a moment when his sole focus was anything other than finding the boy. Or bracing for not finding him. Or finding what they’d all prayed they wouldn’t find. He had also been ready to step between his family and whatever trouble was coming, to absorb the impact with his body; he couldn’t have been more poised had he watched any of them run blindly into oncoming traffic. No longer, though. With Justin home, with Dwight Buford incarcerated and staring down the death penalty, Cecil felt an abiding uselessness.

  The morning paper slapped against the porch and Cecil read it at his kitchen table, finishing off the coffee. The only piece related to Justin was a short column promoting an upcoming event where parents could have their children fingerprinted. Most of the articles concerned the weather. They’d hit a hundred degrees for six straight days, broken two records. The drought was worsening and officials were seeking harsher water restrictions as lake levels dropped. If a hurricane hit—and with the heat and low pressure, the chances were high—inmates in the Nueces County Jail would remain in their cells because the city lacked the money and manpower to evacuate them. Cecil tried to imagine Dwight Buford in his cell with a hurricane blowing outside, but his mind wouldn’t fix on any specific image or narrative. He simply hoped Buford would be afraid and hurt if a storm came ashore. He scanned the obituaries, then the classifieds, then stories about tar balls washing up on the National Seashore and the wars in the world. He rinsed out his coffee mug and watered the ferns Laura had given him. “Trust me,” she’d said when she l
oaded his truck’s passenger seat with potted plants, “ferns are not my forte. You’re performing a lifesaving service.” He stepped outside into the hard sunlight and the smell of salt water and crape myrtle. Or was it bougainvillea? He couldn’t tell. A sticky breeze was coming through the palms and mesquite branches, rattling the tiny leaves. Elsewhere, the high-pitched squawking of gulls, the jostling of a boat trailer, the hydraulic hiss of a bus stopping on Station Street, the long low note of the ferry horn.

  So, Cecil thought. So.

  HE KNEW DWIGHT BUFORD’S FATHER. MAYNE BUFORD WAS A retired oilman. He had ruddy, gin-blossomed skin and wore a straw Stetson. Some mornings Cecil saw him standing outside the Church of Christ, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup with a handful of other men: AA meetings. (Eric and Laura had sampled a grief support group at the same location, but the meetings didn’t take. “Closure?” Laura had said to Cecil and Eric one night. “They talk about closure like it’s the Second Coming. Why would I possibly want closure? Selfish fucking hippies, the whole lot of them.”) Mayne drove a white Mercedes with tags that read OIL-N-WATER, the name of the thirty-two-footer he docked in the marina. He collected nautical equipment and antique fishing lures, and every month or so, he shuffled into Loan Star and poked around in the display cases, asking after scrimshaw and fishing net toggles. He always paid with crisp twenty-dollar bills. Once, when none of the lures in the glass case appealed to him, he chose a pair of opal earrings for his wife. Cecil had never met her. She had cancer or leukemia, something that was killing her slowly. They’d moved to the coast seven years ago and soon after, she went on oxygen and refused to step outside. Their house was a sprawling Spanish structure on Mustang Island, deep-set windows and a nautical rope fence around the property. It was an imposing place, resembled an old fort. A hospice nurse lived in a bungalow behind the main house. Doctors drove in from Corpus.

  They’d had two children, both of whom, Cecil had gathered, were sources of anguish. One of their sons had died in his early teens in a car accident, and his older brother had estranged himself from his parents after high school. There had been periods of reconciliation, but according to Mayne, neither he nor his wife had heard from Dwight since they’d moved down from Dallas. He’d told Cecil this at Loan Star shortly after Justin went missing. Likely he’d meant it as a vow of solidarity. A pledge to their unique brand of isolation. A testament that such cruel distance could be endured. Over the years, the Bufords had donated money to the rescue efforts, and Mayne always asked after Eric and his family when he visited the pawnshop. He’d also gotten in the habit of telling Cecil he hoped Dwight would reconnect with them soon.

  “I’m just not sure how much time the old girl has left,” Mayne said. “He knew she was sick, but he might assume the treatments worked. He might think she’s fixing to run a marathon.”

  “He’ll turn up,” Cecil said.

  “I send letters to his old addresses, but they come back as undeliverable. My gut says he’s still up Dallas way, but there’s no listing.”

  Cecil’s mind was wandering, trying to make sense of the parallels in their lives: the wives with their grueling, insurmountable illnesses and the boys gone missing, seemingly just swept from the surface of the earth. He had never trusted anyone with the kind of money Mayne had—in fact, he’d always resented it, viewed the wealth as evidence of being soft and entitled—but he’d come to sympathize with him. He seemed like a man who was paying for the good fortune he’d enjoyed throughout his rosy life. Cecil remembered well the sorrow of outliving your wife, the cheap rudderlessness of survival.

  “His mother always thought he got tangled up with drugs,” Mayne was saying. He said it every time the subject of Dwight arose. “I think it was losing Gilly, his little brother. My belief is he started running soon as that happened, and now he’s run too far to get home.”

  It made sense. Wasn’t that, in a way, what they were all afraid would happen to Griff? Wasn’t that what Cecil was afraid would happen to Eric if the worst came to pass? Cecil shook his head, trying to keep the thoughts from finding purchase.

  “I hope you find him,” Cecil said to Mayne.

  Yes, he could remember saying those exact words.

  ON THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, A FEW SALLOW MEN WERE LOITERING on the steps of the Church of Christ, drinking coffee and blowing cigarette smoke into the breeze, but Mayne Buford wasn’t there when Cecil drove by. He hadn’t seen or heard from Mayne since everything transpired, but he expected to. For better or worse, it was inevitable. He still believed Mayne had been ignorant to the facts of Dwight’s life, that he’d had no knowledge of his son’s whereabouts or what he was doing with Justin, but there was also, when Cecil thought of him now, no compassion. Instead there was a feeling of jeopardy, of needing to take caution, like he was carrying an armload of old dynamite. Cecil no longer felt any sympathy about Mayne’s wife—that he ever had was galling—and he understood that things between him and Mayne could go very bad very fast. Probably Mayne recognized the risk, too. Probably he was holed up in his extravagant house with his dying wife, drinking expensive liquor and waiting for Cecil to knock on his door with the barrel of a shotgun. Good, Cecil thought. Good.

  It had come as a relief that Eric and Laura had been largely uninterested in anything having to do with Buford’s parents. Their plates were full. Eric had first occupied himself with the barbecue, and now he’d moved on to teaching Justin to drive. Laura was scouring the house and looking into prospects for school next year. Cecil knew they were worried about the trial and what it would take for Justin to feel at home again, and while those were real concerns, he believed things would shake out for the boys. Griff was swooning over the girl who wore all black, and Justin, when he wasn’t talking with the lawyers or the counselor, was tending to his snake and putting up with all of the affection his folks were lavishing on him. They were all settling in, calming down. They were immersed in the dull and pleasurable routines of family, the coded systems of loving and being loved. Had Cecil driven to their house on Suntide this morning, they would’ve been happy to see him, would have offered him coffee and juice and silver-dollar pancakes, but soon it would have dawned on them that he was only there because of the suffering Justin had endured. His presence would highlight everything they needed to ignore as their day got started. And yet he’d unconsciously been driving toward Eric’s house ever since he passed the Church of Christ. He cut over to Beechwood by way of Drum Road and Monette Drive, then curved onto Station and headed toward the ferry.

  Fishermen stood on the piers. An oil tanker made its way through the ship channel. It rode high in the water, which meant the cargo hold was empty and the captain would load up on crude in Corpus. Already, the line at the ferry landing was deep, curling out into the marina. The ferry docked and the long steel gate swung open like an arm. A few cars and trucks clattered onto the landing, and then the line of cars ahead of Cecil started proceeding onto the boat. He doubted he’d make the ferry before it was full and was preparing himself to wait for the next trip when the orange-vested attendant on the deck waved him aboard. Cecil eased off the clutch and pressed the accelerator. The attendant motioned for him to kill the engine, then threw a heavy wooden block behind the truck’s rear tire as they were pushing off.

  My lucky day, he thought.

  The boat rose and fell on the water. There was no rhythm to the movement; the waves came randomly and with different lifts and drops. Occasionally the ferry driver gunned the engine and the vessel surged unexpectedly forward. A few gulls were hovering like kites tied to the railing. The engine rumbled. The horn blew.

  That Cecil was driving to Corpus that Wednesday morning truly registered with him only when he accelerated off the ferry, the truck bumping over the lowered gate and onto Mustang Island. Now that he knew where he was going, he also knew he’d been headed in that direction since he’d climbed out of bed. The sky hung low, a washed-out blue strewn with downy clouds. Bach was playing, first the Prelude
and then Suite no. 1. He passed the Bufords’ property and saw Mayne’s Mercedes in the horseshoe driveway. There were also a couple of NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to the fence that Cecil didn’t remember from before. Then the stretch of grass-feathered dunes, the tidal flats, the smell of baking sand. A man lumbered along the beach with a metal detector. Behind him, a pair of surfers were trying to make the best of the chop. The Bach swelled. An SUV with words shoe-polished on its window approached, and Cecil hoped the writing would have to do with Justin—it happened from time to time, and he always got a charge—but when the truck passed, he saw that the owner had just listed the vehicle’s specs and the words FOR SALE. Strip malls streamed by. Souvenir and sandwich shops, bait stands and convenience stores that sold beer, ice, and sunglasses. (Connie had sometimes said, “If I lost weight the way I lose sunglasses, you’d be married to a pin-up girl.”) Vendors sold beach towels suspended from clotheslines. To Cecil, it appeared that each offered the same prices on identical inventory—towels that depicted the Confederate flag, the Texas flag, the Mexican flag, and towels with wolves howling at the moon and pink-bikini girls riding motorcycles, towels that looked like Budweiser cans. The vendors sat under tents, waiting like spiders for tourists. He briefly considered stopping and buying something for Griff and Justin, but he couldn’t make up his mind and then he was on the causeway, looking down on the water and oyster reefs and spoil islands as he ascended.