Galveston

by Nic Pizzolatto

  “Nah. You’re fine.”

  “I still kind of think it might pass us. Maybe clip us with high winds. No storm surge,” he says, but I know that like me Cecil is having trouble finding a good reason to leave.

  “Anything need doing?” I ask.

  He shakes his head and tosses a hand toward the empty parking lot. “Hurricane holiday.” I stand with him a minute and we watch the animation on the computer, a thermal image of a swirling mass expanding and swallowing the coast.

  He looks me over like I have a secret. He says, “What about the girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “The pretty girl. Spill it, old-timer.”

  “Who?”

  “She didn’t catch you? You’re popular. First the suit, now this chick. Good-looking lady. Young, brown hair? Said she was looking for you. Yesterday evening, early.” He opens a drawer behind the counter and takes out an index card. “I told her you’d be working today, but I didn’t say you had a room.”

  I take the index card, and I don’t recognize the name on it. It’s in Cecil’s handwriting, with a phone number below it. “She didn’t give you a first name?”

  “No. I didn’t think to ask.”

  I reread the card. “What did she say?”

  “That she was trying to find you. Asked me to ask you to call her. She was hot. You should call her, man. If you don’t call her, I am.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I’m going to invite her out for a bite to eat.”

  “How old did she look?”

  “Early twenties? Look, if you end up calling her, put in a good word for me.”

  “Sure,” I say, and I have to turn away a little, because a damp trembling stirs in my good eye. I even feel it in my dead one.

  “I think,” Cecil says, nodding to the screen, “I think I’m going to go ahead and go. You might want to think about it. You could ride with me.”

  “I’m fine.” I push through the door. The sky is a bubbling mass of slate, charcoal, pewter, and the wind whips palm fronds and sends litter flapping down the empty streets. The air seethes with electromagnetism, presses around me, like being underwater, in a sunken city. I lock my door and draw the shades. Sage whines.

  The hunting knife sits on the counter and I contemplate its razor edge against the creased, freckled skin of my wrists. I place the knife in a drawer, and I feel like a moron for ever taking it out.

  I reach up in my narrow closet to a small shelf there, and I pull down the manila folder that contains an X-ray they took of me in prison. You can see the specks hanging in my lungs like stars, like shrapnel blasted backward through time, and I feel like I’ve finally caught up to the moment the bomb goes off. I can feel it in the weather, in the woman’s name on the index card. And there won’t be any assassins, no killers coming to see me off.

  I light up a roach and pinch it between my lips. It’s cool and blue here now with the curtains closed and Sage rests beside my feet, her head between her paws and tail tucked down, so I know she feels it, too.

  The woman must have paid the man in the black Jaguar to find me. So she’s got money, I guess, and I’m glad for that.

  I stay inside with my dog and watch the skies and don’t do much of anything else except glance now and then at that old X-ray and pace and roll another spliff.

  This woman, I think, will want a story. Probably she wants someone to explain her life. She would want to know what happened in those two weeks when she was three years old, when she was taken from home and saw the ocean and played on the beach and watched cartoons. And one day her sister disappeared. What must that have seemed like to a child, I wonder.

  One long story, peopled with orphans.

  I scratch Sage and she whimpers once. My skin itches under my patch, and I lift it. Tears soak my dead eye, and I smear them off my cheek.

  So I was wrong when I told Rocky you could choose what you feel. It’s not true. It’s not even true that you can choose when you’ll feel. All that happens is that the past clots like a cataract or scab, a scab of memory over your eyes. And one day the light breaks through.

  I think about Carmen, and wonder again whether she made it out all right. I hope she found something else.

  When it comes, my heart doesn’t even skip, like I was always expecting the knock on my door. It’s stunted, light, the sound of a nervous person who doesn’t want to disturb.

  I turn the knob without checking the peephole. The door creaks open onto a woman with desperate eyes, full of beauty. Behind her, gray storm scuds are peeling out to sea.

  She has thick, light brown hair, and she wears jeans and a tight tan jacket. Cecil was right, she’s very pretty. More than pretty. She stands on the landing with one hand at her purse, a nice leather piece, and holds in her other a square of paper, a photograph, maybe, and instantly I can tell that there is a fundamental void about her. She aims for me to fill it.

  “Mr. Cady?” She stares at me, a little cockeyed.

  I step back and think to myself that she looks like a capable woman, someone with money, a life, a person who takes care of herself, and I’m glad to see it. Her lips are parted like she’s waiting for words to come, while her eyes quiver between my face and the photo in her hand, searching. Such desperation.

  “I don’t recognize you,” Tiffany says. Her voice is deeper, but almost recognizable, really. She looks back and forth from the picture to my face. “No. It’s not you.” She holds out the photo, offering it to me.

  The picture is old, bent and faded. It shows the ocean, a beach. Three people stand out in the waves. The man is tall, broad and tan, and the girls are blond, lithe, their details lost in the white light off the Gulf.

  I can actually see the child’s face in this woman, the clipped chin and bold eyes, her bowed cupid lips. I ask her if she wants to come in.

  “I don’t . . .” She searches my face again. Thunder crackles and echoes over the sea. “I think I’ve made a mistake.” She sighs. “I’m sorry. I came to the wrong place.”

  She takes back the photo and starts to slip it into her purse as she turns around, and I say, “It was twenty years ago. I’ve changed a lot.”

  She looks back, her brows arched, her stare brimming.

  “You don’t know me,” I say. “But I was your friend.”

  A pin-sized tear skips down her cheek. I move aside from the door and motion her inside. Sage runs to her calves, and she crouches to scratch the dog’s ears.

  I invite her to sit. “Do you want some coffee, tea?”

  “No, thank you.” She pauses, picks her lip in hesitation. “I’d just like to—if you have time. I’d like, just to talk. If that’s all right.”

  “You have questions.”

  “Yes. Please. I—” Scanning the room, she shakes her head, like she can hardly believe she’s arrived at this place.

  “I think I’ll make some tea.”

  I move to the stove and turn on the burner, fill the teapot and set it atop blue flames. She left the photo on the counter, and I wash up at the sink as an excuse not to step back into the main room with her. In the picture I am brown and strong, like a horse in the sunlight. Icy water flows over my fingers, aching the joints. I can barely grasp the reality of this woman on my couch, the unlikely fortune of her existence.

  She deserves better than the truth.

  I step back into the room, met by Tiffany’s quick, intense face. She scratches Sage and tries not to stare at the X-ray on the couch. She looks at my chest.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Oh. It was—the lady from the hotel? A long time ago? She said your real name was Roy. The sisters told me that. The man I hired found your prison records, and pictures. It took him awhile to sniff you out. He’s been looking awhile. We weren’t sure you were the one, though. You don’t look the same.”

  “No, I don’t.” I watch her scan the apartment, the single room, the stacks of paperbacks, and I glimpse a kind of pity from h
er. I don’t like that. “Where do you live?” I ask.

  “Austin.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I do graphic design. Advertising stuff.”

  “Did you have to go to school for that?”

  “Oh yeah. I went to school there. UT.”

  “Huh,” I say, and I almost smile. “Who—where’d you grow up? Your family?”

  “My parents adopted me through the Sisters of St. Joseph. I grew up in Tyler.”

  She looks me over some more, kind of cocks her head. She has a ring on one hand, but I can’t tell what kind it is.

  “You’re married?”

  She shakes her head. “Not yet. Maybe soon. I’ve been seeing somebody awhile, a long time.”

  “You’re in love?”

  “Um. Yes.” She tugs a strand of hair and glances away, and I see Rocky in the gesture, see her so clearly that I have to turn my head. When I peek back, I realize how much she looks like her, and my throat constricts. They have nearly the same face, and it’s almost too much to bear.

  “That’s good,” I say, unable to meet her eyes. “That you’re in love.”

  “He’s the one who got me to—this. He urged me. To find out the truth.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He—I’m sorry,” she says, and I’ve made her nervous. She doesn’t know what to make of this room, its cramped space, those X-rays sitting beside her. Her fingertips draw to her lips and she peers around as if there might be someone else in here. “Would you mind . . . I really feel—there are things I need to know.” She fixes Rocky’s eyes on me, full of suffering, shining like a saint’s.

  I move closer to the couch, hold up a hand. “I know. You’re right. How much do you know?”

  “I kind of remember my sister. A little. I remember us going to the beach. But—” She chokes back a bit of her composure. “But one day she just left me.” Her lips tremble at the statement.

  “No, no,” I say. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were coming back for you right away. We were just going out for the night.”

  “But, then you were in New Orleans? You were in prison.”

  “Yes. That’s right.” I turn over my palms and look down at myself. “I got banged up. An accident. There was a warrant out on me.”

  “But—I don’t understand. What happened when you left me?”

  I keep my head down and watch Tiffany’s hand stroke the dog.

  She looks away and then back to me quickly. “Did you know her very well?” Her voice snags on these last two words—“My sister?”

  “I think I did.” I study the shades of Tiffany’s long hair—a dry prairie in summer—her sharp cheeks and wide eyes. “What kind of advertising do you do?”

  “Sorry? I-I design Web pages, company logos. Things like that.”

  “I been to Austin a few times. Long time ago. Barton Springs still there?”

  “Yes. Um—you said, about an accident?”

  “Good music in Austin, too. Do you like music?”

  She tilts her head at me, seeking my face. It’s so hard to look at her that I’m grateful when I hear the kettle’s shrill whistle and I can step back into the kitchenette.

  My chest hurts. My hand shakes, gripping the pot, and little bulbs of sizzling water spill onto the burner.

  “Listen.” I hear her from the other side of the wall. “I need to know.” She coughs, stifles some grief.

  I pour two mugs of Lipton and leave them to steep.

  “Did you have any other sisters or brothers?” I ask. “Where you grew up?” She’s so young, so real, my voice keeps tripping. Her whole face gapes with hunger.

  She nods. “I had a little brother. He’s adopted, too.”

  “What’s his name?”

  She throws a hand to her forehead and twists up her mouth. “I’m sorry—why won’t you answer me? Please. I don’t understand.”

  No more stalling then, and I understand that I don’t have the stomach to keep her story from her.

  If I give her the truth, then maybe I am released of its obligations. I can pass the truth to its rightful owner, and the frozen stars in my chest might finally ignite.

  So I realize I’m not going to lie to her. I’m going to tell her everything. Rocky, her father, Sienkiewicz’s house, the men from New Orleans and what they did.

  I become scared for her, then. And I think, That void will be filled, baby, but you’re going to have to be so tough to bear it.

  Years you can’t remember. Years like mysterious bruises.

  All this time, I was your friend.

  “All right.” I scratch my mouth and mumble, “It’s bad, though.”

  “What?” More tears well under her fresh scowl, fierce and strong.

  I slide the X-rays to the floor and sit down beside her.

  “I’ll tell you all about her, what happened. All right? But I got a condition.” I pat Sage’s head to indicate my line of thought. “If I talk to you, then you have to leave. There’s a storm coming and you have to get out of town. Now. Right after I’m done.”

  “Are you leaving? I can come back.”

  “No. I’ll talk to you now. I’ll tell you everything. But if I talk, you leave. And you do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “You take this dog with you.”

  “Uh—well . . . I don’t—”

  “That’s the deal. The only one I’m offering.”

  She watches Sage and tilts her head, scratches her. “All right. Okay.”

  “You swear?”

  “Yes. All right.” She nods, wipes her eyes once more.

  She’s grown tall, with strong, chiseled bones, the kind of woman you stop to look at, and her red nails dig into Sage’s cinnamon coat as she sniffles and waits for me.

  “That other girl in the picture isn’t your sister. She’s your mother. You shouldn’t blame her. She had a hard life.” I reach out, sudden and clumsy, put my mangled hand on hers. “But she did a brave thing once.”

  My hand looks monstrous touching hers, but she lets me keep it there. Her stare bores into my good eye.

  “She didn’t leave you,” I say. “It wasn’t like that. You weren’t abandoned.”

  She covers her mouth and her features kind of sink and collapse like a sand castle at high tide. I draw closer and place my other hand on her shoulder, because I can’t really help myself. She squeezes my fingers. I let things wash over her, give her a moment. She’ll need her strength for the rest of it.

  When she’s a little more together and I’ve brought her some tea, I begin again.

  I tell her everything.

  After she’s gone I stand at the door and watch her herd Sage into the car, a sensible gold Toyota. She pauses before getting in, and the rain gives her an aura. She looks back up to me. I have to close the door and step inside until I hear the car drive off.

  I picture her walking Sage along the white rock and clear waters that run through Austin, and I don’t think about Rocky.

  I think about a breeze feathering the surface of a lake, my mother’s voice singing “A Poor Man’s Roses.”

  My head is light, and my hands don’t ache.

  The gale whips the rain into stinging darts, and the clouds turn the afternoon dark as a widow’s dress. The heavy air teems with ozone and seawater. It snaps and crackles into the distance, and flares pop over the ocean as if the sky had swallowed dynamite. At its heaving rim I can almost make out another darkness, a form of denser black slouching up from the horizon in a shape I can’t imagine.

  Branches scraping the boarded windows sound like something trying to claw its way inside, and the wind howls like the voice of that animal, a low, wounded moan.

  It’s been twenty years.

  I was worried I’d live forever.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks to Henry Dunow and Colin Harrison for their faith, insights, and efforts on behalf of
this book.

  I am also grateful to David Poindexter—scholar, gentleman, and friend to writers everywhere.

  About the Author

  Nic Pizzolatto was born in New Orleans and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Best American Mystery Stories, and several other publications. He is the author of a story collection, Between Here and the Yellow Sea, and his work has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. He lives in Indiana with his wife and daughter. This is his first novel.