“He doesn’t look like the happiest camper,” Fiona said.
In his head, Griff was making sure he’d called his father before coming to meet Fiona. Not calling one of his parents before leaving the house was the offense for which they had no tolerance. But he knew he’d called. He was positive. He said, “Rainbow must have gotten out again.”
Griff stood, trying to remember when he’d last been in the backyard. He skated around the pool, hoping he looked cool and unafraid from where Fiona sat. When he reached Papaw’s truck, he said, “Did I leave the back gate open?”
“Nobody pawns anything when it’s this hot, so I was going for a drive and saw her making a break for it.”
“I changed her water before I left,” he said. “Maybe—”
“You been here long?”
“A little while. It’s too hot to skate. Fiona and I were just talking. She dyed her hair.”
Rainbow lay down on the seat, her muzzle on her paws. Papaw clicked off the truck’s radio. He said, “You talked to your folks?”
“I just left a message like I’m supposed to. Leaving a message counts.”
Another wind came off the bay, kicking up more dust. Griff had to close his eyes until it died down. He wondered what he could say to get Papaw to take Rainbow home and leave him alone with Fiona. He imagined himself sitting down beside her, saying Now, where were we?
Papaw fixed him in his gaze—it was as if he were seeing Griff from far away—then turned to look through the windshield. Rainbow groaned. She liked car rides. Sometimes when his father went out to look for Justin, he took her along.
“I need to move some things around in my garage,” Papaw said finally. He shifted the truck into gear. “If you’ll help an old man out, I’ll kindly keep Rainbow’s escape to myself. I’ve got steak in a bag if we get hungry.”
“Sure. Should I come over after you’re done with work?”
“Ivan’ll close up,” he said. “Hop in.”
“I need to walk Fiona home,” Griff said. “Her bike had a flat.”
“Lobster, my boy, that tide’s already gone out for the day.”
When Griff turned to look back at where they’d been sitting, he saw that Fiona was gone. She might have left before he’d even reached the truck. He felt exhausted by everything, confused and goaded by the turns the day had already taken. Papaw rapped twice on his door with his knuckles, and Griff walked around the back of the truck, dragging his fingers along the tailgate.
6
IN THE INITIAL SEARCHES, THE TOWN OF SOUTHPORT HAD cleaved to the hope that Justin had just gotten lost in the dunes. Or he was hiding. Children did it occasionally. Maybe he’d twisted his ankle in the hummocky sand. Maybe sunstroke. It seemed possible that if volunteers sprawled wide enough, if they stayed alert and confident enough, he would soon be found. He’d be sunburned and dehydrated and scared, but unharmed. The mood was serious, not maudlin; at the time, imagining a happy ending required no great effort. They thought of the ordeal as a storm that would, despite its present course, spare them.
But he never returned. The days turned to weeks—then months, then years—and they couldn’t ignore how naïve they’d been. They had been, they realized, like Justin himself. Or almost like him, for they had to work to stay naïve. He’d had an easy smile. Neighbors asked him to water their plants and take in the mail while they were away. They remembered the photo of Justin and his younger brother in the Southport Sun after the boys had set up a table to sell rocks and shells the way other children sold lemonade. They remembered how, on Halloween, the parents would wait hand in hand on the sidewalk while their boys trick-or-treated; hadn’t the younger brother dressed as a cloud one year? His father, the Texas history teacher whose class students jockeyed for, always remembered your children’s names and asked after them. His mother, if she recognized you, would launder four shirts for the price of three at the dry cleaner’s. After the ordeal began, she’d sometimes refuse your cash altogether. They were good people. After Justin Campbell set out for the beach on his skateboard and never returned, people donated money to the rescue efforts, papered their storefronts with his image, volunteered for search parties even when they knew the best thing would be to find nothing at all. They answered detectives’ questions and feigned optimism when they rounded an aisle in H-E-B and saw one of the shattered parents picking out frozen dinners. Then they went home and thanked God the Campbells’ lives weren’t theirs.
The state police combed the dunes with cadaver dogs; the Navy deployed divers; the Coast Guard sent out boats and a helicopter with infrared cameras. An unsolicited psychic—a curandera named Ms. Esther who owned a curio shop in Corpus and who everyone believed was only interested in the reward money the Campbells had put up—said she’d had a vision of violence at the marina, an image of Justin’s body being dumped in deep water from a shrimper’s boat, but renewed searches yielded nothing. Laura visited Ms. Esther twice by herself, offering more money for more-definitive information, but the vision remained unchanged. Cecil had visited her, too, and ordered her to stay away from the family.
The Campbells’ every conversation was strung with snares: Who would avoid Justin’s name too conspicuously? Who would invoke it too often, drawing too much attention to his absence? Who would be the first to speak of him in the past tense? Some nights they went to bed feeling as though they’d been holding their breath for hours. Other nights, they fought; they threw accusations of surrender and apathy like knives. When they woke, they found no relief. Their world was discolored, muted, perforated by helplessness. The search parties dwindled to just a few volunteers every weekend, or if it was too hot, none at all. The detective they’d liked was reassigned, and Justin’s case was handed to a junior deputy. Media coverage dried up. When they’d first installed the 800 number in the kitchen, Eric and Laura could stay up half the night logging tip-line calls, but now it rang so infrequently they sometimes lifted the receiver and checked for a dial tone.
The mail had all but stopped, too. In the first year, that miserable wash of time when every noise in the house sounded like the front door opening, mail had come from Justin’s classmates and from Griff’s, from congregations of churches, from parents and relatives of other missing children, and from strangers from all over. After the second year, the arrowhead postcard had arrived: Don’t Stop Looking. It had been postmarked in Bakersfield, California. Laura became obsessed with having the postcard dusted for fingerprints, but it’d been handled so many times that none of the prints were usable. Now, if any unusual envelope arrived, it was addressed to Justin. He would have turned sixteen this coming November, so credit card companies and car dealerships were appealing for his business. Laura dropped the advertisements into one of the plastic bins she’d bought to collect his mail so he could read it when he returned. She was filling her third now. The bins were in Justin’s room, beneath the Christmas and birthday presents that had accumulated over the years. Continuing to shop for him, to buy gifts like wallets and CDs and books, was an exercise in faith. It was easier than not shopping.
His room was the only space not consumed by his absence, and with the exception of the bins and presents, it still looked much as it had when he’d left for the last time: the lumpy high-top shoes cluttering the closet floor, the fishbowls of rocks and shells atop his dresser, the plaid comforter that had, just months before he vanished, replaced the one with the cartoon airplane print. (Laura still had the airplane one packed away in a box.) A Blue Angels poster commanded the wall beside his bed, and above his desk hung his honor roll ribbons and the print of a car he’d made with a potato in art class; he’d given the potato prints as gifts that Christmas—Eric’s was on his desk at school, Cecil’s was in his office at the pawnshop, Laura’s was framed on her nightstand, crowning the stack of overdue marine biology books from the library, and Griff’s was tacked among the skateboarding photos. Sometimes, if his parents were out, Griff stole into his brother’s room and tried on his cl
othes, charting how long Justin had been gone by how fully he’d grown into them. He’d even taken a couple of his T-shirts and kept them in his room; every week he transferred them from one secret place to another. If his mother came in to clean or put up folded clothes or just to snoop, he didn’t want his brother’s shirts to blindside her.
Laura had known about the shirts since the day Griff had taken them. She sneaked into Justin’s room daily and had immediately noticed the drawer Griff hadn’t completely closed. She struggled with the knowledge, wondering if he’d so poorly covered his tracks because he subconsciously wanted her to confront him. Her son, about whom she knew everything and nothing. Some days she sat on Justin’s floor and wept, others she lay on his bed with her knees clutched to her chest. The room comforted and tormented and confused her with its permanence. One night, after almost two years of sneaking in, she told Eric how she sometimes buried her face in Justin’s closet, how she pressed her nose into his hanging shirts searching for a shred of fabric that still held his scent. She expected Eric to balk, to try pacifying her with a wretchedly upbeat speech, but he did neither; instead, he admitted the same habit. She felt disarmed. And at once she understood that she’d only confessed in hopes of starting a fight. But that he’d been sneaking in, too, that he’d sought shelter—or was it oblivion?—where she had, seemed a kind of communion, a renewal. They made love that night, the first time since their son had disappeared. Initially, the sex seemed another renewal, but soon it turned too raw and desperate, too obviously freighted and inadequate. They’d wandered directionless ever since, stumbling into separate and skeptical lives.
And so, in a tight, boxy room at the police station in Corpus, when the deputy said a fifteen-year-old boy who matched Justin’s description had been located at the Tradewinds Flea Market, Eric went under a wave. The simplicity of the logic, the absurd and easy ordinariness of the scenario, displaced him. A vendor had thought the boy resembled the picture on Justin’s flyers, so she alerted a security guard. He’d been with an adult male, a man who was at present being interviewed by detectives. The deputy said the FBI was coming in from Houston, and the sheriff had a team searching the man’s apartment. The boy, he said, was undergoing a medical exam.
All of it left Eric feeling blunted, saturated to the point of numbness. He told himself to focus. He and Laura were sitting in folding chairs, while the deputy leaned against a steel desk. Laura’s hair was greasy in its ponytail, her eyes wet and worn out. She looked pale, woozy, as if she’d lost something vital on the drive from Marine Lab. He wondered when she’d last eaten. When they’d entered the police station, he’d spied a vending machine in a lounge area. He wondered if he had time to backtrack and buy her some candy. She liked M&M’s and Milky Ways, but not Snickers. Knowing this, at that moment, in that room, was a comfort.
“How long before we see him?” Eric asked.
“Not long, I wouldn’t think. An officer will escort him over after the exam.”
“Okay, sure,” he said. His voice was timid, disappointing. He said, “Thank you for bringing us in.”
“This is great news,” the deputy said. He’d already said it once, closing the door behind them. Eric nodded. His pulse throbbed. He was clasping and unclasping his hands, as if molding a ball of clay.
No one spoke. Eric could hear muffled voices on the other side of the closed door, shoes on the polished linoleum, approaching and passing.
“We broke a hundred today, but came up short on the record,” the deputy said. “Next week we’ll start giving out the free fans.”
Again such banality was vexing. Eric understood the deputy was biding time, but it seemed obscene to mention anything that didn’t relate to Justin. He could feel Laura growing morose. She was staring at her knees, and then the wall, trying to stay composed. He wondered if the dolphin still had a fever, wondered if talking about it would calm her. He wondered how it was that their lives had led them to a day where he spent the afternoon with another woman and his wife spent it with a sick dolphin and now they sat in a cloistered room, waiting for some reckoning.
“And if we’re already this high in the mercury,” the deputy continued, “I’d say we’re looking at a pretty exciting hurricane season.”
“It’s been a while since we’ve had one. I guess we’re about due,” Eric said, trying to sound casual, engaged. Childishly, he wanted to mind his manners in hopes that they’d be rewarded with some fairness.
“The last named storm was—”
“What kind of vendor?” Laura interrupted. Her voice sounded weak, as if she’d gone days without speaking. In the last four years, she’d done exactly that; she’d done it more than once.
The deputy glanced at Eric, then back to Laura.
“At the flea market,” she said. “You said a vendor recognized him.”
“Yes, a woman who sells little critters—gerbils, hamsters. He was buying mice to feed to his snake.”
“His snake?” Eric said.
“It’s not him,” she said, and immediately Eric realized he’d been thinking the same thing for hours. He’d been dreading meeting another runaway that wasn’t Justin. He’d been dreading how it would undo Laura and how he’d have to resuscitate her spirits; he’d been dreading how he’d fail. He reached for her hand. Since the call had come, he’d wanted to be touching her.
“Ma’am?” The deputy cut his eyes to Eric again, a look that asked What is your wife doing?
“It’s not Justin,” she said. “Justin’s afraid of snakes.”
“You’re right to be cautious, but let’s—”
“Haven’t we been through enough?” she said, rising abruptly. Her chair knocked into Eric’s, slid, and clattered against the wall. In the small room, the noise was shrill. She said, “I’m leaving.”
“Laura,” Eric said and stood, “let’s be—”
“No. They can’t keep doing this to us,” she said. She turned to the deputy. “Do you know how many times someone has matched his description?”
“Mrs. Campbell.”
“Do you know that we’ve come in to ID bodies? Do you know that we’ve seen dead children, other people’s dead children, in those bags? Those bags that are too big for their bodies. Do you know what it does to a person to hope your son is—”
“Laura, let’s just wait—”
“Mrs. Campbell, ma’am, I do understand—”
“To hope your son is dead?” Laura continued. Her face was blotched red. She was crying, not wiping the tears. “To hope he’s stopped breathing, to hope his body is somewhere decomposing? Do you know what that’s like? How could you?”
“Laura.”
“And if he were in Corpus,” she said, ignoring Eric, “don’t you think this would’ve ended by now?”
“Laura,” Eric said again, louder. “Baby, we need to—”
Then the door was opening and Solomon Garcia, the district attorney, was stepping inside and Eric at once had the sense there was a long line of people behind him. Suddenly everything was quiet, not just in the room but, it seemed, in the hallways and corridors and the entire building. The idea of sound itself had fallen away, had never been.
And then, in the doorway, a young man.
THEY WERE NOTHING BUT TOUCH. AS GARCIA AND THE DEPUTY stepped demurely out of the room, Laura held her son’s face in her hands, then frantically pulled him close. To Eric, it seemed she was sliding down a hill, clawing at everything she could, trying to catch hold of something solid. Her fingers twisted in Justin’s T-shirt. Eric had his arms around both of them. Laura said what sounded like “We never stopped.” Justin nodded. He pressed his face against his father’s shoulder. Eric felt a loosening inside, a rush of emotion that would fell him, and he choked it down: Showing his son and wife anything less than absolute resolve seemed unpardonable. He swallowed. He raised his eyes to stare into the fluorescent light box on the ceiling. Don’t you cry, he thought. Do not fucking cry. His chin rested on Justin’s hair, but just ba
rely; he’d grown at least six inches. He smelled of a sweet, talcum-y sweat and soap. From the exam, Eric guessed. Laura was crying and squeezing so hard, Eric worried she was hurting Justin. She wasn’t, though. He could feel his son smiling.
But then he was weeping, sobbing. For years, he’d coped with an awful, debilitating confusion: How could his son—a boy so precious that in first grade he’d paid a girl one dollar to be his girlfriend—how could that boy be eating a Pop-Tart when Eric left to run errands and then, just hours later, be gone? The coldness of it, the unassailable and disorienting finality of it, was crushing. That the world had nothing more to offer seemed inconceivable, and yet the days remained grimly unchanging. Now he felt the same confusion in reverse: How could his son—taller now and heavier, but still so much himself—be dropped back among them? He didn’t know. Nor did he know how long they’d stayed in the boxy room—maybe a few minutes, maybe half an hour—but now they were moving through the glossy cinder-block halls of the police station. The white paint was as thick as cake icing. Eric walked in front with Garcia and the deputy, trying to pay attention to what they were saying, but constantly glancing back at Laura and Justin; they walked with their elbows hooked, knocking into each other awkwardly, smiling like they’d just left a movie. Eric thought Justin might be favoring his right leg a little. Was he limping, or had his foot fallen asleep? Eric didn’t know where they were being led. Their path seemed haphazard, as if they were looking for someone who kept moving around. (They were avoiding a clerk who regularly leaked information to the press, but Eric wouldn’t learn that until the following morning.) Each person they passed smiled. Eric had the sense that word was spreading through the station and people were seeking them out, maneuvering to catch a glimpse. When they stepped into a wide room mazed with cubicles and metal desks, the men and women stood and applauded. Eric started clapping, too, and then Laura did, then Garcia and the deputy. There was a sizzle in the air, of mirth and release. Justin smiled his shy smile—still the same!—and shrugged: Pshaw. It was nothing.
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