Laura was also seeking out places to cry again. She wanted thick walls or open spaces. She wanted dark rooms and wide swaths of time. How many movies had she gone to in those four years? She always sat in the back. She bought buttered popcorn out of gratitude for the service the theater provided. She cried in the shower, in the pews of empty churches, in public bathrooms. She cried on the drive to and from Marine Lab; if the sobbing got too bad, she steered onto the shoulder. (But she never clicked her hazard lights on, lest someone stop to help.) And, of course, there were the times she’d broken down in public. How to explain that she felt no embarrassment? How to convey that she liked not being able to contain herself, liked that others had to see what she’d been reduced to? But she’d gotten better over the years, more disciplined. When she could feel the fits coming on, she’d start planning a trip to the movies, a late-night ferry ride. She almost looked forward to them. They became a way of marking the days that otherwise blurred into each other like fog.
She thought things should be easier. Now. Things should be easier now. With Justin home. With everyone having survived his time away. She thought the past should throw the present into a stark, palliative relief. She tried to focus on the beautiful mess of Justin’s hair when he woke up, the way his shirts smelled before she washed them—woodsy, powdery, not unlike his father’s. But the fear and anger and confusion came back with new force, with an intensified, rumbling vigor. She’d tossed out as many of the welcome home plants as she could. They taunted her, reminded her of how gullible she’d been. Had she really been jealous of redheaded Marcy? Had Justin’s reticence really seemed so insulting? She appalled herself. Eric didn’t like her throwing out the plants. She knew that. Maybe she was trying to goad him into a confrontation. If so, he resisted the bait. She admired and resented his composure. His resolute faith that things would work out, make sense, become clear. For her, Dwight Buford’s being out in the world was incomprehensible. She couldn’t figure where to fit such knowledge to keep it from consuming her, and so it was everywhere. Like him.
She’d been worried that she wouldn’t be allowed to volunteer at Marine Lab again. Worried that Paul, the rescue coordinator, would blacklist her for ditching the shifts she’d signed up for before Justin was found. Worried that Alice’s condition would have deteriorated to such a degree that she would have been transferred to the facility in Galveston. Worried—selfishly, unforgivably—that the dolphin would have recovered and been released. Laura felt fairly certain she would’ve read about such developments in the paper or on the website, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being left behind. This was the reality in which she now lived. An essential faith had been stripped away. The assumption that what had existed would continue to exist was itself gone. Her life—everyone’s life—seemed rigged with trapdoors and hidden, collapsible walls, panels that would open without warning and claim what had been yours, claim it only because you’d allow yourself to believe it couldn’t be claimed.
But Paul told her to sign up for as many shifts as she could handle, asking nothing about where she’d been. Most of what was available were murder shifts, so Laura would often go straight from Marine Lab to open the dry cleaner’s in the mornings. She didn’t mind. She liked those quiet hours, how each angle of light took on significance. The track of the moon reflecting on the water like a jeweled path and the rising sun gilding the corners of the morning in nameless color. She liked being back at Marine Lab, the smell of chlorine and frozen herring and water spilled from the pool. The inflatable alligator she’d brought from home so long ago was still standing on its tail in the corner beside the life jackets. Paul was still constantly on the phone, jockeying for donations of one kind or another. Each time she interacted with him, usually when she sterilized her hands at the sink or turned in her shift notes before leaving, she was compelled to explain herself. My son, she would say. My son came home. She kept quiet, though. She was still signing up for shifts under her maiden name.
Alice’s condition had worsened, though not to the point where she needed to be trucked to Galveston. Her appetite was diminished. She likely had another intestinal infection. Because she wasn’t eating enough on her own, they tubed her twice a day, pumping a blended mixture of fish and liquid and antibiotics into her stomach. They wanted to keep her hydrated and make sure she had enough calories to maintain her strength. Laura took meticulous notes and watched for signs of distress, but Alice appeared strong. Maybe lethargic at times, and a little thinner, but healthy. She swam clockwise around the pool, occasionally rolling onto her side as she passed Laura on the observation deck. Sometimes she blew bubble rings that dispersed at the surface. Those were new. Alice gave no indication of recognizing Laura, but neither did she keep her distance the way she often did with unfamiliar volunteers. Laura clung to this, took it as evidence that she might be known again.
Every time Laura made a note on the log sheets she was reminded of how her handwriting had come to resemble her mother’s. She’d started noticing the similarities when she dug up her mother’s recipe box after Justin returned. It had been dislocating to see that the faded, ribbony script detailing how much celery to use in the potato salad so closely resembled the writing in Laura’s Moleskine. Her mother’d had a bawdy, wide-open laugh and a love of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. She’d died young, of a heart attack, and Laura didn’t think of her nearly as often as she believed she should. Nor did she believe she knew the details of her parents’ lives that children—especially grown children—were supposed to. She knew the dates they’d died, but would be hard-pressed to name their birthdays or anniversary or how they met. Before Justin went missing, one of Laura’s greatest fears was that the boys would ask about her own parents and she’d be forced to lie—to invent details of their grandparents’ lives—or admit her ignorance, willful as it was. Unlike Eric, for whom history provided solace and pattern, she’d always sought to leave the past behind. She was insecure in the face of it, shamed by all she’d forgotten or never known.
But since she’d been dipping into the recipe box, and especially since Buford had been released, her mother had been on her mind more. She wondered how Patricia Wallace would have reacted to everything that was happening, how she would have felt about the way Laura had reacted. There was no telling. Her mother seemed to always be holding parts of herself back from those around her. She was most open, most herself, in the late afternoons when she and their neighbor Joyce would sit on the porch. Toddy Time, they called it. They smoked cigarettes, sipped beer, and ate apple slices dusted in salt. They gossiped about neighbors and people from church, and traded ideas about what to fix for supper. Laura played with her dolls in the flower bed.
On the afternoon Laura remembered most clearly, the women had been drinking and talking about some trouble at the jewelry store where Laura’s mother worked. Laura was wearing a new dress, the first one she could remember picking out herself, one she had, in fact, chosen because it reminded her in some unidentifiable way of Joyce. (Joyce was prettier than Laura’s mother, a fact that felt shameful to notice.) The dress was lavender with long lace sleeves. Laura was playing in the flower bed, hunting for woolly worms and ladybugs. She crawled between the house and the rosebushes, taking care not to get dirty. She could hear the women whispering, giggling. She could hear the apple slices snapping between their teeth.
“Oh, he thinks he’s a smart cookie,” her mother said. “He thinks he’s God’s gift.”
When Laura stood up, the lace of her sleeve caught on a thorn and the fabric was ripping, loosening around her shoulder and armpit, before she recognized what the sound was.
Had she gasped or cried out? The thorn had pricked her, too. Her skin was dotted with blood, but she was focused on having ruined her dress, on trying to keep quiet to think of ways to explain herself. Then the women were off the porch and in the yard. Cigarettes clenched in their lips, smoke rising into their eyes, and the branches of the rosebushes being gingerly pul
led back so Laura could step out.
“Laura Leigh Wallace,” her mother said. Her voice was low, but sharp. She blew smoke over her shoulder. “We just bought this dress. Your daddy’ll have both our hides.”
“It’s not that bad,” she said. “We can fix it.”
The women stood her in the grass and studied her. Their hands were on her, dusting off her dress.
“Oh, baby girl,” Joyce said. “All the pretty lace is ripped clean through.”
Laura’s mother flicked her cigarette into the street. She said, “You know what your daddy’ll say? He’ll say, ‘If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it.’ We’re going to hear that for a month.”
“Can we sew it? Fix it up in a way he won’t notice?”
Joyce laughed and said, “Noticing isn’t a man’s strong suit, you got that right. Just ask Mr. Handsy over at the jewelry store.”
“Who’s Mr. Handsy?”
“She means Mr. Clark,” Laura’s mother said. “She means he needs to pay more attention to his inventory and less to his lady customers.”
“ ‘If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it.’ That’s rich,” Joyce said. “That’s richer than rich.”
What, Laura always wondered when that memory arose, had become of her pretty little dress? She had no recollection of what had happened to it, whether they tried to stitch the lace or just wadded the dress into a ball and tossed it in the wastebasket. Nor did she know what became of Joyce. She’d still been alive, still beautiful and smoking on her porch, when Laura left the Panhandle—this was the year after her mother died, when Laura went to live with her aunt in West Texas—but she was surely gone now. Everything about that time seemed cleaved from Laura’s current life. Her handwriting resembled her mother’s, yes, but even that seemed a kind of happenstance. The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all.
ON FRIDAY MORNING, THE EARLY SUN BROKE YELLOW ON THE horizon. Murky light dappled the wetlands around Marine Lab. The smell of dew, a breeze already pitted with heat, every smooth surface streaked with condensation. As soon as she stepped out of the warehouse, she knew she’d have to let the air conditioner run to defog the windows before she could see well enough to drive. Crickets trilled, and frogs. They sounded far away. For a moment, to Laura, everything seemed distant, unknowable. It was as if she were at the bottom of a well.
As she made her way to her car, a man stepped out of a 4×4 truck parked on the opposite side of the lot. He cut a tall, broad silhouette against the rising sun; he left the driver’s-side door open as he crossed the lot. Laura’s heart sped up: Dwight Buford. His boots on the caliche sounded like tiny bones cracking. She didn’t want to be afraid, didn’t want to taste dread in her throat like bile. Sudden bursts of heat flared behind her knees. She kept her eyes on the ground, but knew the man was coming toward her rather than going to the Marine Lab door. The heat behind her knees had, like that, turned frigid, freezing, and yet sweat beaded all over her. She told herself it couldn’t be Buford, that she was being paranoid and Eric was right, nothing to worry about, that no one knew she volunteered here, that she had used her maiden name, Wallace, that Buford would have no reason to come for her, that—
“Mrs. Campbell?”
Campbell. Not Wallace. She was ready to scream. She gripped her keys between her fingers, like spikes, thinking she’d try to gouge his eyes. She thought to turn back, unsure if she was closer to the warehouse door or her car, unsure which would be safer. The caliche cracked more quickly. He might have been jogging now. Her lungs felt shallow, seized up. She didn’t look back, just tried to make it to her car before the man reached for her.
“Mrs. Campbell?” he said again. Then he touched her shoulder.
She spun around, gripping the keys, wondering if she would survive, wondering if she’d go to jail. Then, even in the half dark, she recognized him. Almost recognized him.
“Hey,” the man said, looking remorseful. “It’s Rudy.”
She couldn’t speak. Her throat was closed. Her fingers hurt from clenching the keys. The sense of being in a well returned, but she was farther down now, trying to see this man, this Rudy, from a great depth.
“Did I scare you? I didn’t mean to,” Rudy said. When she didn’t answer, he continued, “We volunteered together a while back. I was filling in for my wife, remember? I told you about the tattoo on her ankle, a dolphin she had done in Cancún.”
“Y’all were pregnant,” Laura said.
“Still are,” Rudy said and looked toward the wetlands. The sun was higher, glinting on the rippled water. With the light and with her heart quieting, Laura had a hazy recollection of having seen Rudy during that shift. Could it have been the shift when Eric had come to get her? The day Justin came home? She wasn’t sure. It seemed years ago. Rudy said, “When you and I met, I think she was on a jalapeño corn bread kick. Now it’s pan dulce. All pan dulce, all the time. But it has to come from a specific bakery in Portland.”
“I liked anything lemon-flavored,” she said. “I used to make my husband go to Luby’s and buy three lemon meringue pies at a time.”
“After my shift, I’m heading to Portland for the second time in two days. We live in Refugio, so I’ll have an extra thousand miles on my truck before the end of the year.”
“Just wait until the baby comes,” Laura said, remembering other cravings she’d had when pregnant. With Justin, she’d had the urge to eat toothpaste straight from the tube. With Griff, she’d loved the smell of charcoal and she couldn’t eat anything that wasn’t drenched in Tabasco sauce.
“I wasn’t on the schedule this morning,” Rudy said, “but I’m at the top of the call list when someone cancels. I guess the person after you got sick.”
I used to be that way, Laura almost said, but changed her mind. She said, “Paul’s with her now. She’s had a good morning. She blew a lot of bubble rings.”
The sun was brightening, the crickets going quiet in the swamp grass. By the time she got to the dry cleaner’s, the temperature would be in the high eighties, if not the nineties. On those afternoons in her youth, her mother would say, “Oh, it’s hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch.”
“The bubble rings are new,” Laura said. “Today she popped a few with her beak.”
“She taught herself to blow them a couple weeks back. She’s always surprised when she pops them, I think. It’s like when a bubble-gum bubble bursts on a kid’s face.”
“Does she ever play with that inflatable alligator? The one that’s standing on its tail in the corner?”
Rudy thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. Mostly I’ve seen her play with the beach ball and those floaty noodles. That was before she stopped eating.”
“A girl has a right to go on a diet,” Laura said, surprising herself. Because this man had turned out not to be Dwight Buford and because he cared for Alice, she wanted to make him feel better. “She’s just trying to get her figure where she wants it. She’ll bounce back.”
“ ‘On a diet,’ ” Rudy repeated. “I’ll tell that to my wife. She’ll enjoy it.”
Something skittered in the grass—a lizard probably, though Laura couldn’t see.
“Well,” Laura said, “have a good shift.”
“Sorry if I scared you,” he said. “I just thought I recognized you and wanted to make sure.”
“It’s me,” she said. “I’m still here.”
LAURA DIDN’T CRY ON THE DRIVE TO WORK, NOR DID SHE DWELL on the implications of Rudy calling her by her married name. Days would pass before she even remembered it. Instead, she thought of the way a mother dolphin will swim with her newborn calf beside her. Echelon swimming, it’s called. Until the calf develops enough strength and coordination, it will swim in its mother’s slipstream. The positioning allows the mother to monitor her calf’s breathing, and the slipstream pu
lls it along, preserving its energy and body heat. From there, Laura’s mind slid to the accounts she’d read of dolphins seeing others in respiratory distress and lifting them to the surface so they wouldn’t drown. There were reports of them saving other dolphins this way, but also dogs and seals and even humans. Pods would band together to take turns keeping the animal afloat, or they would swim so close to the shore that it could reach dry land on its own. How dolphins understood to do this, no one knew, and in her car, Laura found herself hoping it would always remain a mystery. The hour-long drive passed in an instant, the billboard with Justin’s picture on it and the Alamo Fireworks stand hardly registering, and the only time Dwight Buford entered her thoughts was in those moments when she recognized that he wasn’t encroaching. She knew he would, but briefly she felt as if she’d been buoyed, lifted to the surface where she could draw a breath before being pulled under again.
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