In the sky, clouds were stepped like cliffs.
Laura Campbell, that depleted woman. He’d recognized her the first time she’d volunteered, didn’t doubt himself for a second even when she wrote Wallace in the info box. Like she was checking into a seedy motel, using a made-up name. He’d never expected her to stick around as long as she had, never expected her to devour so many books on cetaceans. No question she knew more than he did. She reminded him a little of a drug addict who quit using and got hooked on jogging. There was a level of desperation to her care, an urgency; there was something compelling her that every other volunteer—including Paul—was lucky enough to lack. She never mentioned anything about her struggles; she wasn’t the proud kind of addict, not one to share war stories. She hardly mentioned anything about herself at all—most of what Paul knew had come from articles and news reports—and although he never pressed her, he could always sense a barely muted pain in her voice. How hard she worked to conceal it was as obvious as her long hair.
Who could blame her?
More than once he’d thought: If Alice dies, so does Laura.
If he had to guess, he’d say she used a different name to spare others the burden of offering sympathy. A kind of selflessness that saved her a little, too. Or would have if people didn’t recognize her. But they did, almost always. How many times had new volunteers asked him—sheepishly, perversely, illicitly—if she was who they thought she was? Because he felt protective of her, because he saw how desperately she wanted to hide, he never outed her, but they still knew. Their stricken looks, their somber shaking heads, their conspicuous reaching for their phones to text their friends: “Guess who I just saw at Marine Lab.” It made him hate them a little. Whenever possible, Paul arranged the schedule so that Laura only overlapped with the kindest volunteers—the shy honor students, the barefoot hippies, and the lonely women whose clothes were covered in cat hair. And, of course, the mothers or mothers-to-be, like Officer Treviño’s wife. In fact, the only volunteer he’d talked about Laura with was Officer Treviño. He’d started volunteering right around the time when the Campbell boy had been found, and he was a cop in Refugio, so sometimes he and Paul would sit on the observation deck, watching Alice and talking about Laura. “What I’m hearing at the office,” Treviño had once said, “is that the boy was raped practically every day. He was beaten with rolled-up newspapers until the ink smudged on his skin.”
When Paul called him this morning and asked him to fill in for Laura, Treviño had said, “Copy that. I’m on my way.”
Early light serrated the clouds. Gulls and sparrows and grackles were waking up, landing on the rails above the hatchery. Paul couldn’t decide if he should go into the warehouse. He didn’t know if he’d be welcome. It was what happened when you spent time near someone who’d suffered the way Laura had: You felt the stranger. You saw the void surrounding her, stranding and diminishing her, and you saw her seeing it, too. Undoubtedly, what everyone experienced around Laura was what she experienced around her poor, ruined son. You saw only the wounds. You couldn’t ignore how their bodies betrayed the pain they’d suffered. They were, Paul thought as he eased his car into gear and pulled out of the parking lot, like dolphins. In the water, you could only tell them apart by their scars, the places they’d been hit by outboard motors or sliced by commercial fishing line or bitten by sharks. The gashes defined them.
Paul had thirty minutes before Treviño’s shift ended. He pulled into the abandoned motel lot and closed his eyes, hoping to sleep in the truck for a few minutes. Around him, the morning was slowly rising. There were fragments of a dream—a girl from his youth, pigtailed Esmeralda, and woods strung with oak wilt, and someone welding, someone he knew but didn’t know, the sparks from the torch as blue as ice. Sleep never came, not completely; he was already moored in the waking world. The sun was bearing down, heavy and molten even that early, and the bay was choppy and frothed, insinuating itself, offering up its countless wounded creatures.
22
“THEN BREAK UP WITH HER,” JUSTIN SAID.
Griff had just helped him rearrange his room for what seemed the hundredth time. They were taking a break, assessing the layout, talking about Fiona. Sasha was on Justin’s bed. She was inching under his comforter. Griff could see only her tail now, which bothered him. He thought it would be easy to lose track of her if she went all the way under. He thought she would disappear, for days or weeks, only to reemerge later where they least expected. He was scared of her scaring him.
“Sasha’s going under the covers,” Griff said.
“And?”
“And I don’t want her to get too hot,” Griff said.
“She’s cold-blooded. If she doesn’t get enough heat, she’ll freeze to death.”
Griff wasn’t used to the room looking different. His parents had been so adamant that the room should stay how Justin left it that it had, Griff realized now, seemed fossilized, as permanent as a concrete memorial. He was afraid to ask why Justin kept changing it. Maybe the social worker had suggested it, or maybe the idea was all Justin’s, something that would confound Letty as well. Maybe changing up the room was meant to signal a new beginning. Or maybe there was nothing to be read into it at all. Now, with Justin, there always seemed to be the promise—or threat—of a sign, a symbol that required decoding. Griff found it exhausting.
It was early evening on Monday. Their father was running errands and their mother was closing up at the cleaner’s. Rainbow was under the house, lying in the cool earth; every once in a while they could hear her digging, kicking clumps of dirt against the floorboards beneath their feet. “Just think,” Justin said. “That dirt hasn’t been touched by the sun since the house was built.” Griff didn’t know how to respond when Justin said things like this, so he just nodded, trying to appear unaffected, like he’d thought the same thing before. He felt simultaneously older and younger around his brother, unsure whom their parents had left in charge. It was how he felt in general lately: clueless as to who meant what to whom.
Sasha was completely under the covers now, slithering in the furrows of the sheets. Justin wasn’t paying attention and Griff stayed quiet. He looked around the room, pretending to ponder the best place for his brother’s desk.
When Justin had asked him to help move his furniture again, Griff hadn’t expected to talk about Fiona. If anything, he thought they’d talk about Dwight Buford or where Justin had been going on his midnight drives. Griff no longer thought he’d be invited along, but sometimes Justin shared things he’d seen. “Two people were definitely fucking on the beach. They were old, like in their fifties, probably having an affair,” he’d said. Another time, he’d seen a group of kids they used to know shooting bottle rockets at each other’s feet, the fireworks hissing and skittering across the pavement. But tonight, while Griff and Justin were pushing the dresser toward the wall near the closet, Justin had asked why Fiona hadn’t been coming around. To his surprise, Griff admitted that he’d been avoiding her. He said he didn’t know why, but being around her made him lonely and afraid. He didn’t say that all of this had started after Dwight Buford had been released, but he sensed that Justin understood. That was something that hadn’t changed, the feeling that his older brother was putting things together ahead of him.
Justin said, “Don’t do it on the phone. And don’t wait around for her to break up with you. That’s what pussies do.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Griff said, though he suspected it probably was.
“And, anyway, I don’t think she’s the leaving kind.”
“She’s left a lot of guys. Like, a whole lot.”
“Says who?”
“She does,” Griff said.
“Exactly,” Justin said. He was surveying the room, trying to figure what to move next.
“I believe her. She used to tell me about all of her boyfriends.”
“Boyfriends? Plural? I’d be surprised if she’s had one boyfriend before you,” Just
in said.
“She likes pilots and Coast Guard guys. She calls them her lovers.”
“I’m sure she does,” Justin said.
“You think she’s lying?”
Justin was glancing around the room like he’d forgotten something. Griff leaned against the dresser, hoping he looked bored and cool. He wanted to know why his brother thought Fiona wasn’t telling the truth, wanted to know what his evidence was and how he’d found it. But Justin wasn’t answering. He went over to the bed and lifted the sheets, then cracked his neck.
“Shit,” Justin said. He looked around the room, biting at the nail of his index finger. Then he picked a piece of nail from his tongue and said, “Where’s Sasha?”
GRIFF SNEAKED OUT OF THE HOUSE LATER THAT NIGHT. JUSTIN and his parents were watching television, passing around a bowl of popcorn. Sasha lay coiled in Justin’s lap—earlier, they’d found her wedged between the box spring and mattress—and Rainbow was sprawled on the floor. Griff didn’t need to leave so clandestinely, but he didn’t want to alert anyone to where he was going. Or rather, when he eventually returned, he didn’t want to answer questions about where he’d been. Before he crawled through the window in his room, he’d texted Fiona and asked her to meet him at the marina. She’d responded with “About time, jackass.” He didn’t know what he’d say once they were together. Part of him hoped she’d convince him that breaking up was a mistake. Another part hoped she’d be furious and erratic, hoped she’d dump him before he said a word. Who cares if I’m a pussy? he thought.
Lightning bugs flared in the air. Making his way toward the marina, carrying his skateboard instead of riding it, Griff tried to guess where the insects would next illuminate. He was always wrong. A few cars passed on Station Street, and far off, deep into the trailer park behind the raggedy soccer field, people were laughing. The smell of smoldering charcoal, of smoked brisket. Then, an odd and elusive thought: Griff wondered if the same lightning bugs he was seeing now had just flown through the trailer park, or if they were moving that way now and the people who’d been laughing would soon see their lights. It struck him as the kind of thing Justin would think about, but the notion gave him pause that had nothing to do with his brother. Just then, that he could share anything with anyone else, that he could be connected to them by a sight or sound was mystifying. Nothing seemed permanent. Nothing seemed to have a beginning or end; or, maybe, everything seemed only to have a beginning or an end, and lacked whatever qualities were required to last, to endure, to exist beyond the specific moment of Griff’s regard.
Without meaning to, he’d stopped walking. He stood on the street and found himself surrounded by stillness, by a jarring silence. No cars, no movement or distant laughter, everything mausoleum-quiet. During the years that Justin was gone, there had been times like this, times when the streets of Southport seemed utterly deserted. Lifeless. Motionless. No gulls overhead, no ferry horn in the harbor, no tourists milling around or dogs panting behind fences. The town seemed emptied, abandoned. People had retreated indoors from the withering heat, or they were already in bed or not yet up, but Griff was out. He imagined the whole world this way, imagined that he alone remained. It reminded him of the moments when he used to try to think of himself as an only child, as a kid who’d never had a brother at all. How disgustingly easy it had been. How seamlessly loneliness took hold. The quiet and stillness unnerved him, taunted him. He envied everyone who’d disappeared. He resented having ever been spared.
He lost track of time. Fiona was probably at the marina, fuming. Again, he was torn. He wanted to jump on his board and skate to her as fast as he could, but he also wanted to turn and bolt home. How had his life reached this point? Just months before, he’d been dousing his socks with Fiona’s perfume, preparing to lose her to the next pilot or sailor to come along. (That Justin doubted she’d had other boyfriends was still a riddle he couldn’t unpack.) And before that, four years ago, he’d been where? Justin would have been gone for a couple of months and the searches were already wilting with disappointment; there was the pervading sense that anyone holding out hope was pathetically deluded. Griff had certainly stopped expecting Justin to waltz back into their lives like it had all been a silly misunderstanding; he’d stopped believing that their lives had been paused as opposed to ruined. None of it had ever seemed real, and it rendered everything that followed unreal, too. He remembered someone, his father or grandfather maybe, saying he wished it had happened earlier in the year, when school was still in session, so they could have organized the upperclassmen into search parties.
“Two hundred extra eyes,” he’d said. “That’s what we could use right now.”
And yet here he was, walking through nets of humidity to break up with Fiona. Because Justin was home and had told him not to be a pussy. Because Dwight Buford was out of jail and crowding Griff’s thoughts. Because letting Fiona go seemed somehow right. Because she deserved better. Because the world had stabilized to the degree that this was a worthwhile problem to have.
23
SITTING IN THE TELEVISION’S FLICKERING LIGHT WITH HIS wife and son. A nearly empty bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, a movie full of rooftop chases and explosions on the screen. Eric thought he should feel more sanguine, more at ease. He was trying.
He felt good about having settled into the movie without the urge to vet it beforehand. For years, his habit had been to preview as many programs as he could before Laura or Griff watched them. Tonight he’d just started flipping the channels until they found something interesting. A small impulse remained, a low and constant concern that some plot twist would involve a kidnapping or sex, but it was endurable. Laura’s feet were wrapped in an afghan. She had her Moleskine on the arm of the couch and a pen in her lap in case she needed to make a note. Justin sat beside her, his eyes fluttering as he tried to stay awake. Sasha lay in his lap. The air smelled of her scales, musky. Relax, Eric thought. Enjoy this.
Griff had been in his room all evening, so maybe his absence was the problem. Eric couldn’t remember if Fiona had come over earlier, if they were holed up together. Or the problem could have been what he couldn’t forget: Justin admitting he’d been angry with them while he was in Corpus. Eric had never entertained that possibility, though he should have. His breathing went shallow again. How was Justin to know they’d been tirelessly looking for him? How could he not assume they weren’t doing enough? Then, the more trenchant and damning fear that Justin’s anger was warranted, that they’d been sluggish and complacent when they should have been vigilant, monastic, relentless. Or maybe what was keeping Eric on edge was the worry that Dwight Buford had vacated his parents’ house. That he was gone for good and they’d always expect him to come after Justin. Eric looked at the window. Lightning bugs fired in the dark. Had Griff ambled in at that moment, with or without Fiona, Eric would have paused the movie and told his family how much they meant to him, how he would spend the rest of his life striving to live up to their standards, how he’d never forgive himself for the ways he’d let them down.
And like that, he understood: He needed Griff in the room. He needed the four of them together. He said, “Griff would like this. I’ll go draw him out of his lair and—”
“Shhh,” Laura said, her forefinger to her mouth. Then she shifted her eyes and Eric’s attention to Justin. He’d fallen asleep and in the half dark, he looked young and contented. He looked like the boy he’d been before.
Eric settled back into his recliner. He watched Laura watch Justin, watched her reach for her Moleskine and quietly flip to a page and write something out in her long, looping script. Or was she sketching him? He couldn’t tell. Contentment still eluded him. The three of them seemed a surreal version of the family they’d been for the last four years. Justin had taken the place of Griff, and Griff was missing. There seemed an open circuit, an incomplete iteration. Everything felt ephemeral. Laura wrote in her notebook and Justin slept and Eric was trying not to acknowledge how vulnerable
they all were. But if something can be lost, he thought, then its loss is always just a breath away. Then it’s all but already gone.
24
THE WORLD RETURNED FROM SILENCE. CARS TRUNDLED OFF the ferry, their headlamps pushing through the dark. Griff was nearing the Teepee and could hear skaters in the pool. Urethane wheels groaned against the cement, rattled over the tile below the coping. There was also a dull banging.
Griff couldn’t stop thinking about where he’d been four years ago. He remembered—in addition to the dashed hope of Justin returning, of him explaining everything away—how he couldn’t decide if he should tell his parents or the detectives about the arguments with his brother. “Maybe it’s a small thing that doesn’t sound important at all,” the cops were always saying. “Cases turn on the tiniest detail. One domino tumps another and then, bingo, everyone is safe at home.” But he never mentioned their fighting, or how Justin had left the house because Griff had made him feel unwelcome. He remembered the filthy sense of empowerment, of feeling older and stronger, that came with exiling Justin. This was something else he’d never told: He’d been pleased with himself, proud even, for putting his brother out. What had Griff been doing four years ago? Hindering the investigation. Lying to everyone who could have helped find Justin. He might as well have been colluding with Dwight Buford.
Along Station Street, it wasn’t dark enough for lightning bugs. The streetlights were burning, casting a dusty glow onto the cement. A film of dirt and sand and pollen on everything; it had been months since rain. The dull banging fell and rose, and Griff assumed it was down in the marina, a mechanic working on a dry-docked boat. He was more focused on the noises from the Teepee pool, the harsh rumble of skaters grinding and the clatter of their boards when they fell. He could hear voices, too. Someone, maybe Baby Snot, said, “To the victor go the spoils, and tonight we’re all named Victor!” Others laughed and clapped their boards against the concrete. Then, a new thread of a scent tinged the air: the sticky tang of marijuana. It grew more cloying with every step, and put Griff on alert. If he’d had more time, he would’ve doubled back and taken the long way to the marina. He didn’t want to see the skaters, didn’t want to nod and make small talk, didn’t want to watch their expressions soften as they exhaled pale smoke. Call Fiona, he thought. Say you’re sorry. Say your parents called you home. Say Justin did. Say it’s an emergency.
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