Free Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston Page B

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.

    T HEY WERE NOTHING BUT TOUCH . A S G ARCIA 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 barely; 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.
    Eric tousled his son’s shaggy hair.
    “Dad,” Justin said, smiling, “you’re staring.”
    “It’s really