“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,” Justin 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.