Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  I stopped crying because if there was one thing I knew about Mom, it was that she always kept her promises to me. So many people had let her down in her life, and she didn’t want me to grow up sad like her. She wanted me to feel as though the world was a good place where people kept their word and anything was possible. I believed her. I trusted her with every little cell in my body. I loved her with all that I had.

  But then she got into a car accident and died.

  Sometimes I still have nightmares about Mr. Toad, only it’s just Mom in the car, and it’s not some little kids’ ride at Disneyland—it’s really happening. And then I wake up, and I realize that it really did happen.

  I hate to say this, but I am sure that Mom is in hell right now. She was sent there for lying to me. For making me believe that the world is something it isn’t.

  Gabriel says he doesn’t believe in hell. He doesn’t believe in heaven either. But I believe in both, and I also believe what Papa Pete used to say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  I am going to hell, Aurora Grace. After what I’ve done, it seems pretty obvious. But I don’t feel bad about it. Actually, I’m looking forward. I’ll see my mother again, and even though we will be burning for all eternity in a blazing furnace, surrounded, like the Bible says, by the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, she will hold me tight. She will kiss my forehead. And she will tell me that it’s only a ride.

  Love,

  April

  Seventeen

  Robin

  “IT’S ALL OVER Twitter,” Eric said.

  It was dark out—past 9:00 P.M. Robin had left the postfuneral gathering early in order to sit with her mother in intensive care, and she’d just returned to find the house completely dark except for the kitchen, where Eric stood by the refrigerator, a beer in one hand, staring at his ever-present phone.

  “That makes two of you,” said Robin.

  He looked up at her. “What?”

  “Nothing.” She had to stop it with the pettiness. It wasn’t doing anybody any good. “I’m just . . . I’m tired.”

  “I know, honey.” He started to move closer. She took a step back.

  “Any change with your mom?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s all over Twitter?”

  He handed her his phone—which was, Robin had to admit, a sign that he might have nothing to hide. She looked at the screen. A series of tweets, all with the hashtag #TarryRidgeShooting. “Wow.”

  “I was debating whether or not to show you,” he said. “But I figured it’s always best to know what kind of crazy you’re up against.”

  She clicked on one tweet, linking to Robin’s Femme Seven column and speculating that “some incel POS” had shot Robin’s parents in response to it. #TarryRidgeShooting was accompanied by a dizzying array of hashtags, including #RedPillLosers #MicroPenis and #StoptheHate. Another tweet speculated that if it weren’t for Robin’s “feminist agenda,” her parents would “still be alive.” Yet another included a #GoodGuyWithAGun hashtag and pointed out that Robin’s parents would have been a lot better off had they been armed. She handed the phone to Eric, wondering what that tweeter might say if he knew that the gun that had shot them had actually belonged to her mother. “Hashtag no words,” she said.

  “Labatoir wants to do a show about it.”

  She looked at him. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I wish I was.”

  “Well . . . what did you say?”

  “I told him to shove it up his ass.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I may have said butt. You know how Shawn hates profanity.”

  Robin broke into a smile. She hadn’t genuinely smiled since the shooting and she almost felt guilty about it.

  Eric smiled back at her. For a few careless moments, she felt like falling into his arms, just for the sake of being close to him, of feeling the warmth and strength and promise of his body. “I’m on your side, you know,” he said. “I’ll always be on your side.”

  “Eric,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to live without her.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. She’s going to make it. I know it.” He looked straight into her eyes as he said it.

  “You really believe that, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  She knew he was telling the truth. Eric had always been like this, the very definition of blind optimism. In the past, she’d found it appealing—contagious too, the belief that anything was possible if you just willed it that way. But then Eric started working for sleazy Shawn Labatoir and changed in ways she wouldn’t have willed if she’d had that power. He started showing less of his new self to her and more of it at the office, on social media, wherever else he went to disappear. He worked longer hours and got raises and promotions, which bought them things he, not she, wanted: new furniture for the house, a renovated kitchen, dinners at New York’s finest restaurants. Robin didn’t care about any of that, and now she was the owner of an expensive home she spent a lot of time alone in; its only real value its proximity to her parents, one of whom was dead, the other so very close to it, for reasons she might never know and that, like everything else, she had no control over.

  Robin took a breath. Enough. Eric put his beer down on the counter and took her hand in his. She didn’t pull away.

  “Anybody show up at the house after I left?” she said.

  “A few people.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “Michael from your office. Some lady who said she used to babysit you when you were a kid. A guy who said he was one of your dad’s colleagues, but seemed a lot more like a patient if you ask me—”

  “A babysitter?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She didn’t stay long, but she left her card and said she’d love to catch up. It’s on the table.”

  Robin spotted it and picked it up—a plain white card with black lettering. A name: Nicola Crane. A phone number. A P.O. box in Philadelphia.

  Eric said, “You remember her? Nicola?”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Gray hair. Your mom’s age, maybe? About your height.”

  “Very bright blue eyes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nikki. That’s how she introduced herself. And I got the impression she was a friend of my mom’s.”

  “She is,” he said. “I think she was a friend of your mom’s who babysat you from time to time. Not a babysitter per se.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  “I saw her at the funeral. I don’t remember anyone from my childhood who looked like her.”

  He smiled. “She probably didn’t, back then,” he said. “Anyway, she seemed anxious to get together. She said she’s going to be in town until your mom gets out of the hospital. Said you can call her anytime.”

  “See, now that’s interesting too. Who is this old friend of my mom’s who I haven’t seen since I was a kid—and who cares so much about what happens to my mom, she puts her life in Philadelphia on hold?”

  Eric didn’t answer, and, when Robin looked up at him, she saw he was absorbed in his phone. Her heart dropped a little. “I’m going up to bed now.”

  “Wait, what? Sorry I was just—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Good night.”

  Eric said something. Robin didn’t hear him and didn’t ask him to repeat it. She went up the stairs with Nicola Crane’s card in her hand. She tried to remember her, a younger version of this sinewy, silver-haired, tough-looking woman. Nicola, Nikki. Knickknack, paddywhack . . . Maybe she’d gone by something else. Mrs. Crane?

  Robin changed into a big T-shirt, brushed her teeth. She got into bed without taking off her makeup, because the thought of running those moist towelettes all over her face wore her out and anyway, most of her makeup was gone. She was exhausted, phys
ically and emotionally, head to toe, her muscles like wrung-out rags. Maybe I can get to sleep tonight without any help.

  She lay flat on her back and closed her eyes, the cool of the pillow against her neck, her palms resting on the soft sheets. She listened to the hum of the air conditioner, trying not to let her own thoughts get the best of her, the nursery rhyme playing in her head, over and over, Knickknack paddywhack, give the dog a bone . . .

  The stray dog her mother had brought home, a pit puppy named Brutus with silver fur and big sad eyes. Brutus, that had been his name, and he’d licked Robin’s nose, making her laugh. But her father . . .

  I can’t, Renee. You know that. My allergies.

  But, Mitchell, he has nowhere to go . . .

  The baby bird has no mother. Let me help her, she has nowhere to go . . .

  She has nowhere to go. She won’t be any trouble. She can clean up around the house and help me take care of Robbie. Come on, Mitchell, please . . .

  Mom always taking in strays. Dad always making her take them back . . . “Mom,” Robin whispered, her voice small and alone in the darkened room. “Mom. Don’t go. I need you more than Dad does now. Don’t listen to him. Don’t do what he says for once. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.”

  And then she was sobbing. How fast that had happened, that shift from the brink of sleep to this—Robin bent in two, clasping her knees, her throat aching, all the breath knocked out of her. This is the way grief is. This is the way it’s always going to be. It lies in wait and then it pounces and there’s nothing you can do. There will never be anything you can do to make it better . . .

  She reached for the bottle of sleeping pills on her nightstand, dropped two of them into her mouth, choked them down without water. She ran a hand across her wet face and waited for sleep to take her out, thinking again of that young babysitter—a teenage girl. Her mother’s last stray. She can take care of Robbie, Mitchell. She loves Robbie so much. Her mother’s arms around the girl’s shoulders. And how old had Robin been? Around eight or nine. The girl had called herself CoCo and she’d played Barbies with Robin and let her watch MTV and she’d let her comb her hair. Such long, pretty blond hair and blue eyes. Bright blue eyes. CoCo. Nicola. Oh, how you’ve changed . . . “Mom,” Robin whispered into her arm as she drifted off to sleep. “Your stray has come back.”

  ONE SUMMER NIGHT, when she was ten years old, Robin woke up thinking that someone was breaking into her house. She’d heard the floorboards creaking when she was still half asleep, and she tried telling herself—as her parents had always told her when she was little and frightened by noises in the middle of the night—that it was just the old house settling. But then there had been a crash downstairs, and Robin had sat up in bed, too frightened to scream. After a few moments, she’d heard the squeak of the back door opening.

  Robin had sneaked out of bed and peered out her window. She saw it right away: the shadow of a man, turned away from the house, facing the hedges on the far side of the garden. A shadow that, even from the upstairs window and in such a terrified state, she had recognized as her father.

  Robin had put her sneakers on. She’d hurried downstairs and into the backyard, just as he was putting out a cigarette. The shiny red ashtray cupped in his hand, his cheeks flushed, even in the dim garden lights. Dad. Smoking.

  Don’t tell Mom, he had said, finger to his lips.

  Standing now in her parents’ backyard at two in the morning, thirty years later and with her father in his grave, Robin could practically see him here again, surprised as he’d been on that night, Dad caught in the act in his pajamas and robe, stale smoke hovering between them as he turned to her, shame all over his face.

  You never truly know anyone. Every human being who has lived long enough to make mistakes has secrets stashed away in the back of a locked closet or stored in a cloud or crouching in the darkest depths of the brain, moments of weakness that they’ve worked their whole lives to hide, even from those they love most. Especially from those they love most.

  Robin’s father smoked. Her mother owned a gun.

  Robin shut her eyes tight for several seconds and inhaled the smell of her parents’ garden—the pasty scent of tiger lilies hanging in the sticky night air, the same way it had the night of her father’s forbidden cigarette break. It had been the same time of year. Summer vacation, Robin biding her time until camp, each day an endless day in an endless summer in which nothing bad would happen. Promise me you won’t smoke anymore, Dad, she had said. He’d given her a smile. I’ll try not to, honey. Such a good person. Unable to make a promise to his daughter that he might not be able to keep. When Robin opened her eyes again, they were filled with tears.

  The full moon bathed her parents’ garden and made it glow like an image in a dream. When she’d left her house, Eric had been asleep in the bed beside her, so thoroughly unconscious that she hadn’t even needed to worry about keeping quiet as she escaped. She assumed he’d gotten into her sleeping pills, which was understandable. He had work in the morning.

  At 1:30 A.M., Robin had woken up from a fitful half-sleep, the pills not working quite as well as she’d hoped. She’d watched Eric for a few moments—his pained, twitching face—wondering what he could possibly be dreaming. And then she’d left. Threw some yoga pants on, some sneakers, along with the big T-shirt she’d been sleeping in—one of Eric’s, from a marathon he’d run back in 2004. She’d driven to her parents’ house without thinking, as though drawn here by a magnet with no real idea why. She’d parked about a block and a half up, in front of the small public garden she sometimes played in as a kid, jogged from there to the house on the opposite side of the street, so as not to alert Mr. Dougherty of her presence.

  She hadn’t come here to investigate. The police had swept the house days ago, after all, bagging anything noteworthy and taking it with them. No. Robin had devised an entire plan to get here unnoticed, just so she could breathe in this air and see if her parents’ home still held the same magic . . . the only place, all these years, where she ever truly felt calm.

  It wasn’t the same. Of course it wasn’t. Tire tracks on the front lawn, remnants of yellow crime scene tape hanging from the front and back doors in tatters. The whole house dark, empty. Lifeless.

  Who shot you, Dad? What were your last thoughts?

  In her mind, she saw this place the way it had looked the night of the shootings. The whirling lights of the police cars, the rush to the front door. All those cops she didn’t know, pushing into her parents’ home. And Dad on the stretcher. The wide-open eyes. Whose eyes had he seen last? Who killed you, Dad?

  Robin moved across the garden, to the line of hedges where she’d caught her father smoking. She could still smell cigarettes—clearly some miswired synapse, fried from grief.

  She noticed something glinting between two of the hedges—a hard, shiny thing, reflecting the moonlight—and bent down for a closer look.

  “Dad,” she whispered.

  It was the ashtray. The same one.

  Robin picked it up. An ashtray of red ceramic with black, white, and gold dice painted on it, the words Las Vegas swirling across one side in ’60s-glam cursive. So unlike her scholarly, quiet father. But then, it hadn’t been like him to smoke either.

  It was a good-size ashtray, and there was easily a pack of butts in it. She wondered when he’d smoked the last of these, which were all the same brand. Dad had been a Marlboro man, apparently.

  Robin thought about taking the ashtray home with her as a souvenir. But instead she decided to replace it, crouching down and setting it gently back in its spot behind the hedges, hidden from Mom, from the world.

  As she did, Robin noticed something on the ground that had either been underneath the ashtray or beside it—a piece of lined paper, folded into eighths.

  Robin picked it up and unfolded it—a clean, dry, pristine sheet that clearly hadn’t been outside long enough to survive a rain. And it had come from one of Robin’s father’s n
otebooks.

  When it came to his patients, Mitchell Bloom was an old-school Freudian notetaker, scribbling on a pad while they poured out their souls on his couch, not a laptop or a voice recorder in sight. He’d been using the same type of classy stenographer’s pad for years—leather-bound, the pages a pale aqua. He bought them in bulk from an office supply chain, and in his home office, he kept the used-up ones in a locked cabinet, each notebook labeled with a patient’s name. More than once at her parents’ home, Robin had seen Mitchell opening the cabinet when on the phone with a patient, thumbing through one of these books as he listened.

  Robin had expected to find a page filled with her father’s illegible doctor’s scrawl. But when she opened it, she saw a phone number with a 213 area code. She recognized it from the caller ID at her office, three days earlier. Knew it without having to double-check. Quentin Garrison’s number.

  Below it, her father had written three names in careful capital letters, with arrows drawn from one to the next, from the bottom up. And though she wasn’t quite sure what it all meant, it gave her the most overwhelming feeling, as though each name were a wave sweeping over her, knocking her down.

  QUENTIN GARRISON

  KATE SHARKEY

  APRIL

  ROBIN SAT BOLT upright in bed, the remnants of a nightmare running through her head—a spray of bullets, a wash of blood. She couldn’t remember any more of it than that. Light streamed into the room. She was alone in bed, Eric long gone. The house silent. She checked her phone. 9:00 A.M.

  She rubbed her eyes, confused, but only for a few seconds—only until she saw the folded-up piece of lined, pale aqua paper on her nightstand, and then it all came crashing back.

  Last night, she’d jogged back to her car and sped all the way home, heart racing, eyes bolted open.