Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  Robin opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find the words. Mitchell Bloom had always despised guns, to the point of where he’d complained to Robin’s high school about the use of prop guns in a production of Hedda Gabler. He’d always said it was the thing that had bothered him most about Wards Island—not the murderers, but the armed guards, the ever-present firearms. The idea of her father buying a gun made even less sense than her mother buying one. But what could Robin say? Renee knew it as well as she did.

  “I know it sounds strange,” Renee said. “That’s one reason why we never mentioned it to you.”

  “It was Dad’s gun.”

  “Yes.”

  “He registered it to you.”

  Renee met her gaze, her blue eyes steely. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Robin said. “Thank you for being honest.”

  Renee’s eyes narrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?” She practically hissed it, her face hard and angry and unfamiliar, Robin feeling the way she’d felt as a kid when her mother had railed at her for watching a movie on TV. As though she’d suddenly dropped character, turning into someone Robin didn’t know, someone she couldn’t trust. Someone who scared her.

  “Nothing,” Robin said. “I swear.”

  Renee’s face relaxed. She ran a hand across her eyes and gave her daughter a kind smile and settled back into herself again, as though a mask had slipped off and she’d snapped it back in place. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “Sometimes, I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  Twenty-Three

  June 17, 1976

  9:00 P.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  He’s dead. The cop who pulled us over. His name was Officer Nelligan. He was probably just a few years older than Gabriel. I killed him.

  He’s lying in the middle of some road we never learned the name of. He is a skinny guy with freckles, a gap between his front teeth, a Timex watch. A wedding ring. A name tag that says Officer Nelligan. I learned all those details about him after he was dead, and those details made him alive. When he actually was alive, he didn’t even have a name. He was just a shadow that yelled.

  “What do you think you were doing back there?” Officer Nelligan yelled into our car. “Do you realize you were going eighty in a forty-mile-per-hour zone? What is wrong with you? Are you on drugs?”

  I’d never known cops could be so loud, so terrifying. Before now, the only ones I’d seen up close had been the ones who came to school every year for the first assembly. When we were little, they told us to look both ways before crossing the street and not to talk to strangers, and once we got into junior high they added “don’t do drugs” to the mix. There were different cops every year—usually a young one who tried to act “cool” and an older one who was a little more serious. But no matter what kind of thing they were telling us to do, those cops’ voices had always been calm and kind. This one, Officer Nelligan, was as loud and mean and scary as the siren that blared from his black-and-white car. It was dark out. The sun had just set. His face was hidden by the brim of his hat. Maybe it’s just the way I remember it, but I swear to you that when he was talking to us, all I could see were his eyes, glowing like a rat’s eyes in the dark.

  He had a flashlight in his hand. He aimed it through Gabriel’s opened window. He pushed the beam of it around the inside of our stolen car, over our bodies, into my dyed orange hair so that I could feel its burn. He aimed the beam into my eyes until the pupils squished up. Held it there good and long, so that when he finally moved it away, my eyes didn’t work for at least a minute, and all I could see was this hovering cloud of white.

  Gabriel apologized to Officer Nelligan. He said he hadn’t realized he’d been speeding, and that he was a new driver. “Please forgive me, sir.” He said it so calmly, I was proud of him. I thought to myself, Everything is going to be all right. We will escape with a warning and we will drive far away and he’ll never even know who we are.

  But then the cop asked Gabriel for license and registration. I knew we’d never escape this. Remember, Aurora Grace, we are wanted. Fugitives. And as soon as he got one look at Gabriel’s driver’s license and called in the name or whatever it is that cops do when they take people’s licenses to their cars, Officer Nelligan would know that about us. We were doomed.

  Gabriel stalled a little, pretending like he couldn’t find his license. I sat there, sweat pouring out of my underarms, slipping down my rib cage and into the belt of my too-baggy jeans, the vinyl seat of this cheap stolen car sticking to the backs of my arms and my neck. It felt like the whole car was trying to hold me down, to punish me for stealing it. Without moving my lips, I prayed for something. A miracle to save us. I wasn’t sure what that miracle would be, but I wasn’t picky. I told God, You decide.

  And then I saw it happen: Officer Nelligan recognized us. I knew it before he said anything, just in the way he stopped talking, the way his back straightened, and he seemed to change shape, growing bigger and taller and meaner than he’d been just two seconds earlier. I pictured buttons popping on his uniform, his rage turning him into a giant, a monster that could, would kill Gabriel and me.

  “Get out,” he said. “Get out of the car now. Both of you. Out.” I could hear the crackling of the radio at his belt. I saw the handcuffs in his holster, the gun. He told us to get out of the car again, and then everything seemed to slow down like gears grinding, each movement a freeze-frame, so I could see it super clear. Gabriel opening the door. My hand finding the gun on the seat between us—the gun that had killed Ed Hart. The gun I’d been forced to shoot Papa Pete with after his death, so that it now felt familiar in my hands and I knew what to do. It was a sign. At least that’s how I felt in that moment. Like God was showing me what needed to be done.

  I told Gabriel to move out of the way. I think I must have screamed for him to do it. My throat still feels raw.

  The cop reached for something—his radio or his gun, I wasn’t sure which. I had the gun in both hands. I released the safety the way Gabriel showed me. Time froze into a still photograph. I was standing at one end of a tunnel and Officer Nelligan was at the other and there was no one else in the world but the two of us. I pulled the trigger and we both fell back. It was like a weird dance, only he kept falling. My shoulders jammed into their sockets, same as with Papa Pete. And again, my arms went all weak and tingly and my head got light and I felt like I might pass out. It was only then, when I saw him fall to the ground, the blood spreading across his chest and pooling beneath him, his mouth opening and closing and then stopping—all of him stopping—that time started moving normally again.

  You watch movies where someone kills another person for the first time, and if it’s a girl like me, they get hysterical. They scream and cry and say “Oh my God, what have I done?” again and again until some man has to slap her across the face.

  Aurora Grace, it wasn’t like that for me.

  I could hear Gabriel saying, “Oh my God, babe, oh my God.” And he sounded like a baby, like someone who needed taking care of. It made me want to slap him across the face. Or better yet shoot him. I might have done it too, if he didn’t know where Jenny was.

  I didn’t say a word, didn’t feel a thing, until we got closer to the cop, and I saw his face. His eyes were big and still, the eyelids unblinking. His mouth was open, like he was about to say something but had forgotten what. That’s when it all became real for me—what I had done. The Timex watch. The wedding ring.

  I hadn’t done God’s bidding. I hadn’t saved us from a monster. I had killed a man. I looked into his still, staring eyes and without saying a word, I told him I was sorry. I told his wife I was sorry. His kids, if he had them. I hope he didn’t have them. I put my hand over his eyelids, and I closed them so he could sleep.

  Gabriel told me to cut it out. He warned me about fingerprints and went for Officer Nelligan’s gun, his handcuffs, and his wallet. I hope that shows you how different we are—that I’m not really like him. I think that spen
ding all this time with Gabriel has made me turn a little, like when you leave a glass of milk out in the sun.

  I think about that day in the future when you are born—when Jenny will be in my life and Gabriel won’t be, and I will be free and safe. In that future time, I will go to church every day. I will pray for Officer Nelligan and Papa Pete too, who when you think about it, wouldn’t have been killed if I hadn’t used him as an excuse to break up with Gabriel. I will even pray for Ed Hart. Every day, I will do something good for a person or an animal. I won’t go to sleep until I’ve made someone’s life better. And all those good deeds will turn me back.

  For now, though, I just have to live through this. I have to be what I have become.

  Love,

  April

  Twenty-Four

  Robin

  “I’M SO SORRY,” Renee said again, and it felt as though that momentary outburst had been a passing cloud, a few drops of rain, nothing more.

  Robin smiled. She took her hand. “It was probably just the drugs,” she said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s your father.”

  “Mom?”

  “Him being gone, I mean. He’s been a part of me for all these years. He’s known me longer than anybody and I feel like . . .” Tears streamed down her face. “He was my anchor. He kept me in place.” Her eyes fluttered and closed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me with him gone. I don’t know where I’m going to go . . .”

  Robin kissed her cheek, took her hand in hers. “You still have me,” she said.

  “Yes,” her mother said as she drifted off to sleep. “Yes, Robbie. And the truth is, you’re all I’ve ever really wanted.”

  Robin backed away from her mother’s bed and headed toward the elevators, taking one downstairs to the cafeteria. On her way down, she thought about the weather, about upcoming summer action movies and this week’s column and what she planned on wearing tomorrow or the next day, when she finally returned to work. She thought about nothing important, nothing worth remembering because sometimes, not remembering was best.

  Twenty-Five

  June 17, 1976

  11:30 P.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  We’re at prom now. Well, not prom. We’re at Pullman Park, where everybody goes after prom. Gabriel and I have kept up with our plan to come here together, but for different reasons now. We are here to get a new car.

  After Officer Nelligan, we found a gas station and parked our car behind it. We took turns, Gabriel and I, cleaning up in the restrooms, changing into our prom clothes in order to fit in. We are here now. “Just two prom kids in love, looking for a place to park.” Gabriel says this over and over, trying to hypnotize us both into believing it, as if the two of us believing that we’re “just two prom kids in love” is the important thing. Gabriel is wearing a burgundy sports coat he swiped from JCPenney over a checked plaid shirt and jeans. His bleached blond hair makes him think he can pass for a surfer boy, and maybe he can from a distance, but up close he looks deranged. I am wearing the dress I shoplifted, and I’ve pinned my jagged orange hair behind my ears. I’m wearing mascara and blush and so much Bonne Bell Lip Smacker, the whole car smells of strawberry. But every time I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, I don’t see a prom girl. I see a murderer.

  The area of the parking lot where we are right now is packed, couples drinking and smoking in the cars or leaning back and looking up at the sky from the seats of open convertibles. Other kids are roaming around the area on foot, laughing and shouting, jumping up onto hoods and leaning into windows. In the distance, I can see a group on the baseball diamond, a guy in a pale blue tux rounding the bases. Everyone is wasted and happy. Not a grown-up in sight.

  Music blasts out of car radios. All of them are turned to the same station—the AM Top 40 station I used to listen to at home. “Oh, what a night,” Frankie Valli sings, and he isn’t kidding. The air outside is warm and smells of pot smoke and beer and I wish I could escape into it. I wish I could turn my body to powder and float away forever.

  Gabriel is muttering to himself very quietly. I almost feel like I can hear his brain working as we reach a more secluded area, the make-out area, where cars are parked far apart from each other and the windows are steamed white. Gabriel drives slowly behind the parked cars, eyeing each one—a shiny vintage Mustang, a green VW beetle, a long black Cadillac that has to belong to someone’s dad. I can’t take my eyes off one car, though. It’s a powder blue Honda Accord, and I know it belongs to Brian Griggs because I’ve memorized his license plate. If I squint hard enough, I swear I can see through the fogged-up window—his silhouette in the front seat, his rich, mean, beautiful girlfriend, Carrie Masters, leaning into him. They kiss and he holds her face in both his hands as though it’s precious and delicate. Something tightens in my chest, a dull pain in my heart. Carrie Masters called me a dumb whore once. I passed the two of them in the hallway and said hi. I normally don’t say hi to Brian when Carrie is around, but I said it that time. He said “Hi,” back. And Carrie said, “Why would you say hi to that dumb whore?” She didn’t even bother to whisper it. She didn’t care if I heard.

  Gabriel is watching me now. I expect him to ask me what I’m writing, but instead, he asks me who I’m looking at. How do I answer without upsetting him? “Nothing,” I say. “No one.” But the pain is still there and I’m sure Gabriel can feel it radiating off me.

  If Brian Griggs loves someone as awful as Carrie Masters, he must be kind of awful too.

  Gabriel is parking our car now, about twenty feet away from the other cars. He parks in the shadows, cuts the lights. He tells me to take all the stuff out of the back. I ask him where he’s going. He won’t tell me, but I know. I’m watching him heading toward Brian’s Accord. I see the gun in his hand. Officer Nelligan’s gun. In the other, he is holding the handcuffs. A different girl would stop him. A better girl would. But I don’t. I just watch, and I sing to myself.

  Oh, what a night.

  Twenty-Six

  Reg

  “ARE YOU FEELING all right, Mr. Sharkey?” It was Mrs. Bowen from next door. Always sticking her nose in everybody’s business, especially Reg’s. She’d lived in that house for God knows how many years, and for as many of those years as he could remember, Reg couldn’t go outside to mow the lawn or turn the sprinklers on or even get his mail out of his damn mailbox—which he was trying to do right now—without Mrs. Bowen popping up out of nowhere, her mouth open like a baby bird, ready to feed on his misery.

  One time, he’d gotten her good. Just like always, she’d tapped him on the shoulder while he was watering his lawn and asked, “How are you, Mr. Sharkey?” leaning hard on the are, each word dripping with fake concern. But that particular time, Reg had turned around too fast and accidentally-on-purpose sprayed her with the hose. Made him smile just thinking about it. The sight of her in her sopping wet housedress, her roller-set curls all stuck to her face. “Well, I never!” she’d said. Like she was Scarlett O’Hara. But now that he thought about it . . . Boy, that had to have been a long time ago. Had to have been before he’d put the sprinkler system in, and he’d put the sprinkler system in just about a year after Kimmy was born . . .

  Reg stared at Mrs. Bowen, wondering how it could be that she looked exactly the same as she had forty-five years ago. How was that possible?

  “Mr. Sharkey?” she said again, and it dawned on him like a thick fog clearing. Mrs. Bowen had died a couple of years back, and this wasn’t her talking to him at all, but her daughter, Karen. No, not Karen. Corinne. Corinne Palmer. That was her married name. Reg was fine. His brain was fine. He just wished he didn’t have to talk to nasty Corinne Palmer, with her shitty TV shows blaring out the window all day and all night. Hoarders. My 600-lb Life. 16 and Pregnant. People flaunting their misery for a few bucks and some attention—there was nothing more depressing than that. But Reg supposed that for a nosy person like Corinne, who lived off the misfortune of others, these TV
shows were a regular opiate. Her mother, at least, had never blasted the TV.

  “I’m fine, Corinne,” Reg said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I heard you arguing with that young man a couple of days ago, and I haven’t seen you since. You usually mow your lawn on Mondays, but you weren’t out there yesterday.”

  “Lawn didn’t need mowing.”

  She just kept talking, as though he’d never spoken. “I was worried for your welfare. That young man sounded so angry . . .”

  “I’m fine.”

  “If I’d gone another day without seeing you, I was going to call the police.”

  “The lawn didn’t need mowing. What the hell more do you want me to say?”

  She took a step back, blinking like someone who’d just dodged a punch. Her nose was red and bulbous like her mother’s had been, and something about her expression too, the way she opened and closed her mouth like a dying fish on a dock . . . What had Mrs. Bowen’s first name been again? Had Reg ever learned it?

  “Who was that young man?” How old was Corinne when he’d doused her mother with the hose? Twenty maybe. Did she have any idea, back then, how cruel her own DNA would turn out to be? “You can tell me, Mr. Sharkey. Who was that young man?”

  “Kate’s son.”

  “My God. Really?” She sounded deliriously happy.

  He said, “This better than Hoarders?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Reg opened his mailbox, which was what had brought him out here and into this unpleasant conversation in the first place. Maybe if he threw all his energy into opening his mail, Corinne would feel ignored and go back inside her house.

  Reg thumbed through his letters: phone bill, electric, brochure from Home Depot.

  Corinne Palmer said, “I don’t think I’ve seen Kate’s son since he was a little boy.”