Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  Except for the last one.

  Summer dried her eyes on the bottom of her white T-shirt. She breathed slowly, carefully, as though the end of her crying was something fragile and tentative and the slightest move could start her up again. The thing was, Summer wasn’t a crier, not usually. She probably vomited more frequently than she cried, and she found them both equally unpleasant.

  If she didn’t think of that last conversation with Quentin, Summer figured she could make the rest of the ride home without losing it again. But then she turned on the radio. Rihanna. “We Found Love.” Quentin and Dean’s wedding song.

  “Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

  As she turned off the radio, a phone rang. Not her iPhone, but an old-fashioned beeping like a cell phone from the ’90s. Summer thought it had come from inside her own brain until she realized it was the burner she kept in her purse. The Closure tipline. Well, that’s ironic.

  She hadn’t gotten a call on that phone in at least a month. She glanced at the clock on her dashboard. 5:50 A.M. Quentin had called her at that hour when he’d first arrived in New York, apologizing when he remembered the time difference, and for a moment, she allowed herself the fantasy that it was him calling again, that all this was some big misunderstanding on the police’s part that he and Dean would laugh about once he arrived in New York.

  She slipped the phone out of her purse and put it to her ear. “This is the Closure podcast. May I help you?”

  “I heard about Quentin.” It was an older man’s voice, ragged and sad. “I heard it on the news.”

  Summer switched lanes, her eyes on the rearview, then on the near-empty freeway in front of her, the sky blushing pink from the recent sunrise. “Who is this, please?”

  “Kate’s dad. Quentin’s grandpa.” He coughed a few times. Cleared his throat. “My name is Reg Sharkey. My whole family is dead.”

  Summer gripped the steering wheel. “I know who you are, Mr. Sharkey.”

  “Linda’s dead too. I called her old number. Incredible, isn’t it? Most of the time these days, I can’t remember what year it is. But her phone number’s still in my head, forty years later. Clear as day.”

  “Who is Linda?”

  No response. Summer wanted to cry again, and she hated Reg Sharkey for that. Hated him for a lot of reasons, actually. “Mr. Sharkey, I’m not sure why you called this number, and I have no idea why I answered. There’s no more podcast, so—”

  “What?”

  “There’s no more Closure podcast.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was about Quentin,” she said very slowly, “and Quentin is dead.”

  “Please.” His voice cracked. He started to cry. “Please interview me.”

  Now it was Summer’s turn not to respond. She listened to the old man’s sniffles, his labored breathing, and thought back to the day Quentin had interviewed him, his voice in her ear. How she’d cringed when he’d played her the interview, the old fuck yelling at him, calling him “fake news” of all things, and how despondent Quentin had sounded when he got back on the line. I’ve learned that my only real family is Dean. Summer clutched the phone tight in her hand, wishing she could squeeze the life out of this entire conversation. She said, “Haven’t you been interviewed enough already?”

  Sharkey struggled to catch his breath. “I have a secret,” he said. “An old one. I need to confess.”

  Go to church, then. That’s what Summer wanted to say. But she couldn’t make herself do it. She didn’t have it in her today to be that mean.

  “I need to confess,” he said quietly. “For the sake of all my children.”

  All your dead children. Against her own will, she found herself pitying Reg Sharkey, if only for his age, and for the loneliness and desperation that drove him to call a tipline at dawn. “All right, fine,” she said.

  “Oh, thank you. Bless you.” As he gave her his address, Summer took into account how far it was from her home in West Hollywood. Two hours at least, but strangely, she was glad for it. Summer was in no hurry to be at her own apartment, all alone with her thoughts.

  On the drive to San Bernardino, she thought of the name he’d mentioned. Linda. From her months-long immersion in all things Cooper/LeRoy, Summer knew that Linda had been the name of Gabriel LeRoy’s mother. Following her son’s death, she’d declined a number of interviews—one with Barbara Walters—before subsequently disappearing off the face of the earth. Two years ago, she’d died a recluse, her body found in a shack in the desert—a place she’d bought years earlier, just a half mile away from the Gideon compound, where her son had burned to death.

  It was probably just a coincidence, though, Reg saying the name. There were a lot of people called Linda, after all.

  Thirty-Four

  June 20, 1976

  2:00 A.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  I dreamed I shot Officer Nelligan again. I watched him fall and bleed and die, just like before, and I felt awful. Sick to my stomach. Only when I got closer to the body and looked at his face, I saw that it hadn’t been Officer Nelligan at all. I’d shot Gabriel.

  7:30 A.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  Gabriel is angry. All morning, he has been pacing around our room, back and forth, back and forth, a gun in each hand, Officer Nelligan’s and his own—which, as it turns out, he stole from his mother.

  I think he expects me to ask him why he is so mad, or at least to talk to him. But I can’t do that. I can’t speak at all. Oh my God. He just asked me if I’m still writing the song about us. Can you believe that? Doesn’t he even remember what he said to me last night?

  Aurora Grace, I’ve been awake ever since that dream, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I believe it was a prophecy.

  I am going to kill Gabriel LeRoy. I don’t know when or how. But the moment will present itself to me, and when it does, I will not be afraid. And as he takes his last breath, I will say Jenny’s name to him. I will show him her picture. I will make sure that my sister is the last thought he ever has.

  Love,

  April

  11:00 A.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  It’s Father’s Day. That’s why Gabriel is mad. Because it’s Father’s Day and he doesn’t have a father. He’s always said that his dad left his mom for a dancer, but apparently, that’s just another lie. He’d said it to “save face,” he told me. It was his mother who was the cheater. His dad left because he found out she’d been having an affair with a married man for years and years—and guess what? She still is. A few days before I broke up with him, Gabriel found a box at the bottom of his mother’s closet. Inside was a necklace, a sexy nightgown, and a letter from the married man she’s having an affair with—Gabriel’s real father. In it, he says to Linda, “Take good care of our son. But don’t ever let your husband know.”

  I think that was what drove Gabriel crazy, not me. I think the lava started bubbling up inside him when he found that box, and then when I broke up with him, it was an excuse to explode.

  Gabriel’s mom and her lover have a code: She calls him twice. The first time, she hangs up after one ring. The second time, she hangs up after two. They meet at an Arco station in San Bernardino and they usually go to a motel from there, but not always. Sometimes, they just sit somewhere and talk. If she calls on a weekday, he goes to the gas station during his lunch break. If she does it on a Sunday, they meet after church. Gabriel learned some of this from the letter, some of it from putting “one and two together.” That’s what he said. One and two. He doesn’t even know the right expression.

  It’s a Sunday today and it’s Father’s Day, and this morning, Gabriel called his real father from the pay phone downstairs. One hang-up after one ring. Another hang-up after two. After he made the call, he spent the rest of Ed Hart’s money on a shotgun. He bought it from a guy on our floor who I think is a gang member. The shotgun is in the back seat of the powder blue Accord, strapped in like a passenger. We are dri
ving to the Arco station. Neither one of us speaks, and it’s an awful, ugly silence.

  When Gabriel told me the story about his father, he was crying. He said it was the first time he’d ever said it all out loud. “Baby Blue, you are the only person in the world who I can trust with the truth.” He said this. Gabriel did. The boy who killed my entire family.

  I don’t have a father either, Gabriel. Have you thought about that?

  The bruise on my face has mostly faded. Elizabeth helped me cover up the rest with makeup. But if I touch my cheek, it still hurts. Gabriel LeRoy hasn’t just killed my family. He’s turned me into someone I no longer know. A weak person and a murderer. He’s turned me into him.

  Elizabeth says that if I can get away from Gabriel, she’ll take me to the Gideon compound. It’s something to look forward to, I guess. But right now, all I want to do is make it out of this Arco station alive, so I can kill Gabriel. So I can become me again.

  Love,

  April

  2:30 P.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  Gabriel is a monster.

  Love,

  April

  Thirty-Five

  Summer

  SUMMER SAT ACROSS from Reg Sharkey at his kitchen table, her digital recorder between them, listening so intently that she often forgot to blink, to breathe. “He was your son.” She said it for the second time, just to make sure she’d heard him correctly. “Gabriel LeRoy was your son.”

  “Yes. His mother, Linda, and me. We went to high school together. We never quite lost touch.”

  “Did you ever visit him?”

  “Once, when he was a little boy. He had this funny way of talking. This lisp. He asked me for a doggy . . .”

  “Did he know who you were?”

  “No, of course not. I had a little girl at home at the time. My Katie. She was just a baby.”

  Summer gritted her teeth. She’d just had the strongest urge to call Quentin. Put him on speakerphone and get him in on this. Then she’d remembered. “So, you thought Linda had called,” she said. “But when you showed up at your meeting place. The Arco station—”

  “She wasn’t there, no. The two of them were. Gabriel and that girl. I didn’t see them at first. It was crowded at the station. We were at the pump when they . . . when they got out of their car.” The morning light streamed through the kitchen window, beams of it, infested with dust motes. There was so much dust in this house. So many old, neglected things. “It’s funny, you get into these situations when you’re young,” Reg said. “You know they’re wrong and they’re dangerous, but you think, ‘Just this once. Just for a little while.’ But then a little while becomes a long while and all of a sudden, you’re no longer young. It just feels normal, this dangerous thing you’ve been doing. It feels like it will go on forever.”

  Summer’s mouth was very dry and her eyes ached. It all wore at her, the cobwebby remains of the scotch, the lack of sleep, the crying. She longed for a glass of water, but she didn’t want to interrupt Reg’s train of thought by asking for it. This was probably the best interview she had ever done. If only Quentin were around . . .

  “You thought no one would ever find out about the affair,” she said. “Even though Linda’s husband left her because of it.”

  “He wasn’t going to tell anybody. He was probably more ashamed about it than we were and besides, I think he was looking for an excuse to leave.”

  Those dust motes. Like angry little ghosts. “Okay,” Summer said. “So when you got that call on Father’s Day, you thought it was Linda, wanting to meet.”

  “What’s that expression? No bad deed goes unpunished? And the longer you keep doing it, the worse the punishment is.”

  “It’s ‘no good deed,’ actually. No good deed goes unpunished. It’s sarcastic.”

  “Oh. Well, add that expression to the list of things I’ve been getting wrong for much too long.”

  “You were at the gas station, waiting at the pump. When did you first notice your son?”

  “Not until he started shooting. An old man went down. Then the woman with him. A Mexican lady in a white pantsuit. I think she was his nurse. Then somebody else. A young woman. It was like . . . some kind of sick dance. One body falling after the next. The sound of the gunshots. I turned to where the sound was coming from and there he was. I looked at the girl. I begged her to get him to stop shooting. My daughter. My little Kimmy . . . She dropped her plastic horse . . .”

  “Did you recognize Gabriel?”

  He stared at his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I saw his face and I recognized him right away. Even though I hadn’t seen him since he was a little boy. He looked . . .”

  “Yes, Mr. Sharkey?”

  Reg dragged the back of his hand across his closed eyes and stared up at the ceiling and said it very, very softly. “He looked like me.”

  “Do you want to take a break?”

  He nodded. Summer was glad for that. She needed a break too.

  Summer pulled two glasses out of the cupboard, plastic ones with the Anaheim Angels logo on them, both of them as dusty as everything else in the house. She rinsed the glasses, dried them with a kitchen towel, and filled them with water from the tap. The kitchen towel was clean and white, with little strawberries across the bottom. It looked as though it had never been used, and it was hard to imagine Reg Sharkey doing anything with it, that delicate piece of cloth in those scarred, meaty hands. Summer imagined the towel was part of a set his wife, Clara, had bought, before their kids were even born.

  When she returned with the glasses, Reg took his quickly, but instead of drinking, he held it to his forehead. “Hot in here,” he said. Although it wasn’t. For all its dust and old appliances and ’70s décor, the place had a good, strong central air-conditioning, which had been turned up high enough to ease some of the pain of Summer’s hangover. She gulped her water, until her glass was nearly empty while Reg watched her, waiting.

  “Ready?” she said, and when he nodded, she turned the recorder on again.

  Reg started talking right away. “His face was red—a true red, like a tomato. He wouldn’t stop. There were people screaming and crying but he didn’t seem to hear. He just kept shooting. And that girl. That awful April. She just stood there . . .”

  “Mr. Sharkey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why did you bring Kimmy?”

  He put the glass down.

  “I mean . . . had you ever brought her to meet Linda before?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then why—”

  “It was Father’s Day. I was only going to talk to Linda. Tell her it wasn’t a good day for me.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  He exhaled hard. “She made me,” he said. “Clara made me. She said, ‘Look, if you’re just getting some gas, why not take Kimmy? You know she loves that mural.’ She didn’t say it like a suggestion, though. She may as well have said, ‘Take Kimmy, or else.’”

  “So you did what she said.”

  “We were having a lot of trouble at home. I think she might have figured it out about me and Linda, I don’t know. But yeah. Yeah, I did what she said. To . . . keep the peace.”

  Summer took another swallow of water, lukewarm and metallic, and carefully set the glass down, the truth sinking in. This was why Clara Sharkey had killed herself—not because she couldn’t live without Kimmy. Because her jealousy and anger had led to Kimmy’s death. So much guilt in one family. So many secrets that Quentin had never known. “What about your other daughter?” Summer said. “How did she react to her sister’s death?”

  He looked at Summer, a hard smile crossing his face. “My other daughter didn’t react at all,” he said, “because you see, she wasn’t around.”

  “What?”

  “Katie had run away from home. She’d been gone for two weeks. We’d been worried sick about her at first, but then we’d gotten one phone call. She said to quit looking for her. Leave her alon
e, Katie said. She sounded high.”

  “She ran away?” Summer said. “She didn’t tell you why?”

  “She had problems. Christ, she never stopped having problems,” he said, and Summer heard it again, just a hint of what she’d heard during his interview with Quentin, that frustration and rage. Reg had made so many stupid mistakes in his life, though. He’d lost so many people and still he kept on living. Who wouldn’t be angry?

  “You know, when we’d gone to church that Sunday, Clara and I both prayed we’d have our family together again. For Father’s Day. God has quite a sense of humor.”

  Summer took another sip of water. “When did Katie come home?”

  “A few days after Clara died. I couldn’t even look at her. Didn’t ask her where she’d been. The whole rest of her life, I always found it so hard to look her in the eye without my stomach knotting up. I know that sounds terrible.”

  “You were hurting,” she said. “Looking for someone to blame.”

  Reg took a sip of his water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Summer’s gaze drifted to the kitchen counter behind him. The dusty, empty pasta cylinders, the avocado-green phone with its twisted, old-fashioned cord. And next to it, a pair of sunglasses. Vintage tortoiseshell Ray-Bans. That’s where you left them, Quentin. At your grandfather’s house. She shut her eyes for a few seconds. God has quite a sense of humor.

  “It’s the one thing I’ll never understand,” Reg said. “Gabriel had gone to that gas station with the purpose of killing me, and from where he was standing, he easily could have done it. But he didn’t. He didn’t aim the gun at me. He aimed it at everyone else.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “I think he knew that letting me live would be worse punishment.”

  A tear leaked down his cheek. Summer found herself leaning across the table, taking both his hands in hers. She found herself feeling for him, this scared, stupid, selfish man. What a strange turn this interview had taken—almost as though Quentin had engineered it himself. Closure for someone, anyway, if not for him.