Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  I let her words sit for a moment. “So we both suck,” I say.

  She shrugs. “He went to prison because of me.”

  That brings me up short. I lower my voice. “Frankie went to prison for both of us.”

  She considers this, then nods. “So, yeah,” she says. “We both suck.”

  We look at each other, mutely acknowledging our collective guilt. Then Curtis the mechanic steps into the lounge. “Mr. Faulkner?” he says. “Figured out the problem. Looks like you got some plastic stuck in your gear selector.”

  I close my eyes in disgust, but not before seeing the triumphant smile on my sister’s face.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I lied to Susannah earlier. It wasn’t Brandon Cargill who showed me who my uncle is, not really. Cargill was the precipitating event, true. But it was Uncle Gavin himself who told me.

  After Cargill threatened Frankie and me with a wrench, Ruben drove “me and Frankie” with “us” back to the bar, where I washed dishes and stacked plates and fought hard to stem a rising tide of anger and resentment. Cargill was one eye twitch away from a straitjacket. And I had no doubt my uncle knew it. That was why he’d told Ruben to drive us over. Fat lot of help he’d been, sitting in the car while Cargill terrorized us with a wrench. Who threw a wrench into a windshield? And he’d deliberately thumbed the stack of hundreds at me and Frankie. Why? To get a response? To show off?

  That evening, I planned to lay into my uncle, ignoring whatever look he would shoot at me. But it was one of the days we stayed late, where I ate dinner in the kitchen while Uncle Gavin ate in his office. When he finally walked down the stairs, he was on his cell phone and just waved at me to come on. For the entire drive home that evening, he stayed on the phone, so I seethed in silence next to him while he drove and spoke to someone about renovations he wanted to make to the bar. When he pulled up to the curb outside the house, I got out and slammed the door behind me, then stalked up the steps to the porch. Fuck him, I thought. I walked through the front door and marched straight upstairs to my room, where I shut the door behind me and lay down on my bed. I began counting slowly. When I hit fifty-seven, there was a knock, and Fay opened the door. Of course: Uncle Gavin would send Fay rather than knock on his own nephew’s door.

  “Hey,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. She was going old-school tonight, wearing black leggings and an off-the-shoulder pink sweat shirt like some Eighties starlet. I could smell her coconut hair from my bed. Concern wreathed her face like a halo. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Right as rain,” I said. I swung my feet off the bed and stood up. “Just need to talk to Uncle Gavin.” I made for the door without waiting for her response, and she stepped back to allow me out. Walking through a cloud of her perfume, I nearly buckled at the knees from desire, but I made my way past her and went downstairs.

  I found Uncle Gavin on the porch with his evening paper, just as I had expected. The sun didn’t set until almost nine o’clock in June, and there was still enough light for him to read by. I let the screen door spring back behind me so it smacked the frame. Uncle Gavin glanced at me over the top of his newspaper. I locked eyes with him, determined not to let him hide behind the day’s headlines.

  “What?” he said after a few taut seconds.

  “Brandon Cargill,” I said.

  Uncle Gavin grinned. “Did he tell you to call him Brad?”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “I understand from Ruben he put on a holy show, what with throwin’ a wrench through a car window—”

  “It’s not funny!” I shouted, wiping the grin off Uncle Gavin’s face. I didn’t care if Fay heard me, or Susannah, or the whole goddamn block. “I thought he would hit me! Or Frankie! With a goddamn wrench! Who the hell was that guy?”

  Uncle Gavin didn’t even blink, just sat in his wicker chair, gazing at me with those black eyes.

  “Now I get the death stare?” I said. “Did I offend you by cussing? I’m fucking sorry.” Rage coursed through me, and I began stalking across the porch to the steps and then back to the front door. “Johnny Shaw’s gorilla wore a gun under his jacket. Are you fucking serious with sending me and Frankie to these people? Is this a joke to you? Do you want me to get shot? Have Cargill pull out a, a shotgun or something and stick it under my jaw and blow my head—”

  “Enough,” Uncle Gavin said. He didn’t shout it, or even raise his voice much, but there was something dark and angry thrumming through that one word that brought my marching to a halt. He folded his newspaper and tossed it down onto the porch. “Jesus,” he said, rubbing his face. “Sit down.” He gestured at the other wicker chair next to his. “Come on,” he said, waving me forward. “Sit.”

  I walked over and sat on the edge of the chair, too keyed up to sink back into its cushions.

  Uncle Gavin pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I’m shite at this,” he said.

  “At what?” I said.

  “Raising a teenager,” he said.

  “Not gonna argue.”

  I thought he would get mad, but he just raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you can give me some tips,” he said.

  “You mean like ‘Don’t send a teenager into a situation where he might get shot’?”

  Uncle Gavin snorted. “No one’s going to shoot you.”

  “No, he’ll just bash my brains in with a fucking wrench.”

  “Language,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes but nodded in acquiescence. “How do you know he won’t do that? Or that Mr. No-Neck at Johnny Shaw’s office won’t shoot me in the kneecap?”

  “Mr. No-Neck? You mean Gus?”

  “Johnny Shaw’s bodyguard is named Gus?”

  “Gus Cimino. And no, he definitely won’t shoot you.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  I raised my voice. “How do you know?”

  He fixed me with a look, the same right-in-the-eye look he’d given me in the hospital when he told me that if the police couldn’t find the people who had killed my parents, he would. And then, as if someone had pulled the chain on a lightbulb, I understood.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Language.”

  “Motherfucker,” I said.

  Uncle Gavin raised a flat hand like he was taking an oath. “Hand to God, I’ll smack yer gob right off yer face.”

  “They’re scared of you,” I said. “Or they know not to mess with you. Because you’re …” I ran out of words. No, that’s not it—I just didn’t want to say what came next.

  Uncle Gavin dropped his hand and waited.

  “You’re a criminal,” I said. “Aren’t you.”

  Uncle Gavin sat back in his chair. By this point the sun was a ruddy afterthought behind the skyscrapers to the west, and the streetlight cast shadows from the oak tree in the front yard. Shadow leaves dappled Uncle Gavin’s face so that I lost his eyes in the dark.

  “Do you really want to know the answer to that?” he asked.

  “The wrong path,” I breathed, almost a murmur.

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  Uncle Gavin made a hurry-up gesture with his hand. “Out with it,” he said.

  I hesitated. “It’s … something my parents would say.” I tried to find Uncle Gavin’s face in the shadows. “About you.”

  A pause; then Uncle Gavin leaned forward so the light crossed his face. He looked sallow and grizzled with his five o’clock shadow. But the light didn’t touch his eyes. “Your mother said that,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. He sat back in his chair, back into the shadows. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t read his expression. Was he angry? Sad? Brooding?

  When he spoke, his voice was low and tired but laced with resolve, as if he was determined to say something, no matter how painful. “You know that your mother and I, our parents died when we were young. We were older than you and Susannah, but still. When we came here, to the
U.S., we had a duffel bag of clothes and a couple of hundred dollars between us. I wanted to find a job straightaway. Your mother, she wanted nothing more than to go to school and then to university. But we needed money to find a place to live, to eat. So I had to work.”

  “But why did you come here anyway?” I asked. “I mean, to the U.S.? I know after your parents … after they died, you all left Ireland. But why come here? Why not go somewhere else in Ireland, or England or something?”

  He paused, then, his face still in shadow. “What did your mother tell you?”

  I shrugged. “Not much,” I said. “She … didn’t talk about it a lot. She said you all couldn’t stay in Ireland. That’s all.”

  My uncle nodded. “That’s about right,” he said.

  I couldn’t help it. “But why couldn’t you stay in Ireland?”

  “That’s my business,” he said, with as much finality as if he had firmly shut a door in my face. He waited a moment or two to make sure I understood, then continued. “We moved to Atlanta, your mother and I, and I found work wherever I could get it. I saw straight off it would take years to get a green card. And it would take money to send Alanna to school.” He gestured at the street, at the city towers rising beyond the trees, bright against the night sky. “There’s money in a city. Opportunity. So I found it.”

  I asked the question that had been lurking in a dark crevice of my brain for a few minutes now. “So, you … what? Sold drugs?”

  “Jesus, no.” Uncle Gavin was shaking his head. “Never. Drugs are like a cancer; they rot everything.” He leaned forward, his eyes on me. “In a city, everyone needs something. You need a certain kind of lawyer because your kid got busted with a dime bag and you don’t want his future ruined. Or you can’t get the city to come out and fix a busted sewer pipe. That’s what I do, Ethan. I know things, know people. I help them get what they need.”

  “For money,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “For money. Usually. Sometimes I give favors. But yes, I get paid.”

  I let out a breath. “What about Johnny Shaw?”

  Uncle Gavin grinned. “He’s been my lawyer for years.”

  “And Brandon Cargill?”

  The grin on my uncle’s face shrank, became something harder. “He’s the kind of person you have to work with. There are Brandon Cargills everywhere. Easiest way to deal with them is quickly.” The grin was gone by then, his face now back to its usual inscrutable look.

  A thousand questions filled my head, but they spun by so fast I had a hard time catching one to put it into words. “My mother,” I managed to say, and by saying those words, others rose up behind them. “She didn’t like what you did.”

  “No,” he said, and there was a world of sadness behind that single no, although you wouldn’t have known it to look at his face. He simply looked tired. He took in a breath, breathed it out his nose. “She did not. I kept it from her for a long time. But she was so smart. She figured it out. We fought about it. By then she was in college, and she met your da.” He shrugged. “From then on, we didn’t talk much. Your da met me once at the bar, alone. This was after Susannah was born.”

  “They wouldn’t let you in,” I said, remembering my uncle in his flat cap at the door to the hospital room, my father barring the way. “At the hospital, when my sister was born. They wouldn’t let you into the room.”

  “Your da wanted to talk to me about that, after,” Uncle Gavin said. “I couldn’t tell if he was apologizing or telling me to stay away. Both, I think. I told him I understood and promised not to bother you again, that I would wait for Alanna to call.” He paused. I realized with a sharp jab of conscience that my mother had never called, that my uncle would live for that for the rest of his life. “He was a good man, your da,” Uncle Gavin continued. “Kind enough to me when he had no real reason to be.”

  We sat in the aftermath of that story, each nursing a private grief. Down below us, in the dim halos of light from the streetlamps, I could see bats dip and swerve, zigzagging across the sky.

  “My parents,” I said, and something thick and sorrowful rose up in my throat, behind my eyes. With an effort I forced it down. “You said you would find out who killed my parents.”

  Slowly Uncle Gavin nodded, once. “I did say that.”

  “So, have you …?”

  “I’m waiting for the police,” he said.

  I stared at him. “It’s been months!” I said. “Almost a year!”

  “One thing I’ve learned,” my uncle said, “is patience.” I started to speak, and he held up a hand to cut me off. “They’re still looking,” he said. “The police. I don’t want to get in their way.”

  “Because what? You’re scared?”

  He ignored the anger in my voice and kept his own voice even. “I don’t want to get on their radar,” he said. “They expect me to do something. They know what I do. They can’t prove it, not in court, but they know. So they watch. And so I wait for them to do the work. And if they don’t find what they’re looking for—and it’s still possible that they will—but if they don’t, they’ll close the case and move on to the next murder. And then I’ll be free to look. The police keep me updated every few weeks.” He smiled slightly. “And I have my own sources.”

  I couldn’t contain myself any longer. “And you’re okay with that? Just putting it on hold? Why can’t you just find Ponytail and his partner and—” I stopped, not daring to utter the next words. Kill them. Something dark uncoiled in my heart at the thought, and I shivered.

  In the same even voice, Uncle Gavin said, “I’ve got you and Susannah to think about now. I can’t do much for you if I’m in prison myself.”

  I felt the weight of that settle on me, my uncle’s simple declaration of responsibility for me and Susannah, along with the underlying suggestion that the same unspoken thought of retribution was on my uncle’s mind. Then he glanced at his watch and stood. “Time for bed,” he said, his tone pleasant enough but also definite, and after a moment I stood too and followed him into the house, our conversation over but not finished.

  CHAPTER TEN

  For our second date, I take Marisa to see Romeo and Juliet at the Shakespeare Tavern downtown.

  The play is good—a couple of local high school students play Romeo and Juliet, and although the actress playing Juliet has a tendency to shout her lines, she does a fine job portraying an idealistic teenager pushed to desperation. Marisa seems to enjoy herself, laughing at the bawdy Mercutio and sighing as Romeo falls utterly head over heels for Juliet. When the play ends, we stand and applaud loudly with the audience, Marisa sticking her fingers in her mouth to whistle when Mercutio returns for his curtain call.

  “So you liked it?” I ask as we walk outside.

  “It was so good!” she says. “It’s almost as good as the Globe in London. I saw Othello there a few years ago. Have you been?”

  I shake my head and smile, although the question strikes a sour note. My parents never had enough money to take me and Susannah anywhere farther than the beach at Hilton Head, and Uncle Gavin wasn’t the vacationing type. “It’s on my bucket list,” I say.

  Marisa must sense something, because she immediately downplays going to the Globe. “It was a short trip, not even a week. My father wrote it off as a business expense. He was trying to get some investors for a project here.”

  I make a noncommittal noise, then ask, “Your father works in finance?”

  She wrinkles her nose. “He’s a real estate developer,” she says with clear disdain. Then she laughs. “God, I sound like a snob. Sorry. It’s just I don’t really get along with him. He can be controlling: Mr. Big Shot behind his big old desk.”

  We are walking south on Peachtree, the downtown skyline looming across the highway. Now that the sun has gone down, I’m reminded that it’s only the end of February—there’s a chill in the air, like an invisible frost, and occasionally a cold breeze tries to work its fingers under my coat. Marisa shivers, glance
s at me, and smiles. “I’m okay,” she says. “As long as we aren’t walking all the way back to your place.”

  “No,” I say. “Actually …”

  “What?”

  I’m afraid this is going to ruin a perfectly good evening. “We can’t go back to my house,” I say. “My sister is in town, visiting, and she’s crashing with me until she gets her own apartment.”

  Marisa shrugs. “That’s cool, I don’t care.”

  “Oh,” I say. She doesn’t care about going back to my house? Maybe I’ve misread this entire date. “Okay, that’s good.”

  She looks at me and bursts out laughing. “The look on your face,” she says. She stops walking, so I stop, too, and she leans forward and to kiss me. “I meant I don’t care that your sister is there,” she says. “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Nope,” I say, shaking my head. I start walking again, and Marisa hurries after me. “Not happening.”

  “Why not?”

  I struggle to find words that can adequately explain why not. “My sister is complicated,” I say.

  “Everyone’s complicated.”

  “Not like my sister,” I say. “Look, she won’t get home from her restaurant shift for another couple of hours, and she’s not the kind of person who comes home discreetly. Plus you’ve seen how small my place is.”

  “So we’d all be right on top of each other?” Marisa asks.

  “Exactly.”

  She quirks an eyebrow. “Naughty,” she says.

  “Jesus Christ,” I mutter, and she laughs again so it echoes down the long stone canyon of Peachtree Street.

  “Fine,” she says when she’s recovered. “But it’s your loss.” And she walks ahead of me, swinging her hips from side to side. And although I laugh as she vamps for me, I also can’t help but watch her and stare at the back of her, and I know she knows it, too.

  * * *

  THE SUN DIAL sits at the top of the Westin Peachtree Plaza, a sleek, round tube of steel and glass that rises over seventy stories above the street. We ride to the restaurant in a glass elevator that shoots up the outside of the hotel, all the way to the very top. The outer perimeter of the Sun Dial, with floor-to-ceiling windows, shows off a panoramic display of the city.