Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  So I reached across the table and grabbed Susannah’s plate, pulling it to me. Some of the peas spilled onto the table, rolling across the wood surface.

  “Hey!” Susannah said.

  I shoved my empty plate toward her and began shoveling her peas into my mouth. They tasted like little cold balls of clay.

  “Ethan,” Mom said, but there was no fight in her voice.

  Susannah pounded her fist on the table. “What are you doing?” she cried.

  “You’re welcome,” I said through a mouthful of peas.

  “Those are mine!” She was truly furious.

  I was about to make another retort when Mom stiffened in her seat. I looked over my shoulder to see my father standing in the doorway.

  “Why are you yelling?” my father said to Susannah in a calm voice that raised goose bumps on the back of my neck. “You know we don’t yell at the dinner table.”

  Susannah’s face was bright red. I didn’t look straight at her but continued to eat the peas.

  “Don’t provoke your sister,” Dad said, and he sat down heavily in his chair. He was wearing his gray Glen plaid suit with a red paisley tie that was maybe twenty years out of style. Dad sat there at the kitchen table in his unfashionable tie and tired-looking suit, like a stunned commuter who hasn’t quite realized he’s already pulled into his own driveway, and at that moment my own anger and resentment drained away. He just looked so lost, a sense of confusion tinged with awareness that things were no longer the same but without knowing the precise moment when they had changed. I wanted to give him a hug, but I didn’t because I didn’t know how he would react—he could be particular about being touched—and because I didn’t want to hear Susannah mock me for doing it.

  “How was your day?” Mom asked, smoothing out the napkin on her lap repeatedly.

  Dad blinked, as if the question had woken him up, then shook his head. “Same old, same old,” he said. “Martin was an asshole. Nothing new there.” Martin was Dad’s boss.

  Warily I glanced at Susannah over my last few forkfuls of peas. My father had also begun cursing more freely once he’d come home from Iraq, and Susannah’s reactions to that ranged from feigned indifference to puritanical disdain. Susannah, however, wasn’t paying attention to Dad. Instead, she was glaring at me as if she hoped the force of her gaze would bore a hole through my head. Then Mom got up to fix Dad a plate of pork chops, and we finished our dinner in a strained but familiar silence.

  * * *

  I WAS READING in bed—To Kill a Mockingbird, which I enjoyed, even though it was assigned reading for eighth grade and for some stupid reason you were supposed to hate whatever you had to read for school—when Mom came and stood in the doorway of my room. She was just outside the circle of weak light cast by my bedside lamp, but even then I could see the weariness in her face. Mom was an attractive woman—fair-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed, all traits I had inherited from her, minus the attractive part—and she had always been slim, but lately she had begun to look tired, worn out.

  I closed the book on my finger to hold my place.

  Mom crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe. “Can you do me a favor and take it easy on your sister?” she asked.

  I rolled my eyes. “Honestly, Mom,” I said.

  “I know she can be a pain,” she said. “And I know it must be hard having a little sister. But she’s your little sister, Ethan. She’s the only one you’ve got.”

  Looking at my mother in my doorway, a soft smile on her tired face, I knew that I couldn’t say no to her, that I was bound to carry the cross of the elder brother. I managed a sigh. “Lady, you are the cruelest she alive,” I said.

  Mom squinted in thought. “Macbeth?” she said.

  “Twelfth Night,” I said.

  Mom’s eyebrows rose.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re quoting comedies now,” she said. “There might be hope for you yet. Even if you called me cruel.”

  “It was a joke,” I said.

  She walked over to my bed. “You’re a good son,” she said. “And a good brother.”

  “Whatever,” I mumbled.

  She leaned over and kissed me on the top of the head. “I love—”

  The doorbell rang, followed by a frantic knocking on the front door. My mother drew back and we looked at each other. It was after nine o’clock, and Mom clearly wasn’t expecting company.

  “Alanna?” my father called from down the hall.

  “I’m in Ethan’s room,” my mother called back, turning for the doorway.

  More knocking, and then the doorbell rang, then again, a frantic pealing like an alarm. I heard my father headed for the front door.

  “Jimmy?” my mother called, and she walked out of my room.

  I went to my window and looked out the blinds at our front yard. We lived in an old ranch house in a section of Sandy Springs sandwiched between I-285 and Hammond Drive, a major east-west road connecting shopping districts in suburban Atlanta. Driving out of our neighborhood usually necessitated waiting for a break in the long line of cars driving to or from Perimeter Mall, but our cul-de-sac was two blocks from Hammond and got hardly any traffic. So when I looked out the window, I wasn’t surprised to see that there were no cars on the street. I couldn’t see our front porch from my window—the angle was wrong—but there was something white and shiny on the front walk. It was a shoe, some kind of glittering woman’s sandal. It looked like nothing that either my mother or sister would wear.

  The front door opened and I heard my father talking, followed by a low wail. It sounded like a girl’s voice. Was Susannah awake? I glanced at the closed door to the Jack-and-Jill bathroom we shared, but no light showed below the door. Quietly I stepped into the hallway. Now I could hear my mother; she and my father were apparently both in the foyer with whoever had been at the front door.

  “—for God’s sake,” my mother said.

  “Are you hurt?” my father asked. “Can you tell me—”

  “Please.” This was the new voice, a girl, pleading. “He wants to hurt me. I need help; please help me.”

  I crept down the hallway, then froze as Susannah’s door opened. She stood there, her hair rumpled with sleep. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Shh,” I said with a cutting-off motion. “Go back to bed.”

  “Stop telling me what to do.” She looked down the hall. “Is someone here?”

  I waved her off, trying to hear my parents, whose voices had lowered to a murmuring. All I could hear was my mother saying “police,” and then the girl wailing again—“No, not the police, please.”

  “Who is that?” Susannah said.

  I turned on her. “Shut up,” I hissed.

  Then my parents walked past the end of the hallway, a third person between them. Not a girl but a young woman. She was shorter than both my parents, with her head bowed as she cried, stringy blonde hair hiding her face. She wore some sort of silvery sequined top and jeans. I also saw she was barefoot. Then they passed beyond my range of vision into the family room at the back of the house. The woman was sobbing now, a low, desperate sound of someone breaking inside, piece by jagged piece.

  That’s her shoe outside, I thought. It must have fallen off her foot as she ran up our front walk. I needed to tell Mom, maybe get the shoe myself. It seemed important that I get it.

  Then my father stepped into the hallway, blocking the light so that he loomed like a dark shadow. “Go back to bed,” he said. “And turn your lights off.”

  “Why is that girl here?” Susannah asked.

  “Now,” my father said in a tone that made me automatically turn toward my room.

  Susannah ignored him. “Is she hurt or something?” She craned her neck to try to see around our father. “Do we need to—”

  Dad took a step toward her, and for a brief, silver-bright moment, I thought he would hit her. Instead he spoke in a low, terse voice. “She’s scared and wants some help. Your mother an
d I are going to help her. Now go to bed.”

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing Susannah’s hand. She tried to yank it out of my grasp, but I pulled her back toward her room. “You heard Dad. We’re going back to bed.”

  “Let go of me!” Susannah said, slapping at my arm with her other hand. I managed to open her bedroom door and pulled her inside, then closed the door behind us. As I closed the door, Susannah smacked the back of my head hard enough that stars popped in my vision.

  “Jesus!” I said.

  “Serves you right, you jerk,” Susannah said.

  I took a deep breath to calm down. “You heard Dad,” I said. “He told us to go to bed.”

  “So go to bed.” In the darkened room, Susannah seemed to glow with righteous indignation. “But you can’t make me do whatever you want.”

  “It’s what Dad wants, you moron.”

  “Run your own ranch, Ethan.” This was one of Dad’s sayings, meaning mind your own business. Then Susannah sat on her bed and turned on a lamp. Even her hair seemed to flare with resentment, a corona of rage around her pale, scowling face.

  “Dad said to turn off the light,” I said.

  “I’m not sitting in my room in the dark with you.”

  “Why, because you’re scared of me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Right. Scared of the boy who’s scared Daddy doesn’t love him.”

  “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “Don’t cuss in my room!”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I said.

  “Daddy!” Susannah shouted. “Ethan is cussing!”

  I heard the car then, a deep, loud grumbling, like some mechanized dog of war had just arrived on our street. Headlights washed over Susannah’s bedroom window. The growl of the engine filled the night air outside. A car door slammed with a solid thunk. My spine crawled, and there was a coppery taste in my mouth, like pennies. I was frightened, truly frightened, not the daily, dull red alert of my home life, but a bright flare sent up by my nervous system. Danger, Will Robinson, I thought.

  “Ethan’s cussing!” Susannah shouted again.

  I rushed toward my sister and put my hand over her mouth, shoving her back onto the mattress. Between my teeth, I whispered, “Shut up.”

  For once, Susannah didn’t argue. She was staring at me, surprised, shocked even, by how I had pinned her onto the bed. But she wasn’t afraid. Her stare told me she was assessing, reevaluating, considering next steps. All I wanted to do was hide with her from whatever was coming up the front walk.

  “Let go of me,” Susannah said from behind my hand.

  I shook my head and listened. Someone was climbing the front steps. The car outside growled.

  “Right now,” Susannah said, her eyes narrowing.

  A hammering on the front door—not the frantic knocking from earlier, but physical blows as if someone intended to bash the door in. Then a voice—harsh, male: “Kayla!” Another pounding on the door that made Susannah’s window rattle in its frame. “Kayla, I know you’re in there!” How does he know that? I thought. And then I realized—the girl’s shoe. She had lost her shoe running up to our front door. And whoever was out there had seen it, knew it was hers. My stomach, hollow and acidic, clenched like a fist. I should have grabbed the shoe, I thought.

  Then my mother’s voice, piercing, distraught: “Jimmy!” she called out, and right then I knew my father was heading for the front door.

  I let go of Susannah and half fell off her bed, then fumbled to open her bedroom door. Dad’s angry voice joined the rising chorus—my mother pleading, the man outside snarling, and the girl my parents had let in now wailing and crying in earnest. I couldn’t process the words, just the fear and the anger behind them. Senselessly I thought of FDR’s famous quote, which Ms. Poorbaugh had written on the board in social studies class: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

  Then the front door was thrown open, followed by the harsh male voice: “Kayla!” And my father bellowed, no words, just an unbottled rage that filled the house so that I thought the walls would explode. This is a bad idea, I thought, even as I rushed across the hall into my parents’ room. I had to find the flat, wooden box my father had brought home from Iraq.

  More shouting from the foyer, followed by a hard smack and a bark of pain. Something smashed in the front hall—a plate? No, a lamp. I fell to my knees on the floor of my parents’ room and groped under their bed, struggling to reach the box. My fingertips brushed it, almost pushing it away, and then I gripped the box and dragged it out. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” I breathed, trying to shut out the other sounds—my mother screaming, my father’s incoherent rage, the pounding and stomping of a fistfight in the foyer, the keening wail of the girl, and, in the background, the continuous growl of the car. The box was locked, but I knew my father kept the key in his bedside table. I yanked the drawer out, spilling bottles of pills and loose change on the floor, and I began searching blindly on the floor for the key. “Motherfucker!” someone, not my father, shouted in the foyer. Then my fingers found the key, and I shoved it into the lock and turned it, opening the box. Inside lay my father’s service pistol, a Beretta M9, a black chunk of metal with a pebbled handgrip and a smooth comma of a trigger. I grabbed the pistol and lifted it out of the box and ran out the door into the hall.

  At the end of the hall I saw my father struggling with another man. The man was the same size and build as my father, with a black goatee and acne scars. He was trying to put his hands around my father’s neck. Then they stumbled into the den and out of my line of sight.

  “Dad!” I shouted, and I ran down the hall with the pistol in my hand.

  That’s when I saw Susannah’s bedroom door was opened, but I was already running in my haste to reach Dad. I saw Susannah in the doorway, saw the furious look in her eyes. I did not see her stick her leg out. I tripped over her foot and went sprawling, the pistol still in my hand. I landed on my stomach in the foyer. When I hit the floor, my hand convulsively squeezed around the pistol and I fired a round into the wall directly ahead of me.

  The shot rang in my ears. In the den to my left, I could see my father and the goateed man frozen, still locked in each other’s arms, as if the gunshot had signaled the end of a round. Behind them, my mother and the girl, Kayla, hugged each other on the couch. They were all staring at me. Shakily I got to my feet, the pistol still in my hand.

  “Ethan?” my father said.

  “The fuck?” someone said behind me. I turned to see another man in the open doorway of our home. He wore a black vest over a white T-shirt, and his hair was pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes were wide and frantic. He jerked his hand up—he has a gun too, I thought—and there was a loud, percussive bang and a hammer blow struck my right arm, just below my shoulder. I staggered back a step, and my arm suddenly felt heavy and senseless. Then I saw Susannah at the edge of the foyer, staring at me. No—she was staring at our father’s pistol, which was on the floor between us. I must have dropped it. Run, I wanted to say. Then the ponytailed man in the hallway fired again, and then he kept firing, a jagged roll of concussive bangs like a string of exploding firecrackers in a metal barrel, and I fell to the floor and squeezed my eyes shut against the shots and screamed.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was facedown on the floor, my head turned to face the hallway. Susannah was sitting against a wall, her hands over her stomach, which was red with blood. She was staring straight ahead to the opposite wall. “Susannah?” I managed, my voice thick. She didn’t react. I tried to push up off the floor, but I couldn’t make my right arm move. I felt weak and nauseous and I was sweating and my arm wouldn’t work. “Mom?” I said. “Dad?” I turned my head to look into the den. My mother was still seated on the couch, her head back as if she were looking at the ceiling. Something dark stained the couch. The girl, Kayla, was gone. My father was on the ground a few yards away, on his back, making a horrible gurgling noise. He looked at me.

  “Ethan
,” he managed. “Watch … your sister.” He paused to say something else. And the pause didn’t end, although the gurgling noise did. Dimly I realized that the growling from the car in our driveway was gone too, swallowed up by the night, replaced by the high, thin call of an approaching siren, warning us far too late.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By Friday evening, after confronting Marisa in my classroom, my earlier confidence has dwindled. I meant to come clean to Teri Merchant at the end of the workday, but she wasn’t available after school and I had to settle for scheduling a meeting first thing Monday morning. I don’t know how I’m going to make it until then. I’m unable to read or watch TV or concentrate on anything except my own vague sense of dread. Marisa’s rage unnerved me more than I’d like to admit, but the uncertainty of what she will do next is worse. What if she accuses me of harassing her? Of stalking her? What would she tell Teri Merchant? Susannah is waiting tables at the Palms tonight and won’t be home for hours, so with only Wilson for company—he eyes me nervously from his bed—I pace around my house and think about what to do. Should I call Teri now and forget Monday? No, telling her over the phone won’t work; it needs to be face-to-face—meet it head on. Or am I just holding off until I lose my resolve and convince myself that I don’t need to do this? Twice I pull out my phone, and twice I push it back into my hip pocket. I drink a beer, then another, neither doing anything except making me pee.

  What I want to do, more than anything, is walk away from this, just as I walked away from my uncle. But where? A man cannot flee from himself, as Shakespeare himself said. I can’t joke my way out of this or try to bargain or fight my way out. I recall my words to my students about Macbeth, about how he faces his fate, knowing he will lose and die, and how powerfully compelling that is. I laugh at the thought, finish my beer, then throw it into the trash can hard enough that the bottle breaks. The broken glass stays in the can, though. I take it as a sign of what I’m going to do on Monday—I’ve made a mess, but it will be a contained mess. And then my garbage will be hauled off, leaving me able to start over.