Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  Thirteen

  Robin

  “LET US PRAY,” the rabbi said. He began reciting the Twenty-third Psalm, and Robin mouthed the words, her father’s body in a coffin just a few feet away, the coffin she’d chosen based on some musing of Dad’s that she vaguely recalled. Something about being buried in a “plain pine box.” Though it could have been her mother who had said that. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  Getting ready for the funeral, Robin had downed a glass of wine to steady her nerves, and now her head felt light and woozy, her peripheral vision pierced by tiny, bright sparks. She hadn’t eaten today, and that, combined with the wine and the Xanax she’d taken earlier and forgotten about, was affecting her, that plus her own cartwheeling emotions—confusion and grief and anger and fear, so much fear for her mother. Please, please, Mom, please wake up . . .

  Wake up and explain to me who you are.

  “Are you all right?” Eric put an arm around her and she leaned into his shoulder and closed her eyes for a few moments, waiting for the feeling to pass, trying not to think of Eric texting furiously on a day off from work or the way he’d dropped his phone into his pocket when he realized she was behind him.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” So many things Robin couldn’t let herself look at, not if she was going to get through the rest of this day.

  Robin opened her eyes. She turned her attention to the group surrounding her father’s grave, work colleagues of Dad’s whose faces looked vaguely familiar, a contingent from her office headed by Eileen, a few shell-shocked men and women she figured for Dad’s patients. Morasco was there too, standing in the back of the group with a tall, curly-haired woman Robin assumed was Brenna, his wife. There were a few people from Eric’s job whom Robin barely knew, a voluptuous young woman she recognized as Shawn Labatoir’s latest personal assistant. Some of her mother’s fellow hospital volunteers, her parents’ neighbor, Mr. Dougherty. And Nikki. Nikki was a sturdy-looking woman in a black T-shirt dress with sensibly cut silver hair; a weathered, makeup-free face; and blue eyes so bright they were difficult to look directly at. Before the ceremony started, she’d gone straight for Robin, hugged her tight enough to knock the wind out of her. “My God, Robbie,” she had said. “Little Robbie.”

  “Umm . . . I’m not sure I—”

  “Of course you don’t. It was so long ago. I’ve been keeping up with you, though. Your school and your career. Your mom . . . She is so proud of you.” Her face was wet against Robin’s shoulder, her arms warm and strong. At last, Nikki had pulled away, those otherworldly eyes sparkling with tears, and Robin had hung on to her hands, not wanting to let go of the only person here who seemed as hurt and as lost as she was.

  “She is proud of you,” she had said, leaning on the present tense. “She is.”

  “I wish I remembered you, Nikki,” Robin had said.

  “We’ll catch up. When your mother gets better, we’ll catch up, and we’ll reminisce.”

  Nikki was standing by herself now. She was holding a Bible and mouthing the prayer and Robin watched her, the memory of her like the pinpoints of light at the corners of her eyes, so close. Yet she couldn’t hang on to it long enough to see it clearly . . .

  The rabbi finished the psalm. Workers lowered the coffin into the grave. “Al mekomo yavo veshalom,” the rabbi said. “May Mitchell go to his place in peace.”

  The rabbi was a young man, rosy-cheeked and earnest. Robin’s parents never went to temple that much to begin with, but when Rabbi Isaac left last year and this one took over, they stopped going altogether. Nothing against him, Dad would say. He’s just too young to lead a flock. The new rabbi’s last name was Klein, which means “Little” in German—something Robin’s father had found hilarious. Mom and Dad had referred to him as the Bar Mitzvah Boy. And yet here he was, the Little Bar Mitzvah Boy, laying her father to rest. Life had a sick sense of humor.

  Rabbi Klein beckoned Robin to the grave as the workers lowered the coffin. Eric put one hand on her waist and took her hand with the other, as though she were too frail to walk. He started to lead her to the grave but she shook her head. “I can do it,” she said, a little too sharply. “I can stand on my own.”

  At the edge of the grave, the rabbi handed Robin the shovel. “As is tradition,” he said, “Mitchell will be buried by the hands of those who love him.”

  Just as he was shot by the gun of his wife, who loved him.

  Robin shoved the thought away. She pushed the shovel into the dirt, feeling as though she were moving through water, the lack of her father all around her, the gasp of her mother’s ventilator running through her head. The shovel was heavy as she lifted it, and the clump of dirt hit the coffin with a soft, crumbling sound. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, not with all these eyes on her. Not standing next to the Bar Mitzvah Boy. It was easier to keep her head down, her breath even, to focus not on feelings but on what she had to do: hand the shovel to the rabbi, turn around and walk back to her husband, one foot in front of the other, eyes aimed at the ground, at her open-toed shoes. Her chipped pedicure. Don’t think. Just do.

  As she walked, though, Robin found herself remembering again the last phone conversation she’d ever had with Dad—the strange, sad sound of his voice. Yes, he frequently got sad over the Yankees losing. But this had been different and Robin had known it, deep down. Have we been good parents to you? Over forty-one years of her life and hundreds of poorly played games, he’d never asked her that question before.

  Something had been wrong. Robin had known it at the time. Some part of her had. Yet it had been easier to just believe the lie, the way she always believed the lies her father told her, about everything being okay when it wasn’t, about how he and Mom had only been engaged in a discussion, during those few times they’d woken her up late at night with their harsh, hissed words. About how mama’s baby bird had flown off to join her flock or how seventh-grade parent-teacher conferences had gone just fine, when Robin later wound up flunking math that year, how her eighth-grade perm made her look like a movie star or how the bottomless sorrow she felt sophomore year of high school was nothing serious at all—just teen angst. Everybody has that. It had been Robin’s mother, with her lack of a medical degree, who had finally taken her to a therapist.

  For a person whose job it had been to plumb the depths of criminals’ brains in search of the ugly truth, Robin’s father had been awfully comfortable telling little white lies. And Robin had made herself fall for them, every time. It was easier, wasn’t it, to pretend that things weren’t as bad as they seemed?

  Some of the guests were lining up now, waiting for their turns to shovel dirt onto Dr. Mitchell Bloom’s grave. The others in the group were starting to disperse. She saw Nick and Brenna Morasco heading away from the group and hurried to catch up with them, brushing past some outstretched hands as she did. “Detective Morasco?”

  He stopped, turned around. “Hi, Ms. Diamond,” he said. “It was a lovely ceremony.”

  The tall woman stuck out her hand. “Brenna Spector,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” She had a strong grip and a steady gaze.

  “Thank you.” In one of their early conversations, Morasco had mentioned to Robin that Brenna had that Marilu Henner thing—hyperthymesia, or superior autobiographical memory. Whatever you wanted to call it, it basically meant that she couldn’t forget a damn minute of her life if she tried. Robin couldn’t imagine anything worse. I bet that puts the pressure on you, she had said to Morasco, half joking. You blow it once, she remembers forever.

  But actually she thought that Morasco’s wife’s condition might have had a lot to do with his demeanor—the way he seemed to think all his sentences through before he said them out loud. As though he ascribed a certain permanence to his comments and actions that other people didn’t. “Listen,” Morasco said. “I’m sorry about Ehrlich Baus. I’d tell you he means well, but I don’t know if it’d be the truth.”

  Robin smiled. �
�Yeah, well . . . You have a lot of patience.”

  “He does,” said Brenna. “Believe me.”

  “Listen,” Robin said. “I um . . . I just wanted to get something straight. About the case.”

  Brenna and Morasco exchanged a look. “I’ll see you back at the car,” she said, then turned to Robin. “Again, my condolences.”

  Brenna headed up the small hill toward the parking lot. Robin watched her go, Dad’s funeral, his death, and everything her husband had told her about it trapped forever in the amber of her perfect memory.

  Morasco said, “What can I help you with?”

  “Okay, I didn’t really think about this before because I was so surprised by the information,” she said. “But the killer . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “He or she shot both of my parents with my mother’s gun.”

  “Yes. That appears to be what happened.”

  “So . . . that tells me my mom must have taken it out from wherever she’d been keeping it. You know . . . to defend herself.”

  He said nothing.

  “But you guys were asking me about people my parents know. People they might have had fallings-out with . . .”

  “Yes.”

  Robin was aware of others leaving the cemetery, their eyes on her as they passed. She saw Mr. Dougherty, the bright sun beating down on the back of his bent head. She gave him a weak wave that he returned as he trudged alone up the hill.

  Robin turned her attention on Morasco. “Someone broke in,” she said. “My mother took out the gun she apparently owned. She tried to defend herself. Wouldn’t it make sense that the intruder was not someone she or my dad knew?”

  “There’s a lot of inference in what you just said.”

  “Inference?”

  “No one would be able to confirm that your mother took out the gun or that she tried to defend herself against an intruder,” he said. “No one except for your mother. And she’s . . . unconscious at the moment.”

  “Yeah, but it seems pretty obvious. People buy guns to protect themselves.”

  “Have you been reading the news stories?”

  “Not really.” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “I haven’t been surfing the web very much in the past couple of days.”

  “I asked because the media are treating it as a home invasion.”

  “Isn’t that what it was?”

  He exhaled. “I can’t really discuss the case with you, Ms. Diamond.”

  “Detective Morasco—”

  “We don’t discuss ongoing investigations with—”

  “Please.” Her voice shook. Her hands clenched into fists. The wine was wearing off and the Xanax was long gone and her feelings were showing themselves again—pain and powerlessness and an exhaustion that was agonizing, as though she’d been swimming against a strong current for hours, days. She took a breath. “I need to hear what’s going on, Detective. I won’t tell anyone. Not even my husband if you don’t want me to. But I need to hear the truth. From someone. Please.”

  He looked at her. “You can’t tell anyone. You have to promise to keep this between us.”

  “I promise.”

  He leaned in closer, barely moving his lips when he spoke. “There was no evidence of a break-in,” he said. “No broken windows or locks. The alarm hadn’t been engaged. No one in the neighborhood heard a noise until the gunshots. So even though we’re still looking into every possibility, it seems very likely that the shooter had been invited in.”

  “Oh,” Robin said.

  She felt footsteps behind her. Without turning around, she knew it was Eric, before his gentle hand on her shoulder, his shiny black shoes on the grass, the smell of his cologne, her favorite. The same cologne he’d worn the night of her father’s death, that late dinner he’d had with a source . . .

  “Hi, Detective Morasco,” Eric said. “I’m not sure if you heard, but we’re having some food and drinks at our house.”

  “That’s really nice of you, but I should be heading out.” His gaze moved from Eric’s face to Robin’s. “We’ll be in touch,” he said.

  Robin nodded. She took Eric’s hand and walked up to the parking lot slowly, stopping to accept hugs and condolences, her head resting on his shoulder, inhaling cologne. When they were nearing their limo, she turned to him. She gazed up into his clear blue eyes, and wanted to trust him, wanted to trust someone . . . “Who were you texting earlier?”

  “What?”

  She didn’t repeat herself. She’d said it perfectly clearly, and he’d heard her. That was obvious. She could see him stalling for time, his brain working behind those clear eyes, clicking through responses. At last, Eric opened his mouth, but she put a finger to his lips. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “But I was just—”

  “I mean it, Eric. I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t want to know. Not today.”

  He nodded, slowly. They got into the limo together, neither one of them saying a word. As they headed out of the parking lot, Robin told herself, the way her father would have told her, that everything was fine. That Eric was probably just texting a work colleague about an important matter and even if he wasn’t, that was something to save discussing for another time, when there wasn’t so much going on.

  Robin found herself remembering instead what Mr. Dougherty had told her the night of the shooting, about seeing a strange car near her parents’ home. She scanned the parking lot for silver sedans, because that was something concrete and simple to do with her brain. There were many silver sedans in the lot. Next to one of them, she spotted silver-haired, bright-eyed Nikki talking to a tall, young bespectacled man in a dark T-shirt and jeans, who looked . . . Could it be? Her gaze went to the Chevy insignia on the back of the car, the name of the make. Chevrolet Cruze.

  It could have been important. Or not. During the hours she’d spent in the waiting room at St. Catherine’s the night of the shooting, Robin had looked up Chevy Cruze on her phone. Turned out it was the most popular car at East Coast rental agencies by more than 30 percent. If you rented a car to come to the funeral, odds were you’d get a Cruze.

  More interesting than the model and make of the car was the young man Nikki had been speaking to and how, in the midst of their rather animated conversation, he’d raised his head and watched the limo as it left the parking lot, his gaze intent, as though he were trying to see inside. Robin pulled her phone out of her bag. Looked up images of Quentin Garrison. Sure enough, his headshot from the NPR station came up first, and Robin saw him staring back at her—the young man from the parking lot. Her mother’s old friend Nikki was talking to Quentin Garrison. About what, she had no idea. But Robin wanted to know.

  Fourteen

  Quentin

  WHEN QUENTIN WAS a kid, his mother would sometimes take him to Westwood Village Memorial Park—a patch of green between towering L.A. office buildings and the eternal resting place of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Kate’s idol, Marilyn Monroe. He had hazy memories of those visits: Kate’s cool hand wrapped around his own, that rare touch of her skin and the whispering breeze, the bright flowers on the graves of the stars and Marilyn Monroe’s crypt, the most beloved one of all, the stone gone pink from years of lipstick kisses. He’d been to other cemeteries since, of course. But as he stood under the hot sun that afternoon at Tarry Ridge Cemetery, watching the funeral of Mitchell Bloom from a respectful distance, Quentin found himself feeling much the way he had back then.

  It could have been the summer heat or the dewy grass beneath his sneakers, but more likely it was the emotion coursing through him—the same one he’d felt holding his mother’s hand as she sobbed and sobbed over Marilyn, a dead celebrity she’d never met. It was a disquiet he couldn’t put a name to; an awful, powerless feeling, like pounding on soundproof glass.

  Quentin watched Robin Diamond walk to the head of her father’s grave. He watched her take the shovel, her matchstick arms braced a
s she forced it into the earth. It was hard to reconcile this frail, tired-looking woman with the one in the Mother’s Day video, same as it was hard to think of the woman in intensive care as Renee Bloom. Both of them tungsten-strong in that video, both impossibly, infuriatingly happy. Now, Robin looked dead on her feet, Renee was fighting for her life. And Mitchell Bloom . . .

  I should warn you, the man in the coffin had said to Quentin three days ago, when he’d spoken to him at 4:00 P.M. at his office in Tarry Ridge. Since I’ve been in private practice, I’m no longer as up on all the current theories as I once was.

  You think I want your expertise as a forensic psychiatrist?

  You don’t?

  I’m sorry, sir, but no.

  Well . . . What do you want then?

  Dr. Bloom, how well do you know your wife?

  Had that been so wrong of him to ask? It had been a simple question, really. One that could have resulted in Quentin closing up shop, heading back to L.A. and finding himself a new angle for Closure. If only Dr. Bloom had been able to answer it. If only he hadn’t chosen instead to psychoanalyze Quentin, to dig down into the reserves of his pain and bring it to the surface, where it could breathe and flourish.

  Quentin felt a tap on his shoulder. “Here to pay your respects?”

  It was Detective Morasco from the Tarry Ridge Police Department, and Quentin jumped a little when he saw him. A day ago, he’d found Detective Morasco good-looking in a Mark-Ruffalo-with-a-hangover kind of way, and reasonably easy to talk to. But maybe that was just compared to his partner, who was—and Quentin normally didn’t generalize like this—the worst type of straight man: that guy who’d lived his whole life thinking he was the cleverest and most charming son of a bitch in the room, either because no one had bothered to let him know otherwise, or because in the rooms he frequented (shudder), he was.

  Anyway, the partner wasn’t here, but Morasco was, and Quentin didn’t find his presence as reassuring as he had at the police station. “To be honest,” Quentin told him, “I’m not sure why I’m here.”