Never Come Back

by David Bell

  Dan’s eyes moved back to mine, but he didn’t speak.

  “Do you mind?” I said. “I’ll call you when I know something.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “I am. It has to be this way. I’ll be fine. Really.”

  He reached out and took my hand in his. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Keep in touch. Text me as much as you can so I know you’re okay. Or have Encyclopedia Brown out there do it for you.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go see your uncle.”

  “Thank you.”

  We stood close to each other for a long moment. I leaned up and kissed him.

  He didn’t let go of my hand. I squeezed his hand back. Hard. I liked the feel of it in mine.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  “How far is it?” I asked.

  Neal sat behind the wheel of a surprisingly new Lexus SUV. It didn’t seem to match his dirty hair and army jacket, but I didn’t point that out. It made me wonder about the kind of clients his father represented.

  “You’ve never been there?” he asked.

  “Never.”

  “Aren’t you from Dover?”

  “I am. But what would I go to Reston Point for? What’s there?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “They’ve got Murray’s, the best steak place in the state. They’ve got Fieldstone Farms, where they raise turkeys and serve them in their own restaurant. You never went there for Thanksgiving?”

  “We never went anywhere for Thanksgiving.”

  “You should go this year,” Neal said. “Get your boyfriend to take you, unless it’s too… what would he call it? Beaujolais?”

  “Do you mean bourgeois?”

  “I guess so.” He fumbled around in the glove compartment, reaching across me with his long right arm while he steered the car with his left hand. “We’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.”

  “Is that all?”

  The car swerved. “Shit,” he said.

  “Do you want my help?”

  “Got it,” he said. He held a shiny CD, which he slipped into the car’s player. “Driving music.”

  I looked out the window. We were on a two-lane road passing through harvested cornfields. In the dying light I could see that everything had been hacked to the roots. A thin band of red glowed along the horizon, but the sky was darkening above. My hands were folded in my lap. I balled my right fist up inside my cupped left hand. I felt nervous and twitchy.

  “You like this song?” Neal asked.

  “What?”

  He pointed to the radio. “The song? You like it?”

  I hadn’t been paying attention, so I listened. It sounded slightly familiar. A man sang a slightly poppy, slightly country song in a twangy voice.

  “Yeah, it’s fine,” I said.

  “Fine? Fine? That’s Glen fucking Campbell you’re listening to. Glen fucking Campbell.”

  “It sounds good.”

  “Sheesh, Teach. You need an education. You don’t know Ohio. You don’t know music. What are you learning in graduate school?” He must have sensed my anxiety. “You know, this woman’s probably not dangerous. Most people aren’t. And her record says she isn’t. It’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “When we get there, I think it’s best just to play it straight. Just go up to the door and tell her who you are. None of this sneaking around shit. Like you said, you have a legit reason for showing up.”

  “And you’ll be right there, so that will help.”

  “Negative, Teach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t go to the door with you,” he said. “A dude—a tall dude—showing up and asking questions? Too intimidating. Best to keep it woman to woman. I’ll be around. I’ll have your back.”

  I let out a long breath. Neal’s presence brought me comfort, but I had imagined him being right next to me, not waiting in the car. My fears ran deeper than simply the physical. Deeper and, yes, scarier.

  Neal must have understood. He asked, “What are you really worried about, Teach?”

  I stared out the window. “I guess I’m just scared of what I might find out.”

  • • •

  On the outskirts of Reston Point, we turned onto a county road, one that took us west. The sky was fully dark by now. A few stars and a sliver of moon shone above, and at the horizon line I saw the scattered lights of the town. A cluster of bright yellow globes indicated a factory of some kind, and past that the dimmer lights of the downtown. If Elizabeth Yarbrough was really my sister, if we really shared blood and a relationship to Mom, then what was her life like here in Reston Point? Where did she work? What did she do? Was there a damn thing we shared in common besides the woman who gave birth to us?

  Neal made a couple of turns, and we ended up in a working-class neighborhood. The houses were small and close together. In the glow of the streetlights, I saw yards full of cars, and people lounging on their small porches smoking and drinking beer from bottles. Neal’s car stood out, and the eyes followed us as we passed.

  “It’s right up here,” Neal said.

  He made a last turn onto a side street. The sign read CAMELOT LANE, and I wondered whether anyone saw the irony. He slowed the car halfway down the street. He checked his phone, then looked up at the house numbers.

  “That’s it,” he said, pointing to the right.

  The house looked the same as all the others. It was white and compact. The yard looked well maintained. There were no cars in the driveway. A dim porch light illuminated the house number.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” I said. I hoped no one was.

  “No, Teach—look.” Neal pointed again. “See that glow back there?”

  I followed the line of his finger to a window at the back. The blinds were closed, but the glow from a television leaked around the edges. Someone was there, watching TV.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “This is what you’ve been looking for,” Neal said. “Take out your phone.”

  I did.

  “Make sure it’s ready to call my number. If you have any trouble, just hit the call button. I’ll come running. Okay? I’ll be right out here.”

  I took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Chapter Forty-six

  I stepped onto the porch. A light wind blew down the street, cool and crisp. It raised goose bumps on my arms and neck, but beneath my clothes I felt hot and clammy. A trickle of sweat ran between my shoulder blades. I lifted my hand and rang the bell.

  I waited. I turned and looked back at Neal. I saw the outline of his black SUV in the fading light, but I couldn’t see him. I turned to ring the bell again, but before I could, I heard the lock turn on the other side of the door. I swallowed hard again and waited. I felt like an unprepared actor caught in the glow of the stage lights, except my stage light was a grimy little bulb on somebody’s porch, the globe filled with the summer’s dead bugs.

  The door opened, and there she was. If time travel existed, I would have sworn I had gone back twenty years, to the time captured in photos of my childhood. Before me stood a replica of my mother from that time. A little rougher around the edges certainly, a little more worn by whatever life had thrown at her, but a nearly exact version of my mother. I stepped back, so far I almost fell off the porch. I kept my eyes locked on that face. My doubts and questions faded. This woman was certainly related to me. She had to be my half sister.

  The woman—Elizabeth Yarbrough—raised her hand to her mouth when she saw me. Even though I was just partially illuminated by the porch light, and even though I hadn’t showered all day and had woken up from my nap only an hour earlier and must have looked something like a homeless person, she seemed to understand who I was as well. She probably saw the same ghost in my face that I saw in hers.

  She pushed the screen door open, but didn’t speak right away.
I wondered whether she would shoo me away, send me packing because I had violated her privacy. But when she spoke, her voice carried a welcoming tone. “Come in,” she said. “Come in.”

  So I shook myself out of the past and moved forward. I stepped into the small living room. A thick odor hung in the air, as though something greasy had been cooked recently. The blinds were all closed, the walls painted dark green. The furniture looked heavy and stained, and children’s toys were scattered around the room; I had to look where I stepped.

  “Do you have children?” I asked.

  Children. My nieces or nephews. More relatives. Who knew how many people I didn’t know about?

  “I do,” Beth said. “But these belong to my grandchildren.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Grandchildren.”

  “I’m quite a bit older than you,” she said. “A different generation, really.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Beth didn’t offer me a chair or anything. She stared at me from across the room. Her feet were bare, and she wore tight jeans and a loose sweater. She was thin, like Mom and like me. Her hair was colored somewhere between red and brown, with a hint of gray showing at the roots. She folded her arms across her chest and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  “I always knew we’d meet,” she said. “I hoped we’d meet. Mom wanted—”

  She stopped herself.

  Mom. My mom. Before that day I had heard only one other person call my mother by that name. Would I now have to get used to sharing that word with someone else?

  “Can I sit?” I asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  We both sat, on opposite ends of the couch. I still held the phone in my hand with Neal’s number ready to go.

  “I guess you just want to ask me a bunch of questions,” Beth said. “I guess you want to know everything.”

  “Yes. Everything,” I said. “You called me on the day of Mom’s funeral, didn’t you?”

  “I did. Yes.” Beth nodded. Her voice was a little rough, like a smoker’s. “I didn’t think it was right for me to go, especially since you didn’t know about me. I didn’t think that was the time. I almost went anyway. I got dressed. I put on makeup. I was ready to drive down there, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Mom was already gone at that point, and it would only make things complicated for you.”

  “And did you call the lawyer?”

  “I’m not trying to chisel money out of anybody,” Beth said. “I don’t want you to think that.”

  “But you called him?”

  “I just wanted to know where I stood, that’s all,” she said. “You know, I didn’t have anyone else I could ask. I didn’t think I could approach you. I wasn’t sure.”

  “How did you know the lawyer’s name?”

  Beth hesitated, then said, “Mom told me. She told me when she changed the will. She said if anything ever happened to her, that’s who to call. Mr. Allison.”

  “Did she expect something to happen?”

  Beth raised her arms and hugged herself as though a cold breeze had blown through the room. “I don’t know,” she said. “But there were a few times I talked to her, right before she died, when it seemed like she did think something was about to happen. And then it did.”

  Then why didn’t you do something? I thought to myself. Why didn’t anyone do anything?

  • • •

  “Okay,” I said. “Questions. I guess I’ll just start with the big one. Both your father and—”

  “My father?” Beth asked. “How do you know him?”

  “He came to my apartment,” I said. “He told me all about you. About a lot of things. He said you were supposed to be dead, that you disappeared one day when you were fifteen, and you never came back. The police said there was a serial killer in this part of the country then, some guy named… Rodney—”

  “Rodney Ray Brown,” Beth said, her voice thin.

  “That’s it. Gordon said you were dead. Murdered. But apparently you’re not. So what happened?”

  “My dad,” Beth said. She shuddered; this time it didn’t seem to be from the cold, but from the thoughts that were crossing her mind. Thoughts of her father? “I didn’t disappear,” Beth said. “Disappear makes it sound like I was taken—like someone kidnapped me, you know? It wasn’t like that. Not at all.”

  “Then what did happen?” I asked. “If you weren’t kidnapped and you weren’t dead, why did you stay away for so many years? Why didn’t I know about you until now?”

  Beth closed her eyes. She took a long time answering. When she opened her eyes again, she looked right at me. “I chose to stay away all that time,” she said. “I wanted to get as far away as possible from that sick, disgusting house. I didn’t ever want to go back.”

  Something wormed around in my gut. It felt like the worm had teeth and was starting to gnaw on my insides. I didn’t know how to ask the question. But I pressed on. There was nothing to lose now.

  “Did Gordon…” I let my voice trail off. “Did he… sexually abuse you?”

  Beth shook her head. “No, he didn’t do that. It was nothing like that.” She paused. “I’d like to say it was worse, but when you talk about these things, it’s tough to make those comparisons.”

  “Then what happened?” I had the same feeling then that I’d had in the car during the ride over with Neal. I had to know, but I just didn’t want to know.

  Beth forced an awkward smile. “This is the time I would reach for a glass of wine or something.”

  “Do you have some?”

  She shook her head. “I quit drinking. I quit all of that stuff. But sometimes I really want it.”

  “If you don’t want to rehash a bunch of stuff, that’s okay,” I said. But I didn’t mean it. I had come all that way for the rehashing.

  “That’s nice of you to say. But you want to know, don’t you? You really don’t want me to stop now, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to hear it.”

  “And you should hear it,” she said. “It all happened before you were born, but it’s affected your life, right? It’s still affecting your life.”

  I nodded. “And my brother’s.”

  “Right,” Beth said. “I know. And I’m sorry.” She licked her lips. “Well, I was kind of a wild kid. Typical in many ways, but maybe even more wild than most.”

  She then told me the things that Gordon had told me about her wild days in high school. I would have expected Gordon’s version to be worse, exaggerated for the sake of proving his own point, but as things went, it seemed that Gordon had been pretty accurate in his description of his daughter. She’d been a troublemaker. She’d become difficult for her parents to discipline and control. She’d run with an older and wilder crowd. She mentioned the drinking and the drugs.

  “Your dad said they found heroin in your room,” I said.

  “They found heroin paraphernalia in my room,” she said. “And it really wasn’t mine. I know that’s the oldest lie in the book, the one every teenager gives when they’re caught with something illegal, but it was true in my case. I was holding it for another girl. I’ve never shot up. I’ve done a lot of things, but not that. I know it looked bad to them. To Mom and Gordon. Dad, I should say.”

  “You don’t call him Dad?”

  “It’s hard to think of him as Dad,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  She didn’t go on right away. She seemed lost in thought. My phone vibrated in my hand. I thought it would be Neal, but I saw Dan’s name on the display. Just checking in, I assumed. I wished I’d given his number to Neal so he could stay updated.

  “So you were a wild teenager,” I said. “And you ran with some wild kids. Wasn’t this the seventies? Wasn’t everybody wild?”

  “Not everybody,” Beth said. “I don’t think one time is really that different from another. Kids get wild. Parents worry. People didn’t always send their kids off to rehab back then. They took a harder line, I guess. Gordon—Dad
—threatened me with a lot of stuff. He grounded me. He wouldn’t let me use the phone.” She shrugged. “Big deal, you know? Kids can find ways around that stuff.”

  “And Mom?”

  Beth paused. She stared at the floor, her eyes fixed on something, some moment in the past I would never see. “Mom did her best. I understand that now. She was hard, you know? She didn’t take much crap from me. She even slapped me once when I mouthed off to her.”

  “Really?”

  “Did she ever hit you or Ronnie?”

  “Never.”

  “Different times,” Beth said. “I don’t blame her. I would have slapped me too. She tried to talk to me as well. She treated me like a human being. I didn’t see it all then—I really didn’t. But she tried in her own way. I think she was just… confused by me. That’s all. She was just… baffled by my spirit. My strong will. My stubbornness.”

  “She shouldn’t have been,” I said. “She had all those things.”

  “True,” Beth said. “I have a daughter, and I see those same things. But it’s tough to step back from being the parent. Mom tried. I know she did. I couldn’t see that she was doing that, so I couldn’t meet her halfway. I just resisted. That was all I knew how to do back then.” She sighed. “Sometimes it seems that’s all I’ve ever done with people who wanted to help me. Resist them.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  “How did you end up… leaving or whatever?” I asked.

  Beth didn’t hesitate. She plunged right into the story. It seemed as though she wanted to get it all out, and I wondered whether she had told anyone else the things she was about to tell me. I guessed she must have told one person. She had likely told Mom the whole story sometime in the past couple of months.

  “I snuck out of the house one night when I was fifteen,” Beth said. Her voice didn’t change much as she spoke, but I saw something in her eyes as she related the story. They looked a little glassy, a little distant. I could see the regret in them.