Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  “No. Dirt Plow? Who was that, your boyfriend at the time?”

  “They were a band, dumbass.”

  “I’m the dumbass? The band’s name was Dirt Plow.”

  “They were good, asshole. That was their last show before they broke up. They were reinventing grunge. Very earthy.”

  “I’ll bet,” I say. “Did they play on farm equipment? Use a tractor as a drum?”

  “Tommy Mojo was their guitar player. He was a freak.”

  “No doubt.”

  “You wouldn’t know a good band if it farted in your bathtub.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  Susannah glances at her phone. “Shit, it’s almost seven thirty.”

  I groan.

  “Come on, Ethan.” She grabs my TV remote. “It’s time for Jeopardy!”

  Susannah’s version of Jeopardy! is simple: you have to verbally guess the correct question before the contestants or any other opponents—meaning me—do, and if you guess the correct answer first, you win the cash amount for that question. You have to answer in the form of a question, of course, and you cannot write anything down—you have to keep track in your head of how much money you’ve won. She has played this with me since she was ten.

  On the television, Alex Trebek stands behind his Jeopardy! lectern, looking like a televangelist about to gently admonish some wayward teens. The categories appear on-screen, and as usual the titles are somewhere between geeky and twee: MAPS, ATTILA THE HUNGRY, THE 1860S, COMIC STRIPPERS, PRESIDENTS BY FIRST NAME, and MYTHELLANEOUS. The computer programmer contestant starts with Mythellaneous for two hundred and Trebek reads out the answer, about Laocoön and a wooden horse.

  “What is Troy?” Susannah shouts out before I can even open my mouth. “Boom!” She mimes throwing down a mike. I roll my eyes.

  At the end of the first round, Susannah is winning, but I’ve answered five straight in a row and am feeling good enough to get us each another beer at the commercial. “Comic Strippers was so lame,” I call out from my kitchen, popping off the bottle caps.

  “That’s just because you couldn’t get that one,” Susannah says.

  “You mean the one you thought was Family Circus instead of FoxTrot?” I say, grinning.

  She flips me off but takes a beer from me when I walk back in, all without taking her eyes off the television, where Alex Trebek has reappeared with a new board: AMERICAN WRITERS, FOUR-LETTER STOCK MARKET WORDS, PEOPLE ON POSTAGE, ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS, SCIENCE, and YOU KNOW, THE MOVIE WHERE …

  “Science?” I scoff. “Stupid title.”

  “Here’s a better one—what is potassium?” Susannah belts out before Alex Trebek is even halfway through the first question. She gets it right, and naturally it’s worth two grand.

  Nine minutes later the second round is over and we are virtually tied within a few hundred dollars of each other. Susannah bares her teeth at me. I offer a sneer in return. “For our final round,” Alex Trebek says, and we both lean forward in anticipation. With a ding, the final category appears: SHAKESPEARE’S WOMEN.

  “Yes!” I lift my clenched fists over my head.

  “Jesus Christ,” Susannah says.

  Quickly we grab our phones and type out how much we want to bet, which we will show each other at the end to prove who the winner is. Susannah is muttering to herself. I try to calculate how much I can bet without going bankrupt. My sister is brilliant, but this is my game, my question. I bet half of what I have. We both put our phones on the table, facedown, just as Alex Trebek reappears.

  “And the answer is,” he says gravely, just before it appears on-screen:

  The last words spoken by this character are

  “What’s done cannot be undone: to bed, to bed, to bed.”

  “One of your students, maybe?” Susannah says.

  I flip her off—nice try—as I read the words. The answer skates around my brain, too quick to comprehend. Not Gertrude, not Juliet, not Portia … I almost have it, my lips forming the answer.

  “More like whoever you banged at your conference,” Susannah says, and her comment sweeps through me like a winter blast, clearing my head of everything except an image of Marisa, her lips on mine, our bodies tangled together in that hotel room. My heart contracts, squeezed in a fist of granite. Susannah takes advantage of my hesitation and shouts, “Who is Lady Macbeth?” Which is, of course, the correct answer. Triumphantly she picks up her phone and displays how much she bet: everything.

  * * *

  IT’S LATER AND we are sitting on my couch in the dark, the blank screen of my TV facing us. In his bed in the corner, Wilson sighs, a single huff, and then goes back to sleep. I lift my beer to my lips, but the bottle is empty, like the many bottles littering the coffee table. “I need to go to bed,” I say.

  Susannah stirs. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “No,” I say, followed by a molar-cracking yawn. “You get the bed. I’ll take the couch.”

  “I like the couch.”

  “Seriously, Suze, take my—”

  “I’m sleeping on the goddamned couch, Ethan.”

  “Okay, fine. Jesus.”

  Susannah hmms.

  I try to read her expression, but I can’t make out her face in the dark. I yawn again, my wits fading. I feel as if I’m turning to stone, that come morning I’ll be a statue of a man sitting on a couch.

  “You gonna go back to therapy?” I ask. It’s a risky question, but it just popped into my head, and I’m too tired to care.

  To my surprise, Susannah hmms again.

  “Is that a maybe?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. Yes.”

  Wilson whimpers in his sleep.

  “I gotta go to bed,” I say again, without moving.

  Susannah says, “Do you ever think about that night?”

  I hold in my words along with my breath. There is only one night she could be talking about. I try not to think about the shoe on the walkway, or Susannah’s bedroom light, the one she turned on, a beacon in the dark to the growling car. “No,” I manage.

  “I do,” she says. “All the time.” And then she says nothing else as I sit there in the dark next to her. From the street, a passing car’s headlights sweep across the window, glinting off the beer bottles on the coffee table, and then they slide away, leaving both of us stranded in the shadows.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The night my parents died I was taken to the hospital, where, at some point, bathed in a twilight haze of painkillers, I realized that a man wearing a flat tweed cap was sitting in a chair across from me, reading a newspaper. He glanced up as if he knew I was awake, and his eyes were black as tar. “You look like you’re trying to give me a Nazi salute,” he said.

  Slowly, I turned my head to look at my right arm, frozen in a full cast up to my armpit and raised up on a stack of pillows. “Sieg Heil,” I murmured. My lips were dry, and my tongue pushed out between them, fat and rubbery, unable to wet them enough.

  The man put his newspaper aside, stood up, and walked over to me. The first thing I noticed was that he was short. The second was that he held a blue plastic cup in his hand. He shook the cup and it rattled. “Here,” he said. “They said you could have this.” He held the cup to my mouth, and I managed to open my lips. A few crushed pieces of ice slipped into my mouth.

  “Not too many,” he said. His voice was odd, a thin southern accent overlaying something hard in the vowels.

  I sucked on the pieces of ice as if they were peppermints. “Where are my parents?” I managed. “My sister?”

  “The doctor’s coming,” he said. “You hold on.”

  “You’re from Ireland,” I said. That was what I’d heard in his voice. The dohkter’s comin’. It was a version of my mother’s accent. A memory surfaced: I was in a hospital room with Mom and Dad, meeting Susannah just after she was born, and a man appeared in the doorway, holding a wrapped present. Dad wouldn’t let him in. He was shorter than Dad and wore
a flat cap and coat—Susannah was born in February—and he looked at me over Dad’s shoulder with a pair of deep, dark eyes. The same eyes that were looking at me now.

  “Are you my uncle?” I asked him.

  He nodded, once, then turned his head to the door. “Need a doctor in here,” he said, not shouting but something close to a bark.

  “That’s the first thing … you say to me?” I asked. He turned back to me, and I continued, “I look like a Nazi?” It was stupid—hysterical, even. Heil Hitler. I started to chuckle, and even though I could see the alarm in his face and felt tears on my cheeks, I didn’t want to stop laughing, because if I did I’d have to acknowledge that this was my uncle Gavin, my mother’s brother, and if he was here that could mean only one thing. But then a nurse swept in and leaned over me—broad face, professional concern in her gaze, her voice kind and soothing—and everything was sucked down a gray whirlpool that went black.

  When I next woke up, sunlight streamed through the thin curtains shrouding the single window. Uncle Gavin was sitting in the same chair, leafing through a magazine. He’d taken his cap off, and his hair was a tangle of black with a touch of gray at the temples. I managed to clear my throat, and he looked up. No gray in those eyes—just deep, deep black. “Ethan,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Never better,” I croaked.

  He glanced at my arm in its cast. “The doctor says you’ll be in the cast for a few weeks,” he said. “Then rehab. But there shouldn’t be any permanent damage.”

  I took a breath, released it. “I was shot,” I said.

  He gave me a careful look of appraisal. “It was clean,” he said. “The wound. Bullet went right through. Broke the bone in your upper arm, two inches below your shoulder. You’ll have some nice scars to show off.”

  “I got shot in my humerus?” I said. “Hilarious.” I took another breath, aware of a distant pain in my upper arm if I breathed too deeply. “Susannah?”

  His face closed up, though his eyes were the same liquid black they had been. “Hanging in there,” he said. “Touch and go for a while, but the doctor says she’ll make it.”

  “My parents are dead, aren’t they,” I said.

  Another appraising look, as if he were calculating how much grief I could manage. “Yes,” he said.

  I closed my eyes and nodded, then leaned my head back against my pillow. Once, I’d helped my mother make spaghetti squash, scraping the steamed squash out of the gourd with a fork. I felt like that squash, scraped and set aside on the counter.

  “There … was a girl,” I said. “She lost her shoe.” There was more, I knew, just around the slippery corner of my memory, but the shoe was the important point. That and the fact that my parents’ deaths were my fault.

  Mine and Susannah’s, a voice said in the back of my head.

  Shut up, I said.

  “Ethan?” I opened my eyes to see Uncle Gavin frowning. Had I spoken aloud?

  “Did the police,” I said, then swallowed. “Did they find who …” I could not complete the sentence.

  Uncle Gavin shook his head. “Not yet.” Another pause, and something gathered in Uncle Gavin’s face, hard and threatening. “But if they don’t find them,” he said, his voice lower still, his dark eyes fixed on mine, “I will.”

  * * *

  SUSANNAH’S INJURIES WERE far worse than mine. The doctors had explained that the bullet had so damaged her that she would never have children, but that seemed too ridiculous a concept to worry about right now—her lower body being swathed in bandages was a more immediate concern. The nurses had told me that she was on pain medication and so might not be fully alert. In her hospital bed, she looked so small and pale, the skin under her eyes bruised. “Hi,” she managed.

  “Hi,” I said.

  I was in a wheelchair, my cast-encased arm now in a sling. Susannah took this in with a long, slow look. “So we both got shot,” she said.

  Because both of us fucked up, I wanted to say. Instead I nodded.

  She lay her head back, looking at the ceiling. “Mom and Dad are dead, huh?”

  Any resentment or anger I felt toward her at that moment drained away. Her hollow voice was more devastating than tears. My own eyes watered. I was getting sick of crying. “Yeah,” I said, wiping the back of my arm across my face. Orphans, I thought. I looked at my sister, pale and distant, practically mummified by her bandages. What were we going to do?

  “You should’ve shot the other guy first,” Susannah said. Then she fell back asleep.

  * * *

  THE DOCTORS RELEASED me the next day, but I wouldn’t leave Susannah, who had to remain “for observation,” which I read as code for she still might die. I’d like to think that I wanted to stay because of filial loyalty. Looking back, however, I realize it was also fear. Leaving the hospital would mean that I was walking away from my previous life with my mother and father and heading into a new, frightening world without them. It would be an acknowledgment that my parents’ deaths were real. So I remained stubbornly at my sister’s bedside. It was only when Susannah finally told me to get out of her room so she could get some sleep that I left. But as Uncle Gavin steered me and my wheelchair out of Susannah’s room and down the hall to the elevator, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was deserting my post.

  I probably should have been more freaked out by leaving the hospital with Uncle Gavin, who was a virtual stranger. All I knew of him was that he, like Mom, had been born in Ireland and that he had brought her with him to the United States after their parents died in a car accident. On the rare occasions Mom or Dad had mentioned Uncle Gavin, it was always to say he had “gone down the wrong path” or “made bad choices” or “had to lie down in the bed he’d made.” He was a sort of family bogeyman, an avatar of wickedness. What wickedness my uncle had supposedly done was never made clear. As far as Susannah and I could piece together from the rare instances when we overheard our parents talking about Uncle Gavin, somehow Mom felt she had failed as a sister, allowing Uncle Gavin to wander off into corruption and degeneracy. Of course, Susannah and I wanted to know all about him, to hear stories about bad old Uncle Gavin and his iniquity, but Mom refused to discuss it with us in any detail, and Dad forbade us from bothering Mom about him. And now he was rolling me out of the hospital. By all rights I should have been worried, but somehow I felt … not cared for, exactly, but protected.

  Uncle Gavin drove a black Lincoln Navigator, which, while upscale and tricked out in leather and wood trim, left me disappointed. I’d imagined Uncle Gavin driving some sort of bad-boy car, like a Shelby Mustang or maybe a Ferrari. Instead, he was driving the kind of SUV that Buckhead mommies dropped off at the valet at Phipps Plaza. I got into the passenger seat, Uncle Gavin closing my door with a heavy whunk.

  “Where are we going?” I asked once Uncle Gavin got in the driver’s seat. I wanted so badly to go home, except my home no longer existed. Now it was only a house with bloodstains.

  Uncle Gavin looked at me with those dark eyes. “You’re coming home with me,” he said.

  * * *

  UNCLE GAVIN LIVED in Grant Park, a gentrified neighborhood in southeast Atlanta near the zoo. The northern suburbs, seated on the gentle heights of tree-topped hills, gazed down on the glass and steel towers of Atlanta from a distance. Grant Park was older, grittier, a stone’s throw from downtown. It was also a neighborhood getting a facelift. Every third block or so revealed a boarded-up house, a weedy lot strewn with rubble, or brand-new construction.

  Uncle Gavin’s house was a remodeled Victorian bungalow that sat up from the sidewalk, stacked-stone walls flanking stairs up to a gate in a wooden fence that surrounded the property. An oak tree shaded the tiny yard, which had more boxwoods than grass, but everything looked tidy.

  As we pulled up to the curb by the front steps, I saw a woman standing on the front porch, smoking a cigarette. She wore a pink tank top and painted-on jeans, and her chestnut hair was piled in a messy updo. When we got out
of the Lincoln, the woman dropped her cigarette and stepped on it to put it out, then chewed her thumbnail.

  I stopped at the bottom of the steps. “I don’t have any clothes or anything,” I said.

  Uncle Gavin held up a duffel bag. “I got you some things from your house,” he said.

  We looked at each other. I imagined Uncle Gavin walking into my house, where his sister had been killed, and going down the hall to my room to get me jeans and shirts and underwear. The scene hurt so much, so quickly, that I mentally pulled a garage door down, closing it off.

  “You okay?” Uncle Gavin asked, and when I nodded he led the way up the stairs, holding the gate open for me. We climbed the wooden steps to the porch, where the woman was waiting. “Supper?” Uncle Gavin asked her.

  “On the stove,” the woman said. She had the kind of Southern accent I associated with NASCAR and country music stations. “Oh, honey, how’s your arm? Bless your heart.” It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me, but before I could say anything, the woman had enveloped me in a hug, careful not to jostle my slinged arm. Two things registered simultaneously: her hair smelled like coconuts, and she had enormous boobs.

  “Fay, this is my nephew Ethan,” Uncle Gavin said. “Ethan, this is Fay.” He offered no other information, although very soon I realized Fay was my uncle’s girlfriend.

  Fay released me and bent down a bit to look me in the eye—she was taller than me, almost a whole head taller than Uncle Gavin. She was younger than him, too. I tried not to look at her impressive cleavage. Fay was tanned and her face was striking, but there was something slightly off about her, a rabbity nervousness about her eyes and nose. “You have been through an awful thing,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  I’d about lost it right there, blubbering all over the front of Fay’s tank top, when Uncle Gavin stepped forward. “All right, let the boy alone, now. Ethan, I’ll show you to your room, and then we’ll have supper.” I don’t know if he wanted to save me from any further grief for the moment, or if he wanted to avoid having an emotional teenage boy on his front porch, or if he just wanted to eat. But Uncle Gavin’s comment gave me time to pull myself together and walk into his house.