Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  CHAPTER THREE

  On Saturday morning, yawning and not a little hungover, I walk into my den and stop dead. Susannah is in purple leotards and a blue exercise top, doing a downward-facing dog pose, her butt facing me. Wilson is lying on his pillow, staring at Susannah in adoration. He gives me a tail wag but then returns his attention to Susannah.

  “That’s not how I like to wake up in the morning,” I say.

  Susannah, her head pointed to the floor, looks back between her legs at me. “A cute girl in spandex? Perish the thought.”

  “My sister exercising in my den is what I meant.”

  Susannah walks her hands back toward her own feet, bent almost in half, and then stands straight up, the movement graceful and fluid. “You should try it,” she says. “All that sitting around will kill you.”

  I move toward the kitchen and coffee. “I take Pilates,” I say.

  She raises her eyebrows. “Oh, Pilates,” she says, holding one hand to her chest in mock surprise. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware I was speaking to a Pilates student.”

  I flip her off without turning to look at her.

  “What do you call yourselves, anyway?” she calls after me. “Pilatites? Pilatizens?”

  I ignore her, and it’s not just that I’m hungover or that her perkiness is especially annoying. Susannah has dislodged some memories that I had carefully packed away. Not Ponytail—he’s a regular visitor in the dead of the night, stalking my dreams in his black vest and white T-shirt. No. This is something I tied to a concrete block and dropped in the depths of my memory, but now it’s rising to the surface, slimy and mottled and smelling of rotten fish. It’s a nightmare of fragmented images: kudzu in the night, plywood over a hole in the wall, screaming in a pitch-black house. I want to banish it, force it away, but it’s a memory, a biochemical encoding in my brain, and it’s not a single remembered event tucked in a file that theoretically I could delete but a series of smaller memories distributed across my brain, like strands that form a web, a web that has now trapped me. I am again in Frankie’s car—God, Frankie—as he drives down the darkened streets, both of us peering through the windshield, looking for Susannah, riding to her rescue, ha, good one, rescue, like we’d ever had a hope of rescuing her, like my sister hadn’t been lost to us from the start—

  “Ethan,” Susannah says now. She’s in my kitchen doorway, looking at me.

  I realize I am standing at my sink, the water running, empty coffeepot in my hand. “Yeah,” I say, turning off the water. “I’m fine. What?”

  “You okay? You just … zoned out for a minute.”

  I blink at her, then look at the coffeepot in my hand. Coffee. Right. I turn the water back on and fill up the pot. “Just tired,” I say, and I offer her a smile. “And maybe hungover. Can’t hang with my little sister anymore.”

  Susannah looks at me for another moment, then smiles back. “Getting old, big brother. You have enough coffee for two? I’m going for a run.”

  I raise the pot. “On it.” I put the pot in the coffeemaker, then start looking for a filter and grounds. When I glance up at the doorway, Susannah is gone. I pause and place my hands on the counter, closing my eyes for a moment’s peace, trying to visualize that mental vault, the place where I keep the past locked away. But it’s as if the vault door is open and leads to a dark cave at the back of my brain, full of twisting tunnels and passages where I’ve tried to lose all those memories, and there are things in there that I’ve kept hidden for a long time, that I cannot allow to come out into the light. So I reach back into that cave and take out a different set of memories, still painful but less raw, in an effort to keep the truly dark ones at bay.

  * * *

  IN THIS MARGINALLY safer collection of memories, Susannah comes home from the hospital.

  When we picked Susannah up from the hospital, she stared out the car window for the entire ride, despite Fay’s brittle attempts at conversation. Once we reached Uncle Gavin’s house, Susannah moved slowly and stiffly up the front steps, like a woman ten times her age. Her room was at the back of the house, across the hall from Gavin and Fay’s, a guest bedroom that was bigger than mine but with all the sterile personality of a motel room—brown comforter, gray curtains, a dusty-looking throw rug on the hardwood floor. Fay had tried, decorating the room with new frilled sheets, some pink-and-white throw pillows, and a My Pink Pony poster on the closet door, but it was an embarrassing sitcom failure of a little girl’s room.

  When Susannah first shuffled in, she looked around her new room, then at me, then at Fay, who stood smiling nervously in the corner. “What fresh hell is this?” Susannah said, directly to Fay.

  Uncle Gavin strode across the room and slapped Susannah across the face. Fay gasped. I flinched as if Uncle Gavin had struck me instead. Susannah’s face was now pale as paper, except for the reddening handprint across her cheek.

  “Don’t speak to Fay that way in my house, and not anywhere if you know what’s best for you,” Uncle Gavin said. “You’ve lost your parents, and I’m sorry. But you won’t give her any cheek in my home. Understand?”

  Susannah glared at Uncle Gavin, who glared back. Standing there, useless and frightened and utterly confused as to what to do, I thought of the whole irresistible-force-meeting-an-immovable-object scenario. Susannah was a champion at this kind of standoff, but Uncle Gavin stood before her, unbending, his black eyes fixed on hers. And then Susannah’s mouth tightened as if she had made a decision, and she said, “Yes, sir.”

  I let out a ragged, astonished breath.

  Uncle Gavin nodded. “Then let’s get you settled in,” he said.

  Later than night, I knocked on Susannah’s door. She was sitting in bed, reading one of the Harry Potter books. I noticed the My Pink Pony poster was gone from the wall. After reading for a few more seconds, Susannah looked up from her book. “What?” she said.

  I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Are you okay?”

  “I got shot in the uterus, Ethan.”

  “I don’t mean that, I mean … Uncle Gavin.”

  She frowned. “What? You mean earlier? Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “I should have done something,” I said. I hated how pathetic I sounded.

  Susannah raised her eyebrows. “Like what? Hit him over the head with a lamp?” She closed her book. “It’s okay. Now I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Where I stand with Uncle Gavin.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Monday after Susannah appears on my doorstep, I go to work.

  The Archer School originally occupied a single stone house built in the 1930s, but since then the school has expanded to include state-of-the-art science labs, an enormous gym, playing fields, a dining hall, a fine arts center, and new classroom wings. The private-school market in Atlanta is rich with choices, each school trying to create and market its own niche, and Archer has staked its claim on an egalitarian ethos that is open, tolerant, and comprehensive in its curriculum. It’s an ethos I appreciate, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s an ethos I aspire to follow. Archer is a place that has accepted me, which is more important than anything else.

  Hanging above the glass front door of the Stone House is the school seal, an emerald A in a white circle bordered by the school motto: Mente, Corpore, et Anima—“With Mind, Body, and Soul.” Like an ecclesiastical hall monitor, Father Coleman Carter, bald and built like an ex-linebacker, holds the door open for me. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” he says, grinning.

  “That’s pretty cynical for a priest,” I say.

  Coleman’s blue eyes glint. “You’re pretty observant for an English teacher.”

  I walk inside and Coleman matches my stride, letting the door shut behind us. Coleman is blunt, occasionally profane, and delights in mischief. He teaches history and comparative religion. We became friends about a minute after I first arrived on campus for an interview, four years ago.

  “What did you think of the conference?�
� Coleman asks.

  I shrug. “Got a nice tote bag out of it.”

  “Missed you Friday morning,” he continues. “Did you go to the breakfast?”

  “Nope,” I say. “Stayed home. Caught up on my grading.”

  Two freshmen boys pass us in the hall. “Mr. Faulkner, Father Carter,” one says, nodding.

  Coleman has an impressive vocal range, and now his words ring out like sharp notes from a horn. “For the love of God, son, I’m an Episcopalian. Use the name my mother gave me. It’s Father Coleman. Carter is my surname.” He looks at me. “You teach them what a surname is, don’t you?”

  I shrug. “I’m an English teacher, not a genealogist.”

  Coleman’s face is large and expressive, with a potato for a nose and ears like flattened leaves of cabbage. I like provoking Coleman because his face will stretch into all sorts of contortions. Now his eyebrows lower in a frown and his mouth puckers up like he is about to either kiss me or spit. He turns to the two wide-eyed freshmen. “I want you boys to witness this,” he says, his voice vibrating with the first tremors of outrage. “This is the death of American education, right here. I look at Mr. Faulkner, and I despair of the future. When an English teacher fails to inform his students of the meanings of basic vocabulary words, I begin looking for the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

  I say, a bit defensively, “I teach vocabulary.”

  Coleman’s eyebrows rise comically. “Where do you find the time, in between standing on your desk and inspiring your students with Walt Whitman quotations?”

  “Dead Poets Society is so clichéd,” I say. “Nowadays we hold hands in a circle and listen to the beauty of words and weep.”

  Coleman’s laughter fills the hallway, to the marginal relief of the two freshmen staring at us. “You bunch of effete academics,” he says, still laughing. He then looks at one of the freshmen as if sighting him through a targeting scope. “Mr. Deal,” Coleman says, and the student jumps with surprise. “Do you know that word, effete?”

  The freshman licks his lips. “I think … does it mean clever, or something about an accomplishment? Like, a feat of strength?”

  Coleman closes his eyes. “Jesus Christ, it’s worse than I thought,” he says. He opens his eyes and glares at the boy. “No, Mr. Deal, it doesn’t mean like anything, nor does it mean clever or anything about an accomplishment. It means weak or enervated, or delicate due to a pampered existence. It can also mean effeminate, but I do not use the word in that manner, as I dislike gender stereotypes about as much as I dislike the New England Patriots. I would suggest that you run, run to the nearest classroom and find a dictionary, or look one up on the internet if you must, and begin reading as if your life depended upon it. Go.”

  The two freshmen go.

  “That was a nice little teachable moment,” I say. “Very pastoral.”

  Coleman harrumphs. “All I did was ensure that those young men know what the word effete means. I can guarantee you they’ll remember it.”

  “Yeah, about that. What’s with calling me effete?”

  “You love poetry, I thought of John Keats, ergo effete.”

  “Ergo? Keats wasn’t effete. The man wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language while he was dying of tuberculosis, and he only lived to be twenty-five. Ergo, Keats was a badass.”

  Coleman shakes his head, scowling, but I know I’ve pleased him. He appreciates wit and enjoys locking horns in argument. The people who are frightened of him—and there are more than a few—don’t realize how much of Coleman’s behavior is an act. The man uses bluster as a way to engage with the world because, at heart, he doubts both the world and himself and longs for assurance that all will be well, which perhaps explains why he is a priest. I have learned that such assurance is hard to find, and harder to keep.

  “I got coffee,” Coleman says as we walk down the hall toward his classroom. “Not the swill in the lounge, the real stuff.”

  “What, you import it from Colombia?” I say. “Grind it by hand?”

  “It’s Starbucks in a French press, as you know very well.”

  In Coleman’s classroom, Betsy Bales is sitting at Coleman’s desk, typing on her laptop. She gets to her feet as we enter, all five foot two of her. Her short height accentuates how enormously pregnant she is. “There you are,” she says, brushing her blonde hair off her forehead.

  “Here I am,” I say.

  Betsy quirks an eyebrow. “I was talking about Father Coleman,” she says.

  Coleman frowns. “You just want coffee,” he says.

  Betsy lays a hand on her belly, which is roughly the size of a pumpkin, and gravely tells him, “Only your coffee. And just half a cup.”

  Coleman grumbles but moves to a table at the back of the room, where he has a large French-press coffeemaker. Betsy follows him, giving me a smile over her shoulder.

  Coleman pushes down the plunger on his already-steeping French press, then pours Betsy a chipped mug of coffee, another for me, and a third for himself. He holds up his mug. “Onward and upward,” he says, and we clink our mugs and sip. Coleman pauses and sighs contentedly. I look at Betsy and roll my eyes, causing her to stifle a giggle.

  Betsy, who teaches European history, has been team teaching with me this year under Coleman’s guidance as part of a new Humanities course, combining English and history. At the end of last spring, Betsy found out she was pregnant. She taught all fall, her body slowly growing until she resembled the world’s most adorable Weeble, but now she is supposed to go on maternity leave this week. However, her long-term sub, a retired teacher who’s been scheduled since last October, emailed last week to say her husband had—honest to God—won a cool million playing the lottery and they were moving to California immediately. Now we are scrambling to find someone before Betsy gives birth in the classroom.

  “So,” Coleman says, “what are you kids teaching today?”

  “Ethan’s wrapping up Macbeth,” Betsy says, taking a sip. She sighs, supremely content with her coffee.

  “ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ ” Coleman says, waggling his free hand as if conjuring something. Nodding toward me, he says to Betsy, “How is he?”

  Betsy looks at me over her mug, considering.

  “Brilliant,” I say. “The word you’re looking for is brilliant.”

  “Not bad,” she says.

  Coleman grins.

  Indignant, I say, “You’ve been teaching with me for more than a semester now, and the best you can say is I’m ‘not bad’?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Betsy says.

  “Getting Mark Mitchell engaged in class conversation is a lot better than not bad.” I insist.

  “That’s funny,” Betsy says. “I never have trouble getting Mark to talk in class.”

  “That’s because he loves you,” I say.

  Betsy dismisses this with a wave of her hand. “You just need to know how to engage them, get them to do what you want.”

  “I’m a teacher, not a psychologist.”

  Betsy frowns in mock puzzlement. “There’s a difference?”

  Coleman noisily sips his coffee. “This is cute and everything,” he says, “but I was actually asking because I’m going to need your observation notes before you go on maternity leave.”

  “About that,” Betsy says. “Any luck finding a sub yet?”

  Coleman’s phone makes a loud ding, interrupting whatever response he’s about to make, and with an irritated grunt he pulls it out of his pocket and glances at his screen. “Speak of the devil,” he says. “Got a teacher interested in a long-term sub position who just showed up at the front desk.”

  “Please, Baby Jesus,” Betsy says.

  The bell in the hallway chimes, signaling five minutes before class starts.

  “I’ll check on the sub and fill you in later,” Coleman says. He motions us out with his coffee mug. “Go on, go mold young minds.”

  “More like scrape the mold off of them,” I say. �
�I’ll bring your mug back later.” I go to the door and hold it open. “Come on, young Jedi.”

  Betsy picks up her workbag. “Whatever, Yoda,” she says.

  * * *

  THE WHITEBOARD AT the front of my classroom has the words EVIL, TEMPTATION, and DISRUPTIVE written in red marker. I circle EVIL and then draw lines from it to each of the other two words. This is what my student Sarah Solomon has dubbed the Trinity of Terror. I turn to face my AP English students, who are all seated in a half circle before me in their school uniforms: white button-down shirts, gray flannels for the boys, plaid skirts for the girls. Their laptops are open on their desks, their copies of Macbeth balanced on their knees. “So,” I ask, “what’s Shakespeare saying about evil and Macbeth?”

  Mark Mitchell stirs, his moon face rimmed by blue-black stubble. “He likes it. Being evil.”

  Sarah Solomon squints behind her cat-eye glasses. “Does he?” she asks. “He freaks out after he murders the king, he keeps getting frustrated by the witches—”

  “The man’s complicated,” Mark says.

  I tap the whiteboard under the word TEMPTATION. “So what tempts him?”

  A pause as my students reorient themselves to the class discussion. Then Mark shrugs. “He wants power and his wife’s a psycho.”

  I shake my head. “True, but that’s not enough.” I start pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard. “He’s not some greedy pushover who gets bullied by his wife. He wouldn’t be a compelling character if he were. It’s not just ambition. Macbeth knows he’s doing something wrong. He murders the king of Scotland in his own home, then frames the king’s sons for it and takes the throne. He sends murderers to kill his best friend and his friend’s son. He has Macduff’s entire family slaughtered. He ends up literally alone in his castle at the end, no friends, his wife dead, facing Macduff. He never convinces himself that anything he does is the right thing to do. He knows it’s wrong, the entire time. So why does he do it?”