Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  One day, after a couple of hours of spraying pots and pans and cleaning down the grill after the lunch rush, Frankie said, “My dad told me about your parents, man. That sucks.”

  A sudden sorrow rose in my throat, threatening to squeeze it shut. I pushed a rack of dishes into the dishwasher and pulled the door down, starting the cycle. “Yeah,” I managed. My eyes prickled, but I wouldn’t cry. I glanced at Frankie. He was looking at me, but it wasn’t the look of someone who was waiting for me to share the gruesome details. “Yeah, it sucks,” I said.

  Frankie nodded. “My Aunt Josie died two years ago. My mom’s sister. Mom was brokenhearted, you know? Wouldn’t get out of bed.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Was your aunt sick?”

  “Drive-by. Wrong place, wrong time.” Frankie frowned, stacking clean glasses on a shelf. “My mom’s been sick for a while now. Josie was a nurse, would take care of everyone when we got sick. Now …” He shrugged, then picked up a stack of plates. “Gonna take these out to the wait station.”

  “You just want to get a look at Sally’s culo,” I said. Sally was one of the waitresses—cute, blonde, and in her twenties.

  Frankie grinned, a flash of big white teeth. “Listen to the güero speaking the Spanish!” he said—güero meaning “white boy” or “blondie,” a joke aimed at my red hair. “I’m so proud.” Then he dropped his voice into a Barry White register. “But Sally does have a sweet ass.” He walked out of the kitchen, still grinning.

  I watched the dishwasher vibrate, listened to the water shooting around inside it. Frankie was the first person my age I’d met who had some sort of ability to understand what had happened to my parents, to me. He hadn’t pressed for details. And when Frankie had opened up about his aunt and I’d made a lame joke about Sally because I was awkward about sharing anything personal, Frankie had gone along with it. I realized, listening to the dishwasher churn, that Frankie might be the kind of friend you kept for life.

  * * *

  NOW, STANDING AT the urinal in the men’s room of the Palms, which is paneled in dark wood and smells of disinfectant and beer, I think about Frankie, Susannah’s words echoing in my head: He’s your friend. You think Frankie wasn’t alone? I pee, hoping to void the guilt as well, and mostly failing. Susannah and I had been making a yearly pilgrimage every Thanksgiving to Morgan, Georgia, to visit Frankie in Calhoun State Prison, up until two years ago when Susannah went AWOL. I told Susannah it hadn’t felt right to go alone, and that’s true, as far as it goes. What I didn’t say was that going to see Frankie had become less and less about going to see our friend and more and more about fulfilling a yearly ritual with my sister. With Susannah gone and out of touch for most of the past two years, I’d decided not to drive the three hours alone to see Frankie. I was surprised at how simple that decision had been to make, how easy it had been to justify it to myself, and how hard the backlash of shame slapped me upside my head.

  When I finish, flush, and wash my hands and can’t skulk in the bathroom any longer, I go back out and head to the pool table. Halfway there I stop. Three guys, maybe college age or a little older, are standing around Susannah, who is leaning over the pool table to make a shot. One of the guys, his red polo shirt untucked from his jeans and his two days’ growth of beard trimmed just so, is talking to her while staring down the front of her shirt. I can tell that Susannah is leaning over the table deliberately, hiking her ass in the air and showing her cleavage. Jesus.

  “Come on,” Red Polo is saying. “Just one game. If I win, you tell me your name.”

  “And if I win?” Susannah says, still focused on her shot.

  “I tell you my name,” Red Polo says, flashing a high-wattage smile that would not look out of place on a red carpet.

  Susannah shoots, the cue ball striking the racked balls with a crack that makes everyone blink, followed by a thok as she pockets the seven ball in the corner. She stands up, pulling her shoulders back, and gives Red Polo a sad smile that is just this side of a smirk. “You can’t sell me something that I don’t want,” she says.

  One of Red Polo’s buddies, in a blue polo and glasses, smiles and shakes his head. The third guy, wearing a black T-shirt with the Jack Daniels logo on the front, actually snickers. Red Polo glances at Jack Daniels, his smile dimming, then turns his attention back to Susannah. “Trust me,” he says. “You want to know me.”

  “Okay,” I say, stepping forward, and all three guys turn to stare at me. Susannah does, too, but with a grin that’s half welcoming, half irritated—I just interrupted her playing time. “Y’all go get a drink and let us get back to our game,” I tell the three guys.

  Red Polo frowns. “Who the hell are you?” he says.

  “Her brother,” I say, at the same time Susannah says, “My boyfriend.” I resist the urge to close my eyes and groan and instead watch Red Polo and his friends. I’m not big or intimidating, but Red Polo looks at his buddies, nonplussed, then back at me, and shrugs.

  “Sorry, man,” he says, then turns toward the bar, the other two following his lead.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and start to say something to Susannah, but she’s already stalking after Red Polo. “Hey!” she says, and Red Polo stops and turns around, startled. Susannah marches up to him, looking up into his face. “You were all over me at the pool table, but now another dude shows up and you’re like, ‘My bad, bro, didn’t know she was yours’? What am I, property?”

  Red Polo stares at her. “What?” he says, sounding lost.

  “I’d like an apology,” Susannah says.

  Red Polo’s expression morphs into something between a sneer and a scowl. “What is your problem?”

  Susannah takes a step closer to him and, her voice dripping with disdain, says, “You and your man act.”

  Red Polo clearly doesn’t like his masculinity being threatened. His half sneer turns into a snarl, and he makes to shove Susannah away. Susannah grabs his wrist with one hand and with her other grips his arm, her thumb digging into the meat above his elbow. He rises on his toes in pain, and when he tries to twist away, she stomps on his foot with her Doc Martens before letting go. “Shit!” he yelps, and then takes a hard swing at her with an open hand. Susannah raises her arm, blocking his slap while bringing her elbow up into his chin, then follows with a palm strike to his eyes. He cries out and staggers back a couple of steps.

  Jack Daniels, who is behind Susannah and out of her line of sight, starts to make a move, then stops when I whip a pool cue around so the cue end of it is under the soft part of his jaw. “Uh-uh,” I say, pressing into his neck with the cue so he steps back. I glance over at Blue Polo, who raises his hands as if in surrender.

  “You fucking bitch,” Red Polo says, seething and glaring at Susannah. “You are dead.”

  A large hand clamps down on the back of Red Polo’s neck. The bartender, a big bald guy with a beard and an earring, has decided to intervene. In a deep voice corroded with a lifetime of cigarette smoke, he tells Red Polo, “Get out.”

  “That bitch assaulted me!” Red Polo says.

  The bartender shakes Red Polo gently, like a Rottweiler with a rope bone. “Self-defense,” he says. “After you harassed her. Out.”

  Susannah smiles at Red Polo as if sympathetic. “’Bye, Felicia,” she says.

  After Red Polo and his posse leave, the bartender, who introduces himself as Jerry, offers us a drink on the house. “Nice job dealing with those assholes,” Jerry says to Susannah.

  She gives him a little smile. “Instead of a drink, how about a job?” she says. “You need a waitress?”

  Jerry grins, an ugly contraction of his face that still manages to be friendly. “I might at that,” he says. “You waited tables before?”

  “Our uncle—” I start to say, about to mention Uncle Gavin by name, say how both of us worked at his bar, but Susannah interrupts.

  “Our uncle made sure we always got a job in the summers growing up,” she says, smoothly
cutting me off. “I’ve waited tables.”

  “You won’t have any problems dealing with drunk frat boys, that’s for sure,” Jerry mused. “Not that we really get a lot of them. Tell you what, you bring me a résumé, and I’ll get you started on a couple shifts this week.”

  Done with pool, we decide we’re ready to eat, and we sit in a booth and order burgers and another round of beers. After the waitress takes our order, I say to Susannah, “Why didn’t you want me to mention Uncle Gavin?”

  She takes a long pull at her beer. “I don’t need his help,” she says. “Got this on my own. Two days here and already got a job offer. Did you see the look on that preppy boy’s face?”

  “I tend to remember when people look at my sister like they want to murder her.”

  “He was being a dick. Nice work with the pool cue, by the way. Thought you were gonna spear that poor guy in the neck.”

  I frown. She had her back to me when I was holding the Jack Daniels kid at bay. “How did you—” I stop and look over at the bar and its mirrored back wall. “You saw my reflection.”

  “Elementary, my dear Watson,” Susannah says, raising her glass as if toasting me. “See, this is fun.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  February is usually a lousy time of year in school—it’s cold, it rains a lot, and seniors especially are getting antsy. Spring break can’t come soon enough. This year, I’m too busy to pay attention. Susannah showing up on my doorstep radically recalibrated things. She’s still crashing on my couch, although now she’s waiting tables at the Palms and is looking at apartments. She’s also started going back to group therapy, and she hasn’t brought up Frankie again either. All in all, it’s good, or as good as it gets with Susannah.

  Teaching with Marisa has been surprisingly nice. She gets the kids, and while there’s been a little resistance, simply because they like Betsy Bales so much, they’re warming up to her. She’s focused and funny, a good combination with teenagers. And she is very careful to walk that line between taking over the class and letting me be in charge of everything. Not bad for only two weeks on the job. Coleman was ecstatic, of course. We were all relieved—no one wanted to hire a babysitter while we looked through whatever résumés we had left on file, scraping deeper and deeper at the bottom of a pretty crummy barrel.

  Marisa hasn’t mentioned our night together again, and neither have I. Which is good. Except I admit to being distracted sometimes by her hair, or her throaty laugh, or how she walks. It’s not professional of me, but it bothers me for another reason.

  I got this teaching job on my own. Yes, it helped that my mother was a teacher and that my boss used to work with her. But my uncle had zero to do with it. I’ve walled off that part of my life and built this new life, carefully, brick by brick. It’s mine, and I know every layer and crevice of it.

  I’ve built different walls, too, thicker ones, around myself. I’m no wilting flower, and I’m not an insensitive jackass, either. But like I said before, I’ve found it easier to casually hook up with women than to create and maintain a relationship. I’ve told myself it’s because I’m young, that I don’t want to be tied down, that I enjoy being a bachelor. Deep at night, on the edge of sleep, I can admit to myself that it’s because I don’t want to get hurt, that I’m afraid of how I would react if I lost someone else I cared about. Breaking up with a girlfriend is not the same thing as losing one’s parents to sudden violence. But I dated two women semiseriously, one in college and one after, and when each relationship ended I felt gutted, hollowed out, my first instinct to lash out and make my ex feel the same way. I did that in college when my first girlfriend, Caroline, dumped me for another boy, and I said horrible, spiteful things that made her burst into tears before I marched self-righteously out of her dorm room, slamming the door behind me. When I broke up with my second girlfriend, Dani, it was more of a mutual thing—we liked each other, but neither of us was interested in getting married. There had been no other guy, and Dani had been nice. But despite that, I had the same mean desire to make her feel awful for bringing up a fact that had been true for some time: that we had been drifting away from each other. In that instance, to whatever little credit I deserve, I held my tongue, although I wasn’t as warm and understanding as I could have been.

  So whenever Marisa smiles at me and my heart seems to turn over in a way that is not unpleasant, I examine the state of the walls I’ve raised around me, looking for cracks or gaps, and I shore up my defenses as best I can, as if I’m a stone fortress and not a human being.

  * * *

  THE SAME DAY we get word that Betsy Bales has had her baby—a little girl named Allison, seven pounds and healthy—Marisa is in my office after school to go over a reading assignment for our students, Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” She borrows a pen from me to take notes while I give her some background—how Coleridge took laudanum and fell asleep reading about Kubla Khan and had a strange, vivid dream about the Mongol ruler and Xanadu. When he woke up, he had two or three hundred lines of verse in his head and started to write them down. But then someone interrupted Coleridge and he stepped away from his desk for a few hours, and by the time he returned, he found to his frustration that he couldn’t remember the dream-vision or the poem. All he was able to write was a weird, fragmented piece of verse about a pleasure dome, fountains erupting out of chasms, sunless seas, demon lovers, visions, repressed passions, and the mad power of art.

  Maybe I should blame Coleridge and his bizarre poem for what happens next.

  Marisa and I are hunched forward in our chairs, as if conspiring over the poem in her hand. I finish talking, and for a few moments neither of us speaks. Then Marisa leans forward, and when I look up from the poem, her face is perhaps a foot away from my own, her eyes on mine. Everything pauses, like the universe is holding its breath. This close to her, I can smell some sort of underlying spice, a blend of vanilla and pepper. Her lips are barely parted, her eyes wide.

  In a low voice, almost a whisper, Marisa says, “Do you want to kiss me?”

  “Oh,” I say. My brain feels like someone just unplugged it and it’s slow to reboot, but it’s trying to throw up barriers like it usually does. “I … I mean, do you?”

  Something flickers across her expression—disappointment, embarrassment? She withdraws a bit, increasing the distance between us. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I mean, if you don’t want to, that’s fine; I just thought—”

  “No,” I say. “That’s not—I mean, yes. Yes. I would like that. It’s only …” I take a breath, let it out. This is stupid. But those damn walls always rise up, boxing me in. “We work together,” I say finally. It is a statement of fact instead of an argument.

  Her expression relaxes and she smiles shyly. “You’re my coworker, not my boss,” she says. “And I’m an adult. Consenting.” She hesitates, then leans forward. “And if you want to keep it quiet at work, I won’t talk to anyone.” She holds me in her gaze. “Anyone.”

  If I was surprised earlier, now I feel like I’ve been clubbed over the head with a railroad tie. Marisa is wearing an ivory camisole underneath her navy blouse. I think about how the silk would feel in my hands. I try to remember how her mouth tasted, and I want nothing more than to find out again.

  “I’m on the pill,” she says. “And I’ve been tested. No HIV, nothing.” She lifts an eyebrow. “How about you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. I mean, yes, I’ve been tested, but … I don’t have anything.”

  Marisa reaches over and drops my pen back into my shirt pocket, her face only inches from mine, and then withdraws, but then she pauses, resting her fingertips on the inside of my wrist. “If you don’t want to,” she says, “I’ll walk away and never mention it again. It won’t be a problem.” She lightly strokes my wrist. “But I think we would both regret it.”

  Her eyes are gray washed with green. Athena had those kind of eyes, according to Homer. Bright, all-encompassing. I want to swim in them, in her. And wh
y not? Why the hell not? The walls crack, their foundations crumbling.

  She leans forward, hesitates for the briefest moment, and then kisses me, a deliberate, soft pressure of her lips on my mouth. She pulls back and considers me. “Not bad,” she says, and then grins, triumphant.

  I reach out and cup my hand to the back of her head and return that kiss properly, fully, like I am drinking her in, the last wall collapsing under the spell of that kiss, the taste of her lips, her pepper-vanilla scent twining around us.

  * * *

  THAT SATURDAY WE have a dinner date, and I get to the restaurant about ten minutes early. It’s a South African place with a good wine list and spiced chicken and beef dishes that wake up your mouth, just cool and different enough to be impressive without breaking the bank. Susannah, thank God, left earlier to go to a concert downtown with a coworker and said she was going to spend the night at her coworker’s apartment in Midtown, so while I was getting ready I didn’t have to explain where I was going or answer questions about why I was dressing up for a date.

  Right on time, Marisa arrives at the restaurant in an Uber. She didn’t want me to pick her up, which is a little odd. I know she moved back home to take care of her mother, and the one or two times she’s mentioned it she’s seemed upset by it, so I let it go. I wonder if she’s embarrassed by her parents. But when she steps out of her Uber, all those thoughts are blown away like so much smoke. Marisa is an attractive woman, but tonight everyone—the valets and the two guys going into the restaurant and even the two girls with them—is looking at her. She’s wearing a short black dress that shows off her legs. Her dark hair falls to her bare shoulders, framing her face. “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi,” I say reflexively. I don’t swallow, but it’s a near thing. “Wow. You look amazing.”

  She smiles and kisses me on the cheek, sending a pleasant thrill up my spine. “Why, thank you,” she says, taking my arm. “You don’t look half bad yourself.”