Never Turn Back

by Christopher Swann

  “Ethan,” Caesar says. “You might want to look at this.”

  I look at the screen, and when I read the headline, my stomach shrinks into a hard ball: DEADLY HOME INVASION—PARENTS KILLED, CHILDREN IN ICU.

  “What is it?” Frankie asks.

  “It’s an AJC article,” Caesar says. “An old one, about Ethan and his family. Marisa read it twice in the past month.”

  I’m gripping the back of Caesar’s chair so hard that my hand starts to hurt. I let go of the chair and flex my fingers. I don’t need to read the article—I already know what it says.

  I know everything about your mom, Marisa said in my classroom last Friday. About what happened to you and your parents. I read the news reports. They hurt you and your family. But I knew from the moment we met that I could help you. I did this for you, Ethan. I would do anything for you.

  Frankie is reading the article on Caesar’s screen. “Jesus,” he says.

  “Caesar,” I say, “can you—” I clear my throat. My mouth is dry as a stone. “Can you see the rest of her search history?”

  He pauses. “I’d have to hack into her Safari account,” he says.

  “After we’ve already hacked into her iPhone,” I say pointedly. “Can you do it?”

  Caesar gives me an inscrutable look, then turns back to his laptop and begins typing.

  * * *

  I SPEND THE next half hour reading through Marisa’s search history. I’m splashed all over it. She Googled me the day after we met at the conference and went to bed together. She pulled up my profile on Archer’s website, my social media accounts, that AJC article about the home invasion and shooting. She even found an old Northside Neighbor article about my mother being celebrated for her teaching.

  I know everything about you, she told me with a sneer, in my house.

  I feel a terrible emptiness, as if all that’s left of me is a scooped-out rind, tossed to the side. And yet somewhere lost in that vast emptiness is a tiny red flame of anger. I can’t grasp it yet, but I know it’s there. For now, I sit in front of the laptop, numbed, my soul glazed over, trying to understand why Marisa did this. She told me she wanted to help me, to get close, to be with me, so I would … what? Love her forever? But it’s more like she wanted to solve me, like I’m a Rubik’s cube. In all her research, did she somehow truly find out who killed my parents? I parse every conversation, every interaction Marisa and I have had, and now in my memory she looks like someone pretending to be a caring person, someone drawn to broken people, to trauma. To people like me. Until I rejected her. And now she wants to ruin me.

  When I’m done looking at her Safari history, Caesar pulls up yet another window. It’s Marisa’s calendar app. She has a few items for the past couple of weeks, most of them mundane, like a reminder to pick up her dry cleaning. Then I see one scheduled item at ten AM last Tuesday: J Gardner.

  “Mean anything?” Frankie asks.

  I look at the name on the screen. Was J the first initial of the first name, or was J the actual name of the man? In the dim recesses of my memory, something shifts, a ghost barely getting my attention before it floats through a wall and vanishes. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe.” There’s nothing else listed for last Tuesday in Marisa’s calendar. Then something clicks. “She was out last Tuesday,” I say. “She took Tuesday and Wednesday off, said something about her mother not doing well.”

  Caesar clicks, and the screen now shows Wednesday. She has another entry, also at ten AM: S Bridges. That name I recognize—it’s like a tuning fork vibrating in my brain. Now I know who J Gardner is as well.

  “What is it?” Frankie asks.

  My throat is dry and I try to swallow. “Samuel Bridges,” I say. “He was one of the men who came into our house. He fought with my dad.” In my mind I see that newspaper article Uncle Gavin left on my bed soon after Frankie went to prison, with the pictures of two men who had been arrested for drug trafficking. I look at Frankie. “Bridges went to prison, though. Him and this Jay Gardner guy. My uncle—” I pause. “They got arrested for drugs,” I finish. I’ve never actually confirmed that Uncle Gavin got them both arrested—he’s never openly admitted it, at any rate—and so I’m strangely reluctant to broach the subject. And I don’t want to admit that my uncle found Bridges and Ponytail, that he made an unspoken offer to have them disappear. That I said no. And that when my uncle called in an anonymous tip, Ponytail escaped arrest.

  Frankie frowns. “Why does this woman have their names in her calendar?”

  “That’s a good fucking question,” I say.

  There’s a low chime from Caesar’s phone. He glances at it, then stands up and walks across the room to the garage door. When he pulls it up, he lets in bright sunshine and a shadow-darkened figure. It takes a moment for the shadow to resolve itself as Uncle Gavin, and then Caesar brings the garage door back down with a crash.

  “Show me,” Uncle Gavin says, and Caesar walks with him toward me and the laptop. I stand, my legs a bit shaky, and step aside. My uncle doesn’t sit but leans forward, peering at the screen, using the track pad to scroll and to toggle between Marisa’s texts, her tweets, her search history, and her calendar app. I lean against the metal table, arms folded across my chest, exhausted. Frankie stands off to the side, a loyal soldier awaiting orders.

  After several minutes Uncle Gavin straightens up from the screen and looks at me. “You’ve read all this,” he says, and I nod. To Caesar he says, “There’s nothing else? No final text from her, nothing about what happened to her?”

  I frown. “What do you mean, ‘what happened to her’?”

  Uncle Gavin looks swiftly at me. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  Uncle Gavin nods to the empty chair. “Sit down.”

  “I don’t want to sit down; I want—”

  “Ethan,” he says, and I sit down, staring at him.

  Uncle Gavin exhales through his nose. “The police found Marisa less than an hour ago,” he says. “She was in her car. She’s dead, Ethan.”

  I stare at my uncle. My mind has just gone blank, like a TV when the power goes out. Service interruption, please stand by. “What?” I manage.

  “Her car was parked behind a warehouse off Fulton Industrial,” he says. “She was in the trunk. The police think she was strangled, but that’s not clear yet.”

  I lean back in my chair, stunned. Marisa is dead? Murdered? Horror wells up in me, filling that mental blankness. But what is almost worse than the news is a small voice at the back of my skull. Lucky for you, that voice says. I want to vomit. “No,” I say aloud.

  Uncle Gavin leans in front of me and grips my upper arms. “Ethan,” he says. “You have to tell me. Did you do it?”

  I stare at him, eyes wide. “Did I—Jesus Christ!” I throw his arms off me and stand up so fast the chair shoots back across the floor on its casters. “I didn’t kill Marisa! Jesus. No. Shit.” I can’t think. I’m wheezing, taking huge gasps of air. And suddenly I can’t take in enough air. It’s as if my windpipe just shrank to the size of a pinhole. I stare at my uncle, waving my hands. I can’t breathe.

  “Ethan.” It’s Frankie. He moves into my view, edging Uncle Ethan away. “Ethan, look at me. Look at me.” I look at Frankie, my eyes wide, mouth gaping open. “You’re hyperventilating,” he says. “Just look at me and breathe in, okay? Breathe in, and then let a breath out. In, out.” He takes my hands in his. “Here. Cup your hands together, okay? Yeah, like that. Now bend over and breathe into your hands, okay? Like that.” I bend at the waist and lower my face into my cupped hands and do what he says. In, out, slowly, into my hands. In, out. After several breaths, the gray fuzzy feeling that was encroaching at the edges of my vision falls away, and I’m able to sit up and take in a slow, deep breath, then let it out.

  “Thanks,” I say weakly.

  Frankie nods. I take in another breath, let it out. It’s amazing that I’ve done this all my life, breathing, almost always without thinking
about it, and then the second it seizes up, I’m helpless as a trout tossed up onto a riverbank.

  Uncle Gavin is talking to Caesar about something. Marisa’s phone—that’s it. Because Marisa is dead. Someone killed her. The thought is abhorrent, but I find myself repeating it in my head, as if that will allow me to wrap my hands around it. Marisa is dead. Someone killed her.

  And I have her phone.

  Sweet Jesus.

  I nearly hyperventilate again, but I bend at the waist and drop my head between my knees, dignity be damned, and concentrate on not passing out.

  By the time I sit up, warily, and regain my bearings, Caesar has opened the microwave and is removing the phone, unplugging it and then turning it off. Uncle Gavin has put on a pair of black leather gloves he pulled out of his jacket pocket, and he takes the phone from Caesar. Frankie has a container of bleach wipes and pulls out a wipe and hands it to Uncle Gavin, who wipes every surface of the phone carefully. I watch all of this as if it’s a slightly boring crime procedural on television.

  “You’re sure there’s nothing?” Uncle Gavin asks Caesar.

  “No,” Caesar says.

  My brain feels like it has congealed, conscious thought reduced to a slog, but I clear my throat to speak, and my uncle turns his dark eyes on me. “She knows … she knew what happened to my parents,” I say. “To me and Susannah. Marisa knew.”

  As usual, I can’t read the expression on Uncle Gavin’s face. “She was disturbed, that woman,” he says. “What happened to your parents was in the news. She must have done her research.”

  “She did,” Caesar says. “We looked at her search history.”

  Uncle Gavin shakes his head. “Vulture,” he says, his mouth turned down in disgust.

  A thought emerges, like glimpsing someone skating through fog at night. “She had the name of one of the men who shot my parents,” I say. “In her calendar. And another guy. The two that … got arrested running drugs.”

  His tone dark, Uncle Gavin says, “I saw her calendar, her texts. Her twits or whatever you call them. She was stalking you, Ethan. Trying to learn everything about you.”

  “But … she had their names in her phone,” I say. “Maybe she called them—”

  “Ethan,” my uncle says. “How could she have done? One of them is in prison.”

  “Not Ponytail,” I say. “Maybe she, I don’t know, found him somehow—”

  “Ethan,” my uncle says again. “This woman lied to you. She took a job at your school to worm her way into your life and get some sort of … thrill from your own misery. She was a vampire, Ethan. She fed on what happened to you.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. “And someone killed her, Ethan. It’s a terrible thing, her death, but she was preying on you and your sister. You realize that, yes? And now her phone doesn’t do anything good for you. If you take it to the police, what will they say? What will they think?”

  He pauses and considers me. I know what he means—the police will want to question me, want to know why I have her phone. They will treat me like a suspect in her murder. Fear starts to wind itself around my throat and lungs, threatening to squeeze. I feel trapped, at the dead end of a dark alley. Uncle Gavin seems to be waiting. “What do I do?” I ask.

  Uncle Gavin pauses, then says something to Caesar that I don’t catch, and Caesar hesitates, but then he walks over to another table and retrieves something from it, handing it to Uncle Gavin. My uncle kneels and puts the phone on the concrete floor, and it’s at this point that I realize that the object Caesar gave him is a hammer, which Uncle Gavin now holds poised above the phone. The icy numbness that gripped me earlier breaks and falls away, replaced by panic. “Hey!” I shout, but it’s too late. Uncle Gavin brings the hammer down onto the phone. The first blow cracks the screen, the second shattering it. My uncle keeps at it until the phone is bent and twisted, the screen reduced to shards. Gingerly he picks up the ruined frame and plucks out a thin wafer from the wreckage—the phone’s SIM card. He puts that on the floor and whacks it with the hammer until it is pulverized. He puts his free hand on the ground to help him stand up, his knees popping as he does. He winces. “I’m getting old,” he says. He hands the hammer to Caesar, then turns to me, ignoring the fact that I’m gaping openmouthed at him. “No one will know you had that phone,” he says. “If the police ask, you don’t know anything about it. But when they come to you—and they will—you call my lawyer, Johnny Shaw, and then you tell them everything about your relationship with that woman. The truth. Just leave the phone out of it.” He nods, once, then heads to the garage door with Caesar trailing behind. Frankie is already approaching with a broom and dustpan, ready to literally sweep the problem away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Frankie has already swept up and bagged the smashed phone when Caesar returns, pulling the garage door back down. It closes with a horrible crash—he must have pulled it down hard. I’m still leaning against the metal table, but I’m no longer numb. That tiny flame of anger inside me is still burning, and I’m doing my best to nurture it.

  “We need to get back to work,” Caesar says. He’s talking to Frankie, but I know the words are directed to me as well.

  “Sure,” Frankie says. “I need to get rid of the phone case and dump this bag first, and then we—”

  “I need to know what she meant,” I say.

  Frankie looks genuinely confused, but Caesar narrows his eyes, sensing a problem.

  “What who meant?” Frankie says.

  “Marisa,” I say. “The two calendar entries about those men.”

  Frankie glances at Caesar, who is now on full threat alert—arms uncrossed, hands loose at his sides, head up and eyes on me. “Your uncle said she was crazy,” Frankie says.

  “She turned my life inside out,” I say. “She went to bed with my sister to get inside my head. She—” I hear my voice rising and stop, take a deep breath. “I need to know why those men were in her calendar,” I say. “I need to know for certain that it doesn’t mean anything. Susannah is in a psych ward, Frankie. I barely stopped her from jumping off an overpass. I need to know what Marisa did, everything she did. I need to make sure she didn’t do something that’s going to come back and bite me in the ass. So Susannah doesn’t try to hurt herself again.”

  Caesar sucks at his teeth. “Mr. Lester said no,” he says.

  That little flame of anger now blazes up, and I snap, “Fuck you, Caesar.”

  Caesar’s nostrils flare and he steps toward me. Even though I can see he’s angry and all the threat receptors in my lizard brain are pulsing bright red, I still notice how graceful he is, every movement a smooth economy of motion. Some detached part of me is curious to see what he will do, how he will hurt me. I stand up off the table. If I’m going to get beat down, I’d like to be standing first.

  Frankie steps between us, still holding the trash bag with the smashed phone. “That’s enough,” he says firmly. He points a finger in my face. “Don’t talk to him like that,” he says. “Ever. Okay?” Before I can react, he turns to Caesar. “Don’t do it,” he says, his tone still firm but gentler. “He’s hurt and he’s worried about his sister, yeah? He’s scared, too. Look at him. Look at him.”

  Caesar is looking at me, and I wish he wasn’t, because Frankie’s words have shocked me out of my detached anger and now I would like to keep living. Caesar’s expression suggests he would like the exact opposite for me. Slowly, though, slowly, Caesar relaxes. Just barely. But it’s enough.

  “Okay,” Frankie says, “okay,” and he turns back to me. “You gonna be nice now?”

  That anger starts glowing again, but with an effort I stifle it. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry, Caesar. I just … Frankie’s right, man. I’m hurt, and I’m scared, and I’m pissed at my uncle for smashing the phone. I should be yelling at him, not you. I’m sorry.”

  Caesar’s expression is stony, but he folds his arms across his chest and stands still.

  “What do you want, Ethan?” Frankie asks.
/>
  I hesitate. “I need to know if you can hack into Marisa’s phone records,” I say. “Take another look at her posts, her calls, see if we learn anything. Maybe she called one of those men.”

  Caesar snorts, conveying an entire range of derision in a single sound. “You want me to hack into a major communication network so we can take a look at private phone records?”

  “Can you?” I ask. “Can you do that?”

  “It’s stupid,” Caesar says. “A stupid waste of time, and a stupid risk.”

  “Please,” Frankie says. He reaches out and puts a hand on Caesar’s forearm. “For me.”

  Something passes between the two of them, and realization breaks over me like a wave: the jealous vibes I got off of Caesar, this loft. I look at the two men and see them as they are, together.

  Caesar looks Frankie in the eye for a few moments, then nods brusquely at him and walks past, not sparing me a glance as he sits back down at the laptop. “I’m going to need coffee,” he says to Frankie. He’s already typing.

  Frankie heads for the garage door, and I follow him across the room. “Thank you,” I murmur.

  Frankie shakes his head. “Thank him,” he says, indicating Caesar. “But wait until we come back with the coffee.”

  * * *

  THE FRANKENSTEIN PROWLS through the side streets, now busier with lunchtime traffic. I sit in the passenger seat and glance at Frankie, feeling like we’re back in high school and at the same time realizing that’s not where we are at all. “You need a Starbucks?” I say. “I could find one on my phone.”

  Frankie shakes his head, downshifting as we approach a light. “Caesar has this one coffee place,” he says. “It’s not far.”

  We say nothing for a block or two, listening to the rumble of the car and the rush of the air conditioning and the passing traffic.

  “So, you and Caesar,” I say. “You guys are, ah …”

  “Together?” Frankie says. “Yeah.” He looks sideways at me, a short flick of the eyes, then back to the road. Except for the barest hint of tightening around his jaw, he looks unconcerned.