Never Look Back Read online

Quentin’s eyes widened. He turned off the voice recorder. “You, um . . . you said Mrs. Brixton was at last year’s homecoming.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I bet her address is on file here, right? I mean, how else would they have sent the invitation?”

  Melanie looked at him for a few moments, ruby lips twitching into a smile. “I can find it for you,” she said. “Just don’t tell my boss.”

  “You’re the best human being I’ve met in years, Melanie.”

  Quentin followed her down the sad, empty hallway and back to the front desk, where she clicked into the school’s “Friends of SRHS” database and found Edith Brixton’s address and phone number. She wrote them both on a slip of paper and slid it to him facedown, as though they were a couple of wheeler-dealers in a cheesy old movie, negotiating a deal. “No worries,” she said, after he thanked her. “Just make something great for me to listen to.”

  Once he was back in his car, Edith Brixton’s address plugged into his GPS, Quentin found George Pollard on his voice recorder. He replayed that wistful voice describing his first true love, using the same words that had been looping through his own mind, the exact words Melanie had quoted Mrs. Brixton as saying about the smiling girl in the yearbook photo, again and again and again: She couldn’t wait to be a mother.

  “AND WHO MIGHT you be?” Edith Brixton’s neighbor said as Quentin approached the door to her home—a tidy ranch house amidst a swarm of nearly identical one- and two-story stucco buildings at Serenity Springs, a seniors-only condominium complex in West Covina. He’d spoken to Edith on the phone on his way over and was pleasantly surprised to find her both lucid (you never knew past a certain age) and happy to hear from him. “Come right over,” she had said. “Melanie told me all about you.” Melanie, the gift that keeps on giving. So, when he parked his car on the quiet street outside her home and strode up to her front door, he may have done it with a little too much exuberance and bravado. The neighbor, after all, seemed suspicious. Quentin turned to her—a woman probably in her mid-seventies with a dyed-black updo and a perfectly round face. She sweated into a tracksuit of tight pink velour, her face flushed, glasses dangling from her neck on a rhinestone rope. She clutched a skittish little terrier in her arms that yapped and yapped, as though it had been born into the wrong life and was desperately trying to alert the world about it.

  “I’m a friend of the family.” Quentin gave the neighbor his most winning smile, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  “Is Edith expecting you?”

  “Yes.”

  Her face relaxed a little. “Is she . . . uh . . . leaving with you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you taking her away?”

  The door opened and Edith leaned out of it—a small, wiry woman with thick glasses that made her eyes look enormous. Though much frailer and leaning on a metal cane, she was still recognizable as the teacher in the yearbook picture—those same high cheekbones and wide, upturned mouth, the now-silver hair clipped into the same no-nonsense, chin-length style. She wore an oversize oxford cloth shirt that might have belonged to her husband, an A-line denim skirt, and Nikes, her pale, skinny legs roped with veins, like ivy crawling up fence posts. “Fuck off, Gladys,” Edith told the neighbor. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Gladys turned on her heel and stomped back into her house, the little dog protesting the entire way.

  Edith shook her head. “I’m in one of the few one-story houses in this place,” she said. “They all can’t wait for me to either move out or kick the bucket, but that bitch is the most obvious about it, pardon my French.”

  “No offense taken.”

  She smiled. “So . . . April Cooper,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think a day has gone by when I haven’t thought about her, at least once.”

  Quentin looked at her. “Really? After all these years?”

  She pursed her lips, her eyes going misty behind the thick glasses. “She was a special one.”

  “What do you mean by special?”

  “Come on in,” she said. “Excuse the mess.”

  IN QUENTIN’S EXPERIENCE, when interview subjects said, “excuse the mess,” it usually wasn’t over anything noticeable. Maybe they hadn’t dusted yet, or they were busy sorting laundry on the dining room table and didn’t want it mentioned on the air. It was more a sign of performance anxiety than anything else—a last-minute bout of maybe-I-shouldn’t-be-letting-a-journalist-into-my-home. He always put them at ease with a friendly laugh. “What mess?” he’d say. Or “Come on. You should see my place!” But the moment he stepped into the small foyer of Edith Brixton’s coveted ranch house, he knew that wouldn’t fly here. Edith, as it turned out, was a serious hoarder—though her hoarding choices seemed limited to reading material. Newspapers, magazines, paperback books, filing boxes overflowing with ripped-out pages of old spiral notebooks and legal pads, covered with scribbles and yellowing. The whole place stunk of newsprint.

  “Wow,” said Quentin. He couldn’t help it.

  “My husband, Carl, was a neat freak. I think maybe I’ve been trying to get back at him for dying on me.”

  He cleared his throat, pulled his thoughts together. “No, no. I get it,” he said. “You like to read.”

  “Well, yes. I do.”

  “You don’t want to forget what you’ve read, so you keep it around. For reference.”

  “I suppose that’s part of it.”

  Quentin kept his expression neutral. “Listen, when I’m preparing my podcasts, I take notes on old steno pads. I’ve done that for pretty much every story I’ve ever written since I was in college. I’ve kept all of them. My husband makes me store them in boxes in the attic. He hates the clutter, just like yours did.”

  Edith smiled.

  “But the thing is, I can’t get rid of them. It feels like I’m throwing out entire parts of my life.”

  She leaned on her cane, a sigh escaping her lips. “Do you know something, Quentin Garrison? You are wise beyond your years.”

  “Nah. I’m just saying I know how you feel,” he said, “because I’m the same way.” Of course, Quentin was lying. He took notes on steno pads, yes. But only when he didn’t have his voice recorder handy. And after he’d completed his stories, he couldn’t throw them out soon enough. It disgusted him, really, his sloppy, spidery handwriting on the lined page. Something about him that could be analyzed, dissected . . . “Listen, do you mind if I record you?” he said. “I may have forgotten my steno pad, and anyway, I’d rather focus on what you have to say than on my lousy shorthand.”

  She answered fast. “As long as your tape recorder works properly.”

  It always surprised Quentin, how easy it was to get certain people to talk on record. He’d interviewed a guy on death row once, a psycho who’d killed his girlfriend and their baby, yet when Quentin turned on his digital recorder, he started acting as though he were a politician, or a Nobel Laureate, or anyone else who might be famous for doing something that wasn’t horrible. You’re getting every word of this, kid? That equipment you got works, right? Thinking about it now, with this for-all-accounts decent person having the same reaction, he realized it wasn’t delusions of grandeur that made them so eager to have their words preserved forever. More likely, it was the knowledge of being on limited time.

  “I think the living room has the best acoustics,” Edith said. She led Quentin through a long hallway, weaving slowly around the stacks of cardboard boxes, nudging some aside with her cane. They wound up in a room with large windows and the shades drawn—a dark room, the couch stacked high with volumes of Who’s Who in America and Encyclopaedia Britannica on one end, a cardboard Bankers Box on the other. There was a glass-topped coffee table in front of the couch, littered with magazines. It made him think of Reg Sharkey and his old TV Guides, and he imagined introducing Edith Brixton to his grandfather—Reg with his tidy time capsule of a living room, Edith with her barely controlled
chaos. Together, they might raise an army of dust bunnies and take over the world. Quentin sneezed.

  “Bless you.” Edith gestured at the one clear space on the couch, and Quentin settled into it, resting an arm on the encyclopedias.

  Across from the couch was a rocking chair with no room to rock. Edith dropped her cane and hoisted herself into it, her thin legs not quite reaching the floor. Quentin turned on his phone’s voice recorder and set it on the coffee table, atop a New Yorker. “Ready?”

  Edith nodded.

  “I’m speaking to Edith Brixton on June 28.”

  Edith said, “You’re sitting next to April.”

  Quentin swallowed. “Pardon?”

  “The box.”

  He looked at it. Then looked at her.

  “I wasn’t just a homeroom teacher,” Edith said. “I taught English, social studies, one dismal year of geography . . . Anyway, I kept boxes of all my favorite students’ work. My husband, like yours, made me keep them in the attic . . .” She pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, a slight tremor in her hand. “That box next to you—that’s April. I looked for it after you called. It was easy to find.”

  “She was in your social studies class.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She was a favorite student.” He tried to keep the disdain out of his voice. “A special one.”

  She ran a hand across her brow, the index finger quivering. “Take a look.”

  Quentin removed the lid from the Bankers Box. There was a small pile of papers inside, rounded girlish handwriting on lined pages. He read the first page, her name on it, the carefully formed letters.

  Women and the Right to Vote

  By April Cooper

  As Quentin slipped the pages out of the box, a feeling swept through him—a chill that pressed all the way to the bones, followed by a tightness in the muscles—a faint, simmering rage. Her handwriting on the page. This girl, who had watched her boyfriend kill a child, who had most likely killed many times herself. This murderer, who dotted her i’s with little circles. Her handwriting. She wrote this . . . He was aware of the silence in the room, his voice recorder capturing it, but he couldn’t get himself to speak.

  “Can you read it?” Edith said. “I know it’s quite faint . . .”

  He looked up at her—the big eyes behind the glasses, watching him, expectant. He cleared his throat. Read. “Before the 19th Amendment came to be in 1920, women didn’t have the right to vote. But because of the suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and—”

  “No, no. Read what she wrote at the bottom of that page.”

  Quentin coughed. The dust was getting to him, but something else was getting to him too. A special one . . . He wondered if Mrs. Brixton kept boxes for Brian Griggs and Carrie Masters—Cooper and LeRoy’s fifth and sixth victims, found in their prom clothes, handcuffed together, shot in the head. Seniors at Santa Rosa High, not St. Xavier. Most likely victims of Cooper, not LeRoy. A murderer. The girl who ruined his mother’s life. Her handwriting on the page.

  “Go on,” Edith said.

  He took a breath. Keep it together. “The efforts of these brave women allowed for us all to be free,” he read. “But I don’t feel free, Mrs. Brixton, do you? When I am of legal voting age, like you, will I feel free, and equal and strong?” He read the next sentence, looked up at Edith Brixton and recited it out loud. “Is that a reason for me to look forward to growing up?”

  Edith removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “She was one of those kids,” she said. “Always looking out the window, daydreaming. Her body would be in the room, but her mind would be a million miles away.”

  “Did she talk to you directly in all her school essays?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure exactly,” Edith said. “But she’d lost her mother just a year earlier, and most of the other teachers at that time were younger women. Or men.”

  “You think she was looking for a replacement.”

  She put her glasses back on. “Something like that. I asked her to stay after class once, and we discussed the questions she’d written to me. It became a sort of tradition. April staying after class, talking with me about the future.”

  Quentin thumbed through the slim stack of pages, reading sections from them into the voice recorder. An essay about the Great Depression, and its influence on the American family (Which would you rather have, Mrs. Brixton—enough money to eat, or parents who truly love you?) Another, titled the “Arab/Israeli Conflict.” (This happens so often, I think, but maybe you can explain why: people living side by side, but not bothering to understand each other.) Another one was called “The Death Penalty in America.” And when he read the last sentence, his breath caught in his throat. “Mrs. Brixton,” Quentin said, “have you ever met anyone who deserved to be killed?”

  She stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m quoting April.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right. ‘The Death Penalty.’”

  “Did you ever meet with her about these papers? Did you ever . . . I don’t know . . . suggest therapy?”

  She gave him a weary smile. “You didn’t send children to therapy back then,” she said. “Not unless they had real problems.”

  He leveled his eyes at her.

  “I know, I know.” She sighed heavily, the breath draining out of her until she seemed even smaller. “I didn’t think of her as a child with problems,” she said. “The April I knew was sweet and caring. And so very alone.”

  “Even after she started seeing Gabriel LeRoy?”

  “More so.”

  “Really?”

  “He wasn’t good for her. She knew it. He was needy and demanding. He wanted to marry her and she . . . she asked my advice about breaking up with him. She asked me how she should do it.”

  “When?”

  “Just before he took her away.” Her voice quavered. “I . . . I suggested she simply blame it on her stepfather. Tell Gabriel that he said she was too young to go steady.”

  Quentin’s eyes widened. “You think he kidnapped her?”

  “I know he did.”

  “But the police reports . . . The one from the prom night murders. It says—”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck about what the police reports say.” She took another long, wheezing breath. Her whole body was trembling now. Quentin worried she might collapse. “Pardon my French.”

  “Can I get you anything? A glass of water? I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She shook her head, her body calming, slowing. “That poor girl,” she said. “All she wanted to do was grow up and have a baby.”

  Quentin nodded, slowly. There was nothing he could say to that. Except maybe . . . “I hope she realized at some point, how much you cared about her.”

  “I hope so too, Quentin.”

  Quentin started to slip the papers back into the Bankers Box when he noticed something at the bottom of it—a postcard, addressed to Mrs. Brixton, not at her home but at the school. He took it out.

  Edith said, “Oh, that shouldn’t be in there.”

  The postcard was unsigned and read simply, Wish you were here! He stared at the rounded script, the circles over the i’s. He turned it over. A photograph of a maple tree with bright orange leaves. “What is this?”

  “Wishful thinking,” Edith said. “She always used to say that she wanted to go somewhere where they had seasons . . . I got that postcard, and I thought maybe . . . Maybe . . . I know it’s crazy.”

  “You got this after April’s death.”

  “Like I said, wishful thinking.”

  Quentin looked at the postmark: August 1977. A year and two months after the Gideon fire. And the same month and year, according to Wikipedia, that film columnist Robin Diamond had been born. Quentin’s pulse pounded. “She just wanted to grow up,” he whispered, “and have a baby.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Can I photograph this postcard with my ph
one?”

  “I suppose,” said Edith Brixton. “But why?”

  Quentin forced a smile. “Wishful thinking?” he said.

  The postmark read New York.

  Six

  June 10, 1976

  7:00 P.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  They call it falling in love because you really do fall. The ground slips out from under you, and you’re in this place you’ve never been—mysterious and dark as a different planet. It’s hard to breathe there. There’s nothing to grab on to. You can’t pull yourself out. Not until the day you fall out of love. And when that happens, when you fall out of love, it’s just as unexpected and hopeless and impossible to get out of as it was when you fell into it in the first place.

  For me, that happened a week ago, but it could have happened any time. It wasn’t anything Gabriel did or said. It was his face, close up, as we were kissing. Out of focus like that, Gabriel didn’t look like a boy or a man at all, but like some sort of animal—wolf mixed with bear. And it was consuming me, that animal. It was holding me in its claws like a piece of meat.

  Aurora Grace, never open your eyes when you kiss a boy. I swear to God you will not like what you see.

  The next morning, I broke up with Gabriel. I did it over the phone so I wouldn’t have to look at him, ever again. I told him Papa Pete didn’t want us seeing each other anymore, because I thought that might make it easier for him, easier for both of us. Mrs. Brixton had suggested it, and she always had the best ideas. A little white lie. That’s what she said.

  Gabriel cried. Wet sobs I could feel through the plastic. Boys aren’t supposed to cry like that. It turned my stomach. When I hung up, I thought, thank God that’s over. But it wasn’t, was it? My white lie, the thing that was supposed to make it easier on both of us. That lie killed my stepdad. I killed Papa Pete.

  Now we’re sitting in Papa Pete’s car. Gabriel’s behind the wheel and Kool & the Gang is on the radio and I’m not going to cry. I can’t cry in front of him. I can’t even look unhappy, or I’ll get shot too, and Jenny will have no one. So I push Papa Pete out of my mind. Kind Papa Pete who tried his best to cook Mom’s recipes after she died and who told me he loved me the same as Jenny—that I was his real daughter, just as much as her. I tell myself not to think of him, ever again.