Never Look Back Read online

  Anyway, if Garrison’s phone call had taught Robin anything, it was that she needed to talk to her mother more about her past. Here, her parents lived three blocks away, in the house she’d grown up in. She considered her mother her best friend, someone she could talk to about anything. Yet, aside from vague references to foster care and growing up poor, she knew virtually nothing about the life she’d led before meeting her father.

  That was strange, wasn’t it?

  She took another bite of her omelet. The cheese wasn’t entirely melted, yet the eggs were too dry. Robin was a terrible cook. She threw out the rest and slapped together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She ate half of it, polished off the rest of her glass of wine, and tapped her parents’ number into her cell phone. Robin’s father answered after three rings. “Oh, hi, Robbie.” A strange, sad note in his voice. “I was just watching the Yankees lose the fifth game in a row.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “Los Angeles Angels. They’re killing us.”

  “Listen, is Mom around? I just wanted to ask her something.”

  “She’s at the grocery store. We ran out of coffee. Anything I can help you with?”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “How much do you know about Mom’s childhood?”

  Robin heard the TV in the background, Michael Kay saying something about a forced out. “Well, that’s an unusual question,” her father said.

  “It shouldn’t be, though, should it?” Robin said. “I mean, most people can’t get their parents to shut up about the good old days.”

  “The old days weren’t very good for your mother.”

  “Yeah? What do you know about them? Any more than I do?”

  “Robin?”

  “You guys met in Arizona, when you were in med school.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Mom from Arizona, or had she moved there from somewhere else?”

  “She grew up in a foster home in Arizona. I don’t know exactly where.”

  “How could you not know exactly where?”

  “She doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “But . . . she’s your wife.”

  “So that means I have a right to make her unhappy?” There was an edge to his voice, a tightness in it.

  Robin moved to the refrigerator, poured herself another glass of wine. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just . . . I’m a little . . .” Robin took a long sip. The silence in her house. The emptiness. She could practically feel it. Who was she to lecture her father about what spouses should and shouldn’t know about each other? “You’re a good husband, Dad,” she said. “You’re a good person.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, the Yankees game blaring. Kay made his way through a player’s stats and called strike one before her father spoke. “Robbie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “What? Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “You and Eric?”

  “He’s fine. We’re fine. He’s busy.”

  “Mom seemed to think you two might be having some issues.”

  “She did?”

  “Look, honey, I know she always gives the best advice. But since she’s out, you know . . . I’m happy to pinch-hit.”

  “Oh, jeez, Dad. Pinch-hit. Seriously?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good batting average, you know. In the, uh, game of advice.”

  Robin closed her eyes. Now in his late sixties and semiretired, Dad maintained a private practice in town, but for most of his career he’d treated the criminally insane on Wards Island, where she was pretty sure metaphors like that one would have gotten him murdered. “I wasn’t calling to talk to Mom about Eric.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “I swear.”

  “All right. Sorry. I’ll let her know you called.”

  She started to say good-bye, but he stopped her. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have we been good parents to you?”

  Robin blinked at the phone. “What? Of course you have. What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Dad?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud, honey. Looking back . . .”

  Robin took another swallow of wine, waiting for more. But there was nothing. Only her father’s slow exhale, the muffled sounds of the game. “Everything’s fine,” he said, finally. “You know how melancholy I get when the Yankees lose.”

  This was true. He did. Even more so now that he was a little older and not talking to psychopaths all day and therefore no longer feeling the need to keep every emotion in check. After particularly disappointing games, Dad would go on about missed chances, stolen opportunities, how quickly the nine innings went by . . . all in such a way, it seemed as though he was talking about something a lot deeper than baseball. Mom would tease him about it sometimes. Maybe you and Steinbrenner should start a support group. Or a church. “They can still turn it around, Dad,” Robin said. “The game isn’t over yet.”

  “You’re right,” he said quietly. “It isn’t.”

  Robin and her father said their good-byes, the sky darkening outside her window and the voice of Michael Kay in the background, groaning over a pathetic, botched play.

  AFTER SHE HUNG up, Robin pulled a slip of paper out of her wallet—Quentin Garrison’s number, copied off her caller ID at work. She typed it into her phone and called him, but it went straight to his voice mail. She hung up without leaving a message.

  She opened up her laptop, went onto Google Images, and looked up Inland Empire Killers. Far as she could find, there was only one photo of April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy, and it had been taken at his school dance. He wore a brown tuxedo. She wore a high-collared prairie dress with ruffles at the chin. He stood behind her and gripped her shoulders tightly, as though he were afraid she might float away. It was an old, faded picture, the blues gone grayish, the reds rust brown. Robin could barely make out the faces, but they both looked pale for Californians. He had a kind of creepy, closed-mouth smile. She just looked sad.

  The girl had blond hair and a prim, rosebud mouth. Like Mom’s, Robin thought. Robin’s mind, playing tricks on her. April Cooper was three years younger than Mom. April Cooper had died in a fire. But why had she never seen a picture of Mom as a child, as a young girl? Why were there no photographs of her taken before her wedding day?

  I’ll ask her about that, when she calls. Robin took both the cordless and her cell into the den and watched the rest of the Yankees game, both phones on the coffee table. The cell vibrated frequently, but only because of her column. Hate tweets. She read a few, then ignored the rest and continued to wait.

  She waited until the game was over and it was pitch-black outside and headed upstairs, into her bedroom, slipped under the covers of her empty bed, and set both phones on the night table, yawning. “Long meeting with your important source, Eric,” she said.

  Something about the sound of one’s own voice, late at night, all alone in a room . . .

  Robin drifted off to sleep, still waiting for her mother’s call.

  AT 11:45 P.M., Robin’s phone vibrated sharply on the bedstand, waking her from a light, fitful sleep. She blinked at it. She’d uninstalled Twitter about an hour earlier. So many notifications, and they’d all turned out to be hate tweets—hundreds of them. People she’d never met before with flags and frogs and porn models as avatars, calling her a bitch, a dumb skank, feminazi, childless slut. The red-pill crowd telling her to get a boob job, get a facelift, to get laid, to eat poison and die . . . Normally, she wouldn’t have cared all that much. Insults and threats meant her column was getting clicks, which would ultimately up ad revenues before all the trolls moved on to another target. You just breathe deep and ignore it. She’d been through this before, more than once.

  But tonight, the ugly words made her feel vulnerable, even scared. She’d locked all the doors in
her house, turned on the alarm, yet still, she felt watched. Hunted. How had he found her anyway, this Quentin Garrison?

  Robin lifted her phone, remembering her dream—flames enveloping her home, everything burning to the ground.

  The text was from Eric:

  On my way. Meeting went late. Sorry!

  Outside, Robin heard sirens—someone else besides her in this quiet suburban neighborhood, awake and having a crappy night. She stared at Eric’s text. “Fuck you,” she whispered. She thought of Ginny in her patriotic bikini top and typed: Trouble in Paradise. Sent it without hesitation, without thought.

  Eric replied: ???

  Robin saw it through a blur of tears. I’m not an idiot, she typed.

  How had the two of them gotten to this bad place in such a short time? A few years ago, they would have been up and awake together right now, researching the Cooper/LeRoy murders and Quentin Garrison over a bottle of wine—figuring it all out, gazes locked, phones in a drawer. They’d reported stories together in J-school. Sat together at the back of city council meetings, nudging each other in the ribs to stay awake. “We’re a team, you and I,” Eric used to say. “Like Woodward and Bernstein, but with sex.” But now, their texts weren’t even on the same wavelength.

  Is there anything worse than being alone in one’s confusion?

  It was nearly midnight. Robin’s parents were undoubtedly asleep. She didn’t want to wake them or worry them, but it was a tug-of-war, their feelings versus hers. And the state she was in right now. The ugly questions running through her brain, and she was alone with them. All alone.

  She tapped in her parents’ phone number. No answer. They had an old-fashioned answering machine rather than voice mail, so when it picked up, Robin started talking into it, loud enough to wake them but calm, so they wouldn’t panic. “Hi, Mom and Dad. I know it’s late, but can you please pick up? Mom? I really need to talk to you. Please?”

  No answer.

  “Hello?”

  Still nothing. “Mom?”

  Robin thought about calling her mother’s cell phone, but Mom hardly ever had it with her during the night. “I like to give my full attention to Dad, not Candy Crush,” she would explain.

  Robin was starting to get worried. She tried again, louder. “Mom, please! It’s Robin! Pick up the phone!”

  At last, someone picked up. “Are you within driving distance, ma’am?” A woman’s voice. Young. Clinical.

  Robin’s heartbeat sped up. “I’m a few blocks away,” she said.

  “Would you mind coming by their house?”

  “Who is this? Where are my parents?”

  “This is Officer Lebow with the Tarry Ridge Police Department,” the young woman said slowly. “I’m afraid there’s been an incident.”

  Eight

  Robin

  INCIDENT. THE WORD throbbed in Robin’s head as she headed out to her car, clicked open the door, and drove the three short blocks to her parents’ home. Incident. The police officer’s clean, clinical voice. There’s been an incident.

  Robin clutched the wheel, her palms sweating, heart pounding so hard she felt it in her face, her throat. It was hard to breathe.

  “It’s okay.” She said it aloud, a harsh whisper, just to drown out that word and the thoughts that came with it, growing too loud as she approached her parents’ house, three police cars, two ambulances in the circular driveway, lights flashing in such a way it was almost festive, made her think of Christmas, that one Christmas when they had a tree. Dad had brought it home—a surprise. How come we can’t have a tree, just because we’re Jewish? Robin had said that so many times, begged and pleaded with her parents, but she hadn’t thought they’d ever do it, and then Daddy had come through the door smiling. “Come look outside,” he’d said, Mom stifling her laughter, eyes sparkling. “Come see what Santa strapped to my car!”

  As Robin pulled into the driveway and got out of her car, she heard a voice saying her name. Dad. But when she whirled around, it was her parents’ longtime neighbor, Mr. Dougherty. “Robin,” he said again. “My God, Robin.” He wore plaid flannel pajama bottoms, a T-shirt that read DUKE UNIVERSITY. His daughter’s alma mater.

  Mr. Dougherty’s wife had died a year ago of bone cancer. Robin knew this too and it made her feel bad for him, even now, the way he was looking at her, head shaking, cheeks drawn, all the sympathy in the world in his eyes. She didn’t want to think about why. “I thought it was a backfire,” he said. “Then I heard the others.”

  “Where are my parents?”

  “I don’t know.” Mr. Dougherty’s gaze moved to a point behind her. She saw the lights flashing in his eyes, across his face. “Oh,” he said. “Oh my God,” and it was as though she were stuck in a dream. An awful dream. Ambulance lights. She whirled around, saw the first ambulance pulling away and then paramedics wheeling a gurney out, a flash of her father’s barrel chest—such a big man, though she’d never thought of him that way. A linebacker on his college football team. Big enough to earn the respect of his former patients, the criminally insane. But now . . . the white sheet across his chest . . . the blood . . .

  And his face.

  “Dad!” It barely escaped her lips, the faintest whisper. Her feet headed toward the ambulance of their own accord and she said it again, louder. “Dad! Dad!”

  “Ms. Bloom?”

  Robin didn’t even turn at first, unused as she was to her maiden name. But then she heard it said again, felt a hand on her back. She recognized the same cold clinical voice as she’d heard over the phone, only so much more fragile in the warm night air, the shifting swirling lights.

  Officer Lebow caught up with her as the second ambulance sped away, siren echoing, both of them staring after it. Robin gave her a quick glance—a sturdy young girl with a sweet face, the uniform the only thing about her that was truly off-putting. “What happened?”

  “We’re trying to find that out, ma’am,” she said. “There seems to have been a break-in.”

  Dad flashed through her mind again—on the phone, then on the gurney. The blood-drenched sheet, the speed with which the paramedics attended to him. His face . . . Robin heard herself talking, but it was as though her voice were coming from a different body than her own. A weaker one. “They’re still alive, right? They’re going to be okay? Did you see my mother? What did she look like?”

  “Ma’am, when was the last time you spoke to your parents?”

  “My mother . . . They were shot?”

  “Yes. They’re both on their way to the hospital. Don’t worry.”

  How can you tell someone not to worry? What kind of a bullshit directive is that? Robin gritted her teeth. Tried to catch her breath, though she had none to catch. Her arms and legs felt as though someone had pulled the bones out. She means well. Help her. Answer her questions and she’ll answer yours. “About eight P.M., I guess,” she told Officer Lebow. “I spoke to my father. He said my mom was at the grocery store. Did you talk to them? Are they conscious?”

  “What was your conversation about?”

  “The Yankees.”

  “Did he talk about enemies? An unwanted visitor?”

  “Enemies? No.”

  “How about your mother? Has she mentioned enemies?”

  A breeze pushed Robin’s hair from her face. Her gaze drifted up to the cloudless sky, the dirty sliver of moon. “No one that I know of.”

  “How often do you talk to her?”

  “Every day,” she said.

  “So you’re close. She would confide in you.”

  “Officer Lebow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you trying to say that this wasn’t a . . . a . . . simple robbery?”

  “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

  Mr. Dougherty said, “My family. We’ve lived here twenty years, we’ve never had anything like this.” Mr. Dougherty, still talking about his family when he lived alone in his big Tudor house. Still saying we, even though his daughter lived in
DC now and his wife was gone forever.

  “Did your father or mother know anyone who drives a silver compact car? Maybe a Chevrolet Cruze?” It was another cop asking now—a heavyset man, easily twenty years older than Officer Lebow.

  “It was a Chevrolet Cruze,” Mr. Dougherty said, “not maybe.” But all Robin had heard was that one word. Did. The past tense.

  “I need to go to the hospital.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “St. Catherine’s,” Mr. Dougherty said. “That’s where they are.”

  “Thank you.”

  She headed back to her car, jogging then running. No one tried to stop her. St. Catherine’s was one town over. But it was physically closer than Tarry Ridge Hospital. She knew where it was, more or less, but she punched it into her phone anyway. She couldn’t bear the thought of taking a wrong turn.

  Mr. Dougherty was shouting after her. “Is Eric at home? Do you want me to call him?”

  Robin pretended she didn’t hear. As she started up her car, her gaze fell on the front door: uniformed officers and a few men in suits moving through it, a tall man in khakis and a long-sleeved shirt wearing gloves . . .

  A crime scene.

  She backed out of the driveway, her mind filling with images she’d never forget: the flashing lights, strangers filing into her parents’ home. Those thin latex gloves that came with the man’s job. And blood, pooling under the white sheet, spreading across her father’s chest, the glimpse she’d gotten of his face, eyes wide as she’d never seen them before.

  Did your parents know anyone who drives a Chevrolet Cruze? The questions cops asked. As though it would have been normal for Robin to keep a mental tally of the makes and models of all the cars driven by everyone her parents might know. Chevrolet Cruze, though. A Chevy Cruze. She didn’t think she’d ever seen one of those outside of a rental car agency . . .

  The thought lingered in her mind, but only for a few seconds before it was replaced by other thoughts, dark and endless.

  BOTH OF ROBIN’S parents were in emergency surgery. Questioning the nurse at the front desk about it, she learned it was for “bullet wounds.” Nothing more. She couldn’t get a straight answer out of any of the nurses about the location of the wounds, about either of their conditions. “We will let you know, ma’am,” said the nurse at the front desk, using that curt dismissive tone Robin used to hear from certain publicists when she was smack out of journalism school, working as a reporter for a trashy celebrity weekly.