David Bell - Never Come Back

“He’s okay,” I said to him. “I mean, as okay as he can be, considering.”

“Good,” Dan said.

“We’re going to get to see him in ICU soon. They’re moving him up there now.”

“Good,” Dan said again.

Paul said, “We were going to go get something to eat, if you’d like to join us.”

“He can’t,” I said.

Both Dan and Paul looked at me. I sounded edgy and firm, like someone giving commands to a small dog. I could read the look on Dan’s face. He seemed a little hurt. I knew he thought all the progress we had made—my needing him—had evaporated with one sentence barked out by me.

“Can you excuse us just a moment, Paul?” I said.

He nodded and walked away, heading to the cafeteria.

I turned back to Dan. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I need to talk to my uncle. Alone.”

He still looked hurt, but he put on a brave face for me. “I understand.”

“It’s about that person I was talking to today,” I said. “And a bunch of other things.”

“Okay,” he said. “Family stuff. You know, someday we are going to have to talk about all of this… and you’re going to have to tell me what’s going on.” He paused. “If we’re going to be in any kind of relationship.”

“I will,” I said. “I wish I could tell you all about it today. Right now. But I just can’t. I have to get some other answers first. Believe me, I’d rather be with you than doing any of this.”

He nodded. “Call me when you can.”

I leaned up and kissed him. Right in front of everyone.

“Later,” I said. “I promise.”

I selected a lot of food as we went through the St. Vincent’s cafeteria line. I took a plate of roast beef and gravy with a side of mashed potatoes—and more gravy. I also grabbed a piece of chocolate pie. I hadn’t eaten all day, and it was well past lunch. I didn’t even care that the pie looked like it had been sitting on the cafeteria line since the Reagan administration.

Paul was more controlled. He picked a salad and a turkey sandwich. When we reached the cash register, he paid. I made a token offer to pick up the tab, but he refused. I doubted I had more than a few dollars in my wallet.

We found a table out of the way. The cafeteria wasn’t very crowded on a Saturday. People in Dover seemed to be falling ill and having accidents mostly during normal business hours. I dug into my food as soon as we sat down. And I started with the questions right away.

“So, it’s all true?” I asked. “What this guy told me?”

“I don’t know everything he told you,” Paul said. He picked at his salad with a plastic fork.

“I’ll give you the gist,” I said. “Mom was married to that guy—and not just for a short amount of time. They had a daughter. Oh, and her name is Elizabeth, same as mine. That’s not creepy at all, Paul. Not at all. And on top of that, this daughter, this other Elizabeth—my namesake apparently—ran off and was murdered, possibly by a serial killer. And Mom never told me about it. Neither Mom nor Dad—or you —ever told me about it.”

Paul looked as though he didn’t know what to say. He concentrated on his food, his head drooping a bit between his shoulders. My little rant had brought something home to me, something I hadn’t fully comprehended before. This was no longer just about Mom. Sure, she had kept things from me. But so had Dad—and I thought he and I had understood each other in ways Mom and I didn’t. And Paul. He was supposed to be the cool one, the favorite uncle.

Why didn’t anyone tell me?

“For the record,” Paul finally said, “I think your mother should have told you. I encouraged her to.”

“Why didn’t she?”

He laid the plastic fork aside. “Honestly, I think she was embarrassed. You know what she was like. Private, closed off. Strong. She didn’t admit weakness very well, and here she would have had to tell someone very important to her, someone whose opinion she valued, that she had made a horrible mistake in marrying Gordon Baxter. But she had her reasons for doing it.”

Paul’s response seemed to miss the point. I mostly wanted to understand why I had never been told about having a sister who’d been murdered. Paul seemed more concerned with Mom’s marriage.

“Why was marrying him a horrible mistake?” I asked.

“You met him,” Paul said. “What did you think of him?”

I summoned a mental picture of Gordon Baxter. An odd man, that was for sure. Yes, a little creepy. I couldn’t imagine my mother marrying or spending time with someone like that, but then I couldn’t imagine my mother spending time with any man. I knew she and my father loved each other, but their marriage sometimes looked like a relationship between platonic roommates.

“I think I’m missing something,” I said, taking another couple of bites of my food.

“He’s a criminal, Elizabeth,” Paul said.

“What do you mean?” I chewed, trying to concentrate on what Paul was saying.

“He’s spent time in jail.”

“And Mom married him?”

“This was after he and your mom split up,” Paul said. “Several years after. But make no mistake: the guy’s bad news. I never liked him. He was an asshole back in high school, and I’m sure he hasn’t changed.”

Asshole? Paul rarely cursed.

“Mom was a good judge of character,” I said. “She didn’t tolerate anything. She acted like leaving the toilet seat up meant you were going to hell.”

“They met in high school,” Paul said. “Your mom was quiet. Bookish would be the polite way to put it. A nerd, I guess, is what young people would say now. She didn’t have a lot of friends. She certainly never dated. She didn’t even go to the dances we had at the school. And Gordon… he was something of a big man on campus. He played sports, football and baseball. He had a lot of friends. I guess he was handsome in his own way, even though he was short.”

Again, I visualized the man I’d spoken to in McDonald’s, the man who’d been married to my mother. “Handsome” didn’t come to mind. “Toadish” was more like it. But I was meeting him fifty years after the fact. In the wedding photo, he had looked only okay, but I wouldn’t say handsome.

“Go on,” I said.

“He took an interest in Leslie,” Paul said. “I don’t know why. She was a pretty girl when she was young, even if she was reserved and quiet. You’ve seen the pictures of her. It would be easy to see, given her looks, that a young man could be taken with her. I suspect her quiet nature, her refusal or inability—I’m not sure which it was—to reveal anything of herself to the world made her seem even more alluring. You know, the power of mystery. So he pursued her. Asked her out on dates. Took her to dances. He fell for her, and she for him.”

“What did she see in him, then, if he was such an asshole?”

“You remember high school,” Paul said. “What would it be like to have a popular guy show an interest in you? Everybody wants to feel special, to feel pursued and desirable. Right? Your mother was different, but she wasn’t that different. Inside, she was a teenage girl who wanted the things teenage girls want.”

“She wanted them enough to marry him?”

“They got married during their senior year in high school and settled in Haxton.”

“Wait— during their senior year. They got married while they were still in high school?”

“Yes.”

“Was Mom… ?” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. The whole idea seemed so crazy to me.

Paul nodded his head. “She became pregnant with Beth during her senior year and had her when she was just seventeen. Your mom’s birthday is late. July. She didn’t turn eighteen until after graduation. After Beth was born in June.”