David Bell - Never Come Back

“Wow,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“The grandchildren,” she said. “They really helped lead me back to Mom. When I saw them so young, so vulnerable, something kicked in. I guess I realized I was getting older. Time was passing. I’d moved back here, to Reston Point. I’d lived in Ohio once before, about twenty years ago. I lived in Akron. I even thought about coming over and looking for Mom then. I checked the phone book and everything. She’d gotten married by then and had a different name. You couldn’t just look on the computer like you can now. And I thought… I guess I thought she had a new life and maybe she didn’t want me to come back and remind her of all that stuff from the past.”

“You know she wouldn’t have thought that,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I was afraid of Gordon too. I wondered what would happen if I did see him again, so I stayed away. Eventually I realized Mom wouldn’t care about any of that. I tracked her down in Dover. I just used one of those services you pay for on the Internet. They found her, and I called her… and…”

Beth lost it then. She didn’t even have time to raise her hands to her face. The tears poured out and her body shook with the sobbing.

I looked around. Only one other family sat in the waiting area with us, an elderly man and a middle-aged couple. They all turned to look when Beth started crying, then looked away again when they saw me scrambling to find tissues. I grabbed a box and brought them to Beth. While she tried to stem the tide of her tears, I placed my hand on her back and gently rubbed. It didn’t feel as awkward as I would have thought. I felt for this woman. I didn’t want to see her suffer. And I couldn’t imagine the pain she was experiencing over first losing her mother as a teenager, then briefly having her back as an adult only to lose her again so suddenly. If we were going to have a grieving contest, I decided Beth won by a mile. It wasn’t even close.

She composed herself. She used the tissues to wipe her tears and snot away. The other people in the waiting area had gone back to their own worries and problems. I sank back into my chair. I felt tired, mentally and physically. And I still hadn’t been back to Dover to see Ronnie. Maybe Dan was still there, or maybe Paul had returned to the hospital. But maybe Ronnie was there alone, wondering where I was.

“I feel guilty,” Beth said. “So very guilty.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“But I should,” Beth said. “I should have done something to stop him once I saw him again. More than anyone else, I knew the kinds of things he was capable of. And I should have tried to stop him from hurting Mom.”

A nurse appeared in the waiting room. She held a clipboard, and she read something off of it. Then she looked up and said, “The family of Neal Nelson. Is the Neal Nelson family here?” The nurse looked around, her eyes bouncing across all the people in the room. I raised my hand.

The nurse came over. She held the clipboard in front of her like a shield, as if she expected someone to attack. “Are you family members?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“And what’s the relation?”

“I’m his girlfriend,” I said.

The nurse wore a stone face. “Are there any family members here?”

“I don’t know where they are,” I said. “But the detective said they were called.”

The nurse remained stoic, but some of the sternness eased. “I’m just here to tell you that they’re beginning the closing procedures on the surgery. But it looks like everything is going to be fine.”

“Oh, thank God,” I said. Beth reached out for me. We leaned in toward each other, our shoulders touching. “He’s going to be okay.”

“Well,” the nurse said, “I didn’t say that. I’m just here to tell you it looks like he’s going to be okay—so far.”

I could live with that. I thanked the nurse. Then she turned on her heel and briskly walked away, still clutching the clipboard.

“I’m so relieved,” I said to Beth.

“I know.”

We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Then I said, “I hate to go back to this, but I’m wondering why you feel so guilty about Mom’s death and Gordon. You’re being too hard on yourself.”

She paused. I saw that her hands were clenched, the fingernails digging into the fabric of her chair.

“Gordon found me about a year ago,” she said. “I don’t know how. For all I know he used one of those Internet people finder things. Or else he hired someone to find me. Whatever it was, he found me here in Reston Point. He told me then that he’d been thinking about me a lot and hoped we could reconnect. He gave me a whole line about how sorry he was about the past and everything that happened when he sent me away. He said it was a misunderstanding, that he really didn’t mean for me to never come back. I’m ashamed to say I fell for some of it. I guess I was so desperate to connect with someone from my family—this family that had been taken away from me—that I was willing to believe he might be a changed man.” She looked at me, her face serious. “People do change, Elizabeth. Take it from me—they really do. I know that better than anyone.”

I nodded.

“I asked him about Mom, of course. He told me what he knew—that she had remarried and had two kids. He said he’d been in touch with her and maybe it was a little soon for me to go rushing back into her life. I found out later, from Mom, that he had only gotten back in touch with her because he knew she had some insurance money from your dad and wanted to try to get something out of her. Gordon hadn’t been living in Dover for very long. I still don’t know where he’d been living. Columbus maybe. But the money was all he wanted. She said she hadn’t seen him in ten or fifteen years, and then he showed up again. Hell, I think he probably wanted money from me, but one look at my life and he’d know the cupboard was bare. But he said he’d help smooth the way and prepare Mom for meeting me if I wanted. I went along with that too.”

“Why?”

“Because of what I said before,” Beth said. “I still felt that shame, that fear that the life I had led in the past would be… difficult for Mom to accept. I wanted to be sure I was ready for anything.”

“Did you ever think Mom wanted to send you away?”

Beth paused a long time. “I guess at first I might have. We didn’t get along. She was frustrated with me a lot.” She shook her head. “But she would never do that. I don’t blame her. I never would. And I know she thought I was dead. If she thought there was a chance I was alive somewhere… well, I just know she would have tried to find me.”

“So how did you meet Mom, then?”

“About six months after Gordon found me, I could tell he was starting to stall a little about getting me and Mom back together. I was getting impatient. I was ready. As ready as I was ever going to be, and I thought if I didn’t do it soon I might never do it.” She took a deep breath. “He let something slip once. I knew he was seeing Mom somewhere south of Reston Point. I guessed it was Dover because there really isn’t much else down here. Even with a town the size of Dover, finding one person when you only know their first name is like finding a needle in a haystack. And I was afraid I’d run across someone I used to know. A kid from school or whatever. I assumed some people might remember me, and I didn’t want Mom to find out through someone else that I was around. I wanted to have some control over how it went. Instead, in a roundabout way, it was Ronnie who helped me find her.”

“Ronnie?” I asked. “How?”

“Gordon told me once that Mom had a son with Down syndrome. That’s all I knew. I didn’t even know his name. Or your name. But I did know they had that place in Dover, that center where people with disabilities spend time and get jobs and things like that.”