Never Come Back Read online

  “If this is upsetting you, we can stop,” I said. “I know it’s a big loss for you. Your sister—”

  “I have something to tell you,” he said. His voice sounded leaden and ominous.

  “What?” I asked.

  “About Ronnie,” he said, still chewing that nail. He finally stopped but didn’t look directly at me. “Something happened about a month ago. I don’t think your mom told you about it.”

  “Something with Ronnie?”

  “We were supposed to go fishing, he and I. But Ronnie did something that got him in trouble. I don’t really know what exactly. I think he refused to see his speech therapist, something like that. So Leslie said he couldn’t go fishing. You know how she is—rules are rules. Obligation and reward.” He sounded a little angry as he spoke, the younger brother who had faced this catechism before. “She told him he couldn’t go, and Ronnie… well, there’s no easy way to say it. He got a little violent.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t think he touched her, but she felt threatened, you know, by his behavior.”

  “He’s always had those temper tantrums,” I said, remembering many a kicking and screaming fit when we were growing up. They had certainly lessened over the years, but they still returned from time to time. “She can handle those. And so can you.”

  “She felt it was different this time. Worse.” He held his hands out in a resigned gesture. “She called the police. No charges were filed, and Ronnie calmed down. But it really shook her up.”

  It was my turn to stare at the floor. I couldn’t be certain what disturbed me more—the fact that my brother had grown so threatening that the police had to intervene, or that no one had bothered to tell me about this major family crisis.

  Paul said, “I don’t think she wanted you to worry about her. Or Ronnie.”

  “No,” I said. “She wanted to punish me. She wanted me to know I was being excluded from her life.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. His voice took on an edge. “Not now.”

  “You know it’s true,” I said. “That’s how she is.” I caught myself, cleared my throat again before I spoke. “Was. Oh, Paul—I just didn’t think she would ever die. I didn’t think it was possible for her to die.” I wiped at my eyes again. “First Dad… now Mom. I’m not ready for this.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you to make you upset,” he said. “I told you so you’d know. If the police ask. And they probably will ask.”

  “This is all so much,” I said. “Too much.”

  I walked around the room, but I didn’t know where I was going. The room felt small and cramped, like an aquarium filling with water.

  Mom is gone. I felt empty and full of emotion at the same time. I didn’t know what to think or do.

  “Will you stay here tonight?” I asked. “With Ronnie? Will you?”

  Paul didn’t offer the immediate agreement I had come to expect from him. He stumbled over his response.

  “Stay here?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I can,” I said.

  Then I understood his hesitation. He didn’t want to stay there either. Not in the house where his sister had died.

  “I don’t think—”

  I cut him off. “You don’t have to,” I said. “I can.”

  “No, it’s just… I guess I don’t want to wake Ronnie up and bring him to my place.”

  “It’s weird for you too,” I said. “Forget about it. I’ll stay.”

  “No,” he said, his voice firm now. He nodded his head. “I’ll stay. You go take care of what you have to take care of. I’ll be here.” He turned and opened the bedroom door. He left the space as quickly as I wanted to. “I’ll sleep out here. On the couch.”

  Chapter Five

  Paul helped Ronnie with his coat and tie. My brother managed the shirt and pants with no problem. He even polished his dress shoes with a rag from the kitchen and slicked his hair into place with a pocket comb. The tie vexed him, as it would me, but Paul was there wearing a gray suit with a red tie of his own. He stepped in front of Ronnie and expertly knotted it for him.

  I opted for a simple black dress. It wasn’t too revealing. I didn’t want to look like I was hitting a cocktail party. It was Mom’s funeral, after all, and I was going to be doing a lot of talking and hugging. Grad school limited my budget, and I had bought the dress the spring before to attend a party at the provost’s house. The dress made me look good, but it didn’t reveal too much. I was five-five and thin like Mom. We both had narrow waists and small breasts. I didn’t work at staying thin—I just was thin. My grad school friends whose bodies had started to go to pot thanks to nights of drinking Mountain Dew and eating cheap fast food occasionally cursed me for it.

  The previous two days had passed in a blur of phone calls and e-mails and paperwork. And the occasional break to stop and cry. The smallest thing could set me off. I might remember a scarf Mom once wore, or a time she made me a special meal when I was a child. Then the floodgates would open and I’d cry until I was empty. It made me feel better for a few moments, as if the tears needed to be purged from my body. But I never stopped feeling sad.

  When I was coherent and calm, I dealt with the funeral home. As I suspected, Mom had made a lot of the decisions already, but there were still things for me to handle. The staff at the funeral home made it easy. They phrased all the questions to me as if I were a three-year-old child, which was exactly what I needed. They gave me choices, and I picked between two things. Graveside service or chapel? Graveside, I chose. This reading from Scripture or that one? That one. None of us was ever particularly religious, especially Mom. When it came to the afterlife, she simply shrugged and said, “Who knows what’s going to happen?”

  Paul spent a lot of time with Ronnie while I tended to the death errands. I found myself only too happy to have an excuse to leave the house. I liked to tell myself it was because my mother died there, that that was why the place felt too uncomfortable for me to be in. But I knew the truth was something different. I feared being trapped there. I worried that my life would become that house, just as Mom had wanted. Before Mom’s death, I could tell myself I was leaving Dover again at the end of the academic year when my degree was finished. I could go on to get a doctorate or a job somewhere else. Anywhere, really. That was suddenly all in doubt.

  My mother was explicit in her instructions to the funeral home. No viewing. She wanted a simple service at the small Presbyterian church she rarely attended. I pushed the funeral home to have the service as soon as possible. Mom died on Saturday night, and we were burying her on Tuesday morning. Paul had been spending the nights at the house with Ronnie, and I showed up on the day of the funeral so we could all go together. When I arrived, I found them putting the finishing touches on Ronnie’s clothes. It brought me a little comfort, seeing them together, knowing they were there with me.

  “Looks good,” I said.

  “We clean up pretty well,” Paul said.

  Ronnie didn’t say a word or smile. He’d been subdued and morose over the past two days. He hadn’t said much about Mom. He hadn’t said much about anything. I worried about him. Unlike me, he seemed to be keeping a lot bottled up inside. I knew Paul would try to talk to him, but talk only did so much when it went one way.

  Ronnie sat on his bed and picked up a pad of paper and a pencil. He liked to draw, and he drew even more in times of stress. He rarely let me see his drawings. With Ronnie occupied, Paul and I walked out to the living room.

  “He seems pretty out of it,” I said.

  “He’s trying.” Paul forced a smile. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I keep dreaming about Mom. Nonsense dreams. She’s just there all the time, in my head.”

  “I remember that happening to me when my dad died. Your grandpa. You never knew him, but he was quite a guy. Larger than life in a way. I just couldn’t believe the world continued to turn without him in it.” He placed his hands in his pockets
and adopted a slightly businesslike stance. “You know,” he said, “if you want Ronnie to come and stay with me after today, he can. Or if you want me to stay here longer to help out with him and everything else.”

  “I’m going to deal with the lawyer soon,” I said. “Do you know what I have to do?”

  “I think you take the will to them, and they file it,” he said. “Who’s the executor?”

  “Me,” I said.

  “I don’t see that there’s a huge rush,” he said. “It’s only affecting the three of us. If you need to get back to your normal life, the will can wait.” He showed a genuine smile. “Let’s worry about it another day, kiddo. Ronnie’s doing fine.”

  I disagreed, but I also wasn’t in any position to make demands. Paul knew Ronnie better than I did. He understood his moods. He had a real relationship with him, and I didn’t. Not anymore.

  The phone started ringing.

  “Has there been a lot of that?” I asked.

  “Not too bad,” Paul said. “A few old friends, that kind of thing.”

  I went to the kitchen and answered.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice on the other end. “Is this—? I was trying to reach Leslie Hampton’s house.”

  “This is Leslie Hampton’s house,” I said. “This is her daughter.”

  “Oh…”

  There was a long pause. I thought I heard something on the other end of the line, a gasp or a cough. I couldn’t be sure. The pause went on so long I thought the other person had hung up.

  “Hello?” I said.

  I heard the sound of a deep breath. “I read something in the paper, a death notice. I just wanted to call to make sure it was really true.”

  I didn’t recognize the voice, which didn’t surprise me. Even though Mom had few friends, I couldn’t know them all. And I obviously didn’t know a lot about her life, considering what Paul had told me about Ronnie the other night. But just having to tell someone else—even someone I didn’t know—brought a catch of emotion into my own throat. I fought back against the tears.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s true. My mother passed away Saturday night. It was unexpected.”

  “Oh,” the woman said again, and that led to another long pause.

  “Were you a friend of my mother’s?” I asked.

  “I was just getting to know her,” the woman said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I guess I should be saying that to you, shouldn’t I?”

  “Thank you. The funeral service is this morning if you’re able to make it. It’s at First Presbyterian.”

  “I don’t think I can,” she said. “I live a little ways away, and I have my grandchildren here today.”

  “I understand—”

  But she hung up before the words were out of my mouth.

  Chapter Six

  The funeral was, indeed, small. Before the service Ronnie, Paul, and I stood in the back of the church and greeted the arriving mourners. There weren’t that many. Maybe forty total, including the three of us. Most of them were women my mom’s age, ladies she had known to some degree during the thirty years she’d lived in Dover. If I had ever met or seen any of them, it would have been years earlier, and as they approached me, shaking my hand and hugging me, it amazed me how much they had aged. Graying hair, deeper wrinkles. Funerals do make us think of our own mortality. How much time had flown by for me?

  After the service, we proceeded to the cemetery. It was a warm day in late September, and, contrary to popular belief, it didn’t have to rain during a funeral. Few clouds interrupted the flat blue of the sky. The trees had just started throwing out their brightest colors. We rode to the cemetery in Paul’s car, easing along right behind the hearse. Mom hadn’t felt the need to pay for an extra vehicle or anything as extravagant as a limo.

  The graveside service passed quickly. A few words from the Bible, all of us standing there with our heads appropriately bowed. Birds chirped overhead and a light breeze ruffled everyone’s clothes. I stared at the ground, first at the hole that awaited my mother’s coffin. Then I turned my eyes to the space next to her, where my father lay buried. The gauge for my emotional tank showed empty. I’d cried everything out already and just wanted to get out of the cemetery.

  The minister announced that everyone was invited back to Mom’s house for some snacks and drinks. As the mourners filed out, they took the time to talk to us and wish us well. The women doted on Ronnie, and he bore their fussing with the same blank look he’d worn for the past few days. The women also stopped and talked to me. They offered to bring food to us and to check in from time to time.

  Then a woman named Nancy Porter, who volunteered at the library my mom always went to, stopped and leaned in close to my ear. She wore a floral dress with a white cardigan over top.

  “I know you’ll take good care of your brother,” she said, her eyes wide and earnest. “You’re going to do what your mom wanted you to do, right?”

  I gritted my teeth.

  “She wanted you to do this for her, Elizabeth.”

  Even then, speaking to someone I owed nothing to, I couldn’t say what I was supposed to say. Mrs. Porter moved on.

  • • •

  Finally, it was time for us to go. People were on their way to the house, so we needed to get back and open things up. Paul had ordered food from a local deli. It was all crammed into Mom’s refrigerator, waiting for the descending hordes of hungry mourners.

  I looked around the cemetery. I didn’t see Paul. His car was still sitting in the cemetery roadway, the sun glinting off its chrome and glass. But he was nowhere in sight.

  “Come on, Ronnie.” I took my brother by the hand, and we started for the car.

  Then I saw Dan.

  He stood in the shade of a big maple, wearing a white dress shirt and a vintage blue and gray tie with a thick knot. He was thirty, almost five years older than me. A few flecks of gray were starting to show in his dark hair, but he still managed to look boyish. A young, handsome intellectual.

  “Hi, Elizabeth.” He came forward and gave me a hug. It felt good, and for the extra long moment he held me, I relaxed my body and let myself be supported by him, as though I were on the brink of collapse. I needed that. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said as he let me go. “How did you know?”

  “Professor Niehaus told me. I’ve been calling you for the last two days, and you haven’t been responding. Plus you didn’t come to class, so I asked if something was wrong. I thought maybe you were sick.”

  “I asked her not to tell anybody,” I said.

  “She told me because I pushed,” Dan said. “And because she knew we were, or had been, close. Other people from school would have come to the funeral, you know. Why didn’t you want them to hear the news?”

  “I just didn’t want to make a big deal,” I said. “I’ll be back to school tomorrow.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Really?”

  “This is my brother, Ronnie,” I said.

  “Hi, Ronnie,” Dan said.

  Ronnie shook Dan’s hand but didn’t say anything.

  “My uncle is here somewhere, but I don’t— Wait. There he is.”

  Paul stood on the other side of the road, about fifty yards from the car. He was talking to a man I didn’t recognize, someone I didn’t think I had seen at either the church or the graveside service. If he had been there, he hadn’t spoken to me. Paul threw his hands out to his side a few times, as though exasperated and trying to make an important point that the man wasn’t understanding.

  “Do you know who Paul is talking to, Ronnie?” I asked.

  Ronnie shook his head.

  “Do you need anything, Elizabeth?” Dan asked. “Help with school or your classes? Do you just want to get together and have a drink and talk?”

  I looked over at Paul again. He made a dismissive gesture toward the other man, as if telling him he was finished with him. The two men walked off in o
pposite directions. Paul came toward us while the man—short and chubby—walked off the other way. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t see a car or anyone waiting for him.

  I turned to Dan. “We have to go now,” I said. “We have to open the house for the guests.”

  “I can’t make it to your house,” Dan said. “I have class.”

  “That’s fine. It’s just some old people my mom knew. Nothing fancy.”

  Paul used his remote key fob to unlock the car, and I began to head in that direction.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Okay,” Dan said.

  I turned back on the way. “Thanks, Dan. Thanks for coming.”

  “Call me if you need anything,” he said.

  I looked back once as we drove away. Dan remained in his spot, waving good-bye.

  Chapter Seven

  Paul’s face was flushed as we drove to the house. I thought maybe it was from standing in the morning sun. Or maybe stress and grief. But I also remembered the way he’d walked away from the man at the cemetery. The big gestures, the dismissal. He gripped the wheel tight as he drove.

  “Who was that you were talking to?” I asked.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The man at the cemetery. Is he a friend?”

  Paul didn’t respond right away. His eyes pointed straight ahead, fixed on the road and the traffic.

  “Just someone we used to know growing up. He’s nobody.”

  I thought about asking more, then remembered my own awkward encounter with the past in the cemetery. I decided not to press it. Some things were better left alone.

  • • •

  About fifteen people came back to the house after the graveside service. The die-hards, I supposed. They were waiting politely on the porch when we pulled up. The gathering passed with a lot of muted small talk. Comments about the weather were popular, as were compliments about the food. I realized an eternal truth: death makes people hungry. Either because they’ve decided to embrace life to the fullest in the wake of another’s death, or maybe because they don’t know what to talk about at such an event. In any case, the guests made a nice dent in the food. No one held back.