Never Come Back

Chapter Twenty-five

I drove away from the lawyer’s office with that name tumbling around in my head. Elizabeth Yarbrough. Something about this woman drove my mother to show up at her lawyer’s office just a month earlier and include her in the will. And Mom did this shortly after I refused to give her the promise about Ronnie’s care that she wanted. Were the two events linked somehow?

I wanted to call Paul. I figured there was a good chance he knew who Elizabeth Yarbrough was. If he didn’t know, I wasn’t sure anybody did. And I suppose I wanted to tell him about the changes to the will, the differences between the one we read at Mom’s house and the one she’d updated with Mr. Allison. More than anything, I wanted to hear the sound of his voice again. I couldn’t even say who needed to apologize to whom. I didn’t care. I just wanted things to be back to normal.

Humility and apology didn’t come easy to me. It should stand as a measure of how much I cared for Paul that I dialed his number. While it rang, my heart thumped.

But the call went straight to his voice mail, my uncle’s polite, Midwestern tone asking me to please leave a message. It made me feel weak to experience relief at the sound of the greeting, but I did. I even considered—briefly—not leaving a message. But the cell phone didn’t allow us to hide from people. He’d still receive a missed-call notification with my name attached to it, so I plowed ahead.

“Hi,” I said. Then I was stuck. Apologize? I shook my head. No, I told myself, just be normal. “I’m driving away from the lawyer’s office. I thought you might want to know some of the things we talked about with the will and everything. So… okay. I’ll talk to you soon.”

I hoped he’d call me back.

My mother once cleaned my room for me when I was seven. Admittedly, I liked messes as a child. I threw my clothes and toys on the floor with no regard for a system. I grew to hate messes as I became a teenager and then an adult, but back then—look out. My bedroom resembled a yard sale. So Mom insisted on cleaning it for me. And I suffered for it, in the way only a kid could suffer. Mom developed a simple system: She picked up a toy or an article of clothing and asked me the last time I had used it or worn it. If it had been more than a year, she put the item in a box. I didn’t catch on fast enough because when we were finished—and the room was clean to Mom’s standards—she took the box to the Salvation Army. I cried to my dad about it that night. He was always the softer of the two, the more tolerant of the emotional torrents of a young girl’s life, and he held me in his lap while I soaked his neck with tears.

But when I was finished, when I had cried it out, he asked me a simple question: “Why are you crying over things you really didn’t want anymore and had probably outgrown?”

He stumped my seven-year-old brain back then, but as I got older the wisdom of what he said sank in. He really wanted me to not let the past control me, to not stop forward progress for the sake of looking back. And Mom taught me that as well. When something outlived its usefulness, she let it go without regret. Without emotion. I had even allowed myself, just for a few moments in the lawyer’s office, to think she might have extended that philosophy to me and cut me out of her will.

But I was foolish to think Mom would ever do that to Ronnie or me. She was a great mother, and she loved both of us far too much.

Mom’s house reflected her streamlined, unadorned philosophy of existence. It was almost six, and the route back to my apartment took me right past Mom’s street. I hadn’t planned on going there, but the thought of looking through some of Mom’s things—and maybe, just maybe, getting a clue as to who Elizabeth Yarbrough was—proved to be too tempting. If Mom changed the will just one month earlier, then it stood to reason there might be recent evidence of interactions with this woman. A phone number. Letters. A gift or a card.

I turned down Mom’s quiet little street and pulled into her driveway. I sat in the car for a moment, contemplating the scene. The police told me I could go back inside if I needed but to not spend a great deal of time in there. They had finished with it as a crime scene but could require access to the house for follow-up at any future point in the investigation. I remembered so many things about that house. Mornings being hustled off to school, the smell of pancakes and bacon in the air. The little swing set in the backyard, which was taken down when Ronnie and I became teenagers. I sneaked out the back door more than once in high school, meeting up with friends in the middle of the night, even though we really didn’t have anything to do.

In the wake of Mom’s death, the house looked, for lack of a better word, dead. The blinds were closed, the flowers on the porch wilting and dying of neglect in the early fall. It wasn’t that my mother kept the most vibrant or ostentatious house—quite the opposite in fact—but without anyone living there, without any life inside, the house seemed noticeably deflated. It reeked of absence.

I didn’t know whether I could will myself to go in. I knew officers had checked the house the day before while I sat with Detective Post, and just sitting there in the driveway, with the sun starting to set and the shadows lengthening, I couldn’t see any sign that anything had been disturbed. It seemed fanciful and even childish to think that some kind of boogeyman waited inside, hiding behind a door or inside a closet, eager to spring out at me and club me over the head. Fanciful and childish except for the fact that a boogeyman had already visited this house and killed my mother. At least I hoped it had been a visitor and not someone who already lived there. Add to that the break-in at my own apartment and it started to seem unwise for me to enter the empty house alone.

But just enough daylight remained. I carried my cell phone with me, ready to call for help at the first sign of trouble. If the doors were still locked, if there were no signs of disturbance, why shouldn’t I go in? I remembered what Dan had said the night before: What would your mom want you to do? She’d want the matter resolved, and she wouldn’t want to have a daughter who was afraid of her own shadow. Besides, she had left the gaping mystery right there in her will, and named me the executor of the whole thing. If she didn’t want me to dig around and investigate after her death, she should have told me herself what was going on.

Maybe she would have if the two of you had been speaking to each other…

“Shut up,” I said to the little voice in my head. To all those voices.

I paused on the front porch. My keys jingled at my side, the spare to Mom’s house separated from the rest and held between my thumb and index finger. I looked up and down the street, realizing as I did so that I was making myself look as suspicious as a burglar. I didn’t see anybody or anything. The sun’s rays were elongating, stretching through the trees and into the back of Mom’s yard. Soon, I knew, we’d likely have to put the house on the market. I doubted that my small graduate stipend could even pay the taxes, let alone what remained of the mortgage. And if the house was gone, what sense of my mother would be left? Between that and Ronnie’s hospitalization and my fight with Paul, it felt as though everything was slipping away. For so long I’d held my family at arm’s length, only to find out how much I wanted them near me once I risked losing them.

I slipped the key into the lock, still stained with fingerprint powder. The lock turned with only a little resistance, and I stepped inside the darkened living room. I went directly to the windows that looked out onto the street and pulled the blinds up, letting in the light that still remained of the day. It was a fair amount, and immediately the house felt less stuffy, less claustrophobic and close.

I stood by the front door and called out, “Hello?”

There was no response. But what had I expected? Would a burglar or a killer hiding in the dark really answer me?

Undeterred, I said it again. “Hello? Anyone? Hello?”

It made me feel good to hear my voice rattling through the house. Any human sound, even one generated by me, brought a small measure of ease and comfort. I didn’t know where to start. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. Mr. Allison had said that at some point I would need bank statements and insurance policy information, a total accounting of Mom’s assets and liabilities. But I was less interested in that. I thought I needed to find something more personal.

“Okay,” I said to no one in particular. “Let’s do this thing.”

I eased down the short hallway, the one that led back to the bedrooms. When I passed the open door to Ronnie’s room on my left, I looked inside. Nothing seemed out of place or disturbed. I resisted the temptation to go in there and peek in the closet or drop down on all fours and check for monsters under the bed. I went past the bathroom on the right, then reached Mom’s room. I stood in the doorway, waiting and staring, before I went in. I knew I had been in there the other night, talking to Paul, but being in there alone raised a chill on the back of my neck. If ever I was going to turn and run and leave my investigating for another day, it would have been then. But I fought back against the anxiety and stepped into the room where my mother died.

I started in the most obvious places. I went through the drawers of her dresser, finding mostly clothes. As I pawed through them, I realized they had no use anymore, not for my mother anyway. They needed to be gathered together, boxed up, and sent to a charity. I added that task to my mental list of things to do. And I knew Mom would have wanted it done. Within a week of Dad’s death, his clothes were out of the closet. Life moves on, Mom would say.

I found more of the same in her closet, which is to say—nothing. Clothes. Lots of clothes. Simple, unadorned, old-lady clothes. I saw shirts that my mother had been wearing for close to twenty years, ever since I was a child. The closet held a few more personal items, mostly relating to Ronnie or me. Old report cards, silly drawings we made and brought home to her. There were a few photos in a box—all stuff I’d seen before. And no mention of anyone named Elizabeth Yarbrough. I checked the nightstand again, the place where I’d found the will. There was nothing else.

I stopped and stood still in the middle of the room. Something else occurred to me. Not only was I not finding anything about Elizabeth Yarbrough, I wasn’t finding anything about my mother’s past at all. Nothing about the years before she met my father and gave birth to Ronnie and me. No high school yearbooks, no letters from old friends. Nothing even about Paul. I’d never seen those things in the house. Mom never talked about the past. She acted as if the world began the day she married Dad. As I looked around the house, it seemed to be true.

I moved my search out to the living room, to the coat closet in the entryway. As I dug around in there, finding nothing but heavy winter clothes and a box of scarves and gloves, I reflected on how little I really knew about my mother. As a teenager, I’d assumed what all teenagers assume—Mom and Dad just didn’t have lives before I was born. Now I realized how silly that was. Mom didn’t give birth to Ronnie until she was forty-two. She’d married Dad at forty. She’d mentioned having jobs and never finding the right guy until she met Dad, but in those years she’d obviously lived a life of some kind. And judging from what I was seeing, it appeared my mom hadn’t documented it.

Having my face buried in the closet made me hot, so I took a break and sat on the couch. My anxiety about being in the house alone had eased. Other concerns had taken over my mind, but as I sat still on the couch some of those fears crept back over me. The house—even with the curtains open, even with me inside it—felt like a tomb, an abandoned, used-up space. And I felt like an intruder, violating that space as I dug around. Why should I feel that way in my own mother’s home?

I pulled out my phone and checked the white pages for “Elizabeth Yarbrough” in Reston Point, Ohio. No listing, so I tried a Google search for “Elizabeth Yarbrough.” A lot of stuff came up, but nothing of use. High school girls on MySpace and Facebook. An obituary for a ninety-three-year-old woman in Kansas. I tried “Elizabeth Yarbrough Reston Point.” Again, nothing promising. As a last resort, I entered Mom’s name and Elizabeth’s name. Still nothing.

I looked up another phone number, this one right in Dover. She was easy to find, and I dialed. When she answered, I said, “Hello? Mrs. Porter?”

“Yes?”

“This is Elizabeth Hampton. Leslie’s daughter.”

“I know who you are,” she said. Her voice sounded a little haughty, as though my clarification had insulted her intelligence. Maybe so, but I was just trying to be clear.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but—”

“It’s no bother,” she said, her voice brightening. “I wanted to tell you I was thinking of starting a little memorial fund at the library in your mom’s honor. She loved the library so much.”

“That would be very nice.” I held my tongue and didn’t mention that Mom’s obituary instructed any memorials to be made to the local chapter of a Down syndrome support group. I needed Mrs. Porter on my side. “I was wondering if my mom ever mentioned someone named Elizabeth Yarbrough to you.”

“Is this a friend of hers?” Mrs. Porter asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d know.”

“Did you find her name in your mom’s things?”

Who’s asking the questions here, you or me? I wanted to ask. “Something like that,” I said instead.

“What’s the name again?” she asked.

“Elizabeth Yarbrough.”

A long pause. “Hmm. That doesn’t ring a bell with me,” she said.

“Well, thanks. And thanks for the memorial for Mom.”

“I did think of something else after your mom’s funeral,” Mrs. Porter said.

“Yeah?”

“Remember I told you I hadn’t seen your mom in about a month? She liked to come in once or twice a week with your brother.”

“I remember,” I said. “You said she came in alone and was in a hurry to get to an appointment.”

“Right. Well, I remember something else we talked about that day. I remembered it last night as I was dozing off.”

“What’s that?”

“You know your mom liked to educate herself. She read every book she could get her hands on about Down syndrome. And when she’d read all of ours, she requested them from other libraries around the state. She read every new book that came out on the subject.”

“She was thorough,” I said.

“Well, that last time she came in she asked for a book on a different subject. Not Down syndrome. I can’t remember the name of it, but I thought it was an odd thing for her to be looking for.”

Something tingled at the base of my skull. “What was the book about?” I asked.

“Something to do with childhood trauma,” Mrs. Porter said. “I know… it was something like helping an adult deal with childhood trauma. Does that mean anything to you?”

I sat forward on the couch. The phone shook in my hand. I answered Mrs. Porter with complete honesty.

“I have no idea why she’d want that at all.”