Never Come Back

Chapter Twenty-six

I sat on the couch holding the phone in my lap. Helping an adult deal with childhood trauma? Who could the book be for? Ronnie had Down syndrome, but he hadn’t suffered trauma. Not that I knew of. Those five words seemed to be the qualifier I needed to add to everything I said or thought about my mother since her death. Not that I knew of. Had Ronnie been abused or subjected to something awful that I didn’t know about? A kid with Down syndrome—or any disability—was ripe for being preyed on. My grip on the phone tightened just thinking about it.

Could it have been something else? Had Mom been abused or traumatized? Her generation didn’t talk about those things as much. Could she have just started to come to grips with it before she died?

The possibility of those things twisted inside me like a rusty knife. If someone hurt one of them… if someone had taken advantage of or abused a member of my family… I just couldn’t imagine. My chest felt compacted, as if someone had placed me in a vise and squeezed, pressing the organs together, crushing bone against flesh until I had no air.

I sat there with my head down, squeezing the phone between my hands, until the pressure in my chest eased. I took deep breaths that sounded close to sobs. They broke the stillness of the house like shattering glass.

What do I do with this knowledge? I asked myself.

I tried to tame my emotions. I tried to let the logical part of my brain have its say.

Just because she wanted the book didn’t mean it was about her. Or Ronnie. Maybe she was just curious. Maybe she had heard about it on TV. The logic didn’t help much. I knew Mom. She didn’t pursue knowledge just for the sake of knowledge. She pursued knowledge in order to apply it. She used what she learned.

I looked at the phone. Paul. Would he know? And if he did, why had he kept it a secret from me?

I dialed his number. Again I heard his voice mail greeting. I didn’t leave a message. The truth was, I just didn’t know what to do.

I went out to the kitchen. In a drawer next to the telephone, Mom kept stacks of mail. Mostly, it was stuff she hadn’t gone through yet. Credit card offers, coupons, magazines, occasionally a bill she hadn’t paid. Things cycled through that drawer pretty quickly thanks to Mom’s thoroughness, but if something had arrived in the house in the days before she died, there was a chance she hadn’t tended to it yet.

I grabbed a handful of the mail. I flipped through it, my eyes not really registering the things as I did so. I was still thinking about my conversation with Mrs. Porter and that book she mentioned. It was eating away at me, a slow scratching at the base of my skull. I was so distracted I almost missed the bank statement the first time I passed by it. Some part of my subconscious must have registered the name of the bank because after I’d paged through a few more letters, it clicked. I stopped, flipped back, and found the bank statement. I dropped the other mail without thinking.

I slid my finger under the flap, tearing the envelope as I moved along. Mom would have chastised me for not using a letter opener and making a neat, narrow slit in the envelope. But I was rushing, so much so that my hands shook. I pulled the statement out of the envelope and flipped the folded paper open.

I scanned the numbers quickly. Mom maintained a decent minimum balance—at least decent in the eyes of a poor graduate student—of about two thousand dollars at all times. Her checks and debit card payments didn’t look unusual. Small to moderate amounts that I imagined went for food, utilities, Ronnie’s speech therapy, and things like that. I flipped to the second page and then the third. Still nothing.

Then I saw the last page. Mom’s savings account. The balance surprised me—just over thirty thousand dollars. I hadn’t realized Mom had so much cash at her disposal. I assumed most of it came from Dad’s life insurance policy. I wasn’t sure how much the policy was worth when he died, but I assumed it was at least one hundred thousand or so. It only made sense. I thought, looking at the balance, that Mom must have kept a certain amount in a savings account in the event of emergencies, and I hoped the rest had been invested somewhere safe. I’d find out soon enough when I began digging through the rest of her things.

But before I folded the papers and returned them to the envelope, another number caught my eye: $14,550. That number appeared in an entry at the bottom of the page under “Yearly Debits to Date.” So far that year Mom had withdrawn over fourteen thousand dollars from her savings account.

What for?

I thought back over the previous year. Had Mom encountered any difficulties? Had the house needed a new roof? Had there been car repairs? Had there been a crisis with Ronnie—medical or otherwise—that required a large outlay of cash? I couldn’t think of anything.

My mother didn’t travel. She didn’t gamble. She didn’t even buy clothes for herself. What had she done with $14,550?

I looked through the drawer for anything else of note and found nothing. There were no other bank or credit card statements, just coupons and pens, rubber bands and paper clips. I shut the drawer.

I decided to look one more place before I left Mom’s house—Ronnie’s room.

Ronnie didn’t like anyone going into his room when he wasn’t there. On the day of Mom’s funeral and the night Mom died, he’d let me come in there because he was there already. He kept his room neat and orderly, with some but not much help from Mom. He lived in fear that someone—like his little sister—would come in and wreck things, which I’d done on more than one occasion when we were under the age of ten. Given the extreme circumstances of the moment, I had to believe he would forgive me if I entered his private space.

I didn’t expect to find much. Ronnie kept jigsaw puzzles and sketchbooks stacked neatly on a shelf by the room’s lone window. He shared that analytical, logical side of his personality with Mom and not really with me. I opened his closet. Everything hung neatly on hangers, and the shoes were lined up on the floor, two by two, like animals ready to enter Noah’s ark. I didn’t see any loose papers or cards. I closed the closet door.

I was ready to leave when I saw the photo next to Ronnie’s bed. Ronnie used a small nightstand, one made out of cheap particleboard. It had a drawer and two shelves, and on the top sat a lamp, an alarm clock, and an empty water glass. The framed photo rested on the bottom shelf, almost obscured by a box of tissues.

I went over and picked it up. My heart flipped when I realized it was a photo I had never seen before. In the shot, Ronnie and Mom stood behind two small children about three and five years old. Everyone smiled big and goofy, the kids hamming it up like performers. Everyone looked happy. More than happy. Ecstatic. And I had no idea who the kids were.

I guessed it was a recent photo. The four of them were standing outside near a lake, and the trees in the distance were thick and green—it must have been summer. Just a couple of months ago? Was it possibly the last photo ever taken of Mom?

I traced my finger across the glass in the frame, right over her face. I swallowed hard. Who were these goddamn kids? And who had taken the photo?

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”

I threw the photo—frame and all—into my purse and left the house.