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Back Never Look Back Save as PDF
Chapters (51)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-One
  24. Twenty-Two
  25. Twenty-Three
  26. Twenty-Four
  27. Twenty-Five
  28. Twenty-Six
  29. Twenty-Seven
  30. Twenty-Eight
  31. Twenty-Nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-One
  34. Thirty-Two
  35. Thirty-Three
  36. Thirty-Four
  37. Thirty-Five
  38. Thirty-Six
  39. Thirty-Seven
  40. Thirty-Eight
  41. Thirty-Nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-One
  44. Forty-Two
  45. Forty-Three
  46. Acknowledgments
  47. P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
  48. About the Author
  49. About the Book
  50. Also by Alison Gaylin
  51. About the Publisher

After it was done, Gabriel wanted me to help him take Ed Hart into the backyard. He’d found a shovel in his garage, and his idea was to bury him there. When I said I couldn’t do that, Gabriel had the idea of pouring gasoline on him and burning him. But then he worried about the fire spreading and hurting innocent people, and so he came up with putting Ed into his own car. We would wrap Ed in one of his own sheets and put him in the trunk of his car. And then we would drive it to a wrecking yard and make sure the car got crushed, with Ed Hart in it. Gabriel had seen that in a movie once, he said. It would be easy.

Gabriel said, “Don’t you see? He’ll be gone. No one will find him. We won’t have to think of him ever again.”

I thought it was a terrible idea. I doubted we would be able to carry Ed together. And even if we could, we didn’t know the area. How were we supposed to find a wrecking yard? Look it up in the Yellow Pages? Ask the neighbors? I wanted to say all that, but I was crying so hard I couldn’t talk.

I couldn’t even stand. I was on the floor of Ed Hart’s house, curled up into a ball with the stiff shag rug pressing into the side of my face, that copper and smoke smell all around me again, seeping into my skin just the way it had with Papa Pete. Gabriel was standing over me, pleading with me to stand up, all the while talking about throwing Ed into the back of a car like he’d seen in some stupid Charles Bronson movie and I wanted to shut the door on all of it, on him, on this nightmare I seemed to have found my way into.

Finally, I was able to get one word out. I pointed to Ed on the floor, tied up with pairs of his own socks, and I said it. “Why?”

Gabriel’s face changed into something I’d never seen before. It was as though he was a jar and sadness was water, and someone kept filling and filling him until it spilled over the edges. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I can’t say the words.”

It turns out Ed Hart wasn’t a second father to Gabriel. He wasn’t a mentor or a teacher or even a human being to him. Ed did things to Gabriel when he was little that he still can’t talk about for the shame of those things, not even to me. “Especially to you, April,” was exactly what he said.