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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

There’s this ride at Disneyland. It’s called Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and it’s supposedly for little kids. Here’s how it goes: You get in this car with a cute little frog, and everything seems like it’s going to be loads of fun. But the problem is—and this is a huge problem—frogs can’t drive. They can’t even reach the pedals. So, you and the frog end up on this horrible trip where you’re nearly crashing into trees and making fire hydrants explode and getting chased by cops . . . until finally you get into a deadly car accident and you both wind up in hell.

Does that sound like a little kids’ ride to you? (I’m not kidding about the hell part either. The very last part of Mr. Toad is orange and red flames and little red demons dancing around and everything.)

Anyway, one of my earliest memories is going on that ride with my mom. My real dad had left years earlier, when I was just a baby. Papa Pete wasn’t in the picture yet, so it was just her and me back then. I was maybe three or four and when the car started swinging around, I got so scared I started to cry. By the time we got to hell, I was sobbing. But Mom put her arms around me and hugged me tight and said, “It’s only a ride. It’s not real. Nothing like this could ever happen.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

I stopped crying because if there was one thing I knew about Mom, it was that she always kept her promises to me. So many people had let her down in her life, and she didn’t want me to grow up sad like her. She wanted me to feel as though the world was a good place where people kept their word and anything was possible. I believed her. I trusted her with every little cell in my body. I loved her with all that I had.

But then she got into a car accident and died.

Sometimes I still have nightmares about Mr. Toad, only it’s just Mom in the car, and it’s not some little kids’ ride at Disneyland—it’s really happening. And then I wake up, and I realize that it really did happen.

I hate to say this, but I am sure that Mom is in hell right now. She was sent there for lying to me. For making me believe that the world is something it isn’t.

Gabriel says he doesn’t believe in hell. He doesn’t believe in heaven either. But I believe in both, and I also believe what Papa Pete used to say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.