Never Turn Back by Christopher Swann

Author:Christopher Swann
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

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I DRIVE SUSANNAH to Northside Hospital, the closest ER. It’s known as the Baby Factory because most suburban moms in Buckhead and Dunwoody and Sandy Springs deliver their babies at Northside. Both my sister and I were born there. Taking her to Northside makes a strange kind of sense—she was born there and she will avoid dying there.

Susannah sits in the front seat and stares out the passenger window. I don’t know what to say and don’t want to just babble at her, so I say nothing. Instead I scan the radio incessantly, jumping from Fleetwood Mac to Usher to Selena Gomez to Zeppelin, until finally I just turn the radio off and we drive in relative silence.

I pull into Northside’s ER parking lot and head for the gate by the ticket booth, and Susannah stirs, seeming to realize where she is. “Just pull over,” she says.

“I am,” I say. “Just need to get a ticket and find somewhere to park.”

“No, just pull over.”

“Susannah, I have to—”

“Goddamn it, Ethan, just pull over,” she says, sounding angry and resigned at the same time.

I turn hard right, out of the lane leading into the parking lot, and stop behind a black Lexus in a handicapped spot, just across from the ER entrance. “Okay,” I say, turning to Susannah, “what?”

My phone, mounted on the dash, rings. The screen says Coleman Carter. I must have hung up on him when I ran out the door to save Susannah. I’ll call him back. “Sorry,” I say to Susannah. “What is it?”

“I need to go in,” Susannah says.

“Well, yeah,” I say. “That’s why I was looking—”

“I need to go in alone,” she interrupts. “Without you.”

“What?”

My phone rings again. Coleman. I reject the call.

“I need to do this alone, Ethan,” she says.

“Uh-uh,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m going in there with you.”

“Why?” she says.

“Why? Because I’m your brother. Because I want to help.”

“I know,” she says. “And that’s why I have to go in by myself.”

“I don’t—”

She raises her voice. “I have to do this on my own. My whole life you’ve had to pick up after me, clean up my shit. I just … I need to do this.”

My phone rings a third time. Damn it. I stab at the answer icon, then put the phone on speaker. “I’m really busy here, Coleman.”

“Ethan,” Coleman says, and the tone in his voice is like a cold wind on my neck. “I got Sarah Solomon’s father on the phone. Her mother found her locked in the bathroom, lying on the floor next to the toilet. She took a bunch of pills.”

I stare at the phone, struck dumb by the horror of what he said. “Oh Jesus,” I say.

“She’d thrown them up, thank God,” Coleman continues. “They don’t know exactly what all she took; probably some expired pain meds. They’re on the way to the hospital.” He pauses. “Sarah had her phone with her when her mom found her. I told her parents it wasn’t you on Twitter.

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