No Coming Back Read Online Free PDF

first time I have held Jenna in half a lifetime.
    Jenna!
    She looks younger than I remember. A fragile blossom of youth, soon to be crushed underfoot. The image I have of her—the image branded onto my mind’s eye—is all woman, mentally aged over time to keep up with my own passing years. But I am thirty-fiv e now, a grown man, and I realize with a start that this is the picture of a girl. It never felt that way at the time. To us we were mature, fully grown. But the reality is, Jenna has remained forever seventeen, and always will.
    The clawing unease is back in my gut.
    “Belle of the ball,” Ned says with the glimmer of a proud smile. “You caught her at her best there, Jake. It’s one of my favorites.”
    I nod, gripping the frame as the photo comes to life in my memory:
    “Tell me you got it?” Jenna calls on the day it was taken, as if it’s happening right here and now. She shakes the pompoms fiercely, while her fellow cheerleaders sing out the Bobcat’s praises.
    “You’re spoiling the routine,” I call back.
    “No way! I promised my dad a really cool picture of me cheerleading. So did you get it?”
    I shrug and glance at the camera, as though by doing so I can see if the positive light from Jenna’s beaming smile has worked its magic on the negative inside, like it does with me. “I guess I think so. Want me to take another, just in case?”
    “That’s why I bought the film, dum-dum! Take the whole lot!”
    And so I do. I snap away, the bristling boyfriend, while Jenna skips and bounces, performing neat choreographed kicks and jumps, flashing her dazzling smiles and exuding infectious energy.
    If anyone wonders what a snapshot of heaven looks like, here it is. A perfect moment in time, captured and preserved.
    It rips me up on the inside.
    Now it’s my turn to feel a consoling hand on my arm.
    The Luckmans have strategically positioned other photographs of their daughter around the room, so that she is always in the frame. They all show her at the same age—the age she was lost. Most of them taken by me on that glorious spring day. The last photos of her ever taken. There are none of Gavin, her older brother. It’s as though he has been relegated to other parts of the house or forgotten entirely. Only dead Jenna dominates the living room.
    Science teaches us that matter cannot be destroyed, only altered into something else. I kidded myself for years, thinking she’d come back to me from the grave, as a resurrected spirit, but she never did.
    I swallow over a thick throat. “Ned, you do know, if I could go back and undo what was done, I would.”
    He smiles. It’s the smile of a man who has been to hell and back. “Life’s all about lessons, Jake. What good would it be if we never made mistakes?” He takes the photo from my lap and positions it back on the side table. “Speaking of which, I heard about your old man, and I’m sorry. You got my sympathies there. It’s not going to be easy for you dealing with everything that’s to come.” He notices me pull back slightly from the comment. “You want to talk about it, Jake?”
    “Maybe some other time.” I get to my feet, suddenly itching to get out into the cold. “I really ought to be going. It’s been a long night on the back of a long day. Rightly or wrongly, I just thought you should be the first to hear the news. I’ll check in with you again tomorrow, see Nancy while I’m at it, if that’s okay?”
    “Sure.” He accompanies me to the front door, feet shuffling on the boards. “One more thing,” he says as I step outside. “He’s still out there: her killer. Walked free all these years. You’re here now. You can do something. Make amends. She deserved a life. We all did. So what are you going to do about it, Jake?”

Chapter Three
    O ne day, when I was seven, my mother walked out the front door and never came back. At the time, I was too young to understand the complex nature of adult relationships, but I was old