Susan stared at that last line. Was that true? Yes, at everything and everyone. And it had begun as she stood on the bank of Bone River only minutes after Noni had finally told her the truth.
All summer Lois had been acting strange anyway. They’d both be watching TV and Susan would glance over and catch Noni staring at her, her expression hard and mournful.
“What?”
“Nothing, honey.”
Then that smile of hers Susan had never trusted because sometimes she’d feel loved by it, but other times it would precede Lois saying something cruel, like the shorts Susan was wearing made her look like a slut. Or she should wear a bra. “Nipples are advertisements, you know.” Over the years, Noni smoked more and ate less. For all of Susan’s life she’d been a big woman—fleshy arms and hips and legs, her breasts generous pillows Susan would lay her head on when she was very young. That August, Lois was still a big woman but her skin seemed loose and there was less of her somehow and in this diminishment lay waiting something she did not want to do but had to.
Then, just days before Susan was supposed to take the bus back to Gainesville, a boy and four girls were murdered off campus and the killer hadn’t been caught. Noni did not want Susan to go back.
“I’m going back to school, Noni.”
“No you’re not.”
They were sitting at the table out on the back screened porch. Lois had baked manicotti and garlic bread, and Susan had tossed the salad, both of them sipping the Diet Cokes they both drank too much of.
“I’m twenty years old. You can’t really stop me, you know.”
“Christ, do you even know how many times you’ve said that to me?” Noni had taken only two bites of manicotti, and now she pushed herself away from the table and lit up a cigarette. She’d just had her hair done in a perm and colored darker, the brown ringlets around her cheeks making her face look rounder than it was. She was in her sixties but looked younger. A day or two before, Susan had told her she didn’t have to worry about her going back to Gainesville, that lightning had a better chance of hitting her. She did not know if this was true or not, but living with Noni had become suffocating and so she would just take her chances.
“I bought a gun yesterday, Suzie.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s a pistol. I’m gonna learn how to shoot it, too.” Her grandmother blew smoke out the side of her mouth. She said, “You’re old enough to hear this.”
And then what Susan had dreamed and daydreamed since she was a girl fell away—no more late night and the Ahearn car going over the railing of a bridge, her mother and father knocked into one another as they hit the river, cold water rushing in and pulling their car down deep, the air leaving them, their next breaths water, and Susan had prayed again and again that they did not suffer that part too badly, that soon they were both rising up out of that black river into the air, that they’d drifted over their house on the beach for a long time as she, three years old, slept in her bed, Noni reading a magazine in the living room one door away, that from time to time they still drifted over her. Inside Susan somewhere was the memory of her mother’s long brown hair, her smile and her laughter. There was a Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy and riding high above all the people.
“He’s alive?”
Lois nodded. Her eyes were so dark and still and scrutinizing. It was the way someone must look when they have to put down a beloved dog, watching and waiting for the poison to reach the heart and do what it’s going to do. Susan’s stomach seemed to lift and flip inside her. She stood and walked out their back door, letting it slam shut behind her as she ran down to the river. Spanish moss hung from the oak trees and just missed her face.
Anger wasn’t the right word. Rage, maybe. Though that wasn’t quite it, either. Susan remembered seeing across the river an exposed root in the clay bank. It was curved and deep brown, its beginning and end in the earth where she couldn’t see it. It was grotesque to her, a malevolent glimpse of the lie she’d been eating since she was a little girl and she was screaming at it, shrieking at it, and she snatched up pieces of shale from the ground and threw them at it. Everything she saw she detested: the brown river and its sandy banks, the oak trees and their creepy fucking Spanish moss, her and Lois’s house through the trees on the county road, the screened porch where her grandmother stood in shadow watching her.
Susan hated every passenger on the bus back to Gainesville. She hated the floodplains and cattle and the small shit towns and rusted pickups and box houses with TV antennas on the roofs. She hated the fishing boats on trailers and the billboards of cheerful smiling mothers selling cleaning products or serious men selling Jesus or fat happy men selling cars or insurance or guns. She hated seeing Andrea again because Andrea was still rich and oblivious and all she wanted to do was talk about the “Gainesville Ripper.” Susan hated that that was all anyone wanted to talk about. Hadn’t they read anything? Didn’t they know that this fucking planet of ours was saturated with blood? Didn’t they know she had her own problems? She even hated that she felt this way, and when someone painted the names of all five victims on the Thirty-fourth Street Wall, she hated that she didn’t rest a flower or note or votive candle on the shrine pile beneath their names. But she hated even more every young man to glance over at her and smile, and for the first time since she was sixteen, she stayed away from them all. Even when Andrea would drag her to a party and Susan would drink too much. Even then. And she hated whatever music was blasting—the Black Crowes, Alice in Chains, Jane’s Addiction. She hated the pretty girls and the homely girls who wanted to be the pretty girls, and she hated that Chad from New Jersey tried to talk her into a back bedroom “for old times’ sake.” She hated that Andrea noticed all this and told Susan over coffee one Sunday afternoon, “You should get counseling. These murders have fucked you up.”
No, Susan wanted to tell her, What fucks me up is something I’ll never tell you.
But why not? Andrea was her friend. Andrea had driven her to that bright fluorescent room. Andrea had walked her back to the dorm room after, too. She pulled her sheets back and told her to lie down, and she brought her water and Tylenol, and later made her brownies. Eating them together in the late afternoon light, Andrea told her she’d gone through that twice herself. That she shouldn’t think too much about it. “Fucking guys don’t.” Then, drunk one night, Andrea cried with her face in Susan’s lap, her nose pressed into Susan’s belly: “My dad’s fucking some whore my age.”
Susan had comforted her as best she could. She stroked Andrea’s hair, and smoothed it past her damp cheek. She could hear the pain in her friend’s voice, and it wasn’t just one kind of pain, either: there was confusion and disgust, shock and grief; there was even a flash of jealousy, but above and beneath all these there was shame.
Andrea was just so ashamed.
And it was as if Susan’s roommate had tapped a tuning fork against steel, its low vibration moving past the Susan everyone thought they knew into the real Susan, the one who now detested the very blood moving through her, for it was half her father’s, half her mother’s, one a killer, the other his victim, and so Susan herself was really nothing more than the living reminder of an unforgivable crime.
No, I was too shamed to be scared.
Everywhere I went on or off campus I felt naked and ugly, a thousand mirrors and cameras pointing at me. Then they caught the Gainesville Ripper and his name was Danny, too, and I couldn’t read enough about him.
This felt like a sickness. Like one weekend her junior year when she’d slept with three boys separately and only hours apart. Part of her wanted to and part of her didn’t, and she gave in to the part that did.
Danny Rolling had grown up abused. His father was a cop who beat Danny at age one when he didn’t like how Danny crawled. By the time Danny was five his father had tied him up or handcuffed him over a dozen times. Danny’s father tortured the family dog, and it died in six-year-old Danny’s arms. When Danny was
ten, his father tried to teach him how to drive and called him names and slapped him for not knowing how to handle the clutch. All this time his father had been beating up Danny’s mother, too. One night when Danny was eleven, he tried to protect her, stepping between her and his father, and his father beat him almost unconscious. His mother locked herself in the bathroom and slit her wrists but didn’t die. Before he turned thirteen, Danny started stealing liquor and getting drunk in the woods near his house. He taught himself how to play the guitar and he’d sing his prayers, but he also started daydreaming about hurting people and he couldn’t stop. It was turning him on.
Susan read over what she’d just written. She sipped her coffee. Of course her obsession with Rolling was clear to see. She needed to believe that his evil was caused by others. She needed to believe that the other Danny, her father, had somehow been a victim, too.
That late August afternoon when she took the bus back to Gainesville and her senior year, she and her grandmother had not parted well. Ever since Noni had told her, there’d been a coolness between them, and Susan knew it wasn’t Lois’s fault; she probably shouldn’t have told her any sooner than she did, but it had felt good and right for Susan to pack her clothes and buy the bus ticket back to Gainesville, back to a city of murdered young women.
“Why’d you fucking tell me this?”
“Because he might try to find you, honey.”
Which was why Noni bought that little silver gun. Lois never showed it to Susan, but while looking for her other duffel bag, Susan had found the pistol in Lois’s closet. Under Noni’s shoe rack lay a gray plastic case and Susan opened it, this shiny revolver sunk in blue velvet. It made her think of coffins. She closed it and snapped it shut and pushed it back under the shoes.
Back in Gainesville those first months, Susan walked through her life as a new girl, for she had a different history now, one that changed a view of herself she hadn’t known she’d been living: she’d been the orphan raised by her sometimes cruel grandmother, her story as tragic as a fairy tale, which left her feeling—though she’d only felt this faintly before—that she’d been wronged by fate and now the dark spirits that ruled over these things owed her something good.
For too long that goodness lay in books and in the boy who would love her the way she was meant to be loved, whatever that meant, for she still did not know, and now, sitting in front of her laptop, she was back at her commencement under the sun, the bleachers full of men in ties and ironed short-sleeves, women in light dresses, kids in Gator T-shirts, and so many people holding bouquets of roses and baby’s breath. Noni sat under a small umbrella Paul held over her. It was sweet of her uncle/brother to come, for that’s how Susan had always felt about him, that he was both. He’d gained a lot of weight and still kept his hair short, though the Air Force had released him early, and now he worked as an air freight operator at Miami International Airport. His wife Terry sat beside him, a diminutive smoker who handled their six-year old son, Paul Jr., as if he were air freight.
Susan Lori Dubie.
Under her robe she’d worn a cotton top and skirt, but everything had stuck to her skin. Her mouth and throat were dry, the mortarboard heavy on her head as she climbed those five steps of the temporary stage. Paul’s voice carried over the crowd, “Yo, Susan!” and she was shaking the dean’s hand, the university photographer kneeling just feet away, and was she really squinting out into the crowd under the sun in the bleachers looking for him? Was she really hoping to see a man standing or sitting alone staring only at her?
Susan read her last sentence: It was turning him on.
She and Gustavo. They were sitting in the front seat of his El Camino. It was late on a school night, Noni’s ten p.m. curfew long behind them, and Gustavo had parked his car deep in the oaks of the Bone River Campground. They’d been kissing, and rubbing hard against one another, and she let him unbutton her blouse and unhook her bra. He had his radio on low, a rock station from Tampa playing hits Susan felt far away from because the kids in her school liked them. In the dim light of the radio panel, she could see Gustavo’s face as he stared at what she’d just offered him. It was something she had never done for anyone before and she felt exposed but not vulnerable, not the way she’d thought she might. Instead, seeing the hunger and gratitude in his parted lips, it was as if she’d just opened a bureau drawer in her own room and there was a loaded pistol she could take out and wield whenever she felt like it.
Then he’d touched and kissed them both. He began sucking on one nipple, a tingling heat shooting into her crotch his hand was now rubbing over her jeans, and she pushed him away. She buttoned her blouse and told him she wanted a cigarette. He sat quietly a moment. Then he turned off the radio and pulled his Bic lighter from his front shirt pocket and lit a filtered Camel and they shared it.
“You are different.” He took a short hit off the cigarette and passed it to her. He let the smoke out his nostrils so fast it was as if he didn’t smoke and was just pretending to. She took it from him and inhaled deeply because she did smoke, had ever since last year when she’d read a novel set in sun-blinding Morocco, its men and women smoking beside unused swimming pools and in dark lounges sipping chartreuse.
“What do you mean?”
He nodded. With the radio and its light off, he was just a shadow in deeper shadows and she could feel the wetness between her legs caused by him.
“How many years have you?”
“I told you, seventeen.” She had only added one year, so it didn’t feel like a lie. His hand reached for hers and held it. She could feel his calluses, the skin of his palm and fingers like old rubber.
“When I had your ages I made tunnels for La Alianza de Sangre.”
“Drugs?”
“We made tunnels under the streets from one casa to another.”
He went on to tell her about trying to avoid doing anything else for them, but then he was given a gun and a heavy pack he was to carry through one of the very tunnels he’d helped to build. He crawled halfway through then left the gun and the pack in the dirt and crawled out and ran back to his family’s two-room home not far from the Humaya River. Later in the night, he walked to a telephone and called his uncle who had work in Florida in a village with a name that sounded to Gustavo like a bonita girl. Now he was safe and earning honest money and he’d met a girl named Susandubie. That’s how he’d always pronounced her name, like it was one word: Susandubie.
“Each week I send home my money.”
“Your family?”
He’d stared at her. “Si, for my madre and sister.”
“That’s nice of you.”
He shrugged. “I am a man, Susandubie.”
Susan opened the file to her Culiacán novel. She ran the cursor to where she last left off. On Pedro Infante Blvd. a low rider rumbles by, and she can hear American rap music and a young man shouting over it as they drive for the Humaya River. She hopes Adelmo isn’t with them. She hopes she’s wrong about him, and the bloody shirt she found at the foot of his bed is from anything other than what she fears it is. Through the wall comes her father’s labored breathing, his puta’s cries, and Corina rises from her bed and wraps herself in her robe and climbs through her window to the iron stairs leading to the flat roof.
Susan tapped her fingers on the corner of her laptop. This had been so hard to write. Not just because she felt she was pretending to be this Mexican girl Corina, but it was something else too. She’d write a sentence then cut it, write another then delete that one too. She’d thought that maybe her problem was not knowing enough about Mexico. What did she know about it except for what Gustavo had told her? That’s when she began to open links about “narcotrafficking,” how five or six years ago the Sinaloa Cartel broke up into warring factions, roaming clans of young men and women who often filmed and posted online what they had done to their fellow human beings. One video showed the execution of five women who were simply the sisters, wives, or mothers to men of a rival gang.
The women were forced to kneel on the ground, their hands tied behind their backs. Most of them were heavy and middle-aged and wore oversized T-shirts or cheaply made blouses that had been ripped open, their bras torn off. Behind them, leaning against a dusty pickup truck, were three young men in black paramilitary pants and boots, one shirtless, the other two in faded T-shirts. Each held a rifle or a handgun or both, their eyes on a fourth man walking behind the women, speaking in fast loud Spanish, clearly performing for the camera. He was older, short and squat, and he wore an American baseball cap and held a long knife in his right hand. Every few seconds he’d lean down and lower his voice and whisper something into one of the women’s ears. Then he’d straighten up and slap the back of her head and keep pacing with that knife, and Susan could feel her insides begin to twist inside her, her finger trembling over the laptop button that would stop this video, but she didn’t stop it and then it was too late and she couldn’t stab that button fast enough. She’d seen what she’d seen, and its stark and utter darkness carried her back to the Gainesville murders and her Year of Two Dannys. That was the time and place that began to insist on itself. But she did not want to write about that, or maybe she just wasn’t ready to, so she stared and stared and what came was watching her father’s parole officer’s office, and waiting.
Susan sipped her cool coffee. Through the oak branches the sky had no color at all. She closed the file and her laptop, Bobby’s unopened emails still inside it. With him, something happened she hadn’t seen coming. Because she was welcome to follow herself there also came the pull back to what she’d been trying to do for years. No warm body in bed beside her. No loving or grasping gaze on her. Her enemy, for now anyway, at bay.
But now her room felt too small. Too quiet and still. She needed to run.
Then she was walking down her old driveway in her sleeveless top, shorts, and running shoes. It was hot and she could smell pine and eucalyptus, the sun almost directly over her head, a stupid time to run. But here she was doing it anyway, stepping onto the asphalt of the county road and running south.
Gone So Long Page 16