She sips hot hazelnut coffee and smokes a cigarette. The house is packed up. Walter and two of his Mexican hands, both older and polite to a fault, saw to that. Lois draws deep and long on her cigarette. Her own hand and arm look like someone else’s, for she has lost so much weight over the winter and spring. And she’s tired all the time. Just getting out of bed and driving to the shop has become a chore she can no longer pull off. But Marianne will take good care of the place. And Lois didn’t even have to ask her not to change its name.
Susan’s visit last September, it had been only a few weeks since Lois had seen her, but Suzie looked healthier than she had since she was sixteen, her legs and hips fuller, her skin with more blood in it. Her hair had begun to grow out too, and she had the distracted, joyful look of someone deeply in love. She said her book was going well, but that wasn’t her best news, and when she told Lois, Lois wished at the time that Susan had kept quiet about it till she was further along, though thank God Lois hadn’t said that, not that she could speak anyway, the kitchen going all blurry as Suzie rose from her chair at the table and came around and hugged her and wouldn’t let go.
Whatever had lifted from Lois when she was exiled back here has stayed lifted, and she doesn’t like not having a gun in the house but she no longer feels so afraid. No, that’s not true. Her old fear of someone taking her Susan away is still there, but it has shifted to something else: what Lois fears even more is that by locking in on all that can go wrong, she will miss—in whatever time she has left—all that has gone right.
Before Susan drove back home, she went up to her old bedroom and came down with the two Dresden lamps Lois had given to her and Bobby, her pregnant forty-three-year-old granddaughter smiling as openly as when she was a kid, and Lois said: “Just tell me what he was like.”
It was not what Suzie had expected, but she took a half breath and she nodded and said, “Sick. He was very sick, Noni. And he didn’t stay long.”
Two nights before Christmas, too tired to travel to St. Pete, Lois poured herself a tall glass of red wine and smoked a cigarette to the filter. She took a deep, shaky breath, opened her computer, then typed his name onto the keyboard. A hundred Daniel Ahearns came up. She drank off a third of her glass then typed: Daniel Ahearn, Massachusetts. Death notice.
And there it was. In the Port City Daily Gazette. Just five or six lines:
Daniel P. Ahearn
Nov. 28, 1949–Nov. 30, 2013
Daniel P. Ahearn, age 64, of Salisbury. Born in Palisades Park, New Jersey, the son of the late Liam C. and Mary (Orlowsky) Ahearn. Served 15 years in the Massachusetts Department of Corrections for the second-degree murder of his wife, Linda Dubie, 24. He is survived by his daughter, Susan Dunn, of St. Petersburg, Florida. He was buried in Long Hill Cemetery, Salisbury.
Yes, Lois thought, survived. That’s all any of us have done.
Lois stared at that notice for a very long time. He’d just turned sixty-four. Exactly forty more years of life than her Linda got to have. Lois could feel that old rage turn inside her, and she shut off her computer and moved to the kitchen to do nothing in particular. She had thought that when this moment came, she’d feel some kind of—what? Satisfaction? But she just stood there staring at an old cigarette burn on the edge of her kitchen table and all she felt was empty, as empty as the coffee can Gerry had hurled into the sea after pouring out what had lain inside.
Paul and Paul Jr. should be here soon with the truck. The addition Susan and Bobby had built for her is larger than she needs, and Lois feels badly about it taking up most of their backyard. A child needs a place to play. A child needs a safe place to roam.
But the pictures Susan sent her on the Internet are nice indeed. Lois will have her own kitchenette and a sitting area, her bedroom behind a half wall made of glass bricks that were so common when she was growing up. The floors are glossy new oak, and her bathroom has big blue tiles on the floor, and she has a walk-in shower with stainless steel rails for her old liver-spotted hands. There’s a pedestal sink, too, built up against a white marble backsplash that matches her countertop in the kitchen. It’s the kind with gray veins in it, again like what was popular so long ago.
Many times in the last few months, Lois has emailed Suzie that she’s spending too much money on her, that she needs to save it for her little one. But Suzie always writes back the same thing: “Bobby inherited some money, Noni. Stop.”
And over Lois’s bed is a skylight. She has never lived in a house with one of those, and she’s looking forward to lying on her mattress in the dark and looking up into deep space. She will miss her old things in her shop, but what’s older than what she’ll see up there? And besides, this is the time for the new, for Susan’s baby daughter born just three days ago at just over seven pounds.
Again, Susan sent her pictures over the Internet, and there’s one Lois keeps staring at. It’s of her great-granddaughter’s tiny pink face up against the brown nipple of her granddaughter, the infant’s eyes closed tight. Lois has never seen Susan’s breasts, at least not since she was ten or eleven years old, and seeing them now opened a door inside her that led to another, Linda’s bedroom door open, Paul gone somewhere, and Lois had walked in. It was early morning in late summer, and her daughter was standing near the curtained window holding the bra she was about to put on. Her face and shoulders, her arms and flat belly and legs were deep brown, but her breasts were white. They were so lovely and so white, and she wasn’t mad at Lois for walking in like that. Instead, she turned and smiled at her as if they’d just had a good long talk and now it was through, and she put on her bra then slipped her Penny Arcade T-shirt over her head. She brushed her dark hair back with both hands, then she grabbed her coin apron hanging on the doorknob and she said goodbye to her mother, and she kissed her, she kissed Lois on the cheek, and then she was gone.
Lois stubs out her cigarette and slowly stands. The river hisses through the trees. There are the smells of damp pine needles and the clay banks of Bone River. She got a good price for this place, and she set aside quite a bit of it for Linda’s granddaughter, for Suzie’s little Woo Woo, Corina Linda Dunn.
For there is so much she needs to pass on to this child, that our lives are brief, even long ones like hers, and the one thing we should do is take care of each other. That’s all. But honey, it’s so hard. Why, child, is it so hard?
A voice through the trees. A canoe slipping quickly down the river. Lois can make out three people in orange life vests. There’s a woman in the front, her hair tied back, and it looks like her paddle lies across her knees and her husband in the rear is using his as a keel. He wears a cap and sunglasses, and low in the center of the boat is the child, a boy or girl, Lois doesn’t know, though she can hear the child’s high, earnest voice, “I think I see one, Mom. Dad, stop. We’re here. See? We’re here.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my friends and family who read early drafts of this book and gave me invaluable insights into it: Stephen Haley; my mother, Patricia Lowe Dubus; my sister, Suzanne Dubus; my oldest son, Austin; and especially my wife, Fontaine, my first reader for all these years, who read and commented on every incarnation of this novel and made it better by doing so. As always, I am deeply grateful for my friend and agent, Philip Spitzer, as well as Lukas Ortiz and Kim Lombardini. And lastly, no one worked harder on helping me bring this story to fruition than my longtime editor, Alane Salierno Mason. I feel most fortunate to have her in my corner.
ALSO BY ANDRE DUBUS III
Dirty Love
Townie: A Memoir
The Garden of Last Days
House of Sand and Fog
Bluesman
The Cage Keeper and Other Stories
Copyright © 2018 by Andre Dubus III
All rights reserved
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Gone So Long Page 46