Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  That’s when Susan was twenty-five or twenty-six, her beauty truly striking, something dark and bright at the same time. It had begun when she was in high school, and that’s when all the trouble started.

  But they’d had good times before this. When Lois had just sold the arcade, they drove to Florida for Susan’s eighth-grade spring vacation. Suzie was twelve and hadn’t blossomed yet, which made her a bear to live with. Bad skin. No breasts. Her face still round with baby fat. She still only called Lois Noni, and though Lois did not know this then, they were ending a time when they were close in a way that never quite happened again.

  But that was such a happy trip. Susan kept talking about how new their car smelled, how she hoped they’d see some alligators. Lois had been without a man for years, Gerry dead for all she knew, and she often asked her granddaughter to read to her, which she did, though Lois had no memory of any of the stories. But she could still see her granddaughter’s profile on that long trip south as she read from a thick paperback novel with her knees braced against the glove box, her brown hair pulled behind her ears. Her nose was small and she had the same splash of acne on her cheeks Linda had had and she was going to look so much like her mother that it made Lois want to pull her in tighter than ever, and it made her want to push her away.

  They had spent a week at Disney, and it had made Lois feel that her entire life had been small and trashy, her old arcade and the strip back home an insult to what amusement parks should really be. For this place was endless and clean with sky trams and guided boat tours and life-sized mechanical dogs barking at life-sized jumping fish; there were deep swamps and real tropical forests in an Adventureland of gators and snakes that looked more real than real; every kiddie ride was polished and gleaming and upbeat music was pumped in you so you could hear no gears creaking and Dumbo the Elephant would carry children safely away then back again and a polite young woman dressed in a plaid skirt and vest guided Lois and Suzie and a dozen others all over the kingdom and its neighborhoods—yes, neighborhoods: worlds gone by with their cobbled streets and shops with scrolled columns at their doors that looked like they came from old England; or the future where every low white building of glass seemed to come from some astro station on the moon; or the boutiques where Lois bought her and her granddaughter floppy sun hats they wore to the Fantasy Faire where professional actors, dancers, and singers performed under a grand tent, their costumes the colors of cake and ice cream and summer balloons, all the families watching like they were being pulled into someone else’s dream and it was better than any they could have on their own, that magic castle rising above them all as if God Himself must live there. Throughout that hot, lovely week, Suzie beside her in a halter top and shorts and flip-flops, her eyes taking it all in, every bit of it, Lois felt over and over again, Yes, this is it. This is it.

  But she wasn’t thinking only of places where people paid good money to be amused. It was something else, and she did not know what it was until she and Susan were back in their new Reliant driving west on I-70 through country that surprised Lois. Only thirty miles inland and they were in cattle country, no telephone poles or gas stations or houses anywhere. Instead, on both sides of the two-lane highway lay pastures of St. Augustine grass, black and brown cows grazing under the sun or dozing in the shade of oak and hickory trees. There were prairies of palmetto scrub and flatwoods of yellow pine, beneath them soft-looking beds of goldenrod and thistle. As they got deeper inland, the pastures became a floodplain, its shallow sloughs draining into Bone River, whose banks were thick with ferns.

  “Noni, look.”

  Off to the south, a red-tailed hawk glided in a slow downward spiral before flapping its long wings and drifting east. Then they were in Arcadia, driving slowly down Oak Street past its brick and block buildings built in the early 1900s. Most of them had ornate spires mortared into their walls and rising high above flat roofs. There was an opera house and a saloon, and all the sidewalks were in the shade of porticoes, iron posts holding them up so you could stroll out of the sun and peer into the front windows of the antique shops and coffee and tea houses and rare book stores or bars, though there were not too many of those. It was as if she and Suzie had gone back to a time before either of them had come to earth, a simpler time, a safer time.

  How long had Lois been afraid? A dark presence at her back that never let up, a lack of oxygen in the air, getting up twice in the middle of the night to check on Paul and Suzie in their room? And then, when Paul enlisted in the Air Force and it was just Lois and her granddaughter, it got worse. Lois paid a locksmith to install two more dead bolts on both doors of their arcade apartment. She paid him to put extra latches on the windows, too, and then she hired a carpenter to install iron mesh over the windows on the outside. She promised herself she’d hang flower boxes under them so she could grow ivy to snake up around the metal so it would look less like what it did—but she never got around to it.

  One fall afternoon, pulling into their spot behind the arcade from the school bus stop half a mile down Beach Road, Susan said, “Noni, our house looks like a jail.”

  “It looks safe to me, honey. Now help me with these grocery bags.”

  But Lois never quite felt safe there. Growing up outside Boston in that waterfront town with her Italian aunts and uncles, three brothers, and eleven cousins, her mother and father seemingly in love all the way to the day her mother found her husband dead on the bathroom floor, Lois believed the world to be a good and loving place. Yes, you had to shout to be heard, and somewhere along the way she became the loudest of them all. Not just her voice, but her hair, her breasts that by seventeen were larger than anyone’s she knew, her hips and rump. That’s the word Gerry had used. Gerry Dubie, a pipe fitter who worked with her brother, Gio. Gerry, who she first saw rising up out of her brother’s Chevy in the sunlight, all pompadour and slits-for-eyes and French good looks. Gerry, who wanted to go into business for himself one day. Gerry, who made Lois feel not just loud and loved but prized. Gerry, who gave her Linda and Paul and a life on the ocean.

  But Gerry prized other things too, didn’t he? He prized the High Hat, and fine suits like Will Price and the other owners wore. He prized convertible Cadillacs and wristwatches with gold bands. And so he started skimming from the slot machines that Lois did not even know were owned by bad men from Rhode Island. There was that morning when it burned her to pee, and the doctor told her it was no bladder infection and he stared down at her through thick glasses with his lips pursed in judgment of her, this married whore. There was throwing a toaster at Gerry’s head. There was throwing him out and letting him come home again. Then there was Linda and that ugly boy from the Himalaya and all that happened that never ever should have. But that was a bad road to travel. That’s where Lois had begun to lose her very self. No one could go back and change anything—not what you said and wished you had not, not what you did or did not do, not what someone else did that you would have stopped if only you’d known. There was no knowing.

  All those beach bums and barflies starting to sniff the air around Linda only one hour, it seemed, after she’d bloomed at fourteen. But by the time Lois noticed this, it was too late. She’d been too busy worrying about Gerry and running the arcade, little Paul needing her attention, food needing to be bought and cooked, their small, cluttered apartment needing constant care to keep it livable, and—just like that—Linda had slipped away. She’d loved the beach so much and that loud trashy strip, and then Lois was holding her baby’s baby in her arms.

  Even now, over forty years later, Lois can still see the father as she saw him for the first time. It was one of those gray days when the air was so heavy it was like breathing through a wet sheet. It was August, and the strip was still crowded with families trying to buy some fun wherever they could, and Lois had left Linda in charge of Paul and the arcade while she drove to the IGA for groceries. When she got home and unloaded them, her hair had fallen and her blouse was sticking to her breasts and s
he needed to change out of it and sprinkle baby powder on her skin. She needed to spray her hair and find something clean and dry to put on. But Paul wasn’t sitting in front of the TV where she’d left him, so she opened the door to the arcade and there, amid all the blinking lights and whirring pinballs and clinking slot machines, was her son at the controls of his favorite game shooting men dead, and there was his older sister being held by a grown man.

  He was so much larger than she was. He wore a red suit jacket the Himalaya workers wore, and he had both his arms around Linda’s narrow back, the strings of her coin apron low across her rear, and it was the way she let him hold her that did something to Lois, like this man was in charge now, like her daughter would do whatever he told her to. Then he glanced up at Lois, and she could see how young he was, barely twenty, with a big nose and eyes set too close together. His face flushed red as if Lois had just caught him doing something shameful, and he looked away and whispered something to Linda then turned and walked back through the arcade out into the gray of the strip, and it was like washing your hands at the sink of a public toilet then raising your eyes to the mirror, but there is no mirror and so you’re staring at a wall that for a brief moment has erased your entire existence and you feel robbed and then warned that there’ll be more of this kind of thing coming and there’s nothing whatsoever you can do about it.

  But that feeling lifted here in Arcadia. Standing with Suzie in the shade of that portico in this old cattle town surrounded by pastures and floodplains, Lois knew one thing: Here, she could keep bad things from happening to Susan Lori. Here, only one hour’s drive from the Magic Kingdom and its endless lesson in doing things right, she could do for Susan what she had not done for her mother Linda.

  The screen came back to life and Lois typed: I’m sorry, honey. I just opened this today. Of course—

  She stopped. What was she going to write? Of course you can stay as long as you like? This is your home? But why this hesitation? Why wouldn’t she want Susan to stay as long as she needed to?

  Because she brought out the worst in Lois, that’s why. Because seeing Susan at forty-three was never having seen Linda at that age. Because to love Susan was to pull her in with one hand and push her away with the other. Because Lois liked herself better when Susan was not living with her.

  She typed: Of course you can stay as long as you like. This is your home.

  Love,

  She wrote Lois, then she deleted it and wrote Noni.

  Out on Bone River a blue canoe moved swiftly behind the trees. Two men paddled hard from the bow and stern, and a child in an orange life vest sat low in the middle, shouting: “Faster, you guys. Go faster, faster.”

  4

  YESTERDAY, SUSAN still hadn’t heard from Lois and so she’d told Bobby nothing of what she was planning to do. But while he’d cleaned his office on the campus, she packed her suitcase and pushed it into the back of the closet, then she called him and asked what he wanted for dinner. She felt like cooking.

  “You do?”

  It was Bobby who cooked. It was Bobby who nurtured or tried to, especially when her enemy was sitting in her lap.

  “Whatever you want, baby.” He took a half breath. “Why’d you cut your hair?”

  “I don’t know, but I like it.”

  And she did. Before leaving the house yesterday to shop she didn’t even wash it, for it left her feeling reckless in a good way, like she truly did not care what people would think, the same way she did not care whether or not anyone would want to read what had come out of her onto her keyboard as the sun began to rise. And as she pushed her cart down the aisles of the Kroger’s, she’d felt set adrift on some current she knew nothing about, but she knew she was going to let it take her anyway.

  What she felt was light, some freed bird moving easily now between the trees. Back home, there was the sustaining smell of the chickens cooking in hot olive oil, the cool wet tomatoes and olives beneath her fingertips, then Bobby’s big hands on her shoulders as he lightly kissed the top of her head.

  She turned and kissed his thumb, and as she lifted the cutting board and scraped the herbs and tomatoes and black olives over the chicken, she knew they would make love later and that she might even enjoy it.

  Out on their patio, she and Bobby ate her chicken Provençal on a bed of green beans, the citronella candles flickering beneath their two palm trees. Bobby poured her more wine. “Your enemy on the run?”

  “I think so. Yeah, it feels like it.”

  Later, making love, it was like having been away for a very long time then walking through a door that swings open easily on hinges that no longer creak.

  This morning, while Bobby still slept, she went into her writing room and found Lois’s email. She’d written it before six a.m. Of course you can stay as long as you like. This is your home. Something warm opened inside Susan, but it was followed by the cool draft of betrayal, and she moved quickly back into their bedroom and into bed, snuggling in close to her husband.

  She woke to Bobby looking at her, giving her that sideways smile of his. “I do like your hair like that, baby.”

  She could see in his eyes that he was happy she was feeling better, but that he wasn’t going to go on and on about it. It was what she appreciated most about him, his giving her room to move. She got up and peed and made coffee. Soon they were sitting across from one another at the kitchen table, her husband pulling out the Arts section of the Sunday New York Times. He was talking about how his classes hadn’t even begun yet and already one of his students had emailed him to say that he hated the free jazz of Ornette Coleman. It was the man whose work Bobby had been writing about for years, and as he spoke now about his defense of Coleman’s theory of harmolodics she watched him, this man she’d married three years ago, this tall, kind, and attentive man whose bald head had a sheen of sweat on it he didn’t seem to notice or care about.

  “Bobby.”

  “Yeah, baby.”

  “I’m going to go live with Lois for a little while.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “I think so. I don’t know. I guess so.” Susan’s face felt hot. “It’s for my writing.” She reached for her cup of coffee but did not pick it up. “I might be writing a memoir, I don’t know.”

  He looked like he wanted her to say more about this, but she did not.

  “So why go live with your grandmother?”

  “I need to start at the beginning, Bobby.”

  “But why live there again? Won’t a little research be enough?”

  “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.” She looked at him. His stubble was white, his lips parted slightly. He was fifty-three years old, but he appeared to her now as twelve or thirteen, a big, friendly, gangly boy who was preparing himself to be hurt. She felt unworthy of him, and maybe he could see that because now he shook his head and reached across the table and laid his big hand over her wrist. “Follow yourself, baby. Just come home when you’re done, okay?” He was smiling at her, though his eyes were not, and it made her want to reassure him in some way, but she could not deny the relief she felt, something big driving by outside in the street.

  5

  DANIEL WISHES he had never called the Council on Aging today because they’re sending him to pick up Rudy Schwartz in Port City and take him food shopping. Rudy is eighty-seven and gets around in a wheelchair. He was a high school mathematics teacher and does everything slowly and precisely, especially when he shops, studying the unit price of each soup can or package of frozen chickens he may put in the cart Daniel pushes alongside him. Rudy is also a cranky son of a bitch who treats Daniel like a paid employee, snapping at him if the cart isn’t inches from him and his chair. Daniel prefers some of the old ladies he drives to doctors’ appointments. Most of them are warm and chatty, grateful to him for his help and company, and many of them remind him of his mother.

  Rudy’s apartment complex is on High Street, and Daniel drives slowly down it, the sun high, the sky a deep
blue above the maples and roof ridges and telephone lines. He passes all the three-story Federalist restorations, their clapboards as narrow as they were two hundred years ago, though they’re four or five years old and painted white and yellow and owned by bankers, doctors, and businessmen. When Daniel was a kid, he knew this town existed five miles south of the beach, that they called it Schooner City because a hundred years earlier it held shipyards that built schooners with tall masts and billowing white sails. But when the world no longer needed clipper ships, they no longer needed this town, and so it had weeds growing up through broken concrete in the sidewalks, the brick buildings along the streets left empty, their windows gone or boarded up. There was no reason to drive over the bridge across the river then, though he still carries with him the flint of a dream of riding with his father in his yellow Impala, the backseat weighted with folded canvas tarps and paint cans and boxes of brushes.

  The river stank like sewage then. The paint store was small and dark, but the bar next to it was even darker, and Danny remembers eating two hard-boiled eggs, cold and sour from the jar. His father sat on the stool beside him in a white T-shirt, sipping what Daniel now knows was a glass of Bushmills. Near the door was a narrow window. The sun slanted through it and cast a thin, bright shaft across Liam’s hands.

  But Port City got reclaimed by professional men and women who knew a good thing when they saw it—narrow streets of old houses on a river three miles from the Atlantic Ocean—and these good people did what good people do, they turned a shithole into a picnic ground, one too expensive for the natives who’d never left it but then had to. Many summer nights, though, Daniel likes to drive down here. He’ll back his Tacoma out of his fenced-in lot. He’ll head west on Beach Road past the motels and their one-room cabins and fenced-in pools nobody seems to ever use. He’ll pass the camps that were there in his youth, though now people live in them year-round and they have vinyl siding and paved driveways. Where there used to be pine woods, there are now apartment complexes and massive parking lots, and Daniel will ignore these as he turns south on Route 1, passing a seafood restaurant and boat repair shop, a karate studio and fish store and tattoo parlor. Beyond them stretches the salt marsh the sun will be setting into, and as he crosses the bridge over the river, the spangled water below dotted with white motorboats, he’ll see on the bank the Harborside Restaurant, its deck filled with families eating at tables beneath striped umbrellas, the men in short sleeves and the women in skirts, some sitting at the outdoor bar sipping drinks and listening to the jazz ensemble in the corner, none of them looking up at the bridge as Daniel Ahearn’s ten-year-old red Tacoma passes by, its driver feeling like an interloper, a word he learned only recently when the author of the Adams book had used it and Daniel paused the CD and wrote the word down, pulling his Webster’s dictionary from the lamp table beside his bed and looking it up.