Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  But that Soto boy. Gustavo Soto. His high cheekbones and dark eyes and scuffed, pointed boots. He’d come to their house only once. It was a Sunday, and he’d pulled up in a battered El Camino. He wore a straw cowboy hat, his best western shirt tucked into his jeans, a single blue violet between two fingers, and when he stepped up to their front door he took his hat off and held it low in front of him, his chin down but his eyes on the door for Suzie.

  Susan was sixteen but looked twenty. She’d started wearing sundresses, which nobody her age wore. She’d let her brown hair grow long, and she wore too much eye makeup and too many bangles on her wrist, and she’d been sitting in the den with one of her books, chewing gum and acting like it was normal to be all dolled up on a Sunday. Lois opened their front door before Suzie did.

  “How old are you?”

  He didn’t say a word. Just looked at her the way you would look at a dog you weren’t sure was about to bite or not.

  “Do you speak English? I asked you a question.”

  “Yes, he speaks English, Lois. Jesus Christ.” And Susan was stepping past her and hooking her arm in Soto’s, taking the violet from him as he turned and nodded once at Lois and put his hat back on as they hit the ground, and he might as well have been that big ugly boy in a red Himalaya suit jacket holding Linda in the arcade, his eyes on Lois over her daughter’s shoulder, and— No. Just no.

  Lois’s blood began to hum. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

  Lois was in her mid-fifties then, heavy and smoking heavy, but she was running around the hood of the El Camino before the boy had started his engine. She reached inside and tried to yank the keys from his hand, but he held on tight and Suzie was screaming, “Let go, Noni! We’re just going for a fucking ride!”

  “No you don’t.” Lois had both hands on his wrist, but he was strong and jerked free of her and she almost fell on her rump as the engine sprang to life and shot into gear and the El Camino drove off, spitting dirt and dead pine needles under its tires onto the county road.

  It was war after that.

  One exhausting battle after another.

  Lois inhaled deeply on her Carlton. She was sweating and thirsty and knew her blood pressure was up. She was also still tired. It had been a good morning. Maybe she’d close early for the day. Give Marianne her bonus and just go home for lunch and a nap.

  “Lois, can I talk to you about something?”

  Oh, Jesus, what now? “Was I too much of a bitch to that bitch?”

  “Well, . . .” Marianne folded her arms beneath her breasts. She wore a yellow-and-white-striped blouse with pearls, and today she looked old.

  “Marianne.” Lois exhaled smoke. “I’ve had to work my whole life. I won’t have some tourist from Ohio talking down to me in my own shop.”

  “I didn’t think she was that bad.”

  “Well, she was.”

  “But, Lois, that was my sale, and—”

  “You know I’d pay your bonus anyway. Haven’t I done that before?”

  “It’s not just that. I—”

  “Come out with it.” Lois stubbed her cigarette out on the step and dropped the butt into the coffee can.

  “People talk.”

  “So let them.”

  “But Lois, our rating has dropped from four stars to two, and it’s—”

  “Look.” Lois braced her hands on the arm of the chair and stood slowly this time. “I’m pooped from yesterday, and I need to rest. If you want to stay open, feel free.”

  “Lois.” Marianne still had her arms crossed. She looked frustrated and disappointed, and, truthfully, she was probably Lois’s only real friend.

  “Our business isn’t down, is it?”

  “No, but—”

  “Enough said. I’m going home.”

  Somewhere in the neighborhood off Oak Street a man and woman were laughing. The Tejano singer seemed to be singing a ballad now, her voice nearly breaking with sadness, and Lois knew she should congratulate Marianne on her sale today, but she moved by her without saying another word. She didn’t like being scolded. She never had. But once she was back in the old-wood-smelling dimness of the shop, she hoped Susan really would come visit this time. She hoped that she wasn’t just talking.

  7

  BOBBY WAS leaning against the stove in one of his faded Hawaiian shirts. He held an empty coffee cup in his hand and still hadn’t shaved. It was midafternoon, and the gray light coming in from the window made his skin bluish. He looked pathetic to her. God, what was she doing? But wasn’t this a good sign? That she was starting to care again?

  “I’m afraid you won’t come back.” He smiled down at her and shook his head and she stepped to him and he hugged her too hard for too long, his cup clattering to the floor. The skin of his neck smelled vaguely sweet, like fruit right before it starts to turn. It was a scent that had never pulled her closer to him or pushed her away, either, and there was the floating sense that she was watching this moment rather than living it. She pulled back, but her husband’s big hands were still on her hips. He was staring at her shorn hair. “My muskrat.”

  She kissed his cheek. She grabbed her computer bag and stepped through the open doorway, the smells of dried palm fronds in the air, her tall, stoop-shouldered husband standing on the threshold, watching her walk quickly to her car.

  Soon she was driving onto the Skyway Bridge, Tampa Bay stretched out to her left and right. A freighter ship was moving slowly out to sea, its cargo containers yellow-and-rust-colored under the sun. There were Lois’s words to her. This is your home. But leaving her husband behind, driving toward the floodplains and cattle country of Arcadia, her laptop zipped up in its case in the backseat, it was as if Susan were on that freighter ship herself, curled up in the dark in a steel container heading who knows where. But at least she wasn’t giving in this time. At least she was trying to do something about it.

  SUSAN SAT on the top step of her grandmother’s front porch, waiting for her. It was close to five but still hot, the air heavy with the smells of dead pine needles and the long dirt driveway she’d steered down nearly thirty minutes ago. She was sweating and wished she hadn’t worn jeans and, of course, the front door was locked, as was the one to the back screened porch. When she’d checked it a few minutes ago, she was tempted to walk down through the pine and oak trees to the clay banks of Bone River, but there was that cottonmouth she’d written about yesterday morning, the ghost of her fifteen-year-old self dropping her smoking cigarette and running barefoot back home.

  Home. It had never really felt like that to her. Living with her grandmother in this glorified camp in the woods from twelve to eighteen had felt strangely temporary, as if they were both on the run and it was only a matter of time before they would get caught.

  She should write that down. She’d pulled her Honda up onto the grass to give Lois her parking space, and now Susan leaned into it and pulled her notepad and pencil off the passenger’s seat. She drank warm water from a plastic bottle, the taste of it like the bottle itself. She flipped the pad to the notes she’d already begun to take, impressions, really.

  • the high school is the same yellow brick and looks like a prison

  • the Taco Bell is now a Lowe’s. All the palm and acacia trees are gone

  • Gustavo’s old house is just a field of weeds behind a rusted chain-link fence. Half of it is leaning toward the ground like a car drove into it and drove off

  • The citrus workers’ houses still look like shit, though some of them don’t

  • The Bone River Campgrounds? Doing it w/Gustavo in his car? Getting caught by Lois

  • The orange and lemon groves stretching out around this shit town on all sides? How beauty is free unless you can’t see it? I could see beauty, but I always felt so trapped.

  • By Noni? Yes. And by my enemy.

  • Books helped. Books always helped

  Susan wrote: Living with Noni felt like living on the run. No, not on the run. In exile
. Like we’d both been exiled.

  Susan set her notepad back on the passenger’s seat. She needed to pee. Some kind of bird shrieked out in the woods behind the house. If Lois didn’t turn down that driveway soon, she was going to call her. No, she shouldn’t be too pushy or expectant in any way. With Lois it was best to lie low and let her direct things. It’s what Lois did. It’s what she always did best.

  8

  DANIEL LIES on his bed in front of the fan staring at the photograph of Susan Dunn. Right after work and before a lunch he did not want, he drove to the library and found her image again, printed it out, and taped it to the trailer wall, the photo’s lower corners flapping softly in the electric breeze. Its colors are faded and the features of her face are not as clear as they were on the computer screen, but it’s still what Linda would have become, it’s still their Susan. At the bottom of the page, he tacked the phone number for Eckerd College he’d written down the day before, but he doesn’t look at it.

  For a moment, Daniel considers just letting it go, the way he has again and again for years. But there has always been the shadow-weight of her small cheek and ear pressed to his chest, her high, loving voice: It’s so loud, Daddy. He was a young man then, just a kid, really, twenty-two or -three, and he needs to tell her that before he’s gone. He needs her to know that he’s no longer the boy who did what he did. He needs his daughter to know that there was always more to his heart than whatever she heard there.

  Your daughter does not remember you.

  Of course he had more than considered this, worried it like a sore on his tongue. Why would she remember him? When he was three, what did he remember of Liam? His bony lap? The hot paint colors under his nails? His silence as he sat at the table and ate whatever Daniel’s mother had cooked for him? If Liam had disappeared when Danny was three, he would be only the ghost of a dream and no more.

  She only remembers her loving mother you took from her.

  Did she? He hoped so. Linda had been a good mother. The best. Daniel hoped Susan remembered her: the heart-shaped pancakes Linda made for her, the way she called her Suzie Woo Woo, the way she washed and combed and braided her hair, the reading to her at night, and how, if they were walking into the carnival noise of the beach after supper, Linda would carry Susan and would only let her walk if she and Danny were both holding her hands.

  Danny carried her a lot too. He’d lift her onto his shoulders and press one hand up against her back, Susan’s sticky palms on his forehead and sometimes in his eyes. When Susan laughed or yelled over the noise of the crowd and the rides and the arcade machines, Danny would feel the vibration of her voice through her chest at the back of his head. Like the inside of his head was her home.

  There were so many moments like that one. Once, playing hide-and-seek in their three-room cottage two streets from the water, Daniel had taken his time finding her behind the couch. He kept calling her name, calling it and calling it, Susan giggling in her hiding place. He lifted the chair and put it noisily back down. He did the same to the potted plant on the windowsill. “Susan? Suzie Woo Woo?”

  Then he sat heavily on the couch and covered his face and pretended to cry. In seconds a small hand was touching his arm. “Daddy? Don’t be sad. I’m here. See? I’m here!”

  Lying on his bunk back at the Threes, that old question kept turning in him like a rusty auger. Did they ever tell her what he’d done? Not when she was still a child, because that would have been an abuse Lois and even Gerry weren’t capable of, but what about when she got older? Fifteen, sixteen years old? Gerry was long gone then, but Daniel pictured Lois sitting Susan down at some table or on her living room sofa. Lois was where the beauty came from. She’d always been a big woman, but everything in her face lined up just right, eyes to nose to cheekbones to mouth. When Danny and Linda started out, Lois wore her hair up high the way women did then, and she wore heavy black eyeliner and black shit in her lashes, her lipstick a pink that would fade to white. But it would have been the mid-eighties when Susan was fifteen or sixteen, and what words would have come out of Lois?

  Honey, there’s something you should know.

  What, Noni?

  It’s almost what Italians called their grandmothers, but when Susan was two she couldn’t say Nonna, only Noni, and it’d stuck. Daniel tried to see his daughter in this scene. Her hair and face. Braces, maybe? Loose jeans like he heard they wore then? Maybe polish on her fingernails? Thin bracelets on her wrist? Did she have a boyfriend? Did he treat her right? This question inside him so right but so goddamned wrong, coming from him, that when he thought it he broke out in a sweat as instantly as if he were sick.

  But the thing is, he could not picture Susan like this at all. Instead he saw her only as he’d last seen her. In her red shorts, getting jerked from his arms by one of the cops standing in his bedroom.

  That afternoon of Lois’s letter in 1988, Daniel still did not know she’d raised Susan in Florida, so Daniel pictured Gerry and Lois’s apartment in the rear of the Penny Arcade. It was one big open room with two bedrooms in the opposite ends. A long black Naugahyde couch separated the TV area from the kitchen, which was small, not enough cabinets, the rear of the counters lined with cans of Spam and soup, tuna and sardines, boxes of crackers and dried spaghetti, cellophane-wrapped loaves of bread. There was a green Formica table with chrome legs and matching chairs, and in the middle of it was the large clamshell ashtray overflowing with Chesterfield butts from Gerry, Carltons from Lois. Next to this was a hula girls set of salt and pepper shakers, tiny holes in the tops of both their heads just above a hot-pink garland of flowers.

  Did Lois allow Susan to keep his name? Daniel doubted it. Maybe before she was this beautiful Susan Dunn staring at him from her college in St. Petersburg, Florida, she was Susan Dubie. And maybe that’s where Lois began.

  What, Noni?

  Your first last name was Ahearn. It would be hard for Lois to utter his name, but she would do it, blowing smoke out the side of her mouth like a curse. It belonged to your father. But Daniel could never or would never allow the rest of this moment to unfold on the ceiling above him. Because if Lois did tell Susan where he was, then that would mean his daughter did not want to see him or have contact with him in any way because she never came to visit and she never wrote him a letter.

  He did not blame her for this. How could he?

  He should write all this out for her. He has tried before, but then he had no solid notion of where she might be. The act had felt as useless as writing something he’d seal in a bottle and throw into the Atlantic. But he knows where she is. And so he should write something first, then send it to her, then call her. He can’t just be some voice on the wire after so long. Whole lives have come and gone since he last saw her.

  He sits up too quickly, spinning brown plates crowding his vision. He inhales deeply through his nose, smells the burned butter from his grilled cheese sandwich he only stared at, the pine sap through his screened windows. It’s another hot day and his T-shirt sticks to his back, the revolving fan pushing around nothing but warm air.

  In the drawer beneath the toaster, under loose pens and pencil stubs and the broken calculator, is the small pad on which he multiplies his price times the number of chair holes, and he pulls out the pad and one of the newer pens and sits at the table. He stares at the straight blue lines and all that empty space between them. He gets up slowly and fills himself a glass of water. He sits back down.

  The whir of the fan, the shriek of a crow in the trees. He leans forward and writes:

  Dear Susan

  He crosses this out.

  My dear Susan

  No, this sounds too much like she’s his. That he deserves her.

  Susan

  No. Too cold.

  My daughter Susan

  Yes, that’s better. It’s the truth. But it’s still too cold.

  My dear daughter Susan

  That’s right, isn’t it? All four words in that order? Though there’s
still the feeling he’s claiming something that is no longer rightfully his. Then start with that. Why not start with that?

  Ive got no right to call you these things. But even with everything that happened you are my daughter. Our daughter.

  Your mother was a very good mother. I hope you remember that about her. She did not deserve

  He stops.

  That hot, smoky kitchen. The overhead light missing one bulb so it was never bright enough in there. And Linda, she had had it. She was screaming and she was leaving and it was like being told your heart and organs are about to go for a little ride and you have no say in it. None whatsoever.

  Forty years have passed and Daniel still wonders if they had been in any other room if things might have gone differently. Didn’t she know what her leaving would do to him? But how could she? In their four years he had tried to tell her, but words had never come easy for him, and everything he did tell her sounded to his own ears like weak wind through a cardboard box. They’d be lying naked side by side in their narrow bed, her back to him, Danny’s arm over her shoulder, his penis softening, his face in her hair. He’d say: “I wasn’t alive till you.” Or, “What I feel for you is, I don’t know, so damn big.” Did he tell her that? Did he tell her that daily he was afraid he couldn’t hold it all?

  Jimmy Squeeze’s brother Bill. He didn’t have Jimmy’s muscles, but he was taller than all of them and he had a deep voice like Danny’s, and he smiled a lot. Two times Danny had passed the Penny Arcade, pushing his old man’s cart full of paint buckets and rollers and brushes and tarps and rags, and he caught Linda smiling up at Jimmy’s brother, her small hands in the canvas pockets of her change-and-token apron, Bill telling her some private little story or joke that, seeing them like that, Danny just knew was about him and wasn’t good.