Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  Daniel stops. He looks out his small window to his yard and shop. Beyond his Tacoma, a crow is perched on one of his fence posts. Its small black head looks to the right and to the left. Then it lifts its wings and is gone.

  9

  JUST AFTER the Bone River campgrounds, Lois turned her VW Bug onto North West County Road. She had the air-conditioning going full blast, and as she drove onto the concrete bridge over the water she glanced out at all the tents and RVs, smoking grills and upside-down canoes on roof racks or in the dirt. A woman in a camo vest and wet shorts stood near her tent smiling down at her two children squatting on the riverbank. There was so much unguarded love in her face that Lois despised her, and she stepped on the gas and put the campground behind her. To her left stretched groves of orange trees, and she knew she should feel guilty about hating that mother but she didn’t. Lois felt what she felt, and it wasn’t the woman she hated anyway. It was how ignorant she was. That’s what Lois hated more than anything. That young mother’s joy. How long did she think she’d be able to keep it?

  Lois was shaking her head and driving too fast, but she didn’t care. One of her spells was coming on, and there was nothing to do about it. Especially as the county road curved north and she could see the hurricane fence and coiled barbed wire of the road prison, its paved parking lot filled with pickup trucks and cars and work vans. Alongside the concrete buildings of the facility, behind a triple layer of chain-link fences, the outdoor visitors’ area was crowded with families. They’d built this place nearly twenty years ago. At the time, Lois had read in the paper how a hundred men were “housed” in three “dorms,” that they had air-conditioning and their own TVs and vending machines, too. There were a dozen concrete tables under umbrellas and at each one sat a woman and kids sharing a meal with their criminal in blue. For years now, Lois would see these men in work crews in town, cutting grass in front of municipal buildings or trimming tree branches from power lines or picking trash on either side of the highway. Some were black, others white, and they all wore the same prison-issued blue shirts and blue pants with a dark stripe running down the sides. Some were just kids, nineteen or twenty years old, and others could be their degenerate fathers or uncles, and she hated them all. Hated that she had to see them or think about them. Hated that here in Arcadia of all places, this island in the heart of cattle pastures and floodplains, the state of Florida had built a road prison just three miles south of her house.

  And now she had to drive by and see them having a Sunday dinner with their families. One of them—young and white with a shaved head—held his toddler on his lap while he shoveled food into his mouth.

  Lois stepped on the gas harder than she’d meant to, the county road straightening out fast before her, acres of orange trees falling away to her left and right. She stared at the oncoming road with an awakened hatred that had reached her skin, her fingertips and eyelids, the exposed flesh of her old throat. How many times had she pictured shooting him in the face? No, stabbing him. Again and again. Over and over and over. He’d done only fifteen years, and when he got out over twenty years ago she’d bought the gun she still owns. Then six years later they built this prison, and her fears that had begun to subside with time and her fine antiques began to return, and she kept that pistol loaded day and night.

  That’s what I don’t understand. Did Donald say this to her face? How such a loving woman can turn into such a beast.

  You know why.

  I do. But darlin’—

  Darling nothing. He would never understand. Only other mothers and, she supposed, fathers could understand, though Gerry took his grief and used it as fuel for the car that drove him away. These days there were support groups for women like her, but if there were any in 1973 Lois did not know about them, nor did she think she’d ever go to any of them anyway. What had happened to Linda seemed to strand Lois out on some ice floe in the center of an ocean. This three-year-old girl with her, too. This miniature Linda who called her Noni and brought her the promise of comfort when there really was none to be had. The Ahearns did not fight her on raising the child, their shame too great, and the mother was a simpleton anyway, the father a loner and boozer like so many of the Irish Lois had known. Until Susan was ten or eleven she slept with Lois in Lois’s bed. It’s just what they did. A small voice inside Lois told her that the child needed her own bed in her own room, but why? Why should she let her go like that? She knew all too well what would happen when you let go. But one Friday or Saturday night, Susan wanted her friend from school to sleep over, a skinny girl with an overbite whose clothes were too small for her, and they’d slept in Susan’s room, the place she used to only use for reading or doing her homework in, and that was it; the following night Susan wanted to sleep in her own bed. And as Lois lay in her queen-sized bed alone, there was the feeling that she was adrift again in waters that could turn lethal if she wasn’t vigilant.

  Her mouth was dry now and she felt lightheaded and knew her pressure was up again. She needed to calm down. She needed to eat and drink something, and she needed to rest. But Susan was on her way, so how much rest would she get? Just before leaving the shop, Lois checked her email one last time, and there was a new one from Susan. Thank you, Noni. I’ll be there tonight. Love, Suzie

  “Noni” and “Suzie.” She was really laying it on thick, wasn’t she? Did she want money, too? She was probably getting a divorce. Maybe she needed a good lawyer, though her husband Bobby was as agreeable a man as Lois had ever met, so why would Susan need one?

  Tonight? She typed back: Drive carefully. I’ll put fresh sheets on your bed! —Love, Noni

  She’d pressed send and closed her laptop and pushed it aside. She would have to put fresh sheets on her bed. She’d have to go food shopping, too. Susan drank regular coffee, not the hazelnut Lois preferred. Susan also ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, especially celery and green apples, as Lois recalled. Yogurt, too. The Greek kind with no fat. Last Christmas in St. Pete, that’s all she ate every morning while Lois and Bobby made eggs and bacon, French toast, one morning strawberry-and-banana pancakes. But Susan also liked red wine and so did Lois, and she imagined the two of them sitting together on the screened porch sharing a bottle of Cabernet and talking as easily about things as they had last Christmas. Without that cheerful husband of Susan’s here too, though, would it be as easy between them? Or would they fall back into their old ways?

  But oh, shit, she’d been using Susan’s room as storage for years. Between her bed and desk were two unfinished Chippendale bookcases stuffed with vintage toys Lois hadn’t been able to move in the shop. The last time Lois had walked in there it had been stifling hot, the air smelling of old stuffing and dried wood. Why hadn’t there been an air conditioner in the window? She had the flash of a memory of Don putting one in there. Or did Lois remember him pulling it out because it had shorted? Either way, she would now have to clean that crap out of there and install a new goddamn air conditioner too. All before “tonight,” whenever that was.

  Maybe Susan could help her with that. She was certainly going to have to help Lois clear her own room out, that was clear. It’d be nice to have it all ready for her, to have it cooled down for her too, but why should Lois cushion her granddaughter from the realities like this? The woman who’d raised her was eighty-two years old. Climbing those stairs every day had become a chore, and she was seriously considering turning the front parlor into her bedroom. She was heavy and probably diabetic. Rooms tilted on her and she had trouble getting air into her lungs, and on a good day she still smoked six cigarettes and ate whatever the hell she felt like eating. For a few years now, Marianne, in her warm but indirect way, would ask Lois about the future of her business, a question that Lois knew had little to do with profit forecasts and more to do with who will own Lois’s Fine Furniture and Toys after you’re gone, dear Lois?

  Dear Lois, my foot. Marianne would love to own the business. Well, maybe Lois should sell it to her. Marianne and Walter
could afford it. But then what would Lois do? Sit on her screened porch day and night watching fossil hunters through the trees? Travel? Visit family?

  Of her brothers, only Gio was still alive, his wife Kathy long buried, and his kids were neglectful shits who’d put him in a home off Route 1 in Peabody. It was an old brick facility on an asphalt lot wedged between an Applebee’s and a Range Rover dealership, and he told her he had a good view of the parking lots and liked to watch people come and go.

  No, thank you.

  She could leave the business to Paul, but he’d always been all thumbs at everything he did. He’d wanted to fly jets but left the Air Force after only eighteen months and ended up working in air freight warehouses instead, loading who knew what into the holds of those planes he would never fly. He’d married a woman so cold she made Lois feel she was the warm one in the room, and Paul’s wife was one of those churchgoers who slowly over the years had turned him into one, too. In their small living room in their small house on that narrow paved road crowded with other small houses was a color television nearly the size of a movie theater’s screen. Beneath that was a shelf of Bibles, each in a different-colored binding and each bearing Lois’s daughter-in-law’s careful penmanship on the family signature page: The Dubie Family Bible

  Terry Dubie

  Paul Dubie

  Paul Dubie Jr.

  But all religion seemed to have done for Paul was make him fatter and angrier. How many times had she had to ask him to change the subject whenever it came around to blacks or Jews or Cubans, who he called “beach spics” ? He believed we should have electrified fences erected along our country’s entire coastline, which he told Lois was just under eleven thousand miles, though the shore of every bay, peninsula, and island had to be included, which brought our country’s unprotected perimeter to just over fifty-four thousand miles. Then Paul Jr., sitting back on the sofa with one of his many Mountain Dews, reminded his father about airplanes and 9/11, and this got Paul back on the subject Lois could tolerate the least, which was that our own government had slaughtered three thousand of us and the entire tragedy had been a conspiracy.

  No, Paul would turn Lois’s Fine Furniture and Toys into something sinister and strange, selling paranoid pamphlets instead of toys made for small children so long ago.

  But Lois could not leave it to Susan, either. To do so would be to leave it to whatever man she happened to be with at the time. She hated to think this way, but she couldn’t help it. She did.

  And so who was left but—Linda? Her daughter Linda. That’s who Lois should be leaving her business to.

  As Lois got closer to her own end, she could feel her out there in a way she had not in the years after losing her. Would she see her again? Some days, this question floated through her more like an answer in the affirmative, and there was a lightness to everything, the sharp corners of the day dulled, all the shadows lighted away. But there were other days, too, and she seemed to live through more of these, when the answer was, no, Lois, because when you’re gone you’re gone, and when you go, your memories of Linda will go with you, too.

  Those hours were the blackest. Lois would find herself thinking just who, besides her, would remember her daughter, Linda Dubie? There had been her father, Gerry, but before Lois learned what actually became of him it had been so long since she had heard anything of him she suspected he had crossed paths with the men in Providence he had stolen from, and that was that. Then years ago Susan had typed his name into her computer and found out more, but when she sent Lois his obituary saying he’d died of a heart attack in Rhode Island, it was like reading about a stranger. Her last contact with Gerry were divorce papers she’d received by certified mail from his lawyer, papers she happily signed because all he’d wanted were his clothes and his Cadillac.

  There were Paul’s memories of Linda, though Lois had little idea what they were. On the subject of his older sister, he had always been a closed book. Though there was that one Thanksgiving at his house. Paul Jr. was still a teenager. He was sitting next to his father at the dinner table, Lois seated across from him, and Paul’s wife had gone into the living room for a Bible to read them all a prayer and Paul Jr. reached out for a roll and his father said: My sister would have slapped the hell out of me if I did something like that.

  She would, too. Somewhere along the way, Linda had become the manners keeper in the house. At least when it came to her little brother.

  Don’t talk with your mouth full, Paul. That’s gross.

  Paul? Did you wash your hands after you peed? Go back and wash them right this minute. I mean it.

  Paul, if you don’t clean up this popcorn off the floor, I’m gonna make you do it.

  Ma, Mr. Price bought Paul a slice today and he didn’t even say thank you.

  It was strange how this would come back to Lois in pieces, and sometimes only as sound. She could hear Linda’s voice, so much like her own, high but with an edge, cotton candy with a rusty nail in it. Ma, Paul’s such a pig. I hate him. I really hate him.

  That was one of Lois’s smaller regrets, a dark stream leading to a darker ocean of it, Linda having to share a room with her little brother. That was fine when he was a toddler and she was ten, eleven, twelve years old. It helped her get over her first hatred of him, this surprise baby who had come along to take her mother’s attention away from her. But with Paul in the same room as Linda, she quickly began to see him as hers, or maybe as part of her, and those were the years Gerry began to roam and Lois was smoking too much, staying up late in front of a TV she wasn’t watching, trying not to think of her man fucking another woman. How could it have ever been a surprise to Lois that Linda would want to flee just as soon as she possibly could?

  Linda’s cottage was only three streets south of the Midway. Her husband and father-in-law had painted every room white, and Linda had hung curtains and bought throw rugs. Lois had driven her to flea markets down in Port City for perfectly good furniture the rich people no longer wanted. That was a piece Lois could see. Linda in the sunlight in shorts and a light blue maternity blouse she’d bought herself, her brown hair pulled back in a single braid, a red stud in each ear her husband had won for her in the water gun booth. She and Lois were standing in the driveway of a rich woman’s house on High Street, looking over the table of knickknacks and paperbacks, area rugs laid out on the lawn, the cane rockers and bureaus and hope chests. Linda was thumbing through a cardboard box full of albums. She rested one hand on her protruding belly while she flipped through records with the other. A strand of hair had come loose near her cheek and from the corner of her lips she blew the hair back and that did something to Lois. It was like watching a horse use her tail to swat at a fly on her flank, this thing the body did to protect itself without thinking. That protruding belly, Linda’s hand on it. Lois felt less like a mother then and more like a sister in an infinite line of sisters, their wombs full, an older one whose job now was to guide and to instruct.

  That baby girl came on a cool spring day, the sun high over the Atlantic, and Lois had been so swept up in the surprising joy of holding and helping to care for her daughter’s daughter that she just did not see the signs she should have: Linda’s ugly husband telling her she could not even say hello to any men on the strip. Linda’s ugly husband leaving his painting jobs in the middle of the day and showing up at the arcade just to check on his wife. Linda’s ugly husband scanning the strip for boys and men while he walked too close to Linda.

  Gerry had made Linda second in charge then, and while Lois watched after baby Susan in the apartment out back, Linda made change in her apron like she always had, but she also ordered more Skee-Ball tickets when they ran low and popcorn for the popping machine and she kept track of maintenance records on the video games and slots, and she hired a slow boy with three fingers on one hand to keep the place swept and clean all shift long.

  Linda loved the strip and she was a natural at running a business and she would have—

  Wou
ld-have-beens. Could-have-beens. Should-have-beens. These were nothing but skeletal hands shoving Lois under cold murky water and holding her down, down, down. She craved a cigarette and she needed a drink and now she breathed deeply and turned into her dirt driveway under the shade of her live oaks. From here, her porch roof seemed to sag in the center, and her clapboards looked moldy, and there was Susan’s car, her grown granddaughter standing beside it like she was getting ready to climb inside and drive away. But then she smiled and waved, and Lois took her hand off the wheel and waved back, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what did she do to her hair?

  10

  SUSAN SET down her things and stood in the doorway of her old bedroom, its heat thick in her face. In the center of the room were two bookcases filled with old cars and trucks and dolls, one of them lying on her side and staring at her with one dead eye. On Susan’s single bed, still made and covered with a quilted spread, lay an old fan, its blades looking like propellers from a plane that had flown in World War II. The windows were closed, and there was no air conditioner, and there were the depressing smells of dried wood and metal and straw stuffing. Above her bureau still hung her faded reproduction poster of a Renoir painting she’d tacked to the wall when she was fifteen, an image of young men and women under a striped canopy sipping wine and eating, talking, and smoking. They looked like they belonged in each other’s company, and that this good time they were having was just one of many.

  “Well?” Lois called from the bottom of the stairs. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but I can clean it.”

  “I won’t be able to help you, you do know that.” There was an edge to Lois’s voice Susan hadn’t heard in a while, not when Bobby was around anyway.