Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  “The fucking Reactor?”

  “He may not be right in the head, baby. You sure you want to hear the rest?”

  “No.”

  Bobby rested his hand on her knee. One of the painters was smoking a cigarette under the portico of the school. He was small and from here his arms looked brown and thin. “Don’t stop anymore, Bobby. Just get this over with, all right?”

  “Sure thing.” His hand slipped off her, and she looked at him as he began to read again, this first true friend she’d ever had.

  He went on to read her father’s detailed story of spying on his own wife, of leaving work in the middle of the day to catch her but never catching her doing anything “ ‘but working the arcade or taking care of you.’

  “ ‘Everything I’m writing to you now Susan is the story of a changed man.’ ”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Bobby looks over at her then keeps reading.

  Dear Susan,

  The sickness I had has been gone a long time now, that’s all I’m trying to tell you. Captain Suspicion. That snake in my guts. All that—none of it had anything to do with you.

  You should know that I tried to find you too.

  Through the windshield the high school had soft corners, the front glass doors foggy, Bobby’s face as well. His hand was back on her knee. “Almost done.”

  After five years on parole I was cleared to go out of state and I quit my barbering job and took a bus as far as Georgia. But I changed my mind and went back home Susan. I didn’t want to bother you and I don’t want to bother you now but I’m coming to see—

  Bobby stared at the page, his lips pursed.

  “What? Fucking read it. What?”

  “I’m coming to see you in a few days just this one time and I hope that’s all right with you.

  Love,

  Your Father

  Daniel Patrick Ahearn

  “That’s it? When? When the fuck is a few days?”

  “He doesn’t say.”

  She grabbed the letter. “When’d you get this?”

  “Yesterday.”

  She read the last line to herself. I didn’t want to bother you and I don’t want to bother you now but I’m coming to see you in a few days just this one time and I hope that’s all right with you.

  Love,

  Your Dad Father

  Daniel Patrick Ahearn

  “Love? Jesus.” She jerked on the door handle and stepped out into the heat. There were the smells of dried palm bark and the exhaust from Bobby’s car, her heart punching her sternum, sweat breaking out on her face and neck. One of the other painters was walking under the portico then out into the sun for his truck. A dust mask hung just under his chin. He was staring at her as he walked around to the rear of his pickup and lowered the tailgate and pulled out an empty plastic bucket. She thought of her father, the painter. She pictured him wrapping his paint roller in cellophane and driving back to the beach to catch her mother cheating on him. That fucking snake inside him he called “Captain Suspicion.” The painter lifted the tailgate back into place and glanced at her face and breasts and legs.

  “What’re you looking at, motherfucker?”

  The painter kept walking, raising his hand in the air the way people do to homeless men or women who yell at voices in their heads, Bobby rising out of his car and saying, “Let’s go, baby. Let’s get out of here.”

  34

  THE SUN was still out, but just beyond the citrus fields the sky looked low and heavy, a long yellow cloud hanging above the pine woods. It was the color the air gets in hurricane season, which they were in now though they’d been spared so far, and Lois downshifted for the turn on the county road then accelerated past the road prison, its outdoor visitors’ tables empty behind the chain link, and she drove faster toward home. She was tired, and she was thirsty, but she had no appetite, and she was going to tell Susan and Bobby to cook something up for themselves.

  After leaving Marianne to finish up their window display of mirrors, Lois had settled in her easy chair for a while, resting and fighting the urge for a cigarette. She’d had too many the night before, at least two days’ worth, and she’d sat there staring at her Sue Herschel doll collection on the shelves across from her desk, each one staring back at her like they were waiting for her to feed them or take them someplace more fun. On the shelves beside them was a plaited skip rope from 1912, its wood handles dark from so many young hands. There was an 1830s stagecoach drawn by two white stallions, and a German Noah’s ark. On its gabled roof was painted a dove with an olive leaf in its beak, and under that was a Schoenhut toy piano, its tiny keys yellowed, and a 1920s Mickey Mouse organ grinder next to a dinky Heinz tomato ketchup van. Bobby loved that one, and he loved being in her shop, and why wouldn’t he? He’d written a book about what someone else had created. Why wouldn’t he be the kind of man to appreciate what the makers of fine toys and furniture could do, too?

  Over the dehumidifiers, she could hear Marianne humming a tune up front. Lois began to doze and what came to her was Susan’s tall, friendly husband selling that bitch from Ohio that Biedermeier mirror but with a big smile on his face, Suzie sixteen again and sitting in this very chair, a paperback open on her lap.

  When Lois woke, Marianne was talking to a couple in front of the walnut plantation desk. They were young and both wore glasses, and Lois pegged them right away as office workers from Tampa or St. Pete. They probably worked with computers all day but wanted only antiques in their new childless home, and she pushed herself out of her chair and made her way out back for a smoke. She sat in her lawn chair beneath the fire escape and stared out at what was still inside her head, Bobby and Susan owning this place, the emphasis being on Bobby.

  Maybe Lois should feel bad about seeing it this way, but she didn’t. He clearly valued old things, and he was good with people, and he was the only man Suzie’d ever had who was good with her, too. He seemed to take her as she was and he gave her free rein, which she needed, but was she good with him? Her whole life she’d left one for the next, the way some people trade in cars once they hit a certain mileage. But maybe Bobby knew this and wasn’t going to put up with it. Maybe at lunch today he’d laid down the law.

  Lois hoped so. Her granddaughter had always been too involved with herself, as far as she was concerned. All that reading and writing and thinking. Maybe owning a business together would be just the thing they needed. It had been good for Lois and Gerry, at least until it went bad. The day they’d closed on the arcade, it was early spring, cold and gray, but they’d driven out to the beach and Gerry had a key to the padlock at the base of the roll-down doors and he’d squatted in his winter coat and tie, his hair greased back, a smoking Chesterfield between his lips, then he pulled up that big door, creaking in its steel tracks above, and they walked in together holding hands. There were only a few games in there then, two Ping-Pong tables and a pool table and the Skee-Ball that took up the whole south wall. There were none of the pinball or vending machines that would bring trouble years later, and Gerry had big plans. Standing there in the shadows of what they would build, he looked so young and handsome and happy that she’d never loved him more than she did at that moment, her French pipe-fitter husband who’d borrowed every bit of their down payment from uncles and friends and after two years had paid it all back. He was a good man then, that’s how she’d seen him anyway, as good, and when they let themselves into the back apartment, Lois still did not want to live there. She didn’t like how small and dark that place was, and besides, they were renting a nice ranch in the woods two miles from the beach. It had a lawn and a back patio, and she liked to sit out there in the summer in the inflatable kiddie pool with little Linda, and now they had baby Paul, too, both of them at Gio’s place that afternoon so that Lois and Gerry could take a stroll through their new lives.

  “Think of the money, Sweet.” That’s what he called her, and she knew it’d be foolish not to live in that apartment themselves. They’d sa
ve more by living there than renting it out. Besides, they owned it along with the business and when they walked into what would become Linda and baby Paul’s room, there was a mattress and box spring on the floor from the previous owner—an Irish/Italian who was barely sixty and retiring “with a pot of gold,” Gerry had said—and her happy, happy husband had pulled off his winter coat and laid it on that mattress then made her sit, calling her, Sweet, my Sweet, Sweet, Sweet, and he tugged off her rubber boots and nylons and underwear, and pulled her dress up, then he was pushing himself inside her and there was only his breath against her throat, My Sweet, my Sweet, oh, my Sweet, the far-off but close smashing of waves on the beach, this feeling that they were both climbing some shimmering rainbow together and neither one would ever let the other fall.

  Lois slowed for the turn down her two-track. It had been so long since she’d thought of Gerry in this way. She’d nearly forgotten it had ever been good once, but it had, and anyway Bobby was nothing like Gerry. Bobby was a good man. Though as she got closer to her house his car was gone and there was only Susan’s, and there she was, sitting on the front steps. She had her elbows propped on her bare knees, and beside her was her cell phone and a glass of water. She looked like she’d been sitting there a long time.

  Wonderful. Here we go again.

  Lois killed the engine and gathered up her pocketbook and rose out of her VW, her heart pounding faster the way it did now whenever she stood. The air was hot and still and smelled like dead pine needles and the tar from her roof shingles she’d have to replace before too long. She called over the roof of the car, “Everything all right?”

  Susan just looked at her, then half shrugged. “I have to tell you something.”

  “Don’t tell me you two broke up.”

  “No.”

  “No, you’re not going to tell me, or no, you didn’t break up?” She hooked her purse strap over her shoulder and made her way to the front steps. She was breathing harder than she should. Her granddaughter’s legs were slightly parted, and she could see the color of her underwear, pale blue.

  “Will I need a drink for this?”

  “Do you want to sit down?”

  “No, but give me a sip of that water, please.”

  Susan handed her the glass, and Lois drank down half of it and handed it back. She was sweating. “All right, then tell me. What’s wrong?”

  “I did get important mail yesterday.”

  “Bobby went home for it?”

  “No, he had it already.”

  Susan must’ve seen something change in Lois’s face because she said, “He didn’t think it was the right time.”

  “So you didn’t sell that story, honey. So what?”

  “No—”

  “What, Suzie?”

  “I got a letter from my father.”

  At first Lois saw Gerry and his greased-back hair, his ready-for-the-world smile. Oh, my Sweet. My Sweet. My Sweet Sweet Sweet. But then a trapdoor flopped open inside Lois’s very organs, and there was her Linda in the arms of big hook-nosed Ahearn, his eyes too close together, that red suit jacket he wore like he was some royal prince and not just another barking carnie, her Linda in her coin apron swallowed up forever in his big freckled arms.

  The step tread slapped Lois’s rear, and she had to lean forward and breathe into her own heartbeats, but they were like whirling bats in her head. Susan’s hand was on her arm.

  “You okay?”

  Lois nodded, though she was not okay.

  “I don’t know how he found me, Noni.”

  His mother. That simpleton calling late on a Sunday afternoon. Two years ago, maybe more. She said she was dying, and she just wanted to say goodbye to her granddaughter, that’s all.

  How’d you get this number, Mary?

  Your brother give it to me, Lois. He’s in the book.

  Gio would do that. He never met one woman he ever said no to about anything. Lois had been sitting at her kitchen table, a smoking Carlton in her ashtray. It was late fall, close to a Thanksgiving she’d be spending with Paul and his family in Miami. The light coming through her windows was golden, and maybe she felt just a bit sorry for this woman who’d lost her granddaughter to the Dubie family. Just enough anyway to give her a morsel but not the whole meal.

  She’s married now. Her last name’s Dunn. That’s all I’m telling you, Mary, and I’ll thank you not to call me again.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I did it, Suzie. I gave his mother your married name. Your grandmother. Tell me the truth, did she ever find you?”

  “No.”

  Lois could see her now, wearing those housecoats and long dresses even in the summer. This woman who had a plain face and talked to herself all the time and married “the Magic Mick” Ahearn. She was like some peasant from the old country, and Lois would be surprised if she could even read or write. Hearing her voice after so many years was like the doctor telling you your tumor was back, and for weeks after talking to her on the phone Lois regretted giving her that name. She wanted to call Susan about it, but it’d be like grabbing a shovel and digging up something better left buried. “Where’s this letter?”

  “My room.” Susan seemed to sit straighter. “Noni?”

  “What?”

  “He says he wants to come see me.”

  Danny Ahearn towering over her Linda as he hugged her too tight, the lights of the arcade making them both look blue. Lois sitting in the back of that cruiser trying not to scream and run inside that house to her child, but she was holding crying Suzie to her, and Ahearn was being carried out that kitchen door by four or five cops, his hands cuffed behind him, his legs trying to kick, his face bleeding. The way he stood in court in his jumpsuit and turned to her and Gerry and Paul, his mouth saying words that were like a drill now in Lois’s stomach.

  “You can’t see him. I won’t allow it. I’ll call the frigging’cops.”

  “I don’t think he’s breaking any laws, Noni.”

  Lois turned to her. Susan had never sat so erectly in her life. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her chin was tilted up, and Lois could see she’d clearly been working up her nerve for—for what? “Don’t tell me you want to see him.”

  “I don’t know if I do or not. I just thought you should know.”

  “Why? Susan, he’s a—” Her throat felt squeezed in an iron vise, her breathing one shallow wave after another.

  “I almost didn’t tell you, but Bobby thought you had a right to know.”

  “He’s damn right I have a right to know. Where is he?”

  “On the way home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the letter was sent overnight mail.”

  Lois’s porch steps may as well have been a boat, her gravel drive a shifting sea. “You mean he might be there now?”

  Susan fingered her cell phone. “Not yet. And he doesn’t know where we live, as far as we know.”

  “I forbid you to see this man, Susan. I forbid it.”

  “I’m not sixteen anymore, Noni.”

  “But why would you want to?”

  “I’m not sure I do. It just seemed disrespectful not to at least tell you.”

  In the fading light of the afternoon, Susan looked middle-aged and beautiful, even with her thin arms and legs, her chopped hair and very little makeup. Her mother would be in her sixties now, but she wasn’t, was she? Nor did she get to be Susan’s age or even ten years younger than that. Her life was forever stolen from her by that sick ugly Danny Ahearn, and what gave him the right to think he could come visit Susan now? Now? Lois’s face was hot and wet and the words coming out of her seemed to help her stand. “I’ll kill him. So help me God, I will kill him.”

  “Lois.”

  Lois stood and began to make her way to the front door. “And I’m coming with you, too.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Lois had reached the deck, but the house was being lifted and tilted sideways, her arm swinging out to right
herself, her hand reaching for the screen door’s black handle, but its blackness crowded the corners of her eyes then shifted to the center till that’s all she saw, the porch treads whacking her shoulder and the side of her head, Susan calling and calling her name.

  35

  HALFWAY THROUGH South Carolina, the radio is one Christian station after another and Daniel switches it off. An hour ago it stopped raining and he kept watching the late-day sun as it sank into soybean fields to the west. Now a strip of light is holding up a bank of dark clouds above the highway, and the taillights ahead of him are bright and too red. His back and hips ache. He’s passed through towns with names like Turbeville, Manning, and Summerton. Santee, Branchville, Smoaks, and Yemassee. They make him think of the Civil War and long-ago times and he’s not sure why except with each passing mile there’s the feeling he’s descending somewhere foreign and dangerous, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  According to his map he’s around three hundred miles from St. Petersburg, about six hours of driving if he doesn’t stop. That bowl of chili he’d eaten half of in North Carolina is a warm lump in his gut, but at a gas station in a town called St. George he bought a twenty-four-ounce bottle of Coke he sips from now, wedging it back between his seat and the console. The Coke seems to settle his stomach, and he can feel the caffeine moving through his sluggish blood like some screw kicking cons out of their bunks right after lights-up. He’s been going since before dawn, but why stop?

  He keeps thinking about that young waitress back in Dunn, how pretty and warm she was. She’d seated him at a table in the corner near a window, and she’d brought him a menu right away, that coffeepot still in her hand. After he’d ordered his chili, it was hard not to take in how tightly her jeans fit her and how lovely her behind was, though he’d looked away quickly, for it was like passing a fenced-in yard just as the owner steps through the gate and you see a garden of flowers. If he had a granddaughter, which he might, she could be the age of this young woman who’d served him chili and crackers and later smiled at him with all her face as he left her a twenty for an eight-dollar meal.