Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  The closest building is coming up and Daniel steps over a curb onto short grass then a concrete sidewalk under a long canopy. There are floor-to-ceiling windows and inside is a gym under fluorescent lights, boys and girls lifting weights together, pedaling stationary bikes, one kid with a shaved head kicking a long black heavy bag with his bare feet. His hands are wrapped in bandages, and his T-shirt sticks to his chest and stomach, and Daniel knows there’ll be a toilet in there somewhere for sure.

  He steps to the side as an Asian girl in sweats walks out one of the side doors and he walks in. In front of him is a long desk, a kid sitting behind it staring at a computer screen. Against the wall is a glass cooler full of colored drinks in plastic bottles. The open gym door is next to it, a radio playing rap music in there—another pissed-off kid shouting his street meanness—the thwump, thwump of the heavy bag getting kicked, a girl’s voice in there too, and Daniel needs to piss now and not one minute later. He steps up to the counter. The kid takes his time looking up, and again there comes that same old feeling, that Danny has to get permission before he can do anything, even take a piss, this time from a boy with big arm muscles busting out of his T-shirt.

  “Faculty?”

  It’s like the kid just said something to him in a secret language. The boy’s got black hair and he hasn’t shaved his chin and cheeks, just his throat.

  “No, I need to use the bathroom.”

  “There’s one on the second floor. Down the hall on your left.”

  Daniel’s groin is a cloud of stinging bees, and he knows he won’t make it up the stairs. A sweating boy and girl walk out of the gym door and down a hall he hadn’t seen. Screwed into the concrete wall is a sign: Men’s Locker Room—Women’s Locker Room, a single arrow pointing in the same direction. “Buddy, it’s an emergency. Can I just use the locker room down there?”

  “You a visiting parent?”

  A wave of heat passes through Daniel’s head. “I’m just visiting.”

  The kid looks him over, and Daniel’s glad he shaved this morning. He’s glad he wore his good polo shirt with only the slightly frayed collar. He’s glad he’s still got his work glasses hanging around his neck so he looks like the harmless old bastard he is, and the kid says, “Okay. Just sign in when you come back, sir.”

  Sir. Another good sign. And so is this buzzing that pops free the half door Daniel is hurrying through now with his shaving kit, the radio rap louder, the smells of damp rubber mats and disinfectant and sweat. A girl’s voice again, and what if his Susan’s in there? What if she’s exercising in there right now? He moves quickly down the narrow hallway. The walls are covered with framed glass portraits of basketball players and baseball players and soccer players, all of them bunched up in organized rows smiling into the camera. Some of them have their arms around each other’s shoulders, and there’s a look in their eyes like they know they’ll all remember this as a good time in their lives, a good time that they earned and that promises even more good times ahead, and it’s funny what comes to him now, Pee Wee Jones and him standing side by side in a row of cons in front of the Threes, the Winter Hill gang behind them, the North End Italians on one end, the Charleston crews on the other. There’d be the Panthers and the misfit loners nobody bothered with. There’d even be the strangler-of-women McGonigle standing there with his sideburns and long black hair greased back, the screws standing behind them all, the bullies and sadists like Polaski, Sills alive again, the only stand-up CO in this framed photo of extortionists and junkies and rapists and thieves, of dealers and stickup artists and onetime murderers like him, Daniel Ahearn, who, as he walks into this college locker room for young men, feels that old angry sadness rise up in him like the ringing echo of a door slammed in his face.

  The first stall is open, and Daniel is pissing blood before he can even latch the door behind him. It burns too. And the hot ache in his back and legs seems to be pulled into a funnel through what he holds in his hand. On the wall is an ink drawing of a hard cock shooting seed at a spread-open pussy, and it’s forty years ago and he’s staring at that wall drawing in his jail cell on the beach after going after Jimmy Squeeze’s brother, the way Linda hadn’t followed him as the two cops muscled him along, how she just stood there and raised two fingers to her parted lips and watched him go.

  She didn’t love him. She was afraid of him, and he should’ve left her right then, but he was weak. And now he’s weaker. Not just his legs. Or this sick, gut-sucking release behind his navel. But that old need is back, that heart-clutching, air-stealing, skin-tightening pull to be with the one who will love him.

  Before it’s too late.

  Before he’s gone for good.

  Susan. Suzie Woo Woo. Her high, concerned voice as he sat on the couch and pretended he was crying because he couldn’t find her, his hands covering his face. “I’m here, Daddy. See?” Her fingers touching his over his eyes and nose and mouth. “I’m here.”

  51

  BOBBY’S KITCHEN walls were red. This was something Lois must have noticed last Christmas, but she didn’t remember that now as she tried to catch her breath at Susan and Bobby’s small table as he filled her a glass of water from the sink. When she was in their bathroom, the sun came out, though it was still raining and her hair and dress were damp and she couldn’t stop shaking. Bobby set the glass in front of her. “Just a sec.” He stepped into his study and came back with a light wool blanket he draped over her shoulders. She thanked him. Or maybe she only thought it, because he didn’t say anything, just sat down across from her, the sun coming through his front window and shining across the top of his bald head.

  He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt, and he rested the elbows of his hairy arms on the table and looked at her like he was waiting for her to start talking. If anyone else was doing this—Marianne especially—Lois would stand and leave or tell them to look some-damn-where else. But she didn’t feel this way with Susan’s husband. She didn’t feel that way at all. Turned down low in his workroom was that crazy, messy jazz he liked so much. It sounded so out of tune to her. It sounded like a bunch of drunks playing toy instruments on a sinking ship. She shouldn’t trust a man who liked to listen to this, but she did. Not since her Don had she felt this way about a man, and now she was crying again, the same helpless blubbering that had carried her to his door. She lowered her face and shook her head, and Bobby got up and tore a paper towel from its dispenser and sat back down with it, one of his hands laying itself warmly over her own. She took the paper towel and blew her nose. “She has no damn idea. No kids of her own, so she hasn’t got a clue, Bobby. Not one.”

  “You should drink some water, Lois.”

  “What it’s like. To have someone do that to your own flesh and blood. She has no idea. If she did, she wouldn’t even think of meeting with—Jesus, I can’t even say his name.”

  “She hasn’t met with him yet.”

  A white bird rose up into Lois’s head, its wings flapping. “Then where is she?”

  “Picking us up some food. I called her when you were in the bathroom.”

  Lois cupped both hands around the glass of water. “I need to see that letter, Bobby.”

  “I guess that’s up to Susan.”

  “What has she told you?”

  “Everything, I believe.”

  “When?”

  Bobby shook his head once. From his workroom came the screaming of a saxophone and he seemed to be listening to it as if he couldn’t help himself, its ugliness beautiful to him, and Lois felt ugly sitting there across from him. Not her damp hair and lack of makeup. Not her aging sagging everything, either. No, it was the naked ugliness of her own private story, of her history as a mother who had failed her one and only daughter. The tears came again, and she pressed the paper towel to her eyes until they ached and dark mushrooms bloomed behind her eyelids.

  “That must’ve been hell for you all, Lois. I’m so sorry it happened.”

  Lois took in as much air as she could. She
was too warm under this blanket, but she didn’t want to take it off, either. She lowered the paper towel and drank some water and set the glass back on a table that seemed far away and too close.

  “Did she tell you that she was there? Because we think she was. We think she saw it with her own eyes.”

  Bobby seemed to go quiet and still with concern, and it was plain to see how much he loved his wife. “I don’t think she remembers much.”

  “Well, I remember. And if she had any feelings for me whatsoever she wouldn’t even think of seeing that murderer.”

  “She loves you very much, Lois.”

  “Bullshit.” Anger opened up inside her as suddenly as an old friend shoving a baseball bat into her hands. “All she’s ever loved is books. Books, books, and more fucking books. She doesn’t even love herself. All those—” One boy after another after another. In Lois’s head there was a parade of them, their needy eyes fixed on her Susan, losers and degenerates all. “I hope you know what you’ve gotten into with her, is all I can say.”

  “I do. I think I do.” Bobby half nodded and half smiled.

  “You think? You’d better damn well know, Bobby, I’ll tell you that. Jesus Christ, I gave that girl all I had. You think it was easy raising her? Well, it wasn’t. It sure as hell wasn’t. And I never wanted to move down here. I did it for her. To keep her safe. To start over so I wouldn’t—” She was crying once more, covering her face with the damp paper towel, the blanket slipping off her shoulders. That music was all drums now, the sticks banging not on the skins but on the metal edges in a rhythm Lois knew all too well, fast and uneven and everything about to tip over the edge. It was the sound of her fear coming back in full force, of her bottomless jagged regret for not protecting her Linda, as if those shattered weeks after she was taken from her were not forty years ago, and Lois wished she were sitting in her shop right now, surrounded by antique furniture and toys stacked to the ceiling, surrounded by the smells of polished chestnut and old tin and vinegar-cleaned mirror glass, her dehumidifiers gurgling quietly in the corners, Marianne dusting all these lovely things made so well they had lasted and lasted and would continue to last.

  Bobby pulled the blanket back up over her shoulders. Outside a car pulled into the driveway, and the sound of its engine shutting off rode right into Lois’s heart like the echo of a cry she should have heard a long, long time ago but did not. Oh, Lord, she just did not.

  52

  LOIS’S VW was parked just inches alongside Bobby’s car, but it was so good to see it here. Susan pulled up behind it and killed her engine then hooked her laptop strap over her shoulder and reached for the pizza and salads she’d picked up on the way home. In the bathroom of the pizza shop, she’d heaved three times, but nothing had come, and now the first thing she was going to do was apologize to Lois for leaving last night like that, and as she rose out of her car and pushed the door shut with her hip, she looked up and down her street. It was empty, the sun glistening on the wet grass. She could smell marinara sauce and damp concrete, and she began to feel a little queasy again, but there was a time-slowed holiday feeling to this day, like all things routine were being suspended so that something more impor­tant could take place, maybe even something good, and her father’s letter began to feel like nothing but the shred of a dream she shouldn’t have told anyone about because, Jesus Christ, maybe he wasn’t even coming down here at all.

  On her way up the driveway she glanced into her grandmother’s car. On the backseat lay a shotgun. On Noni’s pocketbook in the front was an opened box of Winchester shells. At first it was like looking at things as normal as a laundry basket and a bag of groceries, but now they were a cottonmouth coiled at Susan’s bare feet, the hot tines of a fork pinning her heart to her spine. Oh, no, you don’t, missy. Nope. No way. Years of Lois with her hands on the controls, and if she couldn’t control something, then she would just try to stop it cold, wouldn’t she? That night when she’d pulled open Gustavo’s car door and jerked Susan out by her hair, all of Noni’s transgressions over the years, large and small, how she’d just shrug and say, “So what?” never taking responsibility for anything, blaming everyone but herself. Susan yanked her screen door open. Her computer bag swung, and the pizza and salads on top of it began to tilt, but then Bobby was in the doorway and he took them from her, smiling and winking down at her, though his face changed as he took in whatever was on her face. Bobby was saying something positive about the food, setting it on the counter and reaching for plates, but Susan stood in the middle of her kitchen looking down at her grandmother looking up at her.

  “You brought a fucking shotgun to my house, Lois? Are you out of your mind?”

  Lois was hunched over the table, one of Bobby’s throw blankets draped over her shoulders. Her hair was thin and stringy, parts of her scalp showing, and she wore no makeup, so that her eyes had a loose, hound-dog look to them, her arms just withered tubes of flesh. In front of her was a glass of water, and Noni was clutching a crumpled paper towel in her liver-spotted hands, and it was clear she’d been crying, something Susan had not seen or heard since she was a little girl. Part of what had hurled her into this house receded like a wave pulled back out to sea, but she also stood there feeling tricked somehow. Controlled in a new, maybe desperate kind of way.

  “I told you I was gonna kill him.”

  Bobby looked at Susan, then went out the front door. From his study came the erratic wailing of Coleman’s plastic saxophone, and Lois’s face seemed to suck into itself, her eyes filling and spilling. She squeezed them shut and shook her head. “I can’t believe you want to see him. After what he did to your own mother. How could you, Suzie? Oh, how could you?”

  There was the muffled slam of one car door then another, the kitchen door opening, and Bobby carrying the shotgun and box of shells right past them both into his office. Lois covered her face with her hands, her blanket sliding off her bare shoulders and loose sundress. Her back had a hump in it Susan had not quite taken in before, but the skin of her shoulders looked nearly as smooth as a woman’s Susan’s age, the age Noni was almost exactly when it all happened, and she’d been carrying it since, carrying it and carrying it, all while raising this girl who couldn’t get away from her and her shop of “fine” things fast enough. Susan’s face felt funny. She was about to move closer and put her hand on Lois’s heaving shoulders, but Bobby was stepping back into the kitchen now. He’d turned the music off, and the only sounds were Noni sniffling and blowing her nose and saying, “I need a damn cigarette.”

  53

  DANIEL HEARS a shower running nearby and then he’s taking off his shoes and clothes behind a curtain with jumping dolphins on it. Voices now through the pounding spray. Young men. Just vibrations through the air as Daniel cleanses himself, rinsing all the soap down the drain at his feet and turning off the water. Steam rises off his skin. It feels tight and warm, and it matches the ache in his back and hips.

  A towel. He didn’t think of that. From the locker room come the voices of the young men, two or three of them, and one of them is laughing. “You are so fucking’gay, Peterson.”

  “Yeah? That chick wants me bad.”

  There’s more talk, and Daniel ignores it and jerks open the curtain and walks naked to the sinks. He’s looking for paper towels to use, but there are none, just a bank of electric hand dryers set into the wall, and he presses the big button of the one closest to him and the machine starts up and he squats and leans back so the hot air blows across his chest and belly, his penis and upper legs. He turns and lets it hit his lower back and rear, and he feels like a fool. Like an unprepared and sick old fool.

  One of the boys walks in. He’s wearing only shorts, his stomach muscles showing, and he glances over at Daniel like he sees this kind of thing every day when he’d rather not. Then another boy walks in, and the machine shuts off and Daniel is crossing the floor half wet and the kid steps to the side like Daniel’s the bull and he’s the matador.

 
Back in his stall he pulls on his boxers and khakis, the material sticking to his damp legs. He pats his front pocket for his cash and pulls his shirt over his head, then grabs his shaving kit and heads for the sinks where the two boys are. The one closest to Daniel is running gel through his short hair and spiking it up in the front with two fingers. These young men are lean and have muscles, and it’s hard not to think of what would happen to them both inside. Daniel pulls out his razor and shaving cream. Words come out of him he hadn’t planned on. “You two know where I can find Professor Dunn?”

  “What’s he teach?”

  It’s the one closest to him, pulling his hair up into a point before he levels it off with his hand and tries again.

  “She. English.”

  “I’ve never had her; you, Eric?”

  “I’m an engineer. We don’t do English.”

  “Sorry, man. That department’s over in Seibert Hall, though.”

  “Where’s that?” Daniel is combing back his hair. Standing in front of the mirror beside these two, he feels like a troll from some far-off woods and a time they’ve never even heard of.

  “Just across the quad, man.” The kid hooks his head to the right. “Fifty yards that way. You’ll see it.”

  Daniel nods. He wants to say thank you, but it’s like the kid just flicked his finger into Daniel’s heart. Fifty yards. One hundred and fifty feet. It was the distance between the Norfolk auditorium and the shop. He can be over to that hall in minutes. Forty years, and now he can be there in minutes. But he’s not ready. He needs to buy better clothes. He needs to—

  What? Think of what to say?

  Yes.

  Daniel pats shaving cream onto his face. He runs the razor under the water, but his hand is shaking like some kid’s, and what if he nicks himself? What if she sees him after all this time with blood on his face?