Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  “And of course I don’t blame you for wanting to shoot him, Lois. But I’m awfully relieved you didn’t.”

  But something was off here. It made Lois lean forward and look more closely at Marianne. She was sitting on the other side of the desk in that cane chair from the 1800s, part of a set Lois had never found any matches for, so it had become Marianne’s, and she was sitting so straight and still it was clear she was holding something back. Lois didn’t like it. She didn’t like it one little bit.

  “Well.” Marianne glanced down at her lap, then looked back at Lois. “I suppose I can understand her wanting to at least lay her eyes on him, honey. He is—”

  “What? Her father? Don’t tell me he’s her father, Marianne. I was her father and her mother. Jesus, Mary, and Jos—how would you like it, Marianne? What if one of your precious sons was stabbed to death by his own wife?”

  “Oh, Lois—”

  “Don’t Oh, Lois me. Oh, I’m sure you’d be just thrilled about your grandkids going off to see that woman.” The next words, whatever they were, stopped in her throat. Her heart was an old peasant in a dark tent and just outside it was Susan, her small voice, Because half of me came from him.

  She was right about that. Loving and raising Susan was like loving a poisonous snake and calling it a kitten. But the kitten had been Linda, Linda who nobody seemed to remember but her. Marianne was uttering some kind of apology, but Lois was seeing her fifteen-year-old daughter on her hands and knees painting a straight red line onto the floor of her bedroom. She’d asked Lois first if she could do it, and Lois must not have been listening when she said yes because Linda was using real paint, bright red, but the floor was concrete anyway so why not? She’d rolled the throw rug and leaned it in the corner and she made Paul—five? six?—stay on his bed while she dipped the brush into the small paint can, then carefully drew the excess off on the lid and brought the brush down in smooth, straight strokes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and Lois could see her bra strap behind her sleeveless top, her daughter in cutoff jeans, her legs pale so it must’ve been winter because Linda lived in the sun all through the season. Chubby little Paul sat on his bed in a near-trance watching his big sister divide their room and doing it so calmly, telling him, “That side is yours, Pauly, okay? It’s like your own world. And this side is my world, okay? And I can’t go into your world without asking you first and you have to ask me, too. Okay?”

  Her Linda, who was always trying to head off trouble before it started, bringing Gerry a beer and watching TV beside him just so he wouldn’t yell at her mother. Dropping out of school to help in the arcade. Not telling her one word about the kind of man she’d married.

  Lois’s eyes burned, and she shook her head in the face of whatever her friend was saying because she was her friend. She was, and, “Oh, Marianne, I’m sorry. I’m just so—sorry.”

  64

  THROUGH THE smudged lenses of his work glasses, Daniel takes in words on his menu that make him feel like he’s back on the outside again for the first time, everything too bright and loud and in a language he never really spoke in the first place: baby kale, marcona almonds, and apple jus. Citrus soy gastrique and champagne mignonette and sherry maple gelée. On every line there’s a word he understands nailed to others he does not. Venison with a butternut puree and currant jus. There’s caviar from Siberia for a hundred twenty-five bucks. There’s lobster from Maine, a word that jumps out at him, but it’s buried in other words like pappardelle and leeks and truffle.

  “Anything look good, sir?” McGonigle’s little brother leans closer than before because the place is louder now, all those beers and glasses of wine and martinis kicking in, the big man beside Daniel still blocking his view of the woman who’s telling a story she keeps having to interrupt with her own laughter, and at the top of the menu are two words Daniel gets ahold of like a man being pulled along by stampeding strangers. He says, “Yeah, give me the crab cakes.” And the young handsome bartender takes away the menu and is back in the movement behind the bar.

  There’s a barback working there now too. He’s a skinny kid in a white shirt too big for him in the shoulders, and he has to work more than he should to lift a bucket of ice and dump it into the bin under the bar. Jesus saves, brother. Mike White, alive again, the kid’s tongue flicking his lower lip as he lifts a second bucket into the bin and raps the bottom of the bucket twice with the palm of his hand. And Pee Wee Jones right there at the end of the bar with his woman. Daniel leans past the big man, and he watches Pee Wee kiss his woman’s hand. She could be the one he drew naked, standing with her legs spread and her hands on her hips, this picture taped for years above Pee Wee’s bunk, and it’s good to see them together again.

  And the other bartender could be a close cousin to Johnny Sills. Pouring a bourbon for the man on the other side of the laughing, story­telling blonde, he has the same face, a kind of warm sadness beaten into it, like every bad thing that he’s seen has been the blacksmith’s hammer that’s made the face he now shows the world.

  McGonigle places a rolled linen napkin in front of Daniel, a silver knife and fork tucked inside like smuggled contraband. Then comes a plate of crab cakes drizzled in some orange sauce, and the smell of it is the smell of the strip, Linda and him standing in the doorway to the arcade and his wife jerking her arm away from him, her face a girl’s again, her eyes dark and narrow with fear, “You’re hurting me.” She touched her arm where he’d been holding her, and she turned and walked fast into the blue and red noise of video games and pinball machines, her coin apron tied in a neat bow above her rear. That carefully tied bow, that did something to him.

  You’re hurting me.

  She’d said it in the bedroom, too. She was in her pink nightgown, her hair down, her bedside lamp on, and her arm knocked against the shade as she jerked away.

  She said it on the beach in a black turtleneck sweater, again pulling herself from him, little Susan squatting in the low-tide sand in her winter coat looking for shells.

  And Linda said it in the kitchen right after he’d tried to give her a ruby ring he’d found in front of the Frolics. “That’s enough, Danny. Jesus, I can’t fucking breathe around you.” But why did she have to knock his hand away like that? Why wouldn’t he grab her arm then? Why wouldn’t he want her to feel how much she was hurting him?

  The bar noise has gotten so loud and constant, it’s like one long sound you get used to so much you hardly hear it at all. Like the Himalaya ride below him, those purple cars rattling along so fast on their greased tracks on worn plywood, all those screaming girls, their happy voices a steady, pounding rain.

  65

  SUSAN LAY on her husband’s side of the bed, her face in his cool pillow. When they got home, he’d brewed her herbal tea, and it still sat untouched in its mug on the bedside table, but she felt better. She was glad he now knew, though what they were going to do about it hung over them both like some looming threat. “Baby?” Bobby stuck his head inside the door. “You need to come hear this. You need to come listen to this right now.”

  The floorboards creaked under his weight as he turned and walked back in the direction he’d come from, which was the kitchen then his office and there were only two things to listen to in there and one of them was not playing. Susan swung her legs off the mattress and stood too quickly, the room a moving thing she rushed out of and down the hallway to her husband’s study. Bobby stood at his desk, his finger on the button of his voice machine. “It’s him.”

  She nodded, though she only meant this as an acknowledgment, not for Bobby to press that button, but he did and now came her father’s voice. He sounded younger than he should, and his accent was New England blue collar, his voice deep. I’m here now. That’s all. I’m here. The r dulled and dragged into the air of the click that followed, Bobby looking down at her like he was studying someone who’d just been shot in the chest. But then his hand was on her shoulder, and for the first time all day she did not want t
o pull away.

  Her husband picked up the phone beside the answering machine and pressed the star, the six, and the nine. Behind him, the shade was drawn, and on his desk under the glare of the lamp lay Lois’s pistol and bullets and new-looking box of shotgun shells, her shotgun leaning against one of Bobby’s stuffed shelves.

  This is—this is Daniel Ahearn, your—

  He couldn’t say it. She was glad he couldn’t say it. He should never be able to say it. Bobby wrote down a phone number. He hung up.

  “Bobby.”

  “Should we call it?”

  But she heard it like this: Should we call it quits? Should we just call the whole thing off? And there was a tilting, thickening flutter in her own blood that, yes, something was indeed growing inside her and it was her father. It was her own father. “Bobby.”

  “It’s your call.”

  No, not this time. Not now.

  He stood there taking her in a moment. His shoulders seemed more stooped than usual, and his small gut was more pronounced under his dark T-shirt. He looked like a middle-aged father to her. He looked like a man whose kids had already come and gone. She must’ve nodded because he punched in the number he seemed to have committed to memory. A woman answered. She could hear that, a woman. Was it his wife? Had he brought his fucking new wife?

  “I’m sorry. I have the wrong number.” Bobby poked the off button. He still held the phone at his shoulder. His face was shadowed but in the sideways tilt of his head she could feel his love of dark irony, of all disordered things making their own free sound. “He’s at the Don CeSar, baby. He’s staying at the Pink goddamn Palace.”

  SUSAN RESTED her knees against the glove compartment while Bobby drove. In their bathroom she’d brushed her teeth and rolled on some deodorant, and she’d been reaching for her blush and eyeliner when she pushed both away. Are you fucking kidding me? You’re going to make yourself look good for him? But nor did she want to look as lousy as she felt. In her bedroom she pulled off her top and found a clean bra and a black sleeveless blouse she never had to iron. She brushed her short hair and looked in the mirror over her bureau. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and the word wan came to her. She looked wan.

  Now Bobby was driving them over the bay, the water the color of cranberries, the darkening sky along the Gulf’s horizon torn into strips of purple and orange. He looked over at her and nodded at her belly. “We gonna talk about that?”

  He was staring at her, and she wanted to tell him to keep his eyes on the road. “Yes. But not right this minute, Bobby. Later, though, okay?”

  His eyes stayed on her, his shadowed face showing nothing, and he half nodded and looked straight ahead.

  “Thank you.” Susan’s mouth was dry. She crossed her arms under her breasts as if she were cold when she was not, and she was looking across the water at the sandstone mansions behind royal palm trees, the white motor yachts moored in front so much smaller than Saul’s, and she was seeing her father as she’d last seen him. It was the way he stood on the sidewalk under the sun in front of his parole officer’s building; it was like he didn’t know what to do next until he was told to do it. And he had long sideburns and a hooked nose, everything about him big and thick, his hands and feet, his shoulders and forearms. There was how he’d glanced down the street in her direction, his twenty-one-year-old daughter sitting at that restaurant table watching him from her window, then how he stepped into the street and began to cross without moving his arms much. It was like part of him was tied up and locked away.

  The road sloped down toward Gulf Boulevard, and off to the left the Don CeSar was an eight-story palace the color of Pepto-Bismol, its highest structure four bell towers under thick tile roofs, each window of its hundreds of rooms glowing. Susan had never stepped foot in there before because it was the kind of place Saul would’ve put them up in. It looked like the wet dream of a rum-running gangster from the 1920s, it looked like the last gasp of the Jazz Age, like a pink Christmas tree, and she felt sick again though there was nothing left to throw up. Folded in her lap was what she’d printed out just before she and Bobby left home, her young father in a suit and handcuffs, a cop on each side of him in the courthouse doorway.

  The light, thank God, turned red, and Bobby pulled to a stop behind an old couple on a Honda motorcycle. “I don’t think I can do this, Bobby. I really don’t.”

  “You don’t have to, baby.”

  “But, he’s fucking here.”

  “Do you want me to go find him? You can wait in the car, and if you change your mind, we’re gone.”

  The light switched to green, and the couple on the Honda turned left and Bobby followed them, slowing for the right turn into the entrance for the Don CeSar.

  “Okay? You wait in the car?”

  “Okay.” Her voice sounded young to her own ears. The motorcycle couple accelerated past the hotel and Bobby turned into the softly lighted and arched porte cochere of the Don CeSar. Ahead of them a young valet in white held open the driver’s door of a black sedan for a silver-haired man in sherbet-colored golf clothes. Susan stared at him. His nose was straight, and he had the slender arms and legs of a natural athlete, and she swallowed and wanted water. Bobby was rolling down his window for that same valet, the black sedan pulling ahead.

  “Are you checking in, sir?”

  “No, I just need to run in for a minute. My wife’s going to wait out here, if that’s all right?”

  “I think so, sir.” The boy couldn’t be older than nineteen or twenty, and he was deeply tanned, his teeth orthodontically perfect. He looked like he was trying to decide something important, and he stepped back and pointed to the far corner where a red pickup truck was parked beside a blue van, its roof rack filled with sea kayaks.

  “Just pull over there for now, sir.”

  “You betcha.”

  It was not an expression she’d ever heard from Bobby before, and she could hear the charge in his voice, the adrenaline in it. He drove ahead and pulled in between the van and the truck.

  “I’m going to be sick again.”

  “You want to come in?”

  “No.”

  He switched off the headlights and glanced over at her. The engine was still running, and he wore the shorts and dark blue T-shirt he’d been in all afternoon, and she despised herself for this but she wished he looked a little more respectable. She wished he’d at least thrown on a sports jacket.

  “I’ll leave the AC on for you, baby.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead and took the printout from her lap. “I’m just going to see if he’s actually here. Back in a sec.”

  He climbed out of the car, and she turned and looked over the rear of the pickup truck to see Bobby walk quickly past the valet, lifting his hand to him like he was a regular customer. Then he was inside, and she made herself look straight ahead and breathe through her nose.

  I’m here now. That’s all. I’m here.

  Straight ahead was a row of potted palm trees up against a latticed fence strung with white lights. Beyond this, just before a ten-foot stucco wall with a door in it, was a round patio table and four or five chairs. It looked like a smoking area for some of the hotel’s employees, and she wanted a cigarette right now. It had been years since she’d smoked, but she craved one, the way the nicotine calmed her down and woke her up all at once. And what was Bobby doing now? Asking for her father’s room number? Would they even give it to him?

  A foul taste flooded her mouth, and she needed to move. She switched off the ignition and climbed out of her husband’s car and walked around the front of the red pickup to the smoking area behind the palms and lattice. In the center of the table a ceramic tray was stuffed with butts and ash. On the back of one of the chairs was a faded yellow sweatshirt, though it was warm now and she wanted a glass of water. Even a glass of wine. Two or three of them.

  From the other side of the high wall came children’s laughter, a splash in pool water. There was the low chatter of men and w
omen, the tinkling of glass and silverware. There was music, too, a smooth jazz trumpet, its piercing notes the comprehensible kind her husband refused to listen to. Under the warm light of the porte cochere, another valet ran past with car keys in his hand, and she leaned against the wall and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “Mommy! Mommy, look!” The child’s voice was like needles in the soles of Susan’s shoes. She turned and tried the knob of the door in the wall, but it was locked.

  She kept her hand on that knob. Mommy. Mommy. A man was walking under the lighted archway in this direction. Through the diamond-shaped holes of the lattice she could see sunglasses on his head, a suit jacket, and a white shirt. Hanging around his neck were a pair of readers, and in his right hand hung his car keys glinting in the light. He moved slowly, heavily, his arms nearly still in his suit jacket, and her abdomen seized up and her throat narrowed and she went as still against that wall as if she were a shadow.

  66

  THE VALET smiles at Daniel and pulls his truck keys from a pegboard in a case built into the wall. He glances to the far corner of the archway then back at Daniel. “Your vehicle’s right there, sir. Would you like me to drive it around?”