Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  “No, I’m all set.”

  Daniel reaches for his new money clip and flicks out a C-note. “Take a ten from this.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The kid reaches into his front pants pocket and pulls out his own wad and counts out ninety dollars in tens and fives and ones. Daniel ate those crab cakes too fast, and he can feel them sitting in his gut, but they’ve also absorbed most of the wine and he’s more clearheaded now but tired. Part of him is tempted to drive straight back to his inn and get a good night’s sleep. Drive over to his daughter’s place in the morning after another shower, after some eggs and coffee. But he left a message on her machine tonight, and he thinks of something Pee Wee used to say. He would make a good move on the board then slap his knee: “See how I roll, brother? You can’t sit there when it’s time to move. You got to move.”

  Then Daniel’s walking to his truck, his keys in his hand, his legs heavy beneath him. The air smells like car exhaust and chlorine, and he hears again that message on his daughter’s machine: You’ve reached the Dunns. Leave a message. Thanks.

  And what did he say? He told them he’s here. Like that’s a good thing. And it might be. But for who?

  His Tacoma is parked beside a small black car beside a blue van, its roof covered with canoes or kayaks. White Christmas lights hang from the top rail of a latticed fence behind a row of palm trees, and he hears a kid yelling and splashing in one of the outdoor pools. There’s low jazz coming from speakers somewhere and as he opens the door to his truck he sees through palm leaves and pressure-treated lattice the torso of a woman leaning against the pink stucco wall, one arm under her breasts, the hand of her other holding the knob of an exterior door. Linda standing under the eaves of the arcade having a smoke. His wife he watched from the roof of the Frolics because he was no longer right in the head.

  And that’s what he needs to tell his daughter right now. He needs to leave this haunted place and drive to her house and tell her, I was crazy, honey. I was sick.

  Daniel climbs behind the wheel of his truck and starts it up and puts it in reverse. From here he can only see the woman’s legs and hips, her bare arm under her breasts, her hand on the doorknob like she’s getting ready to run through that doorway or to let someone out. She stands as still as if she’s a snapshot from another time, and he looks behind him and backs into the golden light of the domed archway, the valet in white waving at him as he drives away.

  67

  HE’D LOOKED at her. He’d stopped at his red truck, and he’d looked at her through the palm trees and the fence. She could only see part of his face, but he sure as hell was looking at her, and then he got into his shitty little pickup truck and drove away. It was like he’d grabbed her hair and held on to it and was dragging her down the street alongside him. How could he not know he was seeing her? She recognized him. How could he not recognize her? Or did he? Did he know it was her and then lose his nerve?

  And that suit. Jesus Christ, he looked like a retiree on the prowl for a rich widow. He looked like a fucking player.

  Then Bobby was walking under the light of the domed porte cochere and she let go of the doorknob and heaved air, her hands on her knees, a filtered cigarette butt between two paving stones at her feet. She spat onto those stones. Then she wiped her mouth and walked out to where her husband was calling her name.

  THE SKY had darkened. On this side of the bridge over the bay there were smaller homes on the water, the lights on in only half of them because wealthy people used them for just a few weeks every winter. There were palm trees bottom-lit with security lamps, and the deepwater docks had green starboard lights and red portside lights, and Susan did not want to go where she and Bobby were going. She wanted to be back on Saul’s yacht but without Saul. She wanted to be curled up alone in his stateroom bed with a book and a glass of wine—no lovers, no husbands, no fucking father.

  Just the slow rocking of the boat. Like she was lying in the arms of a woman, a woman who loved her.

  68

  IT’S FULL night now, just a smudge of purple on the horizon in his rearview mirror. On both sides of the bridge the lighted homes of the lucky sit on the bay, and Daniel pulls his new sunglasses from the top of his head and lays them in his passenger’s seat. The Isla del Sol Yacht & Country Club stretches off to his left, its large embossed sign lit from the top and the bottom, and he thinks of all those people back in that grand hotel built in another time—McGonigle and Johnny Sills and Mike White. Pee Wee Jones and Polaski and Lois, too. His mother-in-law Lois, his wife Linda behind the palm trees and fence and small white lights, her one arm under her breasts.

  Linda jerking her arm away. Let go. You’re hurting me! Those three words echoing inside him all through the hours and days after she’d scream them. The last thing he ever wanted was to hurt her—was he sure about that? Didn’t part of him want to hurt her?

  No, he wanted her to feel what he felt, that’s all.

  Well then he should’ve stabbed himself.

  The bay’s behind him now and he passes a small plaza that looks soft under halogen lights. In red neon letters is Tokyo Bay Japanese Restaurant & Sushi, and Daniel glances at the front windows, sees an Asian woman at the register, her black hair pulled up in a bun on her head. He needs to tell Susan that he has lived alone, that he has tried to live right. He has. But this suit he’s wearing, it’s a mistake. He shouldn’t be wearing it. He looks like a man who’s doing well, has done well. And he hasn’t. He’s lived alone, and he’s been so—

  His hips seem to be pressing on his insides, on his liver and kidneys, on his bladder and lethal prostate, on the very time he has left. And he’s already reached Susan’s school. Up ahead on his right, through the pines and oaks, the guard shack is a box of light and the buildings beyond it glow tall among the palm trees like the old looking over the young. It looks like a place where only good things are supposed to happen, and it’s where his daughter is a teacher, a professor, his Susan. Linda’s Suzie Woo Woo. Who is he to dirty up this place now?

  The traffic light goes from yellow to red, and he brakes and wants to turn around and drive back to his inn and change into his clean and wrinkled work clothes. He’ll look more like himself then. He’ll look like a man who has lived small and alone and learned to bear it the way he learned to bear those twenty-two-foot concrete walls and that one patch of sky. The way he learned to bear living in the skin of the man who did what he did.

  There’s the wet rattle of a diesel engine to his left, a white F-150 idling beside him. The windows are rolled up, and in the passenger’s seat a woman is talking. Her hair is short and gray, and she wears glasses and seems upset about something, like she’s telling whoever’s in the driver’s seat just what she thinks about what he or she said or did. Daniel leans forward and can make out a man in a baseball cap. His face is dimly lit from the dash lights below, and he’s nodding his head like he’s in full agreement with whatever the woman’s saying. Either about him or someone else, it doesn’t matter, he’s agreeing with her. About everything.

  Liam and Daniel’s mother, that’s what Daniel sees. Liam, who never raised a hand to his wife, but who treated her like she was a radio playing. And sometimes he’d nod his head at what came out of that radio and he’d wait for the radio to serve him a plate and take it away. Who knew what happened in their bedroom when Danny was asleep or reading his comic books under the light of his bedside lamp, but it was hard to picture them having what Danny had had with Linda, their eyes on each other the whole time, every word or sound that came from his Linda a small treasure to Danny.

  He wasn’t like his old man. He never ignored his wife.

  No, he just watched her like a fucking eagle.

  Heat from old rusty pipes moves into Daniel’s hands on the wheel. Letting the Reactor out was always so easy, so simple and clean, bad feelings burned and beaten away with swift bad action. But it was like the tide, it kept coming back, one wave after another, and yes, the only reason he’s been abl
e to stay Daniel all these years is because he’s put himself in his own solitary. And how he wishes to see his mother right now. To sit beside her in front of one of her shows that made her laugh. Her thinning hair and housecoat. How she’d talk to the TV characters like they were her friends in the living room with her and her grown son, the felon, the killer, The Hammer of Hell.

  Daniel is at a full stop now, and he waits for a motorcycle to shoot past him on his left, then he turns into the neighborhood of well-kept yards and houses where his daughter lives with her family. Think of that. Her own family. Without him or her mother or any of the people she came from. On her own. By herself. He can only admire her for this. And can’t he just tell her that?

  His palms are damp on the wheel, his tongue thick and dry, that fine wine now a sour lining in his throat. Never before has he been this afraid. Not facing Chucky Finn and others like him up to Walpole. Not watching Mike White cut open for the balloons in his gut. Not even at his sentencing while he waited for the judge to tell him his fate, Danny’s hands cuffed in front of him, Linda’s family behind him, Liam and his mother too.

  At the bottom of the street there is no stop sign and Daniel turns slowly to his left. He rolls his front windows down and smells damp asphalt and grass. In the low house at the corner, the picture window has no curtains and a wide-screen TV is on. It looks like a western from when he was a boy, a handsome man carrying a long rifle, but the couch in front of that TV is empty, and he thinks of helping Elaine Muir down from the seat of his truck, how she talks to him like he’s a good man and always has been. When he gets back home, he will ask her to execute his will. She’s the one he will ask.

  His headlights flash on the corner sign for Osprey Lane, and as he takes the slow left onto it he can feel his arms trembling, a cool sweat beading in the center of his chest. He has never been brave. All those schoolyard fights then those on the inside, that was just Danny burning the fear before it ate him. But watching Johnny Sills walk out of the barbershop to calm armed Willie Teague, Polaski bleeding to death just yards away, that was brave. That’s nothing Daniel has ever done. Danny and Daniel have never walked slowly toward what scares them.

  The driveways of these places have cars in them now, and four or five houses up on the left Daniel can see that that Honda is still in his daughter’s driveway. It’s lit by a single flood over her front door, and in two of her back windows there’s dim lamplight. Is she reading in there? He pictures her lying in bed with a book. Reading the way her mother used to read. Is she reading to one of her kids?

  The last time he ever touched or saw her. Her little body jerked away from him.

  He’s getting closer and closer. He begins to ride the brake, waves of darkness passing through his head. Is he going to just pull into her driveway?

  No, he’s got no right.

  None. But he’s here, and fifty yards from his grown daughter’s house Daniel pulls to the curb of the opposite sidewalk and he kills the engine and his lights, and he waits. He closes his eyes and waits to decide what he’ll do next.

  69

  BOBBY WAS talking. There was acceleration and there was braking, there was the car turning left then left again, and there was his voice in the air like a bird flapping itself over the front and backseats. Like a fluttering madness. Like an unleashed sickness. But the madness and sickness were hers. Her husband was saying something about her father not being a registered guest, about how “wild” it was they’d parked right next to his “vehicle,” another word she’d never heard him use before, his voice as impassioned now as when he’d first sautéed spinach for her in hot olive oil in his red kitchen, when he’d smiled sideways at her and told her all about the genius of Coleman dispensing with recurring chords altogether, that nothing has to have a shape and form, that nothing comes back to where it started.

  Except he was wrong. She’d seen her father, and now, as she lay back in her seat, one arm across her forehead, she was small again, riding on his shoulders through all the loud bright magic that smelled like ketchup and cotton candy, like cigarette smoke and dead seaweed and fried dough. There was how she never wanted to let go of him. Ever. And there was how she wanted to run. His screaming. His loud voice when he yelled at—who?

  Mommy. Mommy, look!

  Her mother’s face. Her beautiful mother’s face, her eyes narrowing into slits. “Get away from me!” And she picked Susan up and carried her fast down the street and Susan only wanted to go back because—

  —because she’d loved him. She did. And he had not recognized her. He did not know her and he never would, and her mouth tasted like bitterness itself, the back of her teeth dry with bile, and Bobby’s big hand was on her knee now, the bird and car slowing as he drove up their street. “That’s the same truck, baby. That’s his truck.”

  It was. Bobby’s lights were on it, and Susan could see the rust on the rear bumper, the dusty letters and numbers of a Massachusetts license plate. And there was the back of his head and shoulders in the driver’s seat, too. Jesus Christ, her father’s shoulders. Her father’s big hands and his fucking letter. 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.

  No! It is not all right. It is not.

  “Stop, Bobby. Stop.”

  “Baby—”

  “I said fucking stop!”

  Her husband began to pull over and she had her door open and her leg out before the road stopped moving beneath her foot. Then she was up and out and walking onto grass then back into the street, her father’s small pickup truck in the bright lights of her husband’s car.

  “Susan, wait.”

  She kept her eyes on the back of her father’s head through the truck cab’s rear window, his big nearly bald head. Her legs and arms were water, her mouth ash, each step she took a wave rolling her into whatever was coming which was her father’s truck door opening and him rising slowly and turning into the light. This old man. This old man in a wrinkled suit and worn work boots, reading glasses hanging from his neck, his eyes close together and his ears sticking out. He was blinking into the glare of Bobby’s headlights like some night animal flushed out of the brush, and it was seeing the soft black guts of her shame itself; her very shame was standing there and calling her name, saying, “Susan? Suzie, is that you?”

  70

  DANIEL HAS to squint into the lights at the shadow walking toward him. Her hair is short, her hips small, and it’s seeing Linda walk again, the light swaying of her hips so that she seemed to glide through the strip on a current nobody else had. Nobody.

  Except her daughter. Look at her. His daughter.

  Here, just yards away from him, seeing him.

  At long, long last. Seeing her father, Daniel Patrick Ahearn.

  He has to steady himself on the armrest of his open truck door, and his voice rises from the center of his sick, yearning bones.

  “Susan? Suzie, is that you?”

  “Don’t call me that. You have no fucking right to call me that.” She stops. She stops and stands there. “Why are you here? Where do you get off coming here?”

  A man is walking up fast behind her. He’s tall and thin in a dark shirt and shorts, and he touches her shoulder then keeps coming. “Mr. Ahearn? I’m Susan’s husband. I’m Bobby Dunn.”

  His daughter’s husband is bald. His daughter’s husband stops just feet away. “We’re not sure what you want here, sir.”

  Daniel looks at the shadow that is Susan. Her arms are crossed now, and she stands as still as if she’s holding her breath. She stands as still as if he scares her. Scares her?

  But why wouldn’t he?

  No! Never. She should never be afraid of him. Ever. Not in a million lives. Is she? Is she afraid of him? The question itself is an iron hand squeezing then yanking his guts, his little Susan standing there as the knife clattered into the sink, her mother slumping to the yellow linoleum. Around their daughter’s mouth was a ring of c
hocolate ice cream, and she was so small, standing as still as she is now. Looking straight at her father and not moving because if she moved she would make what was happening real. It would be so real then. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Oh God.”

  It’s like his words are a lit cigarette he just pressed into her flesh and she’s already across the street and walking fast up the sidewalk, crossing both her arms like she’s freezing though the night is warm and smells like rain.

  Her tall husband turns and watches her go. Daniel has to lean harder on his open door, his hips on fire, his legs gone.

  He should go to her.

  The husband steps closer. Daniel can see his shirt is a T-shirt, that his legs are skinny and he has sandals on his feet.

  “Maybe I should talk to her, Mr. Ahearn.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I don’t want to cause trouble. I just—I’m sick, that’s all.”

  Daniel’s daughter’s husband stands there and waits. He just stands there and looks down at him like he’ll do this all night if he has to, and Daniel can see that he’s stand-up, maybe even as stand-up as Johnny Sills, who always gave him just enough air to move through without feeling he had to beg for it. Though he should have been made to beg for it, Daniel knows that. He wants Susan to know that he knows that.

  “I’m going to go talk to her. I’ll be right back, Mr. Ahearn.”

  Mr. Ahearn. Such strange words. The respect in them. Like it’s something he has a right to just because he’s the man’s wife’s father.

  But maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe she never told him what he did.

  Daniel squints into the headlights of the car her daughter’s husband walks quickly back to. He watches him climb in then drive past him and into their driveway beside the Honda. We’re not sure what you want here, sir. No, he knows. Daniel has a hard time swallowing, his eyes beginning to sting as his daughter’s husband glances back at him once before he steps into the light of their front door and walks inside.