Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  Bobby Dunn nods slowly. “You have a will?”

  “I started writing it out.” Daniel sees Elaine Muir smiling down at him at the young doctor’s office. He thinks of when he hands her his will and asks her to help him, how she’ll see his daughter’s name and address down here in Florida, and then will come the questions she’ll have for him. All those damn questions—

  That he’s run from his whole life.

  “Do you have any other children, Mr. Ahearn?”

  “No. Just Susan. I was never with anybody but her mo—” Daniel exiles the word from his head. He swallows and looks at this man’s stereo system surrounded by books, and then something makes him look higher, to words painted in black on the wall. That’s how I have always wanted musicians to play with me: on a multiple level. I don’t want them to follow me. I want them to follow themself, but to be with me.

  “That’s from a jazzman I’m into. Ornette Coleman.”

  Daniel reads that last line again. Follow themself, but to be with me.

  A sharp but muffled sound comes through the wall, like a drawer slamming.

  “I should probably go talk to her.” Bobby Dunn moves to stand, but Daniel holds out his arm to stop him.

  “Tell her everything I got, it’s what my mother left me. Tell her it’s from her grandmother.”

  But then comes the squeak of a door on hinges, then fast light footsteps, and now his daughter is standing in the kitchen under its dull light, his daughter in her black blouse and blue jeans—the woman on the other side of the palm leaves and lattice up against the wall, that torso behind tiny white lights—he had stared at her, but he’d never seen her face. He needs to tell her that, because only now, for the first time, her face is not in shadow and he can see her, his grown Susan, and she’s even more beautiful than her picture. Her face is small, and her eyes are deep and dark, spots of gray under them, like she hasn’t slept in a long while, and she’s holding sheets of paper in one hand and reading glasses in the other. But she doesn’t look angry anymore. That game they would play when he’d pretend he couldn’t find her then pretend to cry, his hands over his face, Suzie running from behind the chair or out of their closet to stand in front of him. But I’m here, Daddy. See? I’m here. And through his fingers, her face was the face he’s seeing now, the very same one. It was like she’d needed something that only he could give her right then. Only him. And so he would make that moment last longer than he knew he should. He would make it last until it was almost too late. And he wants to make this moment last. He wants it to last another forty years.

  “Why did you do it?” Her voice is small. She holds up the pages of paper, and he can see the words and the crossed-out words of his own hand. “All this and—you never say why you did it, and—”

  Her husband stands.

  “You never say you’re sorry.” Her voice catches on that last word, and if she wasn’t standing right there Daniel would walk over to that desk and load that pistol and shoot himself in the heart. He would. Right this very minute.

  “I wasn’t right in the head. It was like I—” He looks over at Bobby Dunn. He’s looking down at him, his long arms hanging at his side. “I thought your mother belonged to me. I didn’t let her—”

  “What?”

  Daniel shakes his head. He tries to swallow but can’t. —follow herself. I just wanted her to be with me.

  “They never should’ve let me out, Susan. I wish they didn’t.” He makes himself look at her. He wants to stand, but he’s afraid he’ll spook her, that she’ll run off and never come back.

  He needs to tell her he loves her. He needs to just do that.

  She’s thinner than he’d thought she’d be, and darker, like she’s spent as much time in the sun as her mother used to. And he’s so grateful that she looks nothing like him. He’s so grateful that she lives so far away and always has. He’s so grateful that she never had to be close to Danny.

  He clears his throat. He makes himself look right into her face, and please no, no, but it’s Linda’s face, it’s her face right after he did it—so still, everything stopped, everything beginning to come so clear to her, and the thing is that that night he’d been trying to change himself. On the way home from work he’d told the voices in his head to shut their sick mouths. He told Captain Suspicion to leave him the hell alone: Linda Dubie was his. She had chosen him. She had given him little Susan. And when he walked into his house Linda was cooking fish. Haddock or cod, he doesn’t remember, only that it was white and sitting in a pan with slices of butter laid on it, ready to go in the oven, and Linda had already peeled the potatoes she was going to fry up, and she was getting ready to slice them, and Danny said, “Want some help?” And he’d taken the knife from her before she could answer and he started slicing the first potato and that’s when she said, “You’re the one who needs help, Danny.” Her voice was low, without enough air in it, and then she started saying other things to him and it was like a rock getting pushed off a hill, how it rolls slow then picks up speed, and he could see that everything she was saying to him she’d been rehearsing in her head for a long, long time. Long enough for the snake in his veins to know that every hissing word he’d been whispering in his blood was true because why would she be leaving him if she didn’t have someone to leave him for? And then he was squeezing her arm and she was pulling back, screaming, “You can’t stop me, Danny!” You can’t you can’t you can’t—but he’d been trying to change, hadn’t she seen that? Couldn’t she see that it wasn’t too late? He was trying to be a better man, and if he hadn’t he never would have started slicing that potato, and he never would have held in his hand what he’d held, and he never—ever—it would never—

  “I never loved anyone like her.” These stinging eyes. His shaking hand still on his money. Linda gone, his little Susan gone—

  “I never stopped thinking of you, Susan. All these years, I—”

  “I need you to leave.” She sets his letter and her glasses on the kitchen table. She stands there and crosses her arms under her breasts.

  He needs to say the words.

  He looks over at his daughter’s tall bald husband. He’s no longer looking at him like a scientist. His eyes are on his wife in the kitchen, and even in this dim room Daniel can see the love there. He can see that he loves her, that he cares for her.

  He can see that he would never do anything like Danny did.

  “Okay.” Daniel sets his water glass on the coffee table. He leans forward and has to push on the arm of the sofa to stand, his new pants cuffs sliding to the tops of his work boots. His jacket feels bunched up around his shoulders, and a hot pain shoots through his abdomen, and he must look like a dressed-up clown. Like an old fool. He’s still holding the clipped money in his hand, and he holds it out to this Bobby Dunn, and he takes it.

  “We don’t want that.”

  Daniel turns in the direction of his daughter’s voice. He’s about to tell her that it’s from her grandmother, but that’s a lie. The money is from him. Every cent earned weaving cane from one ancient hole to another. Under the hot sun or in his shed out of the rain, sometimes snow, the ticking of it against his window, an actor narrating history for him, telling him all about the lives of people who came long before him, of men who did good things and of men who did things as bad as he did, over and over again, so many of them so many times, and who got the worst of it? The women and the children. It was always the women and children. Like Susan stepping back and to the side, his path to her door clear now. He wants to tell her that she used to sit on his lap and listen to his heart. Does she remember that? Does she?

  Then say it.

  He glances back at her husband. Daniel takes a breath that does not enter his chest, and he walks into the light of his daughter’s kitchen with the red walls. He’s close enough now to touch her. If he stops here, he’ll be able to reach out for her hand, or even her arm. Maybe he could just touch his fingers to her shoulder. Feel the warmth of her
skin. But her arms are crossed, and she’s looking at him the way she did the last night he ever saw her. Like nothing could be worse than what was happening now, and she has to stand as still and quiet as possible or she will die. And he has to move as slowly and light on his feet as he did then, as he made his way to their yellow telephone, stepping past his Suzie without touching her, without saying a word, not until after he dialed and asked for help and Suzie was saying, “Mommy? Mommy?” then he lifted his daughter and carried her away and laid her down and picked up a book and read her a story.

  At the door he turns to her. This lovely woman. This woman in black in this red room. You never say you’re sorry.

  Say it. Say it now.

  Her husband Bobby Dunn moves into the kitchen. He’s still holding Daniel’s cash in his hand, and Daniel wants to give him the rest in his other pocket too. He wants to finish his will and come back just long enough for her daughter’s husband to take a copy because this man’s wife is the best thing that ever came from Danny Ahearn. The only good thing. The one thing that will live on he won’t want anybody to ever forget.

  His hand is on the knob.

  A cool trickle slips down his back. He says, “Thank you for—”

  She’s looking right at him. His breath snags in his throat. “I don’t deserve you. I never did.”

  He steps outside and closes the door shut behind him. The floodlight lies across their two cars, his truck in shadows up the street, and it’s as if he’s pulled a blanket up to his daughter’s chin and kissed her good night then stepped into his coffin and pulled down the lid. He stands there and smells rain-damp palm bark and concrete and grass. A car passes in the street, its headlights becoming taillights then nothing. And in that nothing he needs to go back inside and tell her three words. Just three. He turns and almost raises his hand to knock on the door, but he does not. He pulls his suit coat closed and he walks back to his old truck waiting for him in the near-dark, waiting for him like a mute but loyal friend.

  PART

  SIX

  75

  ONCE, WHEN Susan lived alone, her darkness coiled around her, she got very sick. It may have been the flu, she didn’t remember, only that her bed had become a lone mattress on a hot endless sea and the days were long, the nights longer, and nobody even knew she was gone and who would miss her?

  Noni would. Yes, her long-suffering grandmother would, though how could Lois also not be relieved? Oh, the shit she put that woman through.

  Susan’s father standing in the kitchen in his suit and work boots, his glasses hanging around his neck, his hand on the doorknob. I don’t deserve you. I never did. And when the door pulled shut behind him, some tight cord that had been keeping Susan in place since she was a child snapped and she dropped to her knees and sounds came out of her that should never come from a living thing, Bobby trying to lift her up, his hands on her and Susan jerking away as if he were Gary because Bobby was full of shit: All chords recurred and when you tried to stop it, nothing was ever resolved and this would never be resolved because she did not want that man to leave, she didn’t, and yet she would not rise and go to that door, and the sounds kept coming from her when none had come from her mother, her mother just lay there curled up and quiet and she never even said goodbye. No kiss. No smile. Not her fingers on Susan’s cheek or in her hair. And then her father was carried away, screaming and screaming her name.

  I never stopped thinking of you, Susan. All these years, I—

  And she told him to get lost. C’mere, get lost. But she had to, for she could not bear to—

  What?

  Love him. Even after he’d done what he did. Because behind whatever she’d just yelled at him in her house, even behind what she’d asked him, her need for a clear answer so sharp it had pierced her, she could feel that old love for him lying inside her like some lake hidden deep in the woods.

  And now the brush and high weeds had been pulled away, and she had not left her bed in two days, maybe three. For how could she love him and still love the woman he had forever taken from her? “My little Suzie Woo Woo.” Her mother’s tanned, beautiful face up close. Her fingertips rubbing a damp towel against Susan’s head. And there was this: her mother’s voice in two places at once, Susan laying her cheek against her breast as her mother read to her, and so her mother’s voice was in the air where the picture book was, but it was also in her body where Susan could hear the beating of her heart.

  Oh how could her mother have chosen someone who would do that to her? How could she have had a baby with a man who would do that?

  Those two times before, Susan didn’t allow herself to even think the word baby. Instead, what was growing inside her was the eternal fusing to a boy she no longer wanted anything to do with. Or at least that’s what she’d told herself, that it was the boy she’d refused to love.

  It was yesterday morning when Bobby finally brought it back up again. For a day and a half he’d been letting her sleep or just lie there, curled up under the sheets, her back to him, her back to the door that opened into the hall that led to the kitchen she’d only stepped into once or twice since her father left it. Bobby had just brought her a plate of sliced peaches and set it on the bedside table. He was dressed for work in sandals and khakis that needed ironing and one of his new Bermuda shirts under his gray sports coat. After he’d set down the peaches, he stood there staring down at her and she was staring at the tiny green parrots printed all over the yellow material of his shirt.

  “I know you’re working some shit out right now, but Susan—”

  Something changed in his voice then. It made her look up at him. He’d just shaved, and his cheeks appeared smooth and clean, but his eyes were dark with something she’d never seen in him before.

  “A woman I was with a long time ago—” He stood there quiet. He cleared his throat. “She got rid of ours without telling me. We weren’t right for one another, but baby—” Bobby knelt down and rested both hands on the mattress, his face a foot away from hers. “I would’ve loved that child. Do you hear me, Susan? And I didn’t get a chance to love it, and what’s better than getting a chance to do that?”

  He looked at her a full minute, maybe more, and it was as if he couldn’t leave until his question was delivered as deeply inside her as his own seed.

  When Bobby had been gone for hours, Susan pulled out her laptop and opened what she’d been writing and read it. It was sixty pages long, and it was nothing like what she’d been trying to write her entire adult life. It was not fiction, or literature of any kind, but it struck her as honest, at least. Because, reading it, what came clear to her was that she’d also been a girl lost in woods that held a lake she’d always sensed was there but could never step into.

  But how had she gotten so lost? She still did not believe it was as simple as who her father was and what he had done. She needed to keep writing about this. She did, though she suspected there would be no answers in it for her.

  These tender breasts, this fatigue, her nausea and not wanting to even eat a fresh slice of peach, it had to have happened before she went back to stay with Lois. It meant she’d skipped taking her pills in those horrible weeks when she’d felt nothing. The pregnancy had begun then, just before Susan cut her hair and wrote her first line about looking for her father. In the midst of her deadest time, she’d become pregnant with both at once.

  Last night she emailed these pages to Diana Clark. She wrote no note to go with it, just this in the subject line: Tell me what you really think—xo, Susan. Then first thing this morning, right after she’d used the bathroom, she went into her red kitchen for a slice of bread and she glanced at the door the way the survivor of a car accident might glance at a stretch of highway covered with bits of broken glass. In her writing room she sat at her desk and opened her laptop. She only had one email, and it was from Diana Clark. There was a tremor in Susan’s fingers. On the subject line were two words: Your book!

  There were two full paragraphs,
and she read them quickly, for there were far too many words of praise. It was like having someone analyze the way you breathed, or walked. Or died.

  But on the last line came the Diana whom Susan had really sent this to. Not Diana the rigorous reader, but Diana the woman who was the age her mother would have been, the woman who wrote: Honey, why didn’t you tell me any of this?

  It was hard to swallow the bread. Susan read that line over two or three times, her eyes filling, for there was such love in that question, nothing but love.

  She shut her laptop and lay on the sofa. Outside, the wind was picking up. She could hear it pushing against the windowpanes, and through the curtains the sky looked yellow. She closed her eyes. She did not want to sleep any more, but once again a heaviness settled into her legs and belly, and she curled onto her side and then she was waking up, her shirt sticking to her back. Outside, rain blew against her windows. She pressed her hand against her abdomen. On her desk the little green light of her laptop turned as steadily on and off as breathing. Bobby’s face a foot from her own, his bald head and the deep need in his eyes that did not feel grasping; instead, it was like he was sharing with her a very important secret.

  A car drove by. She could hear water sluicing out from under its tires, her father probably back north now. That worn red pickup truck. His sick body that wouldn’t be here much longer. She closed her eyes and what came were her ankles in stirrups, that old fluorescent light above her so bright but far away. She stood and walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was a bottle of white wine in there beside a yogurt, and for a long while she looked at both. The fridge’s motor turned on with a low electric moan. Then she reached for the yogurt and, slowly, she ate that yogurt standing up, her eyes on her front door.

  Epilogue

  IT’S A Sunday in May, less than an hour past dawn, and through the trees the early morning sun glints off the river. It must have rained farther north because Lois can hear the water hissing past its banks. The fossil hunters will be out soon, and as much as they’ve irked her over the years—their damned excited voices over the old bones of dead animals—she will miss sitting on her screened porch and watching their bright canoes drift through the pines and oaks.