That’s why he bought the trailer. To be close to his folks.
And now here he is, standing in his fourth-floor hotel room looking out over Georgia’s darkness. Here and there is a faint glittering of light from a house window, maybe, or a far-off streetlamp on some residential road through the pines. Out on the black horizon a radio tower blinks its tiny red lights at him, and he can only see this as some kind of nagging reminder. He’s been on the road for over sixteen hours. The bones of his lower back feel dipped in some cruel fire that has not yet reached the rest of him but will, and in the bathroom behind him he’s turned the toilet water as red as that blinking light, yet he still feels the pressure to go, his mouth gummy, his eyes sending an ache back through his brain where there are only these words:
Rest, Ahearn. Sleep. Sleep till you open your eyes, then write out that will and type it and get the hell down to St. Petersburg. Get the hell down to Suzie.
36
IT WAS after nine when Susan pulled back up to the house, her headlights sweeping over Noni’s red VW still parked in front of the porch where she’d left it. The house was dark, and as Susan fumbled for the light switch there were the smells of dusty drapes and old cigarette smoke and last night’s chicken. She could feel the too-quickly-approaching time when this old place in the woods would probably be half hers, and she didn’t want it.
She was actually hungry but couldn’t take the time to eat anything. In the kitchen she flicked on the overhead light and opened the fridge and pulled out a foil-wrapped piece of chicken, but when she parted the foil its smell seemed to lift and tilt her organs and she shoved the chicken back onto its shelf and made her way up the dark stairwell, turning on her bedroom light and stepping into this place that had seemed to bring about all that was happening. At her feet was the empty gift bag that had held the shades for the two Dresden lamps sitting on her bureau, this entwined pair of porcelain lovers with electric cords wrapped around them like snakes. Should she take these now? No, she was only going back home until— Jesus. Until what? Was she really going to go meet her “father” ? The way he’d first signed his letter as Dad then crossed that word out and wrote Father, like he knew how much she’d hate him if he wrote Dad.
“You need to see him.” Bobby’s arm around her as they sat side by side on her bed after the high school parking lot. His knee against hers. His ease with the rage that she hadn’t felt coming.
“No, I don’t need to see him. He’s a piece of fucking shit.” She couldn’t sit any longer and she’d stood and paced the bedroom of her girlhood and she went off about what this man had taken. She said the word mother more than once, and she yelled about the grandparents she never knew, maybe cousins on that side as well. She yelled about there being no justice, and how she couldn’t believe you could do that to another human being then one day walk free. She yelled how she would never have had to move to this stinking little cow town in Florida, and that she wouldn’t’ve had to live with her depressed and controlling fucking grandmother her entire life, either. But as she’d yelled all these things in her calm husband’s whiskered presence, her throat sore, what kept coming, like a fever she could no longer deny, was the word LOVE, how her father had written it in capital letters and underlined it over the word Father and his name and how this opened a burning room inside her, and not just because it was cruel for him to have written it, but because, yes, oh, yes, she needed that word. And more, she needed to feel whatever was behind it, and so yes, she needed to see and maybe even meet the man who had written them, never mind what she’d written about that Susan Lori in Lawrence, Massachusetts, not needing to ever see him again. That was twenty years ago. Twenty years. And that’s when the tears came and she wouldn’t let Bobby hold her, but she said, “You have to be with me.”
“That’s fine, baby. That’s fine.”
On her made bed was her duffel bag she’d packed earlier, her closed laptop sitting on her desk like some portal that had conjured the very letter sitting in its envelope beside it, had conjured the man coming to see her “in a few days.” Killyourfatherwithit. Paul laughing at her as she ran out from under the Frolics into the cold sun. But all that she’d begun to write in this room felt thin now, like an instruction manual to a big necessary engine that had started on its own and now was taking her where she had to go whether she wanted to or not because blood-pumping life was always more real and insistent than mere words.
She sat at her desk and opened the letter and stared at his handwriting. It was the careful scrawl of a man who’d rarely been called to write anything in his life.
My dear daughter Susan,
Ive got no right to call you any of these things.
She folded the pages and stuffed them back into the envelope. Lois in her hospital bed. How she’d turned her face away and refused to talk to her anymore. It was the old Lois, the woman who when she looked at Susan seemed to see only bad things or bad things coming. The doctor was handsome and black. He said Noni had merely fainted, but she was dehydrated and her blood pressure was “alarmingly high,” her oxygen levels low, and they’d wanted to keep her overnight for observation.
When the ambulance had arrived, Noni was already coming to on the floor of their porch. “No way. I’m not going anywhere.” But her voice was weak, her face gray, and she let a big EMT press an oxygen mask to her mouth and nose then strap her onto a board that another EMT helped lift onto a gurney. And as Susan had followed the ambulance in her car she thought of her father beating up a man just for smiling at her mother, and it was probably a mistake to have told Lois. But when Bobby said she had a right to know, there came the smell of Noni’s hair as Susan had leaned down and hugged her at the kitchen table—like Carltons and old skin and dehumidified air from the store—as she apologized for having been a selfish little shit for going to murderous Gainesville without a thought about the pain that would’ve opened up inside Lois. No, it had been right to tell her about this letter, though Susan should’ve known what that would’ve done to Lois, what that would’ve done to the two of them.
“You’re going whether I like it or not, aren’t you?” Noni’s voice was reedy and came from high in her chest, but it had the same hot edge to it it’d always had. Her IV arm looked splotchy. Susan was sitting in the chair near Lois’s raised bed tray, and whatever stream of consistent peace that had begun to flow between them this past week now felt dammed up and Susan was Suzie all over again, staring into the hard eyes of her grandmother with nothing to say that she wanted to hear.
“I don’t know, Noni.”
“Oh, you know, all right.”
That’s when Lois turned away and that’s when Marianne walked in, her newly made-up face bright with concern. Susan thanked her, and she couldn’t leave that room fast enough.
Now she picked up the envelope and pushed it and her laptop into its case. She hooked the strap over her shoulder, grabbing her duffel bag off the mattress and switching off the light, but in the darkness of the hall she stopped and made her way down to the cool tomb of Lois’s bedroom. She found the overhead light and opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out the gun. It was heavy in her hand, its grip hard and checkered against her palm. She did not want it, but she could not leave it where Noni could get at it, either. She was old and she was weak, and Susan would probably be back here before she was even out of the hospital, but still.
She shoved it into the side pocket of her duffel bag and left her grandmother’s cold, cold room, the light flicking off under her hand.
37
LOIS LAY alone in her room waiting for the nurse she’d just buzzed for the second time, but everyone had become strangers to her: Susan and this calm distance in her Lois had never seen before; Marianne and her sudden lack of anything to say except, “Rest, dear. You really need to rest.” Even Walter had come by, and he stood there in his finery like he’d come straight from a dinner with bankers or other ranchers. His face was flushed from martinis and cognacs, and h
is turquoise bolo tie hung heavy around his lined neck.
They were all acting like she had a problem. Like there was something wrong with her. Her doctor had already come and gone, too. He was some young black kid with thick glasses, and he spoke in a low, careful voice, already an expert at giving bad news. So her blood pressure was up and her oxygen levels were down, so what? She was big and she’d been smoking too much and she was old, for Christ’s sake. She’d only fainted.
“We’d like to keep you for observation.”
“Nope. No way.”
“But why not, Lois?” Marianne was sitting in the chair beside the bed. Even for this, she’d worn a fresh outfit, a cream shift over navy blue slacks, her makeup reapplied, her hands folded primly in her lap.
“Stay out of it, Marianne. Please.”
The doctor—the name on his tag was Dr. M. Johnson—reached over Lois and checked her IV bag, then he looked back down at her as if she were a chore he didn’t have time for just now. “If you leave, Mrs. Dubie, it will be against my best medical advice. You’ll have to sign a form.”
“Fine. Bring it.”
But he left without another word, and Marianne sat there staring at her. “Lois.”
“Go home, Marianne. You, too, Walter. Jesus Christ.”
“C’mon, darlin’.” Walter had rested his hand on Marianne’s shoulder and he’d winked down at Lois and she’d looked away, but there was only the thin blue curtain separating her bed from her roommate’s, whoever the hell that was. Then Marianne’s cool hand had squeezed hers, and Lois jerked it out of its well-meaning but ignorant-as-hell grip because, once again, she did not know anything.
Imagine, dear Marianne, that one of your grown sons living his happy life down in Miami or out in Los Angeles actually never got to grow old enough to do that because someone who was supposed to love him, had signed on to live with him, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad, on and on, had killed him instead? And then imagine, Marianne—whose biggest problem is your rich husband’s roving fucking eye—then imagine that the person who did this to your baby is not executed like should have happened. No, instead he spends only fifteen years in a prison where they get to take classes and learn a trade. He’s even allowed to leave the place on weekends as long as he behaves himself and comes back home in time. And then imagine, Marianne dearest, that after those fifteen years, which was not even the age of the child he stole from you, they let him out and wished him good luck?
And now, twenty some-odd years later, he wants to come and see the child you’d raised for him, a child that was no cakewalk to bring up, either. She was beautiful the way her mother had been beautiful, but she kept to herself and she buried her head in books, and she started sleeping around just as soon as the first boy looked at her, and whose job was it to protect her from these boys, Marianne?
Lois’s heart monitor was beeping faster, the bright green lines on the screen more jagged than before. Around her upper arm was the squeeze and release of the blood pressure cuff, and her mouth and throat were a dried-up streambed. She sat up and pressed the call button beside her and kept it pressed. “I need a nurse, damn it!” She fell back to the pillow just as a doctor walked in, though he was wearing the same light blue the nurses wore. He had a doughy face, and his hair was graying, and she pegged him right away as a man who had done one thing his whole life only to quit and start something new and this was it. “You a doctor or a nurse?”
“I’m your nurse. What can I do for you, Mrs. Dubie?”
“You can unhook me off all this shit and give me that form to sign so I can leave. How many times do I have to say it?”
“You wish to leave?”
“Yes, I told the doctor that hours ago.”
The nurse was studying the monitor. “Your BP is still awfully high, Mrs. Dubie.”
“You just bring me that form or I will rip these things off myself, do you understand me?”
He stood there and looked down at her with eyes Lois hadn’t seen coming, like he could see someone suffering and he was sorry for it. This made the room blur, for she did not know what she was going to do except go home and sit her Susan down and talk to her, to try and keep her from going out that door yet one more time to be with whoever the hell she pleased. Like no time had passed whatsoever. All those years of screaming and Suzie running out that door anyway, but now her granddaughter wanted to see the man who had made Lois the vigilant and frightened woman she’d become, the man who had taken everything and who, yes, would take Suzie, too.
The nurse’s hand was on her shoulder. She reached up and squeezed his hairy wrist, a watch there, its band soft leather. “Please, I just need to go home.”
38
BOBBY WAS unloading Lois’s gun. He and Susan were sitting side by side on their couch in his study, and it was just after eleven o’clock, the only light coming in from the kitchen and from Bobby’s desk lamp over a stack of books and papers. This entire room was nothing but stacks of books and papers. Packed into shelves on the other side of the room were the spines of books Susan had seen many times before but whose titles she’d never really taken in fully: Jazzology, The Jazz Theory Book, The Realm of Musical Sound, The Chord Scale Theory & Jazz Harmony, After Modern Jazz: The Avant-Garde and Jazz Historiography, My Life in E-Flat. No novels or short story collections, which were the only books in her writing room off the bathroom where at two in the morning she’d lopped off her hair. On the wall above Bobby’s shelves were Ornette Coleman’s words painted in black by Bobby one night when he was half drunk on a bottle of red and close to burning his dissertation. 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.
She thought about her father’s fucked-up jealousy snaking through his veins. “Captain Suspicion.” What the fuck was that? By giving his pathology the name of a comic book hero, he’d romanticized it and made it palatable, acceptable even. Jesus.
It was quiet for once, just the low rush of air from the AC vents. Bobby rarely tolerated quiet. Even when he was writing or grading papers he played his jazz. When she had to do her own work she asked him to put on headphones, but he needed to pace the room so she’d gotten into the habit of closing her writing room door and pushing little pink foam buds into her ears, and for what? Corina Soto who’d led her to Susan Lori who’d led her to killyourfatherwithit? And somewhere along the way she’d gotten pregnant, too. Lovely.
“This is a dirty gun, baby.”
“Aren’t they all?”
“No, it needs some serious cleaning.” He’d flipped the cylinder out and now he squinted into each of its six holes, their bullets on his side table on a JazzTimes magazine. The cover photo was of a man named Freddie Hubbard singing with a trumpet in his hands. Two of the bullets lay across his open mouth.
“What do you know about guns, Bobby?”
“Shit, I’m from Texas. My daddy owned six or seven of these at least.”
She stared at him. And why couldn’t she draw up even one detail about his father other than that he sold insurance? “Did you shoot any of them?”
“Didn’t have to. I had some too.” Bobby set Lois’s pistol on Freddie Hubbard’s face. Surely he’d told her this before. Surely she’d asked him about his life and he’d told her this.
“You had guns?”
He looked over at her. “Still do.”
“You do? Why don’t I know this?”
He shrugged. “It never came up.” He rested his big hand on her knee, his desk lamp behind him silhouetting his head and face. She could be sitting here with a stranger, given all that she had never asked about all he’d done and been before she’d come along.
You use people. You use.
“It’s probably too late for him to come tonight, but I do wish we had his ETA, baby.”
“Bobby?” Her voice shot up her thickening throat like an arrow.
“Don’t worry.
”
“I’m sorry I’m a bad wife.”
Bobby put his arm on the back of the couch and leaned in close. He ran his finger along her cheek. “Where’s this shit coming from?”
“I’m cold, Bobby. I’ve always been cold.”
He kissed her temple and smelled her hair. “What if I don’t agree with you?”
“I don’t even know what your father did for a living. Did I even ask?”
“He’s dead.” He kissed her temple again, and she wanted to push him away.
“Do you know why I cut my hair?”
“No.”
“Because I don’t—” Was she going to hurt him too? Bobby?
“What, baby?”
“Because I don’t feel things, Bobby. I don’t—”
“Bullshit, I think you feel so damn much you get bottlenecked then don’t feel a thing.”
“Love even?”
“For me, you mean?” His voice was calm and steady and so free of fear and need that she turned to him. His eyes were two shadows. She could smell his sweat. “Yes.”
“What if I don’t need that?”
“That’s fucked up, Bobby. I’m your wife.”
“Yeah, well, what’s fucked up is half of us racing up some dark canal to the other half of us waiting there for the fastest fucker to make us one, that’s what’s fucked up.” He looked at the study wall and nodded. “Then after nine months of this multiplying oneness we get squeezed out into this loud bright shitstorm where our first hello is a hard slap to get us to breathe and then for the rest of our lives we’re trying to get back to that damn growing oneness we felt for nine months in that warm dark beautiful place.” He turned to her. “That’s why we make love, baby, that’s why you read all those stories and try to get your students to read them too, that oneness. It doesn’t matter to me whether you think you love me or not. I know you love what we have here. And I know you feel that, too. Don’t you?” His finger grazed her jaw.
Gone So Long Page 32
