Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  18

  DANIEL WAKES behind the wheel of his Tacoma. He’d reclined his seat back and from here there is only the sky through the windshield, a strip of cloud like a torn sheet. He thinks of that con in the Sixes who hanged himself from his sink. This rich prick who’d beaten his wife and kids for years then went down for embezzlement.

  Daniel is hot and sweating. His windows are cracked, and he can hear the whoosh of air brakes, the rattle of a tractor trailer chassis as it rumbles by. He’s thirsty and needs to piss, and he should try to eat something, too. Taped to his dash is the picture of Susan. He stares at it. She seems to be looking right at him, and she’s far more beautiful than her mother ever got to be. He sits up. There across the New Jersey Turnpike and the wide Hudson River are the sun-baked high-rises of New York City, a place he’s never been. From here, in the parking lot of the biggest rest stop he’s ever seen, the lower tip of Manhattan looks like a glass-and-concrete cluster fuck of commerce, the highest building rising out of where the two fallen towers had been. Daniel had seen a photo of it in the paper, and this close it looks like long wide panes of glass fitted together, the top a spire at least another thousand feet on top of that, maybe more.

  There were those months right after when American flags were everywhere—hanging from new poles mounted on people’s porches, or as decals on their car bumpers, or bungeed to pickup truck racks and flapping in the wind. And it was good to be united in hatred for a while. It was good to walk into a store or the library weeks later and have people glance over at him and know right away that he was not one of the bad men. Not him.

  Yesterday, Daniel sat at the library keyboard and typed in: how to write your own will. On the desk to his right was his letter to Susan. He’d folded it twice so it would be narrow enough to fit into an envelope, but it was a few pages long and thicker than he’d thought. He could feel the sweat drying under his shirt from the walk from the garage. He usually used the one down in Port City so he could wander downtown for coffee while his truck was getting tuned up, but Angie’s Repairs was close to the library and post office, and now the screen lit up with a page giving him eight steps to complete. He moved the clicker to the print button and tapped it hard.

  After the bank, when Daniel had asked that man in front of the Starbucks if he was a lawyer and did he know anything about writing a will, the man laughed and said he’d never be a lawyer, but he was also stand-up and he’d looked at Daniel with the respect good citizens give the old and the dying.

  “It’s cheaper to do it yourself. Just go online.”

  “God,” the pretty woman had said. “I wish my husband had known that.” She laughed and touched the man’s shoulder and smiled at him and Daniel before she disappeared around the corner and was gone.

  At his keyboard Daniel typed in Eckerd College, and before he could even type in where it was, it showed up and he tapped it open and there was a color photograph of the entire campus taken from a helicopter or airplane. There were buildings and a long athletic field and a white sand beach on blue water. There were the green dots of palm trees and glass and chrome flecks of cars, and there was the feeling that he was looking at something far more profound than he was—like a picture of a place where people were happy long before you were born.

  Then pictures of students popped up. Boys and girls. They were tanned and wearing white T-shirts, and they looked so damn young and healthy that to know his own Susan was among them, well, it made him feel low and dirty and deeply wrong and he almost stopped everything—the letter, the trip, all of it. But there, at the bottom left corner of the screen, in big black letters on white, were the words: CONTACT US. The center of his bones may as well have been a magnet, those words metal, and he could only take this as a sign. He pulled a pencil from the cup on the windowsill and wrote the address. It occurred to him he had no map, but there was that time he had to drive Rudy Schwartz down to West Roxbury for Thanksgiving, and the lady at the Council on Aging had shown him Google Maps on her computer. Daniel went to that. He did not know where his daughter lived, but he knew where she worked, and he typed that address in as his destination. Then he typed in his own: 26 Butler Place, Salisbury, Massachusetts. He tapped the back of the mouse and there, in less than a full second, was his highlighted route out of Massachusetts, down through Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, the route cutting west and south through Maryland and Virginia into the Carolinas then Georgia to Jacksonville and a straight shot down the west coast of Florida. At the top of the page was: 1,402 miles. He could do it in two long days, seven hundred miles each, twelve or so hours of driving each day. But with his condition he’d have to stop more often than he would like. Maybe he’d do it in three, give her more time to get his letter and know he was coming. In fact, he should pay extra and send it overnight. And he should do that before the post office across the street closed, which was soon.

  He pressed print then read more about writing your own will. It said that if he didn’t have one then all he owned would go to his next of kin anyway, but it would also go to probate and his “beneficiary” would have a “waiting period,” and he did not want Susan thinking that he had not thought this through for her. He glanced down at the list of things he had to do for his will. It looked long and like a lot of trouble, but so be it. Step number five said you cannot handwrite your will. Step number seven said he had to sign it in front of two witnesses. Who would that be? The final step, number eight, said he had to give the original to “a person who will execute the will on your behalf.” What, Rudy Schwartz? Elaine Muir? They’d probably be gone before he was. He’d have to think about this, and he’d have fourteen hundred miles to do it in, too, because he was not going to slow down now.

  Daniel opens his truck door and presses two fingers to the wad of cash in his front pants pocket. For eighteen dollars and change, the postman said Daniel’s letter would be in St. Petersburg by three p.m. today, a Wednesday. When Daniel paid him, he’d pulled out what he’d withdrawn from the bank, four thousand in C-notes. He peeled one off and handed it to him, a short guy with thick glasses and fat cheeks he hadn’t shaved all the way up.

  “What’d you, win the lottery?”

  Daniel had never been any good at that kind of talk. He wanted to say it was none of his business, but it felt good to be finally sending that letter and the man was being friendly, so he made himself smile and said nothing and waited for his change.

  He rises out of the Tacoma and locks the door. His hips and back burn, and there’s a queasiness deep in his gut he needs to feed to get rid of. When he’d backed out of his fenced-in yard at dawn, the siding of his shed looked the color of peaches and he’d like one now. A cool ripe peach. Maybe a cold Coke and some crackers.

  The sun is still not directly overhead, and he glances at his watch. He’s been on the road just over five hours, his nap in this parking lot twenty minutes, and he’s still an hour from noon.

  19

  LOIS SAT in one of Marianne’s stuffed chairs sipping a brandy. It had been a good evening all around, and even though she would like just one more cigarette, she was content to sit here and watch how captivated Walter and Marianne were by Suzie. She sat between them on a leather sofa that had to be twelve feet long. Behind them lay a glass wall separated by wooden posts holding up the high wooden ceilings, and Lois kept admiring the view. Under the last light of the sun lay acres and acres of St. Augustine pasture and palmetto scrub and islands of oak and hickory trees that appeared purple-brown and reminded her of the autumns up north she still missed.

  Susan, beautiful in earrings and a print dress (even with her short hair), was talking about the writings of some Russian doctor Walter had apparently just discovered in his retirement. All night long Walter had drunk in Susan as greedily as a man fresh off the wagon, his smile a bit too constant, his eyes passing over her granddaughter’s face and body like he couldn’t believe his good fortune in having a woman of this caliber inside his home. And now that this wo
man was speaking so intelligently about books, well, he was past gone.

  It made Lois feel both proud and, yes, admit it, a little jealous too. Walter seemed as good and handsome a man as she’d ever met. At sixty-eight, he was tall and had let his white hair grow long enough to curl at the nape of his lined and sunburned neck. His blue eyes were deep-set and gave off the pragmatic light of a born businessman, yet they were warm too, always up for a good time, and tonight he wore an open-collared shirt, pressed khakis, and brown cowboy boots that were broken in but newly shined. Since Lois and Susan had arrived three hours earlier he’d been sipping tequila on the rocks with a squeeze of lime, though you’d never know it.

  He didn’t slur his words or get stupid the way Gerry had. If anything, the more he sipped, the more he seemed to concentrate on whatever the hell Suzie was talking about. Marianne, looking worn and lovely in her navy blue dress, her legs crossed at the knee like the lady she was, kept nodding her head like she had read those same Russian stories when Lois knew she was just being polite. Every few seconds she would glance over at Lois and smile and Lois would smile back, though she wasn’t going to be a phony and pretend she knew anything she didn’t.

  “Seriously.” Walter’s voice was low, a bit thickened now, it was true. “He treated peasants pro bono?”

  “I don’t know if he ever charged anyone.” Susan laughed. She sipped her own brandy, and then Marianne asked her a question about her writing, and Lois could see how taken Walter was with this thought of the Russian doctor who just gave away all his training. Over the years Marianne had told her about how good Walter had been to his help, how when one of his hands got drunk and drove and killed a man, Walter had bailed him out and paid for his lawyer and even supported the hand’s wife and kids for the three years he was in prison. There was one of Walter’s Mexican cattlemen who had a sick mother back home, Walter paying all her medical bills. There were a few stories like that. And there was the way he talked to whomever he met, whether it was an elderly antiques picker in a wheelchair out on Oak Street, or the bank president he went marlin fishing with, Walter looked everyone in the eyes as if they were just as important as anyone else.

  He was too good to be true, frankly, and now Lois could see the chink in his perfect wall she’d suspected for years anyway. Women. If he was given the okay to start making love to Susan right now, there would be no holding him back. And while Suzie talked about the novel she was writing, her face turned toward Marianne, Lois could see how her friend and employee was indeed listening but how she also kept glancing past Susan at Walter on the other side of her, Marianne registering just where Walter’s eyes were aiming, which was Susan’s exposed knees and thighs. Lois could see how much history was in that look, and it made her feel closer to Marianne in a way that surprised her.

  “So, it’s set in Mexico?” Marianne said.

  “Yes, in Culiacán.” Suzie glanced over at Lois and she knew why, but that Mexican boy was old water under a rusty bridge.

  Walter rested his empty glass on the low table in front of them. “Did you fly down there for research?”

  “No, just a lot of reading. And, you know, I grew up with people from there.” Susan sounded apologetic. Spots of blush bloomed at the base of her throat and collarbone. It was what happened to her as a kid when she was ashamed or caught lying, and Lois said, “That girl’s read more books than anyone.”

  Walter looked over at her and smiled as if she were a child. He stood and picked up his empty glass and hovered over Susan. “I’ve been to Culiacán quite a few times. If you ever want to hear more about it, I’m happy to help.”

  Lois just bet he was. Susan thanked him, and Marianne smiled at her, but her eyes were on Walter walking into the kitchen and dropping ice cubes into his glass.

  Lois set her brandy down on the side table and pushed herself out of her chair. Limit or no limit, it was time for that cigarette. The room tilted a bit before it righted itself, and she picked up her bag. “Excuse me, girls. I’m going to smoke.”

  “Haven’t you had your six, Noni?”

  “Who asked you?”

  “I love that you call her that. Have you always?”

  “My whole life.”

  It was a phrase Lois took with her out onto the deck. My whole life. The sun was down now, the sky streaked embers above the pastures and yellow pine. It was warmer out here than she’d expected. Maybe because of the brandy and the earlier light over Walter’s land that had brought her back to the autumns of her girlhood and womanhood and spinsterhood.

  My whole life. Hers was winding down, she could feel it, though there was little sadness about this, just a clear-eyed knowledge. She shook out a Carlton and lit it up and leaned against the high railing and took a deep, luxurious drag. There were still small pleasures like this. There was how surprisingly good these first few days with Suzie were going. Even late this afternoon when Lois had walked into the kitchen to see Susan preparing a marinade for their night’s dinner and she told her no, honey, Marianne’s invited us to her place tonight, there was none of the old drama.

  What do you mean? Were you going to fucking tell me?

  How was I supposed to know you’d cook something? You never lift a damn finger around here—

  Fuck off, Lois. And then the younger Susan would have thrown her wooden spoon against the wall and stomped out of the room as loudly as she could. But tonight there’d been none of that. Susan had simply stopped stirring and shrugged and said, “No problem, I can cook all this tomorrow night.”

  What a pleasant change this was.

  But her granddaughter did have problems, didn’t she? Her fading marriage to a very good man (better than Walter, apparently), her lack of belief in her writings, the way she’d lived her entire life like a wanderer. Lois turned and blew out smoke and watched through the glass as Walter sat back down on the sofa. Susan was listening to Marianne, nodding at whatever she was saying, and Lois felt bad about not having heard much of what Suzie had said about her novel.

  But who writes novels anyway? For his entire life Lois’s father had worked first shift at Malden Mills, helping to make everything from Army uniforms to fake fur coats. Her mother was a housewife. Lois’s uncles and aunts were cops and nurses, a few tradesmen and two firefighters. Her cousin up in New Hampshire had become a high school librarian, but that’s as close as anyone from Lois’s family had ever gotten to rooms full of books and the people who read them, never mind wrote them.

  It was Linda who first loved to read and write. She learned how to do it earlier than the rest of the kids, too. She went from picture books to chapter books in less than a year. Until she’d had Linda, Lois could not remember ever stepping foot inside a public library. But when Linda turned eight or nine that changed. They’d started taking out the limit allowed, which might have been six books at a time, and Linda would be done with them all in less than a week. When she hit middle school and high school her favorite class was English and she actually liked getting assigned an essay to write. Lois still had some of them, her journal too, though there was very little in it and Lois had never been able to sit down and read it more than once. The way Linda had written it, it was with a tone she’d never had in life, and it made Lois feel as if she’d never known her own daughter.

  There was one good thing, though. Until she’d found that journal, Lois had never fully understood Linda’s quitting high school. Her daughter’s grades were better than anyone’s until they weren’t, and there was her love for the written word. Why leave school? But the answer was on the first or second page.

  Being smart only gets you lonely.

  But it wasn’t just being smart. It was being smart and beautiful. It’s what high-class people wanted for their daughters. At least that’s what the night soaps had always shown. If you’re the daughter of a lawyer or doctor or CEO, you’d better be smart and beautiful just to get through those private high schools and colleges and cocktail parties where you could snag your own CE
O if you didn’t become one yourself. But where Lois and Gerry were from, a girl who had both was pegged as thinking she was better than everybody else, and she got shunned.

  And so Linda shunned them and left school and—

  Jesus Christ.

  Lois stubbed her cigarette out on the railing. It was some kind of exotic hardwood, and she thought the better of it and brushed away the ash with her bare hand.

  I need someone who’s different like me. This was written on only page one or two. Linda’s journal was one of those speckled composition notebooks, and on the cover she’d taped a picture from some magazine of a sunset over the ocean. Off to the side of it she had drawn a peace sign and a cross, though Lois and Gerry had never taken the kids to church.

  Lois found it between the mattress and box spring of Linda’s bed in her and Paul’s old room. Maybe she hadn’t taken it with her because down deep she’d known she wouldn’t be able to keep anything private from that Ahearn. It had only been a few months, and it took a lot for Lois to even walk in there, the room blurry as she began ripping off the sheets to wash them. That’s when she found it. She sat on the edge of the mattress and opened the notebook and saw her daughter’s neat handwriting—half print, half cursive—and, no. Lois closed it and did not open it again until at least a year had passed.

  I need someone different like me. Then Linda went on to describe seeing Ahearn for the first time up in the DJ’s booth of the Himalaya ride. It was his voice that got her, something about his goddamned voice.

  “I thought you might need an ashtray.” Marianne was stepping through the French doorway holding a flat seashell for Lois to put her butt in, a gesture Lois found both thoughtful and insulting. “Thank you.”

  On the other side of the glass wall, Walter was leaning toward Susan on the sofa as if he were telling her something he’d never told anyone else.