Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  She hadn’t moved or even turned her face away from the wall. Daniel walked over to her bed and leaned down and held his breath to listen for hers. It came as a light rattle between her split lips, and her eye was swollen shut, dried blood caked beneath both nostrils. The damp cloth he’d laid over her eye lay on the mattress in a wet spot near the radiator. He picked it up and dropped it in her kitchen sink. Taped to the fridge was a Polaroid of the woman and a young waitress in a teahouse. They both had their arms around each other laughing, and they looked like kids, their bare shoulders white and bony, their necks thin stalks, a gold chain around the sleeping hooker’s. Both of them wore dark lipstick and the waitress’s teeth were stained with it.

  Daniel let himself out and down into the street. The sky was lightening up between the buildings, and it was colder than it had been all winter, Daniel’s nose and ears burning from it. He needed to sleep a few hours then go to his barber’s chair and get to work. But in the air was also the sweet yeast smell of baking bread, a bakery and coffee shop half a block east. And the thing is he wanted to go into that shop for a coffee and something soft and warm to bring back to that hurt woman that he had helped, no one else. Just Danny Ahearn.

  That night, lying in his bed in his one-room across from North Station, the elevated train rumbling by every few minutes, he pictured the Chinese whore who wasn’t Linda but stood just like her when she smoked, he pictured her holding his hand as they walked down the strip, the hot sun on them, the thumping of the Himalaya’s amps ahead, the smells of fried dough and pizza cheese and menthol cigarettes, the whore’s hand turning into Linda’s, the whore gone, Linda flesh again, her bare bottom in both hands, her legs around him as he sank into her for the first time, above them the clackety-clackety jerk of the Himalaya cars and the screaming of girls who were only happy.

  To feel that again.

  Happiness.

  It was a reflection in a broken mirror from old photographs he’d lost and could not find, but seeing this woman was at least that. A sliver of what once was. And so he went back again. Even though he told himself not to, Daniel walked right back to Chinatown. The snow had stopped. It was colder and his lined denim jacket and wool cap did not feel like quite enough. But the hooker standing against the laundry wall beside Pinky’s Lounge wore less. Her legs were covered with torn fishnet stockings, and this wasn’t the girl who looked like Linda. This one was round with a blond wig and a yellow leather jacket unbuttoned halfway down to show her cleavage. She saw him standing there across the street.

  “Hey, you. Wanna party?” She started crossing without waiting for his answer. Daniel stepped back and turned and walked away.

  “Faggot!”

  He walked faster, moving west, passing a store for sewing supplies, a poster board duct-taped to the inside of the glass and covered with dollar signs and Chinese characters, down a side street of closed offices and a tailor and beauty shop, their doorways shuttered and padlocked to the concrete. At Kneeland, a Boston Police cruiser was parked at the curb of a strip club, and one of the cops was sipping a coffee behind the wheel, the other standing at the doorway to the club laughing with the bouncer. His big head was shaved and it took Daniel back to Chucky Finn, and there was the gut-dropping sense that he was going straight back to bad things. Then the cop at the wheel stared at him, and Daniel put his hands in his pockets and he walked out of Chinatown.

  He stayed away after that. He still wanted to go back, but he did not, for he and women just do not mix. End of story.

  But as Daniel flicks on his indicator and checks his rearview and pulls into the exit lane, that phrase feels wrong to him because stories never end. Even after we’re gone, what we’ve left behind lives on in some way. All those chairs he’s caned over the years. People will be sitting in them long after he’s in the ground. And if they have them re-caned, some man or woman will punch through the rail holes bits of old cane that he put there.

  And his own flesh and blood. She probably has no memory of him whatsoever. Whatever she knows about him is as bad as it gets. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. His letter to her, his trying to see her, that’ll be part of their story now.

  There’s a burning and a heaviness in Daniel’s abdomen and groin, the sun in his eyes as he takes the ramp and slows for the turn to a Mobil station and a piss and a pair of cheap sunglasses he’s going to buy if they have them. For he has kept his needs small for so long, and surely he can do that for himself, that, and maybe he’ll go looking for a fresh peach somewhere, too. A fresh juicy peach.

  24

  SUSAN STOOD on the front porch with her cell phone pressed to her ear. She was listening to her own voice on her and Bobby’s answering machine, and she didn’t like it. It struck her as a cold greeting. And her voice sounded tired, and yes, depressed. “You’ve reached the Dunns. Leave a message. Thanks.”

  It left her not wanting to leave a message at all. “Bobby, it’s me. We need to change our recording. I sound like a bitch. You must think that anyway, I don’t know. I don’t blame you if you do. I just called to say I miss you. My work seems to be going well.”

  She wished she hadn’t said that. Saying things like that could be a jinx. “Anyway, call back. Love you.”

  Why no I? Because she did feel love for him, didn’t she? In just these few days away from their small red kitchen and big bed and Ornette Coleman’s words painted on Bobby’s study wall? Her plants and books and writing room where she’d tried to become Corina Soto but was faking it?

  She needed to get back to work, but where did she leave off this morning? She was a little girl standing in the dim light of their kitchen. A man’s voice and a hairy arm and a yellow telephone cord. The word hurt.

  Susan pushed her cell phone into her back pocket and stepped inside the house, but once she got to the kitchen her heart was fluttering and she had to sit down. She was aware of her nipples again, how sensitive they were against the inside of her shirt, and she knew she could close her eyes and lay her head on the table and fall asleep right in this chair. No, this was no bug. It just wasn’t.

  She stood and grabbed her keys and then was pulling into the lot of a Walgreens that had not been there when she was young. Inside the bright and air-conditioned cool Susan bought a pregnancy kit from a teenage girl who wore glasses with red rims. Susan asked her where the restrooms were, and the girl looked at her like she was being asked to do something she shouldn’t, but she pointed to the back of the store and said, “Down aisle eleven.” Susan thanked her, and now she sat on a toilet in a stall of the ladies’ room, squinting at the kit’s tiny screen. She imagined her ankles in steel stirrups, that cold white light above for a third fucking time and, goddammit, how could she have let this happen again?

  The first time, she didn’t know whose it was. It could have been Peter Wilke’s or Chad’s or that boy from Miami before Peter or Sanjit’s or—she’d stopped thinking about that part of it. But she’d told her roommate Andrea, and then the procedure was over and Andrea was handing her two Tylenol and a glass of water, pulling the blanket up to her chin and making her brownies. The second time it happened it was Brian Heney’s, but she did not tell him because she knew he would want to keep it because that would mean getting to keep her.

  The ladies’ room door opened, and then a woman was peeing in a nearby stall. Susan peered down at the dispenser. The screen was still blank. She was forty-three, and Bobby was ten years older than that. They had their work. Well, he had his work. No, she did too. She had this new thing she was writing. She had her commitment to Phil Bradford and her second graduate degree. She had—what? The woman flushed her toilet and moved quickly to the sinks. Susan could hear the faucet running then the hand dryer, its blower loud and unrelenting, and here came one red line then two and oh wonderful, just fucking wonderful, the dryer turning off as the bathroom door opened then closed, and the room went quiet.

  ON THE slow drive home, the sun seemed too bright, the orange t
rees too orange, the sky too blue. Susan’s windows were open halfway, but the road wind sounded muffled somehow, and as the asphalt curved past the road prison she stared at the concrete tables in the outdoor visiting area behind chain link and razor wire, and what else could she do right now but get back to work? It was as if she’d just opened a bill so large she knew she would never be able to pay it, but she still had time before it was due and so she would stuff it into a drawer for now.

  Back in Noni’s kitchen Susan brewed coffee. While it dripped, she dumped Lois’s ashtray into the trash then wiped it clean. She washed out Noni’s coffee cup and scrubbed her lipstick off the rim, and Susan thought it touching that Lois had put some on today but nothing else. No eyeliner or blush. Nothing. And she used to really cake it on.

  Susan took a banana from the counter and made herself eat it slowly. Then the phone rang and it was Lois, and Susan did want to cook dinner for them both, but just the thought of those raw chicken breasts sitting in olive oil made her queasy, and now the coffee didn’t smell so good, either, but she poured some into her mug and as she walked up the stairs to her room, she wondered where Bobby could be on a weekday afternoon before classes started, and she felt small and self-absorbed that she did not wonder about her husband’s days nearly often enough.

  Her room was cool, the new air conditioner moaning softly in the window. She sat at her old desk and opened her laptop and file to where she’d left off.

  It could have been life.

  Then she was slipping into the skin of her younger self, staring at the twenty-two-foot walls of Norfolk Prison in early September 1991. The sky was a pure blue above the razor wire coiled along the top, and Susan had gazed at it from behind the wheel of the used Corolla Don had bought her as a graduation present. She’d driven over fourteen hundred miles in less than twenty hours, stopping only once in Virginia after nearly dozing off and sideswiping a guardrail. In her purse was just under two thousand dollars, tips she’d earned all summer working at a sports bar in Gainesville, drinking too much, smoking too much, sharing an apartment with a quiet Chinese woman who studied computer science and kept her milk and eggs in one of their kitchen cabinets. Two of the bartenders had hit on Susan all summer, and her last night working there, closing up with one of them, she got drunk on Patrón shots and fucked him in the bed of his pickup parked out behind the dumpsters. He was short and had thick shoulders and arms and a shaved head. He’d smelled like sweat and limes, and right after he came he began to cry, telling her he was engaged and if he was already cheating on his fiancée then how would he ever not cheat on his wife?

  Ever since Lois had told her about her father, Susan knew she would go looking for him. It was the main reason she’d stayed and earned money in Gainesville after graduation; to go back to Arcadia would be going back to Noni’s hatred of him and her fear and her gun and her claustrophobic fucking antiques store, which was nothing more than a shrine to the dead and gone.

  When Susan could drive no longer, she’d pulled into a rest stop just south of Maryland and parked in front of the bathrooms building under a flickering exterior light. She climbed into the backseat and locked all four doors and lay down with a T-shirt over her face. Fifty yards away, seven or eight hulking eighteen-wheelers were parked in parallel spaces one after the other, and she imagined the drivers as men her father’s age, lying awake in their sleeping compartments, thinking of their wives and children back home. This was a sentimental thought, she knew, and she was sleeping where she was was not safe, but her eyes burned and she was too tired to care and it might take her a long time to find her father, and she wasn’t going to start blowing her money on a room she did not need. Not till she had to, anyway.

  In my room at the Holiday Inn I’d dressed in charcoal rayon slacks and a gray blouse and light sweater. I wore my black shoes with low heels and no necklace or bracelets, just silver studs in my ears and some eyeliner.

  It was a weekday, and the prison’s parking lot was crumbling asphalt. Weeds poked up through some of the cracks, and most of the cars were dark sedans with blue Massachusetts license plates. It was hard not to feel guilty of something as I walked under the granite archway into a small courtyard. On both sides of the sidewalk was patchy grass under the sun. It was littered with cigarette butts and maybe I imagined my father smoking one, though he was no longre in this place and besides this was on the free side of the concrete walls that rose high above the building I walked up the steps and into.

  Susan stopped. She sipped her coffee. It was cooling and bitter, but it was going down okay. Her eyes were on the wall above her bed but not on the wall above her bed. There must have been a uniformed officer she had to confront first. Maybe a metal detector or some kind of pat-down. A waiting room. But all that came to her now—and had never really left her—was the woman sitting across from her at her cluttered desk with the brass nameplate: Asst. Supt. Murphy.

  “He’s no longer in our custody.” Her eyes were flat, and she wore a light blue business jacket bunched up in the shoulders. She was ten or fifteen years older than I was and heavy and had the colorless skin of a smoker, so many of those butts out in the courtyard probably hers. On the wall above her hung a framed portrait of the governor of Massachusetts, his thick red hair parted on the side, smiling down at me in his business suit like every frat boy I’d ever met: it’s good being me because being me is being on top and very soon I’ll be on top of you.

  “But where is he? Can’t you tell me that?”

  “He’s no longer in our custody.” Asst. Supt. Murphy was enjoying this, and I regretted dressing like I was interviewing for a job. I also regretted being young and thin and showing up with a deep tan I got from lying in the sun between shifts at the sports bar.

  “Is he on parole?”

  She just stared at me. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe she picked up papers on her desk and ignored me. Both memories feel accurate. But I knew I had to say the word I did not want to say and did not know I did not want to say until I said it. “I’m his daughter.”

  I’d already told her that I was looking for my father, but this new word may have helped even though I felt like a liar saying it.

  She handed me a business card. “Like I said, he’s no longer in our custody.”

  I drove out of that parking lot slowly, looking in my rearview mirror at those thick, high walls, at a guard tower I could no longer see as the road curved through woods and I drove west for the highway and my room at the Holiday Inn.

  My father’s parole officer’s name was Nicholas Xenakis, and his office was in Lawrence. It was one of those mill towns on the Merrimack River I’d known about but never visited, and the fact he was Greek did something to me. It was like I was on some fateful odyssey now, except as I was getting closer to where I was going I could already feel that I did not want to go at all.

  I just wanted to see this man who was my father. Noni owned no pictures of him, and the Internet was still a few years away. The only photo I carried of my young mother was that Polaroid of her on the strip looking so young and pretty but cheap and insecure.

  At the Holiday Inn I changed into a sleeveless top, shorts, and flip-flops then checked out and hit the highway, driving north. This was so long ago. I may have found a room in Lawrence first, then gone to the beach. Or I may have gone to the beach first, I’m not sure, but I knew I wanted to see the strip again before I did anything else. On the seat beside me was my Rand McNally map, and after almost an hour I left the highway and drove past malls and fast-food drive-throughs, past truck and car dealerships and a marina supply yard, then I was on back roads that cut through pine trees and trailer camps and one-story houses that used to be trailers.

  I rolled down my windows and smelled pine needles. At a boarded-up gas station I turned north and got lost and ended up crossing the border into New Hampshire. It was a two-lane road of convenience and liquor stores, a tobacco shop and gun outlet, a tattoo parlor beside a Mexican restaurant built of yellow p
lywood with one lone pickup truck in the lot at noon. I was hungry but wanted to eat at the beach. I turned around and found a road heading east past motel cabins and a mini-golf park, a towering orange bear standing in its center. Just beyond that was a tire depot. My friend Kimberly Mitchell’s house used to be in the woods behind that, and I wondered if she still lived around there, though I did not want to see her. I didn’t want to see anyone.

  Then the woods opened onto the marsh, and I could see the strip less than a mile to the east. Under that deep September sky, it looked dirty and insignificant, and it’s only now, as I write this, that I know why I wanted to go back there at all. Before Noni had told me the truth a year earlier, I’d remembered living behind the arcade after my grandfather and Paul were gone. I remembered how small and dark our apartment was, and I remembered the heat outside, or the cold. There was the constant breaking of the surf onto wet sand, the smells of fried clams and cotton candy during the season, the pinball machines’ pops and pings, electronic explosions, pool balls breaking. There was Noni’s cigarette smoke and sometimes a drunk outside yelling or laughing. There were both TV’s going all day and night. There was Noni’s perfume and hair spray, the whirring lights of the kiddie rides, kids screaming.

  There was all that cheap glee amid all that deep grief that I’d thought came from a car and a bridge and a river at night, but ever since Noni had told me the truth, I had begun to remember a different night and all my memories of that place felt like a trick of the mind.

  What I wanted to see more than anything was the house I’d lived in before I’d lived with Lois.