Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  When he’d asked her to marry him, they were sitting side by side on this very couch. It was late morning on a Sunday, and they’d both drunk too much coffee and she’d let him read the first few pages of Corina Soto and he told her it was genius. Not ingenious, but genius. He told her she was going to write a great novel and that she should go back to school and study with a master. Sitting there in her underwear and the oversized T-shirt she’d slept in, her mouth dry from coffee, she’d believed him because he wasn’t a bullshitter. The weekend before, she’d read his entire dissertation and was surprised by how much she’d enjoyed it, how well written it was for an academic book. It wasn’t at all like so much of the theoretical reading she’d had to do in graduate school, the prose so dense with abstractions she’d had to reread nearly every sentence just to get through them. Bobby’s sentences were as generous as he was, one eye, it seemed, always on the engagement of the reader. Somehow, in his every word choice, there was warmth too, or at least the hint of it, of tall Bobby Dunn standing to the side and smiling down at you, trusting you to get it without his having to suffocate you into submission with vaguely worded platitudes and endless footnotes.

  That was the thing. Bobby trusted. He trusted that one true note would lead to another then another without having to think too much about it, that if something was working now it would keep working later and that life was one big messy improvisation and you couldn’t do any of it without stepping into what you did not yet know, and the worst thing you could do was to just sit there and try to shape it too much. But you could and should seize the next note, and he said, “Let’s get married tomorrow. Right after class.”

  “Okay.” It came out of her just like that. Because there was a oneness between them, and it began to multiply into her writing again then getting into her second graduate school up in Vermont, this high that led to the low she had come to know so well, her feeling nothing about anything, her wanting to lie down and sleep for days. And now, sitting beside this man she felt she did not deserve, she could almost sense that other multiplying going on inside her, and she’d never told the other two boys but she needed to tell her husband. She could at least do that.

  “Bobby?”

  “Let’s go to bed, baby.” He stood and took her hand. Susan felt relieved and let him pull her up. There was Lois’s unloaded gun sitting on its own spilled bullets like a mother on her eggs, the other half coming fast to see Susan whether she wanted him to or not, and she told herself she would tell Bobby in the morning. That’s when she would do it. Then Bobby turned off the desk light, and she followed her husband into the dark.

  39

  THE GREEN and purple lights of the arcade, Linda in Danny Ahearn’s arms. His red blazer and big hands and hooked nose. The way Linda had let him hold her like that. Then in Lois’s head Linda became Susan, Susan at forty-three, her thin body and chopped-off hair, and Suzie was letting him hold her the way he’d held her mother, and Lois was going to be sick. Her taxicab was pulling away on the county road, and the three steps up onto her porch may as well have been three hundred. Her heart was a bird flinging itself against the bars of its cage, and she had to rest and lean against the railing and get her breath before she could continue. She could smell pine needles, and she could hear the river through the trees, and the space that no longer held Susan’s car may as well be a smudge of red lipstick on the shoulder of one of Gerry’s shirts because, yes, she had been betrayed like this before. How could Susan be doing this? How was it possible that her granddaughter had driven off to wait for that man?

  The way he’d turned to them in court and said, “I’m sorry.” His face and throat were flushed and his hands were cuffed together in front of him, but it was as if he’d just borrowed their car and totaled it, that’s all. Like he hadn’t meant to pick up that kitchen—oh, God, no, no, she was not going to let herself fall back into that black fire. She would not allow herself to see her Linda go through what she did in that moment, over and over and over again, night after night after night after night after night. No, not that. Not that.

  I’m going to kill him. These words in Lois’s head were like a calming melody to the flinging bird in her chest, and her heart seemed to straighten out and slow itself to a clear flight that carried her up into her house, the front door unlocked, for Christ’s sake, Suzie always so bent on what she needed that everything else fell away. Well, not tonight. Nope. Not now. How many years of Lois’s life had she spent thinking about that man walking free? How many years did she lie awake at night picturing him drinking a glass of milk or a cup of coffee? How many years did she imagine him waking well rested in his bed and eating eggs and bacon while the morning sun streamed through his windows? How many times did she think of him walking down a street and breathing fresh air deep into his lungs? How many times did she see him buying a newspaper and sitting on a park bench just to read it? Or to listen to music on his radio? To watch a TV show and laugh? How many times did she think of him drinking a cold beer in some barroom with a roomful of men swapping jokes and telling their happy lies? How many times did she picture him with a woman? Making love with a woman between clean white sheets when he should have been dead? When he should’ve been slowly tortured to death then killed. Yes, tortured. She’d seen this too. And she had no shame about it whatsoever. She pictured her and Paul doing it. They’d drive all the way back to Massachusetts and find Ahearn in whatever hole he was living in. Her son would hit him over the head then dump him in their trunk and they’d drive to some woods somewhere and they’d tie big ugly Danny Ahearn to a tree and then, yes, start in on him with razor blades and a knife, with pliers and an ice pick, with a blowtorch and a length of rope and whatever she and her son could find to make that man cry out for the one who would never come to help. Fifteen years. My God, fifteen lousy years. She was halfway up the stairs to her second floor, but she had to rest. The top of her head felt like trapped air, her throat wet on the outside but dry on the inside. Her son had eaten his rage. Her Paul whose dream to be a soldier then a fighter pilot got lost under rolls of fat and an endless collection of guns. Gerry’s fault. The names he would call that boy—fatso, fuckwad, lazy piece of shit. And he’d called Linda names too. Stupid. He’d called her stupid. And so what was left for her to do but prove him right? Then Lois had Suzie, her granddaughter who unlike anybody in her family had gone to college. Her Suzie who loved the boys, yes, but who also loved to read and write and would make something of herself. Did make something of herself. A college professor. Her Linda’s little Susan. Imagine that. And she was writing a book, too. And she had a husband who loved her and treated her better than any man Lois had ever known.

  Lois was moving again, the railing hard and worn under her hand. She saw Danny Ahearn’s flushed face and neck, his too-close-together eyes as he stared at her over his shoulder in that courtroom. Paul was a teenager, and he’d lifted his finger and pointed it at Ahearn like a gun. She’d been proud of him for that. How many times after Ahearn got out did she sit by the phone and almost call her son? Three? Four? Once with her loaded gun in her lap. But Paul was married and had his own child and a good job in the air freight business, and no, she would not lose him too. Nor did she want to lose herself more than she already had. To drive even one mile north would be letting Ahearn continue to steal from her whatever he could. Her attention. Her constant, vigilant attention to him and him only. And then what? She finds him and shoots him down then finds herself behind the same walls he never should have left?

  No. She put her gun away, and she worked longer hours at the store. She went to auctions and estate sales with Don, and she found excuses to go back to the store at night, to sit among all the furniture and toys made by the loving dead. Here her constant dread slipped out of her and she began to pray for Ahearn to suffer in any way a man could suffer. She wished upon him cancer, arthritis, blindness, deafness. She prayed he would get run over and paralyzed and confined to a home where the help was cruel and he had
to sit in his own shit and get bed sores that burned him to his bones. She prayed—as she did nightly when he was in prison—that he would get stabbed, that he would get stabbed over and over and over again, but slowly, so slowly. And when computers came along, she fought the urge to type in his name, though she did it once very late at night when she’d had too much wine. She typed: Daniel Ahearn. She stared at that name the way one would stare at a raised scar in a lover’s skin, and she deleted every letter and stood and walked as quickly away from that machine as she could.

  But life had bloomed around all this. Susan had bloomed. Her breasts and hips, her acne fading like a bad memory. Her hair was thick and brown, and she had the wild look her mother had, though Suzie’s beauty seemed to go deeper than Linda’s. Linda never seemed to know or believe she was beautiful. Gerry’s fault again. And hers, Lois’s, for not standing up for her, for letting Gerry say or do whatever he wanted just so he’d stay.

  The “I’m Sorry” prayer. After Linda—after she was gone—it was one Lois recited daily and nightly and she’d close her eyes and see her daughter staring at her. Sometimes she’d be small again, a streak of pizza sauce on her cheek. Or she’d be older, seventeen or eighteen, standing in the doorway to the arcade with her arms crossed and her coin apron at her hips. She’d be looking at Lois with that same look she’d given her so often in life, that she felt sorry for her. That she couldn’t wait to live on her own and not be anything like this woman who let her husband say or do whatever he wanted.

  How many times had Lois blamed herself for that? All her horribly short life, Linda had watched a man completely ignore a woman. If Gerry had gone away to buy new machines or to look into a new arcade, when he came back he never asked Lois any questions about her life, about what she’d thought about and what she’d done while he was gone. If she went walking out on the strip with the kids, he was more than happy to let her go do that by herself. He rarely touched her unless he wanted sex. He never told Lois what to do or how to do it, but if she mouthed off she got a slap, and otherwise he hardly seemed to see her at all. Then in no time Linda was married to the first boy who gave her every bit of his attention, a boy who made her a puppet to his hand.

  I’m sorry, Linda. I am so very, very sorry, baby. Please. Please forgive me. Please, honey, please. I am so so sorry.

  And then she’d been given a second chance with Suzie, and it had not been easy, but she had kept that girl as safe and watched-over as any one woman possibly could. Suzie hadn’t cared for that, but so what? This time around Lois had done her job, and she’d be damned now, tonight, really damned, if she were to let those too-close-together eyes see Suzie at all. To see her husband and home. Lois would be damned if she allowed Ahearn to breathe the same air.

  To breathe.

  Her time here was nearly over, and this was a debt she had owed her daughter for forty years, and, well, it looked like it was high time that her mother finally paid it and paid it in full.

  She switched on her bedroom light. She was breathing harder than she should be. At the corners of her eyes was a flurry of white bees, and her mouth tasted like her own tongue, and as she sat heavily on the bed she could see the drawer of her bedside table was already open. On top of her catalogues was the double roll of Scotch tape, the broken case for her reading glasses, the unopened package of mini-tissues, and the expired prescription bottle on its side. The bird in her chest was perched as still as a tombstone; she did not even have to lift the catalogues and look underneath, for they were level and flat as could be, but she dug under them anyway and lifted them up and out, a bed of pennies and paper clips and hairpins staring back at her like the sting after a slap. How stupid could she have been? Susan sitting so straight and still on the porch steps and later in the hospital. Like she’d made up her mind about something big, and there was nothing Lois could do about it. Not one solitary thing.

  40

  HER HANDS were pressed against Bobby’s warm, damp chest beneath her. She seemed to be straddling high above him, so far away from his face in the darkness, and she could smell her own wetness as he filled her and emptied her, filled and emptied, and it was every boy and man coming and going again since Gustavo. There was the darkness of their bedroom and its familiar shadows—the upholstered headboard Bobby had inherited from a blind aunt, their matching reading lamps, off now, their shades like dim centurions in shadow. She didn’t know where she would put Lois’s Dresden lamps, but what had pulled Susan to them was not their fine porcelain lace but the way the woman’s head lay on the man’s chest, the way her dress covered his lower legs. There came Bobby’s small sounds of pleasure. And now she was making her own sounds, and she hoped they sounded to him like an apology. Because he was right; what she married when she married him was not him but that oneness he’d talked about. But couldn’t that be enough? To love the life you’d made with someone else even more than you loved the one with whom you’d made it?

  Bobby was moving faster now, and she folded forward to receive it, her cheek pressed against his, her phone buzzing inches from her head on the side table. She sat up.

  “Ignore it, baby. Ignore it.”

  But she could see Noni’s name, which meant she was calling from her house, which meant she’d left the hospital. “Shit.”

  Bobby’s fingers were digging into her hips and then he filled her all the way and made that sound he makes, like a man falling back to being a boy who can’t wait to be a man who gets to do this.

  “It’s Lois. She’s calling from her house.”

  Bobby let out a long breath and dropped his arms to his sides. She lifted herself off him and stood and grabbed her phone and walked naked into their bathroom and sat on the toilet. She squinted at the glowing screen of her phone: 12:41 am. She imagined Lois standing in her bright kitchen, a Carlton between her fingers, worried about her granddaughter yet one more time when she should be in bed, a hospital bed, at that. Susan almost pressed the buttons to call her, but not while she was still waiting for what Bobby’d left inside her to drain out.

  She wiped herself and flushed. She set her phone on the toilet tank and washed her hands in hot water. The phone buzzed again, its blue glow on the toilet like the answer to a question Susan had not even thought to ask. She wiped her wet hands on her thighs and picked it up and tapped the screen. “Noni?”

  “Where’s my gun, Suzie? Why did you take my gun?”

  41

  THE MORNING sky is a bright gray haze, and Daniel has been behind the wheel just under one hour when he drives over St. Marys River into Florida. Hanging over the halfway point of the bridge is a large rectangular sign: Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State, the o in Florida a juicy-looking orange. He’d slept well, though whatever he dreamed hangs on to him like a list of important things to do he now can’t find. His trailer was in it, Pee Wee Jones sitting at his table in front of his checkers set like he’d been waiting a long time for him to come play. In the yard were young girls laughing, though as Daniel slips on his gas-station sunglasses now, he does not know who they were or why they were laughing.

  It’s the longest he’s slept in quite a while, over nine hours, and he took a hot shower and washed his hair twice and then shaved his face slowly in the hotel mirror. If the map is right, St. Petersburg is less than five hours south, which will get him into his daughter’s city around four o’clock. He still does not know where she lives. On his way out of the elevator this morning he passed a small glassed-in room called the Business Office. There were computers in there and a printing machine and he’d thought about going in and typing up his will. But he needs her street address, and he still doesn’t know who will execute his will when he’s gone.

  And how’s he going to find her? Go to her school? What if she doesn’t want to see him?

  But he just wants to see her. And he wants her to see him seeing her. Just that. If he can just look into her eyes, even from across a room or a field of grass and palm trees, then she’ll know. She’
ll know what he feels for her.

  At least he hopes so.

  He passes signs for Yulee, Fernandina Beach, and Jacksonville. Cars pass him on the left and on the right, and he moves to the exit lane and veers onto the rumble strip along the breakdown lane, the thump-thump-thumping of his tires before he pulls the Tacoma back straight. He’s rested but as tired as if he’s worked a ten-hour shift caning or cutting hair or both. For breakfast he drank half a vending machine Coke, and now he needs more aspirin for the hot iron fist his back and hips are sitting in. Beyond the guardrail rises a high concrete sound wall, a single pine poking over the highest edge, and he feels like he’s back inside. Like he has never truly been free, even when he was done with Xenakis and reporting in, even when he bought his own place and set up his own shop. Even driving these fifteen hundred miles without having to tell or ask anyone. Who’s he shitting? There’s only one way he’ll ever be free.

  Daniel glances down at his daughter’s photo on the dash. It’s his Linda who got to live, his Linda who stood in the sun at the Broadway Flying Horses, the way she held her head just like that. “I’m gonna have a baby.” And that baby looking just like her mother, her eyes pulling you in only to push you away.

  There comes again the thumping of the rumble strip, and it may as well be a CO kicking his bunk to rise and fucking shine.

  Shine, Ahearn. Fucking shine.