Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  42

  LOIS DROVE down Susan’s and Bobby’s street and parked one block away on the opposite side from where they lived. From here she could see both their cars still in the driveway, Bobby’s black Kia looking small beside Susan’s. Lois had started out just before dawn, the day breaking slowly over fields of St. Augustine grass and palmetto scrub that looked blue then sage as the sun rose above the pines and its color faded into a gray light that aggravated her already aggravating headache. It had come on after she’d hung up on Susan at nearly one this morning when her granddaughter told her, “We have it here, Noni. I don’t think you need that right now.”

  “That is my property, missy, not yours. What gives you the right?”

  “I think you know.”

  “You’re protecting him. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you’re protecting that man.”

  “No, I’m protecting you.”

  That’s when Lois had hung up. Or maybe she didn’t then. Maybe she’d yelled a few choice words first. “Who are you to protect me? When have you ever cared about me?”

  But no, that may have been her dream when she’d finally fallen asleep hours later. For a long while after she’d hung up, she kept thinking about driving up here right then, but she was so tired, so very tired, and then Don was there. He was standing in her shop wearing his red plaid shirt he wore nearly every day in the winter. Its elbows were frayed so thin Lois had told him many times to throw it out, but he wouldn’t. His gray hair was pulled back into that stubby ponytail, and his reading glasses hung from his neck, and he was smiling at her while Susan stood in front of Lois’s desk speaking as calmly as she had on the phone and yesterday afternoon sitting on the porch, except in the dream Susan was a teenager again, her shorts too short, a paperback in her hand. No screaming. No throwing things. Just a calm explanation to Lois as to why she should never be permitted to own firearms. That’s the word she’d used, and it was one Lois had never heard Susan use in life. Don seemed to be on Suzie’s side, too. His smile said that he was proud of her and that you, Lois, would be wise to listen. Then he was gone and that Mexican boy Soto, who’d been no boy at all, took Susan’s hand and they walked out the back of the shop, not into the parking lot, but into the arcade, where Ahearn stood in his Himalaya blazer, his hands cuffed in front of him, looking over his shoulder and telling Lois, “I’m sorry.”

  It was so early that cars and SUVs still filled the driveways of Susan’s neighbors’ houses. It was a good neighborhood of stucco homes and clipped lawns, and many of them had bush daisies and vinca planted along their walkways to the porticoes over their front doors. The owners of the house to Lois’s right had laid a bed of rocks and seashells at the base of a thick palm tree, and they’d set two wrought-iron benches on either side of the trunk like anybody walking by was invited to sit and take a load off. Across the street the front door of a blue house opened and a man in a tie walked out sipping from one of those coffee driving cups. He lifted his car keys and pressed a button and the lights of his sedan flashed and he climbed in and drove off without looking over at Lois. Her head pulsed flames behind her eyes. She needed coffee and she needed food, though she wasn’t hungry, nor did she know how she was going to do what she had to do.

  Sometimes she left a half-empty water bottle or Pepsi on her backseat. She could’ve used either now, and she turned and looked and just that movement made her car list a bit to the side. Catalogues were spread about, and there was the blue sweater that’d been there since last winter, pinned now under the shotgun’s stock, but no water or cola.

  She could leave her car and go knock on Susan’s door, but what would she get besides breakfast and a lecture about checking out of the hospital? What would she get other than that high-and-mighty stone wall Suzie had put up around herself ever since she’d read that letter?

  Lois needed to read that letter. She had to read that letter. What could he possibly have said to Susan to get her to want to see him? My God, he was evil itself. All those letters from him before they moved to Florida, DOC #53345, she still sees that number written in his own hand, she still sees Susan’s name written in that hand, and she sees her own hand stuffing those sealed letters deep into the trash.

  Directly across from Susan’s house a new pickup pulled out of its driveway then accelerated to the main road, the traffic thicker there. On the other side oak trees and yellow pines bordered the grounds of Susan’s college, the campus buildings beyond. Last Christmas Bobby and Susan had driven her slowly through it all, pointing out the building where Bobby had his office. It was bright white and nearly all glass, and it looked out over a man-made pond where a great blue heron stood in the shallows under a palm tree. Lois had felt for that entire holiday visit that Suzie had finally landed somewhere good. Now all Susan had to do was accept it and not do what she always did, which was to drive away and leave it all behind in the dust.

  There’s something wrong with me, Noni. The two of them sitting out on the porch with their wine earlier this week. Maybe Lois had been wrong not to take her to a head doctor when she was still young. One of the “officers of the court,” a warm woman in a navy blue pants suit, had given her the names of doctors who “specialized in trauma.” But that just wasn’t Lois’s way. She’d never trusted doctors, especially psychiatrists. They were for crazy people, and her granddaughter was far from crazy. She’d seen the worst thing a child could see and so Lois had her marching orders. She’d just show that child a million things that were bright and safe and happy. She would do that over an entire childhood. She would bury those horrible moments under an avalanche of love.

  But the way Susan was acting now, leaving her to come here to wait for him, that quiet wall she was sitting so straight behind, my God, it was as if the last forty years had never happened at all. It was as if her Suzie had been chained to that night in that kitchen the entire time, and now the one who’d locked her up was coming down to squeeze those chains so tightly around Susan’s heart that it would just stop altogether.

  No, I’m going to kill him. I am going to kill him. So help me God I will do it.

  Lois reached into her pocketbook, a tremor in both hands. She lit up a Carlton and turned the ignition key and opened her windows. The shotgun had been in one of the rear closets since Don was alive and well. He’d bought it and four others at an estate sale along with the chestnut and glass armoire that had held them. He’d also scored a saddle and five or six cowboy hats, and Lois had made a window display out of them that had sold within a month. Suzie was a teenager then. Lois remembered that because her granddaughter, in a playful mood that was rare indeed, put the black one on her head and posed as if for a photograph against the brass register, her bare arms and legs crossed, a knowing smirk on her face like she was telling Lois, Oh, this is me, by the way, your little outlaw renegade.

  Lois had no license to sell guns, so Don sold the shotguns privately on the side, all of them except the one in her backseat, which for nearly thirty years had been leaning in a corner of the shop closet behind rolls of thick brocade fabric Don had bought on a whim. He told her it was historically authentic and two hundred dollars a yard but that he’d gotten it for next to nothing. “Who knows, Lo? Maybe we can upholster some furniture ourselves.”

  She missed that about him the most. His belief that anybody could teach themselves to do anything and that whatever good came your way you had to create yourself. No handouts. No favors. Just on-the-job training. Just start doing and the doing would teach you how to do better.

  Except what did she know about shotguns? Not one thing. She barely knew anything about her pistol Susan had stolen. Lois had only shot it once, that afternoon when Don insisted she learn how, and the two of them had stood together on the banks of Bone River. The kick in her hand and the ringing in her ears and the smell of burnt gunpowder then that small hole in a tree root that hadn’t been there before she’d pulled that trigger. There’d been such power in that shiny steel object in her hand and it scared
her and it thrilled her and it made her want to make hole after hole after hole in the body of one man only.

  Lois inhaled deeply on her cigarette and blew smoke out her window. Another neighbor backed out of a driveway, a young woman behind the wheel with those white earbuds in her ears for her music. How would she hear a siren coming up on her? Or a horn honking? Or a child’s screams?

  But Lois was calm thinking these things. She needed an Advil for her headache, yes, but ever since she’d pulled that shotgun out from behind those rolls of fabric she’d never use, the overhead bulb bright and dusty, the window dark with the predawn she’d driven through, there came a certain stillness and a clarity and a falling away of a clutching, grasping darkness that had been with her ever since those whirling blue lights flashed by the windows of her arcade apartment so long ago. No sirens. Just those lights. Once. Twice. Three times, the third cop car’s engine louder than the first two. And Lois’s body knew before she did, and she was up and out that door and running to her married daughter’s cottage.

  But now she had no bullets or shells or whatever they’re called. Back in the shop it had taken her only a moment to find the latch that opened the shotgun, but both the barrels were empty and she began looking through all the closet shelves. They were filled with broken bric-a-brac she’d never been able to move: a chipped autogiro from the 1930s, a tinplate horse-drawn carriage with no horse or driver, three miniature Alfa Romeo racing cars without one wheel, Don’s collection of square-cut nails from before the Civil War, but no box of bullets. Nothing.

  A child’s laughter. Or was it crying? No, it was laughter and it was coming from the house to Lois’s right, the one with the wrought-iron benches beside the palm tree. It was muffled and from behind a closed window, but it sounded like a young girl being tickled. Then there was a woman’s voice, and that’s when Lois noticed the chalk drawings on the sidewalk, squiggly orange and green lines that ran off into the bush daisies. Linda, the joy she took in being a mother, the way her face lit up whenever she looked at her daughter, tickling her and calling her Suzie Woo Woo.

  Lois stubbed her cigarette out in the full ashtray and started her VW and turned on the AC. She’d broken out in a sticky sweat, and now a minivan pulled away from the curb two houses down from Susan’s and it was time for Lois to get out of here. She needed a drugstore for Advil and then she needed a gun supply shop. She hoped her flip phone was charged so she could call information, and she hoped it was somewhere in her pocketbook, where she would leave it for weeks at a time. She put the VW in reverse and used only her mirrors to back away. To turn around would make her dizzy again, to turn her head would make her calm morning start to spin.

  43

  OUTSIDE THE kitchen window a car drove by and Susan stood then sat back down, her heart slapping against her sternum. Bobby had been gone for just over an hour, and she hadn’t told him yet. She’d been planning to once they sat down with their coffee, but he had an early committee meeting she hadn’t known about, and when he told her this as he hooked his leather satchel over his shoulder, relief began to open inside her that this, too, was not the time to tell him. Then he was standing at the door, looking back at her. “Should I skip this meeting?”

  “No, you go, I’ll be fine.”

  “If he comes, though, you call me, okay?”

  Susan smiled and said she would. Then he was gone, and she couldn’t touch her coffee or even look at it. Also, she was worried about Lois. After Noni had hung up on her last night, Susan had called right back but got no answer. As soon as she woke this morning, she’d called Lois’s house again but still got no answer. Then she called Lois’s old flip phone and got a computerized voice mail. It had been early, though, and Noni was probably still asleep, but Susan kept seeing how gray her grandmother’s skin had looked last night at the hospital. She kept seeing the loose splotchy flesh of her arms. Or maybe Lois had been awake and she was refusing to pick up. Susan hoped that’s what it was, just Lois being the old Lois. In a few minutes she and Marianne would open the shop and Susan would call then.

  She opened her file and scrolled down to where she’d left off.

  . . . and I run back out into the light and he’s laughing like he’ll never stop.

  Did that even happen? Yes, because she can still feel the soft sand under her shoes, how hard it was to run fast in it, how she kept slipping and the air was so cold on her face and Paul’s laughing was so mean, so very mean.

  Grandpa Gerry walking into low waves in a dark suit. His shirt was white and his tie was black, and his belly pushed against the lower buttons. She was seeing him from someplace off the ground. Noni’s breasts pushing against her. Noni’s hair smelling sticky with spray. Noni’s smeared eye makeup, and Noni crying and having to put her down.

  This was new.

  There was the earth-yanking lurch that Susan was running down a hill she hadn’t known about. She began tapping the keys to keep falling into it.

  I was in a dress. It was blue and had ruffles along the hem. I kept staring at Grandpa Gerry all dressed up and getting wet. He held something in front of him I couldn’t see. A seagull shrieked. Noni was crying. Brown seaweed lay in the sand in front of me. I never liked it because it looked like dead snakes, and I stepped back in my party shoes. They were black and pretty and I wore short white socks with lace.

  Noni reached down and took my hand. There were other people on the beach. Grown-ups dressed in dark clothes. My auntie Gina was in a long black dress that looked like it would rip because there was a baby in her. My uncle Gio wore a suit the color of my dress and his hair was combed back and he had on sunglasses though it was cloudy. There were my big cousins. Mike in a white shirt with short sleeves that showed his skinny arms. He was wearing a striped tie.

  Tina holding one of the baby cousins. Mr. Price, the man who owned everything, standing in seaweed with his arms crossed in front of his shiny brown suit. One of the little cousins was laughing and one of the aunts or uncles got mad and the little cousin went quiet, and Grandpa Gerry’s suit was getting all wet. The water was up to his belly now, though all I could see was his back, his black suit back, and now his arms were doing something. He lifted something over his head and turned it upside down and white and gray powder fell out onto the water. It floated in a clump then broke apart and sank. Noni’s crying was a burn in my ear and she was squeezing my hand too hard and it hurt and I wanted her to let go and I was crying and Noni let go and I was running. I was running away.

  Susan stood. This girl. This girl who had been her. She had never gone this deeply before. She sat back down.

  I ran away.

  She hadn’t even noticed she’d slipped to first person again. She did not care.

  A party after, though nobody was laughing, and it was too quiet. It was in a restaurant. Grandpa Gerry was still all wet, and he sat in a chair by a window in his wet clothes. His pants were sticking to his legs. His shoes left spots on the red rug, and out the window was a Ferris wheel and a clown’s face on the sign over the Kiddie Park.

  I wanted to go there. I wanted to go on the kiddie rides. Grandpa Gerry was sitting next to Mr. Price, and they were drinking brown juice in little glasses and Grandpa Gerry was talking quietly and he was shaking his head and kept saying bad words and Mr. Price was saying things too, but even quieter, and he kept patting Grandpa Gerry’s arm over and over again.

  Aunts in black. They buzzed around Noni like bees. A sting in my shoulder. Uncle Paul was smiling down at me, his face all tight, his fingers still pinching, and I pulled away and said, “Ow!”

  He had pimples on his cheeks. He had a double chin, and he was wearing a white shirt like Mike, but it wasn’t tucked in and he pushed at me a piece of chocolate cake on a napkin. I knew Noni told him to give it to me and I didn’t want it.

  I wanted to go home.

  Home.

  I was standing in front of the tub and I was wet and she was rubbing my hair with a thick white towel. I was laughin
g and she was laughing and she kept calling me “Suzie Woo Woo, my Suzie Woo Woo!” I smelled like soap and shampoo and there was the cleanness of the towel and every time she pulled it off my head there were her brown shoulders and her pretty face and her laugh and her smile and she kept saying, “My little Suzie Woo Woo!” before she did it again and again, and I kept laughing and she lifted me up and I wanted to keep going up and up.

  There were my daddy’s shoulders and his big sweaty head, his hands around my ankles as I rode high above the carnival sounds and carnival smells, the sweet cotton candy and the cinnamon dough and all the kids who had to walk or run by themselves to the noisy lights of rides, but I was already getting my own ride and now it was over. Now it was gone.

  Uncle Paul was always taller than me. He would pinch me and call me spoiled. He would kick me when Noni wasn’t looking. Grandpa Gerry was gone, too. It was like he just walked away in his wet clothes.

  Being with Noni was like living inside a sad whale. It was dark and it was hard to breathe and she hugged me without letting go, but I wasn’t Suzie Woo Woo anymore. Noni never smiled.

  Her face looking at me. We were in the kitchen. I was sitting at the table and my feet didn’t reach the floor. The TV was on. People were laughing, though it sounded fake. The back of Paul’s fat head from the couch. Spaghetti on my plate. Noni looking at me. She looked scared and she looked mad, then she started to cry and she came over and hugged me too hard and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, honey.”

  But it was like she had done something bad to me, and she wanted me to tell her it was all right, but all I wanted was to go home.

  Susan stared at that last word. Home had always been Noni. It had been their apartment behind the arcade. It had been their house in the oaks and pines fifteen hundred miles south. But this home before home, if any of it had remained, it was that hot kitchen, that yellow floor, that telephone cord against her father’s arm. His deep voice, a whale about to swim away.