Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  Sitting naked in front of Macio’s computer. She hadn’t thought about this in years. She wrote: Then the Internet would get invented and that girl would be a young woman who would look up her father and find a picture of him. It would be from the front page of a small newspaper called the Daily Gazette, published in Port City, Massachusetts. It was that town on the river her grandmother would sometimes drive them to for an ice-cream cone, or to just walk and look in the windows of women’s dress shops that were starting to open their doors then. Half the town was blooming and half looked abandoned. The headline above the photo read: “Ahearn Sentenced for Wife’s Slaying.”

  There was something biblical about that word choice, and the young woman did not like it; it was the word used for cutting down dragons and many-headed serpents, not a wife and mother who did nothing to deserve what she got. Looking all this up for the first time, the young woman sat at the bedroom computer of a bass player she was living with named Macio. It was after midnight and hot and the young woman was naked and sweating and it was the worst way possible to see her father for the first time; in the newspaper photograph he was looking directly into the camera, so now he was looking directly at her. His wrists were handcuffed to a chain around his waist, and he was dressed in a corrections jumpsuit of some kind, and he was being led through a courthouse door. At his sides were uniformed cops. Her father’s eyes were too close together, his nose hooked, his hair so short that his ears stuck out. There were the young woman’s grandmother’s words in her head. “He was a big ugly prick and he knew it and your poor mother couldn’t take a breath without him okaying it first.”

  Her father’s letter on the table. She needed to see that picture again. Twenty years ago, she hadn’t even printed it out, and if she ever thought of it over the years it was the way you recall a detail from when you were drunk—the bulb burns in a lampshade from a bed that isn’t yours.

  Susan opened Google and typed: Ahearn Sentenced for Wife’s Slaying. When it did not come up right away, when other Ahearns came instead, one a judge who’d imposed a harsh sentence on the wife of a town selectman, she typed: Port City Daily Gazette. Then there it was, the same photograph. Her father was handcuffed and looking right at her. Except in this one he’s dressed not in a jumpsuit but in a coat and tie. His hands are still cuffed in front of him, and there are uniformed cops on either side of him in the courthouse doorway, but he’s wearing a suit when all these years she’d remembered something else. It made her wonder about the accuracy of other memories she’d been recording.

  But the headline was the same, and so was his homely face. His prominent nose and his ears sticking out, and the thing was he looked brutish and not very bright. But his letter, these weren’t the thoughts of a stupid man. They just weren’t.

  Oh, Jesus Christ, was she just going to sit around for the next “few days” and wait for him? He’d sent it overnight mail two days ago. What if he’d flown down right after mailing it? What if he’d rented a car and Googled their names? Could he even find her address that way?

  She tapped back to the empty Google bar and typed: Susan Dunn, St. Petersburg, Florida. Within a second came: Susan Dunn in St. Petersburg, Florida—Whitepages. She tapped it open: One White­pages profile found for “Susan Dunn in Saint Petersburg FL,” and 35 possible matches.

  “Thirty-five.” She read down the screen.

  1) Susan Dunn

  Age: 54–60

  Current: Saint Petersburg, FL

  Prior: Unknown

  Knows: No Known Associations

  2) Susan Dunn

  Age: 40–44

  Current: Saint Petersburg, FL

  Prior: Hallandale Beach, FL

  Knows: Robert Dunn

  Hallandale? Her last apartment three blocks from the water. Knows: Robert Dunn? Jesus. It even had the range of her age, and to the right of these intrusions was View Profile, which she opened, and there, for anyone and everyone to see, was not just her and Bobby’s street address but a map of their neighborhood with a red arrow marking their house. In the upper right corner were two boxes: Neighbors and Directions.

  Something dry and black roiled through her. She looked out the kitchen window then stood and walked fast into her bedroom. She opened her bureau drawer and jerked out jeans and pulled them on. She yanked off her nightgown and grabbed a purple top off the closet shelf and slipped it over her head. She considered a bra, but there was no time for that, and she brushed her hair back with both hands and snatched her purse off the floor.

  In the kitchen she pushed her laptop into its case then hooked the strap of her purse over one shoulder, the strap of her computer case over the other. She picked her keys out of the ceramic bowl near the stove and at the door she stopped. She peered out the window. There was her Civic sitting in the driveway. There was that old dark spot on the concrete beside it. The sky above their neighbors’ houses was bright gray, the fronds of their sable palms still as bones. There were no cars parked anywhere. None of any kind. And just who the fuck was he to come to her house? Who in the hell did he think he was anyway?

  She pushed open the door. She turned and locked it, her head and neck and back feeling exposed as the bolt slid into place. She walked quickly to her car and dumped her computer and purse into the backseat, then she started up the engine and backed out without putting on her seat belt, without thinking about where she was going, without thinking anything but this: I will not wait for him. I will not be the one sitting around to wait for him.

  44

  BETWEEN FLAT green fields and strip malls come Lawtey, Starke, Waldo, and Hawthorne. Soon enough there’s Lochloosa Lake, Island Grove, and Citra, then a sprawling housing complex as Daniel heads west then south on I-75, Ocala coming and Marion Oaks coming and not long after that there are signs for Tampa and St. Petersburg, and Daniel’s having third, fourth, and fifth thoughts about it all. He never should’ve written that damn letter. And he sure as hell never should’ve said he’s coming to see her.

  Not one letter from her when he was inside. After five years in, she was eight. After ten years in, she was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Eighteen when he got out. She could’ve written to him then, but she didn’t, and why would she want to see him now?

  She won’t. She doesn’t.

  His gas needle is just about on E, and he should take the next exit and gas up and point his truck north.

  But then what? Tell her he’s coming and then don’t do it? What if she does want to see him again?

  “See how you are?” Sills’s voice in his head. He used to say that all the time. Danny would be late for the barbershop or the caning room, walking fast behind two cons in the yard, and he’d step off onto the grass of the quad to pass them, and Sills would be standing at the shop doorway with his arms crossed, shaking his head at Danny and saying, “See how you are? I could write you up, Ahearn.” But he wouldn’t, and there’d be a smile in his eyes Danny knew he never deserved but took anyway, and that’s what he feels as he takes the Ocala exit, that he wants something he has no right to, that he’s asking for something he should never ever get.

  Sills getting shot, that bothered Danny for a long time. There were a lot of COs Willie Teague could’ve plugged that nobody would’ve missed, but not Sills. He was rock-solid stand-up. Some screws were too friendly and didn’t last long. They made the mistake of making friends with guys on the inside and then one day they’re getting busted for smuggling in a dime bag, skin magazines, nips of real booze. One screw, Kenny Yameen, gave one of the Winter Hill guys a conjugal with his girlfriend in the assistant superintendent’s office just before visiting hours closed. But Yameen also videotaped it on the sly, and he made the mistake, drunk one night, of playing it at his house to a roomful of other drunk screws. After he was busted, he moved and changed his name, not because of the DOC but because of the Winter Hill con on parole who was no longer his good buddy.

  But Sills was respectful without being a target to get played, hard witho
ut being a hard-ass, and he always looked Danny in the eye like Danny was a man. Then Sills was dropping to the ground with a hole in his chest, and Danny had stood in the doorway to the barbershop in the endless quiet and emptiness of where Sills used to be and he was Danny and the Reactor all over again standing in another doorway because yes, he too, had done to another what Willie Teague just did. Soon enough there came Willie’s last shot, and it was like a call to Daniel from his dreams, that he was late in doing something that had to be done, but he just couldn’t see it yet.

  In front of him is an eighteen-wheeler of new cars. Their exhaust pipes are shiny, their tire treads deep, and as the rig steers off to the left there appears a gas station called RaceTrac. Under these words, over the pumps, are Boiled P-nuts, Gift Shop, T-shirts. He should eat something, maybe just a bag of nuts.

  In the shade of the awning over the pumps he rises slowly out of his Tacoma into the heat. He pats his front pocket for his cash and smells gasoline on warm concrete. A radio is playing. It sounds like some kind of love song, a woman singing. One bay over a young black kid is washing his windshield and using the squeegee to do it. His driver’s-side door is open, and Daniel can see a woman sitting there. She’s much older than the boy, and she’s in a dress and pearls and her hands are folded over a black purse in her lap. She’s looking straight out the window and she’s smiling at the boy and Daniel knows she’s his mother. He pulls the handle of the glass door advertising chewing tobacco and Red Bull, a bell ringing above him, and Daniel misses his own mother. She was never quite right and she’d never had any lasting friends and she was always talking to that voice in her head, but she loved him the way that mother loves her son. And no matter what was going to happen down in his daughter’s town, nobody could take that away from Daniel Ahearn. Not even Danny. Not even him.

  45

  LOIS STOOD in the Pharmacy section squinting at shelves of bottled painkillers and fever reducers. Her purse hung from the crook of her elbow, and the ache behind her eyes felt like an electronic pulse from some machine she just needed to unplug, yet she still felt strangely calm, even with a jittery thrumming through her legs, she did.

  After leaving Suzie’s street Lois had ended up on I-275 heading south. The first exit took her onto a bridge over water, dozens of white boats moored there under the bright gray sky, and then came a dirty clump of palm trees and a wide parking lot for this Walmart she was standing in now. A young salesgirl was squatting a few feet away, stocking a lower shelf from a plastic basket beside her. Lois said, “Where’s your Advil?”

  The girl looked up at her, her skin bad on both cheeks, and in that moment Lois could hear how bitchy her tone had been. But the girl smiled and stood. “Advil? It’s right here, ma’am.” The girl plucked a bottle from the shelf Lois had been staring at, handed it to Lois, and smiled once more. Lois could see how pretty the girl would be once her skin got better.

  “Thank you, honey. Is there a gun store near here? My son’s going hunting.” That same calmness telling this lie. Such a calm. And again that warm smile pointed up at her. Lois could see acne on the poor girl’s forehead too, and her eyebrows needed plucking.

  “Yes, ma’am, Sporting Goods.” The girl turned and pointed her arm down the aisle. “Just past Electronics and Home Furnishings. Would you like me to show you?”

  “I can find it, honey, thank you. And listen . . .”

  The girl looked up at her, her smile a bit unsure now. Lois was about to tell her to wash her face with cold water to close her pores. It was the same advice she’d given to Suzie and to her mother. But this girl didn’t seem to know how bad her skin was—she wasn’t trying to cover it up with anything whatsoever—and who was Lois to point that out to her? “You’re a beautiful girl. I just wanted to say that, honey.”

  “Thank you.” The girl looked quickly down at her work, her back straight, and as Lois turned and walked away with her Advil she could see how much that girl had needed to hear that. It made Lois feel good that she’d said it, but it also pulled her to an empty quiet room of no words like that ever coming out of her for Suzie. But how could they? If she’d told her beautiful Susan how beautiful she was, that’s all she’d think she was good for. And how many times had Lois told Linda how pretty she was? One hundred? Five hundred? How many afternoons in her bedroom behind the arcade had she sat her daughter on the table of the makeup mirror and told her to point her face up at her mother and close her eyes so she could brush mascara onto her long lashes? Lois could still feel Linda’s small jawbone against her fingertips. She could still feel her daughter’s light hand resting on her knee. “You’re so lucky, Linda Lou. You got my features, honey. You’re going to be a beauty like your mama, honey, but even better. My, my, my, you’ll be the belle of the ball.”

  Across from the registers was a glass cooler of bottled waters, and Lois pulled one out and twisted it open and took a long drink, swallowing three times. She set it on a shelf in front of cans of WD-40 and worked the cap of her Advil until she finally got it open, her purse swaying heavy from her forearm. She pushed her finger into the seal, shook out two pills, and popped them into her mouth, swallowing them down with more water. There was the chatter at the registers, cash drawers sliding open and shut, the squeak of shopping cart wheels, a country singer on the store’s sound system whining about one thing or another. From deep in the back of the store a baby was throwing a tantrum, and Lois needed to get out of here. She screwed the Advil cap back on but didn’t want to carry that and the water bottle and her purse, so she left the water where it was—So what, I’ll get it when I come back—and she made her way down a central aisle past racks of T-shirts and shelves of plastic-wrapped underwear for kids, cartoon colors, blues and yellows and reds, Spider-Man on one of them, on ten of them.

  The store was too cool, and she wanted her sweater back in her car. She should call Marianne. That woman would’ve called the hospital first thing this morning. Then she would’ve called her house. Once she got no answer she might even drive over there. And then she’d probably call Susan, if she had her number, which Lois didn’t think she did. Inside the warm gelatin of calm Lois had found herself in, there came a low vibrating itch to get back to Susan’s street. A young man was standing behind a glass countertop, the lighted shelves beneath filled with silver and black pistols, their barrels long and short, narrow and wide, all of them meaning business.

  It was hard to get her breath. It would be nice if she could sit down. She set her purse loudly on the countertop.

  “Yes, ma’am. Can I help you?”

  Another polite one. Lois wanted that water she’d left back on that shelf. She looked around for a stool, but there was none.

  “Are you interested in purchasing a firearm today?”

  That word from her dream. The boy was leaning against the edge of the counter with both palms so his bare forearms were exposed. They were smooth and pale, and Lois could see a network of blue veins just beneath the skin. He was young and had a wispy mustache and goatee. His name tag said: Clay Moore. To his right was a white Styrofoam cup of coffee Lois could smell and wanted for herself. “No, just bullets, or whatever you put in a shotgun.”

  “Not a problem, ma’am. What gauge, shot, and length are we talking about?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “For your shotgun.”

  “I don’t know. It’s not mine. Just give me anything.”

  This Clay smiled, his teeth crooked but as white as if he’d used a whitener on them. “That’d be very dangerous, ma’am. You don’t want your weapon blowing up in your face.”

  “It’s not mine, it’s my son’s.”

  “Do you know the gauge?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about it. It has two barrels.”

  “Under-over or side-by-side?”

  “The second one, I guess. It’s in my car. Can you come look at it for me?”

  Clay seemed to take her in for the first time. She’d left without putting on any
makeup, and she wasn’t even sure she’d brushed her hair or put on anything more than her underthings and this housedress she felt too chilly in now with this superstore’s AC. This Clay glanced at her purse and her watch and her fingers that wore no wedding ring, just a single pearl in a silver band Don had sized for her not long before he died.

  “My son’s going hunting. He needs it.”

  “Well, the only game in season right now are hogs and rabbits.”

  “I don’t know what he hunts. Can you come look at my gun?”

  “Well, that’s kind of an important thing to know.”

  “Hogs, then.” Yes, hogs. A big, ugly, pink-faced hog.

  Clay smiled again, then looked behind him where a curly-headed man in a tie and a Walmart vest was sitting at a computer. “I’ll be right back, Robert. I need to take a look at this lady’s shotgun.”

  IT WAS only as she stood at her VW under the gray sky, the air warmer now, the lot filled with more cars and pickups than just a few moments ago, that Lois remembered she hadn’t paid for the bottle of Advil in her hand. But it felt good to be back out in the heat, and just as soon as she bought what was needed, she was going to find a coffee shop or a bakery or both, then she was going to drive back to Susan’s street. And who knows? She might even knock on the door. Walk right in and see what was what.

  “This is a fine old Mossberg, ma’am, but it’s in very poor condition.”

  In the daylight it was clear this boy was older than he’d looked back inside under fluorescent lights. There were faint pockets under his eyes, and in his goatee sprouted a few gray whiskers. He was standing at the open door of her backseat, the shotgun open, staring once more into both barrels before snapping them back shut. “Does your son ever clean his guns?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll tell him to do that.”