Those times she would rest her cheek against Noni’s big soft breasts. How she could hear the muffled rise of her grandmother’s breathing. How she could hear her steady, faraway heart.
47
THE CITY of Tampa almost behind him, a dense cluster of concrete and glass and open parks, cars and buses moving through it, people on its sidewalks and boardwalks coming and going, some under umbrellas because it’s raining, and Daniel glimpses a farmers’ market under a long wet tent, crates of oranges and tomatoes and a man in a wet T-shirt smoking a cigarette as the unfolding interstate now takes Daniel onto a bridge over a bay that stretches for miles to the north and to the south. There are boats out there, even under this rain. This bridge goes on and on, and he’s grateful for the wide-open view, though it brings him back to that Sunday morning when he’d stood on the water side of the railing of the Tobin Bridge ready to jump.
He glances down at his daughter’s picture still taped to the dash. He feels like he might be able to eat something. That bag of nuts he’d bought at the gas station had gone down all right, and now he wants some eggs. Maybe he can find a joint somewhere that sells breakfast all day. But maybe he should wait for that. Maybe that’s something he can do with—
But he’s getting ahead of himself.
Daniel has both hands on the wheel. He can feel his heart beating in his palms and fingers. At the other end of this bridge over this bay lies St. Petersburg, and what then? Just go to her school? But what if she’s not there today?
Then he’ll have to ask around. Find out where she lives. Maybe she’s in the phone book. He’ll find a St. Petersburg phone book and look her up. Then he can call her house, and—what? His stomach burns. It matches the hot, jagged grip on his back and hips, and now fried eggs don’t sound so good anymore. He flicks on the radio. He wants music or the news, something to take his mind somewhere else, but it’s still his book on tape. The narrator’s quoting some old English law from the 1600s, a bunch of haths and loseths, and Daniel turns it off. Through his rising and falling wipers he follows a Dodge Charger onto a wider interstate, the Dodge leaving him far behind, a white spray shooting out from under mag tires. Probably a young man behind the wheel. Just a young man doing what young men do.
The rain eases up, and Daniel needs a toilet. He needs to study his map, too. He should be only ten or so miles away from his daughter’s college, but he’s not sure. To his left and to his right, stretching out for miles among pine and palm trees, lie neighborhoods of mobile homes and low wood and brick houses, hundreds of them, all these lives being lived with others, and it makes him think of Suzie again, of how she used to sit in his lap and press her ear to his chest. It’s so loud, Daddy. It’s so loud.
48
LOIS TOOK an exit too soon and found herself driving through a low-rent neighborhood. She passed a house on her left that had a collapsed carport, and in the next driveway an old air-conditioning unit was stacked in a rusty wheelbarrow and an obese boy sat on his stoop in a T-shirt in the rain staring at her as she drove by. Her headache was back, Advils or not, and she was itching to get back to Susan’s but dreading it too. She should ask somebody how to get to the college, and that would get her back to Suzie’s street. And she should call Marianne.
Lois pulled over alongside an abandoned lot, kept the engine running, then fumbled through her purse until she found her flip phone and turned it on. The battery was low. She squinted at the buttons and called her shop.
“Lois’s Fine Furniture and Toys?” Marianne’s polite and peppy voice, it irked Lois, even though there was no better way to answer the phone than the way she just had. But why did she always have to sound like the shop was hers when Lois’s name was on the marquee?
“Marianne, it’s me.”
“Lois, honey, where are you? Are you all right? I called the hospital and heard you’d left. I’ve been calling your house all morning. My God, I was just about to send Walter over.”
“I’m fine, Marianne.”
“Are you home?”
“Look, I won’t be in today. I just wanted you to know.”
“Lois—”
“I’ll call you later, Marianne. Goodbye.”
Lois pushed buttons till her phone was off. Then she closed it and dropped it into her pocketbook, and funny how her fingers trembled just a bit. Funny how she felt right then, like she’d just said something far more important than she had.
At a gas station with full service she rolled her window down all the way and asked the man pumping her gas where the college was.
“What college is that?” He had to be fifty, a white man chewing gum and needing a shave. His eyes were a lovely blue, and he knew it and smiled at her with the kind of ease with women only slick players had and that she’d never had any use for whatsoever.
“Eckerd. Is there another?”
“You need 275. Take the Twenty-second Avenue exit.” He glanced in her backseat and had to’ve seen the shotgun but just winked at her and pulled his nozzle out of her VW, Lois’s face flaming up as she handed him her credit card and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
The rain was really coming down on the highway, but it eased up once she was back in Suzie’s neighborhood. She drove slowly up and down wet streets and mostly empty driveways and quiet-looking homes. Then she was back on Susan’s street, and only Bobby’s car was still parked in their driveway, and that same icy sweat broke out along Lois’s forehead and the back of her neck. Had Suzie already gone to meet with him? Was she too late?
Lois kept her eye on Bobby’s car through her arcing windshield wipers as she pulled into the spot where she’d been before. The child’s chalk lines on the sidewalk were beginning to run in muted colors into the bush daisies, and Lois just sat there a moment. She took a long, deep breath but got little air for the effort. She looked over at that Walmart bag on her passenger’s seat, staring at it as if it were a wild animal somebody had left there. Then she pulled it onto her lap and reached in for the box of shotgun shells. Winchester. Those damn westerns Gerry had liked so much, his stocking feet propped on the coffee table while he drank his 7&7s and watched men on horseback shooting other men down in the street. Oh, he loved that, but he was a coward himself. All his hard talk after Ahearn was arrested. How many nights did Lois have to listen to drunk Gerry go on and on about “people” he knew in the “system” ? His “friends in Providence” who would have Danny killed “in no time” ? But what happened? Nothing, that’s what. Lois spent her days and nights wanting to die herself, to just walk out of their arcade apartment down to the beach and into the ocean. But there was Paul to think about and now there was little Suzie, who had seen it all and who did she have now but her?
“Nope. It was always up to me, wasn’t it?” Lois will do it. Lois will take care of that. Lois, Lois, Lois. Raindrops pattered along her roof. She ripped up the flap of the box and nearly broke a nail doing it, though what was there to break? It had been years since she’d kept them long and manicured. And her hair. She used to have it styled once a week all year long, sometimes twice a week in the summer. When had she stopped giving two shits? After Don died? Or was it before, when Susan left for good?
The shells were made of green plastic. She pulled one out. It was heavy and smelled new, and the brass casing at its end was shiny and beautiful, but her hands were shaking when before she’d been so calm, and when she turned toward the backseat her VW listed again and a flurry of dark movement crowded her eyes. Was she going to have to step out into the rain then lean into her backseat to load that thing? And then what? Sit here and wait for Danny Ahearn, who for all she knew could be meeting with Suzie right this minute? And what if he didn’t show till tonight or tomorrow? Was she really going to wait so she could cut him down in front of the same girl who’d seen what her mother had suffered?
A sound was coming out of Lois that was foreign to her own ears, her chest heaving for air and there would never be enough. It was like a twin of herself was
crying, not her, but some younger Lois the older Lois had turned her back on years ago. It was the one who had held little Suzie in her blue dress at low tide on the beach. It was the one who had watched her Gerry walk out into that surf holding their daughter in a coffee can. It was the one watching those awful ashes, so little of them, so much lighter than they should be, fall into a clump into the ocean, quickly spreading out and dissolving as if Linda had never lived at all.
“Oh, honey. Oh, hon.” The shell slipped from Lois’s hand and rolled onto the floor at her feet. She wiped her nose and tried to breathe, but there wasn’t enough air. There just wasn’t. Her wipers were still moving. Her engine was still running. In the rain ahead of her, her granddaughter’s husband’s car sat in its driveway as solidly as a lighthouse before the rocks, and Lois pushed the box of shotgun shells onto her pocketbook and put her VW in gear and drove the short but long, so very long, distance to their house.
49
SUSAN STOOD outside under the eaves of the Starbucks with her phone pressed to her ear. It was still raining, but now the sun was out and a stippled puddle in the parking lot was the same pale lemon as the sky. Noni’s phone rang and rang and Susan imagined her dead in her bed, her loose skin grayer than it had been in the hospital the night before.
“Who are you to protect me? When have you ever cared about me?”s
“Answer the phone, Lois.” Susan’s voice seemed to rise up from some black promise of an earth-tilting grief. What was she thinking, leaving her in the hospital like that? Had she thought to even leave her a note? No, she hadn’t, nor had she ever put herself fully in her grand-mother’s skin because never had there been a more self-absorbed and selfish bitch than Susan Ahearn Dubie Dunn. And Bobby was wrong. She shouldn’t have told Lois about the letter. Doing that was so much worse than when she’d hopped that bus back to Gainesville where Danny Rolling still roamed freely, Susan too wrapped up in her own story to even begin to think of what her grandmother was having to suffer through.
And why did she tell her? Because Bobby said she had a right to know? That Susan would be disrespecting Lois’s loss and treating her like a child if she withheld such news from her? No, this was all bullshit. She’d told Noni about the letter because part of her wanted to hurt her with it. Because part of Susan was still angry at her grandmother for ever telling her in the first place. Because, oh, how much easier it would have been to have lived all these years believing that her mother and father had died in each other’s loving arms.
Susan punched in the speed-dial number for Lois’s cell phone, though she knew Noni never used it. She waited five rings then called the shop. Marianne answered right away, her voice prim and a bit too composed, but there was a genuine warmth there, even answering the phone, and it was as if she were reaching through the phone and squeezing Susan’s hand.
“Marianne, it’s Susan. Did my crazy grandmother actually come in today?”
“No, honey, she didn’t. But she called me, and she sounded strange. I’m worried about her.”
“Is she at her house? She won’t pick up.”
“She didn’t say. Susan, I don’t mean to pry, but has something happened that I might be able to help with?”
Susan stared at the puddle in the lot. A large businesswoman in a tan pants suit smiled at her as she pulled open the Starbucks door and walked in. Susan’s eyes stung. Her throat was a thick mass of far too much to say, though she wanted to say all of it, beginning with what was growing inside her, beginning with that. “Yes, I don’t know, I—”
Her phone buzzed against her ear. She pulled it away and saw “Home,” her heart skidding along packed dirt, for Bobby could only be calling about one thing, the other Danny, her “father.” My God, was he here?
“I have to go, Marianne. Thank you.” Susan’s fingertips were hot wax, and Bobby answered after the first ring.
“Hey, baby.”
“Is he there?”
“No, but your grandmother is. And she’s not doing so well. She’s not doing well at all. Where are you?”
Slumping relief then cool disappointment, it was like being pulled in for a long, consoling hug then pushed far away. It was so familiar, really. So goddamned familiar.
“I couldn’t stay there.”
“I should’ve canceled my meeting.”
“What’s Lois doing?”
“She’s using the bathroom. I’d like to feed her, but we’re low on everything. Maybe you can pick something up?”
A Jeep pulled into the lot, a big man climbing out. His eyes walked all over Susan, and she turned her back on him and said to Bobby, “Okay. I can do that.” She heard the big man open the Starbucks door behind her, and she kept her back to it and him and said, “I’ll be home soon.” Those last two words felt so natural, as natural as air and water and fire and sky, so why was she denying it? Wasn’t it time to stop denying it?
50
THIS LIGHT is taking its own sweet time to change, and Daniel keeps staring out his passenger’s window at his daughter’s school, an electric current humming through his bones. From here it doesn’t look like much. Beyond a scrappy stand of pine and oak, there’s a scattering of buildings under the sun, the rain stopped for good now, though his windshield is still dripping and he flicks on the wipers one more time as a horn sounds behind him and he takes a slow left into the entrance of Eckerd College.
He should clean up first. The last few miles he’s kept his printed-out directions pressed against his steering wheel, his reading glasses just under his new sunglasses, and if he hears another damn car horn go off on him he’ll— What? He’ll what?
He hadn’t expected her school to be so close. He still needs to piss, and he wants to brush his teeth and wash his face and comb his hair, but now he’s pulling up to a security guard’s shack. It’s painted white and is nearly all glass, and Daniel may as well be back inside, a screw eyeballing him as he steps into the mess hall or the barbershop or the school.
Except this guy’s smiling and waving him on before Daniel can even pull to a full stop. The shack’s door is slid wide open, and he’s an older guy sitting on a stool, silver hair and an easy smile in a tanned face. No uniform, just a white shirt and khaki shorts and running shoes, an open newspaper on his lap. Daniel waves back and drives on.
This feels like a good sign. It does. So does the midafternoon sun shining brighter now, the way it makes the wet grass sparkle along a man-made pond, beyond it a modern building that’s whiter than the security shack in Daniel’s rearview mirror. Off to his left, through a line of planted palm trees, are more modern-looking buildings. They have concrete wheelchair ramps and tall glass windows and doors, and three young women are walking out of one into a parking lot. One is black, the other two white, and all three are wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts and flip-flops. The black girl is showing the other two something on her phone and the three of them laugh, then a bearded man in a tie walks ahead of them to his car, and he’s got to be a professor, and Daniel is not ready to be here. Not yet. What if she just comes walking out of a building like that? What if her eyes lay on his red Tacoma with the Mass. plates and she sees his sixty-three-year-old mug staring out at her? Does she even remember what he used to look like? Would she have seen any picture of him at all?
He’s driving down a narrow asphalt lane. Across it lie wet pine needles and a few flattened green leaves, and it must’ve rained harder here than out on the highway. He passes half-full parking lots. His back and hips burn. There’s also a groin-heaviness he’s been putting up with since way before Tampa. He needs to park and find a restroom. He needs to get himself cleaned up.
Two young men are walking on the other side of the road talking to one another. Their T-shirts are wet, and they’ve got the kind of muscles so many kids do today, everybody built like Jimmy Squeeze, who these days wouldn’t even turn anybody’s head. Daniel rolls down his window and slows to ask them where he can find a toilet, but they don’t seem to notice and no
thing comes out of his mouth and he drives ahead and pulls into the next parking lot he sees. In the car beside him a red-haired girl is talking fast into her phone she holds in front of her face. She looks pissed off, and even from where Daniel sits, rolling up his driver’s-side window, he can hear the voice of the boy she’s talking to. He sounds like he’s defending himself, like she’s all wrong about him, and this is wrong, Daniel being at this school before he’s ready. He should just drive out of here and find a gas station where he can take a long slow piss then wash himself up again. Better yet, he should go book a room in a motel somewhere and take his time doing it right. He’s wearing his best khaki pants, but they need ironing, this shirt too, and even though he showered and shaved early this morning he should do it again.
Daniel almost puts the Tacoma back in gear, but a hot point of pain is pressing against the tip of his penis, and he needs a toilet right now.
“I fucking told you that, Ethan! I did too!” The girl’s voice is muffled now, but what she’s spewing is in the air and it comes to Daniel that maybe that’s the history of the world right there, people who can’t get along spreading their hurt out to everybody else.
Daniel reaches back into his duffel bag for his shaving kit.
“Bullshit, you never said that! You’re lying, Ethan.”
Linda yelled at him more than he ever yelled at her. “You’re sick, Danny! You’re fucking sick in the head!”
Daniel touches the cash in his front pants pocket. He locks his truck and looks back at the girl behind the wheel of her car, but she’s looking straight ahead through the windshield at the air itself, her pretty face ugly with bad feeling, and he walks across the road and through a bigger parking lot, his legs stiff, his feet like bear paws. Most of the cars have Florida plates, but there’s one from Alabama, another from Illinois, and he thinks about young people packing up and going off to school somewhere. This was never even a thought for him growing up, not from his mother, not from Liam, and not from himself.
Gone So Long Page 37
