Gone So Long Read online

  Interloper: One that interferes in the affairs of others, often for selfish reasons. One that intrudes in a place, situation, or activity.

  On those nights when he parks his truck in the municipal lot of minivans and glossy black SUVs, he does not believe he is intruding on anyone, but as he steps onto the brick walkway for the main thoroughfare of strolling tourists and taxpaying residents, there’s the thin-skinned sense that he’s snuck in the back door of a party to which he was never invited. And it’s in moments like these that he studies his own reflection in the plate-glass windows of pubs and boutiques and sees an aging man with a slight paunch and big hands, a man in a clean button-down shirt and khakis, both of which he ironed earlier in his trailer on the Formica table of his kitchenette. He sees a man wearing eyeglasses, his thinning hair combed back, his face lined in a way that somehow has lessened the prominence of his hooked nose, a tuft of gray hair visible just beneath his clavicle. He could be a retired schoolteacher or an accountant, maybe even a lawyer, a grandfather. Is he a grandfather? Or even a great-grandfather? These questions are not new.

  Your children need your presence more than your presents. These were the words of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and they were typed on a sheet of paper behind framed glass fixed between two posts in the ground. This was in front of the white clapboard Unitarian church. It was the highest structure in town, its bell tower taller than the Methodist church’s shingled cupola in the south end, taller than Immaculate Conception’s cross two blocks west, taller than the domed roof of the Greek church to the north.

  Daniel had driven over the river into town one night last fall to go walking. From the bridge he could see that all the boats had been stored in marina yards for the winter and the docks had been pulled in, the water flat and gray as it flowed east to the dark lip of ocean at the river’s mouth. When he parked his truck in the lot, a young family in matching sweaters walked by. The wife and mother had the curly blond hair of a young girl, and she smiled at him and he smiled back, but still, there was the feeling he was creeping into a good town of nice people where he would never be truly welcome. He tried to ignore this, for a lifetime ago he had accepted that all his invitations were forever canceled, that he was simply no longer here at all, which was only right, and that was when he walked by the Unitarian church, Your children need your presence more than your presents.

  Daniel heard those written words in Jesse Jackson’s voice, and it made him think of Pee Wee Jones. It’d been years since Daniel had thought of him. Jones was black, and he stayed away from the Panthers because they were too disciplined for him; the Panthers didn’t drink hooch or smoke cigarettes, they wore clean denims and white T-shirts and studied books they discussed in small groups in the yard. But Pee Wee could draw and paint, and one time he did this sketch of a peasant woman he copied out of a book on Russian history. He lived in the Fives and Danny was in the Threes, but one night just before lights-out, Danny was shooting the shit with him in his cell and that’s when he saw that sketch taped to his wall just above Pee Wee’s bunk. It was the profile of a woman bending low over some task or another, her hair thin and pulled back in a tight bun. She had a hooked nose and her eyes were set deep into her face. Danny said, “Pee Wee, you just drew my mother.”

  Pee Wee knelt on his bunk, untaped that sketch from his wall, rolled it up, and handed it to him. Two days later was May 5, 1980, Susan’s tenth birthday. Daniel had been gone over half her lifetime. He never knew if anybody ever read her the letters he sent her, and now he wanted to send her something more. In his own cell, he wrote on the back of Pee Wee’s sketch: This is a picture of your grandmother. I hope you like it. You’re ten years old! Love, Daddy.

  Or something close to that. He didn’t want to ruin the sketch by folding it, but there was nothing else he could do so he folded it carefully and sealed it into an envelope, stamped it, wrote his mother’s and father’s address on it, and carried it down to Polaski, a screw no one liked because he pushed his weight around and got joy making cons more miserable than they already were. When Polaski found out Willie Teague had a pretty wife, he’d stop Teague whenever he saw him and say, “Your wife’s fucking your best buddy right this second, Teague. I mean right now. How do you like that?”

  Polaski was big, well over six feet and two hundred fifty pounds. Like all the CO’s he kept his head nearly shaved, a red stubble smeared across his shiny scalp. He had flat blue eyes and a wide face, and even when he was not tormenting Teague or dropping another con’s mail in the mud on purpose or putting a ticket on somebody for insolence if they didn’t give him the “proper attitude,” then his thin smile always said he was about to and what are you going to do about it?

  Danny did not want to give his daughter’s gift to Polaski, but he had no choice. It was minutes from lights-out, and Polaski was locking up the steel mesh door at the bottom of the stairs. Danny had to stop on the last step and hold the envelope out to him.

  “The fuck is that?”

  “For tomorrow’s mail.”

  “For tomorrow’s mail, what?”

  “Sir.”

  Polaski unlocked the mesh door and snatched the envelope from Danny and stuffed it into his back pocket. “It’s lights-out, Ahearn. I could fucking’write you up.”

  “I’m going now. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, what?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Less than a year later, Polaski would bleed to death not four feet from where he was standing then.

  Your children need your presence more than your presents.

  On another day, Daniel might have felt unfairly stripped down and admonished by this sign, but that fall evening, the streetlamps flickering on, the smell of pizza dough and woodsmoke in the air, he felt only a melancholy gratitude for the memory of Pee Wee it gave him.

  The following Sunday morning was cold and bright, and he was on his way to the German bakery that sold strong coffee and walnut scones. Now there was a new quote fixed to the sign: Moses said to God, “Where can I find you?” God said, “If you are looking for me, you have already found me.”

  Daniel stopped and read it again. A boy on a skateboard passed by so closely Daniel could smell his hair gel and the wool of his sweater. Moses’s question: “Where can I find you?” From inside the church came singing, something choral and triumphant. A red beer truck rumbled by in the street. Where can I find you? It was as if a sentence that had lain as deeply inside him as the marrow of his own bones had just been pulled from him and tacked to that sign in the sunlight. But it wasn’t God he was looking for—there was no God—it was Susan, and it was her mother Linda, and it was even Danny before he became Daniel reading that sign.

  The singing stopped. Soon enough the front door of the church opened, and Daniel stayed where he was and watched the congregation leave. Grown men and women. A lot of corduroy and sweater vests, reading glasses and colorful skirts and long gray hair and even a plump girl carrying a sleeping infant wrapped in a white blanket.

  Later, after he’d sat in the bakery sipping his coffee and eating his scone, he walked up to the tall doors of the church, pulled one open, and stepped inside. He stood in a plank-floored entryway. One of the interior doors to the church was open, and he could see empty whitewashed pews, could hear male voices coming from an anteroom off to the right. Daniel did not know why he’d entered this building. It was not for God, nor for any of His followers. But what was written on that sign out front had gone inside him, and now he was slipping on his reading glasses to peer at a list taped to the wall.

  People Helping People Volunteer Opportunities in the Greater Port City Area

  Daniel read the list of agencies and halfway houses. Help for alcoholics and drug addicts, for poor people and sick people and women raising kids alone. He thought of all those years ago and his mother-in-law raising her young son, Paul, and now her granddaughter, Susan. Gerry ran off after only a year of that. That’s what Daniel’s mother had told him in Visit
ing anyway, though it clearly pained her to talk about the Dubies at all, so Daniel stopped asking. But he knew Gerry had owed money to the owners of his poker and pinball machines, serious men from Providence, and before Danny went down he’d heard something about a waitress, too, a big-breasted brunette over at the High Hat.

  Port City Youth Services*

  Daniel began to see some beleaguered woman and her wild kids. He began to see himself cutting her grass for her, hauling in groceries, sitting down at her kitchen table and helping her son or daughter do their homework. But of course there was an asterisk beside this agency, and he leaned in closer and saw he’d have to be given a CORI check. Where there were kids, there was this, and even though he’d never been a danger to kids, Daniel knew his history would be discovered and he’d be denied.

  He kept reading until he was near the bottom of the sheet: Elder Services, no asterisks, the Council on Aging the first one he saw. He studied the phone number, committed it to memory, and left the church before anyone saw him and tried to rope him in.

  Just past the State Street intersection, Daniel takes a right and accelerates up the asphalt lane to Rudy’s building. The old man is sitting in his wheelchair at the end of the ramp, his shoulders hunched, a scowl on his lined face like Daniel’s late when he’s at least ten minutes early. Daniel waves, that jagged heat in his hips shooting down both legs.

  NOW DANIEL sits at the computer table, sweating from hurrying here from his truck. He feels weak from skipping lunch, and he can feel his heart beating in his dry throat, and he moves the mouse until the screen lights up, and he waits. By the time Daniel pulled up to Rudy’s apartment complex and lifted the old man’s wheelchair from the bed of his Tacoma it was well after five, and the library closes at six. Two monitors over, an overweight girl with a streak of green hair is tapping away at the keyboard. The older librarian is on duty, standing at the circulation desk reading something on a laptop computer. When he walked in, she glanced up and studied him as if she knew all about him, then she smiled automatically before going back to the small screen. “We close in forty minutes.” Part of Daniel was relieved to hear this. He would never be able to find his daughter in forty minutes, but then his face warmed with shame for feeling this relief. But why wouldn’t he feel it? If he ever does find her, what then?

  The room is cool. He smells the spearmint gum the girl near him is chewing. She keeps tapping one key over and over, and he knows she’s playing a video game of some kind. He’s stalling and knows that too. He types in Google and waits. But that bright page comes up faster than he expected and now its long, empty bar wants him to fill it with words. There’s an aching pressure in his groin that when he was healthy would send him to the toilet, but now he just looks out the window at the lawn, how it narrows into the town’s center green where there’s a granite monument to those killed when young.

  He types Susan. Then he types Dunn. He presses the enter button and in half a breath one Susan Dunn after another presents herself to him: Susan Dunn—Interior Designer; Susan Dunn—LinkedIn; Susan Dunn, Nursing School Faculty, Wideman Community College. Daniel’s heart is a lost fish swimming through his chest. Can that be her? That same little girl who’d pressed her ear to his chest? Daniel sees her as a woman, a stethoscope around her neck as she lectures a classroom full of earnest students. His fingertips have gone numb, and he taps the mouse and opens the file for Susan Dunn the nursing teacher: There’s a résumé. A Ph.D. A photograph of a red-haired woman with warm green eyes and a wide smile. Fifty years old, at least. The kind of woman Daniel would want at his hospital bedside, though it is not his Susan, and now he is being pulled down a cold black river, and he begins tapping his way back to the others. There’s one who’s a psychiatrist in Minnesota. A head doctor. That would make sense too, but when he opens her file there’s no photo, and this Susan’s résumé has her going to college in the forties. He taps back to the list and scrolls down to a Susan Dunn Facebook page. He clicks it open. There’s a photograph of an empty Adirondack chair on a dock on some lake. Beneath that is this Susan’s Favorites:

  Music: Bobby Vinton, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Luciano Pavarotti

  Books: The Bridges of Madison County, and The Notebook

  Movies: With the Wind

  He does not need to read more. This cannot be his Susan. He knows so little about her, but he knows this: she was a teenager in the 1980s, not in the 1950s or ’60s, the time this Susan has to come from.

  Daniel’s tongue feels thick. He needs water. He taps back to all the other Susan Dunns in the world and scrolls below this one’s Facebook page and sees: Susan Dunn—Images. He tries to swallow but can’t. Under this are photographs of six women, but not one of them can be her. Too old, too fair, three of them blond, though his brown-haired daughter could have dyed it, couldn’t she? He peers closer at one of them, but she has to be sixty, at least. He clicks the mouse too hard, and the screen freezes. Something loud is rumbling by out in the town square, motorcycles, eight or nine of them. He glances at his watch. Twenty minutes to six. He takes a breath, swallows clammy spit he can feel his heart beating in. He taps the mouse again, this time slowly, the screen opening up into dozens of photographs of Susan Dunn.

  His eyes fill. They are all, every single one, women, not a young girl anywhere, but why would there be?

  She’s forty-three years old. She’s forty-three years of age.

  He pulls away his reading glasses, but they’re his work glasses, still attached to the thin cord around his neck, and he has to wipe at each eye with a forefinger. He lets out a long breath that’s louder than he intended. He puts his glasses back on, leans closer, and begins to study one Susan Dunn after another.

  Most of the pictures are posed portraits, and Daniel’s eyes pass over them too quickly. He has to force himself to slow down and take in each one. There is a blond woman in a dark business suit, staring into the camera with a smile so cold Daniel assumes her to be a state prosecutor. There is a younger woman, her hair short and black, two fingers under her chin like she’s just finished writing a book and is still reflecting on it. There are women only in profile, some wearing earrings and some with pearl necklaces, and almost all of them have their hair newly done. There is a Susan Dunn standing at a podium, glasses at the end of her nose as she reads from her speech. On the wall behind her is a blue and gold banner: National Real Estate Appraisers. She is the right age, and Daniel squints at the screen then thinks to click the image itself, and yes, it gets bigger, but no, that can’t be his Susan because this one’s eyes are blue and her nose is too small. He clicks the woman’s face, and it gets smaller and he scrolls slowly down, more faces rising up to him, so many Susan Dunns, too many.

  “We’ll be closing in fifteen minutes.”

  The older one at the desk. Daniel nods at her over his computer screen. The heavy girl next to him keeps tapping away.

  He is thinking about tomorrow. How he will take a day off and come back here first thing in the morning. How he’ll stay all day looking at these pictures. There are so many of them. How can there be so many? And now there are a few men, too. A man in a suit and tie. Another in a T-shirt under the sun on a boat. There is a Susan staring at him from a family photograph of her and her husband and five kids, all of them obese. She’s the right age. Can they be his? Five fat grandchildren? He clicks the picture and narrows on the woman’s face. No, too German. Or Swedish. Even under all that weight, it can’t be his daughter. He clicks the picture small again. That word in his head, daughter, like a blade all these years, and there, just one row down from the big woman and her big family, is Linda.

  The blood inside him stops moving. The tapping of the keys to his left becomes muffled and far away. It is his wife as she would have been if she’d lived another fifteen or twenty years. She is standing outside under the sun in front of a concrete building. Her hair is long and most of it is swept around to hang over her left shoulder. She isn’t smiling, but she isn’t not smil
ing, either. She wears a sleeveless cotton dress and no jewelry, her tanned arms hanging at her sides as if she’s about to lift them and start running. A hand rests on her shoulder, a group portrait. Daniel’s fingertip clicks the mouse. She becomes larger and more beautiful. It is Linda looking up at him in his glass booth at the Himalaya’s gate. And it is Susan just before she ran from him to play hide-and-seek. Or just before she would climb up into his lap, her expression unsure but game. It is the daughter he hasn’t seen in forty years, and he’s found her in less than twenty minutes. The screen becomes a foggy blur. He pulls his work glasses over his head and wipes his eyes against his upper arms and puts his glasses back on. At the bottom of the picture, in small yellow print is: Susan Dunn, Adjunct Faculty, English. A teacher. His daughter has become a teacher, a little girl who loved books though Daniel was slow in reading them to her. She preferred Linda to do it, she and her mother lying in bed together, both their heads on the pillow while they stared up at the open book in Linda’s hands.