8

DANIEL LIES on his bed in front of the fan staring at the photograph of Susan Dunn. Right after work and before a lunch he did not want, he drove to the library and found her image again, printed it out, and taped it to the trailer wall, the photo’s lower corners flapping softly in the electric breeze. Its colors are faded and the features of her face are not as clear as they were on the computer screen, but it’s still what Linda would have become, it’s still their Susan. At the bottom of the page, he tacked the phone number for Eckerd College he’d written down the day before, but he doesn’t look at it.

For a moment, Daniel considers just letting it go, the way he has again and again for years. But there has always been the shadow-weight of her small cheek and ear pressed to his chest, her high, loving voice: It’s so loud, Daddy. He was a young man then, just a kid, really, twenty-two or -three, and he needs to tell her that before he’s gone. He needs her to know that he’s no longer the boy who did what he did. He needs his daughter to know that there was always more to his heart than whatever she heard there.

Your daughter does not remember you.

Of course he had more than considered this, worried it like a sore on his tongue. Why would she remember him? When he was three, what did he remember of Liam? His bony lap? The hot paint colors under his nails? His silence as he sat at the table and ate whatever Daniel’s mother had cooked for him? If Liam had disappeared when Danny was three, he would be only the ghost of a dream and no more.

She only remembers her loving mother you took from her.

Did she? He hoped so. Linda had been a good mother. The best. Daniel hoped Susan remembered her: the heart-shaped pancakes Linda made for her, the way she called her Suzie Woo Woo, the way she washed and combed and braided her hair, the reading to her at night, and how, if they were walking into the carnival noise of the beach after supper, Linda would carry Susan and would only let her walk if she and Danny were both holding her hands.

Danny carried her a lot too. He’d lift her onto his shoulders and press one hand up against her back, Susan’s sticky palms on his forehead and sometimes in his eyes. When Susan laughed or yelled over the noise of the crowd and the rides and the arcade machines, Danny would feel the vibration of her voice through her chest at the back of his head. Like the inside of his head was her home.

There were so many moments like that one. Once, playing hide-and-seek in their three-room cottage two streets from the water, Daniel had taken his time finding her behind the couch. He kept calling her name, calling it and calling it, Susan giggling in her hiding place. He lifted the chair and put it noisily back down. He did the same to the potted plant on the windowsill. “Susan? Suzie Woo Woo?”

Then he sat heavily on the couch and covered his face and pretended to cry. In seconds a small hand was touching his arm. “Daddy? Don’t be sad. I’m here. See? I’m here!”

Lying on his bunk back at the Threes, that old question kept turning in him like a rusty auger. Did they ever tell her what he’d done? Not when she was still a child, because that would have been an abuse Lois and even Gerry weren’t capable of, but what about when she got older? Fifteen, sixteen years old? Gerry was long gone then, but Daniel pictured Lois sitting Susan down at some table or on her living room sofa. Lois was where the beauty came from. She’d always been a big woman, but everything in her face lined up just right, eyes to nose to cheekbones to mouth. When Danny and Linda started out, Lois wore her hair up high the way women did then, and she wore heavy black eyeliner and black shit in her lashes, her lipstick a pink that would fade to white. But it would have been the mid-eighties when Susan was fifteen or sixteen, and what words would have come out of Lois?

Honey, there’s something you should know.

What, Noni?

It’s almost what Italians called their grandmothers, but when Susan was two she couldn’t say Nonna, only Noni, and it’d stuck. Daniel tried to see his daughter in this scene. Her hair and face. Braces, maybe? Loose jeans like he heard they wore then? Maybe polish on her fingernails? Thin bracelets on her wrist? Did she have a boyfriend? Did he treat her right? This question inside him so right but so goddamned wrong, coming from him, that when he thought it he broke out in a sweat as instantly as if he were sick.

But the thing is, he could not picture Susan like this at all. Instead he saw her only as he’d last seen her. In her red shorts, getting jerked from his arms by one of the cops standing in his bedroom.

That afternoon of Lois’s letter in 1988, Daniel still did not know she’d raised Susan in Florida, so Daniel pictured Gerry and Lois’s apartment in the rear of the Penny Arcade. It was one big open room with two bedrooms in the opposite ends. A long black Naugahyde couch separated the TV area from the kitchen, which was small, not enough cabinets, the rear of the counters lined with cans of Spam and soup, tuna and sardines, boxes of crackers and dried spaghetti, cellophane-wrapped loaves of bread. There was a green Formica table with chrome legs and matching chairs, and in the middle of it was the large clamshell ashtray overflowing with Chesterfield butts from Gerry, Carltons from Lois. Next to this was a hula girls set of salt and pepper shakers, tiny holes in the tops of both their heads just above a hot-pink garland of flowers.

Did Lois allow Susan to keep his name? Daniel doubted it. Maybe before she was this beautiful Susan Dunn staring at him from her college in St. Petersburg, Florida, she was Susan Dubie. And maybe that’s where Lois began.

What, Noni?

Your first last name was Ahearn. It would be hard for Lois to utter his name, but she would do it, blowing smoke out the side of her mouth like a curse. It belonged to your father. But Daniel could never or would never allow the rest of this moment to unfold on the ceiling above him. Because if Lois did tell Susan where he was, then that would mean his daughter did not want to see him or have contact with him in any way because she never came to visit and she never wrote him a letter.

He did not blame her for this. How could he?

He should write all this out for her. He has tried before, but then he had no solid notion of where she might be. The act had felt as useless as writing something he’d seal in a bottle and throw into the Atlantic. But he knows where she is. And so he should write something first, then send it to her, then call her. He can’t just be some voice on the wire after so long. Whole lives have come and gone since he last saw her.

He sits up too quickly, spinning brown plates crowding his vision. He inhales deeply through his nose, smells the burned butter from his grilled cheese sandwich he only stared at, the pine sap through his screened windows. It’s another hot day and his T-shirt sticks to his back, the revolving fan pushing around nothing but warm air.

In the drawer beneath the toaster, under loose pens and pencil stubs and the broken calculator, is the small pad on which he multiplies his price times the number of chair holes, and he pulls out the pad and one of the newer pens and sits at the table. He stares at the straight blue lines and all that empty space between them. He gets up slowly and fills himself a glass of water. He sits back down.

The whir of the fan, the shriek of a crow in the trees. He leans forward and writes:

Dear Susan

He crosses this out.

My dear Susan

No, this sounds too much like she’s his. That he deserves her.

Susan

No. Too cold.

My daughter Susan

Yes, that’s better. It’s the truth. But it’s still too cold.

My dear daughter Susan

That’s right, isn’t it? All four words in that order? Though there’s still the feeling he’s claiming something that is no longer rightfully his. Then start with that. Why not start with that?

Ive got no right to call you these things. But even with everything that happened you are my daughter. Our daughter.

Your mother was a very good mother. I hope you remember that about her. She did not deserve

He stops.

That hot, smoky kitchen. The overhead light missing one bulb so it was never bright enough in there. And Linda, she had had it. She was screaming and she was leaving and it was like being told your heart and organs are about to go for a little ride and you have no say in it. None whatsoever.

Forty years have passed and Daniel still wonders if they had been in any other room if things might have gone differently. Didn’t she know what her leaving would do to him? But how could she? In their four years he had tried to tell her, but words had never come easy for him, and everything he did tell her sounded to his own ears like weak wind through a cardboard box. They’d be lying naked side by side in their narrow bed, her back to him, Danny’s arm over her shoulder, his penis softening, his face in her hair. He’d say: “I wasn’t alive till you.” Or, “What I feel for you is, I don’t know, so damn big.” Did he tell her that? Did he tell her that daily he was afraid he couldn’t hold it all?

Jimmy Squeeze’s brother Bill. He didn’t have Jimmy’s muscles, but he was taller than all of them and he had a deep voice like Danny’s, and he smiled a lot. Two times Danny had passed the Penny Arcade, pushing his old man’s cart full of paint buckets and rollers and brushes and tarps and rags, and he caught Linda smiling up at Jimmy’s brother, her small hands in the canvas pockets of her change-and-token apron, Bill telling her some private little story or joke that, seeing them like that, Danny just knew was about him and wasn’t good.

Though what could Bill have told her? Danny had always stayed to himself, and so there wasn’t much that could be said. Even when he became “The Sound” of the Himalaya. He would dress and climb up into the plexiglass booth and take to the microphone, but he never went drinking with the ticket takers later. There might be trouble and Danny had never liked trouble. Maybe it was from all those days he was sent home from school with swollen knuckles, his mother waiting for him with food and his comic books and that loving look in her eyes, like she somehow knew her son was going to have one of the hard lives, and she had to give him strength any way she could.

Until the Himalaya, Danny had begun to feel that, too. That his life would be lived on the edge of things, that he wasn’t going to get what the others would. But when the rides shut down around midnight he took his time walking back to the Sea Spray because he still had on his white pants and red jacket and people nodded respectfully in his direction or smiled at him just because of what he’d done all night over the Himalaya’s gate, all the beach rats acknowledging him like he was somebody, it was like when a fever breaks and you’re sitting on your couch and you can feel the strength come back into your arms and legs; maybe he’d just moved too much from town to town and there was nothing wrong with him at all. Maybe he just needed to stay still long enough for somebody to notice him, an important man like Will Price.

And a girl like Linda Dubie.

Because there she was just after midnight only hours after she’d stared up at him in his booth. She was smoking a Camel under the orange light of Joe’s Playland, one arm folded under her breasts, her hair loose over her shoulders. There were always a couple of police cruisers parked in front of the Frolics. Still, she shouldn’t have been there alone. She was wearing that thin gold chain, and her bell-bottoms were tight and flaring out wide over leather sandals and her bare toes. When she saw him, she seemed to straighten a little. She held her burning cigarette low at her hip, one arm still crossed in front of her. Was she waiting for him? Him? The boy with the bad skin and hooked nose and eyes too close together? Because that’s all that came to him as he slowed and looked over his shoulder for who she must really be waiting for. But there was only the wooden railing that bikers would park their Harleys and Nortons against during the day, the littered sand and black surf beyond, a drunk lying faceup mouthing words in the air.

“You Danny Ahearn?”

“Yeah.” His voice sounded too cold to himself, testy and wrong. He stopped and stepped into the warm light of Joe’s Playland. “And you live behind the arcade.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I seen you making change there.”

“That don’t mean I live there.” Her tone was tough, like most of the girls in these beach towns, but there was a softness behind it and some kind of tiredness, like she’d had it being one way and was hungry for another.

“It’s the strip. Everybody knows everybody’s business, right?”

He may have said something like that, Daniel doesn’t remember, but he remembers Linda’s small face under those orange bulbs over the sign for Joe’s Playland. He remembers how dark that made her eyes, how long her throat looked, the dull glint of that thin gold chain resting on her clavicle. And he remembers what she said: “You’re the best one they ever had.”

She took a last drag of her cigarette, dropped the butt, and stubbed it under her sandaled foot. She blew the smoke out her nose and stepped off the sidewalk into the Midway that cars cruised around day and night. On the other side was the cluster of shops and kiddie rides and arcades, and Danny fell into step alongside her.

“I’ll walk you home.”

Weeks later, curled on his couch together, Danny’s mother and father in bed hours earlier, Linda told him that’s what did it for her, that he didn’t ask if he could walk her home, he just told her he was going to.

That was her big mistake. She thought he was strong, and for a while, because she believed this about him, he did too. Out of all the boys on the strip, Linda Dubie had chosen him, Danny Ahearn, who at nineteen was already saving to rent or buy a cottage of his own. And the thing is—and how could Daniel ever write this to their grown daughter?—he and Linda couldn’t stay away from each other.

Their first kiss was under the Frolics at high noon. The beach was crowded with the flesh of families, transistor radios playing rock and roll or baseball out of Boston, Frisbees spinning through the air, some hitting an umbrella or the open mouth of a running dog, the endless pounding surf, the sand too bright under the sun to look at without squinting, but there, under the Frolics, Linda’s back against one of the wooden piers, a ring of dried barnacles above her head like a crown, it was cooler there and except for two hippies sleeping on an Indian blanket thirty feet away, Danny and Linda were alone. She leaned toward him and parted her lips, and though he had never kissed anyone before, kissing her then had felt like something he’d done every single day of his life with her and her only but a thousand years ago and they were picking up where they had left off so it felt new: her taste and her smell, they were kind of sweet the way pine is sweet, something with roots that go into you and spread out, and there was no end to wanting more of it, their tongues going deep, and she seemed to need him as much as he needed her, but there was nowhere to go. Both their mothers would be at home, so Danny was leading her through the bright sun and screeching of gears and yelling, laughing kids and tinny canned music, the smells of fried clams and hot asphalt and car exhaust, her small hand in his, his hardness an ache he tried to cover with his other hand. He was probably wearing cutoff jeans and she was too—they all did then—and because it was a Saturday the Himalaya was open and Price’s son Ricky was up in the DJ booth, his voice okay but not deep enough, the purple cars full of happy faces whizzing around their track, and Ricky was playing “Sugar, Sugar” because he only played the top three hits on the charts over and over again, then Danny was ducking under the chain with Linda, her brown hair falling across her face, her eyes curious and eager, then under the Himalaya itself, the music buried now under the muffled rumble of the cars above them, the screams muffled too, and in the dark corner there, Danny’s back against the plywood wall, their thousand-year-old kisses began again and he has no memory of either of them pulling off their shorts and underwear, just Linda’s warm soft bottom under his hands, his sinking into her a homecoming somehow, her tongue in his mouth as they rocked, the rattle and rumble and screams above, just a wisp of “Sugar, Sugar, honey, honey” as he filled her with the only thing he could give her and maybe the only thing she’d ever really wanted from him.

Daniel writes: What is done cannot be undone.

He reads it, then crosses it out three times. Ronnie Dee used to say something like that all the time. He was a con in the Twos, and he was skinny and white and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes. He also had the book on hockey, but then one of the Italians from Springfield, Tommy Gardino, lost ten cartons of cigarettes on a Flyers game and Dee made the mistake of trying to collect. At Norfolk, they called the yard “the quad,” clipped grass between sidewalks cons weren’t supposed to step off of or congregate on, and that cold afternoon between schooling and work, Danny heading down to the barbershop, Dee was standing in front of Gardino and one of his boys, pulling hard on a cigarette, pointing his finger at Gardino’s face. “What’s done is done, Tommy. That’s it.” And when Dee walked away, Danny knew Ronnie Dee had probably just smoked his last cigarette, stood under his last patch of sky, smelled his last hit of grass and dirt and his own sweat. Two nights before, they’d been served cold pork chops in the mess hall, and there was still some gristle left on the long bone they found in Ronnie’s chest less than one hour after he told Gardino what is done is done.

Daniel stares at the sentence he just crossed out. He writes: undone. There is little he does not know about that word. He has lain down with it since he was twenty-four years old, or no, it has lain with him, a thick chain around his neck pinning him to the bottom of a black sea. Nothing can be reversed. This he knows.

Susan, I used to be Danny.

You’re a grown woman now so maybe I can tell you this. Danny was all blood and body. Danny didn’t know how to think or sit back. Danny was a reactor. When he was a kid he used to read comic books but he could of been a hero of one himself and you could call it “The Reactor.” His family moved around a lot and Danny was always the new kid and you may know what happens to new kids. But Danny would only take it for a half-minute or two maybe less and then the meltdown would start inside him though nobody could see it until it was too late. It was like the inside of him was white heat at all times and any slight that came his way and a button would get pressed by a part of him Danny couldn’t seem to control and the walls would come down and the white heat would gush out and people would get burned.

Daniel reads over what he’s just written. He doesn’t like it. But he doesn’t like it because it’s true, so he keeps writing.

Your grandmother knew that about Danny and she was always trying to keep him cooled down. She loved him see? She loved him so much and she thought if she just kept covering him with coats of love it would dry into a hard shiny shell and no more heat could escape. But then I—but then Danny found another kind of love and everything got messed up. Your mother—

Daniel crosses out those last two words. He writes: Linda Dubie was the most beautiful woman on the strip except she didn’t know this. I don’t know what she thought. Even now I wish I could tell you what she thought of herself. She was quiet like my old man was quiet. (Your grandfather Liam was an artist you probably know. The man who kept the beach magic looking.) But Linda’s quiet wasn’t cold it was warm. It was always warm. She smiled at us a lot. You and me. You’d be on my lap on the couch in front of the TV and Linda—your mother—wouldn’t be watching the show. She’d be sitting in that hard chair against the wall just smiling at us. She had these dark eyes. Like yours. Like your picture I got off the computer at the library. You have her beauty that’s the thing. She was a looker and I was too weak to allow that.

Daniel stops. He’s sweating, and his mouth is dry, and he glances behind him to his bed and Susan Dunn’s picture taped to his wall. It doesn’t feel right to be telling her all this, but it doesn’t feel wrong, either. She’s not a kid anymore. Maybe she never was because of him.

He writes: We’d be out walking the strip. Sometimes I put you on my shoulders or when you were still a baby your mother held you in one of those slings the hippie girls liked to carry their babies in back in those days.

Daniel pauses. He can still feel baby Susan in his palms, her tiny bottom and legs. Where he’s going with his pencil right now can only get bad, and he wants to shield that baby from it, but it comes to Daniel that if he’s learned nothing else he’s learned one thing: the truth is the truth and whether you want to dig it up or not, it always makes its way back to the surface.

He writes: Even out as a family like that the men would give your mother the twice-over. Sometimes we’d leave you with Lois and Gerry and that’s when it really got to me. When men see a good looking woman with another man it’s different. She’s all woman to them then and they want her to themselves and now I was getting looks like I didn’t deserve your mother. This one afternoon. It was the end of the season right before Labor Day and your mother and you had been on the beach while I worked with your grandfather painting. No. Maybe by then I was out on my own. I’d bought a shit box truck and I was trying to build my own painting business down in Port City. Anyways it was a Friday afternoon and I was done early and your mother had just put you down for a nap at Lois and Gerrys place behind the arcade. Linda was wearing flip flops and a skirt and just a bikini top. Her skin was brown and her stomach was flat and the way she carried herself with her long hair down her back well I shouldn’t be writing these things to you but she had a beauty that could crack your heart. And she must of seen the looks she got from the strip boys and from the family men sneaking a second or third look when their own wives who seemed invisible to me were busy buying fried dough or a cheap t-shirt. But I don’t think she did. Linda liked to hold Danny’s hand and she liked to get a slice and sit on one of the benches on the Midway and eat it and watch the loud sunburned world go by.

Like I said she didn’t talk much but when she did it was all about you. Suzie Woo Woo. That’s what she liked to call you. She said you were smarter than she was and she was proud of that. That’s one thing you should know too. Linda quit school when she was 16. Gerry and Lois weren’t happy but Linda couldn’t do it anymore. She used to tell me. She used to tell Danny she didn’t see the point. Anything she wanted to learn she could get from books and anyways she was going to run the arcade. See she loved the beach and the strip. Even the off-season when the cottages were boarded up and the rides were locked and snow blew in drifts down the Midway. I think she also got shit from other girls at the high school. Don’t forget Linda was quiet and if you’re beautiful and quiet other girls that age think you’re stuck up and then your on the outs. Plus Linda thought she was dumb. Even though she could read books faster than anybody I knew. I blame her old man. He was no good. I’m sorry. I know he was your grandfather but he called her and Paul names. Shit for brains. Fathead. Stupid. Fuckwad if he’d been drinking. That shit goes in like poison. I know it does and I never got that from my own. No. What I got were strip rats looking at me like I didn’t deserve Linda Dubie. See Danny believed that too. Deep down he did. Which is why he started doing what he did that day you were napping and he and Linda were sharing a slice on a bench under the sun.

It was Jimmy Squeeze’s brother Bill. He walks by in one of them v-neck t-shirts he was always wearing and he had one of those leather wallets on a chain stuck in his back pocket and that’s what caught my attention first. The sun was flashing off that chain. Then a station wagon full of sticky faced kids cruised in front of us and that’s when I saw Bill glance over at Linda with this smile on his face like they both had a secret and maybe I could of let it go if he also didn’t glance at me but he did and it was his mouth. Like this—I don’t know the word. Sneer. And to this day I don’t remember jumping off that bench or getting to the other side of the street right after that station wagon passed. Only the surprise in Bill’s eyes before I hit him in the face then I was on top of him swinging and swinging. That white heat flowing and flowing. And the funny thing is—no it’s not funny. The strange thing is I’d been married to Linda for two years then but I’d never heard her scream but now that’s all I could hear—Danny! Danny! She kept yelling my name over and over but that did something worse to me because how come she’s defending Squeeze’s brother like this? And I think that’s when the worm started to grow. That’s what I call it. That digging squirming burning that she was lying to me somehow and maybe always had been. And I’d never hurt anybody like I just did to Jimmy Squeeze’s brother. Even when I was the new kid my whole life punching kids who called me names.

Two cops pulled me off and I got arrested for disorderly and a few other things and the thing is I hated trouble and had never given the cops any but as they cuffed my hands behind my back—people staring—I didn’t even care because all I could hear were your quiet mother’s screams in my head. It had so much—I don’t know—caring in it. Bill was out cold and his face looked real bad but I wanted to hit him again. I’m not proud of saying this. But I did. And this was different. This kind of white heat was new. With them boys from all those schools the heat cooled almost as soon as I got it out of me. But now—well it just got hotter.

I was on a really bad road then but it had just started and I didn’t know it. The station house was only two blocks away built up against the fence around the wooden roller coaster so the two cops walked me down there. One was on each side and they were pissed off and walking me fast so it was hard for Danny to turn around and look back at your mother. That’s when he knew. Or that’s when he thought he knew. Because why wasn’t she coming with him? Her husband? How come she was standing on the sidewalk where Jimmy Squeeze’s brother was getting attention from some EMT?

You know there are some pictures that stay in your head like somebody burned them in with a pack of lit cigarettes and this is one I have of Linda Ahearn. Because that was her name then. I forgot to tell you that. She took my name and liked the sound of it. She said her old name was for a little doll you play with but now she had a woman’s name.

She was standing there watching me go. That wind off the beach was blowing her skirt around her legs—her hair half in her face and half out of it. One night she looked up at me when I was working in the DJ booth of The Himalaya (that’s another story. I was somebody at the beach because of my deep voice. My boss Will Price called me The Sound.) Anyways your mother looked up at me like God had made me or something good and special like that. But now—just before I couldn’t see her anymore—she looked like maybe she’d been wrong and it was the devil who made me. No. It wasn’t that bad. I just remember she was standing so still watching me go and she raised two fingers to her mouth which was open a little and I’d never seen her look like that. She looked scared. Then I was in a cell till Liam bailed me out without a word though I could see the Irish pride in him and the shame too. All he said to me was: You owe me every penny, hot head.

Hot head. The way he said it seemed to explain everything to me. I was just a hot head. Except it didn’t explain it. The heat wasn’t in my head. It was in my chest and gut. My blood really. And after that day is when I—is when Danny started to slowly go crazy because he didn’t trust her anymore. He had never trusted the strip rats but it never came to him not to trust her. She had chosen him. She and Danny and how from day one they could never hold back from each other.

Daniel stops. He looks out his small window to his yard and shop. Beyond his Tacoma, a crow is perched on one of his fence posts. Its small black head looks to the right and to the left. Then it lifts its wings and is gone.