The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “How are things at home?” her father asks.

  It’s an open question, applicable to the physical status of her house and a much larger, if vaguer problem. Gwen chooses to address the physical.

  “Not great. The county came out and pushed the ruins of the retaining wall back on our property, but says it’s our job to rebuild it. And even when we do, it won’t necessarily address our foundation issues. The ground could shift again.”

  “Why—never mind.”

  “Why did we buy out there when our inspector warned us of this very problem? I ask myself that every day. For me, I think it was because Relay reminded me of Dickeyville. Isolated, yet not. A little slice of country so close to the city, the idiosyncratic houses. And for Karl, it was all about convenience—the commuter train station within walking distance, BWI and Amtrak ten minutes away. Go figure—for once, my dreamy nostalgia and his pragmatism aligned and the result is utter disaster. There’s probably a lesson to be learned there.”

  “The lesson,” her father says, “is that you have a five-year-old daughter.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gwen says, pretending not to understand. “We’ve figured out how to make it work once you come home. I’m going to get up at six A.M. and drive over there, do the breakfast and getting-her-off-to-school thing. And I’ll reverse it at day’s end, be there for dinner and bedtime. But I’m going to spend the nights at your house, so we don’t have to have a nighttime aide.”

  “Gwen, I can easily afford—”

  “It’s not about affording. And it’s just for a few weeks. Anyone can tolerate anything for a few weeks.” Months, years, her mind amends. It is amazing what one can tolerate, what she has tolerated. “Also, it’s not the worst thing in the world, making Karl curtail his travel, to learn that he’s part of a household, not a guest star who jets in and out as it suits him.”

  “He is who he is, Gwen. You went into this with eyes wide open. I told you all about cardiac surgeons. And Karl was already a star. It’s not like this sneaked up on you. Not like the chicken.”

  “What?”

  “The chicken. That’s why I fell. There was a chicken on the steps, trying to peck at my ankles, and all I wanted to do was avoid stepping on it. I twisted my ankle and went over.”

  Gwen tries not to show how alarming she finds this. A chicken? There haven’t been chickens in their neighborhood, ever. Except for—but those birds were far away and far in the past. No, that couldn’t be. Her father must have imagined the chicken. But if her father was imagining chickens, what else was breaking down inside his mind? She would almost prefer there was a chicken. Maybe there was. The past few years have seen a flurry of stories about animals showing up in places where they shouldn’t be—wildcats in suburbs, a deer crashing through the window of a dental practice, and, come to think of it, a chicken in one of the New York boroughs. And Dickeyville is the kind of place that has always attracted crunchy granola types. It is easy to imagine some earnest, incompetent locavore trying to raise chickens only to have them escape from his ineptly constructed coop. Gwen will ask around when she goes by the house this afternoon, to begin preparing for her father’s return.

  The Robison house is isolated, even by Dickeyville’s standards, which in turn feels cut off from much of Baltimore. It is officially the last house on Wetheredsville Road, only a few feet from where the Jersey wall now blocks the street, marking the start of a “nature trail” that one can follow all the way to downtown. The blocked street means Gwen can’t use the old shortcut, through what is properly called a park, but which she and her childhood friends always referred to as the woods. Their term was more accurate. Leakin Park is a forest, vast and dense, difficult to navigate. Gwen and her friends covered more of it than almost anyone, and even they missed large swaths.

  Traffic is surprisingly heavy, the journey longer than anticipated, giving the lie to her blithe words about dashing back and forth between here and the house in Relay. Still, the chance to move to Dickeyville, even temporarily, is providential. Maryland law requires a separation of at least one year to file for an uncontested divorce. She learned this during her first divorce, a sad bit of knowledge she had never planned to use again. Does anyone plan to divorce twice? Then again, after that first failed marriage, the fact is always there, incontrovertible. You’re not going to go the distance with one person, your chance at perfection is lost. For someone like Gwen, who is professionally perfect—she edits a city magazine that instructs others how to have the perfect house, children, wardrobe—this is particularly irksome.

  Yet even if she can manage to extend her time in her father’s house for a year, it won’t be enough. It is the spouse who stays who can file after one year, on the grounds of abandonment. As the spouse who is leaving, Gwen will have to wait two years if Karl doesn’t agree, and he has made it clear that he won’t, ever. She can’t spend that much time away from Annabelle, but nor can she afford her own place in their current school district. They aren’t upside down in their mortgage, but they have virtually no equity, and home equity loans are hard to get now, anyway. Karl has lots of money, but, again, he isn’t going to use it to let her leave him. And if she spends even a single night back in the Relay house, the clock resets on the separation. Maybe Annabelle will move into the Dickeyville house and they can keep this information from the school?

  But the Dickeyville house will be chaotic, once her father returns. A geriatric specialist should have designed a home that would be friendlier to old age, but his house is downright hostile to the idea. There is the first level, the stonewalled basement, with the laundry room and various systems. Then the large glass-and-timber first floor, built to take advantage of the site, but with only a powder room. Yet the top two floors, with its full baths, have narrow halls and tight corners. Their father, appalled at the spiraling costs and delays, skimped on his dream house’s bedrooms. She will have to set him up in the first-floor “great room,” where he will have nice views and space in which to move, if no bath. But then her father will dominate the first floor, and privacy will be found only in the cramped, dark bedrooms above. And how will he bathe? Besides, Annabelle would be lonely, as Gwen once was, and she won’t even have the freedom to roam the woods. What was considered safe in Gwen’s childhood is unthinkable for Annabelle’s.

  Her head hurts. It’s all too complicated. Dial it back, as she tells her writers when they are in over their heads on a story. Concentrate on one thing, one task. Get to the house, make sure it’s clean, do laundry, call a nursing service, let the nursing service figure out the best place for her father to convalesce.

  Once there, she finds three newspapers in yellow wrappers, several catalogs, but almost no real mail. Her father doesn’t recycle—on principle, he believes it’s a ruse, an empty, feel-good gesture—so she tosses everything, leaving only the bills on the kitchen counter. The kitchen is small, another victim of the house’s cost overruns, but her mother made it a marvel of efficiency. The light at this time of the day, year, is breathtaking, gold and rose streaks above the hill. Even with the old appliances, the yellowing Formica counters and white metal cabinets, it is a warm, welcoming room.

  Gwen goes upstairs. Everything is in order, there is no evidence of a man in decline. Widowed at sixty-three, her father quickly learned to take excellent care of himself. His closet and drawers are neater than Gwen’s, there is an admirable lack of clutter. A single page from the Times, dated the day before his fall, is on his nightstand—the Wednesday crossword puzzle, filled out in ink, without a single error. The puzzle, the tidy house, it all indicates he’s of sound mind and should back up his version of events. So why does she keep thinking of it that way, as a version? She’s still troubled about that chicken.

  Glancing out the narrow casement window toward the street, Gwen sees a black-haired man walking two dogs as black as his hair. She knows him instantly by the part in his hair, impossibly straight and perfect, visible even from this distance.

&nb
sp; “Sean,” Gwen calls out through the window. Seconds later, she is running heedlessly down the stone steps that undid her father.

  “Gwennie,” he says. Then: “I’m sorry. Old habits. Gwen.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Well—my brother, of course.”

  “Tim? Or Go-Go?”

  “Gordon,” he says. Perhaps Sean has sworn off nicknames. Funny, Gwen liked hearing Gwennie, even if it always carries the reminder that she was once fat. Gwennie the Whale. She was only fat until age thirteen. They say people are forever fat inside, but Gwen’s not. Inside, she’s the sylph she became. If anything, she has trouble remembering that she’s growing older, that she can no longer rely on being the prettiest girl in the room.

  “What’s the incorrigible Go-Go—excuse me, Gordon—done now?”

  Sean looks offended, then confused. “I’m sorry, I assumed you knew.”

  “My father fell three days ago, broke his hip. I don’t know much of anything.”

  “Three days ago?”

  “In the morning. Coming down the steps to fetch his paper.”

  “Three days ago—that’s when Go-Go . . .” His voice catches. Sean is the middle brother, the handsomest, the smartest, the best all-around. Gwen’s mother used to say that Tim was the practice son, Sean the platonic ideal, and Go-Go a bridge too far. Gwen’s mother could be cutting in her observations, yet there was no real meanness in her. And her voice was so delicate, her manner so light, that no one took offense.

  “What, Sean?”

  “He crashed his car into the concrete barrier where the highway ends. Probably going eighty, ninety miles per hour. We think the accelerator got stuck, or he miscalculated where it ended. I mean, we’ve all played with our speedometers up there.”

  Yes, when they were teenagers, learning to drive. But Go-Go was—she calculates, subtracting four, no, five years from her age—forty, much too old to be testing his car’s power.

  “He’s—”

  “Dead, Gwen. At the scene, instantly.”

  “I’m so sorry, Sean.”

  Go-Go, dead. Although she has seen him periodically over the years, he remained forever eight or nine in her mind, wild and uninhibited. The risk taker in the group, although it was possible that Go-Go simply didn’t understand the concept of danger, didn’t know he was taking risks. She flashes back to an image of him on this very street, dashing across the road in pursuit of a ball, indifferent to the large truck bearing down on him, the others screaming for him to stop.

  “Thank you.”

  “How’s your mom holding up?” She remembers that Mr. Halloran died years ago, although she didn’t go to the funeral, just wrote proper notes to the boys and their mother. It was a busy time in her life, as she recalls.

  “Not well. I came home for the funeral—I live in St. Petersburg now.”

  “Russia?”

  A tight smile. “Florida.”

  Gwen tries not to make a face. Not because of Florida, but because the Sean she remembers would have been in Russia, a dashing foreign correspondent or diplomat. He’s still pretty dashing. Close up, she can see a few flecks of white in his hair, but the very dignity that bordered on priggish in a teenage boy suits him now. He has finally grown into his gravitas.

  “I feel awful that I didn’t know. When is the funeral?”

  “Tomorrow. Visitation is tonight.”

  Gwen calculates, even as she knows she must find a way to attend both. She will have to ask for another half day at work, make arrangements for Annabelle tonight. There is already so much to be done. But this is Go-Go—and Sean, her first boyfriend, even if she seldom thinks of him in that context. Gwen is not the kind of woman who thinks longingly of her past, who tracks down old boyfriends on the Internet. The Hallorans, along with Mickey Wyckoff, are more like the old foundations and footings they sometimes found in the woods, abandoned and overgrown, impossible to reclaim. They had been a tight-knit group of five for a summer or two, but it couldn’t be sustained. Such coed groups didn’t last long, probably. Funny, it has never occurred to Gwen until now that she and Mickey could disengage thoroughly from the group, but the Halloran brothers had to remain a set, mismatched as they were. Crass Tim, Serious Sean, Wild Go-Go.

  “I’ll be there.” She considers placing a hand on Sean’s forearm, but worries it will seem flirtatious. Instead, she strokes the dogs, who are old, with grizzled jowls and labored breathing, so ancient and tired that they don’t object to this long interlude in the middle of their walk. Yet old as they obviously are, they can’t be more than, what? Fifteen? Sixteen? Which is still older than her marriage to Karl.

  “Mom will appreciate that,” Sean says and heads back up the hill. She knows the route, knows the house at which he will arrive after going up Wetheredsville, then turning left on “New” Pickwick, a street of what once seemed like modern houses, small and symmetrical relative to the shambling antiquities for which Dickeyville was known, following it to the shortest street in the neighborhood, Sekots, just four houses. The Halloran house always smelled of strong foods—onions, cabbage, hamburger—and it was always a mess. Sometimes the chaos could be comforting; no child need worry about disturbing or breaking anything in such a household. It could be terrifying, too, though, a place where the adults yelled horrible things at one another and Mrs. Halloran was often heard sobbing, off in the distance. The boys never seemed to notice, and even Mickey was nonchalant about it. But the Halloran house scared Gwen, and she made sure their activities centered on her house or the woods beyond.

  Go-Go, dead. The only surprise was that she was surprised at all.

  Most thought he was called Go-Go because it was a bastardization of Gordon, but it really derived from his manic nature, evident from toddlerhood, his insistence on following his brothers wherever they went. “I go-go,” he would say, as if the second syllable, the repetition, would clinch the argument. “I go-go.” And he did. He ran into walls, splashed into the polluted waters of the stream, jumped from branches and balconies. Once Go-Go spent much of an afternoon running head-on into an old mattress they had found in the woods, laughing all the while.

  Now he has run head-on into the barrier at the end of the highway. Gwen can’t help wondering if he was drunk. Although she hasn’t seen the Halloran boys for years, she knows, the way that everyone knows things in Dickeyville, that Go-Go has a problem. It is implied, if never stated outright, in the lost jobs, the broken first marriage, the rocky second one, the fact that he returns to the roost for open-ended stays.

  Then again, who is she to judge Go-Go? Isn’t she pulling the same trick, running home, a two-time loser in matrimony, taking comfort in a parent’s unconditional love? Mr. Halloran may have been hard as nails, but Mrs. Halloran, when she wasn’t screaming at her sons and wondering why they had been born, spoiled them to the best of her ability, especially Go-Go. And while most people will assume Gwen is nothing more than a devoted daughter, some will see through her. Her brother and sister, certainly. And Karl.

  That is, Karl would see through her if it ever occurred to him to look, really look at her. But if Karl looked at her that way, they wouldn’t be in this fix. At least that’s how she likes to see it.

  Chapter Two

  Summer 1976

  “I hate it here,” Fee said. “It’s boring.”

  “There’s no place to go,” Miller said. “There’s nothing to do.”

  “Only boring people are bored,” their father said.

  “Or maybe only boring people don’t realize how bored they are,” Fee said. “They are so boring that it never occurs to them to do anything.”

  “Gwen likes it here,” their father said.

  “Well, Gwen.” Fee sniffed. “She’s a child.”

  “Of course I’m a child,” Gwen said mildly. “I’m ten.”

  “The thing is,” Miller pressed on, intent on making his case, “there are plenty of kids for Gwen to play with—that Mickey girl, those broth
ers—”

  “We do NOT play with the Halloran boys. They’re too wild,” Gwen put in.

  Gwen spoke the truth, at the time. In the summer of our nation’s bicentennial, the five of us were not friends yet and the Hallorans were considered wild. We were two and three—the two girls, Gwen and Mickey, the three brothers, Tim, Sean, and Go-Go. We would not come together as a group until the following spring. But we were all aware of each other. Mickey was a familiar little figure in Dickeyville, a terrifying tomboy assumed to be a loner by choice, a child who wanted to be outdoors no matter how fierce the weather. The Halloran boys were known as hellions, primarily because of Go-Go. Besides, in the summer, they went down to the ocean, then to camp.

  And Gwen’s family, the Robisons, were famous in Dickeyville because they had been trying to build their new house for almost seven years, stopped twice by injunction because of the neighborhood’s historic status. Strangely, Dr. Robison did not resent the neighborhood’s resistance to his house. This was his dream house and he would suffer anything to get it. He had bought the lot a decade earlier, around the time Gwen was born, after stumbling across Dickeyville while trying to get to the Forest Park golf course. First he had been told that the lot wasn’t suitable for building, that its pitch would make it impossible. He refused to accept this and finally found an architect who said it could be done, although at great expense. Then the neighborhood had decided to fight it, although Dickeyville had its share of postwar nondescript houses. The Hallorans lived in one, in fact, but did not feel themselves hypocrites for joining the opposition. The Robison house—new, modern—signified something, even if no one was quite sure what. Change, hypocrisy, a challenge to traditional values. Yet nine years after the lot was purchased, five years after ground was broken, the house had asserted itself into being, through the sheer force of Dr. Robison’s will.