The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  Over hill, over dale . . . Mickey was in front, but it was the Halloran boys who began to piece together the landscape, who saw the connections. “That’s Suicide Hill,” they said, shocking Gwen, because our favorite sledding spot was far enough that we drove there as a special treat. It was not particularly dangerous, just very long and straight. We crossed the road and walked along the stream. No one said anything, but we could all tell that everyone felt relieved at finding a recognizable landmark. We weren’t lost, after all. No one would have to cry uncle, admit to being worried about how far we had gone. Mickey began to walk faster, as if she knew where she was headed, running up and over a small hill, then disappearing from view.

  “Hey,” she called back to the rest of us. “Do you know about this?”

  “This” was a house, a log cabin set back in a thicket of trees. If it were in a book, it would have been charming, the kind of primitive dwelling that makes girls want to play dress-up and pretend they are living in the olden days. But this place—it was dirty. And it smelled. Not of woodsmoke and apples, but of, well—it had a bathroom smell, very strong. Go-Go held his nose, and the rest of us wanted to do the same.

  “It’s the outhouse,” Sean said. “This place has no indoor plumbing.”

  “Does someone live here?” Gwen asked.

  “Not now,” Sean said. Always confident, always the one with the answers. Not even Tim contradicted him back then. “Maybe once, but you wouldn’t be allowed to live like this now. There are rules about how you have to live, zoning and things. You have to have a bathroom.”

  “Then how do you explain the chickens?” Mickey asked. “And the laundry on the line?”

  There was an assortment of clothes, men’s shirts and jeans, drying on a coarse piece of rope, and three unusually calm chickens bopping toward us with herky-jerky movements. We were used to the aggressive geese that guarded the Gwynns Falls, so most of us stepped back. But Mickey was already at the threshold of the house, peering in.

  “Mickey,” Gwen called, trying to get her to stop. But now Sean was beside her, then Tim, then Go-Go. Gwen had to step up.

  Although the day was not bright, we still needed time for our eyes to adjust once inside. It was a simple room. Something—burlap—had been tacked over the windows, which accounted for the dimness. There was a chair, a small plastic tub that held dishes. A rickety pair of cabinets hung crookedly on the back wall and there was a makeshift counter—it looked like something you’d find on a church altar—piled with boxes and canisters. The cabin wasn’t neat, but some sort of order was at work. Someone was taking care of it, in a fashion. The only really messy thing in the room was a pile of rags left on a cot. These smelled, too, not like the outhouse, but of something dank and strong.

  “Who lives here?” Go-Go asked in a hoarse, awed whisper.

  “No one lives here,” Sean said. Sean didn’t like to be wrong. “Hunters use it, maybe, but you couldn’t live here.”

  “Hunters?” Gwen asked. “In Leakin Park? Is that legal?”

  “No, but that doesn’t stop some people.”

  Go-Go, with his magpie eyes, had spotted something glinting. “Look,” he said, darting toward the cot with the pile of rags, no longer perturbed by the smell. “A guitar.”

  As he crouched down to drag the guitar from beneath the cot, a hand shot out from the pile of rags and grabbed Go-Go firmly by the wrist.

  “Don’t,” the rags said.

  Chapter Seven

  Sean still needs a moment to register where he is when he awakens, although he has been staying at his mother’s house for almost a week now. Not. Home. This is his first conscious thought the morning after Go-Go’s funeral. He’s not at home, and home is St. Petersburg. He’s clear on that much. The first clue is the light. It is different from his bedroom in Florida, especially this time of year. He loves the light in Florida. It’s one of the few things he loves. The light, winter, and the lack of state income taxes. But this room is dark, depressing, although he’s glad for the darkness this morning. His head is so heavy, his mouth and throat feel as if they are coated with sand. Not a hangover, exactly, if only because Sean believes he never gets hangovers. Allergies, perhaps. He thought he had outgrown them, but maybe he’s just not allergic to stuff in Florida.

  So: Baltimore. So: a dark room, although it’s beginning to brighten around him. The light is gray, watery, the sheets a little grainy beneath him, as if someone has been eating here, as if these are the crumbs of crumbs of crumbs. Go-Go ate in bed, among other things. Go-Go still fouled the sheets when he was nine or ten. Their mother made excuses for him, said it was a medical condition. But the medical condition vanished when Go-Go was given the single room that, by all rights, should have been Tim’s, then Sean’s when Tim left for college. It was a narrow, dark room, not particularly desirable except for its solitary state. Besides, Tim and Sean enjoyed rooming together, talking late into the night. Go-Go, always terrified of being left out, ended up more left out than ever.

  Sean’s in a double bed, but that’s right. The twin beds in his room were replaced by a double bed when his mother decided the room needed to be at least nominally welcoming to her sons and their wives.

  Only this bed moves. Sways and rolls beneath him.

  But maybe that’s okay, too? At home, he has a memory foam mattress, bought because his wife, Vivian, is a light sleeper, so the movement is merely relative to what he’s used to. His mother is not someone to splurge on a mattress that was used, at most, five or six nights a year, because Tim never sleeps over, and Sean is lucky to make it home for Christmas. And when Go-Go returned home, he always chose his old room, dark and sunless and unimproved as it was.

  The bed moves again, an actual roll. Sean sits up, puts his palm against the mattress. Warm to the touch, it pulses.

  “A water bed?” he asks wonderingly, waiting to awaken from yet another banal dream. Sean has the dullest dreams of anyone he knows, assuming other people tell the truth.

  “I know,” replies a woman’s voice, with a little throb of Baltimore in it. Aye knoah. “I’m such a cliché. The swinging flight attendant and her water bed.”

  Mickey—McKey—is standing across the room, her back to him as she fashions her long dark hair into some kind of upsweep. She is wearing a navy dress, and even in the pale light of what Sean realizes now is very early morning, it looks a little cheap and too tailored for McKey. Funny, she lived in jeans and overalls when they were kids—she was defiantly not a girly-girl, not like Gwen—but she was, well, sexy, even when she was eleven. Sean, two years older, felt guilty for noticing that and felt angry when Tim actually articulated the same thoughts, lying in their twin beds. “I saw Mickey’s underwear yesterday. That’s why I let her lead the way—when she’s going up the hill and wearing those old cutoffs, you can see right up them. She’s got a bangin’ body.”

  She still does. The tailored dress—her uniform, duh—can’t hide that, but it doesn’t take advantage of it, either. McKey should have been a flight attendant back in the day when they were called stewardesses, when being a Pan Am or TWA air hostess was basically one step away from being a beauty pageant contestant. As a child, she always seemed slightly out of place—in her boyish clothes, in her friendship with Gwen, in her chaotic household, a thousand times crazier than his. Yet the undercurrents in her house never seemed to touch Mickey, whereas the relatively mild disorder of the Halloran household resonated within Go-Go. He was like a tuning fork, vibrating from the tiniest bit of tension, while Mickey could be still and composed in the middle of a hurricane. Literally, come to think of it.

  When Go-Go was in his twenties and going through the twelve steps for the first time, he came to the making-amends part and ended up twisting it, demanding that his parents apologize to him for the handful of spankings he had been given, all quite justified in Sean’s view. Go-Go also cited the time his mother had tied him to the laundry pole because she had to go to the grocery store and Go-Go threw a
tantrum and refused to get in the car. Yes, it had been primitive, inexcusable, but their parents were throwbacks, raising their children as they had been raised. They had been younger than most of their peers, Doris only twenty-two when Tim was born. And while they were native Baltimoreans, going back two generations, they could have been right off the boat in a lot of ways. The Hallorans seemed perpetually baffled by the world at large and always—what were the phrases they used? At the end of my rope. This is the last straw. When they counted to ten, they started at nine. Angry, angry people, although his mother prefers not to remember that now.

  So many memories clamoring for his attention. But not one of them can change the fact that he is in McKey’s bed, his head throbbing, and she’s getting dressed.

  “Where—”

  “My apartment in Riverside, south of Federal Hill,” McKey says. “Close to the highway—hear it?—but also only ten minutes from the airport. Not really within walking distance of the restaurants and bars, except for Rub, the barbecue place across the street. That’s where we went last night.”

  She’s toying with him. If McKey were a cat, she would spend hours batting her prey between her front paws, she would tease other animals to death. Sean takes inventory. He is shirtless, but he has his jeans on, boxers beneath. Surely—

  “I took your keys away from you,” she says. “You were way too drunk to drive. Tim was long gone, and Gwen didn’t come out with us. Said she had to get up early to drive over to her house, have breakfast with her daughter, that she was already guilt-ridden about missing her bedtime. That story doesn’t quite hang together, does it? Her moving back home, I mean. They’ve got the money to provide her old man with all the care he needs. I thought about being a nurse. For about three seconds. It wasn’t the gross stuff that changed my mind. As you know, nothing really grosses me out.”

  Sean nods carefully, not wanting to move his head too much. His headache is worse than he realized. It feels like a blister, like something he yearns to pop, but shouldn’t. Mickey is right, she never shied away from things that other girls, even some boys, found disgusting. She would touch anything they found and with her fingers yet, not stand back, prodding with a stick. Except for snapping turtles. On those she used a stick.

  “But all that, well, caring. It’s exhausting, being all about another person. That’s why I’m not married, although I tried it. A flight attendant—those expectations I can meet. A drink, a blanket, a meal when I work first class. Maybe a little bit of attention when some guy gets on all pumped about himself, needs to find a way to brag while pretending he’s not. It’s funny, it’s never the really famous or successful people who hold forth about themselves. I haven’t had that many celebrities on my flights—I fly mainly Baltimore to Detroit, sometimes Minneapolis and sometimes I’m on a route that continues to Seattle—but I’ve had some famous people on board and they really do NOT want to be hassled. They want to be recognized, sure, but that’s enough. No, it’s usually some salesman who’s just made, I don’t know, whatever milestone his industry uses, some big sale or award, who needs to impress upon me just how very, very successful he is.”

  Sean doesn’t recall McKey talking this much. Maybe that is another change, part of the transformation from Mickey to McKey. One of the nicest things about Mickey was that she used words for concrete, tangible purposes. Let’s go here. Let’s do this. She had been like a boy that way. A boy with a bangin’ body.

  “We didn’t have sex,” she says, turning back from the mirror, fiddling with her scarf.

  There’s the girl he remembers. Direct and blunt.

  “You were wasted. I had to drape your arm over my shoulder to get you here. You didn’t even drink that much, not that I noticed, but you were fucked-up. And suddenly, really fast. If Tim had seen the way you were headed, I don’t think he would have left when he did.”

  Sean feels as if he remembers the evening, which isn’t quite the same as remembering it. There was barbecue, quite decent, and he was drinking beer. He switched to Jameson at some point, but he didn’t pound shots or anything. He didn’t drink that much, but he probably hadn’t been eating regularly. Funerals were like weddings that way. Family members barely got a bite down, they were so busy consoling the people whose ostensible job was to console them.

  Of course, the guest of honor at a funeral never eats at all.

  McKey sits on the water bed, which shivers beneath them, exacting a toll on his aching head.

  “I wanted to,” she says. “But you’re married. Happily, Gwen told me. Warned me. Maybe that’s true, but I think she wants you for herself.”

  “I am,” he says, his voice weak, croaky. “Happily married. I’ve never—”

  “Of course you haven’t. You’re the good one. You’ll always be the good one, Sean.”

  If he is so good, then why is he thinking about what it would be like to take that uniform off McKey?

  “It’s my fault, how drunk you got,” she says matter-of-factly, patting his cheek. “I wasn’t thinking of you, only myself, what I needed to tell you. Of course it was upsetting. I kept talking and talking, and you kept drinking because I wasn’t letting you get a word in edgewise.”

  He has no idea what she is referring to. His blankness must be transparent because she then says: “You don’t remember? Maybe it’s for the best. We’ll talk about it later. Or maybe not. I’m sure it was hard. And it violated everything AA is about. Still, I thought you should know, and we ended up alone together in a bar.”

  “In a bar.” But she just mentioned AA. Something’s not hanging together.

  “They know me there,” she says. “I drink club soda with a splash of tonic and lime. It looks like a gin and tonic and it keeps people from being so damn pained around me. There are different ways to be sober, you know. Some of us learn to navigate the other world, the one where people drink. Go-Go was the opposite. When he went into a bar, all he saw, all he thought about, was drinking. There was no other reality for him. He shouldn’t have tested himself that way. I wasn’t there, but I can figure out what happened, Sean. I know.” No trace of the arch Baltimore accent this time. “I don’t care what anyone says. Go-Go didn’t kill himself. He got drunk. He crashed. End of story. No matter what the toxicology report says. It would take very little alcohol to fuck him up.”

  She glances at the clock on the wall. It is charming, yet generic, the kind of thing Sean’s wife despises. His wife’s entire life centers on not having anything that anyone else has. She buys into the idea that there is one perfect everything, all the way down to the light plates. The problem is, Vivian’s process is so time-intensive that it never ends. Every time she “finishes” one room, another room is begging to be redecorated, having gone out of style or spawned low-end imitators, which means she is no longer one of a kind.

  “Gotta go,” McKey says. “Just push the button on the lock, don’t worry about the dead bolt. I don’t. Another perk of this location. It’s pretty safe.”

  She kisses him on his cheek and leaves, sending the water bed lurching again. After a few minutes, Sean manages to heave himself out of it without actually heaving, gathering up his shirt and socks, folded neatly in a chair, locating his shoes, oxfords that someone—well, OK, McKey—has untied and removed, finding his jacket and overcoat in the closet. She wanted to sleep with him. He can’t help feeling good about that.

  Only what did she tell him about Go-Go, exactly? Something about Go-Go and AA, why it wasn’t working for him. Why can’t he remember? Is it possible he simply doesn’t want to remember? Sean has always been very good about forgetting inconvenient things.

  Chapter Eight

  Summer 1978

  “Don’t touch my guitar, little boy.”

  The voice was as grimy as the hand, low and guttural and flecked with debris, but matter-of-fact, not particularly harsh or threatening. Although we had all yelped when the hand shot out—even Tim and Sean, although they later denied it—we felt strangely calm. Exce
pt, perhaps, Go-Go, who writhed in the hand’s grip but could not free himself. Go-Go was terrified.

  The man sat up, releasing Go-Go, although Go-Go continued to twist and turn as if held by invisible hands. The man was not really grimy, we saw, but extremely dark-skinned, black as ink, although with large patches of pink-white skin. His forehead, the area around his right eye, his right cheek, and chin were all ghostly, without pigmentation. Later, we managed to find a way to ask Gwen’s father about this without revealing why we were asking. He explained that a person with this skin condition wasn’t a burn victim, as some of us thought, or diseased in any way. But before that explanation was offered, we speculated at length on his appearance. Leprosy, Sean said. A horrible accident, Gwen said. Burned himself up smoking in bed, Tim said. Go-Go said he was a monster, and Mickey said he was just born that way, and she was closest to right.

  “What are you children doing in my house?” the man asked us, although the word sounded like chillrun in his mouth. We would come to understand that his words were as soft and mushy as the food required by his rotting teeth, which made his breath fearsome. He didn’t seem angry. He didn’t even seem particularly curious. And, unlike most adults who asked that question, he apparently wanted an answer, a real one. He wasn’t quizzing us as a pretext for scolding us, or setting us up, testing to see if we would lie to him. He honestly thought we might have a good reason for being there.