The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  They were still trying to figure out what to do about Michelle when the mother of Lisa’s best friend called. They had discovered a joint in her daughter’s room, and the daughter said it was Lisa’s, that she let her hide her “stash” there. The two sets of parents talked to the girls alone, then together. They played good cop, bad cop. They threatened, cajoled. And those two little teenyboppers turned out to be tougher than the most hardened career criminals that Tim could imagine. And Tim, as an assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore County, knows from hardened career criminals. He blames Law & Order. Everybody is too fucking savvy these days. When he tried to tell the girls that he could send the joint to the crime lab and figure out which one of them had smoked it, Lisa’s friend, Dani, said blandly, “There’s a huge backup. Plus, our DNA isn’t on file, and I’m not letting you swab my cheek unless you get a court order.”

  He decided to believe his own daughter. Why would a non-drug user let someone stash drugs in her home, especially a hard little number like this Dani, a fleshy, unattractive girl who has trouble written all over her? That gut on her was probably the result of pot-inspired munchies. It was a weird thing, maybe a trick of memory, but teenage girls these days seemed fatter to Tim. Either really fat or a little too slender, his daughters falling in the second camp. It kills him, when he does the laundry, to see how tiny their clothes are, and not just the baby’s, as they secretly still think of Karen. The tiny underwear, which wouldn’t hold one of Arlene’s ass cheeks even in her college days, the little T-shirts, the narrow blue jeans. Anyway, this Dani is bad news. The two sets of parents decided to keep the girls apart for a while, see what transpired. The other parents got custody of the joint. Tim wondered if they had smoked it. They looked a little unsavory, those parents.

  Michelle having sex. Lisa maybe smoking pot, or friends with a stoner. He wonders what Karen has up her sleeve. Only eight, one of those drunken mistakes that married couples make on their anniversary nights, she should be Daddy’s little angel, years away from breaking his heart. But with Michelle and Lisa as her role models, she is clearly ready to raise some hell as soon as she figures out how. Just last week, he caught her playing a kissing game with a neighborhood boy. Only kissing, not doctor, but still. He wishes, not for the first time, that St. Lawrence was still open for business, that he could send his girls to a school where the nuns knew how to terrify children into behaving. But the problem isn’t that his old parish school has closed. There are, after all, other parish schools, although fewer of them each year, thanks to the financial troubles that never end for the archdiocese. No, he needs his girls to go to his school in the past. Circa 1950 might work.

  “Girls have always had sex,” Arlene said when he confided his retro fantasy. “The difference is that they used to get pregnant and ruin their lives.”

  “Really? Where were all those girls when I was seventeen?”

  Arlene laughed, punched his arm, assuming he was joking. But Tim was a virgin at seventeen, which wasn’t unheard of in 1979, although kind of a torture when you thought your younger brother was getting it.

  The summer Sean and Gwen started going together, Tim had been obsessed with their sex life. It was weird, given that she was not quite fourteen and Sean was fifteen, but his imagination had been inflamed by the possibility they were doing it. He decided they must be doing it because Sean never wanted to talk to him about it. He tried to follow them when they escaped to the woods in the afternoons and weekends, even agreed to drive them to the mall and attend the same matinees, in hopes of seeing what they did with—and to—each other. But they mainly watched the movie, attempting no intimacy greater than sharing popcorn.

  Once, however, he stumbled on them by accident, down in his family’s basement, a room marooned somewhere between its utilitarian origins and his mother’s dream of a rec room. The dream basically began and ended with a plaid sofa, carted down there after his mother bought a new living room set. Tim had been in the walk-in pantry, searching the metal shelves for an air pump when he heard them come in. He stilled himself, waiting to see—or at least hear—what they did alone. He hadn’t done it himself yet and he was dying to see someone do it, even if it was Sean and Gwen. He waited for what felt like ten, fifteen minutes, listening to their whispered giggles, then the long silences. “Oh,” Gwen kept saying in a soft breathy exhale. “Oh.” They had to be doing it. He allowed himself to creep up to the door, crouching so he would be eye level with the old sofa. To his disappointment, they were sitting side by side, kissing very softly, lightly. His brother took his time. No, his brother wasn’t even trying to make a move. Although he had his hands inside Gwen’s shirt, he wasn’t trying to go any further. To Tim’s amazement, it was Gwen who seemed to be moving things forward. She pulled away from Sean, but it was to lift her top. Wow, she was pretty built for her age. Tim raised his head slightly to get a better view and his elbow struck something on the shelves by the door. It wasn’t a big noise, but it was enough.

  “What was that?” Gwen asked. “Your mom?”

  “She’s not home,” Sean said, but he was helping Gwen back into her shirt, buttoning it, leading her out of the basement. He seemed almost relieved by the interruption.

  That night, as they were drifting to sleep, Sean said suddenly: “Tim, were you in the basement today?”

  “What?” He felt like there was an appropriate level of surprise in his tone. Surprise, but nonchalance. He shouldn’t be shocked by the question, or indignant in his innocence. If he hadn’t been there, if he had no context, he would find the question odd, nothing more.

  “Were you in the basement this afternoon?”

  “I went down there to get the bicycle pump. My tires were flat. I think Go-Go’s been riding my bike. Have you seen him?”

  “No.” He could tell Sean was frustrated. But he couldn’t follow up without tipping his hand. “Where was Go-Go today, anyway?”

  “He was with that new friend, Billy or something. He goes to his house.”

  “So Go-Go wasn’t around this afternoon?”

  “I don’t think so.” Tim smiled in the dark. If Go-Go had been lurking in the basement, he would have made far more noise, probably jumped on Sean and Gwen, tried to join in the game they were playing. Go-Go knew how babies were made, technically, but he didn’t think it had anything to do with him. It was just something stupid that parents did.

  As they fell asleep, Tim was pretty sure that Sean was whacking off. Lord knows, he was, and thinking about Gwen, although he felt a little pervy about it. Only thirteen, and his brother’s girlfriend. If he were to confess such things—and he never did—he wondered what the priest would find more egregious, the girl’s age or the covetousness. Not to mention all the impure thoughts backed up behind his desire for his brother’s girlfriend. The thing was, he didn’t want Gwen, not really. Mickey, maybe, but there was something about Mickey that scared him a little. He wanted a girlfriend. He had one at camp, last summer, and it was frustrating when they didn’t get to go back because he was pretty sure that he and Anne would have worked their way up to all sorts of things. Then his dad had to go and lose his job, and Tim lost his chance to get laid.

  Tim was a virgin until senior prom, when his date seemed to assume that giving it up was virtually required, and he did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But she wasn’t special. He met Arlene freshman year of college, however, and she was. Pretty and bubbly and in love with him, and he still can’t quite get over that fact.

  When their girls arrived, Michelle and Lisa practically on top of each other, then Karen after a long pause, almost everyone made the same two observations. One: they were spaced out just like the Halloran boys, with only twelve months between the first two and then six years, a daddy-got-lucky baby. Then everyone added: “But girls are easier.” Really? Really? He looks at the three girls clustered together on the padded banquette in their breakfast nook and has to wonder. Sure, Go-Go broke their mother’s heart, driving into that J
ersey wall, almost assuredly drunk after another failed attempt at sobriety. Go-Go had broken her heart over and over. With the first divorce and then the separation, which had led to the estrangement from her two grandbabies. Six grandchildren and only one boy, and of course it would be Sean who produced the much-beloved grandson, another chip-off-the-oh-so-wonderful block. When the families gather—rare, because Sean’s wife and her family have a stranglehold on Sean, and the distance is not insignificant—Duncan appears to be every bit as perfect as Sean, a dark and contained little soldier among his fluffy blond cousins. When they were younger, Tim’s girls had fussed over Duncan, but now Michelle and Lisa say he is stuck-up and boring. “Yeah, he makes his parents proud, with his straight A’s and cross-country running and jazz band, what a dipshit,” Tim wants to say. He doesn’t, though.

  Aware of his daughters’ glares—even the little one is eye-fucking him and he hasn’t done shit to ruin her day—he hoists his golf bag over his shoulder and heads out to his car. His car, goddammit. He is entitled to take his car to the golf course on his day off, to have a little relaxation after working hard all week to buy their shoes and their criminally tiny T-shirts and whatever else they want. Isn’t he? But already he is thinking about dinner, concocting a plan that will make things up to them, assuming they will even deign to spend the evening with him and Arlene. Did he shut his parents out at that age? Of course he did. But his parents wanted to be shut out, whereas Arlene and Tim flutter around their children, courting them, wooing them. In some ways, he is still a hopeless seventeen-year-old, trying to win the approving glance of a teenage girl, no matter how fleeting.

  Maybe pizza will win him some points. From the good place, which he thinks is Fortunato’s. He better check with Arlene, though. Fortunato’s was the good pizza place last month, but things change so quickly.

  Chapter Fourteen

  September 5, 1979

  Gwen was the only one of us queer enough—that’s what we called it then, sorry if it offends—to look forward to the first day of school. Perhaps Sean did, too, but he had the good sense not to say as much. Tim, in his Tim-like way, accepted school as a fact of life. Couldn’t get out of it, so why waste energy complaining. Then again, he wasn’t about to celebrate the fact, either. Let Gwen and Sean grade-grub. Tim had carved out a groove for himself as a B student, the path of least resistance, as he saw it. To be an A student would have required more work, to slide down to C’s would risk his father’s ire. That was Tim’s particular genius at the time, getting by. Doing just enough, but never too much.

  Poor Go-Go had no genius, except for destruction, with a subspecialty in self-destruction. He was miserable in school, and if there was some root cause that might have been treated—attention deficit, dyslexia—the nuns of that particular time and that particular school weren’t inclined to investigate or address it. Go-Go was told he was lazy, incorrigible, bad. Work harder, try harder, think harder, his teachers lectured him, and he would see results. He was almost grateful for the reprieve of Mass, boring as it was. Go-Go could fake his way through an hour of Mass.

  As for Mickey—she hated school because she hated being indoors. Ironic, one might think, given her later choice to spend her working life inside a long narrow tube, but Mickey would argue that she never felt freer than she did on a plane, thousands of feet above the ground, hurtling through the air. Free, if she chose, to disappear into a new city, to start life over again in Chicago or Seattle or Dallas. Not that she ever did, but the opportunity was there. She could grab her wheeled suitcase and disappear.

  So: Gwen was the only one who cared that summer, in 1979, when Hurricane David began moving up the coast over Labor Day weekend, threatening the first day of school. Well before it reached us, David was a monstrous storm, destined for the history books, killing more than two thousand people in the Dominican Republic. But all Gwen cared about was the possibility that she would be denied her triumphant return to school. Triumphant because she had a boyfriend now, one that almost any of her classmates would envy. Good-looking, a grade ahead of her—a high school freshman yet. She had a photo of Sean in her new wallet, ready to go. In a photo, Sean was perfect. Did this imply he was not perfect in the flesh? As the first day of school drew closer, did Gwen start to notice the things about Sean that her private-school friends would find uncool? His politics, for example, inherited from his father, were conservative. The way he dressed, almost as if he wore a uniform even when not in school. Plus, his family didn’t have money, which everyone at Gwen’s school professed not to care about, but—everyone at Gwen’s school had money.

  Yet, no, that can’t be. Gwen could not have had any doubts about Sean because that foils the before-and-after symmetry of our story, in which everything was perfect until the moment it wasn’t. Gwen and Sean were still in their honeymoon period, although perhaps understandably with some trepidation about whether this was a flimsy summer romance or something sturdier. Tim and Sean, good soldiers, marched off to the first day of school at Cardinal Gibbons. Gwen, giddy with reinvention, rode in her father’s car to Park School. For the second year in a row, Go-Go was alone at St. Lawrence, where Sean, and even Tim, left behind long, long, long shadows that the nuns kept holding up to him, like some Punch-and-Judy silhouette on the wall, a play in which Go-Go was always the butt of all the jokes. Mickey stood on Forest Park Avenue, waiting for the bus to junior high, furious and forlorn.

  The first day of school came and went, without incident. But just as a change in barometric pressure anticipates a hurricane’s impending arrival, things were changing, even if we didn’t acknowledge it. Tim, advised by his father at breakfast that he would need a scholarship if he planned to attend school beyond community college, came home and cracked the books. Sean and Gwen raced through their homework so they could be alone. Mickey and Go-Go were left to their own devices. The last month of summer had been like this, too, with Sean and Gwen isolating themselves from us. But their continued desire to be just two instead of five was somehow more striking, now that a new season had arrived. The first day of school established what we had long suspected: the five of us, as five, as a star, as a constellation, were over.

  Hurricane David moved up the coast. It was not as destructive as feared, not in the United States. Five dead in Florida, which was as remote to us as the Dominican Republic. As was Savannah and the Carolinas and even Virginia and suburban Washington, D.C., and western Maryland. It was only when the rains started in Baltimore on September 5, the second day of school, that we cared about Hurricane David. Yes, we were young, but this is how people are: we care about what affects us. Two thousand Dominicans, five Floridians—we could not muster true worry in the abstract. But when the rain started that afternoon and there were disturbing reports that the creek might rise and cross the road, as it had during Agnes, Mickey’s mother called Tally Robison and asked her to send her home.

  “Mickey?” Tally said. “Mickey’s not here.”

  Sean was. He was lying on top of Gwen in her bedroom, the pretense of homework abandoned. They had all their clothes on—Tally Robison was within earshot, after all, and the door was ajar, house rule—but they were dizzy and amazed at the things that could be accomplished through their clothes. At Tally’s polite knock, Sean jumped back with so much force he almost hit the opposite wall. But they had their clothes on. No one could prove anything.

  Tally, who had come up the stairs on swift, stockinged feet, took in the scene—the rumpled bedspread, the mussed hair, the high color in Gwen’s and Sean’s faces—without comment. She told them that Mickey was missing and her mother was worried, asked if they might know where she was.

  “There’s one place—” Gwen began.

  “We’ll go,” Sean said quickly. “It’s just over the hill.”

  He called Tim at the Hallorans’ house, who arrived with slickers and high-beam flashlights. Like Gwen and Sean, he did not invoke Chicken George’s name. Why didn’t anyone say his name? Did we really bel
ieve that we would get in trouble if our parents found out we had formed a friendship with the odd man who lived, off and on, in the woods? What was our transgression? That we had traveled so far from home in our walks there, or that we had stolen from our families’ pantries at his instigation? That Sean and Gwen had then used the cabin to do whatever they did? Or was it something less rational, a desire to have a secret for the sake of the secret? Chicken George belonged to us. He had been missing for many weeks at this point and we believed we would never see him again. Still, we did not speak of him, not then. Tim, Sean, and Gwen walked, calling Mickey’s name, the flashlights strafing in the growing gloom. The rain had started, heavy and thick. Hurricane rain.

  When they crested a hill, still about a half-mile from Chicken George’s, they saw Mickey and Go-Go running toward them, breathless.

  “What happened?” Tim asked. “What’s going on?”

  Neither one answered.

  “What happened?” Tim repeated.

  “Something bad,” Go-Go said.

  Mickey tried to keep going, but Tim caught her by the arm. “Show us.” She paused, and it seemed she was considering whether she could outrun Tim. She probably could, but she didn’t try. Mickey was crying—and Mickey never cried. Shrugging off Tim’s hand, she turned around and led us back down the hill, to the stream, which was growing in width and speed. Chicken George was there, lying on his back, his precious steel guitar nearby.