The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “Duncan says he’s planning to go to New Orleans over school break.”

  “Yes,” she says, biting a piece of thread. “With a group from church. I think it’s a great idea.”

  “The thing is, my mom is pretty fragile right now and I think it’s important for all of us to go see her.”

  “Certainly you should go. I understand.”

  This is how she does it, he thinks. She doesn’t even acknowledge there’s another side to the issue. She’s seizing the high ground, being magnanimous for allowing him to go see his mother.

  “She loves Duncan, dotes on him. It would be great if he were there, too.”

  “I’m sure she’ll understand when you explain how important this is to his college applications.”

  “But how do I explain you not being there?”

  “Oh, honey—it’s New Orleans. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I wasn’t one of the chaperones. It’s a very dangerous city. I’ll make you miserable, worrying about Duncan, so I might as well go.”

  He wants to argue on principle, then thinks Fuck it. He’ll go back to Baltimore, stay with his mom, something Vivian abhors, although she never admits it. But when forced to spend even a night in his boyhood home, she goes through the day murmuring, murmuring, murmuring, keeping up a running litany of disapproval that pretends to be disinterested commentary, as she ticks off everything that bothers her about the house, about Dickeyville, about Baltimore. It’s been years since they’ve stayed under his mother’s roof as a family.

  Sean will go home, spend the long Easter weekend, look up some old friends. Maybe even check in with McKey, if only to assure himself that what didn’t happen between them definitely didn’t happen between them. And if it did—if he’s already cheated—then doesn’t he deserve to remember it?

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Doris sits in the chair where her husband died, reading a mystery novel. She goes through two or three a week. As she tried to tell Tim Junior when he bought her that ridiculous plasma thing, she has little use for television these days. It makes her jumpy, and the more channels and control she allegedly has over it, the more she feels in its control. She was happy with the five local channels and rabbit ears.

  But she can read when and wherever she wants. Her favorites are the modern American versions of the old-fashioned English mysteries, with a dash of humor. She likes series because she likes the details that repeat—the beloved restaurants, the irascible but adorable landlords, the kooky families, the on-again, gone-again boyfriends.

  She reads in Tim’s old chair because it has the best light and is also the most comfortable. It has been reupholstered, but only because Arlene insisted. It’s not as if it were stained or marred in any way. Thoughtful girl that she is, Arlene wrapped the chair project inside the larger job of redoing the living room, but Doris knew that she thought the chair bothered her. It’s funny about Arlene—as much time as they spend analyzing other people, it never seems to occur to her that Doris parses her motives as well. Luckily, Arlene is unfailingly well intentioned. The fact is, if the chair harbored bad memories, no mere slipcover could redeem it.

  But Doris no longer imbues objects with any kind of significance or meaning. She did that for a long time, too long. In a house of rowdy boys, it was hard to have nice things, so she cherished the ones she managed to protect from their roughhousing. Then one day Go-Go broke a pitcher that Father Andrew had given her. Waterford crystal, brought back from his summer vacation in Ireland. She caught Go-Go holding it one afternoon and yelled at him to put it away. Startled, he dropped it.

  He was thirteen, too large to paddle, yet she paddled him anyway. And he slapped her. It was the most shocking thing that ever happened to Doris. Even Go-Go was appalled, bursting into tears. Doris sobbed, too, hugging him fiercely, something else for which he was too large, too old. He begged her not to tell his father, or even his brothers, about the slap. She had no desire to tell anyone. In Doris’s opinion, Go-Go was right to slap her. Yes, he had dropped the pitcher, but only because she yelled at him. No, he shouldn’t have picked it up in the first place, but it was a beautiful thing in a house with very few beautiful things. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to touch it, even if he had been explicitly forbidden to do so.

  And Go-Go, unlike the other men in the house, noticed beautiful things, beautiful people. As he got older, he cared about his clothes, dressing better than either brother. He chose beautiful wives. Merely beautiful, unfortunately, with little else to offer, especially that first one. Terrible, terrible girl, and Doris blames herself for that choice, too. Lori wasn’t much better, in Doris’s estimation, but she didn’t pummel Go-Go, and she was the mother of two of Doris’s grandchildren. Lori has power over Doris, and she knows it. Vivian plays the same game. Just this afternoon, Sean, in his regular weekly call, admitted that he would be visiting alone for Easter because Duncan has other plans. He tried to disguise it as positive news—such a good cause, very valuable for his college application, who could be a better chaperone than Vivian. There’s a name for what her son is, and it isn’t very polite.

  What Sean didn’t realize was that Doris considered it a case of good news/bad news. It is bad news that she won’t see Duncan, but very good news that she doesn’t have to see Vivian, who always enters the house on Sekots Lane as if it smells. True, sometimes the odor of cabbage lingers—everyone else in the family loves her cabbage rolls—but the house is pin neat these days, a perfect case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. It is neat because there is no one to clean up after except herself. It takes Doris three days to fill the dishwasher, almost a week to have a load of clothes to run through the wash. If it weren’t for the dogs, she’d probably never have to sweep the floors. She remembers—not quite wistfully, but with a little more perspective—the days when she thought she would be found dead under a mound of boys’ underwear.

  Yet there also is solace in being alone because her loneliness makes sense now: she is lonely because she is alone. Why was she lonely when the boys were here, when Tim Senior was still alive? Part of it was being the only female, the butt of every joke. Tim grew disenchanted with her for a time, and he let the boys see that. Doris Halloran, the enemy of fun. Now Doris believes she was born lonely. Lonely is who she is. If she had been born a man, she would have been a good priest, yet she didn’t think she was cut out to be a nun. Nuns were meant to function in groups. Priests got to run the show.

  She had enjoyed the final years with Tim Senior, when it was just the two of them, with occasional rebounds, as they called them, from Go-Go. There is something to be said for lowered expectations. Tim mellowed a lot as he aged, especially when he saw how the boys turned out. It gave him a thrill when one of Tim Junior’s cases ended up in the news, and he endorsed Sean’s idea—really Vivian’s scheme, in Doris’s view—to leave journalism for a more lucrative field.

  Go-Go’s fitful path through life was hard on them both, but Tim Senior himself had been in his midforties when he found the right professional fit, running a small handyman company. Funny, because he wasn’t particularly handy, but then he wasn’t the handyman. He was the guy who sat in an office and dispatched his workers to the women who needed them, the guy who kept the books, filed the paperwork. The idea had come to him in the mid-1980s, when he saw that cartoon on the cover of a newsweekly, the one that announced the era of the yuppies, a new word at the time. Tim told Doris: “If both people are working, then there’s no time for doing stuff, but extra income to pay others to do things that we always did for ourselves.” The business was steady, if not spectacular, and he sold it two years before he died for a tidy sum that left them comfortable. Not go-to-Florida-for-the-winters comfortable, but he paid off the house, a big deal. They celebrated with dinner at Haussner’s.

  For Tim Senior, the big secondhand revelation of running Mr. Handy was how—he blushed when he used the word in front of Doris—horny the women were, how often his guys were propositioned. They never said y
es. Or at least they told their boss they never said yes. But here was the kicker: These women, in their power suits, married to men pulling down six figures, were gaga for guys with tool belts.

  Doris and Tim could talk about sex because they were actually having it again. While her early menopause had seemed tragic at first, the end of her monthlies made it possible for her to have sanctioned sex with her husband with no more fear of creating life—or death. Doris began to take better care of herself and even used Rogaine for her hair loss. They found they could talk about all sorts of things that had once been taboo—the miscarriages, which Tim admitted he blamed on Doris, how cowed she had been by his temper. They could talk about almost anything. Except Go-Go. Any discussion of their youngest son either escalated into an argument or ended abruptly, as if they had run into something hard and unyielding.

  So when Tim Senior, sitting in this chair, clutched his chest and fell to the floor and said “Go-Go,” Doris knew he believed himself to be dying. There is no other way he would have gasped out those two syllables. She hoped he was wrong, even as she tried to remember CPR, assuming she had ever learned it. But when she started to run to the kitchen phone to call 911, he grabbed her wrist, desperate for her to stay with him, to have someone there for his last few minutes of life.

  And then he was dead. The story has become a legend in the family because it happened on October 9, 1996, during the Orioles’ play-off game with the Yankees, the one where a boy interfered with play and the Yankees won. It’s a good story, one that appears to make her sons feel better, and isn’t that what stories are for? Doris has no intention of telling them that the game had ended an hour earlier and that Tim Senior accepted the Orioles’ bad luck philosophically. There was a time when he would have broken something over a bad call, but those times were long behind them. In middle-verging-on-old age, Tim and Doris had found a rhythm together, contentment if not true happiness. And contentment is pretty good if you’ve never been particularly happy.

  Only it turned out that Tim Senior wasn’t even content. That was the sad part, learning in those final moments what lay beneath the muted, restrained temperament of Tim’s last years. Doris thought his mild success had made life easier for him, but Tim had kept a secret all these years: “I killed that man. For Go-Go. I killed him.” Why did he tell her? Why should she have to know such a terrible thing, and what should she do with it? It made her wonder if the years she thought of as contented had felt different to Tim Senior, if he held his temper and treated her nicely because he considered it his penance.

  For fifteen years, Doris guarded Tim’s secret, and she assumes the other men did the same, although she has her moments of wondering. She tries to remember her encounters with Tally Robison over the years, if she dropped any hints about knowing something, but the woman always acted superior to her, so her conceited manner was no clue. She never saw Rita again, although her daughter was around sometimes. She considered tracking down Father Andrew—long gone from the parish, out west somewhere—and talking to him about the situation, albeit in a hypothetical way. If a man killed a man who touched his child, would God forgive that? Is that murder? But Doris doesn’t want to know the answer. She thinks Tim did the right thing.

  Which is why she told Go-Go, when he came back this time, the last time. Always given to moping, he had fallen down a very deep hole after being kicked out by Lori. He said she had no cause, but Doris assumed her daughter-in-law had some complaint. She worried it had to do with other women. She’s not sure why, it’s just a feeling she has. Go-Go has a problem with women, did all during his first marriage, which is part of the reason why Claudia got violent, started attacking him. The alcohol was merely a substitute for the thing he really wanted. So when Go-Go was drifting around the house, feeling sorry for himself, she finally told him: Your father did this for you. Your father loved you.

  Within a week, Go-Go was dead.

  She puts down her book, although she is only twenty pages from the end. Doris hates to go to bed with a book finished. She can’t say why. Certainly it’s not because she fears dying in the night and never knowing the ending. Maybe it’s because it’s a little less lonely, knowing she has a group of people waiting for her in the morning, people who can’t go on unless she opens the book. Hello, Meg! Hello, Josie! What’s up with you? For a while, her favorite series was about two Alabama sisters, and then the writer died, which felt almost like a betrayal. Then Doris discovered she can still reread those books and derive almost as much pleasure from them. The books never change, the characters never disappoint.

  Whereas with Go-Go, all she can do is wonder how many secrets she’s required to keep, and for how long.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  It is no small thing for two mothers of young children to arrange a coffee date, and it takes several days for Gwen and Lori to find a convenient time and place to meet. They end up agreeing to late morning, at a Starbucks in the Columbia Mall, which is only a few miles from Lori’s town house. The suburb of Columbia came into being as a planned community, and although that plan included abundant green space and man-made lakes, Gwen feels that the seams show. She wonders how Go-Go felt about nature in such an orderly state, if he compared it to the untamed landscape they had known. Whenever she reads Where the Wild Things Are to Annabelle, she thinks about Go-Go, how he, too, would have liked to wear a wolf suit and sail to a place where he was king, commanding all the beasts to follow him in a wild rumpus. In a sense, they had, although only Go-Go danced.

  “How did you happen to move out here?” she asks Lori, making conversation as they settle in with their drinks. The Starbucks is opposite an enormous carousel and train, which seem old-fashioned and a little out of place in this cookie-cutter mall.

  “For the schools,” Lori says. “And the yards. I loved the city—we had a great apartment in Brewers Hill—but it didn’t make sense when our second one came along.”

  “How old are the girls—”

  Lori silences her with a hand. “You don’t need to make conversation for conversation’s sake. I know you’re busy, and I am, too. Let me say what I have to say: Yes, I threw Go-Go out. But it wasn’t for drinking, like it was the last time. He was sober and had been doing pretty well, too.”

  “What was the reason?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know.”

  “You threw your husband out for reasons not even you know?” It sounds ludicrous. Then again, Gwen is no less ridiculous, using her father’s accident as a way to attempt a trial separation from Karl for reasons she still can’t articulate.

  “He was up to something, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. So I told him to leave.”

  As a journalist, Gwen is used to hearing people’s life stories in choppy, nonsequential bursts, with much presumption of context on the listener. She will have to guide Lori through this if Lori really wants their meeting to go quickly.

  “Back up. When did you ask Go-Go to leave?”

  “Right after the holidays. The calls started before then, but I wanted to get through Christmas for the girls’ sake.”

  Ah yes, the timetable of the failing marriage. After Christmas, after his birthday, after Valentine’s Day. Gwen is familiar with how it works

  “Calls?”

  “A woman telephoned the house, looking for Gordon. Very polite, said he knew the reason she was calling and she was hoping to hear back from him. When I gave him the message, he acted weird. Jumpy. He said it was a scam and he wasn’t going to call her back. But then the same number began showing up on his cell phone, several times.”

  “And you know this because—”

  “Because I check my husband’s cell phone log. And his e-mail. If he had a Facebook page, I’d check that, too.” She gives Gwen a can-you-blame-me look, and Gwen, who continues to monitor her husband’s Facebook page, understands.

  “Did Go-Go—Gordon—give you a reason to”—Gwen thinks it best to choose her next words with great care—“keep cl
ose tabs on him?”

  Lori stares down into her drink, backing away from eye contact for the first time.

  “Not really. I don’t think he ever cheated on me, although I know that was an issue during his first marriage. I mean, he looked at porn on the Internet, but so what? I didn’t care as long as he cleaned out the cache and the children couldn’t stumble on those sites. But something was . . . missing, always.”

  Something in Gwen—her stomach, her heart, her throat, it’s too quick to pinpoint—clutches. This is how she feels. Something is missing. But her fear is that it’s in her.

  “What do you mean by ‘missing’?”

  “It’s like—this is going to sound weird, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. When I was younger, living on my own, I got this video center from Ikea, and one of the parts was missing, or I couldn’t find it in the packaging. But it didn’t seem essential, because I put the thing together and it held. Then one day, without warning, the whole thing came down with a crash. I feel that’s how it was with Gordon. There was some little piece missing, something no one could see, and he finally fell apart.”

  What had Go-Go told Lori, if anything? What happened to him was his story to share. But what happened to Chicken George belonged to the others as well. Could he have told Lori the first part without the second? Again, Gwen chooses her words carefully: “Did Go-Go—Gordon, I’m sorry, he’ll forever be Go-Go to me—acknowledge this? Did he see it, too?”

  “He wasn’t a talker that way. And, for a long time, there was the drinking. He was an alcoholic, and that explained everything. Then, this latest time with AA, it seemed to take, and yet he was still kind of mysterious, closed off. It was like he was holding a piece of himself back. From me and even the girls, although he doted on them. But he was never fully present.”