The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  Gwen thinks of the boy she knew. His one gift was to be startlingly, insistently there. The boy who ran for the ball, fearless of a truck bearing down on him, while the others stood frozen, debating. The boy who did the wild dance. He was never self-conscious, not then. Then the rumors started, disturbing stories about putting cats in milk boxes, shoplifting, acting out in school. However wild and frantic Go-Go was when they roamed the woods together, it was only after the night of the hurricane that he became wild in a frightening, disturbing way. But Gwen had broken up with Sean by then. Go-Go wasn’t her problem.

  “Like, here’s a classic Gordon story,” Lori says. “We had a neighbor, Mrs. Payne, back in the city. And she was a pain. Strange, paranoid. She was the last holdout on the block, everyone else was young, like us, and she hated us all, but Gordon was the only one who cared. She yelled at us for not cleaning up after our dog, and we didn’t even have a dog. Thought we stole her mail, thought we stole her newspaper. And Gordon couldn’t stand it. He had to make her like him. When it rained or the weather was bad, he started carrying her paper up to her door, putting it inside the storm door. With a note! So she would know it was him. One day he came home from the store with our oldest, Mia, in her car seat. She would have been eighteen months or so. And he saw Mrs. Payne dragging her little grocery cart down the street, and nothing would do but he had to get out and carry her groceries and put away the cold things—leaving Mia in the car! He completely forgot about Mia. I happened to come home from the gym and found her sleeping in the car. She was fine, but what if something had happened while he was carrying in groceries for a woman who didn’t give a shit about him?”

  Gwen can imagine the scene too well—the sleeping baby, slumped over in the seat, unharmed, while the mother runs through every nightmare that might have happened. In some ways, tragedies averted are even more terrifying than the things that actually occur.

  “Jesus,” she says.

  “I know,” Lori says. “And all because he’s sucking up to some woman who still didn’t like him. He shoveled her walks during snowstorms, too, put out ice melt crystals, and all she did was complain that it left pockmarks on her steps.”

  “It is human nature to chase after those who don’t like us.” Although, Gwen thinks, not Karl’s nature. He’s done very little to encourage her to return home. He has spoken his piece, said he loves her and wants to continue to be married to her, but he sees no reason to repeat himself. He thinks she is acting like a child. She thinks she’s acting like a human being. They both could be right. “I bet Go-Go chased you hard during your courtship.”

  “No.” Lori shakes her head, smiling at some private memory. “I pursued him. Everybody said he was no good, but I didn’t see that. I thought he was sweet and funny and a really good time. I converted for him.”

  “He was still a practicing Catholic?”

  “It was more about his mother, I think. I didn’t care. I loved Go-Go. Doris was part of the package.”

  “But wasn’t he married before?”

  “Yes.”

  “So Go-Go got an annulment?”

  “Apparently. Again, I think his mother pressed for it. She called in a favor, that’s how I heard it.”

  “It’s just hard to imagine he would have had grounds. Or, frankly, the kind of drag one needs with the church.”

  Lori shrugs. Everything she does is pretty, dainty, adorable. “All I know is Gordon’s first wife was bat-shit crazy. Violent, even, although Go-Go didn’t like to talk about that. She hit him, I mean, she whaled on him. At any rate, he got whatever he needed, and we married in the church. It was really important to Doris.”

  “How’s Mrs. Halloran doing since he died?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. She’s all but put Go-Go’s death on my doorstep, said it was my fault for throwing him out. But I couldn’t go on. Whatever he was doing, he was definitely lying to me about something. I’d had enough. I wasn’t going to be made a fool of.”

  “Did you ever call the number on his cell, try to find out who the mystery woman was?”

  “Oh, yeah. I was on the verge of my own private Jerry Springer Show. I called the number, ready to throw down. Only the woman who answered said I had the wrong idea, she was a private investigator and really had been paid to find Gordon, although she couldn’t tell me why. When she found out I was his wife, she urged me to get him to call, said it was really important, that someone from Gordon’s past needed him.”

  Someone from his past. Gwen’s stomach lurches, even as she tries to remind herself that Go-Go had forty years of life, only a scant part of which intersected hers. It could be anyone, anything. Go-Go was a mess. He must have left a lot of messes behind.

  “Did you call her after Go-Go died?”

  “What would be the point? If she couldn’t tell me why she was trying to find him when he was alive, she wasn’t going to tell me anything after he died.” Lori makes a sound that is supposed to be a laugh, but it is strangled, mirthless. “Someone from his past needed him. Who cares? It’s like Mrs. Payne all over again. Could anyone from his past need him as much as his girls do, as much as I did? I know it’s a stereotype, Catholics being guilt-ridden, but I have never known anyone as guilty as Gordon. He was up to something. I just never figured out what it was.”

  Gwen wonders if Lori can pick up on how guilty Gwen feels at the moment. About Go-Go, but also about Chicken George. She is remembering how Chicken George came and went without explanation, how he had been missing much of that summer—and how she and Sean had used his little cabin for their own furtive means. As children, they had accepted the mystery of his life as a given. There was much about adults that didn’t make sense to them. They were incurious. The cabin was there, if not the steel guitar, which always went with Chicken George. Who cared why he wasn’t there? Who could possibly notice the boy and girl who visited there?

  Now, as someone with experience in the world, it occurs to her to wonder where he went during those absences. Jail? A hospital? A mental hospital? What if Chicken George had a family, who intervened, forced him to get treatment and had to sit back when he signed himself out of the hospitals, never crazy enough to be declared incompetent? And what if those family members lived on and still wonder about their relative’s death? Because, after all, who ventures out on a night of a hurricane, steel guitar in hand?

  “Do you still have the private investigator’s number?” she asks.

  Chapter Thirty

  Annabelle sits on Clem’s bed, telling him a story. He can’t begin to follow it, and for a moment, he feels anxious. It is finally happening. His mind is slipping. Clem knows too much about aging to worry about the occasional grope for a word, the inability to dredge up some name that should be on the tip of one’s tongue. He understands these lapses are “normal” from a relatively young age on. But the inability to follow a complicated story—that’s qualitatively different. He has no idea what Annabelle is talking about, which is worrisome until he remembers—she’s five. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about. She strings together names and events willy-nilly, expecting her listeners to be up-to-date on all the personalities and politics of her preschool, neighborhood, and toy box.

  “—and then Mr. Gray put Fred in a time-out but it wasn’t a real time-out because—”

  The effect is akin to dealing with Tally when she was excited about something. The one-sided conversation went on and on, but Clem indulged them, because the fast, intense talking days were preferable to the silences. Tally had especially bad postpartum slumps after Miller and Fee, something he has come to understand in hindsight. Then there was a long grace period, until Gwen went to college. Tally, of all people, struggled with having an empty nest. The ups, the downs. Most people would compare it to a roller coaster, he supposes. But on a roller coaster, one has a clear sense of the duration of the ups and downs. The entire trip is telegraphed, the tracks are visible, the safe landing is guaranteed.

 
But then, everything is understood in hindsight. Hindsight, in Clem’s experience, gets a bad rap. Foresight is the fraud. No one has the ability to predict the future. People have hunches that they remember as wisdom because they happened to be right. They conveniently forget all the times they were wrong. Just as rare is the ability to understand, in the moment, exactly what is happening and how a moment that has already passed will affect one’s entire future. A swinging arc of light, a man’s lifeless body, an angry man, snorting like a bull in strong emotion—how could anyone process that moment and its multiple futures, how that moment would determine the next minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade of life?

  “—then Noah got to take the hamster home, which wasn’t fair because he already had a turn and some people haven’t had any.” Annabelle looks wistful. “I haven’t had a turn. Daddy forgot to sign the slip.”

  It takes Clem a second to grasp this, too. Sign the slip—why would someone have to sign an undergarment? Oh, slip of paper, permission slip.

  “Can’t your mommy sign it?”

  Annabelle looks at him pityingly. “She could if it was real. I was telling you a story. My class doesn’t even have a hamster. I wish it did, but Seth has allergies.” Annabelle’s disdainful tone makes Clem feel sorry for Seth, whom he imagines as a snuffling, unhealthy-looking boy, saddled with the onus of denying his entire class the pleasure of a hamster. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “Do you have a book you’d like me to read? Did you bring some books for the weekend?” She is staying here through Sunday, as she does every other week. Clem still disapproves of Gwen’s separation from Karl, but he enjoys the visits from Annabelle. “Or we could read this book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read to your mother.”

  “I want a made-up-for-real story.” Again, her syntax confuses him so much that he questions his mental competency. How can something be made up for real? Ah, Annabelle wants an improvised story, conjured on the spot, just for her. She wants to be present for the moment of its creation.

  Clem looks out the window. His bed is set up in the sunroom at the rear of the house, so it feels as if he’s surrounded by trees. Spare and spindly at this time of year, but if one looks closely, the leaves and buds are there. Spring is coming. Right now, he can glimpse the edge of Tally’s old shed, its prefab walls badly weathered but still standing. Soon it will be hidden by the foliage, which has been allowed to grow wild around it, the need for light long gone.

  “Once there was a little girl who lived at the edge of a forest,” he begins.

  “And was her name Annabelle?”

  “Why, it was,” he says, and Annabelle bounces with approval, which sends a painful wiggle through the mattress, essentially his cosmos these days. He has not been as faithful as he should about physical therapy, skipping days here and there. Why? It is one of the most mystifying questions in medicine and human nature. Why don’t people do the things they should? He’s not thinking of the hard things, changes required by genuine addictions. He understands how difficult it is to quit smoking and change one’s diet, even when the consequences of inaction are dire. It’s the neglect that otherwise rational people allow—skipping annual exams, declining exercise, refusing to eliminate foods that cause them actual distress.

  Tally was casual about her health, not that it would have mattered. No diet, no regimen, no amount of vigilance, no regular checkup would have yielded a different result in her case. She was stage IV at the time of diagnosis. It turned out that she had been experiencing abdominal pain for years and never mentioned it. And that she sneaked cigarettes in her studio. With the paint fumes and the little space heater—he’s surprised it didn’t go up in a ball of fire years ago.

  Sometimes he wishes it had. Without her, of course. He considered the shed, Tally’s studio, his romantic rival in some ways.

  “And Annabelle had a little house in the woods.”

  Clem asked Gwen a few months ago if they should try to make the shed, which stands empty, a playhouse for Annabelle. “A little house in the woods,” he said. “A little house in the woods,” Gwen echoed, her face troubled. A little house . . . maybe it wasn’t the best idea. Or maybe it was. Maybe if one had a little house on the edge of the woods, children wouldn’t press farther into the real woods.

  Not that Annabelle would ever think of walking through the woods, even with another child. Gwen wouldn’t allow it. Probably no modern parent would. Clem has always been skeptical of any pronouncement about how times change. Very few things about people have changed in his lifetime. Machines change, people don’t. Yet childhood—technology can’t change it, but technology has been used to plug all those beautiful, empty hours that children once had to fill on their own. What else can children do but stare at screens when the outdoors is denied to them, except in scheduled doses of sports practice and supervised playdates?

  Do mores change? Attitudes about profanity and behavior have changed, but the real change is that people speak of that which was once kept covert. Addictions, affairs, perversions. So much confession, yet America’s collective soul doesn’t seem to benefit from it. Peter De Vries, a writer that during his forties Clem particularly liked, once said that confession was good for the soul in the same way that a tweed coat was good for dandruff. A palliative, De Vries noted, not a cure, and Clem admired a layperson’s use of that distinction. Clem should read De Vries’s work again. He wonders if it holds up. The conventional wisdom is that such humor, dependent upon knowledge of an era’s social customs, has an expiration date. Yet Dawn Powell has come back and even Patrick Dennis, whose work Clem discovered because it nestled next to De Vries on the library shelves. He will ask Gwen to pick them up from the library, assuming they’re still in the library.

  “What did the little girl do in her house, Poppa?”

  “She lived there with a dog, a goat, and a horse named Charley.”

  “Boo,” Annabelle says.

  “Are you haunting me?” he asks, startled.

  “No,” she says with a giggle. “The horse is named Boo.”

  “Ah, of course, a horse named Boo. And she likes to—” He pauses, knowing Annabelle will direct the story where she wants it to go.

  “Cook.”

  “Cook. Your grandmother liked to cook.”

  “I didn’t know her,” Annabelle says. “She died a long, long time ago.”

  True, yet harsh, a reminder that twenty-five years ago, when Tally died, Clem was very much alone in his own house in the woods, without even so much as a horse named Boo. Gwen returned to school, after much melodramatic agonizing and self-exploration. It didn’t seem to occur to her that her father had lost his wife, much less that Miller and Fee had lost a mother, too. But Miller and Fee were adults. Young to lose a parent, but still adults. Miller was born an adult, and Fee became one more or less on schedule, upon college graduation, whereas Gwen—sometimes he feels he is still waiting for Gwen to become an adult. Anyway, Miller and Fee went back to their households, their respective partners and lives, while Gwen pursued and married a man so inappropriate that Clem felt as though he were watching a Restoration comedy that forgot to guide its lovers toward the proper partners at curtain. And now she is separated from Karl. Clem always thought Fee would be the one with a rocky romantic life.

  Fee had come out just before Tally’s diagnosis, surprising no one, and she still lived with her first love, an instructor at Mills College. The match had overtones of Clem and Tally: Fee’s lover was significantly older, an academic. They were still together, although they had weathered a tough time, quarreling bitterly about having children. Interestingly, it was Fee’s lover, almost sixty at the time, who thought they should adopt a child. Chinese adoption was fairly new when this came up. But Fee thought it was wrong to become parents to a child if one didn’t have a reasonable belief of being there for all a child’s milestones. Oh, Fee, he tried to tell her. You can’t control that, no matter when you have children. Tally, a bride at eighteen, misse
d so much. Gwen’s wedding. Both Gwen’s weddings. Fee and her partner’s marriage in that first, brief window of legality. Annabelle.

  Who has taken over the story, as he knew she would, allowing his mind to wander. “And they made pudding and soup and cake and doughnuts and chocolate jelly—”

  Clem was fearful when Gwen informed him of her plans to adopt overseas. Could he love a child who was not his biological heir? What about developmental delays? Then Annabelle arrived, he looked at her—and all his fears vanished, just like that. He was heartened to discover that his heart had room for someone new to love. Because in the twenty-five years since Tally’s death, no adult woman has found a way there. Many have tried. When his two older children speak of him moving to a senior community, as they always call it, their selling points include “company.” This was exactly what kept Clem in his house. He didn’t want to deal with all those widows looking for companionship. He is happy as he is. Still women call, drop by. Since his accident, there has been a second wave.

  Last week even Doris Halloran showed up on his doorstep, casserole in hand. Unsure of the etiquette, he had his daytime aide invite her in to share it with him, which she did with an almost frightening alacrity. Silly Clem. Doris wasn’t looking for a mate. She wanted absolution. She unburdened herself to him and left, seemingly happy. The casserole, whatever it was, might as well be called the misery dish, for once he ate of it, he could never be happy again. What he had always feared, what he knew but did not have to admit, had been thrust on him: Tim killed the man in the woods. He told Doris so before he died. She defended her husband’s actions to Clem, said she believed it was the right thing. “Think of the other children he might have hurt, that man.”