The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  What did she know from fathers and daughters, anyway? The only example she had close to hand was Gwen and her dad, and that wasn’t anything to emulate. For one thing, he was old and he looked it, even back in the day. And he was always—what was Tally Robison’s term for it?—holding forth. On the occasions that Mickey ate dinner with the Robisons, the meal was like another class, with quizzes on current events and science and history and vocabulary. She didn’t even try to participate, except when it came to plants and trees. Even as a girl, Mickey knew as much about those subjects as Dr. Robison. She didn’t have all the right words, but she understood the natural world in a way that Gwen didn’t. She was aware of the seasons and the smells. It was Mickey who taught Go-Go how to catch salamanders, Mickey who lured crawfish from the old storm drain at the bend in the creek, Mickey who found the tiny little fossil, which Rita threw away.

  “You should study botany,” a bored high school adviser told her. But that wasn’t right for her. No job was. Park ranger, gardening—there was no paying gig that could return her to the way she felt when she roamed the hills of Leakin Park as a child. Maybe there is no job that can make a person feel as she felt at ten, eleven. That do-what-you-love bullshit—it’s another scam, as far as McKey is concerned, another way people set you up for disappointment. She loves having a job she doesn’t love because she’s always clear on why she’s there: to pay the bills.

  The AA meeting gets under way and she assumes her attentive posture, listening and nodding, capable of taking in the stories, even while following her own thoughts. There really are only so many variations to addiction stories. Names change, but bottoming out, based on what she hears here, appears to be a largely universal experience. How much longer must she attend? Perhaps she’ll tell Dan she’s moving to Minneapolis. Always tricky to tell such a lie in a small-town city like Baltimore, where people’s paths are forever crossing, but if that day should come, she’ll find a plausible reason to be back here, no? Dan is a pain in the ass and too chummy for her. Maybe all his concern really is part of his role as her sponsor, but she’s dubious.

  Take tonight, his insistence on walking her out to her car, as if there’s any danger in this church parking lot.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” he says. “Now we just have to worry about Daisy.”

  “Daisy?”

  “The older woman who used to bring knitting to the meetings. Very Madame Defarge.”

  She stares at him blankly, realizing she should recognize the reference, but not caring if he sees it has gone past her. Just like dinner with the Robisons, all those years ago, all that talk, talk, talk flying around the air. Mickey stared into space, defiantly bored by the Robisons, who thought they were so interesting.

  “Big woman,” Dan says. “Wore flowery dresses. Smoked clove cigarettes.”

  “Oh, yeah.” McKey doesn’t pay much attention to women because they are seldom of use to her.

  “Her sponsor tried to call her, but she’s not answering, doesn’t even have voice mail.”

  “Maybe she died.”

  “McKey!” Dan acts as if she’s making a dark joke, but she was being merely factual. Daisy’s an old lady, probably alone. She could have fallen in her apartment. She could be lying there right now, dead or dying. Does Dan think all the tragedy of the world is linked to drinking? He probably does. He’s built his life around it.

  “Be safe,” he says as she gets behind the wheel.

  “I always am.”

  It’s a haul, getting back to her apartment. It’s a haul getting almost anywhere from this corner of Baltimore, and she wonders, as she has often wondered, how her mother ended up there. Because of Rick, of course. She met Rick, he worked at the Exxon station, and there you have it. Or was it the man before Rick? Rita followed men wherever they led her, yet now she is living man-less in Florida. This must explain her sudden interest in McKey, the messages on her answering machine. Call me, call me, call me. No thanks. Not my problem you’re alone and bored. I’m alone and never bored.

  McKey lets herself into her apartment and goes straight to the refrigerator, pours herself a glass of white wine. Nothing like pretending to be an alcoholic to give one a craving for drink. Liquor is like porn to those people, and after listening to them talk about it nonstop, she can’t wait to have a drink, although normally she can take it or leave it. Wrangling drunks at 30,000 feet puts one off alcohol. It was stupid, telling Sean she was in AA with Go-Go. And he probably blabbed to Tim—boys are the worst gossips—maybe even Gwen. Should they meet again, she won’t be able to drink in front of him. And she wants to see him again. Although it would be nice this time if he weren’t so blotto. He was useless.

  She examines herself in the mirror, pleased by what she sees. Her body, like her mother’s, is naturally hard, at least for now. Hard is good. Hard is what she strives for across the board. Hard of body, hard of heart, hard of mind. McKey is a warrior, a survivor. She’s ready—for the plane to go down, for a terrorist to pull a knife, for the world to end, for whatever comes. And, increasingly, it feels like something is coming for her, but she’s sidestepped it for now. She’s pretty sure she’s sidestepped it.

  But at night, alone in her water bed—her mother’s old bed, a gift McKey accepted from her half brother because she thought it ironic, although she has lost track of what the irony was supposed to be—at night, on the edge of sleep, it’s hard to stay hard. She ends up crying as she has cried every night since Go-Go died. Even the night Sean was passed out in her bed, when she was finally so close to having the one thing she’d always wanted, she found herself weeping for the little brother of the man lying next to her.

  Pity Us All

  Chapter Thirty-five

  When Sean’s plane touches down at Baltimore/Washington International on Good Friday morning, he is thinking about the first time he landed at this airport, which happened to come at the end of his first plane trip. He was in college, heading home for a surprise Thanksgiving visit after signing up to courier a package, a not uncommon arrangement then. Twenty years old! Duncan has been on a plane at least twenty times, possibly more. He’s on yet another one right now, en route to New Orleans, a place where Sean has never been. “It’s just not on my list,” Vivian had said when he proposed it as a romantic getaway for the two of them a few years ago. “The food is so heavy.”

  The airport where Sean landed in the mid-1980s had already switched its name to Baltimore/Washington International from Friendship, an unlikely moniker for any airport in these hostile days. Sean travels enough for work that he is a low-maintenance passenger—shoes off, laptop unsheathed, liquids in the right volume, stowed in a plastic bag of the dictated size. He has little patience for the petulant fliers who treat everything as an affront, who have decided that the security line is the place to throw down for their dignity, to argue for the five-ounce bottle of hand cream, which is apparently made from ground diamonds if it’s really a hundred dollars an ounce, as the woman at the Tampa airport kept insisting. For Christ’s sake, even if you seldom fly, is it so darn hard to get on the Internet and do a little homework? The only people who don’t annoy him are the very old travelers, often infirm, who seem genuinely overwhelmed by the experience. He does the math—people in their late eighties were born before the Depression, knew a childhood in which cars were far from the norm. He thinks people have a right to be spooked by anything invented after they were twenty-one. Commercial air travel is a relatively recent phenomenon. His own mother can’t manage the trip to Florida on her own. Or so she says.

  Twenty-seven years ago, when Sean made his first flight, he tried to play it cool. But between the novelty of the plane—a little disappointing, except on landing, not at all what he thought flying would be like—and the responsibility of being a courier and the coiled surprise of showing up unexpectedly for Thanksgiving—oh, how happy he was going to make his mother—it was hard not to be giddy. He checked his bag, a boxy suitcase without wheels, and held the pa
ckage on his lap throughout the flight, although it was only a stack of legal files that needed to be in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving.

  He handed these papers to a local courier who met him at the airport, then realized he had no idea how to get into Baltimore without ponying up for a cab, which probably cost twelve, fifteen bucks at the time. He was Timothy Halloran’s son and couldn’t bear to pay that much for something so simple. He wandered the terminal, found a free hotel shuttle to a place over on Security Boulevard, then caught the bus from there to Dickeyville. Two buses because he couldn’t walk the final mile with that heavy suitcase. In the end, it took almost three hours to get from the airport to the house, while the flight itself had been barely ninety minutes. That was okay. It just heightened the pleasure of the surprise, of the anticipation of walking through the door and saying jauntily, “I’m home!”

  But the house on Sekots Lane was empty that day. Empty, yet with a sense of things having been interrupted very suddenly—his mother had clearly been in the early stages of preparing the Thanksgiving sauerkraut, one of those Baltimore customs that Sean didn’t think to question until he ventured out in the world. Cabbage sat on the cutting board, a knife was in the sink. Hours later, the family car, yet another one of his father’s Buicks, pulled into the driveway, and Sean, peeking through the curtains, saw his parents get out, Go-Go between them, almost as if he needed to be propped up.

  “Oh—Sean,” his mother said. “I didn’t know you were coming in.”

  “I wasn’t,” he said, his happy secret shriveling, dying within him, displaced by whatever accident, tragedy, fuck-up had befallen Go-Go. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “A little woozy from loss of blood,” his mother said.

  “Loss of blood?”

  “An accident,” his father said. “Very common this time of year, according to the ER doctor over at St. Agnes. That place is a sea of sliced thumbs and fingers.”

  The bandage was on Go-Go’s wrist. Sean looked at it, looked at his father, and decided not to say anything.

  While his parents led their youngest son upstairs, Sean went back to the kitchen, examining the knife in the sink. It was clean. The cabbage may have been left behind, but there was time to wash the knife. Or maybe the knife was innocent. Maybe Go-Go had raked something disingenuous across his wrists just to get attention.

  Go-Go wore long sleeves to Thanksgiving dinner. Sean thought of taking Tim aside and saying something, but Tim had brought his girl, Arlene, and was too wrapped up in her, wouldn’t leave her alone for more than a minute or two with either parent, although both seemed to like her. And suddenly it was Sunday and it was time for Sean to fly back to St. Louis, and there was never a time, really, to ask anyone—his mother, his father, Go-Go—what had happened the day before Thanksgiving. To this day, he has never told Tim about the incident. What would he tell? He knows nothing. He supposes that he should be the one arguing that Go-Go’s car accident was a suicide, given what he knows. But he believes it was like the Thanksgiving Day incident—not serious, an attempt at an attempt that caught Go-Go off guard by being successful. He was always trying to get attention.

  At least, Sean thinks, getting into a cab that would probably cost forty-some dollars, I learned not to try to surprise my parents. What was the point, really? That was Go-Go’s role in the family.

  He arrives to a shining house, a cake on the sideboard, the table set for tea. “You didn’t have to do this for me, Ma,” he says, kissing her papery cheek. He likes being reminded that he’s her favorite, even though he knows he’s no longer deserving of the post. How did he and Tim end up switching places in life? How did Tim become the reliable one? And does that make Sean the loudmouth? Sean thinks it’s the difference between Arlene and Vivian. One wife pushes her husband toward his family, the other drags him away. He wonders how Vivian will feel if Duncan falls in with a girl as relentlessly out for her family as Vivian is, as sure that her family does everything right and Duncan’s does everything wrong.

  And if it’s not a girl—but Sean’s mind balks, again. He simply has no idea how that works.

  “Oh,” his mother flutters, embarrassed. “It’s not for you. I mean, of course I hope you’ll join us, but an old friend is stopping by. Do you remember Father Andrew from St. Lawrence?”

  “Not really. He came after I was already at Cardinal Gibbons, remember? I remember you talking about him, though. He gave you that Waterford pitcher, the one that Go-Go dropped, and he used to come to the house.”

  “Once,” his mother says. “Just the once. For tea.”

  “Mom—” Suddenly he wants to ask her about that long-ago Thanksgiving. He wants to ask her about everything, all the things that they weren’t supposed to ask. Why was his father so angry all the time? Why is she sad? Was she always sad and he didn’t notice, or is the sadness new? Is he still her favorite? Does he deserve to be her favorite? What would she think if her only grandson—?

  He says: “I’ll clear out, after I’ve had a shower, let you two talk over old times.”

  Within an hour, he’s sitting at Monaghan’s Tavern, enjoying a beer, watching ESPN. He feels totally outlaw—a beer at 3 P.M. Sitting in the bar where his father used to go, which probably hasn’t changed much in all that time. He takes out his phone, checks e-mail—a note from Vivian, saying that they’ve landed, all is well, although she’s appalled by the hotel the church group has chosen and is trying to rebook; a few odds and ends from work, even though it’s a holiday on the calendar. He calls up a number that he has left on his log yet never stored in his contacts. He summons it up, puts it down, summons it up, hits the wrong button, finds himself making the call that he honestly wasn’t sure he was going to make until this moment.

  McKey doesn’t even have an outgoing message. It seems odd at first, this complete void. He could be speaking to anyone’s phone, even though he’s pressing the number that her phone sent his phone last month, almost as if the technology was calling the shots. He decides the lack of a message is reassuring. McKey, unlike, say, Gwen, doesn’t need to put everything in words. You can’t imagine her with a Facebook page or a blog or a Twitter account. He speaks into the space she has left: “I’m in town. We should get together to talk. All of us—Tim, Gwen, me—or just you and me, whichever you prefer.”

  He’s pretty sure which she’s going to prefer.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Good Friday reminds Gwen of how deeply Catholic Baltimore still is. Although it’s not an official holiday for businesses, many companies offer it as a flex day. And if schools are not already on spring vacation, students are guaranteed the day off. So she has brought Annabelle to her office, never really a good idea. The place fascinates Annabelle—for about forty-five minutes. Then the whining begins. Gwen has parked her in a conference room with a DVD player, a stack of Disney movies, a stapler, and some scratch paper and asked her to “work” on the paper. Like many children, Annabelle yearns to be useful. She quickly abandons the project, curls up in a chair, and begins sucking her thumb as she watches princesses cavort.

  “There will be something,” another parent in Gwen’s group told her when she entered the China adoption program. This woman was going back for her second child, and Gwen initially appreciated her advice and expertise. “What do you mean by something?” she asked. They had met—it seems silly now—in a Chinese restaurant up in Towson.

  “Well, in our first group, one of the girls was a hoarder. She hoarded immense amounts of food, trash. She was older, almost two. Another child clearly had medical problems. The question was how serious they were. The family had to take a leap of faith to bring her home.”

  “And?” Gwen could not believe how nervous she was about the answer to her question, how invested she had become, in the space of a sentence, in a family about which she knew nothing.

  “She was fine.”

  “Did your daughter—”

  “Lily.”

  “Yes, Lily. D
id she—?”

  The woman stared off into space, but that didn’t keep her eyes from welling with tears. “There was a bonding issue. She was very attached to my husband, but she had nothing for me for a long time. It was hard.” She swallowed, blinked, smiled. “But it turned out great. These are such great kids.”

  Inevitably, Gwen started trolling the Internet. She lasted about a week on a forum for prospective parents. It was too much, an aggregation of nightmares and dreams.

  In the end, she didn’t really have something with Annabelle, other than the expected developmental delays. She had been warned that Annabelle would think her new parents smelled funny and looked funny, that she would stare at the ceiling when overwhelmed. But her daughter had an indomitable spirit. It was a strange thing to think, but Gwen sometimes finds herself wondering how Annabelle would have fared if she hadn’t been adopted. She believes she would have thrived. She believes her daughter would have thrived anywhere. Though Gwen and Karl are important to her, beloved by her, they’re not shaping her in any way. She is who she is. All Gwen can do is stand by, rather helplessly, and love her to pieces.

  This year Annabelle will spend Easter weekend with Karl, by his request, which surprised Gwen. Karl has never been religious and had no desire to see Annabelle brought up in his faith, Catholicism. They have been taking Annabelle to the little Presbyterian church in Dickeyville, a place that Gwen attended until she announced, at age twelve, that she didn’t want to go anymore, and her parents didn’t object. Gwen isn’t sure what Annabelle is taking away from it, but it’s a nice ritual, going to church, then stopping by her father’s house for Sunday lunch.

  But this year, Karl’s sister has arrived from Guatemala, and he is putting on a bit of a show for her, taking her to services at the cathedral, making reservations for brunch at one of the downtown hotels. Gwen will be alone. Well, with her father, but alone. She has entrusted Annabelle’s Easter basket to Karl, with careful instructions about where to put it this year. It kills her, not being there, but Annabelle will be out of bed by seven, maybe even six. For a moment, Gwen was tempted to tell her there was no Easter bunny, just so Gwen would have a reason to bring the basket the day before. But Annabelle is only five. She deserves several more years of believing in impossible, lovely lies.