The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “I just do.”

  She has to think—or pretend that she’s thinking. “In the garage. I so seldom use it.”

  It is the stepladder from his childhood, the one that used to be kept in the upstairs hall closet, the one that he needed last month to put away things on the high shelf of the china cupboard. In the event of a fire, they were to drag the stepladder to Go-Go’s room, lift the rectangular board that led to the attic crawl space, then proceed to throw a rope ladder out the attic window and clamber to the ground. The only problem was that their father never anchored the rope ladder to the sill, which meant it was useless. If the house ever caught fire, they would have been safer jumping out the second-story windows than clambering down an unsecured rope from the third. Still, the stepladder belonged in that upstairs closet. It’s the only way to get to the attic. He was surprised that his mother had moved it to the garage. Now he has a hunch why.

  It clearly has been years since anyone has pushed open the door, leading to the storage space under the eaves. Someone—Go-Go, his father, his mother?—has tried to nail it shut, but it’s a piss-poor job. Tim pushes it with his shoulder and the nails slide from the thin, splintery wood.

  Tim isn’t particularly tall, but once in the attic he has to stay hunched to keep his head from grazing the ceiling. He pulls the chain on the single-watt bulb only to watch it die with a pop. There’s enough light from the window for him to make things out, though. He begins taking inventory. On a set of low shelves, he finds the hockey gear that Go-Go wore in the Fourth of July parade. Hadn’t he said he borrowed it? That was the summer of 1980. It never made sense, Go-Go showing up with that gear. Tim always assumed he stole it. But if Father Andrew is right—it could fit. Someone could have given Go-Go the mask, the stick, the padded glove to ensure his silence. Interesting, but is this reason enough to seal up the crawl space? He pokes and prods the various cardboard boxes, filled with the most incredible debris, stained clothes, and broken toys. Tim sees a pile of old sheets in the corner, yellow with age, wrapped around something, and he moves toward it, keeping his head low, almost crawling.

  A steel guitar.

  He rocks back on his haunches, tells himself that there is more than one steel guitar in the world, that the guitar’s presence here means nothing. But it is Chicken George’s guitar. Go-Go went back for it, went back to where Chicken George fell and took the guitar. Why?

  Because Chicken George never touched him. Because it was all a lie. And Go-Go wanted to be caught in the lie, wanted someone to ask him about it.

  When he comes downstairs, his mother is in her chair, but no longer wrapped up in her book.

  “You knew it was up there,” he says, not bothering with his professional techniques, not setting up a careful path of questions to which she must answer yes, so she can’t deny the established facts. His father might not have been handy, but he would have done a better job at nailing that door in place. Go-Go, too, for that matter. His mother hid the guitar, his mother nailed the attic up and moved the stepladder, hoping that it would deter anyone who decided to go up there. How long has she kept Go-Go’s secret?

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew it meant something.”

  “What? What did you think it meant?”

  “Something bad.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Clem hears the front doorbell, a conversation between Gwen and a man. Karl? Has Karl relented and decided to let Annabelle spend Easter weekend here? He feels Annabelle’s absence keenly. As much as he wants Gwen to stop being an idiot and go back to Karl, he likes the fact that Annabelle has been here almost every weekend. He has started reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to her, over Gwen’s protestations. Gwen says Annabelle’s too young, which is probably true. But Clem thinks that Gwen’s real problem is that she wants to read the book to Annabelle and he is usurping her. He is. Given his age, there is so much he will never do with this grandchild. He will never run alongside her two-wheeler. He couldn’t carry her even before he broke his hip. He feels as if he has missed out twice-over on being a real grandfather. Miller’s children lived too far away, and now Annabelle has arrived when he’s too old. He might not even see her through grade school. Gwen might have a little more empathy, he thinks.

  In general, Gwen might have a little more empathy. The problem is, she thinks she does. But Gwen’s idea of empathy is that she knows how she would feel in any given situation. If she fell down and broke something, she would throw herself into physical therapy, do everything right, so why won’t Clem? If she were Karl, she would pursue her runaway spouse, do whatever was necessary to woo her back. Gwen has a good heart, but a person can have a good heart and be self-involved to the point of blindness.

  Yet it is Clem who does not register, not right away, how much distress his youngest daughter is in when she enters his room with a lunch tray.

  “I thought I heard someone at the door,” he says.

  “You did. Tim Halloran stopped by.”

  “What did the lummox want?”

  “He’s not.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not a lummox, actually. Not really. He can be crude and coarse, and he was kind of a bully as a boy, but he’s smart and surprisingly . . . ” She does not find the word she’s looking for. “We have to go out later. Tim and I. We need to . . .” Another sentence left unfinished, and Clem finally realizes his daughter is agitated, pale and drawn.

  “Gwen, I feel you haven’t been telling me everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “About Karl. Why did you leave?”

  The question catches her off guard. Her thoughts are far from her husband, her domestic situation. She seems almost relieved by the change of subject. She sinks on the chair next to his bed.

  “There was infidelity,” she says.

  “You said Karl was insistent nothing happened, that he didn’t even realize what that woman on the Facething was trying to do.”

  “No, not Karl. I cheated. Just once—no, that’s a lie. I still can’t tell the truth about it. More than once, but it wasn’t what you would call an affair. It was something really stupid I did, but something I can’t take back. Last summer, with someone at the office. Someone much younger. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could be fired over it.”

  “And Karl threw you out?”

  “No. He doesn’t know, doesn’t even suspect.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  “Because I don’t want to tell him, but I don’t know how to go forward if I don’t tell him. Yet if I do tell him—”

  “He will throw you out.”

  Gwen shakes her head. “Worse. He’ll forgive me. If only for Annabelle’s sake. But I’ll be in his debt forever, then. It will be official: I’m the bad one and he’s the saint.”

  “Husbands and wives aren’t working off a balance sheet, Gwen. Look, I think it would be OK not to tell him. I really do. This mania for honesty—”

  She catches her breath, almost as if she has been hit unexpectedly.

  “I’m just saying that people don’t have to tell each other everything.”

  “Easy for you to say, with your perfect marriage.”

  He takes her hand. “Really? That’s what you saw? A perfect marriage?”

  “Yes. You never quarreled. You adored her. You saw her, encouraged her, praised her. My husband can’t even pretend to be interested in what I do. And perhaps by the standards of what he does, it is shallow and trivial, and perhaps people shouldn’t have to pretend . . .” Her voice trails off, her point lost even to her.

  “Gwen, I’m not even sure your mother truly loved me.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “We got married because she believed she was pregnant.”

  “That makes no sense. Miller was born more than a year after you married.”

  “I didn’t say she was pregnant. She believed she was pregnant, but she was terrified of g
oing to a doctor anywhere in Boston, assumed there was no way she could keep the secret from her parents. She all but asked me to marry her.”

  “Well, of course you did the right thing.”

  “No, you don’t get it. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She was proud. She didn’t want anyone to think she made a mistake, that she wasn’t in absolute control of her own destiny. So we married—and she lived with her mistake the rest of her life.”

  “She loved you.”

  “To the best of her ability, yes. And she stayed with me after she realized she was wrong. We never spoke of it. She had no idea that I knew. But I did, and there was always that seed of doubt there. I had to wonder if she loved me as I loved her.”

  “She was so young,” Gwen murmurs. Excuses, always excuses. Tally trained everyone to make excuses for her. “Karl is older than I am, allegedly a grown-up. But he never thinks about anyone but himself.”

  “Gwen—most people don’t think about anyone but themselves and maybe their children. Your mother would have walked through fire for you.” A pause. “As would I. But we don’t ask that of our spouses. Oh, we can ask, but we’re sure to be disappointed.”

  Gwen shakes her head. “I’ve lived my whole life believing my mother to be happy, someone who struck a perfect balance before anyone even worried about such things. And now you’re telling me it was a lie.”

  “Not a lie, exactly. But I don’t think she ever stopped thinking about the life she might have—what might have been. If she had gone to Wellesley, as she planned, if she had studied painting seriously—well, she couldn’t know who she might have been. The generation of women who came up behind her, girls barely a decade younger, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted. She ended up abandoning the painting she thought would be her masterpiece.”

  “The painting of the young couple in the woods. What happened to that?”

  “She painted over it, gave up.”

  “I sometimes wonder about those paints, their toxicity, that poorly ventilated shed. And then there was all that diet soda she drank. Do you think either one could have caused her cancer?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care, Gwen. Knowing the cause means nothing. She was the love of my life, and I never regretted how our marriage came to be. But I’ll never know if she would say the same thing.”

  “What should I do? About Karl? Go home and tell him everything? Go home and tell him nothing? For all the time we’ve been together, I’ve had the small comfort of being the good spouse, the one who made everything work. If I tell him about the affair, I won’t even have that anymore. I’ll just be the one who cheated.”

  “I’ve had only one marriage, Gwen. You’ve had two. Perhaps you should be advising me.”

  “I felt old,” she says. “And unattractive.”

  “Dearest Gwen, there are only so many details I can handle.”

  She looks down at her hands, and Clem’s eyes follow. They are shaking. The veins stand out in sharp relief, the skin is dry. He thinks about Gwen’s baby hands, cupping his face. Annabelle’s hands. Tally’s hands, dry and a little coarse from being denuded of paint every day, how she hated to leave a speck behind. His daughter’s hands make him feel so old.

  “It’s easier to talk about Karl, what I’ve done, than the thing that’s really bothering me. Daddy—do you remember the night of the hurricane?”

  It’s a double blow—the use of “Daddy,” the mention of that night.

  “I wouldn’t be likely to forget that.”

  “Tim and I—we’ve learned some things since Go-Go died.”

  Blabbermouth Doris. Who hasn’t she told by this point?

  “It wasn’t true,” Gwen says. “It didn’t happen.”

  “Go-Go didn’t die?” He is honestly confused, and that one moment of confusion scares him, as it always does. The inability to follow a conversation—that’s a far more serious indicator of a failing mind than mere memory lapses.

  “He wasn’t molested. Not by the man in the woods. He lied, he and McKey.”

  “Who?” He decides it’s the sheer anxiety that he feels at the mention of the hurricane that is making it hard for him to focus.

  “Mickey.”

  “But why—”

  “We’re not sure. We—Tim and I—are going over to McKey’s apartment and talk to her. Maybe Go-Go lied to her, too, and she was caught up in it. She was the one who pushed the man—we never told you that part, McKey begged us not to, she was terrified, and it was an accident. That’s when he hit his head. That’s why he died. But we thought—Tim and Sean and I—we really did think he had hurt Go-Go. It was easier to tell only that part. You see—we knew him. We visited his house all the time.”

  He looks at A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on his bedside table, a handsome special edition with illustrations of which he doesn’t quite approve. That’s not his Francie Nolan. He and Annabelle haven’t gotten very far, but they have already read the scene in the first chapter, the one about the old man in the bakery, who is gross and unappealing to Francie. Then she realizes that he was once a baby, that a mother loved him, welcomed him into the world with joy. It is just what Clem used to think, walking up Eutaw to Lexington Market, seeing the city’s saddest souls. Everyone was loved once. Everyone was a baby. He knows that not all children are loved, that many come into the world without provoking joy. But most do.

  And now the moment has come. He must let his daughter know of his mistakes, his cowardice. No wonder Go-Go drove into a wall. His well-meaning mother had to tell him that his father killed a man, just for him, not knowing that the man was innocent, that she was inadvertently putting the murder on her son.

  The chickens have come home to roost.

  “Gwen,” he begins. “I can tell you almost definitively that McKey was not responsible for the death of the man in the woods.”

  He starts, much as he gingerly made his way down the steep pitch of the hill, watching the swinging arc of light, knowing, yet not wanting to admit, that he is watching a man kill another man. It happened. And only by admitting it can he take the sin off his daughter, the other children. It’s too late for Go-Go, but at least he can spare the others, assume the mantle of guilt that is his, his alone. He will walk through fire for his daughter, at last. What if it was your child? Tim Halloran asked him all those years ago. It is.

  Chapter Forty

  Doris watches Tim come and go until it is almost 2 P.M. He does not tell her what he is doing. He barely speaks to her at all. Why? Why is he mad at her? She did what a mother should do, tried to protect her son. It was no different from washing his sheets.

  She found the guitar under his bed a week or so after the night of the hurricane. She knew there was no way that Go-Go could have come honestly by such a possession. She didn’t know what to do. He had been through so much. It seemed wrong to ask him about the guitar. She took it away, put it in the attic. And over the years she was the one who made sure they had no reason to go up there. She moved the stepladder to the garage, put the Christmas ornaments in the basement. By the time she was done, the only things up in the crawl space were the guitar, the hockey costume, some old boxes, and the rope ladder. As far as she knew, Go-Go didn’t even remember it was there.

  Something bad, she told Tim. She has always known that the guitar stood for something very bad. But how bad could a little boy be, especially Go-Go, who didn’t have a mean bone in his body? Yet it wasn’t long after the discovery of the guitar that the bed-wetting started. Then he showed up with that hockey stuff, also expensive. She pretended to Tim Senior that she bought it, told him she used money from a birthday check from one of her aunts, withstood his criticism for being wasteful when the household needed every dime.

  Something bad. The truly bad thing was when Doris told Go-Go about his father, what he had done for him. Her intention wasn’t only to raise Tim Senior up in his son’s memory. She also—oh, what parent feels like this?—yearned to tear Go-Go down a little, let him know
of the sacrifices made for him. She was tired of his brooding, his “poor me, poor me, poor me” routine. He had a house nicer than any Doris had ever known, two beautiful little girls, and a good-enough wife.

  All she wanted him to say was thank you, or words to that effect. To say that Tim and Doris did right by him, the best they could. To tell her that it wasn’t her fault that he couldn’t get his life together. Was that wrong? She tried to explain herself to Father Andrew yesterday, without telling him all the details. But Father Andrew isn’t as satisfactory a confidant, now that he’s not a priest. She isn’t sure why that should be, and maybe it’s just her own prejudice, but he seems less wise to her now, and much less sympathetic. He’s of the world now. He has lost his perspective. He wears a turquoise ring.

  Tim goes out to his car, carrying the guitar. Good. She should have gotten rid of it long ago.

  “Are you going to throw it in Leakin Park?” she asks him.

  “Throw it—?” He shakes his head. “Sure. Why not? It’s where all Baltimore’s best dead bodies go.”

  “Will you be here for lunch tomorrow?”

  “It’s Easter. We’re always here for Easter lunch.”

  “So you don’t hate me?”

  He could be a little quicker in his reply, but when he does answer, he seems sincere. “No, Mom. I don’t hate you. I know you always had Go-Go’s best interests at heart.”

  “When I told him about your father—I thought it would make him happy. Well, not happy, but proud. Loved.”

  “I know, Mom.” He kisses her on the forehead. “You meant well. You always meant well.”

  “You called me the enemy of fun.”

  “What?”

  Even Doris is surprised by how this old grievance bubbles up. “Your father, but all of you agreed, behind my back. You didn’t know that I knew, but I knew. You thought I wasn’t fun.”

  “Being fun isn’t the most important thing in the world.”

  “We’ll have fun tomorrow,” she says. “With the girls and Easter lunch. I have all the usual things. Ham and sweet potatoes.”