The Most Dangerous Thing Read online

  “He went nuts on us,” Mickey said. “He found us in the cabin, playing his guitar—”

  “You know you’re not supposed to touch it,” Tim said. “And what where you doing over there, on a day like today?”

  “He’s been gone so long this time,” Mickey said. “I didn’t think he was coming back. We were going to save the guitar from the weather.”

  “The guitar wasn’t there,” Sean pointed out. “He took his guitar when he disappeared, the way he always does. And if you wanted to save it, why did you carry it out without the case, into this rain?”

  “We didn’t,” Mickey said. “Chicken George did. He went nuts, when he found us there. It was like he didn’t know us, had never known us. He cursed us, he said terrible things. He called us—he called us robbers, although we only meant to surprise him. That’s when he grabbed the guitar from Go-Go and started to chase us. He went nuts.”

  Sean looked at Go-Go.

  “He went nuts,” Go-Go said.

  “And then he fell, lost his footing. It wasn’t our fault. He thought we were robbing him, but we only meant to help.”

  “Mickey pushed him,” Go-Go said in a small voice.

  She whirled on him. “Go-Go.”

  He backed away, but he didn’t change his story. “You did. You pushed him.”

  Sean—of course it would be Sean—knelt next to Chicken George, pressing a finger on his throat. “He’s alive. We have to call someone, figure out a way to get an ambulance crew in here.”

  “But he’ll say we were robbing him,” Mickey said. She grabbed Sean, came close to hitting him. “He’ll get us in trouble. Don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter that he’s crazy. People will believe him, take his side.”

  “Mickey—” Sean took her wrists, surprisingly gentle, unafraid of her aggression, the fingernails that raked his cheek.

  “Look, I didn’t want to tell you this, but—it’s not about the guitar. That’s not what happened. I decided to go check on the place. It’s been empty so long now. I—I had a feeling. So I got off the bus from school and went straight there. It’s not like Gwen cared if I came to her house.”

  It was clear she wanted Sean and Gwen to feel guilty, that she wanted them to confront what they had done to her, to us.

  “And?”

  “Go-Go was already here, and Chicken George. He was touching him.”

  “Go-Go was touching Chicken George?”

  “Chicken George was touching Go-Go.”

  Tim and Sean looked at their brother. He didn’t exactly nod, only shrugged helplessly, as if he didn’t have the vocabulary to speak of what had happened. Then said: “But Mickey pushed him.”

  “Go-Go!”

  “You did. He tried to grab you and you pushed him. That’s when he fell.”

  “He was trying to hit me. Because of you, because of what I knew.” Mickey was yelling at Go-Go as if everything was his fault. He hung his head. “I pushed him to keep him from hitting me.”

  “We still can’t leave him here, without telling anyone,” Sean said. “Even if he did that. We have to tell our parents.”

  “Can’t we go back and call 911 anonymously?”

  “There’s no way to explain to them how to get here. There’s no road—and the street may already be impassable. If we hike back to the Robisons’, though, our dads might be able to carry him out of the woods. And Gwen’s father is a doctor. He can help him.”

  “Help him,” Mickey said. “He’s a child molester. He’s been waiting all this time to get Go-Go alone and he finally did.”

  There was an accusation there, for all of us. But mainly for Sean and Gwen. Go-Go wouldn’t have been alone in the woods if it weren’t for Sean and Gwen, if we were still a we. That was how Chicken George got to him.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” said Sean, who still wanted to be a doctor then, having not yet been defeated by organic chemistry.

  “What do we tell our parents?”

  “The truth.” Sean paused. “Why is the guitar there?”

  “He tried to hit us with it,” Mickey said.

  “The truth,” Sean said again.

  “That is the truth.”

  He looked to Go-Go. After a second, he nodded. “He was trying to hit Mickey with it. He called her terrible names. He wanted to kill her. We didn’t take it.”

  We made our way back to Gwen’s house as quickly as possible. To our surprise, all the adults were there—Dr. and Mrs. Robison, the Hallorans, Mickey’s mom and not-quite-stepdad, along with her baby brother.

  “It’s an impromptu hurricane party,” Tally Robison said. “Your parents came here to wait for you all to return, and now people are worried it’s going to be like Agnes, with water rushing down the road. In which case, we’ll be stuck.” She seemed jolly about it. There were wineglasses out, the fathers had beers. Tally Robison liked parties and she tried to create them out of the flimsiest of pretexts. Still, we were struck by our parents’ naïveté, their assumption that we would all return safely. Didn’t they know, or had they forgotten: things could go wrong, so quickly.

  Tim and Sean took their father aside and spoke to him. Certain things were not said, by unspoken agreement among all of us. We did not mention that we had a long-standing relationship with the man who was lying in the creek. We did not say that Mickey had pushed him. The story was only that Mickey had found him touching Go-Go and he had chased them both, then slipped and fallen.

  “Touching? What do you mean by touching?”

  “Just—touching,” Sean said, for he didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know.

  Mr. Halloran then left the house with Dr. Robison and Rick, Mickey’s sort-of-stepdad. The boys wanted to go with them, fearful that the grown-ups could not find their way, but Mr. Halloran was adamant that they stay behind. They were gone for about an hour, but it seemed much longer. It seemed like days had passed before we saw the beams of their high-powered flashlights at the top of the hill. They came in through the basement door, and Tally Robison brought them towels and fresh T-shirts, then mugs of coffee with whiskey in them. She still wanted her party. She and the other women had played charades, and she wanted the men to join in.

  “Where’s the—man?” Mickey asked.

  “He was gone,” Dr. Robison said.

  “Gone? Are you sure you went to the right place?”

  “I mean—he didn’t make it. There was nothing we could do. I’ll call the police, but—you see, when he slipped, he fell and hit his head. He lost a lot of blood, and by the time we got there—” He shook his head. “We made our way down to the road, hoping to flag someone down, but there’s no one out there because of the storm. Our part of the road is clear, but there’s flooding farther down and up on Forest Park.”

  “The phones are out,” Tally said.

  “We’ll call in the morning, then,” Dr. Robison said. “We can’t leave him there.”

  “Why not?” Mr. Halloran said, bolting his beer.

  In the wake of the hurricane and the damage to the neighborhood, the police did not come for several days. We never knew exactly what Dr. Robison told them. We were not even sure if Chicken George’s body was found, or if it ended up being washed away as the stream gained in power. It rained very hard that night, and the streets did flood, as predicted, but they were empty by morning and everyone made their way home.

  A week later, we went back to his house, perhaps the last thing we ever did as a group. It was empty, but then—it had been empty before.

  “Do you think he had a funeral?” Go-Go asked.

  “Who cares?” Mickey said. “He was a bad person. Not you, Go-Go. Chicken George.”

  It was the right thing to say. Yet why did it sound as if Mickey was saying the exact opposite? In telling Go-Go that he was not a bad person, wasn’t she suggesting that some might think he was, that everything was his fault?

  “What if he’s still alive,” Go-Go said. “What if he never really died?”

>   “It’s not like a horror film,” Sean assured his brother. “He died. He most definitely died. Dr. Robison said so.”

  Chicken George died. From his head injury, according to Gwen’s father, but it was hard not to wonder about the water rushing around him, growing in power, carrying him and his guitar—where, exactly? Where did the stream end up? In the harbor, at a treatment plant? We knew the stream so well, understood its moods and shifts, its dangers, but we didn’t know its ultimate destination. We knew only the part we saw.

  Chicken George died. Our group, already splintering, died with him. Sean quickly became unsatisfactory to Gwen, and he didn’t seem particularly brokenhearted when she invited another boy to the Homecoming dance in October, her way of telling Sean that things were over. Tim worked even harder for those elusive A’s, determined to get a scholarship. Mickey’s mother broke up with Rick and moved across the county line—not even two miles, to the Strawberry Hill apartment, but far enough away that we never saw Mickey, now in a new school, hanging out with new friends. Go-Go got caught shoplifting at the Windsor Hills pharmacy. Go-Go got caught setting a small fire. Go-Go put a stray cat in an old insulated milk box, but maybe that was just a rumor. At any rate, with each incident, people sighed and said: “Oh, that Go-Go.” We never spoke of Chicken George again, and perhaps some of us even managed never to think about him, although that’s harder to imagine.

  Tally Robison died—cancer at age forty-nine. Tim Senior died, a heart attack while sitting in his recliner, watching the 1996 play-off between the Orioles and the Yankees. Mickey’s mother met another man, someone older, and followed him to Florida. It was sad, but natural, the way things happen. It was life.

  Then Gwen’s father fell down the steps. Tripping, he said, on a chicken. And Go-Go drove his car into the concrete barrier at the foot of the highway. The highway that, had it been completed, would have cut straight through the park and the land where Chicken George once lived. Could the highway have saved Go-Go? Could anything save Go-Go? Could we have saved Go-Go?

  Thirty-two years later, we are still trying to figure that out.

  Them

  Chapter Fifteen

  Autumn 1979

  Tally Robison has made a private game of cooking dinner out of whatever is at hand. She doesn’t plan the week’s meals in advance. That would be cheating. She flies down the aisles of the Giant every Saturday morning, picking up things on a whim, never using a list. The rest of the week, she stays at her easel as late as possible, channeling a character in a fairy tale, an enchanted princess who shifts shape every evening. Sunset is coming! The dark forces are gathering. Once the light is gone, she will be transformed into an everyday wife and mother, making dinner and small talk.

  This strict separation between her daytime and evening lives is entirely her choice. Neither Clem nor Gwen challenges the hours she devotes to painting, much less suggests she is neglectful of them in any way. Tally is the one who has decided that her artistic self must be banished with the dying of the light. Clem and Gwen wouldn’t mind if Tally threw buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the table, or fell back on Chinese takeout. They wouldn’t notice if she remained in her painting clothes or allowed a few romantic spatters to linger on her hands. But she minds. She notices. There has to be a clean break between her two lives, no overlap. That way, she is wild to get back to her work in the morning.

  Even so, it’s hard to let go of her daytime life, now that the days are short. The inevitable consequence is that she tests time, working feverishly to the last possible moment, showers as quickly as possible, then descends to the kitchen to face the challenge of assembling that night’s meal.

  Today, it is barely five-thirty when she enters the kitchen and sets to work on a quiche recipe out of the Moosewood Cookbook. Tally’s vegetarian aspirations are another secret, a new regime launched with no fanfare just after Labor Day and the big storm, when the lights went out for several hours and she decided she didn’t trust any of the meat in the house. September is a better time for new beginnings than January 1, when she is usually so depressed she can barely haul herself out of bed. No fanfare, no resolutions, no grand pronouncements, yet September’s changes stick. Now, two months later, neither Clem nor Gwen has picked up on the fact that Tally prepares red meat only once or twice a month and that the evening meal is altogether meatless every other night. Do they notice anything she does? But who would register the lack of steak and pot roast when there is quiche with homemade crust, pizza from scratch, red beans and rice, Moroccan stew with couscous? Besides, food isn’t important to them. Clem is one of those odd people who eats mainly for fuel, although he has a yen for greasy fast foods. Gwen, untrusting of her newfound slenderness, evaluates every mouthful based only on what it might do to her figure.

  Where is Gwen? Tally stands still, listens to the house, catches the buzz of a radio or television coming from Gwen’s room. She is supposed to check in with Tally upon arrival home, but that is Clem’s rule, and Tally doesn’t bother to enforce it now that Gwen is alone behind her closed door. Tally doesn’t want to be disturbed while in her studio, and Gwen understands that. She’s a considerate girl. She is Tally’s favorite child, a sentiment she would freely profess if it didn’t horrify others. She believes all mothers have favorites. Hers did, and it wasn’t Tally. Miller is a stolid, dutiful lump, Clem without a sense of humor. And Fee, lacking any talent for introspection, is an utter bore. How did Tally have such dull children?

  Two months ago, Where is Gwen? was a much more freighted question because Gwen would have been with Sean, and the two of them were clearly working their way toward serious mischief. Clem professed to be unconcerned, called it puppy love, said Gwen was too young to get into trouble. Tally considered that an interesting bit of denial for a man whose own bride had been a mere eighteen to his thirty-two on their wedding day. But Clem’s naïveté turned out to be justified. The romance with Sean was fleeting. Now Gwen is seeing other boys, determined not to be tied down. She’s all about quantity now, flitting from one to another. Tally approves, for the most part. Her only worry is that Gwen will meet a boy who ignores her and mistake his lack of interest for love.

  Tally zips through the crust, thanks to the Cuisinart she received last Mother’s Day, at her request, grates the cheese, slices the mushrooms, marveling—no false modesty for her, thank you—at her dexterity and speed. A tidy person, she cleans up as she goes, which is all to Gwen’s benefit, as it’s Gwen’s job to clear the table and load the dishwasher at dinner’s end, not that Gwen notices, much less thanks her. I am a good mother. I am a good wife. I take good care of my family. It is the very same theme embodied by a new perfume commercial, the one that uses the old blues song, although the woman in the ad also makes money for her household. Tally might not bring home the bacon, but she is creating beautiful, beautiful things in her makeshift studio. And the new project—

  Her litany of self-congratulation stalls when she opens the refrigerator and discovers that she has only one egg. Good at improvisation Tally may be, but not even she can make a quiche with one egg. She has forgotten that Gwen is going through a phase where she exists on hard-boiled eggs, eating them for breakfast and lunch. Stupid fad diet. Tally will have to drive to the little grocery store at the top of the hill, an errand that quashes her spirits. She has lost at her own game. Plus, she hates the gloomy makeshift grocery at the top of the hill, which seems to exist only to remind her how far she is from everything, how her husband has chosen a place that is the worst of all worlds—in the city, yet as remote as any suburb, with nothing within walking distance, and no sidewalks on which to walk, anyway. She wants to move to Paris.

  She wants to move to Paris. It’s a stupid thought, petulant and impossible. Such a notion should flit across her mind and disappear in the minute it takes to grab her purse and car keys, yet it lingers, stubborn and defiant. Get out, she tells the thought, as if it were a neighbor’s dog that has wandered into her house. I have a wond
erful life. I love my husband, and he adores me. I have terrific kids and I was young when I had them. I won’t even be fifty when Gwen goes off to college. I’m already doing what I want to do, what I was meant to do. Nothing is holding me back.

  I want to move to Paris.

  She turns on the car radio, hoping to drown out her own thoughts. “Those Were the Days.” An oldie, at least a decade past its prime. Clem clearly drove her car at some point in the past few days.

  What Tally actually wants is a do-over, to move to Paris at age eighteen, to return to a time when she had such choices. The problem is, she is forever destined to make the same choice, because the facts never change: she was eighteen, accepted at Wellesley, having a wonderfully secret affair with a thirty-two-year-old man, her father’s colleague and her uncle’s best friend.

  And she believed she was pregnant, although she never told Clem that. If she had to get married—and she thought she did—at least the groom could believe it was pure love. Besides, she wasn’t an artist then, she wouldn’t have dreamed of Paris, or even New York. She thought her choices were Clem or Wellesley. If she had found a way to get rid of the baby, it just would have been Wellesley and then another, possibly lesser, version of Clem four years later. Girls of her time and class were not programmed to bring home the bacon. Her dilemma—the eternal human dilemma—is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future. But there’s a reason that there’s no game show where they throw a car, a washer-dryer, and a goat onstage and ask you to select forthrightly among them. Where’s the drama in that? Where’s the suspense? The only possible surprise would be the one-in-a-million person who picks the goat, on the grounds that he doesn’t drive and already has a serviceable washer-dryer.

  If Tally ever had three wishes, she expended them long ago, on the most mundane things. Everyone has wishes—and everyone squanders them. The fairy tales got that right. Magic exists only to screw with you. Eggs, for example. She wished for eggs not five minutes ago, and while most people think a wish should produce the desired thing at that instant, in a puff of smoke, who’s to say that her wish isn’t being granted as she drives to the store, money in her purse? Somewhere on the planet, in this very city perhaps, a person is wishing for eggs right now and can’t have them. So Tally wishes for Paris and somewhere else right now—in Logan Airport, the airport of her youth—a beautiful young woman is waiting to board an Air France flight, a rucksack at her feet, her future wider and broader than the ocean she’s about to cross. Whatever you want at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for. In the time it takes her to work this out, Tally has driven the mile to the store, parked, gone in, and grabbed a carton of eggs, checking the expiration date. She can’t begin to list all the stale, expired, past-their-sell-date items she has brought home from this store.