The Most Dangerous Thing Read online

  “I thought he was in a sober phase.”

  “He was, best I can tell, right up to last Tuesday night. Went to meetings every week, seemed to be making progress. We only have Mom’s word for it and she forgave him everything, covered for him whenever possible, but he had been clean for almost two years. He left to go to a meeting, in fact, about seven P.M. Next thing Mom knew, it was two A.M. and the cops were at her door. They had gone to Lori’s first, because that was the address on his license.”

  “Lori?”

  “His ex, although I guess technically they were just separated. The second ex, the one with the kids.” Tim points to two blondes, tiny things. These girls are not inspecting the dead man in the casket but keeping their distance, clinging to their mother. Even in their sadness, all three are gorgeous. “Only decent thing he ever did for her and those kids was taking out that policy and now he might have screwed that up. All he had to do was hit the brakes, leave some skid marks, but no—”

  “Shut up, Tim,” Sean says, joining them.

  “It’s just Gwen.”

  The words are at once warm and vaguely insulting, conferring a privilege while making it sound as if Gwen is a person of no consequence.

  “Gordon did not commit suicide.”

  “Look, we’re not going to rat him out to the church, keep him from being buried in consecrated ground. And I’m not going to break Mom’s heart. But among the three of us, can’t we at least drop the bullshit?”

  “He was drunk. He called me an hour before, wasn’t making any sense.”

  “Probably.”

  “If he was drunk, then he didn’t know what he was doing. He was drag racing, like in the old days, and he miscalculated.”

  “OK, but—we lived here all our lives. We all learned to drive on that patch of dead-end highway. Drunk or asleep or dead, he couldn’t have forgotten that there were barricades, that it ended.”

  “Let it go, Tim.”

  “Speaking of drinking—anyone want to?”

  They end up at the Point, once a reliably sleazy dive on Franklintown Road. To their horror, it has been yuppified. Live music on the weekends, a decent wine list. The bar food is traditional but prepared with care. It isn’t the kind of experience Gwen—or most Baltimoreans with money, or even the city’s pseudohipsters—are inclined to seek out on Franklintown Road, although Gwen realizes she might find it a handy retreat as long as she’s staying in her father’s house.

  The boys drink Rolling Rock on tap, while she has a microbrew.

  “Raison D’Être.” Tim pronounces the name of her beer with great disdain. Ray-zohn Det-ruh. “Faggot beer.”

  Sean winces at his un-PC brother, but Tim isn’t shamed: “Any beer with a French name has to suck.”

  “It’s very good,” Gwen says. “And it’s made in Delaware. Taste it.”

  Tim refuses, but Sean is polite enough to try it and say nice things, although he clearly doesn’t care for it.

  “You are such a fucking yuppie,” Tim says. A new insult, but in the same vein of all the insults heaped on her when they were children. Gwennie the Whale. Gwen the Goody Two-shoes. Yet Gwen was never as proper as Sean. She wonders if Tim knows that.

  She responds, because Tim wants her to and his brother is dead, so she owes him a little good-humored argument. “That term is incredibly dated to the point of being meaningless. When did it come into vogue? The eighties? And who isn’t an urban professional among the three of us? Young we’re clearly not.”

  “But you work at that stupid magazine—”

  “I edit it, yes.”

  “And it’s all about what to buy and what to eat and what to wear.”

  “We do a lot of substantive journalism. More than ever, given how the Beacon-Light has been gutted. I’d love to commission an article on the trial you’ve got going, Mr. State’s Attorney. We also still make money. You know why? Because we are business friendly, which kept our advertising stable when the economy bottomed out. And we don’t give all our content away.”

  “Best doctors. Best restaurants. Best neighborhoods. Best of the best. Why not—best places to pick up hookers? Hey—why not best hookers? That’s news I could use.”

  “I didn’t know you had to pay for it, Tim.”

  “I don’t. I prefer to pay for it.”

  “He’s kidding,” Sean puts in, ever the PR man, worried that Gwen is going to run off and write a headline: ASSISTANT STATE’S ATTORNEY PREFERS HOOKERS. “Tim’s so straight he doesn’t even drive over the speed limit. And he’s still stupid-in-love with Arlene.”

  It’s funny, how quickly they revert to their roles—their roles as they first were, when they functioned as a group with no relationships within the relationships. The only thing different about their interaction is the alcohol. And that they are three, instead of five. They can never be five—the starfish, as Mickey called it—again. Gwen realizes she always hoped they might be, if only for a night, that they would come together once more and confront all the little ragged pieces of their shared story. Other than her father and her siblings, no one in her life knew her as a child. No one has any sense of the totality of who she is. Not even Karl, and certainly not Annabelle. Not her current staff and not her former colleagues from her newspaper days, scattered throughout the city. The Gwen that most people know is the adult Gwen. She wants to be among people who know her. She yearns for her mother, who made her feel special even when she clearly was not, who trusted her to morph into a swan. She even misses Mickey.

  That is, she misses Mickey until the next morning when McKey, swathed in black from head to foot, enters the church moments before the funeral service begins and takes a seat in the Hallorans’ pew, as if she’s a part of the family. McKey even reaches around Sean to pat Doris Halloran’s shoulder, then leaves her arm around Sean for several seconds.

  It’s easy to miss some people, Gwen thinks, until they actually show up.

  Chapter Four

  Autumn 1977–Spring 1978

  It was Mickey who decided we should be a group, that the duo of Mickey and Gwen should be joined to the trio of the Halloran brothers. Before, we were two and three. Five together was stronger than two and three. Our country’s own Department of Defense, Sean later pointed out, was contained within the Pentagon, so it must be the strongest thing possible.

  But our coalition began as a dispute, an argument over territory. Although the Hallorans lived on Sekots, at the far end of the neighborhood, they often used a vacant lot at the end of Gwen’s street as their makeshift kickball field. The squarish mound of grass was just large enough to approximate an infield, but the lack of an outfield was problematic, dangerous even. A strong kick—and all the Halloran boys were powerful—inevitably sent the ball into the street or skittering across the foundation of a long-abandoned springhouse on the other side. And while Wetheredsville Road—oh, how Gwen complained about having to learn to spell her street name—was not heavily trafficked even then, the mill was still open and enormous trucks rumbled past several times a day.

  Mickey, who cared nothing for the field but liked to cut through it to reach the stream, decided the Halloran boys were presumptuous. The lot was not theirs to annex, she argued. Not yours, either, Tim argued back. You don’t even live in the village. Mickey countered that Gwen, as the resident of the last house on Wetheredsville Road, should have the right to use the lot, or not use the lot, as she saw fit. The boys should have to pay Gwen to use the field, Mickey insisted.

  “Or”—and this was clearly where she had been heading all along—“let us play, too.”

  It was fall. The promise, the glow of back-to-school had already faded. Gwen’s denim binder was full of torn papers, and she could never find her little box of reinforcements. At St. Lawrence, Go-Go had already been given multiple detentions, and Sean was bored by the writing assignments, which never allowed him to show his range. Tim was getting by at Cardinal Gibbons, but getting by was Tim’s particular genius. A letter had al
ready been sent home to Mickey’s mother, noting that she was not working up to her potential. That is, the letter was sent, but it never arrived. Mickey stuffed it under a rock in the hills behind the Robisons’ house, where she arrived every day and waited for Gwen. When Gwen got off the private bus that took her to her door, she found Mickey in the kitchen, eating cookies and drinking one of her mother’s diet sodas. Gwen wasn’t allowed to have diet soda, but Mickey was, because she was a guest. Years later, when her mother was dying of bladder cancer, Gwen couldn’t help thinking of all those diet sodas. She knew science was not on her side, but the notion still persisted. She tricked Annabelle into thinking sparkling water was a treat, making it in a penguin-shaped canister from Williams-Sonoma that produced wonderful belching noises, sometimes adding juice and slices of lemon to give it something extra. But it was all parental sorcery, and Gwen knew that Annabelle would see through the ruse eventually, start asking for soda, or god help her, putting Equal in her cocoa.

  When they were indoors, Gwen set the agenda, teaching Mickey how to play the elaborate make-believe games that were the cornerstone of Gwen’s de facto only-child status. Miller and Fee were both gone now. But the girls spent as little time as possible indoors. Mickey was restless. Mickey liked action, she wanted to move. She wasn’t a particularly good athlete, as would become evident when the girls joined the Halloran boys’ kickball game. Mickey was wildly uncoordinated at almost any organized sport. Yet, stalking through the woods, climbing over and under fallen branches, jumping rocks across the stream—no one was more graceful or strong. Mickey could even do chin-ups, something no other girl of our acquaintance could do. She said she had won the Presidential Medal for Fitness, although she never remembered to show it to Gwen on those rare occasions Gwen was allowed to go to Mickey’s house.

  The day that Mickey decided to crash the kickball game was early November, the first fair day after a week of lashing rains. The hills and fields were muddy, and Gwen’s mother, sighing, reminded her to come in through the basement, please? And leave her boots down there? Please? Mickey didn’t even have boots, but she said her mother didn’t mind if her tennis shoes were caked with mud. “You just have to let it dry and then it brushes off as easy as anything,” she told Gwen.

  But despite the break in the rain, Mickey didn’t want to roam the hills today, looking for places they could claim as their own. Instead, she led Gwen up the road and across the street, to the vacant field where the Halloran boys were playing kickball.

  “We want to play,” Mickey said to Sean.

  “No thanks,” he said. “It works best with three.”

  Tim was less polite. “Go screw yourselves.”

  Gwen sucked in her breath. That was a curse, or as good as. Go-Go was delighted, repeating it over and over. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”

  Mickey was not easily intimidated. She put her hands on her hips and stared Sean down. “This lot doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Doesn’t belong to you, either.”

  “It belongs to her, though.” Pointing at Gwen. “To her family. They bought a whole bunch of land when they built their house.”

  “No way,” Sean said. We all knew—except gullible Go-Go—that it was an outrageous lie.

  “Go look it up,” Mickey said.

  “Where?”

  “Downtown.”

  “Get out of here,” Tim said.

  Go-Go was running in circles. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”

  Sean took Mickey’s measure. “You any good?”

  “What does it matter? It will be a better game with five than with three. We’ll play two-on-two, with a permanent pitcher.”

  Gwen assumed she would be the permanent pitcher. She was. She rolled the ball across the plate, first to Sean, then to Tim, then to Go-Go, finally Mickey. Tim’s ball came back at her, hard, right to her midsection, and it clearly wasn’t accidental. Gwen clamped her lips tight to keep from crying.

  But it was a better game, just as Mickey had said. She and Tim faced off against Sean and Go-Go. Gwen was supposed to get a turn at some point, but she didn’t, not that day, and not often in the days ahead. The game evolved into something more like football or rugby or dodgeball, with complicated rules about tackling and catching. We became attuned to the noises of the street, the sound of approaching cars and trucks, and learned to time the action of the game around the traffic. We fought sometimes, went home early, yet came back together the next day, or the day after if there was rain. We suspended the games during the heart of the winter, but started playing again long before spring. The Halloran boys were baffling to the girls. Sometimes they presented as a unified front, sometimes it was every man for himself, and, most often, it was two against one, with Go-Go, the baby, the odd one out. And Go-Go was easy for the girls to gang up on as well, so it was just as often four on one. Every group needs its goat, and Go-Go was the inevitable choice in ours.

  We were having a four-on-one day in late April, a cranky, frustrating day in which all the gains of spring seemed to have been lost. The sky was gray, the air had a real chill in it, and the things that had budded and bloomed over the past month looked miserable. Daffodils and tulips bent their heads, beaten down. On the way to the field, Go-Go jumped on one of Tally Robison’s flowerbeds with both feet, irritating the rest of us, who understood our freedom came at a price. If we gave adults any reason to complain about us, we knew we would lose privileges.

  But Go-Go became only more intolerable when we tried to explain to him why he shouldn’t jump on flowers. He pinched the girls, he pulled at their clothes, he flailed at his brothers. Finally, in frustration, Mickey threw the red rubber ball over his head, into the street. Later, she said it wasn’t on purpose, which would fit with her general incompetence on the playing field, yet it had seemed deliberate to the rest of us, an exaggerated, high, arching throw that would have soared over anyone’s head, but especially over little Go-Go’s. There’s no doubt that she said: “Go get it, you moron.”

  Which Go-Go did, despite the rumbling noise that we all knew to heed. He dashed into the road after the bouncing ball just as one of the huge mill trucks came around the curve, going much too fast, but we all knew the mill trucks went too fast and it was our responsibility to be careful. The rest of us watched, frozen, mesmerized. We were going to see someone die. We watched the truck bearing down on the boy and the ball, saw the ball disappear under its wheels, heard terrible noises—honking, brakes squealing. But Go-Go seemed to change the rules of physics, accelerating so that he reached the other side of the road just before the truck passed by. We were amazed to see him, upright and laughing, after the long truck had passed.

  Tim was the first to speak.

  “Screw you, Go-Go,” he said. “The ball is ruined.” But his tone was admiring, almost reverential, his voice shaking.

  The ball had been split by the truck’s wheels. We looked at the flattened red mass. “That could be Go-Go’s head,” Gwen said. We all nodded. He could be like one of the squirrels we saw in the road, a red smear with hair sticking out of it. We weren’t to touch the squirrels, or any other roadkill, lest we risk rabies.

  Sean ran across the road and grabbed his brother by the arm, shaking him violently, angrily.

  “Don’t ever do that again.”

  “But Mickey said—”

  “Mickey’s not the boss of you.”

  “No one’s the boss of me,” he countered, pushing out his lower lip.

  Without a ball, kickball was over. We couldn’t get a new ball unless we told a grown-up what had happened, and no one thought that was a good idea. And, although it was hard to envision on such a cold, gray April day, summer was coming, and not even our odd brand of kickball/dodgeball/rugby could fill those longer, emptier days. We needed a new game. Mickey suggested an explorer’s club. Sean and Tim said it was babyish, yet the next day we all ended up following her deeper and deeper into the woods, marveling at the t
hings we found. Abandoned campsites, downed trees. Beer cans, garbage. “Teenagers did this,” Go-Go would say solemnly, as if Tim and Sean were not already teenagers, Mickey and Gwen both about to turn thirteen that autumn. Teenagers were fearsome creatures to Go-Go.

  And then we met the man who lived in the woods.

  Chapter Five

  “What’s the point of this charade?” Karl asks Gwen the morning after Go-Go’s funeral as she arrives with only minutes to spare before Annabelle awakens and comes down to breakfast.

  The question catches her short, her mind snagging on his choice of word, charade. What, exactly, is a charade? Where is the pretense? She puzzles through this as she sets breakfast in motion. She isn’t pretending to Annabelle that she spends the nights here. Her daughter knows that Gwen is staying at her grandfather’s house while he heals, but that she still wants to be here for meals, bedtime, and off-to-school. The charade, to use Karl’s word, is pretending that the household will return to normal after her father’s situation has been normalized.

  Charade. The mothers had played charades that night, first with their husbands, then alone after the men left. How innocent they had seemed in the candlelit living room, making the familiar, exaggerated gestures. Paging through a book, running a movie camera, flipping channels. She and Sean had watched them from the steps, feeling more akin to them than they did to the others by that point. They—well, she—honestly believed that they would get married, that they would one day be a couple among other couples, laughing and clowning. They—again, maybe just she—had been preternaturally attracted to adulthood, eager for it, in a way that Tim, Mickey, and Go-Go weren’t. They were the normal ones, trying to grow up, be typical teenagers.