The Accidental Detective and other stories (19 page)

Tally Robison died in Gwen's senior year of college. She had been too ill to see her daughter accept a prize for her college journalism, too ill to tell her daughter that the gorgeous college sweetheart to whom she would soon become engaged was
too
gorgeous. Gwen kept assuming Mickey would get in touch. Whatever had happened, all those years ago, did not change the fact that her mother had been good to Mickey, kind and generous. Certainly, Mickey must know of Tally's death, must have heard from someone, even if her family had long ago left the town houses of Purnell Village, which had become exceedingly rough, even as Dickeyville continued to be its placid, sui generis self. Gwen was just shy of her twenty-second birthday, much too young to lose a parent, especially a parent as lovely as her mother had been. But we were all young then, unaccustomed to death and its rituals, how important the smallest gestures were. Only Sean—forever Sean-the-Perfect—wrote a note, and it was a little stiff, almost grudging, as if he felt that Gwen's mother had died in order to force him to contact her daughter.

Five years later, the two former best friends met face-to-face on a plane. Gwen was in first class, upgraded on her husband's miles. Mickey was the flight attendant. Still beautiful, but there was a hardness to her now, a sense that the real person was layers and layers down.

“Mickey,” Gwen said brightly when offered a beverage before takeoff. A blank stare. “Mickey. It's Gwen. Gwen Robison.”

Mickey continued to stare blankly. No, she stared through her, which is quite different. “It's McKey now.”

“Mick Kay?”

“Think of it this way—I dropped the
i,
capitalized the
K
. McKey.”

“Legally?” A bizarre response, but Gwen couldn't think of anything else to say.

“You always were a stickler for rules,” Mickey—McKey—said. “Can I get you anything?”

The other passengers, businessmen accustomed to life in first class, were growing impatient with this trip down memory lane. They wanted their drinks, their hot nuts, whatever small treats their status entailed. But Gwen couldn't let her old friend go.

“It's been so long. I hate that we lost touch. In fact, I thought I might hear from you when my mom died. She died, did you know that? Five years ago, from bladder cancer.”

“I heard, but not right away. I'm sorry.” The words had all the intimacy of
champagne or orange juice?

“You heard from—” Foolish to extend the conversation, and what did it matter how McKey had learned?

“From Sean.”

“You're in touch?” She couldn't decide if what she felt was jealousy or—stickler for the rules she was—a sense of betrayal. They weren't supposed to be friends anymore. That was the price they paid for the horrible thing that had happened.

“Sometimes. He sends Christmas cards.”

“He told you about my mom in a Christmas card?” Not challenging Mickey—McKey—but honestly astonished, confused.

“Look, I'll come back and chat later in the flight, okay?”

She didn't.

Gwen was spared funerals as a child and accepted this practice, as she ac
cepted so many of her parents' practices, as the inarguably right thing to do. Certainly, it has not occurred to her to bring Annabelle to Go-Go's visitation, and she is shocked to see how many young children are here. More disturbing, they are gathered around the open casket, inspecting Go-Go with a respectful but palpable excitement.
A dead person! This is what a dead person looks like!
In the face of their bravery, how can Gwen not come forward and look as well?

A dead person this may well be, but it is not the boy she remembers and not only because he is thirty years older than the Go-Go who lives in her memory. This person is too still, his features too composed. Go-Go was never still.

“Gwen.” Doris Halloran holds her hands tightly, peers into her face, as if nearsighted. “Pretty little Gwen. You look wonderful.”

She does? She doesn't feel as if she looks wonderful. True, she is thin. She has no appetite as of late. But she is pretty sure that the lack of food has made her face gaunt, her hair dull and dry. Then again, maybe it's all relative. She looks better than Go-Go, for example. And better than Mrs. Halloran, whose face is white and puffy in a way that cannot be explained by mere grieving. Her eyes are like little raisins deep in an uncooked loaf, her mouth ringed by wrinkles.

“I'm sorry for your loss, Mrs. Halloran. My father would be here, but he broke his hip. I'm staying with him while he recuperates.”

“What happened?”

“Slipped on those steps. They've always been a hazard.”

Mrs. Halloran does not let go of Gwen's hands. Pressing, squeezing. It is a little painful, while Mrs. Halloran's breath—it isn't bad, exactly, but old, reminiscent of mothballs and dimly lit rooms.

“So many accidents,” she murmurs.

“Yes. It's a shame about Go—” Gwen stops herself, remembering Sean's reaction to his brother's nickname. “Gordon.”

“Oh.” She seems jolted. “Yes, I suppose that was an accident, too.”
Supposes?
Gwen assumed that Doris Halloran, always the super Catholic, wouldn't even contemplate the possibility of suicide. Doris lets go of Gwen's hand abruptly, so abruptly that her body registers the end of the pain as a deepening of the sensation. It's as if phantom hands still gripped hers, squeezing, intent on hurting her.

“I know it's a cliché,” Gwen says, “but it throws the world out of whack when a parent loses a child, at any age.”

“Well, I lost a few, you know.” She lowers her voice. “Miscarriages. Three. Actually four, although that one was so early it barely counted.”

Gwen probably did know this in the vague, indifferent way that children intuit things about the grown-ups in their lives, but this revelation suddenly connects a series of mysterious events—Mrs. Halloran “sleeping” a lot, Mr. Halloran yelling at the boys for making noise, a grandmother who came for a visit that wasn't at all like the grandparent visits Gwen knew. (No meals out, no trips to the toy store.)

“Do you have children. Gwen?”

“Yes, a little girl. Annabelle. She's five.”

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“Sorry?” Did she think it was a shame to have girls? Or does she know that Annabelle is not Gwen's biological child? The senior Hallorans were never open-minded people, they would probably call her daughter a Chink or something worse. Gwen's color rose, she is on the verge of saying that Mrs. Halloran hasn't done so well herself, that only one of her boys is worth anything. But where are Sean and, come to think of it, Tim?

Doris is suddenly contrite. “I didn't mean—I'm taking something. The doctor gave me pills. And I feel like things get mixed up, my sentences come out in the wrong order or I say what people say to me. No, it's good you have a little girl. I'm happy for you. But daughters are hard. Secretive. I was sad I didn't have one, but then happy. Then again, daughters stay with you. Sons leave. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.” No.

Mrs. Halloran grabs her hands again. “I'll see you tomorrow, right?”

“At the funeral? Of course.”

“And at the house, after. Not everyone is invited, but we want you there. You're like family, even if it's been years. It's funny, I s'pose you come back to see your father all the time, yet I never see you. Even when Gordon moved back home, you didn't come visit him. Why didn't you visit him?”

So many reasons.
Because he was an angry drunk most of the times. And when he wasn't angry, he was pathetic, self-pitying.
But the main reason was the one that divided them long ago: it was simply too painful to be around each other. They couldn't talk about it, and they couldn't not talk about it, so they stayed away from each other.

“When Sean moved away, I lost touch. Mickey Wyckoff, too. And my father keeps to himself.”

“Yes, he always did.”

He did?
Gwen remembers her father as gregarious. But, perhaps, a little snobbish about the Hallorans. That's why the night of the hurricane had been unusual, all the parents together in the Robisons' house, drinking and laughing late into a weekday night.

“Don't be a stranger now,” Mrs. Halloran says suddenly, full of fake merriment. “We'll be seeing lots of each other. Right?” The question feels unusually earnest—and a little threatening.

“Absolutely.”

Sean and Tim finally appear, explaining that they have been speaking with the priest about tomorrow's service. Sean takes his mother by the shoulders, gently, and begins guiding her to other well-wishers, making Gwen feel as if she is in the wrong somehow, that she has monopolized the grieving mother when it was Doris who insisted on prolonging their contact.

Tim gives her a half smile. “Sorry.”

It seems to be the word of the evening. “No need. I think it's a miracle she's standing upright.”

“Sean said your dad had an accident?”

“Yes. As I told your mother, that seems to be the theme of the week.”

Tim's face is blank. It's funny, how he looks so much like Sean, yet still isn't handsome. Everything is a bit fuzzier in Tim's face. Rougher, coarser, indistinct. It's like a face drawn by a child, the features slashed in. Plus, he's allowed himself to get plump.

“Go-Go's death wasn't an accident, Gwen. He drove right into the Jersey wall at over a hundred miles per hour.”

“Sean said—”

“Oh, Sean. He's proper now, careful about what he says. Professional liability since he moved to public relations. He can't stop spinning things. No, Go-Go aimed his car straight at the barricades at the end of the highway. Probably drunk, so it's hard to know his intent, but he clearly didn't try to steer away. We're waiting for the toxicology reports. Well,
we're
not waiting for them. The insurance company is, because they're keen to deny his kids the life insurance if they can. I can't figure out if we should root for drunk and claim he wasn't capable of forming suicidal intent or pray for sober and say the accelerator got stuck.”

“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 micro-brew.

“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.”