The Most Dangerous Thing (23 page)

Chapter Thirty

A
nnabelle sits on Clem’s bed, telling him a story. He can’t begin to follow it, and for a moment, he feels anxious. It is finally happening. His mind is slipping. Clem knows too much about aging to worry about the occasional grope for a word, the inability to dredge up some name that should be on the tip of one’s tongue. He understands these lapses are “normal” from a relatively young age on. But the inability to follow a complicated story—that’s qualitatively different. He has no idea what Annabelle is talking about, which is worrisome until he remembers—she’s five.
She
doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about. She strings together names and events willy-nilly, expecting her listeners to be up-to-date on all the personalities and politics of her preschool, neighborhood, and toy box.

“—and then Mr. Gray put Fred in a time-out but it wasn’t a real time-out because—”

The effect is akin to dealing with Tally when she was excited about something. The one-sided conversation went on and on, but Clem indulged them, because the fast, intense talking days were preferable to the silences. Tally had especially bad postpartum slumps after Miller and Fee, something he has come to understand in hindsight. Then there was a long grace period, until Gwen went to college. Tally, of all people, struggled with having an empty nest. The ups, the downs. Most people would compare it to a roller coaster, he supposes. But on a roller coaster, one has a clear sense of the duration of the ups and downs. The entire trip is telegraphed, the tracks are visible, the safe landing is guaranteed.

But then, everything is understood in hindsight. Hindsight, in Clem’s experience, gets a bad rap. Foresight is the fraud. No one has the ability to predict the future. People have hunches that they remember as wisdom because they happened to be right. They conveniently forget all the times they were wrong. Just as rare is the ability to understand, in the moment, exactly what is happening and how a moment that has already passed will affect one’s entire future. A swinging arc of light, a man’s lifeless body, an angry man, snorting like a bull in strong emotion—how could anyone process that moment and its multiple futures, how that moment would determine the next minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade of life?

“—then Noah got to take the hamster home, which wasn’t fair because he already had a turn and some people haven’t had any.” Annabelle looks wistful. “I haven’t had a turn. Daddy forgot to sign the slip.”

It takes Clem a second to grasp this, too.
Sign the slip—
why would someone have to sign an undergarment? Oh, slip of paper, permission slip.

“Can’t your mommy sign it?”

Annabelle looks at him pityingly. “She could if it was real. I was telling you a story. My class doesn’t even have a hamster. I wish it did, but Seth has allergies.” Annabelle’s disdainful tone makes Clem feel sorry for Seth, whom he imagines as a snuffling, unhealthy-looking boy, saddled with the onus of denying his entire class the pleasure of a hamster. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Do you have a book you’d like me to read? Did you bring some books for the weekend?” She is staying here through Sunday, as she does every other week. Clem still disapproves of Gwen’s separation from Karl, but he enjoys the visits from Annabelle. “Or we could read this book,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
which I read to your mother.”

“I want a made-up-for-real story.” Again, her syntax confuses him so much that he questions his mental competency. How can something be made up for real? Ah, Annabelle wants an improvised story, conjured on the spot, just for her. She wants to be present for the moment of its creation.

Clem looks out the window. His bed is set up in the sunroom at the rear of the house, so it feels as if he’s surrounded by trees. Spare and spindly at this time of year, but if one looks closely, the leaves and buds are there. Spring is coming. Right now, he can glimpse the edge of Tally’s old shed, its prefab walls badly weathered but still standing. Soon it will be hidden by the foliage, which has been allowed to grow wild around it, the need for light long gone.

“Once there was a little girl who lived at the edge of a forest,” he begins.

“And was her name Annabelle?”

“Why, it was,” he says, and Annabelle bounces with approval, which sends a painful wiggle through the mattress, essentially his cosmos these days. He has not been as faithful as he should about physical therapy, skipping days here and there. Why? It is one of the most mystifying questions in medicine and human nature. Why don’t people do the things they should? He’s not thinking of the hard things, changes required by genuine addictions. He understands how difficult it is to quit smoking and change one’s diet, even when the consequences of inaction are dire. It’s the neglect that otherwise rational people allow—skipping annual exams, declining exercise, refusing to eliminate foods that cause them actual distress.

Tally was casual about her health, not that it would have mattered. No diet, no regimen, no amount of vigilance, no regular checkup would have yielded a different result in her case. She was stage IV at the time of diagnosis. It turned out that she had been experiencing abdominal pain for years and never mentioned it. And that she sneaked cigarettes in her studio. With the paint fumes and the little space heater—he’s surprised it didn’t go up in a ball of fire years ago.

Sometimes he wishes it had. Without her, of course. He considered the shed, Tally’s studio, his romantic rival in some ways.

“And Annabelle had a little house in the woods.”

Clem asked Gwen a few months ago if they should try to make the shed, which stands empty, a playhouse for Annabelle. “A little house in the woods,” he said. “A little house in the woods,” Gwen echoed, her face troubled. A little house . . . maybe it wasn’t the best idea. Or maybe it was. Maybe if one had a little house on the edge of the woods, children wouldn’t press farther into the real woods.

Not that Annabelle would ever think of walking through the woods, even with another child. Gwen wouldn’t allow it. Probably no modern parent would. Clem has always been skeptical of any pronouncement about how times change. Very few things about people have changed in his lifetime. Machines change, people don’t. Yet childhood—technology can’t change it, but technology has been used to plug all those beautiful, empty hours that children once had to fill on their own. What else can children do but stare at screens when the outdoors is denied to them, except in scheduled doses of sports practice and supervised playdates?

Do mores change? Attitudes about profanity and behavior have changed, but the real change is that people speak of that which was once kept covert. Addictions, affairs, perversions. So much confession, yet America’s collective soul doesn’t seem to benefit from it. Peter De Vries, a writer that during his forties Clem particularly liked, once said that confession was good for the soul in the same way that a tweed coat was good for dandruff. A
palliative,
De Vries noted, not a cure, and Clem admired a layperson’s use of that distinction. Clem should read De Vries’s work again. He wonders if it holds up. The conventional wisdom is that such humor, dependent upon knowledge of an era’s social customs, has an expiration date. Yet Dawn Powell has come back and even Patrick Dennis, whose work Clem discovered because it nestled next to De Vries on the library shelves. He will ask Gwen to pick them up from the library, assuming they’re still
in
the library.

“What did the little girl do in her house, Poppa?”

“She lived there with a dog, a goat, and a horse named Charley.”

“Boo,” Annabelle says.

“Are you haunting me?” he asks, startled.

“No,” she says with a giggle. “The horse is named Boo.”

“Ah, of course, a horse named Boo. And she likes to—” He pauses, knowing Annabelle will direct the story where she wants it to go.

“
Cook
.”

“Cook. Your grandmother liked to cook.”

“I didn’t know her,” Annabelle says. “She died a long, long time ago.”

True, yet harsh, a reminder that twenty-five years ago, when Tally died, Clem was very much alone in his own house in the woods, without even so much as a horse named Boo. Gwen returned to school, after much melodramatic agonizing and self-exploration. It didn’t seem to occur to her that her father had lost his wife, much less that Miller and Fee had lost a mother, too. But Miller and Fee were adults. Young to lose a parent, but still adults. Miller was born an adult, and Fee became one more or less on schedule, upon college graduation, whereas Gwen—sometimes he feels he is still waiting for Gwen to become an adult. Anyway, Miller and Fee went back to their households, their respective partners and lives, while Gwen pursued and married a man so inappropriate that Clem felt as though he were watching a Restoration comedy that forgot to guide its lovers toward the proper partners at curtain. And now she is separated from Karl. Clem always thought Fee would be the one with a rocky romantic life.

Fee had come out just before Tally’s diagnosis, surprising no one, and she still lived with her first love, an instructor at Mills College. The match had overtones of Clem and Tally: Fee’s lover was significantly older, an academic. They were still together, although they had weathered a tough time, quarreling bitterly about having children. Interestingly, it was Fee’s lover, almost sixty at the time, who thought they should adopt a child. Chinese adoption was fairly new when this came up. But Fee thought it was wrong to become parents to a child if one didn’t have a reasonable belief of being there for all a child’s milestones.
Oh, Fee,
he tried to tell her.
You can’t control that,
no matter when you have children.
Tally, a bride at eighteen, missed so much. Gwen’s wedding. Both Gwen’s weddings. Fee and her partner’s marriage in that first, brief window of legality. Annabelle.

Who has taken over the story, as he knew she would, allowing his mind to wander. “And they made pudding and soup and cake and doughnuts and chocolate jelly—”

Clem was fearful when Gwen informed him of her plans to adopt overseas. Could he love a child who was not his biological heir? What about developmental delays? Then Annabelle arrived, he looked at her—and all his fears vanished, just like that. He was heartened to discover that his heart had room for someone new to love. Because in the twenty-five years since Tally’s death, no adult woman has found a way there. Many have tried. When his two older children speak of him moving to a senior community, as they always call it, their selling points include “company.” This was exactly what kept Clem in his house. He didn’t want to deal with all those widows looking for companionship. He is happy as he is. Still women call, drop by. Since his accident, there has been a second wave.

Last week even Doris Halloran showed up on his doorstep, casserole in hand. Unsure of the etiquette, he had his daytime aide invite her in to share it with him, which she did with an almost frightening alacrity. Silly Clem. Doris wasn’t looking for a mate. She wanted absolution. She unburdened herself to him and left, seemingly happy. The casserole, whatever it was, might as well be called the misery dish, for once he ate of it, he could never be happy again. What he had always feared, what he knew but did not have to admit, had been thrust on him: Tim killed the man in the woods. He told Doris so before he died. She defended her husband’s actions to Clem, said she believed it was the right thing. “Think of the other children he might have hurt, that man.”

Clem has thought of them. He thinks about them constantly. Yet he still cannot persuade himself that these potential crimes entitled Tim Halloran to murder the man. And it makes him nervous that Doris knows. She was not there; her husband is dead. Clem has long lost track of Rick. Doris has little to lose by telling others what happened. Clem’s entire life could be taken from him retroactively. Everything he has done and accomplished—the career, the children, the grandchildren—would be wiped out by the fact that a man was murdered in front of him and he kept his silence for sheer convenience’s sake. Why? Because he knew the man in the woods didn’t count, that no one would miss him. It was the coldest, most inhumane calculation of his life. He can never make it right.

“And then I got on Boo and he ran and ran and ran—”

“Galloped,” he corrects gently. “Horses gallop. Or canter. But you can say
run,
too.”

“I want to ride horses. Daddy says it’s too dangerous.” Annabelle curls into his side, looking up through her lashes. That is Gwen’s look, Gwen’s wheedling tone, Gwen’s feminine confidence.

“Well, daddies get to decide such things. Daddies know a lot about danger.”

Father knows best. If they’re telling stories, he might as well go whole hog.

Chapter Thirty-one

T
im is
surprised and pleased when Gwen calls out of the blue and asks to meet him for
lunch. It’s as if she has picked up on his own desire to talk about the past,
about Go-Go. He asks her to meet him at the Towson Diner, in part because he
likes it, but also because it’s bright and shiny, the kind of place where
friends meet. He is sensitive to appearances, especially since he has begun
toying with the idea of vying for state’s attorney in the next election, or
maybe positioning himself for a judgeship. Gwen is a good-looking woman, and if
Baltimore is a small town masquerading as a city, then Towson, the county seat,
is smaller still. He never goes out for lunch or runs an errand without seeing
someone from the courthouse or the police department.

Here in the Towson Diner today, he spots two
homicide cops, good guys, not like the lunkheads who have handed him his latest
loser of a case. Although, of course, it’s his boss who determines the
assignments. He wonders if his ambition is showing. He would not run against the
sitting county attorney, not unless there was a major fuck-up to exploit. That
would be idiotic. Unfortunately, the time to run was probably four years ago,
when his previous boss stepped down. Why didn’t he go for it then? But Tim’s
late-blooming ambition has been fueled by watching someone no smarter than he is
do the job. Now he knows he can do it. He doubted himself before.

Tim has often doubted himself, and although he
hates the whole blame-your-parents school of thought, especially since he is now
a parent, he can’t help thinking it would have been nice if his father and
mother had been a little more rah-rah on his behalf. He was once doing something
idiotic, and his father called him stupid. Doris, parroting advice gleaned from
a woman’s magazine or daytime talk show, said: “They say you should never call
children stupid, but say that their actions are stupid.” Tim Senior took his
oldest son’s full measure with his eyes and said: “This is a stupid child.”

Of course, Tim was tough-skinned, a good foil.
Go-Go was so crazed that a statement like that wouldn’t land as a joke. And Tim
has never doubted it was a joke. His old man had his moments, dry and
inappropriate as his humor might have been. If his father had been around for
the Twitter generation, he definitely could have been the hero of Shit My Dad
Says. He was anti-PC before there was PC.

Sean, for all his confidence, was a sensitive
little shit, could not stand for the joke to be on him. So it fell to Tim to be
the butt of most family punch lines. Tim and Doris, to be fair. They all ganged
up on her. She was the odd woman out, the spokeswoman for cleanliness and sanity
and don’t-play-ball-in-the-house. Tim loves his daughters, but he wouldn’t have
minded one son, if only so that there would be someone in the household he
actually understood on a regular basis.

Gwen breezes through the door and catches almost
everyone’s gaze, especially the younger homicide cop, a total hound of a guy.
Tim has logged a lot of hours in courthouse corridors, passing time by listening
to this guy’s exploits, as his sergeant likes to call the guy’s one-night
stands. “Tell us about your latest
exploit
.”

The stories were funnier before Tim’s daughters
started growing up.

There is a moment of awkwardness when Tim and Gwen
greet each other. At Go-Go’s funeral, an embrace had been the proper thing, but
here—she starts to shake his hand, then almost kisses his cheek, only to pull
back, lets him kiss
her
cheek.

“Not a very diet-friendly menu,” she says, studying
the laminated place mats.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Tim says. If
anything, he thinks that she should put on a few pounds. Her slenderness looks a
little rough, the result of stress. He doesn’t think Gwen was really meant to be
thin.

“I’ve been worrying about my weight for most of my
life. If I stop, I won’t know what to do with myself. Cottage cheese and a pear!
I love that. Did I enter a time machine?”

Tim knows she’s making fun of the diner, not him,
yet he feels a little mocked. So it’s not tapas or sushi, or whatever the fuck
she eats most days. It’s good, honest food.

“What the hell, I’ll have an open-face turkey
sandwich with mashed potatoes, gravy, and a fountain Coke. What’s the point of
coming to a diner if one doesn’t eat diner food? Seize the day. One never
knows—” Her voice trails off, and Tim doesn’t have to ask where her train of
thought is headed.

“What’s the point?” he echoes. “And what’s the
point of this meeting? You promised it wasn’t work related. You know my office
doesn’t do the glory hog thing. I’m not going to talk about my current
case.”

“No, although if you did want to talk—” She gives
him a mischievous smile. “It is awfully interesting. If you ever do decide to
spill the beans, I expect you to honor your old friend with the story.”

“Are we old friends, or once-upon-a-time friends?
We haven’t really stayed in touch.”

Gwen shrugs. “When you’re friends as kids, it never
really ends, does it?”

“Sure it does. Childhood friendships end all the
time. I see it with my girls. Friendships end, romances end, half of all
marriages end. Family’s the only thing that’s forever, and I’m not even sure
about that sometimes.”

“I’m here about family, actually. Your family.” She
studies the photo of the open-face sandwich on the menu, as if she might not
recognize it when it arrives. “Did you know that a private investigator tried to
get in touch with Go-Go earlier this year?”

Tim, by dint of his profession, is used to treating
conversations as poker games. Surprised by Gwen’s information, he automatically
reverts to state’s attorney’s mode, guarding his emotions. “Where did you hear
that?” It’s a calculated phrase. He’s not admitting that Gwen knows something he
doesn’t and he wants to find out more before he commits himself.

“I ran into his ex-wife, and she told me. It’s why
she threw him out. A PI kept calling, saying she needed to talk to him, that
someone from his past needed him. But he wouldn’t talk to the PI and he wouldn’t
tell Lori what was going on. She decided he must be cheating on her and threw
him out.”

“That’s her story.”

“Well—yes.”

Tim has enough information now to stake out his
territory. Some would say he’s being the devil’s advocate, but as he sees it,
he’s standing up for his brother, who isn’t here to defend himself. “Did it ever
occur to you that Lori wants to revise their history? She threw him out, he
started drinking again, he ended up dead. She doesn’t want to be
responsible.”

“Yes, but why confide in me?”

“Because here you are, sharing it with his brother.
She saw you at the funeral, she knows there’s some connection. She’s trying to
get back on my mother’s good side.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why does she need to be on your mother’s good
side?”

“For one thing, my mother essentially owns the
house she lives in. She loaned Go-Go the money to buy it. She could call in the
note.”

“Grandmothers don’t do that to their grandchildren,
no matter how they feel about their daughters-in-law. Lori is the one who has
the power in this situation. She could sell the house and move away. She can
keep your mom from seeing the girls. Anyway, I assume you know your
sister-in-law better than I do, but that strikes me as way too devious for her.
She’s pretty direct.”

Tim is ready to counter—to say he does, in fact,
know Lori better than Gwen, to ask who she is to presume to tell him about his
family, his sister-in-law—but he starts to laugh instead.

“What?”

“It’s like we’re kids again. This is how we argued
then.”

Gwen laughs, too. “So maybe we are still
friends.”

“Maybe.” He can’t go that far. As Gwen said, it’s
like entering a time machine. They went into the past there for a moment. But
they can’t stay there. He doesn’t want to stay there.

“Look, Tim, the reason I called you is because—this
private detective. What if she was hired by his family?”

He is confused by the pronoun. “Go-Go’s? My mom,
you mean?”

“No.” She lowers her voice and leans toward him. He
wishes she wouldn’t. Her posture is a secret personified. He leans back, crosses
his arms. “
His
. Him. From the woods.”

It takes another second to process. “He didn’t have
any family.”

“That we know of. But he would disappear, remember?
Why did he disappear? I never really thought about it, but chances are that a
family member would intervene from time to time, if his health was jeopardized.
They’d get a judge to put him in a hospital for his own good, but then he would
sign himself out. I know it was easier to institutionalize people then, but if
he was considered sane, he couldn’t be kept anywhere against his will.”

“OK, so maybe he had family. So what? He fell down
in the woods, he hit his head, and bled out or drowned. It
was
an accident. Mickey didn’t mean to—well, you know. It was just
easier not to explain that part, or to tell our parents how well we knew him,
how we created the circumstances that ended up with Go-Go being assaulted. Those
omissions don’t change the basic facts.”

“I know. I was there. And if we had told the full
story at the time, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But if it were your
relative, if he was found in the woods without his guitar, his single most
precious object, a day or so after a horrible hurricane, based on an anonymous
call—would you think it was an accident?”

“He had the guitar.”

“When we saw him. My father told me he hiked back
to make sure if the EMTs had found him and there was no body—and no guitar.”

“Paramedics probably stole it. Besides, why wait
thirty years to pursue it? Why now?”

“I don’t know. But who else from Go-Go’s childhood
would think he could do him a favor?”

“You said ‘need,’ not a favor.”

“Yeah, well, a smart private investigator isn’t
going to say, ‘Hey, I’m looking into a suspicious death of which you might have
knowledge.’ She’s going to set you up to think it’s something good, then lower
the boom.”

Their food arrives, but the gyro, which Tim had
been looking forward to with almost pathetic anticipation, is tasteless. If the
guy does have family, if there are suspicions—well, there goes any chance of
political office. He’ll be lucky to keep the job he has. But how would anyone
know to look for Go-Go? Someone else would have blabbed. Not him. Not Sean. Not
McKey. Gwen? She’s a journalist, and they’re a little too free with information
in Tim’s experience. It’s their currency, they can’t help it.

Then he thinks of Go-Go, on a bender. Not the most
recent one, but a year or so ago, the next-to-last time he fell off the wagon.
Go-Go was not good with secrets, and his feelings about Chicken George would
have been understandably confused. No one had shown him greater kindness. No one
had betrayed him more thoroughly. Go-Go drunk was capable of saying anything to
anyone. And now he’s dead.

“So what do we do?” he asks Gwen.

“That’s why I called you. You’re a prosecutor.
Can’t you make the PI talk to you? I mean, I have no standing, but you’re his
brother and an officer of the court—”

He shakes his head. “Gwen, that would be a horrible
violation of my office. And, by the way, PIs, if retained through legal counsel,
can’t be forced to give up information about their clients. They enjoy almost
the same privileges as lawyers. I mean, yeah, if you subpoena someone, but—no,
no way. Even if this PI would talk to me, I don’t want to put us in play. Does
he still call Lori? Has he called you?”

“She,” Gwen says. “The PI is a she. And, no,
there’s no evidence she’s tried to get in touch with anyone else.”

“So drop it.”

“But—”

“Drop it, Gwen. You’re overthinking this. I
understand the impulse. I’m on intimate terms with it. You’re worried that
something’s going on, something you can’t control. You want to get out in front
of it. You can’t. Leave it alone. Let me tell you this much: Among the three of
us, the brothers? We never spoke of it. Neither did my parents. They thought it
was for the best. It probably wasn’t, and maybe Go-Go ended up telling someone
he shouldn’t. But there’s nothing we can do about it, and the minute you start
poking around, you’re more apt to stir things up.”

Gwen sips her Coke. For all her big talk about
seizing the day with an open-face turkey sandwich, she’s barely touched her
food, only moved it around on her plate, a trick he knows from his
daughters.

“It’s not just this. My father—”

“How is he?”

“He’s doing okay, all things considered. Breaking a
hip at his age is no small thing. Anyway, the day he fell? He claimed it was
because he saw a chicken on the stairs.”

Tim can’t help himself. He laughs, an all-out
guffaw. Gwen looks genuinely hurt.

“I’m sorry, Gwen, but—what do you think this is,
some horror movie, where a relative bent on revenge stalks us and our parents?
Hires a PI to pressure Go-Go, then surreptitiously places a chicken on your
father’s steps? Forces Go-Go to drive into the barricade? What about you, Gwen,
do you hear steel guitars in the night? I mean, come on.”

She tries to act as if she’s in on the joke, but he
can tell she’s not entirely persuaded. “OK, I’m a little paranoid. Go-Go’s
accident, then my father’s accident—”

“Gwen, it’s fucking middle age. Parents die.
People
die. I lost my dad fifteen years ago, you lost
your mother before that.”

“She wasn’t even fifty, and I was in college. There
was nothing middle-aged about that.”

“My dad went young, too. I’m just saying—we’re in
our forties, and this is when the bullshit begins to mount. Just when you think
you’ve got things figured out—boom, boom, boom. We start losing our parents,
then we start losing our friends. Your father fell down the steps? He’s in his
eighties. I’m even less surprised that Go-Go’s gone. The shocker there was that
he made forty. Look, my brother broke my heart. You don’t think I haven’t asked
myself again and again if a more open, touchy-feely family would have been
better equipped to deal with what happened to him? You don’t think I suggested
psychiatrists, even offered to pay if that’s what it took? I found that AA
meeting for him. Sean tried, too. So sure, I’m racked with guilt, but about
that. Not about that monster dying in an accident.”