The Most Dangerous Thing (30 page)

“A sexual game?”

Mickey’s eyes skate, looking for a safe place to
land. She decides on Sean. “I guess you could call it that.”

“He was nine. You were almost fourteen.”

“There was no law against it.”

“There is now.” Gwen has no idea if this is true,
and she looks to Tim for confirmation. But he and Sean seem mainly bewildered,
unsure of how to react. “You had to know it was wrong, otherwise you would have
admitted it. Chicken George knew it was wrong. Even Go-Go must have known.
That’s why he followed your lead, when you lied and said Chicken George molested
him.”

“
He
pushed Chicken
George. Go-Go. From behind. All these years, I was protecting him.”

But not even Mickey sounds convinced of what she’s
saying, and Tim comes back to life. “Oh, come on.”

“He did. I was covering for him. That’s why he was
willing to lie, because he was the one who hurt him. We weren’t doing anything
bad. We made each other feel good. What’s the big deal?”

“He was nine,” Gwen repeats.

“Most nine-year-old boys would be thrilled to have
a girl touch them.” She appeals to the two men in the room. “Am I right?”

Sean starts to stammer something, then stops.
“Don’t ask him,” Tim says. “He’d pay a crack whore to initiate his son into sex
if it could keep him from being gay.”

“Fuck off, Tim. Duncan’s not—”

“
Out,
Sean. Not out.
But everyone knows he’s gay. His cousins get it, even our littlest. Mom has
figured it out. Everyone but you. Has it ever occurred to you that Duncan hasn’t
come out because he can sense you’re less than thrilled, that he’s being
solicitous of your feelings?”

Gwen sees Mickey’s eyes gleaming. She has
distracted them, divided them. She’s winning.

“What about the boys?” Gwen asks her.

“What boys?”

“The high school boys. The ones that Go-Go told
Father Andrew about.”

“As I said, maybe he liked sex with boys.” She
tries to give a blithe shrug but can’t pull it off.

“Did it appear that he liked it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you were there. You made it happen. If it
was just you and Go-Go, that one time, then he might figure out one day that he
really hadn’t done anything wrong, but you had. So you made sure that he had
other things to be confused and ashamed about. You came up with more
games,
knowing that Go-Go would always want to do
whatever the big kids were doing.”

Mickey curls into herself. She crosses her arms,
brings her feet beneath her. She’s like the turtles she used to torture, poking
them with sticks so they withdrew all their limbs, even the snapping turtles.
Gwen can tell that she’s not going to talk, not to her. And not to Tim. Gwen
looks to Sean, who is flushed and angry. Over the comments about his son or his
brother?

Gwen asks: “Why? Why did you do it?”

Although it is Gwen who is pressing her, she
addresses herself to Sean. “I didn’t think it was wrong. I wanted to be with
you, but you chose Gwen. So I chose Go-Go.”

Tim says: “If you had wanted to fool around with
one of Sean’s brothers, I would have been glad to oblige.”

If he meant the joke to distill the tension in the
room, he has failed. Not even Tim seems amused by this brief return of his
lummox self.

Sean asks: “Is Gwen right, Mickey? About the boys?
Did you do that to Go-Go?”

“Hockey mask,” Tim says. “It’s in the attic, too.”
Sean nods. Gwen has no idea what they’re talking about.

Mickey shakes her head. “I gave him that. I got the
money out of my stepdad, telling him it was for school stuff.” She looks small,
sitting on her sofa. Gwen remembers the girl she met almost thirty-five years
ago. So pretty, so scruffy, so lacking in things that the others, even the
Halloran boys, took for granted. A girl who would be your best friend for a
drawer full of candy.

“You know something?” Gwen is speaking to the
Halloran brothers. “Go-Go never said anything about Mickey. Even to Father
Andrew, whom he told about the high school boys. He lied about Chicken George to
protect her. All these years, he’s protected Mickey, for whatever reason.”

“Because they’re responsible for a man’s death,”
Sean says.

Mickey—and she is undeniably Mickey again to all of
them, so young and vulnerable she reminds Gwen of Annabelle after being caught
at something, miserable not at being caught but about being bad, which no one
ever really wants to be—picks at the lush, embroidered flora of her gown, which
is riotous with green tendrils and scarlet blossoms.
Pretty,
Gwen thinks again of the silk robe. Not the gown of a femme
fatale, but of someone who wants love and romance. She is repelled by what
Mickey did but can’t disavow her.

Yet it is Tim, the father of three girls, who goes
to sit next to her. “Talk to us, Mickey. Tell us everything that happened. We
won’t turn our backs on you.”

“But you did,” she says. “You all did. Except
Go-Go. You left me.”

“We’re here now.”

She takes a sip of bourbon—from Gwen’s glass. “For
all these years—for all these years—we felt responsible. Chicken George grabbed
me, and I pushed him to get away. He fell. It was our fault, even if we didn’t
mean to do it. Then this priest comes along and Go-Go wants to tell everything.
Everything
. For his own sake, not caring what
will happen to me. I told him it was too risky to talk at all. We were
responsible for Chicken George’s death and that’s something that never goes
away.”

“Not legally,” Tim says.

“Not in any way,” Mickey says.

“What about the high school boys?” asks Tim. “The
ones that Go-Go told Father Andrew about?”

“I met some guys when I went to the new school.
Seniors. They wanted to mess around, and I was cool with it. Go-Go wanted to
play, too. You know how he was. He always wanted to do what we were doing. So he
wanted to do this, too.”

“No,” Sean says. “That I don’t believe. You forced
him.”

“He didn’t know enough to know he shouldn’t like
it,” Mickey says. “And, yeah, they gave him money sometimes. Gifts. Bribed him,
I guess, so no one would tell. But they were more interested in watching Go-Go
and me do things together than in doing things to him. They laughed at us.”

“But they did do things.” Not a question on Tim’s
part.

“Nothing—nothing invasive. I mean, you can probably
guess. Then they got bored. It was no more than three, four times. And, okay, it
fucked Go-Go up a little. But he managed. He kept going, more or less—until your
mom told him what your dad did. That’s when he went off the rails. Yes, I went
to AA to watch him, make sure he didn’t break down and confess. Mr. Halloran was
dead and had nothing to lose. If Go-Go started telling people about what
happened—I wasn’t sure where it would lead. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Here,” Gwen says. “We ended up here.”

Tim puts an arm around Mickey, tender and careful.
Gwen sees in that moment something she will tell Tim later:
She didn’t choose you because she looked up to you, because you were more
of a father to her than any of the men who passed through Rita’s
life.
She needed someone she could control, and that was Go-Go.
She was trying to hurt all of us through Go-Go. She did—herself
included.

Gwen will tell Sean things, too, when the time is
right. That he shouldn’t confess to Vivian what happened here today because, in
a way, it didn’t happen today. It happened a long time ago. Today was simply the
resolution, a bill that came due. Her father might be right about this modern
mania for honesty. It isn’t that we talk too much or talk too little, Gwen
decides. It’s that most people choose an all-or-nothing approach. They speak of
everything, or they speak of nothing. When we confess, it’s because we need to
be absolved, and we don’t care how that affects others.

Yet Gwen decides she will unburden herself to Karl.
She will tell him what she’s done, the stupid affair—and forever forgo her role
as the perfect, put-upon spouse. She has wronged him in a way that obliterates
every slight, every moment of inattention and neglect. Because he’s Karl, he
won’t hold it over her head. He will forgive her eventually. He will forgive
her, but he won’t ever forget. Sadness will move into their house, an invisible
sibling for Annabelle, a quiet, sneaky child who will on occasion misbehave
outrageously, if only to remind Gwen that she’s there. It will be hard. It will
be worth it. Allowing one’s self to be forgiven is just as hard as forgiving.
Harder in some ways. Because to be forgiven, one first has to admit to being at
fault.

Mickey needs them. They need Mickey. They will
never be five again. They won’t even be four. But there’s no doubt in Gwen’s
mind that Go-Go would want them to take care of Mickey, that he wishes her no
harm. Go-Go was the most generous of all of them.

Gwen goes to Mickey’s kitchen, pokes around,
knowing she will find a stash somewhere. Yes, here are circus peanuts, candy
Boston baked beans, and in honor of Easter, Peeps. She puts them on a plate and
sets them in front of Mickey, urges her to eat, joins her. Tim and Sean also
join in, although without much enthusiasm. It all goes down surprisingly well
with bourbon.

Chapter Forty-two

G
wen went
home.

We all went home. Gwen to Karl. Sean to Vivian. Tim
to Arlene, although there was never any suspense about that. It’s not clear who
told what to whom. We no longer share everything. But then—we haven’t shared
everything for a long time. It’s possible we never shared everything.

Doris stays in the house on Sekots Lane, where she
continues to entertain—or not entertain, depending on one’s perspective—all her
grandchildren, including Go-Go’s daughters. There are even visits from Duncan,
at Sean’s insistence, three-day weekends carved out of his crammed schedule.
That is Sean’s newfound talent, being insistent with Vivian. Duncan has yet to
reveal his college preference or his sexual preference, but Sean is trying to
find a way to convey that he is comfortable with anything Duncan wants, or
is.

Clem left his dream house and has taken up
residence at an assisted-living facility in the D.C. suburbs, a mere
thirty-five-minute drive from Gwen’s home, as close as many of the retirement
communities Clem might have chosen on Baltimore’s north side. He has made a full
recovery, although his hip aches on cold, sharp days. The Robison house has not
yet sold, and Gwen agrees with Karl that it is wildly impractical for them. It
is a unique property, to use the real estate parlance, waiting for a special
buyer, someone who values trees, if not light, and a sense of isolation. A new
Clem Robison.

We try to stay in touch. Of course Tim and Sean
were always in touch, but now Gwen checks in with them from time to time, which
is more than she used to do. They talk about their kids and their parents. These
are dutiful conversations, full of pauses. If the subject of Go-Go comes up,
it’s only in the safest of memories.
Remember how he chased
the ball into the street that time? Remember how he danced?
It’s hard
to say how much longer this will go on.

McKey has made it clear that she does not care for
speaking on the phone. But a few months after we saw one another last—and that
night, in her apartment, was the last time we were together, probably the last
time we will ever be together—she sent everyone a note, announcing her marriage
to a man she met on one of her flights. A botanist, she wrote, underlining the
word three times. The other three talked among themselves about the meaning of
that underline. Sean thinks she is excited to have met someone who has made a
profession out of the thing she loved most. Tim thinks she just likes to
underline things.

Gwen believes that McKey wants us to know that she
has been rewarded, which is proof that she never did anything wrong. And who
knows, maybe she didn’t. Maybe they were just two children, playing a game, as
children always have and always will. Maybe she was as much a victim as Go-Go of
the high school boys. Maybe. It is hard not to judge things from where we stand
now, by the standards of the present, but we try not to. A girl and a boy played
at being grown-ups. Another girl and a boy imitated them. Was anyone right? Was
anyone wrong?

We take a step further back, consider our parents.
Clem Robison marrying Tally when she was barely out of high school. Imagine how
Tim would feel if a thirty-two-year-old man dated his high school daughter.
Rita, flitting from one man to another as if they were cheap furniture, things
you acquired with no intent of keeping. Was she liberated or merely pathetic?
Doris and Tim Senior, left on the sidelines by a quirk of timing, too old to
join the fun, too young not to miss it. At least Tim got to march in one
parade.

Chicken George remains in the pauper’s grave where
he was buried more than thirty years ago, the usual arrangement for a man who
dies as a John Doe, with no family to identify him. We are his family. We would
come forward to claim him if we knew his real name, but we never even thought to
ask his real name. That’s how incurious we were. Our parents allowed us to roam
the thickly wooded hillside of Leakin Park, while warning us about its dangers,
large and small—hair-matting burrs, the polluted stream, the poisonous red
berries on those spiky shrubs, rusty nails, broken glass, the possibility of
rabid animals and, after the fact, the alleged pervert in the ramshackle house.
They tried, they really tried, to anticipate everything that could bring us
harm. But it was us, in our naïveté and heedlessness, who were to be feared. We
were the most dangerous thing in the woods.

Acknowledgments

T
his is the most autobiographical novel I have written in strict geographical terms. For many years now, I have been circling the unusual neighborhood in which I grew up, determined to write about it, but wanting to wait for the right time and story. Very careful readers—one might even say obsessive—will realize that several of my previous books have gotten close to this territory. The cabin in the woods, the crafts store near High’s Dairy, Monaghan’s Tavern, the dead-end highway, Leakin Park, the cops and the attorney sitting in Towson Diner—they’ve all shown up before.

But because Dickeyville and Leakin Park are real, it’s important to say what’s not true in the preceding pages. There is not and never has been a house such as Clem Robison’s in what would be the 4700 block of Wetheredsville Road. The Hallorans’ house on Sekots is also wholly an invention of mine. St. Lawrence, the Catholic parish school near Dickeyville, has indeed closed, but I know of no allegations against any priest who worked there in the 1980s. All the families in this book are drawn from my imagination.

Perhaps because this book was intensely personal, I asked for less help than I usually do. Still, I am grateful for the daily support of: Carrie Feron (and everyone at William Morrow/HarperCollins); Vicky Bijur; David Simon; Ethan Simon; Theo and Madeline Lippman; Susan Seegar (my favorite bookseller); Dorothy Simon. I have stolen jokes from my brother-in-law, Gary Simon, often enough to give him credit here. And while Dana Rashidi technically doesn’t work for me, she’s awfully good-natured about the way my life bleeds into hers. Alison Chaplin has become a vital part of my writing process. Alison has called my attention to factual errors in the text; to the extent that any remain, it is because I do think novelists have some leeway. I also am grateful to my two “offices”—Spoons in Baltimore, Starbucks in New Orleans—and the people who work there. A special shout-out to Niki Hannan.

But nothing would have gotten done this past year without the help of several wonderful young women, especially Sara Kiehne. A woman is only as good as the people taking care of her children. A man, too, probably. Like Tally Robison, I am keenly aware that I have only a limited amount of time to work every day now, that I must put my work away before the sun goes down. Unlike Tally, I am happier for it.