Gwen lives in the future. All magazine editors do. Here it is, the last night of March, and she is already focusing on September, which brings the annual “best of” issue, exhaustive and exhausting. When that’s done by midsummer, Christmas will be bearing down on her. Her daughter is dreaming about the Easter bunny, whose arrival is less than a month away, and Gwen is trying to think about “hot gifts for cold nights!” She hopes her copy editors can do better than that.
So she has agreed to her publisher’s pressure to attend the opening reception for the big craft fair, the kind of work duty that she loathes and is usually spared. Her boss once adored attending all these things, but even he is burning out on the endless plastic cups of bad wine and prosciutto-wrapped bits of melon and mini crab cakes. Or perhaps his social interactions are less enjoyable since the magazine has started silting bits of real journalism among the themed guides (best doctors, best neighborhoods, best schools, best restaurants, maybe Tim was on-target with the best prostitutes issue) and shopping-friendly features. Gwen is particularly proud of a recent piece on one of Maryland’s most famous cold homicide cases, the 1980 murder of a nun. The article managed to upset everyone-the nun’s family, the diocese, the newspaper journalists who wrote about the case a decade earlier. Margery, her star reporter, took a measured approach toward the crime, and that seems to have inflamed everyone. The family is desperate to believe that a priest killed the young nun, but Margery’s dispassionate analysis makes a good case that the more likely suspect was a serial sex offender who later died in prison. Meanwhile, the diocese is displeased at the implicit criticism that its knee-jerk circle-the-wagon response to the initial police inquiries probably impeded the investigation in the first place. Gwen thinks it’s a good sign that everyone is unhappy. Her publisher does not see it the same way, but at least no major advertisers were offended.
Yes, maybe it would be a good time to go to the craft fair and start scouting new artisans they could feature. She asks Margery to go with her.
“Am I being punished or rewarded?”
“A little of both. I’ll buy you dinner after.”
At least they don’t have to contend with the crowds that flock to this show once it is officially open to the public, and there are some beautiful things to see. Gwen’s real complaint is that it cuts into her evening with Annabelle, a situation made more problematic by the fact that Karl is out of town again, leaving Annabelle in the care of a babysitter. Annabelle cried on the phone when she called to tell her of the plan. Stoic Annabelle, who seldom cries, her girly-girly tomboy who combines tiaras with cowboy boots. “I ha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ate Kristen,” she gulped out in heart-wrenching sobs, and Kristen is her favorite babysitter. When Annabelle was a baby, she cried so seldom that when the tears did come, they were almost a source of marvel to Gwen and Karl. They would stand, transfixed-only for a moment-watching tears roll down their daughter’s face. She was cute when she cried.
But perhaps that was because they were sure they could end her tears easily, something of which Gwen is now less and less sure. She caused her daughter’s tears tonight. She may cause her more. How can she do this to her daughter?
“So you’re still staying at your dad’s and driving over there every morning and night?” Margery asks as they move through the endless aisles of handcrafted goods, their eyes quickly growing numb to all the stimulation. Their goal is to spot things that are local, original, and, if possible, eco-friendly, as their Christmas issue will be built around a green theme.
“It’s barely been a month,” Gwen says. “It’s not so bad.” Actually, it’s awful, just as her father and Karl predicted, but she can’t back down now. Besides, her father needs her, even if he won’t admit it. The daytime aide does the bare minimum. Gwen couldn’t sleep if she had to leave her father in another aide’s care at night.
“When did everyone become a purse designer?” Margery’s voice isn’t loud, but it’s clear and it carries. “Or jewelry designer? When did these become the default professions? You think that between Monica Lewinsky and all those reality-show types who run around with BeDazzlers and glue guns, people would have too much pride to make this crap.”
The woman at the nearest booth shoots Gwen a glance that is at once puzzled and wounded. Gwen shrugs, hoping the gesture serves as a blanket apology for her opinionated friend. To further make amends, she stops, examining this particular crop of purses. They are clutches woven from recycled materials, candy and gum wrappers and newspapers. Not original-she has seen bags like this in other stores and catalogs for the past several years-but well executed. Besides, being of-the-moment is not important in Baltimore.
“Are you from here? Do you have a card?” she asks the woman, who points to a little stand with embossed business cards: LH DESIGNS.
“I’ve only been at this for a few months, but I’ve managed to place my bags in some local stores,” she says. “Are you-”
“Just an editor, not a buyer. Gwen Robison of Baltimore magazine.”
“You looked familiar, but I guess that’s why. I’ve probably seen your picture in it.”
“Not mine.” That bit of vanity is reserved for her publisher, the moneyman. He pays the bills, which entitles him to a monthly column, rambling on about some safe, boosterish profundity that never angers anyone. Except, perhaps, people who dislike exclamation marks and chamber-of-commerce boosterish crap.
“Still, I feel I have seen you somewhere.”
“You look familiar, too.”
She holds out her hand: “Lori Halloran.”
“Oh my god-the funeral. I’m so sorry.”
Margery has kept moving all this time and is far, far down the aisle. She turns around, makes an impatient hurry-up gesture. But there’s no way to walk away now. Lori Halloran is young, early thirties at most. She was Go-Go’s second wife, Gwen recalls. Estranged at the time of the accident, although she and her daughters were down front in the church, sitting with Tim Junior’s wife and girls, while the brothers flanked their mother. They were the little girls who wouldn’t go up to the casket.
“I’m really sorry,” Gwen repeats. “I’ve known him since he was a little boy, although we had fallen out of touch-”
“He talked about you a lot.”
“Me?” A lot?
“All of you. His brothers, you, a girl named Mickey, although it was a while before I even realized Mickey was a girl. He said that was the best time in his life, playing in the woods.”
“Really?” Before, perhaps. Before Chicken George did whatever he did. Why does Gwen still feel that twinge of guilt she always feels when that memory returns, unbidden? We shouldn’t have left him there. He was hurt. Whatever he did, it wasn’t right to leave him there to die alone.
“I admit, that’s not saying a lot. He wasn’t a very happy guy.”
How much do you know? What did Go-Go tell you?
Gwen chooses her words with care. “We had a lot of freedom. Sometimes I think we were the last generation to live that way. These days, we live near a state park, very pretty and bucolic, and I would never dream of letting my daughter play there, unsupervised.”
The “we” is a lie, used for convenience’s sake but it gives her a pang.
“Gordon was real paranoid about our girls, too. He didn’t even like them to be in our fenced backyard by themselves.”
“I saw them at the funeral. They’re beautiful little girls.” Gwen is not being polite. The girls are beautiful, as is their mother-blue eyes, blond hair, fair skin. Go-Go, for all his rough-and-tumble ways, always liked beauty, respected it. He had high standards, too. He clearly thought Tally Robison exquisite, he loved to look at her, grab her. Gwen, even after her transformation, did not impress him.
“My mother-in-law blames me for his death,” Lori says. Her tone is matter-of-fact, as if commenting on the weather, but she has to know this is a shocking thing to say. Neither Tim nor Sean mentioned it to Gwen. But then-Tim and Sean are a long way past the time when they felt obligated to tell Gwen things.
“Oh, people say all sorts of things when grieving-”
“She’s not entirely wrong.”
An older woman jostles Gwen to get to Lori’s bags, but that is the point of the craft fair, after all. She paws the little bags, snaps them open, runs the zippers up and down, fingers the lining. The bags deserve kinder hands, but if the woman is a buyer, Gwen doesn’t want to come between Lori and a sale. Lord knows if Go-Go had a life insurance policy, or if it paid off, given the uncertain circumstances of his death. Gwen digs through her own shoulder bag and finds her card, adds her cell and the landline for her father’s house.
“If you want to talk,” she says. “About anything.”
She assumes, hopes, Lori won’t follow up. Go-Go’s secrets are, in part, Gwen’s, although she likes to think she is the least guilty of the five, the sole bystander. All Gwen did was agree to go along, to let Sean be the spokesman and not insist on including the troubling details that might complicate their story when they told their parents. No, Lori will think better of it, decide she doesn’t want to talk, not to a virtual stranger. But if Lori does confide in Gwen, is Gwen obligated to tell her there are all sorts of reasons why Go-Go might have driven into that concrete barrier, none of which have anything to do with his second wife kicking him out? No need to worry. Lori won’t call. Even if she does, Gwen owes her nothing.
Yet several hours later, when Gwen places her cell phone by her girlhood bed, there is a text from Lori staring up at her.
I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO YOU. SOON?
It’s the question mark-unsure, pleading-that makes the request impossible to ignore.
It has taken several days, many promises, and a few threats, but Tim has finally corralled all three daughters and taken them to his mother’s house for Sunday lunch. “What about Mass?” his mother asked when told of the plan. He couldn’t bear to let her know her oldest two granddaughters are basically heathens, so he made up a story about the SATs and a sleepover and sent Arlene to Mass with his mother as the family’s sacrificial lamb. In old age, which seems to have fallen on Doris suddenly and even a little precociously-she’s barely in her sixties-she is as distractible as a baby.
The house on Sekots Lane was a desired destination when the girls were younger, a place they clamored to visit. It had a doll’s house feel to them-smaller in scale than the houses in their Stoneleigh neighborhood, and full of wonders. The carpet sweeper, a waist-high freezer in the basement stocked with Good Humor bars, Grandma’s “goodie jar,” the dogs. But the house and its inhabitants long ago ceased to entertain the girls. Lunch finished, the three sisters slump on the sofa in the downstairs rec room, watching the flat-screen television, a gift from Tim and Sean, connected to cable, a bill that Tim pays monthly, dismissing Doris’s protestations that she doesn’t need it. If not for cable television, the girls would never come here, but he doesn’t want to spell that out for his mother.
Yet even the television barely holds their interest. The older two are bent over their phones, texting, texting, texting, while the baby, as he still thinks of eight-year-old Karen, twirls her hair and watches them covetously. She has been told she can have a phone at age twelve, a decision she challenges daily, sometimes with fresh arguments, more often with mere petulance. Yesterday she told Tim she should have a phone because it would keep her safe from child molesters.
Only if you see them coming from a long way off, sweetheart.
What could the older girls be texting about on a Sunday afternoon? And to whom? Only last week, Lisa left her phone unattended and Tim seized the chance to read every text still in it, rationalizing that he was right to violate her privacy because of the Dani/joint incident. Yet the conversation, such as it was, revealed almost nothing. The only topics were location (at mall/at McDonald’s/at skate park) and mood. Everything is lame. Everyone is lame. Parents, friends, school, any activity. The jokes of the other texter are lame. Lord, is it any wonder that zombies are enjoying a resurgence in pop culture? This generation is the new walking dead, except they lumber away from brains, disdainful of anything that requires thought, passion, participation. He imagines his daughters vacant-eyed, arms stretched in front of them, tottering down the street moaning: “No brains, no brains.” But still texting, all the while.
“Some help with the dishes?” He tries to make it sound like a suggestion, yet one that cannot be ignored.
“Sure,” Michelle says.
“In a minute,” Lisa says.
Nothing moves except their thumbs. He thinks of the heroine of Tom Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, imagines a generation of girls with giant thumbs, hypertrophied from overuse. What he can’t imagine is his daughters hitchhiking. Not because it’s forbidden, but because that’s way too much effort.
“Leave the girls alone,” his mother calls down the stairs. “There’s not that much to do. And it’s easier to clean up when there aren’t so many bodies in the kitchen. Do the girls want some more cookies or chocolates?”
They look up, dazed. Certain words, such as cookie, can penetrate the force field around them. “OK,” Michelle says, as if conferring a favor. All three continue to sit.
“Well, you can at least go upstairs and get them yourselves,” Tim says.
A pause. “That’s all right,” Michelle says. “I’m not really that hungry.” But Doris is already bustling downstairs with her “goodie” jar, a huge Tupperware container that holds opened bags of cookies and a selection of miniature candy bars. The goodie jar is a long-standing tradition in her household, but Tim has noticed on recent visits that sometimes the items are quite stale. This was true even before Go-Go died, but it troubles him. He asked the girls not to mention it. They said they hadn’t noticed.
Doris spoils all her grandchildren this way. To be fair, she spoiled her sons almost as much. They had few responsibilities in the house and only marginal ones in the yard because their father loved his lawn mower and did not want to entrust it to them. They were savages. Or so Arlene said in the early years of their marriage, when she discovered that Tim did not know how to do anything domestic-wash his clothes, sew a button, scour a pan, run the vacuum.
He did not think Arlene should have been surprised. She had seen his apartment, after all, even pretended affection for his bachelor ways. But Arlene, like a lot of women, had one set of standards for her boyfriend, another for her husband. The difference was that Arlene really did manage to change him. Everyone said that people couldn’t be changed and perhaps it was all semantics, perhaps Tim had chosen to change. Still, he believed that Arlene transformed him by the simple act of loving him. Despite being raised in a household where nothing was expected of the males and everything was given, he learned to shoulder household tasks and, when the time came, child care. If anything, he did more than Arlene around the house because she left all traditional masculine chores to him. He was, after all, the only man in the house.
He often wonders now if his mother felt similarly isolated as the sole female in a house of men. In the years since his father’s death, Tim has put in a lot of time helping his mother create the pretty, well-maintained house she never really had. The basement rec room was one such project-white paint brightened the inevitable knotty pine paneling, his father’s beloved bar was replaced with a craft table, the crappy old sofa was tossed. He also helped her wallpaper the dining room and do some modest updates in the kitchen. Mother and son paid lip service to the idea that these renovations were geared toward an eventual sale. Yet Tim knew his mother would never move. Because if Doris moved, where would Go-Go go when he boomeranged, as he did every few years or so? That was one room they never touched, Go-Go’s little bedroom at the head of the stairs. Through high school, college, and two marriages, Go-Go’s room remained the same, waiting for him to fail again.
Yet although Go-Go’s intermittent homecomings should have been disappointing to their mother, she never quite saw it that way. Doris was thrilled to have him back, and Go-Go, whatever his faults, was good company for their mother after their father died. So Tim did the work, standing in for the father who had died too young, and Go-Go made their mother laugh, the perpetual baby of the family. Yet it is Sean, far away, who still gets to be the good son, the perfect son, the pride and joy. How does that figure? Maybe being perfect can be achieved only at a distance.
Tim wipes down the counters, letting Arlene carry the conversation with his mother. It’s mindless, maddening chatter-analyzing various mutual acquaintances, discussing that morning’s Mass. Tim may not have standing as the best son, but there’s no doubt that Arlene’s the best daughter-in-law, steady and reliable. Doris likes Lori, too, or did before she threw Go-Go out. Doris can’t take the side of anyone who has hurt one of her sons, no matter how justified it might have been. Sean’s wife, Vivian, is on Doris’s permanent shit list because Doris thinks it was her idea to move to Florida. Funny, because Sean was for it. So why does Doris blame Vivian? Probably because Sean told her as much. A lot of lying goes into being perfect.
As a prosecutor, Tim feels he has a particular insight into lying. People lie to him all the time. Perps, of course, but also cops who don’t want him to know about corners cut, rights violated. Even colleagues lie. Tim lies, too. Everyone lies. It’s a cardinal rule of homicide investigation, but he feels this maxim has broader applications. He lies to Arlene-harmless things, not for advantage, just to keep the peace. He lied to her, for example, about “loaning” Go-Go money a year or so ago. They do OK, with her back to teaching school, but they don’t have money to throw around. Loaning-OK, giving-money to Go-Go was, by definition, throwing money around, out, away. But Go-Go was never more sincere than when he promised to pay back a loan, and Tim couldn’t bear not to reward Go-Go’s belief in himself, wan and flickering as it was. Had Go-Go ever been truly confident? He was loud and brash, yes, but that’s not confidence. When Tim tries to talk to his daughters about the dangers of the world, they roll their eyes, wholly convinced that they know everything. Go-Go was never like that. He was bold, but not fearless. He knew the world could hurt him. He just didn’t know how.
Doris and Tim Senior made it clear that Tim and Sean were never to speak of what happened the night of the hurricane. They led by example. If someone mentioned Hurricane David, his parents would pretend to need to be prompted on the date. Eventually it didn’t even seem a pretense. “Oh, that storm,” Doris might say. “That was the night that we went to the Robisons’ house and stayed because the power was out and the street in front of their house filled with water.” Tim and Sean were more than happy to leave it at that. If Go-Go was never molested, then Chicken George never died. It was almost as if Chicken George never existed at all.
In law school and later, preparing for the bar, Tim sometimes laid out the facts of that night as if it were a case he might one day prosecute. A man who had been sexually assaulting a child chased him and another child through the woods. He slipped and fell, injuring himself fatally. The children dutifully reported this to their fathers, who trekked back into the woods and found his body. There was no crime in this. Well, Mickey pushed Chicken George. She admitted as much. But she was acting in self-defense. She was not even fourteen, a child by the standard of the law at the time. No, they committed no crime that night. Still, as an adult, as a father, Tim has often longed to speak of it. Not to Go-Go, never to Go-Go. That would have been unfair to him.
He can’t tell Arlene either because they have been together too long now, the time for such secrets is past. There’s Sean, but Sean is even more adamant than their parents that they must not speak about the night of the hurricane. Tim thinks it’s because it doesn’t jibe with Sean’s version of Sean. Gwen, Mickey-now-McKey?
Gwen . Despite his habit of teasing her, he likes and respects her. As a kid, he was even a little into her, and not just out of envy for whatever sexual favors his brother was being granted. Tim liked Gwen before, when she was a plump little girl. She was smart beneath all her girly mannerisms. He doesn’t have any present-day yearnings for her. Arlene is the love of his life, and he is grateful for the clarity with which he sees that, accepts the compromises required by monogamy. He’s a man. He thinks frequently about other women, wonders what it would be like to fuck this one or that one. There are things, extreme things to be sure, that he has never done, and it now seems unlikely that he will. It’s okay. He has a good imagination, which serves him well when he’s alone. Still, he would like to talk to Gwen, just talk.
Tim carries the clean platter, one of his mother’s “good pieces,” to the built-in corner cupboard. It goes on the highest shelf, which is not quite within his reach. “Ma, where’s the stepladder?”
“Oh, I put that out in the garage, years ago. Just stand on a chair.”
He does, although he’s nervous about his weight, and he doesn’t like the idea that his mother gets up and down from a chair when she needs something from the upper reaches of the breakfront. He really should get that stepladder out of the garage, have it closer to hand.
His father always complained that the house wasn’t well built, but it appears more solid to Tim than the overpriced town house Go-Go bought for his family last year. Tim couldn’t begin to help with that purchase. One thing to hide a thousand or so from Arlene, quite another to come up with fifty thousand. His mother mortgaged this house without consulting him or Sean. He probably should be grateful that the housing market had already imploded, even if the stock market crash did ding the hell out of his girls’ college funds. Otherwise, his mother would have taken out even more and ended up underwater in her mortgage in a house that had been hers in full before his father died.
Both Tim and Sean were outraged when they heard about the loan, but it was too late to do anything. Doris claimed she didn’t understand why they were angry with her. “I bought a house for my grandbabies, and that’s who all my money is for anyway, the grandchildren.” Tim didn’t want to explain to her that she had taken her primary asset and given it in full to two of her six grandchildren. The whole subject made him feel small and mercenary. But Sean had no problem expressing his fury. He told Doris she should rewrite her will to make up for this inequity, reflect the fact that the $50,000 loan was an advance against what the girls might have inherited and they would be entitled to nothing else. A disproportionate advance, he added, with surprising bitterness. Of the three boys, Sean is the best fixed. Only one kid, the kind of kid sure to score a financial aid package to college because of his cross-country stuff. Plus, Sean’s father-in-law is loaded. “It’s not about the money,” Sean said heatedly when Tim called him on this.
In Tim’s experience, everything is about the money, especially whenever people say it’s not about the money. Granted, the money stood for something in Sean’s eyes, but what? Attention, love? Sean never lacked for either. And he still gets to be the good son, even though it’s Tim standing in their mother’s kitchen, drying the things that are too precious or too large to go in the dishwasher.
Arlene catches his eye and gives him a smile, one in which there is a world, a history of understanding. She is both insider and outsider in the Halloran family and her perspective, more dispassionate, yet also more forgiving, keeps him on an even keel. Go-Go got the beauties. Sean’s Vivian has a wealthy, privileged family. But there’s no doubt in Tim’s mind that he, of all the Halloran boys, made the best match. How did he do this? How did he find the right woman when he was a sophomore in college, only a few years older than Michelle is right now? Let Sean be the favorite. Tim’s the lucky one, and he’ll take lucky every time.
T he problem with Florida, Sean thinks, is that the weather means more yard work. Sure, its partisans would reply, but there’s no snow to shovel. Ah, but snow shoveling ends, eventually. Yard work never does, especially here in St. Petersburg, even with Duncan’s reluctant help. Duncan despises working in the yard even more than Sean does, but Sean is adamant that Duncan must have some household responsibilities. He rejected Vivian’s suggestion that Duncan do laundry or help with meals, two things he genuinely enjoys and might execute without protracted nagging. “Life isn’t just about having fun, doing what one likes to do,” Sean told Vivian yesterday. Even as he said it, he heard his father’s voice in his head, but it was too late to back down. Plus, the old man had a point.
What would Tim Senior have done with a son like Duncan? Not that Tim Senior would have had a son named Duncan to begin with. Like so many things in Sean’s life, this was Vivian’s decision. “Duncan” was mapped out years ago, back in Vivian’s college dorm room, or possibly in doodled daydreams in high school or even junior high. It was a plan of such long standing that Sean couldn’t begin to counter it when she laid it out after they became engaged. They would wait exactly two years into their marriage to start trying to have a child. They would have only one child. Sean was OK with both those decisions. If the child was a girl, she would be named Madeline; if a boy, Duncan. Sean did not approve of Duncan, but Vivian claimed it was a family name. Later, her mother admitted it was merely a name she loved and wanted to use, only she never had a son. Sean should have started a betting pool on how old Duncan would be before some kid at school started calling him Donut. That clocked in on the first day of third grade here in St. Petersburg, when they were new to the town.
What was less predictable, at least to Sean, was Duncan’s ability to roll with such teasing, deflect and thereby neuter it. Even at eight, he was a confident kid. “Just like you,” his mother said, and Sean would have liked to claim Duncan’s poise as his own. But he knew, even then, that it was different, that his own so-called confidence is all bravado. Duncan is genuinely comfortable in his own skin, which may explain why Sean feels this need to make him uncomfortable from time to time. It’s not that he’s competitive with his son, not at all. The kid just takes so much for granted. He wins races, he’s first chair in all-county orchestra, he gets the lead in all the school plays. Not the musicals, because he can’t sing well enough, but the straight plays. Anything he wants to do well, he does.
So it’s infuriating to watch him half-ass it around the backyard, acting as if he can’t quite understand what is required to prepare the garden for the hot months ahead. Sean doesn’t understand, either, but at least he listened to Vivian when she gave them their marching orders after lunch. She was very clear. Vivian is always clear about all her expectations. For example, if Sean decides he doesn’t want to do yard work at all, that’s fine: Vivian will hire someone to do it. Not some guy with a lawn mower and a truck, though. Vivian will hire the full Magilla Gorilla, a landscaping service, guys in uniforms, with mulch that costs about the same per pound as caviar, not that Sean has eaten much caviar in his life. Vivian’s family isn’t that fancy.
The full Magilla Gorilla . That was a Go-Go-ism, a mangling of the cartoon and the arch phrase, which he probably picked up from one of the gangster films shown on Picture for a Sunday Afternoon.
Vivian’s family doesn’t describe themselves as rich, if only because it would be vulgar to do so. But they are undeniably well-off, and when Sean married her, her father let it be known that marrying his beloved daughter meant supporting her in the style to which she was accustomed. It was like buying a sports car. Sure, you’ve got the cash now, but do you realize how much the maintenance will be? Her parents are on the young side, and they plan to retire early and enjoy their money. These things are never put into words, yet there is no doubt about their expectations. Vivian is the same way. She somehow makes everything clear without being blunt or even raising her voice. After she presented Sean, for example, with her timeline for having their one (and only) child, she added: “And, of course, I will be staying home.”
“Of course,” he replied, although he had assumed she wanted to work. She had seemed so gung-ho ambitious when they met.
“I could go back to work, but almost all my income would go to child care, so what’s the point of that?”
“Of course,” he repeated.
“Which means you’ll probably want to leave the newspaper and go into a corporate position.”
“Of-what?”
They had been living in Charlotte then. It was a hot newspaper, coming off a Pulitzer win for its coverage of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, part of a much-respected chain. Sean, who used his aborted premed education to position himself as a medical reporter, had planned to go as far as he could there, then move on to one of the big dogs, the Washington Post or the New York Times. It was not an unreasonable dream in 1989. It would not have been an unreasonable dream even ten years later. Twenty years later-the chain that owned the paper doesn’t even exist anymore. If he had followed his heart, he might have been one of the lucky ones, safe and sound at a big national newspaper when all the other papers started to shrink. But he was long gone from journalism by then, exiled to corporate communications, first in Charlotte’s banking industry, now for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida. He makes good money, and he earns that salary in income-tax-free Florida. It was enough-just-to buy Vivian the house she expected in a neighborhood she deemed worthy, Old Northeast, although without a water view. It’s a good life. Really.
Together more than twenty years, they never fight or raise their voices. They disagree. They often disagree. Then Sean explains his side and Vivian explains hers and they end up doing what Vivian wants. Or so it seems. Sean knows, realistically, that he can’t be losing every disagreement, but it sure feels that way. When he starts to feel sorry for himself, he thinks about his son, who really is a delight, and maybe that’s because of all the attention Vivian has lavished on him. Straight-A student, good enough at track to be certain of a scholarship, sweet, yet popular at school.
And almost certainly gay.
He and Vivian have not spoken about this yet. That’s Sean’s decision, for once. If they speak of it, then it will be true, and he’s not ready for it to be true. Let Duncan bring it up. Isn’t that how it works? It’s up to Duncan to come out to them. When he does, if he does, Sean will be OK with it, he really will. But he’s in no hurry to hear this particular revelation. He could be wrong. He’s known some effeminate guys who were amazing pussy hounds, although Duncan isn’t effeminate. At any rate, Sean doesn’t bring it up to Vivian, doesn’t ask Duncan awkward leading questions. (I see Ricky Martin came out. Not that surprising, huh. What do you think about “don’t ask, don’t tell”? Gay marriage? ) Instead, he talks to Duncan about the Tampa teams, the Bucs and the Rays, or his inclinations about college, which are kept as close as his sexual preference. Duncan never admits to liking any college, turning all questions back on his parents. “What do you think about Bard?” “How bad do you think the winters in Ann Arbor are?” He is vague, too, about what he plans to study or whether he is committed to the idea of continuing to run cross-country, fearful that he may have peaked, that he’s fighting his body type. The other day, Sean caught him pinching a nonexistent slice of flab at his waist, making a face in the mirror. Would a straight kid do that?
Duncan also watches the strangest mix of television shows- American Idol, another singing show, some dancing shows, a lot of reality television-part of a standing date at a girl’s house. Not a date-date, and not a girlfriend, just a girl who’s a friend. This is how Duncan says it, word for word, in a high singsong voice, followed by a sigh. Not a date-date, not a girlfriend, just a girl who’s a friend, DAD.
Really, it’s almost a relief to have him here in the yard, grumbling about a chore and doing it poorly. It seems more normal, more boylike.
“You have to be careful pruning,” Sean says, taking the massive trimmers from Duncan and demonstrating the technique, the proper place to cut. Duncan sighs and imitates Sean’s motions with arch lassitude.
“Mom says you want to go to Baltimore for spring break.” They usually shoot for a special trip for the spring break, something splashy, often underwritten by Vivian’s parents.
“I’m not sure about want . But I think we need to check in with your grandmother over Easter. It will be hard for her, being alone.”
“She’s not alone. Uncle Tim and his family live twenty minutes away.”
“Still, we should go.”
Duncan focuses on the branch in front of him. “Some kids from school are going to New Orleans to work with one of the house-building programs there.”
“That’s still going on?”
“Of course it is. You don’t rebuild a city overnight.”
Sean knows New Orleans wasn’t rebuilt overnight. His surprise is that school and church groups are still going, that the attention-deficit-disordered world hasn’t moved on to a new tragedy. Events move into the rearview mirror quickly these days. Earthquakes, tsunamis-it seems like every month, celebrities are back on television, running some phone bank.
“I thought I would go,” Duncan says. “It will look good on my college applications. I’m light on volunteering and community service.”
“Can’t you do something similar in the summer?”
“I’m going back to Stage Door, then doing an intensive cross-country camp, one that attracts scouts.”
Scouts mean scholarships, and Sean is no enemy of financial assistance for Sean’s college education, although he knows that’s the sort of bill that Vivian’s family will pick up if he really finds himself on the ropes. And if the school is impressive enough. Sean isn’t sure which schools will make the cut, but he knows his alma mater, Washington University, isn’t among them, although it’s no safety school. But no one in Vivian’s family is familiar with it, and what they don’t know can’t possibly be worth knowing. Vivian went to Duke, and Sean’s room has been filled with blue-and-white devils almost since the day he was born.
“You haven’t seen your grandmother in a while. You didn’t even make it to the funeral.”
“Dad, I had that competition in Orlando. If I hadn’t gone, the chamber quartet would have been penalized.”
“You’re the only grandson-and the only one who doesn’t live there.”
“That’s not my fault,” Duncan says in his factual, even-keeled way, so much like Vivian. “And being the only grandson shouldn’t matter. Are you saying boys are more important than girls to Grandma Dee?”
“It would make her really happy if you came with us. That’s all.”
“But we’ve already bought our plane tickets.”
“We?”
“Mom and me. She’s planning on being one of the chaperones on the New Orleans trip.”
Duncan’s face is turned away from Sean’s. Sean has never been sure how much Duncan picks up on his parents’ dynamic. Sean’s father, if he were still alive, would probably say Vivian wears the pants in the family, but that’s not exactly right. She’s not a ballbuster. Her manner is unfailingly polite, reasonable. She simply cannot see Sean’s side of things. When they clash, her attitude is almost pitying. Poor silly Sean, thinking that’s a viable idea. She humors him, hearing him out.
He thinks of another thing his father liked to say: Don’t marry above yourself or you’ll never get out from under. He chose Vivian because she was a prize, something bright and shiny on a shelf barely within reach. The problem is, she sees herself the same way.
He waits to talk to her until he has showered and dressed, picking a collared shirt, one he knows she likes on him. She is in the family room, sewing something. Vivian is seldom at rest and she expects Sean and Duncan to follow suit. To be productive, almost every waking hour, is her goal. But Sean has earned his beer, the right to have the television on mute, baseball scores scrolling by. He still thinks of the Orioles as his team. They still break his heart on a regular basis.
“Duncan says he’s planning to go to New Orleans over school break.”
“Yes,” she says, biting a piece of thread. “With a group from church. I think it’s a great idea.”
“The thing is, my mom is pretty fragile right now and I think it’s important for all of us to go see her.”
“Certainly you should go. I understand.”
This is how she does it, he thinks. She doesn’t even acknowledge there’s another side to the issue. She’s seizing the high ground, being magnanimous for allowing him to go see his mother.
“She loves Duncan, dotes on him. It would be great if he were there, too.”
“I’m sure she’ll understand when you explain how important this is to his college applications.”
“But how do I explain you not being there?”
“Oh, honey-it’s New Orleans. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I wasn’t one of the chaperones. It’s a very dangerous city. I’ll make you miserable, worrying about Duncan, so I might as well go.”
He wants to argue on principle, then thinks Fuck it . He’ll go back to Baltimore, stay with his mom, something Vivian abhors, although she never admits it. But when forced to spend even a night in his boyhood home, she goes through the day murmuring, murmuring, murmuring, keeping up a running litany of disapproval that pretends to be disinterested commentary, as she ticks off everything that bothers her about the house, about Dickeyville, about Baltimore. It’s been years since they’ve stayed under his mother’s roof as a family.
Sean will go home, spend the long Easter weekend, look up some old friends. Maybe even check in with McKey, if only to assure himself that what didn’t happen between them definitely didn’t happen between them. And if it did-if he’s already cheated-then doesn’t he deserve to remember it?
D oris sits in the chair where her husband died, reading a mystery novel. She goes through two or three a week. As she tried to tell Tim Junior when he bought her that ridiculous plasma thing, she has little use for television these days. It makes her jumpy, and the more channels and control she allegedly has over it, the more she feels in its control. She was happy with the five local channels and rabbit ears.
But she can read when and wherever she wants. Her favorites are the modern American versions of the old-fashioned English mysteries, with a dash of humor. She likes series because she likes the details that repeat-the beloved restaurants, the irascible but adorable landlords, the kooky families, the on-again, gone-again boyfriends.
She reads in Tim’s old chair because it has the best light and is also the most comfortable. It has been reupholstered, but only because Arlene insisted. It’s not as if it were stained or marred in any way. Thoughtful girl that she is, Arlene wrapped the chair project inside the larger job of redoing the living room, but Doris knew that she thought the chair bothered her. It’s funny about Arlene-as much time as they spend analyzing other people, it never seems to occur to her that Doris parses her motives as well. Luckily, Arlene is unfailingly well intentioned. The fact is, if the chair harbored bad memories, no mere slipcover could redeem it.
But Doris no longer imbues objects with any kind of significance or meaning. She did that for a long time, too long. In a house of rowdy boys, it was hard to have nice things, so she cherished the ones she managed to protect from their roughhousing. Then one day Go-Go broke a pitcher that Father Andrew had given her. Waterford crystal, brought back from his summer vacation in Ireland. She caught Go-Go holding it one afternoon and yelled at him to put it away. Startled, he dropped it.
He was thirteen, too large to paddle, yet she paddled him anyway. And he slapped her. It was the most shocking thing that ever happened to Doris. Even Go-Go was appalled, bursting into tears. Doris sobbed, too, hugging him fiercely, something else for which he was too large, too old. He begged her not to tell his father, or even his brothers, about the slap. She had no desire to tell anyone. In Doris’s opinion, Go-Go was right to slap her. Yes, he had dropped the pitcher, but only because she yelled at him. No, he shouldn’t have picked it up in the first place, but it was a beautiful thing in a house with very few beautiful things. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to touch it, even if he had been explicitly forbidden to do so.
And Go-Go, unlike the other men in the house, noticed beautiful things, beautiful people. As he got older, he cared about his clothes, dressing better than either brother. He chose beautiful wives. Merely beautiful, unfortunately, with little else to offer, especially that first one. Terrible, terrible girl, and Doris blames herself for that choice, too. Lori wasn’t much better, in Doris’s estimation, but she didn’t pummel Go-Go, and she was the mother of two of Doris’s grandchildren. Lori has power over Doris, and she knows it. Vivian plays the same game. Just this afternoon, Sean, in his regular weekly call, admitted that he would be visiting alone for Easter because Duncan has other plans. He tried to disguise it as positive news- such a good cause, very valuable for his college application, who could be a better chaperone than Vivian. There’s a name for what her son is, and it isn’t very polite.
What Sean didn’t realize was that Doris considered it a case of good news/bad news. It is bad news that she won’t see Duncan, but very good news that she doesn’t have to see Vivian, who always enters the house on Sekots Lane as if it smells. True, sometimes the odor of cabbage lingers-everyone else in the family loves her cabbage rolls-but the house is pin neat these days, a perfect case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. It is neat because there is no one to clean up after except herself. It takes Doris three days to fill the dishwasher, almost a week to have a load of clothes to run through the wash. If it weren’t for the dogs, she’d probably never have to sweep the floors. She remembers-not quite wistfully, but with a little more perspective-the days when she thought she would be found dead under a mound of boys’ underwear.
Yet there also is solace in being alone because her loneliness makes sense now: she is lonely because she is alone. Why was she lonely when the boys were here, when Tim Senior was still alive? Part of it was being the only female, the butt of every joke. Tim grew disenchanted with her for a time, and he let the boys see that. Doris Halloran, the enemy of fun. Now Doris believes she was born lonely. Lonely is who she is. If she had been born a man, she would have been a good priest, yet she didn’t think she was cut out to be a nun. Nuns were meant to function in groups. Priests got to run the show.
She had enjoyed the final years with Tim Senior, when it was just the two of them, with occasional rebounds, as they called them, from Go-Go. There is something to be said for lowered expectations. Tim mellowed a lot as he aged, especially when he saw how the boys turned out. It gave him a thrill when one of Tim Junior’s cases ended up in the news, and he endorsed Sean’s idea-really Vivian’s scheme, in Doris’s view-to leave journalism for a more lucrative field.
Go-Go’s fitful path through life was hard on them both, but Tim Senior himself had been in his midforties when he found the right professional fit, running a small handyman company. Funny, because he wasn’t particularly handy, but then he wasn’t the handyman. He was the guy who sat in an office and dispatched his workers to the women who needed them, the guy who kept the books, filed the paperwork. The idea had come to him in the mid-1980s, when he saw that cartoon on the cover of a newsweekly, the one that announced the era of the yuppies, a new word at the time. Tim told Doris: “If both people are working, then there’s no time for doing stuff, but extra income to pay others to do things that we always did for ourselves.” The business was steady, if not spectacular, and he sold it two years before he died for a tidy sum that left them comfortable. Not go-to-Florida-for-the-winters comfortable, but he paid off the house, a big deal. They celebrated with dinner at Haussner’s.
For Tim Senior, the big secondhand revelation of running Mr. Handy was how-he blushed when he used the word in front of Doris- horny the women were, how often his guys were propositioned. They never said yes. Or at least they told their boss they never said yes. But here was the kicker: These women, in their power suits, married to men pulling down six figures, were gaga for guys with tool belts.
Doris and Tim could talk about sex because they were actually having it again. While her early menopause had seemed tragic at first, the end of her monthlies made it possible for her to have sanctioned sex with her husband with no more fear of creating life-or death. Doris began to take better care of herself and even used Rogaine for her hair loss. They found they could talk about all sorts of things that had once been taboo-the miscarriages, which Tim admitted he blamed on Doris, how cowed she had been by his temper. They could talk about almost anything. Except Go-Go. Any discussion of their youngest son either escalated into an argument or ended abruptly, as if they had run into something hard and unyielding.
So when Tim Senior, sitting in this chair, clutched his chest and fell to the floor and said “Go-Go,” Doris knew he believed himself to be dying. There is no other way he would have gasped out those two syllables. She hoped he was wrong, even as she tried to remember CPR, assuming she had ever learned it. But when she started to run to the kitchen phone to call 911, he grabbed her wrist, desperate for her to stay with him, to have someone there for his last few minutes of life.
And then he was dead. The story has become a legend in the family because it happened on October 9, 1996, during the Orioles’ play-off game with the Yankees, the one where a boy interfered with play and the Yankees won. It’s a good story, one that appears to make her sons feel better, and isn’t that what stories are for? Doris has no intention of telling them that the game had ended an hour earlier and that Tim Senior accepted the Orioles’ bad luck philosophically. There was a time when he would have broken something over a bad call, but those times were long behind them. In middle-verging-on-old age, Tim and Doris had found a rhythm together, contentment if not true happiness. And contentment is pretty good if you’ve never been particularly happy.
Only it turned out that Tim Senior wasn’t even content. That was the sad part, learning in those final moments what lay beneath the muted, restrained temperament of Tim’s last years. Doris thought his mild success had made life easier for him, but Tim had kept a secret all these years: “I killed that man. For Go-Go. I killed him.” Why did he tell her? Why should she have to know such a terrible thing, and what should she do with it? It made her wonder if the years she thought of as contented had felt different to Tim Senior, if he held his temper and treated her nicely because he considered it his penance.
For fifteen years, Doris guarded Tim’s secret, and she assumes the other men did the same, although she has her moments of wondering. She tries to remember her encounters with Tally Robison over the years, if she dropped any hints about knowing something, but the woman always acted superior to her, so her conceited manner was no clue. She never saw Rita again, although her daughter was around sometimes. She considered tracking down Father Andrew-long gone from the parish, out west somewhere-and talking to him about the situation, albeit in a hypothetical way. If a man killed a man who touched his child, would God forgive that? Is that murder? But Doris doesn’t want to know the answer. She thinks Tim did the right thing.
Which is why she told Go-Go, when he came back this time, the last time. Always given to moping, he had fallen down a very deep hole after being kicked out by Lori. He said she had no cause, but Doris assumed her daughter-in-law had some complaint. She worried it had to do with other women. She’s not sure why, it’s just a feeling she has. Go-Go has a problem with women, did all during his first marriage, which is part of the reason why Claudia got violent, started attacking him. The alcohol was merely a substitute for the thing he really wanted. So when Go-Go was drifting around the house, feeling sorry for himself, she finally told him: Your father did this for you. Your father loved you.
Within a week, Go-Go was dead.
She puts down her book, although she is only twenty pages from the end. Doris hates to go to bed with a book finished. She can’t say why. Certainly it’s not because she fears dying in the night and never knowing the ending. Maybe it’s because it’s a little less lonely, knowing she has a group of people waiting for her in the morning, people who can’t go on unless she opens the book. Hello, Meg! Hello, Josie! What’s up with you? For a while, her favorite series was about two Alabama sisters, and then the writer died, which felt almost like a betrayal. Then Doris discovered she can still reread those books and derive almost as much pleasure from them. The books never change, the characters never disappoint.
Whereas with Go-Go, all she can do is wonder how many secrets she’s required to keep, and for how long.
I t is no small thing for two mothers of young children to arrange a coffee date, and it takes several days for Gwen and Lori to find a convenient time and place to meet. They end up agreeing to late morning, at a Starbucks in the Columbia Mall, which is only a few miles from Lori’s town house. The suburb of Columbia came into being as a planned community, and although that plan included abundant green space and man-made lakes, Gwen feels that the seams show. She wonders how Go-Go felt about nature in such an orderly state, if he compared it to the untamed landscape they had known. Whenever she reads Where the Wild Things Are to Annabelle, she thinks about Go-Go, how he, too, would have liked to wear a wolf suit and sail to a place where he was king, commanding all the beasts to follow him in a wild rumpus. In a sense, they had, although only Go-Go danced.
“How did you happen to move out here?” she asks Lori, making conversation as they settle in with their drinks. The Starbucks is opposite an enormous carousel and train, which seem old-fashioned and a little out of place in this cookie-cutter mall.
“For the schools,” Lori says. “And the yards. I loved the city-we had a great apartment in Brewers Hill-but it didn’t make sense when our second one came along.”
“How old are the girls-”
Lori silences her with a hand. “You don’t need to make conversation for conversation’s sake. I know you’re busy, and I am, too. Let me say what I have to say: Yes, I threw Go-Go out. But it wasn’t for drinking, like it was the last time. He was sober and had been doing pretty well, too.”
“What was the reason?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know.”
“You threw your husband out for reasons not even you know?” It sounds ludicrous. Then again, Gwen is no less ridiculous, using her father’s accident as a way to attempt a trial separation from Karl for reasons she still can’t articulate.
“He was up to something, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. So I told him to leave.”
As a journalist, Gwen is used to hearing people’s life stories in choppy, nonsequential bursts, with much presumption of context on the listener. She will have to guide Lori through this if Lori really wants their meeting to go quickly.
“Back up. When did you ask Go-Go to leave?”
“Right after the holidays. The calls started before then, but I wanted to get through Christmas for the girls’ sake.”
Ah yes, the timetable of the failing marriage. After Christmas, after his birthday, after Valentine’s Day. Gwen is familiar with how it works
“Calls?”
“A woman telephoned the house, looking for Gordon. Very polite, said he knew the reason she was calling and she was hoping to hear back from him. When I gave him the message, he acted weird. Jumpy. He said it was a scam and he wasn’t going to call her back. But then the same number began showing up on his cell phone, several times.”
“And you know this because-”
“Because I check my husband’s cell phone log. And his e-mail. If he had a Facebook page, I’d check that, too.” She gives Gwen a can-you-blame-me look, and Gwen, who continues to monitor her husband’s Facebook page, understands.
“Did Go-Go-Gordon-give you a reason to”-Gwen thinks it best to choose her next words with great care-“keep close tabs on him?”
Lori stares down into her drink, backing away from eye contact for the first time.
“Not really. I don’t think he ever cheated on me, although I know that was an issue during his first marriage. I mean, he looked at porn on the Internet, but so what? I didn’t care as long as he cleaned out the cache and the children couldn’t stumble on those sites. But something was… missing, always.”
Something in Gwen-her stomach, her heart, her throat, it’s too quick to pinpoint-clutches. This is how she feels. Something is missing. But her fear is that it’s in her.
“What do you mean by ‘missing’?”
“It’s like-this is going to sound weird, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. When I was younger, living on my own, I got this video center from Ikea, and one of the parts was missing, or I couldn’t find it in the packaging. But it didn’t seem essential, because I put the thing together and it held. Then one day, without warning, the whole thing came down with a crash. I feel that’s how it was with Gordon. There was some little piece missing, something no one could see, and he finally fell apart.”
What had Go-Go told Lori, if anything? What happened to him was his story to share. But what happened to Chicken George belonged to the others as well. Could he have told Lori the first part without the second? Again, Gwen chooses her words carefully: “Did Go-Go-Gordon, I’m sorry, he’ll forever be Go-Go to me-acknowledge this? Did he see it, too?”
“He wasn’t a talker that way. And, for a long time, there was the drinking. He was an alcoholic, and that explained everything. Then, this latest time with AA, it seemed to take, and yet he was still kind of mysterious, closed off. It was like he was holding a piece of himself back. From me and even the girls, although he doted on them. But he was never fully present.”
Gwen thinks of the boy she knew. His one gift was to be startlingly, insistently there. The boy who ran for the ball, fearless of a truck bearing down on him, while the others stood frozen, debating. The boy who did the wild dance. He was never self-conscious, not then. Then the rumors started, disturbing stories about putting cats in milk boxes, shoplifting, acting out in school. However wild and frantic Go-Go was when they roamed the woods together, it was only after the night of the hurricane that he became wild in a frightening, disturbing way. But Gwen had broken up with Sean by then. Go-Go wasn’t her problem.
“Like, here’s a classic Gordon story,” Lori says. “We had a neighbor, Mrs. Payne, back in the city. And she was a pain. Strange, paranoid. She was the last holdout on the block, everyone else was young, like us, and she hated us all, but Gordon was the only one who cared. She yelled at us for not cleaning up after our dog, and we didn’t even have a dog. Thought we stole her mail, thought we stole her newspaper. And Gordon couldn’t stand it. He had to make her like him. When it rained or the weather was bad, he started carrying her paper up to her door, putting it inside the storm door. With a note! So she would know it was him. One day he came home from the store with our oldest, Mia, in her car seat. She would have been eighteen months or so. And he saw Mrs. Payne dragging her little grocery cart down the street, and nothing would do but he had to get out and carry her groceries and put away the cold things-leaving Mia in the car! He completely forgot about Mia. I happened to come home from the gym and found her sleeping in the car. She was fine, but what if something had happened while he was carrying in groceries for a woman who didn’t give a shit about him?”
Gwen can imagine the scene too well-the sleeping baby, slumped over in the seat, unharmed, while the mother runs through every nightmare that might have happened. In some ways, tragedies averted are even more terrifying than the things that actually occur.
“Jesus,” she says.
“I know,” Lori says. “And all because he’s sucking up to some woman who still didn’t like him. He shoveled her walks during snowstorms, too, put out ice melt crystals, and all she did was complain that it left pockmarks on her steps.”
“It is human nature to chase after those who don’t like us.” Although, Gwen thinks, not Karl’s nature. He’s done very little to encourage her to return home. He has spoken his piece, said he loves her and wants to continue to be married to her, but he sees no reason to repeat himself. He thinks she is acting like a child. She thinks she’s acting like a human being. They both could be right. “I bet Go-Go chased you hard during your courtship.”
“No.” Lori shakes her head, smiling at some private memory. “I pursued him. Everybody said he was no good, but I didn’t see that. I thought he was sweet and funny and a really good time. I converted for him.”
“He was still a practicing Catholic?”
“It was more about his mother, I think. I didn’t care. I loved Go-Go. Doris was part of the package.”
“But wasn’t he married before?”
“Yes.”
“So Go-Go got an annulment?”
“Apparently. Again, I think his mother pressed for it. She called in a favor, that’s how I heard it.”
“It’s just hard to imagine he would have had grounds. Or, frankly, the kind of drag one needs with the church.”
Lori shrugs. Everything she does is pretty, dainty, adorable. “All I know is Gordon’s first wife was bat-shit crazy. Violent, even, although Go-Go didn’t like to talk about that. She hit him, I mean, she whaled on him. At any rate, he got whatever he needed, and we married in the church. It was really important to Doris.”
“How’s Mrs. Halloran doing since he died?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. She’s all but put Go-Go’s death on my doorstep, said it was my fault for throwing him out. But I couldn’t go on. Whatever he was doing, he was definitely lying to me about something. I’d had enough. I wasn’t going to be made a fool of.”
“Did you ever call the number on his cell, try to find out who the mystery woman was?”
“Oh, yeah. I was on the verge of my own private Jerry Springer Show . I called the number, ready to throw down. Only the woman who answered said I had the wrong idea, she was a private investigator and really had been paid to find Gordon, although she couldn’t tell me why. When she found out I was his wife, she urged me to get him to call, said it was really important, that someone from Gordon’s past needed him.”
Someone from his past . Gwen’s stomach lurches, even as she tries to remind herself that Go-Go had forty years of life, only a scant part of which intersected hers. It could be anyone, anything. Go-Go was a mess. He must have left a lot of messes behind.
“Did you call her after Go-Go died?”
“What would be the point? If she couldn’t tell me why she was trying to find him when he was alive, she wasn’t going to tell me anything after he died.” Lori makes a sound that is supposed to be a laugh, but it is strangled, mirthless. “Someone from his past needed him. Who cares? It’s like Mrs. Payne all over again. Could anyone from his past need him as much as his girls do, as much as I did? I know it’s a stereotype, Catholics being guilt-ridden, but I have never known anyone as guilty as Gordon. He was up to something. I just never figured out what it was.”
Gwen wonders if Lori can pick up on how guilty Gwen feels at the moment. About Go-Go, but also about Chicken George. She is remembering how Chicken George came and went without explanation, how he had been missing much of that summer-and how she and Sean had used his little cabin for their own furtive means. As children, they had accepted the mystery of his life as a given. There was much about adults that didn’t make sense to them. They were incurious. The cabin was there, if not the steel guitar, which always went with Chicken George. Who cared why he wasn’t there? Who could possibly notice the boy and girl who visited there?
Now, as someone with experience in the world, it occurs to her to wonder where he went during those absences. Jail? A hospital? A mental hospital? What if Chicken George had a family, who intervened, forced him to get treatment and had to sit back when he signed himself out of the hospitals, never crazy enough to be declared incompetent? And what if those family members lived on and still wonder about their relative’s death? Because, after all, who ventures out on a night of a hurricane, steel guitar in hand?
“Do you still have the private investigator’s number?” she asks.
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.
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.”
Gwen stares out the window at York Road, and Tim follows her gaze. It’s one of those places that seem to have changed very little over the years. It’s ugly now, but it was always ugly.
“I’m going to go talk to her.”
“Her?”
“The PI.”
Tim shakes his head. “Don’t. This is about my family, not yours, Gwen.”
“It’s about all of us. There’s no hierarchy.”
“Really? Were you sexually molested in the woods? I mean, nonconsensually?”
She blushes. “That’s a little crude, Tim. Even for you.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to take the bloom off your first love, the tender memories of dry-humping and second base.”
He has been too specific. She shoots him a look. “I always thought you watched us.”
“Only once,” he admits. “And not out there. In the basement.”
She looks down at her plate. “That summer, when Chicken-when he-disappeared that last time, Sean and I started using the cabin. Only a few times. It smelled so bad. I felt dirty there.”
“And not in the good way.”
“Tim.”
God, they are their young selves again, him teasing Gwen because he’s so insanely jealous of his brother, having a willing girlfriend when Tim can’t find one. It’s not that he wants her, or ever really wanted her. It’s that his brother leapfrogged ahead of him. Later, Go-Go got more pussy than the two of them combined. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure that one out.
“Did you ever go back?” she asks. “After?”
She doesn’t have to specify back to where. “No.”
“My dad did. He went back again and again. He doesn’t know I know this. He would set out for these long walks on weekends and he wouldn’t invite me, the way he used to. I’m sure that’s where he went.”
“He probably thought you had no interest. You were a teenager by then. Trust me, teenage girls have very little use for their fathers. Their fathers’ wallets, but not their fathers.”
“My dad and I got along well. Then and now. Yet we can’t talk about this.”
“Gwen, let it go. This isn’t about you.”
Gwen glances around the table, in search of something. She grabs a napkin, rummages in her purse, finds a pen. A much-chewed pen, Tim observes, the one thing about Gwen that is not put together, polished. She draws a star in the way that grade-schoolers are taught, with five slashing lines.
“This was us. The five points of a star,” she says. “Remember? Mickey said we were like a starfish.”
“A starfish regenerates its limbs. My brother isn’t coming back. My brother, Gwen.” He is trying to underline to her that he gets to decide this. He and Sean, if it comes to that, but not Gwen.
“Now look at the center. When you draw a star this way, it forms a pentagon at the center. That was Chicken George. Not just him, but the woods, and our adventures there. When he molested Go-Go, when he died-we were all cut off from each other. I suddenly couldn’t stand to be around Sean. I didn’t know why, I just know it was so. And I think he was relieved that I didn’t want to go with him anymore. Mickey went to a new school, and we didn’t see her anymore, but we had always gone to different schools, so that wasn’t it. You think it’s dangerous to look closer at this. I think it’s dangerous to look away.”
Their appointment had been for twelve forty-five, late for lunch in this part of town, and the diner has emptied, entered the afternoon lull. He sees the homicide detectives up at the cashier, paying their separate checks, shaking toothpicks free from the dispenser. A lawyer he knows, a formidable defense attorney, is finishing her coffee at the counter, reading the paper. She catches his gaze, arches an eyebrow at him. That old bag doesn’t miss a trick.
“I’ve got to get back to work.” In his mind, he is running through the chain of events if this were ever to become public. What if Gwen decides to write about this, for God’s sake? Writers have so few boundaries. Didn’t she publish an article about her own daughter’s adoption a few years back, complete with details no one needed to know about her fertility problems? Maybe he should tell his boss, confidentially and preemptively. Hell, forget his boss, how does he tell Arlene, someone from whom he has no other secrets? When I was a kid … But even now, even with Go-Go dead, it feels like a betrayal. They are not supposed to talk about this. Even with his mother, in the weeks since Go-Go’s death, they have strenuously avoided the topic. “You don’t think-” his mother said the weekend after the funeral, when everyone else’s lives were going back to normal and they were left alone in their new normal, this territory of grief, whose boundaries lie far beyond their range of vision, making it impossible to know how long they will be here, if they will ever leave. “No,” he said. He didn’t think it was a suicide. He didn’t think it had anything to do with what happened when Go-Go was nine because why now? It made no sense. He got drunk. He cracked up his car. End of story.
His conversation with Gwen has nowhere to go, but they make a stab at it. They talk idly about their children, schools, whether they fit the definition of helicopter parents, although they’re both pretty sure they don’t. Gwen wraps a strand of hair around her finger, a habit he remembers from childhood. She’s going to do whatever she wants. She always has. A moment ago, when she mentioned breaking up with Sean, Tim almost blurted out what he has always known about his brother: Sean was relieved that Gwen broke up with him because he was terrified of her, of sex. Oh, Sean wanted to have sex. But not with Gwen, because she was too scary-good at getting what she wanted, and what if she wanted to be his only girl, ever? As a newly pretty girl, Gwen was rough with her power, as reckless in her own way as Go-Go. She was like a child discovering a loaded gun in Daddy’s nightstand. Even if nothing happens, the sight is terror enough, the weapon juggling in those small hands, so many possible outcomes, almost all bad.
As a woman, she is smoother, but still not as smooth as she thinks she is. She will do whatever she wants, with no regard for anyone’s feelings. She always has.
R ita can tell it’s going to be a bad day even before she opens her eyes. She feels it in her bones. Well, technically, she feels it in her joints, which are not the same thing as bones, as she now knows, thanks to all those smarty-pants doctors, men younger than her, who could be the very residents who used to undertip her at Connolly’s. In spite of herself, Rita has learned a lot about the body, her body. She could probably pass whatever test people have to take for medical school from all the tedious blah, blah, blah about her joints, tendons, lining, inflammation. Her situation boils down to this: She hurts. A lot.
Besides, Rita has no desire to go to medical school, so having all this information at her fingertips-her swollen, clumsy, useless fingertips-is like being asked to familiarize yourself with the life story of a person who ran you down with a car. What’s the point of understanding a disease when the disease can’t be cured? Rita has to settle for managing her rheumatoid arthritis. Her doctor keeps trying various drugs in new combinations. A little more of this, a little less of this. Wait, this is interacting badly with that. He reminds her of Mickey as a child, busily arranging spindly wildflowers in a jar, the stems wilting, the blossoms drooping from all her handling. Meanwhile, Rita can’t find a sleep drug that works. Even with Ambien, her sleep is thin, barely sleep at all.
She bets her doctor sleeps beautifully. Probably has one of those special beds-the one designed for astronauts, or the one with the individual controls. There’s not a bed in the world that could help Rita sleep better. Rita, who could sleep sitting up, in a car, even on her feet once upon a time. She tried a water bed after she was diagnosed, thinking the heat would help, but it was a bust. She gave it to Joey, who gave it to Mickey, which pissed her off a little. “If I want your sister to have something, I’ll give it to her,” she told Joey. “But you never want her to have anything,” he pointed out. Not exactly true. It’s just that anything Rita has to give, she always offers Joey first.
And why shouldn’t she? Mickey-Rita’s not about to use that stupid name she’s conferred on herself, kids don’t get to pick their own names, that’s a parent’s right-doesn’t do anything for her. Never visits, even though she almost certainly gets to fly for free, deadheading or whatever they call it. Won’t send money when she knows Rita is perpetually short. Says she doesn’t have any, but Rita doubts it. That girl is a squirrel, putting away anything she can. As a child, Mickey had drawers full of things she had found, stupid, nasty things. Nests, rocks, birds’ eggs. She yowled when Rita threw them out, but you can’t have things like that in the dresser drawers. Dirt attracts dirt.
Rita brings her legs over the side of the bed. Stiff, but not awful. Then again, her legs never bother her that much. The pain lives in her upper body, in her hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders. She makes her way to the kitchen, bumping the corner of the old-fashioned bureau. The slight movement almost knocks off the scarf she has draped over the mirror. Rita has covered up all but one of the mirrors in the house, a small makeup mirror in the bathroom, the one she uses when brushing her hair and applying lipstick. She’s OK with seeing herself, but she doesn’t like to be surprised by her image, doesn’t want that moon face sneaking up on her. She has to be prepared. It’s a tough thing, trying to get rid of one’s image. Her bungalow, it turns out, is full of reflective surfaces-the windows at night, the microwave door, even the faucet. The world keeps throwing her face in her face.
In the kitchen, she puts the water on to boil, shakes a cigarette out of the pack, which she leaves here at night so she won’t be tempted to smoke in bed. When rheumatoid arthritis was finally diagnosed-after three years of chasing so many other demons and diagnoses-she was advised that smoking was a risk factor and she should quit. “But I’ve got it already,” she told the doctor. “Can’t unring the bell, can I?” Her fingers are knobby and stiff; lighting the cigarette off the burner and getting it to her lips requires effort. But it’s worth it. Smoking’s one of those pleasures that never dims. Smoking and orgasms, and Rita’s resigned to the fact that the only orgasms in her future will be thanks to her Medicaid-subsidized massage tool, applied to one of the few places where she feels no pain.
The aches started about eight years ago, moody and intermittent. Rita assumed they were occupational, as did most doctors. She had spent decades carrying trays, scrubbing down tables. Something was bound to give, and she’d have chosen tendinitis over varicose veins any day. Rita took good care of her legs. She would come home from work, prop them up on the coffee table, coax her guy into rubbing them, applying cream, promising there would be rubbing in his future, a promise she always kept. Rita was no tease. Funny, Rick did the best job, bone tired as he was after a day at the garage. Larry had him beat in bed, but Rick-well, Rick knew what it felt like to put in a hard day’s work, while Larry didn’t have a clue. Yeah, Rick was the better man all around. But she didn’t love him, and it would have been wrong, staying with him only because he treated her well. If you don’t love a man and you stick it out with him, you’re little better than a whore in Rita’s book, whether it’s his paycheck or his love or a roof that’s keeping you with him. Even if Larry hadn’t resurfaced, she would have ended up cheating on Rick.
Not that she counts Larry as cheating. She wishes she could have done it more gracefully, not let things get so nasty between her and Rick. But she doesn’t regret doing it. Rita doesn’t regret anything.
The water boils as she finishes her cigarette. Her hands cushioned in oven mitts, she manages to pour most of the water in her cup, splashing only a little on the counter. But the jar of Folgers mocks her, its lid unbudgeable. She thinks about the ease with which she opened those huge jars back in Connolly’s, how she was the one who could get any top off. Where’s her gripper? Joey has given her an assortment of tools and devices, but she constantly misplaces them. She’ll catch herself in the act time and again, putting something down and thinking, Oh, I shouldn’t put that there, I’ll never remember, even as another part of her brain chimes in: But you can’t forget this spot, it’s such an unlikely place. Sure enough, when she goes looking for something, she remembers she put it in an unlikely spot, just not what that spot was. She’s got to have a jolt of caffeine. She will have to search her bungalow for the gripper, and small as the place is, her water will probably be cold by the time she finds it.
Rita moved to Florida, real Florida as she thought of it, shortly after Larry turned out to be Larry. Unreliable, incapable of holding down a real job, no interest in being a father to his son. She had no one but herself to blame-and no interest in doing so. She tried to make a go of it with her kid’s real father, a man she loved. How can that be wrong? She relocated to Boca Raton with Joey and a guy who seemed steady. She was trying to be pragmatic again, but the guy didn’t last, as it turned out. Other men came and went in the little bungalow. One stayed five years, the rest were more short-term. Joey never minded, although he liked it better when it was just the two of them. No, Rick was the one who raised a fuss, back when she first left. He challenged her for custody, and she pulled out her ace in the hole, said he wasn’t Joey’s father anyway. A judge laid it out for Rick: He could act like Joey’s parent, keep paying support, have a relationship with him. Or he could walk away, scot free. Either way, he couldn’t have custody and he couldn’t force Rita to stay in Baltimore. So what did that sap do? He decided to keep paying, so she would at least send Joey up there for a couple of visits a year.
Maybe Rick deserves a little credit for how Joey turned out. Her son stayed in Florida, although he lives down in Fort Lauderdale, married a nice girl, who looks a little like Rita in her prime, has three kids. He visits every weekend, fights her battles for her-got her on SSI disability, arranged for cheaper drugs, found whatever agencies to assist her. Now here’s a kid who has every right to hate her, and he rocks steady. It’s Mickey who barely picks up a phone. What ails the girl? She doesn’t call her brother, either, and has never even seen her nieces and nephew, except in pictures. Joey shrugs it off. “We’re just not that close, Ma. I’m ten years younger, and we moved away when I was eight, leaving her in Baltimore.”
“So why did you give her the bed?” Man, that bugs her.
“I had to drive a rental truck up there anyway, to bring back stuff from Dad’s house. And we couldn’t give that thing away on Craigslist. Why not give it to Mickey? It was nice to see her, even if it was for Dad’s funeral.”
Rick died at the age of seventy last year. A stroke, out of nowhere, and no way to prepare for it. A weakness somewhere, maybe lurking there for years and then- kaboom . Dudley Do-Right to the end, he included Joey in his will, despite having two kids with the namby-pamby he married. Maybe it’s because they’re both girls and Rick was very specific about the things he wanted Joey to have-tools, a Jet Ski. He left him a little money, too. Rita’s emotions were all over the place when she heard about Rick’s death. Sad, mocking, resentful. Joey decided to drive a U-Haul up there and bring back the things his not-father had left him, despite having little use for them. He’s not particularly handy, can’t fix anything for shit. He is Larry’s son.
Rita’s sixty-three now, but crabbed and wrecked as her body is, she never doubts she’s going to live a long time, even with the smoking. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” her doctor always says. “I mean, other than the rheumatoid arthritis. Your cholesterol’s good, your blood pressure is good.” He says it grudgingly, as if Rita doesn’t deserve any good health. That’s the thing about doctors. They secretly want to call the shots, decide who gets the good life, and it pisses them off when someone like Rita isn’t crushed by illness.
Rita walks through her house, checking surfaces low and high. It’s a tiny house, two bedrooms off an open area that contains the kitchen, dining nook, and living room. The Strawberry Hill apartment was bigger. Where did her grabber go? Again, all she remembers is the very thought- Well, this is a weird place to leave it. Ah, she spies it through the sliding glass doors that lead to a tiny patio, sitting on a wrought-iron table. That’s right. It was a pretty evening last night, warm but not hot, probably one of the last decent nights before full-on summer lands. Rita sat on the patio, eating an entire jar of cashews, rationalizing that she needed a treat. Her days of watching her figure are long gone, and although she’s not fat-Rita’s genes keep her lean, another thing that probably pisses her doctor off-she’s got a few rolls on her.
The patio door’s lock is sticky, hard to maneuver on her best days. It’s easier to slip out the front door and circle around, grab the grabber, and come back to the front door-which has locked behind her. Fuck . Her bones, her joints, whatever, didn’t begin to tell the story of how bad today was going to be. Given the nature of her relationships with the neighbors-she hates the one to the east, the one to the west hates her-she can’t see knocking on their doors at 7 A.M., asking to use the phone to call Joey. Who, bless him, would be here as fast as he can with her spare keys, no questions asked. She could walk to the Circle K and use the pay phone, but it would take her forever to shuffle that dusty mile. Plus, while her loose flowery nightgown and slippers pass muster for sitting on her front steps, it’s not an outfit that a sane woman wears walking down a busy street. She’d get picked up and taken in for a psych exam.
She sits on the steps, picks up the paper, which they won’t stop delivering no matter how often she cancels it. She gets all the news she wants from television, and the last thing she needs is something that comes in the house only to pile up and have to be discarded. Her grandchildren lecture her on recycling. On recycling and smoking and voting. When did children get so moral ? Weren’t the parents and grandparents supposed to be instructing them? She has asked them as much, and they say: “But, Grandma, it’s going to be our world.”
She doesn’t have the heart to tell them that you get the world on loan, on terms you don’t dictate and can’t control. It’s about as good a deal as those furniture leases with all the hidden interest rates. Rita figures she had the world for about twenty years, from age twenty to forty. Then it was Joey’s turn to step up, take his bite out of it. Being Joey, he took a small, polite bite, sort of like: Oh, thank you for my job as a probation officer and my nice wife and my three children, but really, I couldn’t eat another bite. He was born good, that’s all there is to it, and Mickey was born-not bad, but angry and fretful, always discontent, so concerned with the fairness of things that she ended up with nothing. Best Rita can tell, Mickey’s never had a happy day in her life, and it breaks her heart, truly. Because for all she has to mourn-the breakdown of her body, being alone, all the daily demon worries about money and bills-she had a lot of fun, when there was fun to be had. A lot. She scratches her ankles, one part of her body that hasn’t succumbed to the pain or the steroids, smiling at her memories.
A patrol car idles by and she flags it down, thinking the cops can help her break into her own house. She’s pretty sure the bathroom window is unlocked and someone could wiggle through it. Someone whose body is reliable, that is. The officers are Latino, very handsome, but Rita’s not deluded enough to flirt with them, although she’s happy when one sees a photograph of her in the front hall and asks: “Is that you?” She nods and he says, respectfullike: “You must have had to beat them off with a stick.” He adds quickly: “I bet you still do.”
“No,” Rita says. “Now I have to beat them with a stick and drag them in here.” She brandishes her grabber at them, and they laugh. Rita doesn’t need the pretense that she hasn’t aged. The idea of aging bothers her less than it might have, perhaps because she has a specific reason to look as she does. She can tell herself she’d look good if it weren’t for the steroids. “I got a daughter, though, who looks exactly like that now. Better, if you want to know the truth.”
That’s not exactly true. But she suddenly feels generous toward Mickey, wants to balance the scales of her own mind, where she’s been running her daughter down.
“You’ll have to introduce us when she comes to visit.”
That’ll be the day, Rita thinks, going back to her teakettle, the jar of Folgers, restarting her morning. What did I do, Mickey? I know I wasn’t perfect, not by a mile, but if Joey can forgive me, why can’t you? The difference, she thinks, is that Joey is a parent. He gets it, he knows how high one’s hopes and aspirations are-and how awful it is to confront the gap between the parent you want to be and the parent you are. Maybe she shouldn’t have had kids, but where would Mickey be then? Would she rather not exist at all? Rita, for all her aches and pains, for all her mistakes, thinks life is a hoot. She’d do it all over again, and the exact same way, knowing full well where she’s headed.
Coffee in one cramped, crabbed hand, she shuffles to the living room to watch the news, smoke another cigarette.
G wen has met many people who hate journalists-they announce it happily, proudly, often at cocktail parties where she has just been introduced-but none quite as vociferously as the private detective who tried to contact Go-Go in the weeks before his death. Tess Monaghan has refused to return Gwen’s calls and didn’t even acknowledge e-mails sent to the bare-bones Web site she maintains. After several days, she finally sent back a terse note:
I don’t talk to reporters.
Gwen wrote back, under her personal e-mail :
I’m not approaching you as a journalist, but as a friend of Gordon Halloran, who died in what may well be a suicide committed after you tried to contact him, wreaking not a little havoc in his life.
Another day went by before she received this e-mail:
My office, 2 p.m.
The office is in Butchers Hill, less than a mile from the magazine’s headquarters, yet worlds away in a sense. While Butchers Hill caught a whiff of the go-go real estate boom of the century’s first decade, it is nothing like the glass canyon where Gwen’s office is located. It has retained its human scale, tucking new restaurants and shops into old rowhouses. Tess Monaghan’s office, which was virtually unmarked, sits two blocks from Patterson Park.
“It’s open,” a woman’s voice calls out. Working behind an unlocked door seems a little casual for this neighborhood, even during the daytime. But as Gwen enters, she is immediately inspected by two large dogs, a greyhound and a Doberman, and a jumpier, miniature version of the greyhound. They circle and sniff her, apparently with satisfactory results, as they then return to the sofa, where they arrange themselves in an overlapping lump. Tess Monaghan, sitting behind her desk, doesn’t rise at all, but she has good reason: she is holding a baby, who is spitting up on her shoulder.
“Way to miss the burp cloth, Scout,” she says, clearly unperturbed by the fountain of curdy white liquid that trails down her sleeve.
“He’s adorable,” Gwen says, making conversation. She can’t really see much but the dark hair. She doesn’t have any real experience with infants. Annabelle was eight months when they met her in a Beijing hotel.
“She.”
“I thought you said scout?”
“That’s her name. Her middle name.” Tess Monaghan has a manner of speaking that makes questions seem not only unnecessary but also rude. The things that Gwen might normally ask-from To Kill a Mockingbird ? Why do you use her middle name? How old?-die on her tongue.
“I don’t normally bring her to the office,” Tess says. “We had a child care crisis today and I didn’t want to cancel on you.”
“No one has to explain child care crises to me. Most of my employees are working moms. She’s so tiny, but-” Gwen stops, not wanting to comment on a stranger’s appearance, but this woman looks pretty fit for having had a baby recently.
“She was really early. She’s technically almost five months old, but if she had been on time, she’d be barely three months.” Again, it is somehow clear there are to be no follow-up questions. “So, Gordon Halloran. Just to be sure we are on the same page-I am speaking to you off-the-record and this is not for anything you might write, ever, on any subject.”
“Right.”
“And by off-the-record, we both agree that means nothing I say is to appear in print, attached to my name or to an unnamed source?”
“I’m not here as a journalist.”
“Would you be willing to sign something to that effect?”
“Sure,” Gwen says. “After it was reviewed by my attorney.”
Tess smiles. “Fair enough. I just have to be super careful.”
“Were you burned by a journalist?”
“Worse. I was one. Your magazine did once put me in your hot singles issue, when I was neither single nor really all that hot. Although now when I see photos of myself from back then-only a few years ago-I think I look magnificent.”
“I’m pretty sure that was before my time,” Gwen says, then blushes. She was trying to reference the magazine, not the issue of Tess Monaghan’s looks, which merit the not-quite-compliment of handsome. Strong features, hair pulled back in a ponytail, a fresh-scrubbed face. “We still do the singles issue-it sells very well, and we make a bucketload on the advertising-but I’ve tried to add some serious journalism to the mix.”
“I’ve noticed. That’s why I don’t want to talk to you about Gordon Halloran in any kind of professional capacity. Besides, there’s not much I can tell you. I’ve spoken to my client. My client prefers to remain anonymous.”
Shit. That doesn’t assuage Gwen’s conscience in the least.
“Could I have any nonidentifying information about your client?”
“Such as?”
“Age, gender, place of residence. Race.” If the client isn’t African American, there’s little chance that one of Chicken George’s relatives has hired Tess Monaghan.
“I can ask. But my client is pretty paranoid. And unnerved by Gordon Halloran’s death. As am I, since you told me it might be a suicide. The news reports last month didn’t say that. At my discretion, I haven’t passed that information along to my client yet, but I will. It-” She pauses. “It complicates things for us, and I’m afraid it will make my client, who is a very nice person, feel quite bad. Are you sure?”
“It’s unclear,” Gwen says truthfully, not wanting to admit that she guilted the PI into this meeting. “It will probably always be unclear. He had been drinking after several months of sobriety. He drove into the concrete barrier at the foot of I-70, where it dead-ends into the park-and-ride. He was speeding, but he was always a reckless, fearless person. He could have been playing some silly game, misjudged the end of the highway.”
Tess Monaghan shifted the baby on her shoulder. Annabelle had been tiny, too, for her age. Still was. But Gwen had forgotten how alien young babies look, with their comically smushed faces and toothless smiles.
The detective says: “But he was a regular at AA.”
“Was. He didn’t go to the meeting that night.”
“Right.”
“Right-wait, how do you know that? I said only that he was sober.”
“One of my employees was attending those meetings.”
“That’s horrible .” Heedless of the lie she had told to gain this audience, Gwen is genuinely appalled. “The whole point of twelve-step programs is to provide people with a safe place to unburden their hearts. It’s a-desecration to send a spy there.”
Tess surprises her by nodding. “I wasn’t wild about it. I’m not wild about a lot of the things I do. But my client-well, my client is an honorable person who has a right to set the record straight on a matter that goes to the heart of my client’s very being. There was a possibility that Gordon Halloran was someone who could help do that. I sent someone into the meeting to see if he ever spoke about certain events in his past, if he contradicted what my client was telling me.”
“And-?” Gwen is shocked at how nervous she feels and hopes that Tess Monaghan can’t tell. It’s like driving down the road, glimpsing a cop in one’s rearview mirror and starting to shake despite being within the speed limit. No, it’s not like that, because Gwen is not without blame.
“He never spoke at all, not during the meetings. He was a little more open during smoke breaks.” Tess Monaghan laughs. “My poor partner, who hates cigarettes, took to smoking clove cigarettes and now has a bit of a penchant for them. Still, he talked only of his family, his wife and his daughters, how he was doing this for them.”
“It’s your messages to him that got him kicked out of the house,” Gwen says, eager to shift blame, to make someone else feel as twitchy and uncomfortable as she feels. “Which is probably why he started drinking again. And died.”
Tess Monaghan studies her intently. “Do you believe that? That’s not a rhetorical question.”
“Not exactly,” Gwen admits.
“You were attempting leverage, to guilt me into telling you things I just can’t tell you. I might do the same thing in your position. But please understand, I am working with an attorney-a very high-powered one, not my usual kind of gig. I have to respect the client’s wishes or I’m in violation of the agreement I signed, and this lawyer will come down on me like a ton of bricks if I do that. He’s a prick that way.”
“So why are you in business with him?”
The baby emits a comically large burp, delighting her mother. “The client’s a sweetheart. And the circumstances-I almost wish I could speak of them because it’s darn fascinating.” She laughs again, this time at herself. “Darn! As if this lump in my arm would be shocked by my old vocabulary, but I really have trouble cursing in front of her. Let’s just say my client is that rare person who’s interested in justice.”
Again Gwen is feeling far from comforted.
“Can you tell me anything?”
Tess thinks for a moment. “The client lives quite far away. New Mexico. I’m willing to tell you that one detail so you’ll understand it’s not someone you can find.”
“At what time in his life did Go-Go know this person?”
Tess gazes at the ceiling, absentmindedly places her lips against her daughter’s temple. “I don’t think I’ve ever said that Gordon did know this person. Or that he didn’t. When I finally spoke to Gordon-”
“You spoke to him? His wife thought-”
“I didn’t stop trying to speak to Gordon after he moved out, although I didn’t realize my calls had anything to do with that. And he affirmed what I believed and what my client believes. But now he’s dead and all I have are my notes from that brief conversation, and my notes-they’re not enough.”
“Enough?”
“They’re not proof of anything. I will say this much: I think my client was right in assessing Gordon’s character.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s essentially an honest person and has a hard time carrying secrets. He very much wanted to do the right thing. Look, my investigation is ongoing.” Gwen feels another flush of panic. “That’s why I have to be reserved about it. And any media attention, the barest whiff, would have horrible repercussions. You can’t imagine.”
Gwen can, though.
Tess Monaghan walks her to the door. It’s cool for April, and she cups a hand protectively over the baby’s scalp. “I worry about her immune system because she was a preemie. I make her wear hats to guard from cold, no matter how balmy it is, overdress her. Like all women, I have become my mother.”
Only Gwen hasn’t. Her mother never would have left her, under any pretext, not when she was Annabelle’s age. Her mother waited until Gwen was a teenager before she even dared to stake out a life of her own, through her painting. And by then Tally had so little time left. Would she approve or disapprove of Gwen as a parent? Could Gwen ever have lived up to her example-the well-kept house, the perfect meals? No, she runs a magazine for those who aspire, as she does, to be like her mother-effortlessly stylish, abreast of things. Gwen does a fair imitation of Tally, but it requires mountains of effort. Perhaps her mother put in just as much effort. Perhaps beneath the sweet, serene surface she also roiled with self-imprecations and disappointments. Still, she never let Gwen see that, whereas Gwen already has exposed her much younger daughter to a world of doubt.
Gwen’s thoughts are derailed by the squeal of brakes, a small but undeniable crash: an MTA bus has managed to stop before hitting the van that is blocking the street, but a Toyota Corolla behind the bus hasn’t been as fortunate, plowing into it. And now people are filing out into the street, but only one or two people are peering at the Toyota’s driver, who appears unhurt if dazed. No, most of the people are trying to get on the bus, prying open the doors, while the bus driver shouts at them to stop. Tess Monaghan laughs so hard that her baby daughter wobbles on her shoulder.
“This is why MTA buses have cameras,” she tells a mystified Gwen. “Whenever there’s an accident, people try to say they were on the bus in order to file a claim. And it’s why,” she says over her shoulder, retreating back into the tiled vestibule, “that I have a thriving business. People are always looking for an angle, another pocket to pick.”
Walking to her car, Gwen is briefly entranced by the insight that Tess has just handed her, wonders if there’s a feature in it for the magazine. But then she thinks about the larger meaning of Tess’s words. Another pocket to pick . If Chicken George’s relatives wanted to file a wrongful death suit against someone, then Gwen’s pockets-actually Karl’s-would be the deepest. Can she be sued under such circumstances? Could any of them? What if she goes ahead and divorces Karl? Does that make her more vulnerable or less?
Yet it would be a relief if money is all that someone wants from them. Money always can be found, some way, somehow. If someone bears a grudge toward them, if someone knows that they left a man to die-money will be the least of their problems.
I t was never McKey’s intention to continue attending the AA meetings at the old St. Lawrence, and no one was too alarmed when she skipped the first few sessions after Go-Go’s death. She uses the cover of her work schedule, tells her sponsor that she’s attending meetings in Minneapolis, where she has frequent layovers. Luckily, the sponsor knows nothing about a flight attendant’s life and has no idea how little time she has on such trips, the airlines turning them around as fast as the regulations allow. At the same time, the sponsor is worried about her. A death in the group is a dangerous thing, especially when it involves someone falling off the wagon. He keeps checking in, and McKey decides it would be easier to show up than to endure Dan’s achingly sincere phone calls. Guy wants to bang her so bad, it’s pathetic.
She doesn’t share at the meetings. Go-Go didn’t either, at least not after she started showing up. But McKey’s work has made her good at appearing to be an empathetic, interested listener, and those who do speak seek out her gaze, especially the men. She is the best-looking woman here, there’s no use being modest about it. And the ban on relationships gives male-female interactions a kind of buzz that McKey hasn’t experienced since grade school, if even then. Men want her, or think they do because she meets their eyes and nods, encouraging them.
“We were worried about you,” Dan says when the others step outside to smoke, one vice McKey has never known.
“Because I wasn’t here?”
“And because of Gordon.”
She measures her words. “That was shocking.”
“You knew him, right? Outside of AA.”
Never lie until cornered. Counter first. “What makes you think that?”
“You two talked about how this place used to be a Catholic parish, back in the day.”
She remembers now, how Go-Go reacted the first time she came here, his inability to disguise his feelings at seeing her. She let him-them-off the hook with some inane chatter about St. Lawrence, showed him how to play it off. Just like when they were kids.
“My little brother went here, but he was much younger than Go-Go.”
“Go-Go?”
Shit. “What?”
“I thought you said-”
“One of those things. Gordon. I meant to say Gordon. I barely know my own name, after working eighteen hours yesterday. Mouth not connected to brain.” She smiles, lets him contemplate the mouth in question, full and wide under a fresh coat of lipstick. “Gordon. Duh.”
Joey had gone to St. Lawrence, at Rick’s insistence. Rita hadn’t even known that he was Catholic when they were together, but when he realized how close Rita’s apartment was to the school, he insisted that Rita enroll Joey there and he paid the tuition. McKey went to public school, not that she cared. She didn’t want to wear a uniform every day. Now that she wears one for work, she finds she enjoys it. One less decision to make. Joey went to St. Lawrence through third grade, the year that McKey graduated from high school. Her mother, by then on the outs with Larry-big surprise, that not working out-decided she wanted to move back to Florida, make a new start. Rick objected, and that’s when she dropped the bomb: Joey’s not your kid. Nowadays, there are talk shows essentially dedicated to paternity testing and baby-daddy-dom, but twenty-plus years ago, this was considerably more novel, the kind of judicial issue that all but required a Solomon. Rick was lucky enough to land a progressive judge, someone who said it was basically his choice: He could continue to pay child support and inhabit the role of Joey’s father, although he still couldn’t stop Rita from taking him to Florida. Or he could suspend ties altogether.
McKey thought it should be a no-brainer: if he couldn’t prevent Rita from moving away with the kid, he should definitely end support. But Rick didn’t see it that way. After the breakup with Rita, he became almost insufferably proper. Rita cheated on him, played him for a fool, but Rick acted as if he were the one who had to make amends. He started going to church, enrolled Joey in the parish school, married a young goody-goody, ended up adopting two kids when it turned out she couldn’t have any of her own. He stayed in touch with McKey through college. “I’m here for you,” he would say, and she always wanted to say back: No, you’re not. Because Rick, for all his goodness and niceness, could never quite treat her like a daughter. She was his girlfriend’s daughter, his son’s sister, but not his daughter. It obviously wasn’t a blood thing because the lack of a blood connection to Joey didn’t keep him from wanting to be Joey’s dad. Eventually she stopped worrying about it.
What did she know from fathers and daughters, anyway? The only example she had close to hand was Gwen and her dad, and that wasn’t anything to emulate. For one thing, he was old and he looked it, even back in the day. And he was always-what was Tally Robison’s term for it?- holding forth . On the occasions that Mickey ate dinner with the Robisons, the meal was like another class, with quizzes on current events and science and history and vocabulary. She didn’t even try to participate, except when it came to plants and trees. Even as a girl, Mickey knew as much about those subjects as Dr. Robison. She didn’t have all the right words, but she understood the natural world in a way that Gwen didn’t. She was aware of the seasons and the smells. It was Mickey who taught Go-Go how to catch salamanders, Mickey who lured crawfish from the old storm drain at the bend in the creek, Mickey who found the tiny little fossil, which Rita threw away.
“You should study botany,” a bored high school adviser told her. But that wasn’t right for her. No job was. Park ranger, gardening-there was no paying gig that could return her to the way she felt when she roamed the hills of Leakin Park as a child. Maybe there is no job that can make a person feel as she felt at ten, eleven. That do-what-you-love bullshit-it’s another scam, as far as McKey is concerned, another way people set you up for disappointment. She loves having a job she doesn’t love because she’s always clear on why she’s there: to pay the bills.
The AA meeting gets under way and she assumes her attentive posture, listening and nodding, capable of taking in the stories, even while following her own thoughts. There really are only so many variations to addiction stories. Names change, but bottoming out, based on what she hears here, appears to be a largely universal experience. How much longer must she attend? Perhaps she’ll tell Dan she’s moving to Minneapolis. Always tricky to tell such a lie in a small-town city like Baltimore, where people’s paths are forever crossing, but if that day should come, she’ll find a plausible reason to be back here, no? Dan is a pain in the ass and too chummy for her. Maybe all his concern really is part of his role as her sponsor, but she’s dubious.
Take tonight, his insistence on walking her out to her car, as if there’s any danger in this church parking lot.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he says. “Now we just have to worry about Daisy.”
“Daisy?”
“The older woman who used to bring knitting to the meetings. Very Madame Defarge.”
She stares at him blankly, realizing she should recognize the reference, but not caring if he sees it has gone past her. Just like dinner with the Robisons, all those years ago, all that talk, talk, talk flying around the air. Mickey stared into space, defiantly bored by the Robisons, who thought they were so interesting.
“Big woman,” Dan says. “Wore flowery dresses. Smoked clove cigarettes.”
“Oh, yeah.” McKey doesn’t pay much attention to women because they are seldom of use to her.
“Her sponsor tried to call her, but she’s not answering, doesn’t even have voice mail.”
“Maybe she died.”
“McKey!” Dan acts as if she’s making a dark joke, but she was being merely factual. Daisy’s an old lady, probably alone. She could have fallen in her apartment. She could be lying there right now, dead or dying. Does Dan think all the tragedy of the world is linked to drinking? He probably does. He’s built his life around it.
“Be safe,” he says as she gets behind the wheel.
“I always am.”
It’s a haul, getting back to her apartment. It’s a haul getting almost anywhere from this corner of Baltimore, and she wonders, as she has often wondered, how her mother ended up there. Because of Rick, of course. She met Rick, he worked at the Exxon station, and there you have it. Or was it the man before Rick? Rita followed men wherever they led her, yet now she is living man-less in Florida. This must explain her sudden interest in McKey, the messages on her answering machine. Call me, call me, call me . No thanks. Not my problem you’re alone and bored. I’m alone and never bored.
McKey lets herself into her apartment and goes straight to the refrigerator, pours herself a glass of white wine. Nothing like pretending to be an alcoholic to give one a craving for drink. Liquor is like porn to those people, and after listening to them talk about it nonstop, she can’t wait to have a drink, although normally she can take it or leave it. Wrangling drunks at 30,000 feet puts one off alcohol. It was stupid, telling Sean she was in AA with Go-Go. And he probably blabbed to Tim-boys are the worst gossips-maybe even Gwen. Should they meet again, she won’t be able to drink in front of him. And she wants to see him again. Although it would be nice this time if he weren’t so blotto. He was useless.
She examines herself in the mirror, pleased by what she sees. Her body, like her mother’s, is naturally hard, at least for now. Hard is good. Hard is what she strives for across the board. Hard of body, hard of heart, hard of mind. McKey is a warrior, a survivor. She’s ready-for the plane to go down, for a terrorist to pull a knife, for the world to end, for whatever comes. And, increasingly, it feels like something is coming for her, but she’s sidestepped it for now. She’s pretty sure she’s sidestepped it.
But at night, alone in her water bed-her mother’s old bed, a gift McKey accepted from her half brother because she thought it ironic, although she has lost track of what the irony was supposed to be-at night, on the edge of sleep, it’s hard to stay hard. She ends up crying as she has cried every night since Go-Go died. Even the night Sean was passed out in her bed, when she was finally so close to having the one thing she’d always wanted, she found herself weeping for the little brother of the man lying next to her.