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The Innocents
Laura Lippman
Years ago, they were the best of friends. But as time passed, they grew apart, became adults with families of their own, and began to forget about the past – and the terrible lies they shared.But now Gordon, the youngest and wildest of the five, has died and the others are thrown together for the first time in years.Could their long-ago lie be the reason for their troubles today? Is it more dangerous to admit to what they’d done or is it the strain of keeping the secret that is beginning to wear down on their souls.Dark, provocative and beautifully written, Laura Lippman’s genre defying novel will appeal to fans of Lionel Shriver, Megan Abbott and Kate Atkinson.(First published as The Most Dangerous Thing in the US)
THE INNOCENTS
Laura Lippman
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the USA by HarperCollinsPublishers,
New York, NY, 2011
Copyright В© Laura Lippman 2012
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Laura Lippman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9781847561954
Ebook Edition В© July 2012 ISBN: 9780007453290
Version 2018-07-23
For Georgia Rae Simon
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.
—JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, “MAUD MULLER”
Table of Contents
Title Page (#uec4f778e-1b5f-5014-ae62-fc6462965410)
Copyright (#u4c6c160e-8bfe-5e7c-8efd-709cb8126182)
Dedication (#u0ce425e5-95cf-517a-85dc-e60f240578d6)
Epigraph (#u8540aafc-c946-5992-bff5-c71167c29852)
GO-GO (#u76617fca-6184-5b39-9ab4-b003e2fdce02)
US (#u7f5f25a8-ce8b-5c0a-aacd-31a9c2b489c9)
Chapter One (#ue5f10397-b71f-5524-98ef-c0b322036d74)
Chapter Two: Summer 1976 (#uac1e0ae2-8f48-55c4-bc87-e3520699e9e4)
Chapter Three (#u22d2bc08-a800-5690-ad46-6e6472c88ace)
Chapter Four: Autumn 1977–Spring 1978 (#u377aafbf-1d26-5f64-ad80-5730a4816a35)
Chapter Five (#ud025728b-6a6a-5d97-82ce-0415776c6869)
Chapter Six: Summer 1978 (#u5fc6dff4-e811-5cca-901f-c9cd6839e718)
Chapter Seven (#uc2f26bb1-3ab6-53bf-b18d-db9c25829e90)
Chapter Eight: Summer 1978 (#ua42b5e90-ee22-505d-9296-730561190445)
Chapter Nine (#u141a697a-3660-5719-a8d2-e33d804f0a0e)
Chapter Ten: Autumn 1978–Winter 1979 (#u4dec02b5-aff9-5c4f-8496-855127bff392)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Summer 1979 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: September 5, 1979 (#litres_trial_promo)
Them (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: Autumn 1979 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen: Winter 1980 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen: Spring 1980 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One: Summer 1980 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two: Autumn 1980 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four: Winter 1980 (#litres_trial_promo)
Pity Them (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Pity us All (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
GO-GO
They throw him out when he falls off the barstool. Although it wasn’t a fall, exactly, he only stumbled a bit coming back from the bathroom and lurched against the bar, yet they said he had to leave because he was drunk. He finds that hilarious. He’s too drunk to be in a bar. He makes a joke about a fall from grace. At least, he thinks he does. Maybe the joke was one of those things that stays in his head, for his personal amusement. For a long time, for fucking forever, Gordon’s mind has been split by a thick, dark line, a line that divides and defines his life as well. What stays in, what is allowed out. But when he drinks, the line gets a little fuzzy.
Which might be why he drinks. Drank. Drinks. No, drank. He’s done. Again. One night, one slip. He didn’t even enjoy it that much.
“You driving?” the bartender asks, piloting him to the door, his arm firm yet kind around Gordon’s waist.
“No, I live nearby,” he says. One lie, one truth. He does live in the area, but not so near that he hasn’t driven here in his father’s old Buick, good old Shitty Shitty Bang Bang they called it. Well, not this Buick, but the Buick before, or the Buick before that. The old man always drove Buicks, and they were always, always, crap cars, but he kept buying them. That was Timothy Halloran Sr., loyal to the end, even to the crap of the crap of the crap.
Gordon stumbles and the bartender keeps him steady. He realizes he doesn’t want the bartender to let go of him. The contact feels good. Shit, did he say that out loud? He’s not a faggot. “I’m not a faggot,” he says. It’s just been so long since his wife slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, so long since his daughters put their sticky little hands around his neck and whispered their sticky little words into his ears, the list of the things they wanted that Mommy wouldn’t let them have, but maybe Daddy would see it differently? The bartender’s embrace ends abruptly, now that Gordon is out the door. “I love you, man!” he says, for a joke. Only maybe he didn’t. Or maybe it isn’t funny. At any rate, no one’s laughing and Gordon “Go-Go” Halloran always leaves ’em laughing.
He sits on the curb. He really did intend to go to a meeting tonight. It all came down to one turn. If he had gone left—but instead he went straight. Ha! He literally went straight and look where that had gotten him.
It isn’t his fault. He wants to be sober. He strung together two years this time, chastened by the incident at his younger daughter’s first birthday party. And he managed to stay sober even after Lori kicked him out last month. But the fact is, he has been faking it for months, stalling out where he always stalls out on the twelve steps, undermined by all that poking, poking, poking, that insistence on truth, on coming clean. Making amends. Sobriety—real sobriety, as opposed to the collection of sober days Gordon sometimes manages to put together—wants too much from him. Sobriety is trying to breach the line in his head. But Gordon needs that division. Take it away and he’ll fall apart, sausage with no casing, crumbling into the frying pan.
Sausage. He’d like some sausage. Is there still an IHOP up on Route 40?
Saturday morning. Sausage and pancakes, his mother never sitting down as she kept flipping and frying, frying and flipping, loving how they all ate, Gordon and his brothers and his father, stoking them like machines. Come Saturday morning, I’m going away. Hey, hey, hey, it’s Fat Albert!
When he moved back home six weeks ago, he asked his mother to make him some pancakes and she’d said, “Bisquick’s in the cabinet.” She thought he was drinking or whoring again, assumed that was why Lori had thrown him out. It was easier to let her think that. Then it turned out it was easier to be that, to surrender to drink and bad habits.
When it comes down to it, drunk and sober are just two sides of the same coin, and no matter how you flip it, you are still your fucked-up own self. It sure didn’t help that his current AA group meets in his old parish school, now a Korean church. It’s too weird, sitting on the metal chairs in an old classroom. Drink and the line gets fuzzy. Get sober and the line comes back into sharp relief, but then everyone starts attacking the line, says he has to let it go, break it down. Take down the line, Mr. Gorbachev. Boy, he’s all over the place tonight, tripping down memory lane in every sense of the word. Funny, he has a nice memory associated with Reagan, but it feels like he was really young at the time. How old was he when Reagan made that Berlin Wall speech? Sixteen? Seventeen? Still in high school and already a fuck-up.
But to hear everyone tell it, he has always been a fuck-up, came into the world a fuck-up, is going to leave as a fuck-up. Then again, whoever followed Sean was destined to be a disappointment. Sean-the-Perfect. You would think that with three kids in the family, the two imperfect brothers would find a bond, gang up on that prissy middle fuck. But Tim has always taken Sean’s side. Everyone gangs up against Go-Go, the nickname Gordon can’t quite shake even at age forty. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. That’s what the others had chanted when he did his dance, a wild, spastic thing, steel guitar twanging. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. GoGoGoGoGoGo.
Give Sean this: He’s the one person who consistently uses Go-Go’s full name. Gordon, not even Gordy. Maybe that’s because he needs two full syllables to cram all the disappointment in. Actually, he needs four. “Jesus, Gordon, how many times can you move back home?” Or: “Jesus, Gordon, Lori is the best thing that ever happened to you and you’ve got kids now.” Jesus, Gordon. Jesus, Gordon. Maybe he should have been Gee-Go instead of Go-Go.
He thinks about standing up but doesn’t, although he could if he wanted to. He isn’t that drunk. The beer and the shot hit him fast, after almost two years of sobriety. He was doing so good. He thought he had figured out a way to be in AA while respecting the line. They don’t need to know everything, he reasoned. No one needs to know everything. There would be a way to tell the story that would allow him to make it through all twelve steps, finally, without breaching any loyalties, without breaking that long-ago promise, without hurting anyone.
He gets up, walks down the once-familiar avenue. As kids, they had been forbidden to ride their bikes on the busy street that essentially bounded their neighborhood, which should have made it impossible to find their way to this little business district, tempting to them because of its pizza parlor and the bakery and the High’s Dairy Store. And there was a craft store with an unlikely name, a place owned by the family whose daughters had disappeared. He was little then, not even five, but he remembered a chill had gone through the neighborhood for a while, that all the parents had become strict and supervigilant.
Then they stopped. It was too hard, he guesses, being in their kids’ shit all the time and the children slipped back into their free, unfettered ways. Nowadays … he doesn’t even have the energy to finish the cliché in his head. He thinks of Lori, standing guard at the kitchen window of their “starter” home, a town house that cost $350,000 and to which he is now barred entry. Is that fair? Is anything fair? Sean is still perfect and even Tim does a good imitation of goodness, Mr. State’s Attorney, with his three beautiful daughters and his plumpish wife, who was never that hot to begin with, yet Gordon can tell they still genuinely like each other. He’s not sure he ever really liked Lori and he has a hunch Sean’s in the same boat with his wife, Vivian, who’s as frostily perfect as Sean. Tim and Sean, still married to their first wives, such good boys, forever and ever. Hey, he got an annulment, he’s technically in the clear. Besides, fuck the church! Where was the church when he needed it? And now it’s Korean Catholic, whatever the fuck that is, probably Kool-Aid and dog on a cracker for communion.
Where was he? Where is he? On Gwynn Oak Avenue, thinking about how Sean, of all people, had figured out that if they rolled their bikes across the bridge to Purnell Drive, they could technically obey the rule never to ride their bikes on Forest Park Avenue and still manage to get over to Woodlawn, where the shops are. Or was it Mickey who had figured it out? Mickey was the one who lived above Purnell Drive, after all. She would have known the route, too. Even when they were kids, Mickey had been smart that way. She should have become the lawyer, not Tim. She was the real brains.
He walks for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, willing his head to clear. He walks down to the stream, where there once were swans and ducks, then to the public park, the site of an amusement park that closed before Go-Go was old enough to go there. It survived integration, his father always said, but it couldn’t beat back Hurricane Agnes. Still, one roller coaster remained standing for years, long enough for Go-Go to feel thwarted, denied. Sean and Tim claimed to have gone many, many times, but they weren’t that much older. Sean would have been seven or eight when the park closed. Maybe they had lied? It makes Gordon feel better, catching perfect Sean in a potential lie.
Soon enough, the hypothetical becomes real to him, and he has worked up a nice fury. He gets out his cell phone and punches his brother’s name on his contact list, ready to fight with him. But his hands aren’t steady and he fumbles the phone as Sean’s voice comes on, cool and reserved. The phone ends up on the ground, where the black turtle shape is hard to find in the dark. As Go-Go crawls around on his hands and knees, he hears Sean’s voice, disgust evident. “Gordon? Gordon? Jesus, Gordon—”
I shoulda been Gee-Go. Does he say that out loud? His hand closes over the cell phone, but Sean has hung up. Okay, it isn’t exactly the first time he has drunk-dialed his brother. But he’s had a good run of sobriety, so Sean shouldn’t have been all pissy and judgmental. Sean has no way of knowing he took a drink. No, Sean expects him to fail. That’s unfair. And what kind of brother is that, anyway, expecting—rooting—for his younger sibling to fail? But that’s Sean’s dirty little secret. His perfection is relative, dependent upon the fuck-ups of Go-Go and Tim, and Tim isn’t giving him much breathing room these days. In another family, Sean wouldn’t even be all that. In another family, Sean might be the problem child, the loser. Especially if he had been treated like a loser from jump, the way Gordon was. They set him up. Of course he did whatever he was asked. He was just a little boy. Any little boy would have done what he did. Right?
His head clearer, he walks to the convenience store, buys a cup of scorched coffee, and drinks it in his car, his father’s old Buick, the last iteration of Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, which has survived his father by almost fifteen years now. He is less than two miles from his mother’s house. He has to make exactly four turns—two lefts, two rights. There are—he counts—one, two, three lights? The first one is there, right in front of him, complicated because there are actually five points at this intersection—five points, like a star. He sees Mickey making the drawing in the dirt, the stick slashing down and up, across and down, then up.
He makes it through, heads up the long steep hill. I think I can I think I can I think I can. Past the cemetery, through the second light. Almost home. Almost home. Only it isn’t his home.
At the next light, he turns right instead of left. Go, Go-Go, Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Climbs the freeway entrance ramp just before the Strawberry Hill apartments. Mickey’s family had moved here right before high school and Mickey’s mother was hot. Sean and Tim swore they saw her sunbathing topless once, but they probably lied about that, too. Roller coasters, topless girls—they lied about everything.
Gordon heads west on the highway, then makes a U-turn before the Beltway cloverleaf, aiming his car back home along the infamous highway that ends, stops dead. As teenagers, they treated this two-mile stretch as their own little drag strip, but now the secret is out and others race here. He wonders how fast his father’s old Buick can go. Ninety, one hundred? Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go-Go. The steel guitar twangs in his ears, in his memory, sharp and awful. Guy could not play for shit, much as he loved that damn stupid guitar. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. He is dancing, wild and free, his little arms moving so quickly it’s almost like he’s lashing himself, self-flagellation, and everyone loves him and everyone is laughing and everyone loves him and everyone is laughing and he is splashing through the stream, heedless of the poisonous water, no matter what Gwen’s father says about tetanus and lockjaw, desperate to get away, to escape what he’s done. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go.
By the time he hits the Jersey wall, even the needle on the old Buick’s speedometer has abandoned him.
US
CHAPTER ONE
Clement Robison’s house is wildly impractical for almost anyone, but especially so for an eighty-eight-year-old man living alone, even if he happens to be the one who designed it. Forty years ago, when Clem began the drawings for his dream house, he could not imagine being eighty-eight. Who can? Eighty-eight is hard to imagine even at eighty-seven. His youngest daughter, now forty-five, summoned home—or so she’s telling everyone—by her father’s accident, doesn’t really believe she’ll ever be as old as he is. Oh, she expects, hopes, to enjoy the genetic advantage of his longevity. But the number itself, eighty-eight, is like some monstrous old coat discovered in the hall closet, scratchy and smelling of mothballs. Who left this here? Is this yours? Not mine! I’ve never seen it before.
The Robison house was modern once and people still describe it that way, although its appliances and fixtures are frozen like the clocks in a fairy tale, set circa 1985, the last remodel. A mix of milled stone, lumber and glass, it nestles into the side of the hill on a stone base, a door leading into the aboveground basement, but the family custom was to use that door only in the most inclement weather, and Clem is not one to break long-standing habits. He has continued to mount the long stone staircase, which creates the illusion that one is climbing a natural path up the hillside. The steps are charming, but there is something off about them. Too low or too high, they fool the foot, and over the years almost everyone in the family has taken a tumble or near-tumble down. Gwen’s turn came when she was thirteen, rushing outside and neglecting to consider that the sheen on the steps might be ice, not mere moisture. She traveled the entire flight on her butt, boom, boom, boom, her friends laughing at the bottom. At thirteen, the end result was a bruised coccyx and ego, nothing more.
Her father, coming outside to get the paper on a cool but dry March morning, missed a step, tumbled almost to the street and broke his left hip.
“Do you know how many people die within a year of breaking a hip?” Gwen asks her father, still in University Hospital.
“Gwen, I taught geriatric medicine for years. I think I’m up on the facts. Most people don’t die.”
“But a lot do. Almost a third.”
“Still, most don’t. And I’m in good health otherwise. I just have to be disciplined about recovery and therapy.”
“Miller and Fee want you to sell the house, move into assisted living.”
“That again. And you?”
“I’m holding them off. For now. I told them I would assess your situation.”
They smile at each other, coconspirators. Gwen believes herself to be her father’s favorite, although he would never say such a thing. His denials are sincere when her much older siblings, Miller and Fiona, bring up the contentious matter. “I was just more available when Gwen was little,” their father says. “Less career obsessed.” “Daddy doesn’t have favorites,” Gwen says. But she knows the seven-year gap between Fiona and Gwen is not enough to explain their father’s clear preference for her. There is her remarkable resemblance to their mother, dead for almost twenty-five years. And there is the bond of the house and the neighborhood, Dickeyville, which Gwen and her father love more fiercely than anyone else in the family. As a child, she used to take long walks with him in the hills behind the house, never letting on that she traveled farther and deeper into them when she was with her friends. Miller and Fee, living thousands of miles away, have been trying to get their father out of the house for years, decades, ever since their mother’s death. Gwen, who remains in Baltimore, has done whatever she can to allow her father to stay in the family home. Should the day come that he really can’t live there, it has always been their unspoken understanding that Gwen will take over the house for her own family.
“How are things at home?” her father asks.
It’s an open question, applicable to the physical status of her house and a much larger, if vaguer problem. Gwen chooses to address the physical.
“Not great. The county came out and pushed the ruins of the retaining wall back on our property, but says it’s our job to rebuild it. And even when we do, it won’t necessarily address our foundation issues. The ground could shift again.”
“Why—never mind.”
“Why did we buy out there when our inspector warned us of this very problem? I ask myself that every day. For me, I think it was because Relay reminded me of Dickeyville. Isolated, yet not. A little slice of country so close to the city, the idiosyncratic houses. And for Karl, it was all about convenience—the commuter train station within walking distance, BWI and Amtrak ten minutes away. Go figure—for once, my dreamy nostalgia and his pragmatism aligned and the result is utter disaster. There’s probably a lesson to be learned there.”
“The lesson,” her father says, “is that you have a five-year-old daughter.”
“Don’t worry,” Gwen says, pretending not to understand. “We’ve figured out how to make it work once you come home. I’m going to get up at six a.m. and drive over there, do the breakfast and getting-her-off-to-school thing. And I’ll reverse it at day’s end, be there for dinner and bedtime. But I’m going to spend the nights at your house, so we don’t have to have a nighttime aide.”
“Gwen, I can easily afford—”
“It’s not about affording. And it’s just for a few weeks. Anyone can tolerate anything for a few weeks.” Months, years, her mind amends. It is amazing what one can tolerate, what she has tolerated. “Also, it’s not the worst thing in the world, making Karl curtail his travel, to learn that he’s part of a household, not a guest star who jets in and out as it suits him.”
“He is who he is, Gwen. You went into this with eyes wide open. I told you all about cardiac surgeons. And Karl was already a star. It’s not like this sneaked up on you. Not like the chicken.”
“What?”
“The chicken. That’s why I fell. There was a chicken on the steps, trying to peck at my ankles, and all I wanted to do was avoid stepping on it. I twisted my ankle and went over.”
Gwen tries not to show how alarming she finds this. A chicken? There haven’t been chickens in their neighborhood, ever. Except for—but those birds were far away and far in the past. No, that couldn’t be. Her father must have imagined the chicken. But if her father was imagining chickens, what else was breaking down inside his mind? She would almost prefer there was a chicken. Maybe there was. The past few years have seen a flurry of stories about animals showing up in places where they shouldn’t be—wildcats in suburbs, a deer crashing through the window of a dental practice, and, come to think of it, a chicken in one of the New York boroughs. And Dickeyville is the kind of place that has always attracted crunchy granola types. It is easy to imagine some earnest, incompetent locavore trying to raise chickens only to have them escape from his ineptly constructed coop. Gwen will ask around when she goes by the house this afternoon, to begin preparing for her father’s return.
The Robison house is isolated, even by Dickeyville’s standards, which in turn feels cut off from much of Baltimore. It is officially the last house on Wetheredsville Road, only a few feet from where the Jersey wall now blocks the street, marking the start of a “nature trail” that one can follow all the way to downtown. The blocked street means Gwen can’t use the old shortcut, through what is properly called a park, but which she and her childhood friends always referred to as the woods. Their term was more accurate. Leakin Park is a forest, vast and dense, difficult to navigate. Gwen and her friends covered more of it than almost anyone, and even they missed large swaths.
Traffic is surprisingly heavy, the journey longer than anticipated, giving the lie to her blithe words about dashing back and forth between here and the house in Relay. Still, the chance to move to Dickeyville, even temporarily, is providential. Maryland law requires a separation of at least one year to file for an uncontested divorce. She learned this during her first divorce, a sad bit of knowledge she had never planned to use again. Does anyone plan to divorce twice? Then again, after that first failed marriage, the fact is always there, incontrovertible. You’re not going to go the distance with one person, your chance at perfection is lost. For someone like Gwen, who is professionally perfect—she edits a city magazine that instructs others how to have the perfect house, children, wardrobe—this is particularly irksome.
Yet even if she can manage to extend her time in her father’s house for a year, it won’t be enough. It is the spouse who stays who can file after one year, on the grounds of abandonment. As the spouse who is leaving, Gwen will have to wait two years if Karl doesn’t agree, and he has made it clear that he won’t, ever. She can’t spend that much time away from Annabelle, but nor can she afford her own place in their current school district. They aren’t upside down in their mortgage, but they have virtually no equity, and home equity loans are hard to get now, anyway. Karl has lots of money, but, again, he isn’t going to use it to let her leave him. And if she spends even a single night back in the Relay house, the clock resets on the separation. Maybe Annabelle will move into the Dickeyville house and they can keep this information from the school?
But the Dickeyville house will be chaotic, once her father returns. A geriatric specialist should have designed a home that would be friendlier to old age, but his house is downright hostile to the idea. There is the first level, the stonewalled basement, with the laundry room and various systems. Then the large glass-and-timber first floor, built to take advantage of the site, but with only a powder room. Yet the top two floors, with its full baths, have narrow halls and tight corners. Their father, appalled at the spiraling costs and delays, skimped on his dream house’s bedrooms. She will have to set him up in the first-floor “great room,” where he will have nice views and space in which to move, if no bath. But then her father will dominate the first floor, and privacy will be found only in the cramped, dark bedrooms above. And how will he bathe? Besides, Annabelle would be lonely, as Gwen once was, and she won’t even have the freedom to roam the woods. What was considered safe in Gwen’s childhood is unthinkable for Annabelle’s.
Her head hurts. It’s all too complicated. Dial it back, as she tells her writers when they are in over their heads on a story. Concentrate on one thing, one task. Get to the house, make sure it’s clean, do laundry, call a nursing service, let the nursing service figure out the best place for her father to convalesce.
Once there, she finds three newspapers in yellow wrappers, several catalogs, but almost no real mail. Her father doesn’t recycle—on principle, he believes it’s a ruse, an empty, feel-good gesture—so she tosses everything, leaving only the bills on the kitchen counter. The kitchen is small, another victim of the house’s cost overruns, but her mother made it a marvel of efficiency. The light at this time of the day, year, is breathtaking, gold and rose streaks above the hill. Even with the old appliances, the yellowing Formica counters and white metal cabinets, it is a warm, welcoming room.
Gwen goes upstairs. Everything is in order, there is no evidence of a man in decline. Widowed at sixty-three, her father quickly learned to take excellent care of himself. His closet and drawers are neater than Gwen’s, there is an admirable lack of clutter. A single page from the Times, dated the day before his fall, is on his nightstand—the Wednesday crossword puzzle, filled out in ink, without a single error. The puzzle, the tidy house, it all indicates he’s of sound mind and should back up his version of events. So why does she keep thinking of it that way, as a version? She’s still troubled about that chicken.
Glancing out the narrow casement window toward the street, Gwen sees a black-haired man walking two dogs as black as his hair. She knows him instantly by the part in his hair, impossibly straight and perfect, visible even from this distance.
“Sean,” Gwen calls out through the window. Seconds later, she is running heedlessly down the stone steps that undid her father.
“Gwennie,” he says. Then: “I’m sorry. Old habits. Gwen.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Well—my brother, of course.”
“Tim? Or Go-Go?”
“Gordon,” he says. Perhaps Sean has sworn off nicknames. Funny, Gwen liked hearing Gwennie, even if it always carries the reminder that she was once fat. Gwennie the Whale. She was only fat until age thirteen. They say people are forever fat inside, but Gwen’s not. Inside, she’s the sylph she became. If anything, she has trouble remembering that she’s growing older, that she can no longer rely on being the prettiest girl in the room.
“What’s the incorrigible Go-Go—excuse me, Gordon—done now?”
Sean looks offended, then confused. “I’m sorry, I assumed you knew.”
“My father fell three days ago, broke his hip. I don’t know much of anything.”
“Three days ago?”
“In the morning. Coming down the steps to fetch his paper.”
“Three days ago—that’s when Go-Go …” His voice catches. Sean is the middle brother, the handsomest, the smartest, the best all-around. Gwen’s mother used to say that Tim was the practice son, Sean the platonic ideal, and Go-Go a bridge too far. Gwen’s mother could be cutting in her observations, yet there was no real meanness in her. And her voice was so delicate, her manner so light, that no one took offense.
“What, Sean?”
“He crashed his car into the concrete barrier where the highway ends. Probably going eighty, ninety miles per hour. We think the accelerator got stuck, or he miscalculated where it ended. I mean, we’ve all played with our speedometers up there.”
Yes, when they were teenagers, learning to drive. But Go-Go was—she calculates, subtracting four, no, five years from her age—forty, much too old to be testing his car’s power.
“He’s—”
“Dead, Gwen. At the scene, instantly.”
“I’m so sorry, Sean.”
Go-Go, dead. Although she has seen him periodically over the years, he remained forever eight or nine in her mind, wild and uninhibited. The risk taker in the group, although it was possible that Go-Go simply didn’t understand the concept of danger, didn’t know he was taking risks. She flashes back to an image of him on this very street, dashing across the road in pursuit of a ball, indifferent to the large truck bearing down on him, the others screaming for him to stop.
“Thank you.”
“How’s your mom holding up?” She remembers that Mr. Halloran died years ago, although she didn’t go to the funeral, just wrote proper notes to the boys and their mother. It was a busy time in her life, as she recalls.
“Not well. I came home for the funeral—I live in St. Petersburg now.”
“Russia?”
A tight smile. “Florida.”
Gwen tries not to make a face. Not because of Florida, but because the Sean she remembers would have been in Russia, a dashing foreign correspondent or diplomat. He’s still pretty dashing. Close up, she can see a few flecks of white in his hair, but the very dignity that bordered on priggish in a teenage boy suits him now. He has finally grown into his gravitas.
“I feel awful that I didn’t know. When is the funeral?”
“Tomorrow. Visitation is tonight.”
Gwen calculates, even as she knows she must find a way to attend both. She will have to ask for another half day at work, make arrangements for Annabelle tonight. There is already so much to be done. But this is Go-Go—and Sean, her first boyfriend, even if she seldom thinks of him in that context. Gwen is not the kind of woman who thinks longingly of her past, who tracks down old boyfriends on the Internet. The Hallorans, along with Mickey Wyckoff, are more like the old foundations and footings they sometimes found in the woods, abandoned and overgrown, impossible to reclaim. They had been a tight-knit group of five for a summer or two, but it couldn’t be sustained. Such coed groups didn’t last long, probably. Funny, it has never occurred to Gwen until now that she and Mickey could disengage thoroughly from the group, but the Halloran brothers had to remain a set, mismatched as they were. Crass Tim, Serious Sean, Wild Go-Go.
“I’ll be there.” She considers placing a hand on Sean’s forearm, but worries it will seem flirtatious. Instead, she strokes the dogs, who are old, with grizzled jowls and labored breathing, so ancient and tired that they don’t object to this long interlude in the middle of their walk. Yet old as they obviously are, they can’t be more than, what? Fifteen? Sixteen? Which is still older than her marriage to Karl.
“Mom will appreciate that,” Sean says and heads back up the hill. She knows the route, knows the house at which he will arrive after going up Wetheredsville, then turning left on “New” Pickwick, a street of what once seemed like modern houses, small and symmetrical relative to the shambling antiquities for which Dickeyville was known, following it to the shortest street in the neighborhood, Sekots, just four houses. The Halloran house always smelled of strong foods—onions, cabbage, hamburger—and it was always a mess. Sometimes the chaos could be comforting; no child need worry about disturbing or breaking anything in such a household. It could be terrifying, too, though, a place where the adults yelled horrible things at one another and Mrs. Halloran was often heard sobbing, off in the distance. The boys never seemed to notice, and even Mickey was nonchalant about it. But the Halloran house scared Gwen, and she made sure their activities centered on her house or the woods beyond.
Go-Go, dead. The only surprise was that she was surprised at all.
Most thought he was called Go-Go because it was a bastardization of Gordon, but it really derived from his manic nature, evident from toddlerhood, his insistence on following his brothers wherever they went. “I go-go,” he would say, as if the second syllable, the repetition, would clinch the argument. “I go-go.” And he did. He ran into walls, splashed into the polluted waters of the stream, jumped from branches and balconies. Once Go-Go spent much of an afternoon running head-on into an old mattress they had found in the woods, laughing all the while.
Now he has run head-on into the barrier at the end of the highway. Gwen can’t help wondering if he was drunk. Although she hasn’t seen the Halloran boys for years, she knows, the way that everyone knows things in Dickeyville, that Go-Go has a problem. It is implied, if never stated outright, in the lost jobs, the broken first marriage, the rocky second one, the fact that he returns to the roost for open-ended stays.
Then again, who is she to judge Go-Go? Isn’t she pulling the same trick, running home, a two-time loser in matrimony, taking comfort in a parent’s unconditional love? Mr. Halloran may have been hard as nails, but Mrs. Halloran, when she wasn’t screaming at her sons and wondering why they had been born, spoiled them to the best of her ability, especially Go-Go. And while most people will assume Gwen is nothing more than a devoted daughter, some will see through her. Her brother and sister, certainly. And Karl.
That is, Karl would see through her if it ever occurred to him to look, really look at her. But if Karl looked at her that way, they wouldn’t be in this fix. At least that’s how she likes to see it.
Summer 1976
CHAPTER TWO
“I hate it here,” Fee said. “It’s boring.”
“There’s no place to go,” Miller said. “There’s nothing to do.”
“Only boring people are bored,” their father said.
“Or maybe only boring people don’t realize how bored they are,” Fee said. “They are so boring that it never occurs to them to do anything.”
“Gwen likes it here,” their father said.
“Well, Gwen.” Fee sniffed. “She’s a child.”
“Of course I’m a child,” Gwen said mildly. “I’m ten.”
“The thing is,” Miller pressed on, intent on making his case, “there are plenty of kids for Gwen to play with—that Mickey girl, those brothers—”
“We do NOT play with the Halloran boys. They’re too wild,” Gwen put in.
Gwen spoke the truth, at the time. In the summer of our nation’s bicentennial, the five of us were not friends yet and the Hallorans were considered wild. We were two and three—the two girls, Gwen and Mickey, the three brothers, Tim, Sean, and Go-Go. We would not come together as a group until the following spring. But we were all aware of each other. Mickey was a familiar little figure in Dickeyville, a terrifying tomboy assumed to be a loner by choice, a child who wanted to be outdoors no matter how fierce the weather. The Halloran boys were known as hellions, primarily because of Go-Go. Besides, in the summer, they went down to the ocean, then to camp.
And Gwen’s family, the Robisons, were famous in Dickeyville because they had been trying to build their new house for almost seven years, stopped twice by injunction because of the neighborhood’s historic status. Strangely, Dr. Robison did not resent the neighborhood’s resistance to his house. This was his dream house and he would suffer anything to get it. He had bought the lot a decade earlier, around the time Gwen was born, after stumbling across Dickeyville while trying to get to the Forest Park golf course. First he had been told that the lot wasn’t suitable for building, that its pitch would make it impossible. He refused to accept this and finally found an architect who said it could be done, although at great expense. Then the neighborhood had decided to fight it, although Dickeyville had its share of postwar nondescript houses. The Hallorans lived in one, in fact, but did not feel themselves hypocrites for joining the opposition. The Robison house—new, modern—signified something, even if no one was quite sure what. Change, hypocrisy, a challenge to traditional values. Yet nine years after the lot was purchased, five years after ground was broken, the house had asserted itself into being, through the sheer force of Dr. Robison’s will.
This apparently came as something of a surprise to Mrs. Robison and the two older children, twenty-year-old Miller and seventeen-year-old Fee. And although Miller had to endure only summers there, and although Fee had only a year of high school left and she was continuing at Park, the same private school Gwennie attended, they were bitter. Mrs. Robison was not bitter, not exactly, but we all sensed something in her attitude. How to put it? There was a quality of withholding. In her beautiful, hippieish clothes, she moved through the world with her head down and arms crossed, as if to say to Dickeyville: I will not love you, I will not. Inevitably, all the fathers and even some of their sons were a little bit in love with Tally Robison, mistaking her coolness to her surroundings as a coolness toward them, which never fails to provoke a man. Gwen never doubted her mother’s love, however, which was mildly infuriating to the rest of us, who sometimes wondered if our mothers were altogether pleased by our existence. Mickey’s mom, the boys’ mom—they tended toward moments of frustration. Doris Halloran, in particular, had a way of asking “Why were you born?” as if she didn’t really know, or as if she was debating the church’s doctrine on abortion. Not that abortion was legal even when the youngest of the Halloran boys, Go-Go, was conceived. But we still had the impression that Mrs. Halloran would have appreciated having a choice.
But we didn’t care what the grown-ups thought, or even Gwennie’s older brother and sister, impressive as they were, with their driver’s licenses and studied indifference to us. In our imaginations, we lived in a world without grown-ups most of the day. We all had the same rules, more or less. Don’t ride your bikes on Forest Park Avenue (busy, blind curves), be on time for dinner, and stay out of the creek. We found a way around the first rule, had no problem with the second, and figured the third didn’t matter if our tetanus shots were current. We never went into the creek on purpose, but we ended up in it a lot by accident.
Gwen and Mickey met by the creek that bicentennial summer. Mickey was lying belly-down on the bank, near a culvert where crawfish were sometimes found, poking the murky water with a long stick.
“I’m Gwen,” Gwen said shyly to the wiry little back and frowsy black hair.
“You live in that big house, at the end of the road. Are your parents rich?” Mickey replied, eyes fixed on the brown water.
“I don’t think so.” Gwen considered the evidence. Their house was grand, at least on the lower floors. The bedrooms felt a little stingy. Fee and Miller had a car, but they had to share it, and it was an old Volvo. Her parents went to New York once a year to go to the theater and shop for Christmas gifts. Did this make them rich?
“What does your father do?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“So you’re rich,” Mickey said, eyes never leaving the water. Did crawfish really live there? Gwen could not imagine it. But Mickey insisted they were there and that, furthermore, she was going to take them home and eat them. If she caught any. She had a net at the ready, but it didn’t look up to the job. It was tiny, the kind of thing used in tropical aquariums. Even one small crawfish would test its capacity.
“He’s the kind of doctor who teaches.”
“My dad owns the service station, up the hill. Well, he’s not really my dad, but my stepdad. He’s good-looking. He looks like Tom Selleck.”
“That’s cool. Him owning the service station.”
“No, it’s not. Because when I want a soda or a snowball or something from the pharmacy next door, I can’t go there because someone from the station will rat me out. And there’s nowhere else to go. There used to be a store here in the neighborhood, where they sold penny candy, but they stopped. Do you have treats at your house?”
“What?”
“Treats. Ice cream and cookies and candy and soda? I suppose not, your father being a doctor.”
“Oh, no, we have—treats. My mother goes grocery shopping once a week, and each one can choose whatever snacks we want. But that’s it, for the week. If you eat it all up right away, you have to wait until the next week.” Gwen did not add that she had learned all sorts of ways of making treats last. She nibbled 5
Avenue candy bars, plucking off the solitary almond, then slowly removing the chocolate with teeth and tongue, leaving behind an unsheathed bar of peanut butter. She ate peanut M&M’s by cracking the chocolate shell, removing the peanuts, then placing the peanuts in a bowl, to be gobbled in a handful. She was proud of these maneuvers but aware that others considered them gross. Besides, she was pudgy and desperate to pretend candy was not particularly interesting to her, that her condition was glandular.
Mickey sat up. “Would you get circus peanuts sometimes?”
“Peanuts?”
“Circus peanuts. The big fluffy ones. Kind of like Peeps, only not so sticky.”
“Sure.”
The next Friday, on her mother’s weekly shopping trip, Gwen put a bag of the orange peanuts into the cart. “Really?” her mother asked. “You hate marshmallow.” Gwen nodded. The next day, she took the treats to Mickey. Over the course of the summer, she brought Mickey Smarties, candy buttons, Pixy Stixs. Necco Wafers. Now and Laters. Gwen’s mother figured it out within a week or so, but she didn’t care. In fact, she complimented Gwen on her selflessness. But it didn’t feel selfless to Gwen, more like a necessary tribute. Mickey was valuable. Mickey knew things. You couldn’t have access to all she knew without making some sort of contribution.
Mickey had been roaming the wooded hills around Dickeyville since the age of eight, when she persuaded her mother to let her walk home from the public elementary school on the other side of the hill. She acted as if she owned every inch of it, and we didn’t contradict her. We never got lost when we let Mickey lead the way, while the rest of us could get turned around quite easily.
Yet Mickey was the only one of us who didn’t live in Dickeyville. Her family lived above it, in the town houses called Purnell Village, on the other side of Forest Park Avenue. Most children would not have been allowed to cross that street, much less walk to school alone, but Mickey had permission. Or said she did. Mickey was not always the most reliable person when it came to herself. Her stepfather, for example, was not her stepfather and did not own the gas station. He managed it. He did, however, look a little like Tom Selleck.
Caught in a lie or a contradiction by the rest of us, Mickey would shrug, as if the misstatements that flowed from her were incidental, a slip of the tongue, like mixing up facts you knew perfectly well. And because Mickey was beautiful, despite her wild bush of hair and grubby clothes, we came to believe that was one of the perks of beauty, the freedom to lie and not be called on it. Who wanted to fight with someone as pretty as Mickey? She was prettier still for not being able to do much about her appearance. She wore jeans and T-shirts, often the same ones two days running, and her hair was never quite brushed. Sometimes, Gwen’s mother would say, “Let’s play beauty parlor,” and Gwen understood it was an excuse to pull a brush through Mickey’s matted hair, which would shine and gleam under her mother’s care. Later, when we became a group, a unit, the boys wished they could have Mrs. Robison pull a brush through their hair, short as it was. Not that they ever said anything. Well, maybe Go-Go did. Go-Go never understood that there were things he shouldn’t want, desires he shouldn’t express. He would watch Tally Robison work on Mickey’s hair, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as it often did, as if he thought something tasty might fall from the sky at any moment and he didn’t want to miss it. Sometimes Go-Go would try to climb Tally Robison, would literally start to shimmy up her body, trying to force her to unfold those thin arms and hold him.
But that was yet to come. That first summer, 1976, there was only Gwen and Mickey, Mickey and Gwen, best friends along with everything that being best friends entailed, all the wonder and closeness, all the pain and resentment. We didn’t have the term BFFs back then, and even if we had, it wouldn’t have been accurate. Mickey and Gwen fell well short of forever. But that summer, it felt like forever.
Tally Robison died in Gwen’s senior year of college. She had been too ill to see her daughter accept a prize for her college journalism, too ill to tell her daughter that the gorgeous college sweetheart to whom she would soon become engaged was too gorgeous. Gwen kept assuming Mickey would get in touch. Whatever had happened, all those years ago, did not change the fact that her mother had been good to Mickey, kind and generous. Certainly, Mickey must know of Tally’s death, must have heard from someone, even if her family had long ago left the town houses of Purnell Village, which had become exceedingly rough, even as Dickeyville continued to be its placid, sui generis self. Gwen was just shy of her twenty-second birthday, much too young to lose a parent, especially a parent as lovely as her mother had been. But we were all young then, unaccustomed to death and its rituals, how important the smallest gestures were. Only Sean—forever Sean-the-Perfect—wrote a note, and it was a little stiff, almost grudging, as if he felt that Gwen’s mother had died in order to force him to contact her daughter.
Five years later, the two former best friends met face-to-face on a plane. Gwen was in first class, upgraded on her husband’s miles. Mickey was the flight attendant. Still beautiful, but there was a hardness to her now, a sense that the real person was layers and layers down.
“Mickey,” Gwen said brightly when offered a beverage before takeoff. A blank stare. “Mickey. It’s Gwen. Gwen Robison.”
Mickey continued to stare blankly. No, she stared through her, which is quite different. “It’s McKey now.”
“Mick Kay?”
“Think of it this way—I dropped the i, capitalized the K. McKey.”
“Legally?” A bizarre response, but Gwen couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“You always were a stickler for rules,” Mickey—McKey—said. “Can I get you anything?”
The other passengers, businessmen accustomed to life in first class, were growing impatient with this trip down memory lane. They wanted their drinks, their hot nuts, whatever small treats their status entailed. But Gwen couldn’t let her old friend go.
“It’s been so long. I hate that we lost touch. In fact, I thought I might hear from you when my mom died. She died, did you know that? Five years ago, from bladder cancer.”
“I heard, but not right away. I’m sorry.” The words had all the intimacy of champagne or orange juice?
“You heard from—” Foolish to extend the conversation, and what did it matter how McKey had learned?
“From Sean.”
“You’re in touch?” She couldn’t decide if what she felt was jealousy or—stickler for the rules she was—a sense of betrayal. They weren’t supposed to be friends anymore. That was the price they paid for the horrible thing that had happened.
“Sometimes. He sends Christmas cards.”
“He told you about my mom in a Christmas card?” Not challenging Mickey—McKey—but honestly astonished, confused.
“Look, I’ll come back and chat later in the flight, okay?”
She didn’t.
CHAPTER THREE
Gwen was spared funerals as a child and accepted this practice, as she accepted so many of her parents’ practices, as the inarguably right thing to do. Certainly, it has not occurred to her to bring Annabelle to Go-Go’s visitation, and she is shocked to see how many young children are here. More disturbing, they are gathered around the open casket, inspecting Go-Go with a respectful but palpable excitement. A dead person! This is what a dead person looks like! In the face of their bravery, how can Gwen not come forward and look as well?
A dead person this may well be, but it is not the boy she remembers and not only because he is thirty years older than the Go-Go who lives in her memory. This person is too still, his features too composed. Go-Go was never still.
“Gwen.” Doris Halloran holds her hands tightly, peers into her face, as if nearsighted. “Pretty little Gwen. You look wonderful.”
She does? She doesn’t feel as if she looks wonderful. True, she is thin. She has no appetite as of late. But she is pretty sure that the lack of food has made her face gaunt, her hair dull and dry. Then again, maybe it’s all relative. She looks better than Go-Go, for example. And better than Mrs. Halloran, whose face is white and puffy in a way that cannot be explained by mere grieving. Her eyes are like little raisins deep in an uncooked loaf, her mouth ringed by wrinkles.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Halloran. My father would be here, but he broke his hip. I’m staying with him while he recuperates.”
“What happened?”
“Slipped on those steps. They’ve always been a hazard.”
Mrs. Halloran does not let go of Gwen’s hands. Pressing, squeezing. It is a little painful, while Mrs. Halloran’s breath—it isn’t bad, exactly, but old, reminiscent of mothballs and dimly lit rooms.
“So many accidents,” she murmurs.
“Yes. It’s a shame about Go—” Gwen stops herself, remembering Sean’s reaction to his brother’s nickname. “Gordon.”
“Oh.” She seems jolted. “Yes, I suppose that was an accident, too.” Supposes? Gwen assumed that Doris Halloran, always the super Catholic, wouldn’t even contemplate the possibility of suicide. Doris lets go of Gwen’s hand abruptly, so abruptly that her body registers the end of the pain as a deepening of the sensation. It’s as if phantom hands still gripped hers, squeezing, intent on hurting her.
“I know it’s a cliché,” Gwen says, “but it throws the world out of whack when a parent loses a child, at any age.”
“Well, I lost a few, you know.” She lowers her voice. “Miscarriages. Three. Actually four, although that one was so early it barely counted.”
Gwen probably did know this in the vague, indifferent way that children intuit things about the grown-ups in their lives, but this revelation suddenly connects a series of mysterious events—Mrs. Halloran “sleeping” a lot, Mr. Halloran yelling at the boys for making noise, a grandmother who came for a visit that wasn’t at all like the grandparent visits Gwen knew. (No meals out, no trips to the toy store.)
“Do you have children. Gwen?”
“Yes, a little girl. Annabelle. She’s five.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Sorry?” Did she think it was a shame to have girls? Or does she know that Annabelle is not Gwen’s biological child? The senior Hallorans were never open-minded people, they would probably call her daughter a Chink or something worse. Gwen’s color rose, she is on the verge of saying that Mrs. Halloran hasn’t done so well herself, that only one of her boys is worth anything. But where are Sean and, come to think of it, Tim?
Doris is suddenly contrite. “I didn’t mean—I’m taking something. The doctor gave me pills. And I feel like things get mixed up, my sentences come out in the wrong order or I say what people say to me. No, it’s good you have a little girl. I’m happy for you. But daughters are hard. Secretive. I was sad I didn’t have one, but then happy. Then again, daughters stay with you. Sons leave. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.” No.
Mrs. Halloran grabs her hands again. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“At the funeral? Of course.”
“And at the house, after. Not everyone is invited, but we want you there. You’re like family, even if it’s been years. It’s funny, I s’pose you come back to see your father all the time, yet I never see you. Even when Gordon moved back home, you didn’t come visit him. Why didn’t you visit him?”
So many reasons. Because he was an angry drunk most of the times. And when he wasn’t angry, he was pathetic, self-pitying. But the main reason was the one that divided them long ago: it was simply too painful to be around each other. They couldn’t talk about it, and they couldn’t not talk about it, so they stayed away from each other.
“When Sean moved away, I lost touch. Mickey Wyckoff, too. And my father keeps to himself.”
“Yes, he always did.”
He did? Gwen remembers her father as gregarious. But, perhaps, a little snobbish about the Hallorans. That’s why the night of the hurricane had been unusual, all the parents together in the Robisons’ house, drinking and laughing late into a weekday night.
“Don’t be a stranger now,” Mrs. Halloran says suddenly, full of fake merriment. “We’ll be seeing lots of each other. Right?” The question feels unusually earnest—and a little threatening.
“Absolutely.”
Sean and Tim finally appear, explaining that they have been speaking with the priest about tomorrow’s service. Sean takes his mother by the shoulders, gently, and begins guiding her to other well-wishers, making Gwen feel as if she is in the wrong somehow, that she has monopolized the grieving mother when it was Doris who insisted on prolonging their contact.
Tim gives her a half smile. “Sorry.”
It seems to be the word of the evening. “No need. I think it’s a miracle she’s standing upright.”
“Sean said your dad had an accident?”
“Yes. As I told your mother, that seems to be the theme of the week.”
Tim’s face is blank. It’s funny, how he looks so much like Sean, yet still isn’t handsome. Everything is a bit fuzzier in Tim’s face. Rougher, coarser, indistinct. It’s like a face drawn by a child, the features slashed in. Plus, he’s allowed himself to get plump.
“Go-Go’s death wasn’t an accident, Gwen. He drove right into the Jersey wall at over a hundred miles per hour.”
“Sean said—”
“Oh, Sean. He’s proper now, careful about what he says. Professional liability since he moved to public relations. He can’t stop spinning things. No, Go-Go aimed his car straight at the barricades at the end of the highway. Probably drunk, so it’s hard to know his intent, but he clearly didn’t try to steer away. We’re waiting for the toxicology reports. Well, we’re not waiting for them. The insurance company is, because they’re keen to deny his kids the life insurance if they can. I can’t figure out if we should root for drunk and claim he wasn’t capable of forming suicidal intent or pray for sober and say the accelerator got stuck.”
“I thought he was in a sober phase.”
“He was, best I can tell, right up to last Tuesday night. Went to meetings every week, seemed to be making progress. We only have Mom’s word for it and she forgave him everything, covered for him whenever possible, but he had been clean for almost two years. He left to go to a meeting, in fact, about seven P.M. Next thing Mom knew, it was two a.m. and the cops were at her door. They had gone to Lori’s first, because that was the address on his license.”
“Lori?”
“His ex, although I guess technically they were just separated. The second ex, the one with the kids.” Tim points to two blondes, tiny things. These girls are not inspecting the dead man in the casket but keeping their distance, clinging to their mother. Even in their sadness, all three are gorgeous. “Only decent thing he ever did for her and those kids was taking out that policy and now he might have screwed that up. All he had to do was hit the brakes, leave some skid marks, but no—”
“Shut up, Tim,” Sean says, joining them.
“It’s just Gwen.”
The words are at once warm and vaguely insulting, conferring a privilege while making it sound as if Gwen is a person of no consequence.
“Gordon did not commit suicide.”
“Look, we’re not going to rat him out to the church, keep him from being buried in consecrated ground. And I’m not going to break Mom’s heart. But among the three of us, can’t we at least drop the bullshit?”
“He was drunk. He called me an hour before, wasn’t making any sense.”
“Probably.”
“If he was drunk, then he didn’t know what he was doing. He was drag racing, like in the old days, and he miscalculated.”
“OK, but—we lived here all our lives. We all learned to drive on that patch of dead-end highway. Drunk or asleep or dead, he couldn’t have forgotten that there were barricades, that it ended.”
“Let it go, Tim.”
“Speaking of drinking—anyone want to?”
They end up at the Point, once a reliably sleazy dive on Franklintown Road. To their horror, it has been yuppified. Live music on the weekends, a decent wine list. The bar food is traditional but prepared with care. It isn’t the kind of experience Gwen—or most Baltimoreans with money, or even the city’s pseudohipsters—are inclined to seek out on Franklintown Road, although Gwen realizes she might find it a handy retreat as long as she’s staying in her father’s house.
The boys drink Rolling Rock on tap, while she has a microbrew.
“Raison D’Être.” Tim pronounces the name of her beer with great disdain. Ray-zohn Det-ruh. “Faggot beer.”
Sean winces at his un-PC brother, but Tim isn’t shamed: “Any beer with a French name has to suck.”
“It’s very good,” Gwen says. “And it’s made in Delaware. Taste it.”
Tim refuses, but Sean is polite enough to try it and say nice things, although he clearly doesn’t care for it.
“You are such a fucking yuppie,” Tim says. A new insult, but in the same vein of all the insults heaped on her when they were children. Gwennie the Whale. Gwen the Goody Two-shoes. Yet Gwen was never as proper as Sean. She wonders if Tim knows that.
She responds, because Tim wants her to and his brother is dead, so she owes him a little good-humored argument. “That term is incredibly dated to the point of being meaningless. When did it come into vogue? The eighties? And who isn’t an urban professional among the three of us? Young we’re clearly not.”
“But you work at that stupid magazine—”
“I edit it, yes.”
“And it’s all about what to buy and what to eat and what to wear.”
“We do a lot of substantive journalism. More than ever, given how the Beacon-Light has been gutted. I’d love to commission an article on the trial you’ve got going, Mr. State’s Attorney. We also still make money. You know why? Because we are business friendly, which kept our advertising stable when the economy bottomed out. And we don’t give all our content away.”
“Best doctors. Best restaurants. Best neighborhoods. Best of the best. Why not—best places to pick up hookers? Hey—why not best hookers? That’s news I could use.”
“I didn’t know you had to pay for it, Tim.”
“I don’t. I prefer to pay for it.”
“He’s kidding,” Sean puts in, ever the PR man, worried that Gwen is going to run off and write a headline: assistant state’s attorney prefers hookers. “Tim’s so straight he doesn’t even drive over the speed limit. And he’s still stupid-in-love with Arlene.”
It’s funny, how quickly they revert to their roles—their roles as they first were, when they functioned as a group with no relationships within the relationships. The only thing different about their interaction is the alcohol. And that they are three, instead of five. They can never be five—the starfish, as Mickey called it—again. Gwen realizes she always hoped they might be, if only for a night, that they would come together once more and confront all the little ragged pieces of their shared story. Other than her father and her siblings, no one in her life knew her as a child. No one has any sense of the totality of who she is. Not even Karl, and certainly not Annabelle. Not her current staff and not her former colleagues from her newspaper days, scattered throughout the city. The Gwen that most people know is the adult Gwen. She wants to be among people who know her. She yearns for her mother, who made her feel special even when she clearly was not, who trusted her to morph into a swan. She even misses Mickey.
That is, she misses Mickey until the next morning when McKey, swathed in black from head to foot, enters the church moments before the funeral service begins and takes a seat in the Hallorans’ pew, as if she’s a part of the family. McKey even reaches around Sean to pat Doris Halloran’s shoulder, then leaves her arm around Sean for several seconds.
It’s easy to miss some people, Gwen thinks, until they actually show up.
Autumn 1977–Spring 1978
CHAPTER FOUR
It was Mickey who decided we should be a group, that the duo of Mickey and Gwen should be joined to the trio of the Halloran brothers. Before, we were two and three. Five together was stronger than two and three. Our country’s own Department of Defense, Sean later pointed out, was contained within the Pentagon, so it must be the strongest thing possible.
But our coalition began as a dispute, an argument over territory. Although the Hallorans lived on Sekots, at the far end of the neighborhood, they often used a vacant lot at the end of Gwen’s street as their makeshift kickball field. The squarish mound of grass was just large enough to approximate an infield, but the lack of an outfield was problematic, dangerous even. A strong kick—and all the Halloran boys were powerful—inevitably sent the ball into the street or skittering across the foundation of a long-abandoned springhouse on the other side. And while Wetheredsville Road—oh, how Gwen complained about having to learn to spell her street name—was not heavily trafficked even then, the mill was still open and enormous trucks rumbled past several times a day.
Mickey, who cared nothing for the field but liked to cut through it to reach the stream, decided the Halloran boys were presumptuous. The lot was not theirs to annex, she argued. Not yours, either, Tim argued back. You don’t even live in the village. Mickey countered that Gwen, as the resident of the last house on Wetheredsville Road, should have the right to use the lot, or not use the lot, as she saw fit. The boys should have to pay Gwen to use the field, Mickey insisted.
“Or”—and this was clearly where she had been heading all along—“let us play, too.”
It was fall. The promise, the glow of back-to-school had already faded. Gwen’s denim binder was full of torn papers, and she could never find her little box of reinforcements. At St. Lawrence, Go-Go had already been given multiple detentions, and Sean was bored by the writing assignments, which never allowed him to show his range. Tim was getting by at Cardinal Gibbons, but getting by was Tim’s particular genius. A letter had already been sent home to Mickey’s mother, noting that she was not working up to her potential. That is, the letter was sent, but it never arrived. Mickey stuffed it under a rock in the hills behind the Robisons’ house, where she arrived every day and waited for Gwen. When Gwen got off the private bus that took her to her door, she found Mickey in the kitchen, eating cookies and drinking one of her mother’s diet sodas. Gwen wasn’t allowed to have diet soda, but Mickey was, because she was a guest. Years later, when her mother was dying of bladder cancer, Gwen couldn’t help thinking of all those diet sodas. She knew science was not on her side, but the notion still persisted. She tricked Annabelle into thinking sparkling water was a treat, making it in a penguin-shaped canister from Williams-Sonoma that produced wonderful belching noises, sometimes adding juice and slices of lemon to give it something extra. But it was all parental sorcery, and Gwen knew that Annabelle would see through the ruse eventually, start asking for soda, or god help her, putting Equal in her cocoa.
When they were indoors, Gwen set the agenda, teaching Mickey how to play the elaborate make-believe games that were the cornerstone of Gwen’s de facto only-child status. Miller and Fee were both gone now. But the girls spent as little time as possible indoors. Mickey was restless. Mickey liked action, she wanted to move. She wasn’t a particularly good athlete, as would become evident when the girls joined the Halloran boys’ kickball game. Mickey was wildly uncoordinated at almost any organized sport. Yet, stalking through the woods, climbing over and under fallen branches, jumping rocks across the stream—no one was more graceful or strong. Mickey could even do chin-ups, something no other girl of our acquaintance could do. She said she had won the Presidential Medal for Fitness, although she never remembered to show it to Gwen on those rare occasions Gwen was allowed to go to Mickey’s house.
The day that Mickey decided to crash the kickball game was early November, the first fair day after a week of lashing rains. The hills and fields were muddy, and Gwen’s mother, sighing, reminded her to come in through the basement, please? And leave her boots down there? Please? Mickey didn’t even have boots, but she said her mother didn’t mind if her tennis shoes were caked with mud. “You just have to let it dry and then it brushes off as easy as anything,” she told Gwen.
But despite the break in the rain, Mickey didn’t want to roam the hills today, looking for places they could claim as their own. Instead, she led Gwen up the road and across the street, to the vacant field where the Halloran boys were playing kickball.
“We want to play,” Mickey said to Sean.
“No thanks,” he said. “It works best with three.”
Tim was less polite. “Go screw yourselves.”
Gwen sucked in her breath. That was a curse, or as good as. Go-Go was delighted, repeating it over and over. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”
Mickey was not easily intimidated. She put her hands on her hips and stared Sean down. “This lot doesn’t belong to you.”
“Doesn’t belong to you, either.”
“It belongs to her, though.” Pointing at Gwen. “To her family. They bought a whole bunch of land when they built their house.”
“No way,” Sean said. We all knew—except gullible Go-Go—that it was an outrageous lie.
“Go look it up,” Mickey said.
“Where?”
“Downtown.”
“Get out of here,” Tim said.
Go-Go was running in circles. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”
Sean took Mickey’s measure. “You any good?”
“What does it matter? It will be a better game with five than with three. We’ll play two-on-two, with a permanent pitcher.”
Gwen assumed she would be the permanent pitcher. She was. She rolled the ball across the plate, first to Sean, then to Tim, then to Go-Go, finally Mickey. Tim’s ball came back at her, hard, right to her midsection, and it clearly wasn’t accidental. Gwen clamped her lips tight to keep from crying.
But it was a better game, just as Mickey had said. She and Tim faced off against Sean and Go-Go. Gwen was supposed to get a turn at some point, but she didn’t, not that day, and not often in the days ahead. The game evolved into something more like football or rugby or dodgeball, with complicated rules about tackling and catching. We became attuned to the noises of the street, the sound of approaching cars and trucks, and learned to time the action of the game around the traffic. We fought sometimes, went home early, yet came back together the next day, or the day after if there was rain. We suspended the games during the heart of the winter, but started playing again long before spring. The Halloran boys were baffling to the girls. Sometimes they presented as a unified front, sometimes it was every man for himself, and, most often, it was two against one, with Go-Go, the baby, the odd one out. And Go-Go was easy for the girls to gang up on as well, so it was just as often four on one. Every group needs its goat, and Go-Go was the inevitable choice in ours.
We were having a four-on-one day in late April, a cranky, frustrating day in which all the gains of spring seemed to have been lost. The sky was gray, the air had a real chill in it, and the things that had budded and bloomed over the past month looked miserable. Daffodils and tulips bent their heads, beaten down. On the way to the field, Go-Go jumped on one of Tally Robison’s flowerbeds with both feet, irritating the rest of us, who understood our freedom came at a price. If we gave adults any reason to complain about us, we knew we would lose privileges.
But Go-Go became only more intolerable when we tried to explain to him why he shouldn’t jump on flowers. He pinched the girls, he pulled at their clothes, he flailed at his brothers. Finally, in frustration, Mickey threw the red rubber ball over his head, into the street. Later, she said it wasn’t on purpose, which would fit with her general incompetence on the playing field, yet it had seemed deliberate to the rest of us, an exaggerated, high, arching throw that would have soared over anyone’s head, but especially over little Go-Go’s. There’s no doubt that she said: “Go get it, you moron.”
Which Go-Go did, despite the rumbling noise that we all knew to heed. He dashed into the road after the bouncing ball just as one of the huge mill trucks came around the curve, going much too fast, but we all knew the mill trucks went too fast and it was our responsibility to be careful. The rest of us watched, frozen, mesmerized. We were going to see someone die. We watched the truck bearing down on the boy and the ball, saw the ball disappear under its wheels, heard terrible noises—honking, brakes squealing. But Go-Go seemed to change the rules of physics, accelerating so that he reached the other side of the road just before the truck passed by. We were amazed to see him, upright and laughing, after the long truck had passed.
Tim was the first to speak.
“Screw you, Go-Go,” he said. “The ball is ruined.” But his tone was admiring, almost reverential, his voice shaking.
The ball had been split by the truck’s wheels. We looked at the flattened red mass. “That could be Go-Go’s head,” Gwen said. We all nodded. He could be like one of the squirrels we saw in the road, a red smear with hair sticking out of it. We weren’t to touch the squirrels, or any other roadkill, lest we risk rabies.
Sean ran across the road and grabbed his brother by the arm, shaking him violently, angrily.
“Don’t ever do that again.”
“But Mickey said—”
“Mickey’s not the boss of you.”
“No one’s the boss of me,” he countered, pushing out his lower lip.
Without a ball, kickball was over. We couldn’t get a new ball unless we told a grown-up what had happened, and no one thought that was a good idea. And, although it was hard to envision on such a cold, gray April day, summer was coming, and not even our odd brand of kickball/dodgeball/rugby could fill those longer, emptier days. We needed a new game. Mickey suggested an explorer’s club. Sean and Tim said it was babyish, yet the next day we all ended up following her deeper and deeper into the woods, marveling at the things we found. Abandoned campsites, downed trees. Beer cans, garbage. “Teenagers did this,” Go-Go would say solemnly, as if Tim and Sean were not already teenagers, Mickey and Gwen both about to turn thirteen that autumn. Teenagers were fearsome creatures to Go-Go.
And then we met the man who lived in the woods.
CHAPTER FIVE
“What’s the point of this charade?” Karl asks Gwen the morning after Go-Go’s funeral as she arrives with only minutes to spare before Annabelle awakens and comes down to breakfast.
The question catches her short, her mind snagging on his choice of word, charade. What, exactly, is a charade? Where is the pretense? She puzzles through this as she sets breakfast in motion. She isn’t pretending to Annabelle that she spends the nights here. Her daughter knows that Gwen is staying at her grandfather’s house while he heals, but that she still wants to be here for meals, bedtime, and off-to-school. The charade, to use Karl’s word, is pretending that the household will return to normal after her father’s situation has been normalized.
Charade. The mothers had played charades that night, first with their husbands, then alone after the men left. How innocent they had seemed in the candlelit living room, making the familiar, exaggerated gestures. Paging through a book, running a movie camera, flipping channels. She and Sean had watched them from the steps, feeling more akin to them than they did to the others by that point. They—well, she—honestly believed that they would get married, that they would one day be a couple among other couples, laughing and clowning. They—again, maybe just she—had been preternaturally attracted to adulthood, eager for it, in a way that Tim, Mickey, and Go-Go weren’t. They were the normal ones, trying to grow up, be typical teenagers.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she says, trying to be careful with Karl’s feelings but also her words. She doesn’t want to be drawn into making promises she can’t keep. But his eyes are sad and hurt. He clearly wants to ask other, softer, more vulnerable questions. Why did she leave? Doesn’t she love him? Doesn’t she want to be with him? But these are not the kind of questions that Karl will ask out loud because Karl does not know the answers and Karl never admits he doesn’t have answers. “That’s a surgeon’s personality,” her father, Karl’s onetime professor, told Gwen early in their courtship. “He’s used to being in charge, having authority.” Like most people in love, she ignored any observation that didn’t serve her vision of her romance.
“Aren’t you running late? Go save lives,” she says now, not meaning to be cruel, only factual. But Karl takes offense.
“It’s not—” he begins, then stops because Annabelle has entered the kitchen, frowning at the morning, slow and cranky, quite unlike both of them. Gwen is a morning person, while Karl, like many hyperachievers, permits himself no more than four or five hours of sleep.
Annabelle, by contrast, is a night owl who fights bedtime and treats morning as a personal offense. Another reason for Gwen to be here for bedtime every night. Karl would never have the patience to cajole Annabelle through her nighttime routine. There are circles under Annabelle’s eyes, bigger and darker than usual. Gwen wonders if Karl knows that Annabelle sometimes creeps down to the kitchen with the earbuds from her little MP3 player and then watches the television on the counter, standing all the while. Once Gwen found her with her chin resting on the counter, asleep on her feet, while an infomercial touted the miracle of mineral makeup. She wonders at the secrets of her daughter’s DNA. Were her parents night owls? How had they coped? Given the remote orphanage where Annabelle spent the first eleven months of her life, her parents were almost certainly farmers. Did they frown at sunrise, did they stay up late, despite knowing the price they would pay come morning? Did they abandon their daughter to strike out for the city, find a life that suited them better?
“Good morning, sweet pea.”
“Peas are not sweet,” she says. Then: “Can I have pancakes?”
“We’re a little pressed for time. But we can have them this weekend. I thought you could come over to Poppa’s, have a sleepover?”
“You should check with me—” Karl begins, but Annabelle is already lighting up. “Can I have the princess room?”
“Of course,” Gwen says. The princess room is nothing more than Gwen’s childhood room, virtually untouched since she left for college. If her mother had lived—but her mother did not live.
“You didn’t ask me,” Karl says in a low voice after she sends Annabelle back upstairs to put on real pants. She was trying to coast by with her pajama bottoms. Plaid, they would have fooled her father. This is another reason why Gwen has to come by every morning; Annabelle gets too much by Karl. Their daughter is the one person impervious to his surgical authority and expectations.
But for all the reasons Gwen can list for being here every morning and evening, none really matters. She’s here because she cannot bear being away from her daughter. Yet she has chosen to be away from her daughter. No, she doesn’t understand it herself.
“I know we have no formal arrangement—” Karl continues.
“Yet.”
“But you didn’t ask me if you could have Annabelle this weekend.”
“I don’t have to,” Gwen says, putting bread in the toaster, getting out the cinnamon sugar that Annabelle likes. It comes in a plastic yellow sifter shaped like a bear, a relic of Gwen’s childhood. Her own did not survive, but she bought this one at an antique store, laughing at herself for paying seven dollars for a piece of plastic that used to cost less than two—and was filled with cinnamon sugar.
“If you are serious about this—”
“I am serious. Serious as a heart attack, as they say in your world. But then, my world doesn’t have metaphors or similes about what matters because, as you so often remind me, nothing matters in my world.”
“I never—”
“Always,” she says. She is aware that she is interrupting him, aware that she is enjoying it a little too much. “You always let me know how trivial my life is. Not in words. Through your lack of words, your lack of questions, your inability to feign interest. By your silence, you let me know every day that what I do and who I am is of absolutely no interest to you.”
Annabelle has returned and is standing in the doorway, regarding them. She is bright, exceptionally bright, although no child could be expected to compete with the brainiac powers of Karl Flores. Still, she is probably aware of more than they want her to be. Gwen hopes those dark circles aren’t from lying awake, worrying. When she first started out testing the idea of leaving Karl, trying it on in front of her friends, as she might have asked them about a particularly bold fashion choice or luxury purchase, the litany of questions had been consistent: Did he cheat? Is he abusive? Is he an addict? Has he lied to you about important things? When Gwen said no, everyone said: “You should stay together for Annabelle’s sake.” Karl said the same thing. No one understands that she could leave for Annabelle’s sake. She likes to think her mother would have, if she had lived. But if her mother had lived, would Gwen have chosen the men she has chosen? Certainly, she never would have married Stephen. Ironically, her mother’s death probably drove her into that doomed, ridiculous marriage.
“You’ll be late, Daddy,” Annabelle says. Ah, she wants to defuse the bomb, ticking away, separate them now so they might choose to be together later. So that Gwen might choose. Karl has made it clear that he has no desire to divorce her. But not because he loves her, only because he can’t stand to lose at anything.
“Will the film crew be there today?” Gwen asks, taking in her husband’s suit, one of his nicest, and the bright blue shirt that flatters his dark complexion.
“Only for—I’m not sure what you call them. No interviews, but walking, sitting in meetings. Establishing shots? Something like that. I wish I hadn’t said yes.”
Under her breath: “But you always do.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” She turns back to the task of fixing Annabelle’s breakfast, as if it requires great concentration to butter toast and sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, pour a glass of juice. But it works. When she looks up, he’s gone.
Friends have pointed out to Gwen that it is hypocritical of her to complain about the constant media demands on her husband, given that she was a journalist who met him on assignment. She knew of him, of course. Dr. Karl Flores had been famous for a long time, more than fifteen years, when they met. He became famous for performing heart surgery on infants, working with tiny instruments of his own design, precious things that appeared to be plundered from a doll’s hospital.
Plenty of surgeons do what Karl does, with just as good results. But few have Karl’s charisma, and no matter how the world changes, some aspect of his life always seems to be in sync with the zeitgeist. Gwen met him when he was in handsome-surgeon mode. Never married, he was the subject of much gossip. But the ordinary truth was that he worked too much and had no taste for a playboy lifestyle because it would have undercut his good-guy image, which he enjoyed mightily. His self-knowledge on this topic was his saving grace. “I like the attention,” he told Gwen on their third interview, which somehow mutated into their first date, upending her professional life when she failed to reveal this fact to her bosses before her article ran. “Not because I’m egotistical but because I can use it.”
“Oh, you use your powers for good,” she said, laughing.
“Yes,” he said, laughing yet earnest. On the first night they spent together—which happened to be the next night—they watched a movie on cable, a wonderfully campy affair in which a doctor, asked during a deposition if he had a god complex, replied: “I am God.” Oh, how they laughed.
Oh, how true it was.
Karl is a surgeon. Karl is handsome. Karl goes to third world countries on his “vacations” and makes miracles. Five years ago, as the subject of immigration heated up, Karl revealed that he had entered the country illegally as a child, obtaining citizenship status under the Reagan-sanctioned amnesty of 1986. He testified before Congress. He wrote op-eds for the New York Times, although with considerable help from Gwen, who made his language less pedantic and high-handed. Karl may not have a god complex, exactly, but he has a touch of Zeus in him, flinging his words like thunderbolts. He wrote a memoir, this time with the help of a not-so-ghostly ghost. The memoir led to a cable television show, and while it wasn’t a huge hit, it scored solidly in the ratings, renewed year after year. Every journalist who wrote about the show seemed obligated to include the detail that it was the rare case where a Hollywood actor wasn’t quite as good-looking as the real person he portrayed.
Seven years ago, when they started the process that would bring Annabelle into their household, Gwen thought, hoped, prayed that a child would change the balance in their lives, that their professional selves would recede somewhat. She was right, and yet she was wrong. Karl adores Annabelle, despite initially resisting Gwen’s choice of China. Why not his native Guatemala? (Gwen claimed she feared that country’s bureaucracy, but the truth was she couldn’t bear to have a daughter who would be like Karl, but not her.) What about Zimbabwe, where he had performed yet another surgery? He wanted to find the child that needed them most, he wanted to save someone. But Gwen understood that a child would save her. If they had a child, at least one person would find her essential.
“How was the freel?” Annabelle asks, mouth full of toast.
“The what?”
“You said you were going”—she swallows—“to a funeral yesterday. For your friend.”
“Oh. It was very sad. It’s always sad when people die. But I saw some old friends.”
“Your best friends?” Annabelle is entranced with the idea of best friends. Since entering kindergarten this year, she has had no fewer than five. She tries them on like hats. She has a heartless quality. Nature or nuture? Gwen or Karl?
“Yes, I guess so.” Does Gwen really want to affirm Annabelle’s belief that best friends are interchangeable, disposable, that they come and go like trends? “We were best friends until high school, when we went to different schools.” True, but a lie. She was suggesting to Annabelle that the different schools changed the nature of their relationship. But Gwen and Mickey had never attended the same school, and their friendship was irrevocably broken before they started high school.
“Who’s your best friend now?” Annabelle asks her mother.
“Miss Margery, I suppose,” Gwen says, although she considers all her female friends equally close. Which is to say—not very. But Margery is the one she would call if there were major trouble. She’s the one she called the night she decided she wanted a trial separation from Karl.
“Did he cheat on you?” Margery asked. Everyone starts there. Everyone expects it. He’s too damn handsome. Gwen’s looks are holding up well, and Karl is ten years older, yet it’s clear that everyone thinks she’s competing above her weight class.
“No, not really.”
“Not really?”
“A woman’s after him, but he really doesn’t get it. I mean, he has no clue. He’s pretty naive that way.”
“How do you know, then?”
“He’s so naive that he showed me her e-mails because he thinks they’re funny. He’s, like, �She’s such a good writer. You should hire her, give her a column.’ I had to explain to Karl that women don’t write funny, flirtatious e-mails about being newly single to their old boyfriends in order to get the attention of their editor wives.”
“Someone from high school?”
“College.”
“Had they seen each other recently? At a reunion? Did he e-mail her first?”
“No. And no. Margery, that’s not the point.”
“What, then?”
What, then. She toys with the story in her head. It still hurts, thinking about it, but she knows others would find her overly sensitive. Babyish, even.
It was last month. Karl came home from one of his full, full days. The White House had called. Not the president himself, but still. And now there was going to be this documentary, serious stuff, made by an Oscar winner. Two hours of Karl’s life, his real life, not the cotton-candy version on the cable network, with all the fake romances and intrigue thrown in. Gwen listened, happy for him, happy for their life. Gwen never had a problem being happy for Karl. Annabelle put out place mats in the renovated kitchen alcove, where they preferred to dine. It’s a lovely house. A lovely house is practically obligatory when one is the editor of a consumer service magazine, but that doesn’t make obtaining and maintaining one any easier. Their life, at that moment, looked like the kinds of lives in Gwen’s magazine. The house and the magazine had just come through a year of turmoil but were relatively solid now. (It was two weeks before the retaining wall gave way and the basement filled with mud.)
As they ate dessert—homemade apple pie with a cheddar crust, made by Gwen—she started to tell Karl about her problems with a fairly big story, something a little tougher than the magazine usually did. She had a showdown with the publisher, the money guy, and had persuaded him to see things her way, although he wouldn’t let her make it the cover story. Still, it would run as written. It would make news.
“I met with the publisher about the Figueroa story today,” she began.
He nodded absently, pulled out his BlackBerry, and began scrolling through his messages as he left the room. Annabelle, who had started to clear the table, didn’t notice.
And that was the problem.
I can’t do this to her, Gwen thought. I can’t let my daughter grow up in a household where Daddy matters, but Mommy doesn’t, where only one person’s day matters. She’ll make bad decisions, she’ll choose the wrong men.Just like I did. Twice. Once. Twice.
Back in the kitchen, which looks quite perfect, although now there’s a pervasive dank smell from the basement problems, she still feels the same way. Everyone keeps telling her she has to stay for Annabelle’s sake. If she were to tell them why she left Karl, would anyone agree that it was for Annabelle’s sake? Probably not. Besides, it’s not the whole truth. But it’s part of the truth, a big part.
Then again, parsing out the truth—deciding what needed to be told and what could be held back—wasn’t that the beginning of the end for Gwen, Mickey, and the Halloran brothers?
Summer 1978
CHAPTER SIX
Sean—of course—found the fact in a book, and although he could never find it again, that didn’t make it not so: our own Leakin Park was one of the largest parks within a city’s limits, 1,200 acres or so when combined with Gwynns Falls Park. We loved telling that fact to out-of-town guests, who always countered: What about Central Park? But Sean had an answer for that, too: Central Park was a paltry 843 acres. Still, our visitors—cousins and the like—were seldom impressed. To them, it was just a bunch of trees and hills. Even if we took them to the tamed part that had tennis courts and ball fields and a little train and the wonderfully spooky chapel on the old Crimea estate, they remained bored. But that was the thing about our park, as we thought of it: It required day-in, day-out commitment to find its treasures. It was a place that rewarded persistence and stillness. In the summer of 1978, we pushed farther and farther into the park every day, Mickey at the lead, and each day brought a discovery. A branch of the stream, with tiny minnows and frogs and snapping turtles. Bright blue flowers in places so shadowy that it was a miracle they bloomed at all.
Sometimes the park turned on us, reminded us of its power and immensity. We blustered into mud as deep as quicksand, came home with burrs in our hair, rips in our clothes, scratches on our faces. On such days, our exasperated mothers would threaten us with day camp or chores or house arrest. But they never followed through. Mickey’s mother worked, and Gwen’s mother had one hobby after another, and Mrs. Halloran did whatever she did. Cleaning, she said, but either she was bad at it or the Halloran boys were too much for her because their house was never really tidy. Clean, perhaps, but messy. By the summer of 1977, when Go-Go was seven, she was reduced to buying underwear in various sizes and leaving them on a sideboard in the upstairs hall. It was up to the boys to find pairs that fit.
Anyway, the primary rule, in those days before cell phones, was that we had to stay within shouting distance of Gwen’s house. But what was shouting distance? How far could sound carry? Whose lung power dictated the range? We would sometimes tell Go-Go to let the rest of us walk ahead for five minutes or so, then bellow. We could always hear Go-Go, so we kept going. And, yes, we understood that we were cheating, that Go-Go’s shouts did not expand the farther we walked, but we were prepared to plead ignorance of this bit of physics if ever confronted. The fact is, our parents didn’t want to look too closely at how we spent our days because then they would have to be responsible for us. And, as noted, Mickey’s mother worked late and slept later, Mrs. Halloran did whatever she did, and Tally Robison threw pots, scribbled on legal pads, and, eventually, stared trancelike at blank canvases in her little studio, frozen with doubt. It could take her days to apply a single stroke of color, and her paintings were never really finished, not that anyone could tell. Tally Robison painted the kind of pictures that made people like Mr. Halloran say: “My kids could do better than that. Even Go-Go.”
But one overcast day, we walked so far that some of us began to wonder how we could ever get back by dinnertime. It was one of those gray-green days that feels deliciously poignant after so much summery perfection. Rain threatened, but it was an empty threat. The air was moist, heavy, yet not unpleasant. We walked for what felt like hours. Gwen struggled at the end of the line. She was the least athletic of us and fat to boot. Over hill, over dale, she sang in a soft whisper, and the rest of us picked up her song, although we all found it mystifying. We weren’t clear on what dales were, much less the “case-ons” that kept rolling along. Gwen must have learned the song from her father, who was old, in his fifties already. We sang absentmindedly, glad for the sound of our voices. If we had taken time to contemplate how queer this was, we would have stopped. But not even Tim, sixteen at the time, uttered his favorite insult: This is so gay. We just kept marching and singing, singing and marching.
Over hill, over dale … Mickey was in front, but it was the Halloran boys who began to piece together the landscape, who saw the connections. “That’s Suicide Hill,” they said, shocking Gwen, because our favorite sledding spot was far enough that we drove there as a special treat. It was not particularly dangerous, just very long and straight. We crossed the road and walked along the stream. No one said anything, but we could all tell that everyone felt relieved at finding a recognizable landmark. We weren’t lost, after all. No one would have to cry uncle, admit to being worried about how far we had gone. Mickey began to walk faster, as if she knew where she was headed, running up and over a small hill, then disappearing from view.
“Hey,” she called back to the rest of us. “Do you know about this?”
“This” was a house, a log cabin set back in a thicket of trees. If it were in a book, it would have been charming, the kind of primitive dwelling that makes girls want to play dress-up and pretend they are living in the olden days. But this place—it was dirty. And it smelled. Not of woodsmoke and apples, but of, well—it had a bathroom smell, very strong. Go-Go held his nose, and the rest of us wanted to do the same.
“It’s the outhouse,” Sean said. “This place has no indoor plumbing.”
“Does someone live here?” Gwen asked.
“Not now,” Sean said. Always confident, always the one with the answers. Not even Tim contradicted him back then. “Maybe once, but you wouldn’t be allowed to live like this now. There are rules about how you have to live, zoning and things. You have to have a bathroom.”
“Then how do you explain the chickens?” Mickey asked. “And the laundry on the line?”
There was an assortment of clothes, men’s shirts and jeans, drying on a coarse piece of rope, and three unusually calm chickens bopping toward us with herky-jerky movements. We were used to the aggressive geese that guarded the Gwynns Falls, so most of us stepped back. But Mickey was already at the threshold of the house, peering in.
“Mickey,” Gwen called, trying to get her to stop. But now Sean was beside her, then Tim, then Go-Go. Gwen had to step up.
Although the day was not bright, we still needed time for our eyes to adjust once inside. It was a simple room. Something—burlap—had been tacked over the windows, which accounted for the dimness. There was a chair, a small plastic tub that held dishes. A rickety pair of cabinets hung crookedly on the back wall and there was a makeshift counter—it looked like something you’d find on a church altar—piled with boxes and canisters. The cabin wasn’t neat, but some sort of order was at work. Someone was taking care of it, in a fashion. The only really messy thing in the room was a pile of rags left on a cot. These smelled, too, not like the outhouse, but of something dank and strong.
“Who lives here?” Go-Go asked in a hoarse, awed whisper.
“No one lives here,” Sean said. Sean didn’t like to be wrong. “Hunters use it, maybe, but you couldn’t live here.”
“Hunters?” Gwen asked. “In Leakin Park? Is that legal?”
“No, but that doesn’t stop some people.”
Go-Go, with his magpie eyes, had spotted something glinting. “Look,” he said, darting toward the cot with the pile of rags, no longer perturbed by the smell. “A guitar.”
As he crouched down to drag the guitar from beneath the cot, a hand shot out from the pile of rags and grabbed Go-Go firmly by the wrist.
“Don’t,” the rags said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sean still needs a moment to register where he is when he awakens, although he has been staying at his mother’s house for almost a week now. Not. Home. This is his first conscious thought the morning after Go-Go’s funeral. He’s not at home, and home is St. Petersburg. He’s clear on that much. The first clue is the light. It is different from his bedroom in Florida, especially this time of year. He loves the light in Florida. It’s one of the few things he loves. The light, winter, and the lack of state income taxes. But this room is dark, depressing, although he’s glad for the darkness this morning. His head is so heavy, his mouth and throat feel as if they are coated with sand. Not a hangover, exactly, if only because Sean believes he never gets hangovers. Allergies, perhaps. He thought he had outgrown them, but maybe he’s just not allergic to stuff in Florida.
So: Baltimore. So: a dark room, although it’s beginning to brighten around him. The light is gray, watery, the sheets a little grainy beneath him, as if someone has been eating here, as if these are the crumbs of crumbs of crumbs. Go-Go ate in bed, among other things. Go-Go still fouled the sheets when he was nine or ten. Their mother made excuses for him, said it was a medical condition. But the medical condition vanished when Go-Go was given the single room that, by all rights, should have been Tim’s, then Sean’s when Tim left for college. It was a narrow, dark room, not particularly desirable except for its solitary state. Besides, Tim and Sean enjoyed rooming together, talking late into the night. Go-Go, always terrified of being left out, ended up more left out than ever.
Sean’s in a double bed, but that’s right. The twin beds in his room were replaced by a double bed when his mother decided the room needed to be at least nominally welcoming to her sons and their wives.
Only this bed moves. Sways and rolls beneath him.
But maybe that’s okay, too? At home, he has a memory foam mattress, bought because his wife, Vivian, is a light sleeper, so the movement is merely relative to what he’s used to. His mother is not someone to splurge on a mattress that was used, at most, five or six nights a year, because Tim never sleeps over, and Sean is lucky to make it home for Christmas. And when Go-Go returned home, he always chose his old room, dark and sunless and unimproved as it was.
The bed moves again, an actual roll. Sean sits up, puts his palm against the mattress. Warm to the touch, it pulses.
“A water bed?” he asks wonderingly, waiting to awaken from yet another banal dream. Sean has the dullest dreams of anyone he knows, assuming other people tell the truth.
“I know,” replies a woman’s voice, with a little throb of Baltimore in it. Aye knoah. “I’m such a cliché. The swinging flight attendant and her water bed.”
Mickey—McKey—is standing across the room, her back to him as she fashions her long dark hair into some kind of upsweep. She is wearing a navy dress, and even in the pale light of what Sean realizes now is very early morning, it looks a little cheap and too tailored for McKey. Funny, she lived in jeans and overalls when they were kids—she was defiantly not a girly-girl, not like Gwen—but she was, well, sexy, even when she was eleven. Sean, two years older, felt guilty for noticing that and felt angry when Tim actually articulated the same thoughts, lying in their twin beds. “I saw Mickey’s underwear yesterday. That’s why I let her lead the way—when she’s going up the hill and wearing those old cutoffs, you can see right up them. She’s got a bangin’ body.”
She still does. The tailored dress—her uniform, duh—can’t hide that, but it doesn’t take advantage of it, either. McKey should have been a flight attendant back in the day when they were called stewardesses, when being a Pan Am or TWA air hostess was basically one step away from being a beauty pageant contestant. As a child, she always seemed slightly out of place—in her boyish clothes, in her friendship with Gwen, in her chaotic household, a thousand times crazier than his. Yet the undercurrents in her house never seemed to touch Mickey, whereas the relatively mild disorder of the Halloran household resonated within Go-Go. He was like a tuning fork, vibrating from the tiniest bit of tension, while Mickey could be still and composed in the middle of a hurricane. Literally, come to think of it.
When Go-Go was in his twenties and going through the twelve steps for the first time, he came to the making-amends part and ended up twisting it, demanding that his parents apologize to him for the handful of spankings he had been given, all quite justified in Sean’s view. Go-Go also cited the time his mother had tied him to the laundry pole because she had to go to the grocery store and Go-Go threw a tantrum and refused to get in the car. Yes, it had been primitive, inexcusable, but their parents were throwbacks, raising their children as they had been raised. They had been younger than most of their peers, Doris only twenty-two when Tim was born. And while they were native Baltimoreans, going back two generations, they could have been right off the boat in a lot of ways. The Hallorans seemed perpetually baffled by the world at large and always—what were the phrases they used? At the end of my rope. This is the last straw. When they counted to ten, they started at nine. Angry, angry people, although his mother prefers not to remember that now.
So many memories clamoring for his attention. But not one of them can change the fact that he is in McKey’s bed, his head throbbing, and she’s getting dressed.
“Where—”
“My apartment in Riverside, south of Federal Hill,” McKey says. “Close to the highway—hear it?—but also only ten minutes from the airport. Not really within walking distance of the restaurants and bars, except for Rub, the barbecue place across the street. That’s where we went last night.”
She’s toying with him. If McKey were a cat, she would spend hours batting her prey between her front paws, she would tease other animals to death. Sean takes inventory. He is shirtless, but he has his jeans on, boxers beneath. Surely—
“I took your keys away from you,” she says. “You were way too drunk to drive. Tim was long gone, and Gwen didn’t come out with us. Said she had to get up early to drive over to her house, have breakfast with her daughter, that she was already guilt-ridden about missing her bedtime. That story doesn’t quite hang together, does it? Her moving back home, I mean. They’ve got the money to provide her old man with all the care he needs. I thought about being a nurse. For about three seconds. It wasn’t the gross stuff that changed my mind. As you know, nothing really grosses me out.”
Sean nods carefully, not wanting to move his head too much. His headache is worse than he realized. It feels like a blister, like something he yearns to pop, but shouldn’t. Mickey is right, she never shied away from things that other girls, even some boys, found disgusting. She would touch anything they found and with her fingers yet, not stand back, prodding with a stick. Except for snapping turtles. On those she used a stick.
“But all that, well, caring. It’s exhausting, being all about another person. That’s why I’m not married, although I tried it. A flight attendant—those expectations I can meet. A drink, a blanket, a meal when I work first class. Maybe a little bit of attention when some guy gets on all pumped about himself, needs to find a way to brag while pretending he’s not. It’s funny, it’s never the really famous or successful people who hold forth about themselves. I haven’t had that many celebrities on my flights—I fly mainly Baltimore to Detroit, sometimes Minneapolis and sometimes I’m on a route that continues to Seattle—but I’ve had some famous people on board and they really do NOT want to be hassled. They want to be recognized, sure, but that’s enough. No, it’s usually some salesman who’s just made, I don’t know, whatever milestone his industry uses, some big sale or award, who needs to impress upon me just how very, very successful he is.”
Sean doesn’t recall McKey talking this much. Maybe that is another change, part of the transformation from Mickey to McKey. One of the nicest things about Mickey was that she used words for concrete, tangible purposes. Let’s go here. Let’s do this. She had been like a boy that way. A boy with a bangin’ body.
“We didn’t have sex,” she says, turning back from the mirror, fiddling with her scarf.
There’s the girl he remembers. Direct and blunt.
“You were wasted. I had to drape your arm over my shoulder to get you here. You didn’t even drink that much, not that I noticed, but you were fucked-up. And suddenly, really fast. If Tim had seen the way you were headed, I don’t think he would have left when he did.”
Sean feels as if he remembers the evening, which isn’t quite the same as remembering it. There was barbecue, quite decent, and he was drinking beer. He switched to Jameson at some point, but he didn’t pound shots or anything. He didn’t drink that much, but he probably hadn’t been eating regularly. Funerals were like weddings that way. Family members barely got a bite down, they were so busy consoling the people whose ostensible job was to console them.
Of course, the guest of honor at a funeral never eats at all.
McKey sits on the water bed, which shivers beneath them, exacting a toll on his aching head.
“I wanted to,” she says. “But you’re married. Happily, Gwen told me. Warned me. Maybe that’s true, but I think she wants you for herself.”
“I am,” he says, his voice weak, croaky. “Happily married. I’ve never—”
“Of course you haven’t. You’re the good one. You’ll always be the good one, Sean.”
If he is so good, then why is he thinking about what it would be like to take that uniform off McKey?
“It’s my fault, how drunk you got,” she says matter-of-factly, patting his cheek. “I wasn’t thinking of you, only myself, what I needed to tell you. Of course it was upsetting. I kept talking and talking, and you kept drinking because I wasn’t letting you get a word in edgewise.”
He has no idea what she is referring to. His blankness must be transparent because she then says: “You don’t remember? Maybe it’s for the best. We’ll talk about it later. Or maybe not. I’m sure it was hard. And it violated everything AA is about. Still, I thought you should know, and we ended up alone together in a bar.”
“In a bar.” But she just mentioned AA. Something’s not hanging together.
“They know me there,” she says. “I drink club soda with a splash of tonic and lime. It looks like a gin and tonic and it keeps people from being so damn pained around me. There are different ways to be sober, you know. Some of us learn to navigate the other world, the one where people drink. Go-Go was the opposite. When he went into a bar, all he saw, all he thought about, was drinking. There was no other reality for him. He shouldn’t have tested himself that way. I wasn’t there, but I can figure out what happened, Sean. I know.” No trace of the arch Baltimore accent this time. “I don’t care what anyone says. Go-Go didn’t kill himself. He got drunk. He crashed. End of story. No matter what the toxicology report says. It would take very little alcohol to fuck him up.”
She glances at the clock on the wall. It is charming, yet generic, the kind of thing Sean’s wife despises. His wife’s entire life centers on not having anything that anyone else has. She buys into the idea that there is one perfect everything, all the way down to the light plates. The problem is, Vivian’s process is so time-intensive that it never ends. Every time she “finishes” one room, another room is begging to be redecorated, having gone out of style or spawned low-end imitators, which means she is no longer one of a kind.
“Gotta go,” McKey says. “Just push the button on the lock, don’t worry about the dead bolt. I don’t. Another perk of this location. It’s pretty safe.”
She kisses him on his cheek and leaves, sending the water bed lurching again. After a few minutes, Sean manages to heave himself out of it without actually heaving, gathering up his shirt and socks, folded neatly in a chair, locating his shoes, oxfords that someone—well, OK, McKey—has untied and removed, finding his jacket and overcoat in the closet. She wanted to sleep with him. He can’t help feeling good about that.
Only what did she tell him about Go-Go, exactly? Something about Go-Go and AA, why it wasn’t working for him. Why can’t he remember? Is it possible he simply doesn’t want to remember? Sean has always been very good about forgetting inconvenient things.
Summer 1978
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Don’t touch my guitar, little boy.”
The voice was as grimy as the hand, low and guttural and flecked with debris, but matter-of-fact, not particularly harsh or threatening. Although we had all yelped when the hand shot out—even Tim and Sean, although they later denied it—we felt strangely calm. Except, perhaps, Go-Go, who writhed in the hand’s grip but could not free himself. Go-Go was terrified.
The man sat up, releasing Go-Go, although Go-Go continued to twist and turn as if held by invisible hands. The man was not really grimy, we saw, but extremely dark-skinned, black as ink, although with large patches of pink-white skin. His forehead, the area around his right eye, his right cheek, and chin were all ghostly, without pigmentation. Later, we managed to find a way to ask Gwen’s father about this without revealing why we were asking. He explained that a person with this skin condition wasn’t a burn victim, as some of us thought, or diseased in any way. But before that explanation was offered, we speculated at length on his appearance. Leprosy, Sean said. A horrible accident, Gwen said. Burned himself up smoking in bed, Tim said. Go-Go said he was a monster, and Mickey said he was just born that way, and she was closest to right.
“What are you children doing in my house?” the man asked us, although the word sounded like chillrun in his mouth. We would come to understand that his words were as soft and mushy as the food required by his rotting teeth, which made his breath fearsome. He didn’t seem angry. He didn’t even seem particularly curious. And, unlike most adults who asked that question, he apparently wanted an answer, a real one. He wasn’t quizzing us as a pretext for scolding us, or setting us up, testing to see if we would lie to him. He honestly thought we might have a good reason for being there.
“We didn’t know it was anyone’s house,” Mickey said.
“We didn’t know it was anyone’s house,” Sean repeated, a little louder. Sean had a way of saying what someone else had already said, yet making the words his own.
“You knew it was somebody’s,” the man said. His voice was mild, though. “Laundry on the line. Chickens. Didn’t you see my chickens?”
He made a clucking sound, and the chickens crossed the threshold, almost as if in a parade. They gave us a wide berth, cutting as large a circle as possible in the small house. He picked up the one in the front, stroking it and cooing to it as if it were something much more cuddly, a kitten or a puppy.
“Do you eat them?” Go-Go asked, and the rest of us wanted to shush him. But the man didn’t seem to mind Go-Go’s question. He didn’t seem to mind Go-Go, which was unusual in an adult. Go-Go got on grown-ups’ nerves quickly, very quickly.
“Sure,” he said. “What else is chickens for?”
“Eggs,” Tim said.
“That’s true,” the man said. “And I eat eggs, too. But I got to make do with what I have. My garden, my chickens, things that folks bring me.”
“What do you do when the cold weather comes?” Mickey asked, bold as ever.
“Build a fire in the stove. Put an extra blanket on the bed. Keep the door shut.”
“And the chickens?”
He had grown tired of the conversation, or tired of us. He bent down and pulled the guitar out from under the bed. We were kids then, all adults were old to us, but Chicken George, as we would come to call him, was especially confounding. You could have told us he was fifty, not that much older than Tim is now, or you could have told us ninety, and we wouldn’t have argued. He was old, someone who had seen a lot and knew a lot.
He began to play the guitar and sing. His voice was awful and he didn’t know the words to whatever song he was trying to play, so there were a lot of uh-huhs and moans. If Mick Jagger had been standing there, he probably would have been in ecstasy at this raw display of old-fashioned blues playing and singing, but we were callow kids. We listened to Billy Joel. Some of us still do, even if we don’t admit it.
“It is customary,” he said when he finished, “to reward a man if you like his song.”
He held out his palm, which was amazingly pink, pink as the pads on a newborn kitten’s feet. It was creased and craggy, a hardworking hand, yet rosy pink. We stared at his hand, not gleaning what he wanted. Sean, at last, put a quarter in it, and the man actually bit the coin. But then he smiled, letting us know he was in on the joke, that he knew biting a coin was something people did with gold pieces in a movie, not with a quarter from Sean’s pocket.
“Well, I guess you weren’t expecting a show, so that’s okay that you don’t have more,” he said. “Tell me your names.”
Mickey took the lead.
“I’m Leia,” she said.
“Han,” said Sean, always quick.
“Luke,” said Tim.
“Carrie,” said Gwen, who couldn’t think of another girl’s name from Star Wars, clearly begrudging Mickey’s decision to crown herself as the princess.
“Go-Go,” said Go-Go, not getting it. Even if he had, he probably would have said R2-D2 or Obi-Wan. It was funny about Go-Go. He lied. He lied a lot, trying to avoid punishment for his various misdeeds. But he was bad at it. He couldn’t tell a lie to save his life. And his honesty often came out at just the wrong time.
“Where y’all live?”
“Franklintown Road,” Mickey said. There probably weren’t four or five houses along Franklintown, but it was nearby and a credible place for us to be from. If we mentioned Dickeyville, we would give ourselves away. Should the man ever come up that way, determined to find the five children who had come into his house and tried to take his guitar—not that we would have taken it, but that’s probably what he thought—he would find us all too easily. All he would have to say is: blond girl, brunette girl, three boys with their hair cut way short, and everyone would say, Oh, the Halloran boys, fat Gwen, and that dark-haired girl they play with.
“And you came all the way down here. Huh. You going to come visit me again?”
It sounded more like a request than a question. Why would we come here again? What was the point of visiting this strange old man, who smelled bad and couldn’t sing?
“Sure,” said Sean, our spokesman.
“I need some canned goods,” he said. “Beans, soup. And I wouldn’t mind some new shirts. I like them flannel shirts, but I need T-shirts, too.”
“Sure.”
Why not agree? We were never going to return here. It was a far walk, something to do on a summer’s day when you had all the time in the world. Come Labor Day and school, we wouldn’t have the time. What was the harm in promising that Leia, Han, Luke, Carrie, and Go-Go would return?
We were back within the week, with all the things he requested.
We called him Chicken George, after the character in Roots, which had aired the previous year. He never seemed to remember our names, nor notice when we slipped and used our real ones. He asked almost nothing of us, beyond the canned goods and old shirts we pulled from our parents’ homes, and each visit was the same: he would play his guitar, singing in his caterwauling style, and Go-Go would dance his dance, flinging his body around as only he could. It shouldn’t have been fun and yet it was, if only because it was a secret among the five of us. There was no one else in Chicken George’s life, no one else who knew of him or cared about him. He was ours, a new toy.
And, in time, we treated him as all children treat their toys—with increasing carelessness and indifference.
CHAPTER NINE
For four years, Gwen has lobbied for the right to telecommute, only to receive the most infuriating argument in the world from her boss: she wouldn’t like it. As if she were a child who didn’t know what she wants. But then, Gwen has always hated pronouncements about her character, anyone else’s attempt to define her. She tolerates this tendency, just barely, from loved ones, although Karl’s observations about her these days are hurtful. But she cannot stand it when anyone else attempts to sum her up. She would hate to be profiled in her own magazine, which allots a few breezy sentences, equal parts biography, description, and idiosyncrasy, to summing up someone’s entire character. Besides, her request should be considered on its merits, not on her publisher’s belief that he knows better than she what she wants.
But in caring for her father, Gwen has quickly discovered her publisher is right: she’s not built for telecommuting. Not that she ever wanted to work from home every day. Her work life involves too many meetings and lunches and functions for that to be feasible. But she thought everyone would thrive if she were allowed to work at home one day a week, shutting herself away with her reporters’ copy, free from the interruptions of the workplace. In her father’s house, she has discovered there are even more distractions away from the office than there, and she can’t even blame her father, a stoic patient, almost to a fault. He never asks for anything from her and can barely force himself to seek the day aide’s help.
Gwen keeps cooking, for instance, rationalizing that she is trying to find dishes that are gentle, yet not insulting to her father’s palate. Homemade puddings and soft-boiled eggs in delicate sauces, milk shakes and smoothies. She has tackled the rather messy job of dusting his books, a task he used to do every year but has clearly ignored for at least a decade now.
And then there is her mother’s closet.
Gwen was a senior in college when her mother died. Back then, she was still very much the family baby, still young enough to be allowed the privilege of falling apart while Miller and Fee, proper adults, stepped in and helped her bewildered father make arrangements, short- and long-term. Tally Robison’s end was at once shockingly fast and excruciatingly slow, six weeks from diagnosis to death. It was agreed that Gwen should stay in school, up at Barnard, until the semester ended or she was summoned home. She submitted her final paper on an eerily balmy December day, then returned to her apartment to find the message light blinking on her machine, something that had once heralded only joy, usually in the form of a new conquest: Come home now. It didn’t occur to her to spring for the Metroliner, as the fast train was known then, and the old NortheastDirect wheezed its way down to Baltimore, indifferent to her urgency. By the time she arrived at University Hospital, her mother was dead.
“She was out of it the past two days. She wouldn’t have known you,” Fee said, meaning to comfort her. Or did she? To this day, Gwen can’t help wondering. With her dark hair and eyes, Fee looks exactly like Clem and Miller, which is a kind way of saying she is plain. Although not what anyone would call butch, she always disdained Gwen’s girly-girly ways, her flirtatious style of wheedling. She probably resented the way that Gwen was raised practically as an only child, not to mention the duties thrust upon Fee as Gwen’s primary babysitter, starting at the much too young age of eleven. That was when Tally started going to the ceramics studio in Mount Washington, or was it the weavers’ collective in Clarksville?
Gwen feels bad now, looking back, at how she acted. It was as if her mother’s death had happened only to her. And, maybe a little bit, to her father. But not to Miller and Fee. Her brother and sister, edging toward thirty, seemed old to her. They had jobs, spouses, children. Well, Miller had all three, and Fee was living with the woman she would one day marry. It was part of the natural order for them to experience death. But not Gwen. She moped around the house through Christmas break, of help to no one, unaware that there was any help to be provided, that death required anything besides mourning. Then she went back to school and wrote a lot of poetry in between her journalism assignments, never stopping to consider that Miller and Fee had lost their mother, too. She did think a lot about how Mickey failed to come by over the holidays, which functioned as an open-ended mourning period. No Mickey, although she had remained in the area when her mother moved to Florida. The senior Hallorans made a dutiful visit. Mrs. Halloran brought crab dip, which Gwen’s father wasn’t sure was safe to eat.
That was almost twenty-five years ago. A quarter of a century, and now Gwen is approaching the half-century mark, only five years out. She realizes some of her mother’s things must still be in the house. True, the jewelry was divided between the sisters long ago, not that Fee has much use for Tally’s jewelry, although she insisted on taking a coral squash blossom ring that Gwen coveted. Other things have been boxed up, donated to thrift stores. But the closet is still quite full, and Gwen keeps returning to it, losing hours in it. Each dress has a memory. Some even hold on to Tally’s signature perfume, Shalimar.
So Gwen is sorting through her mother’s clothes, putting aside items for Annabelle’s dress-up chest and appropriating some more timeless things for herself—cashmere sweaters, a fabulous wool cape—when the doorbell rings. She shouts to her father’s aide that she will answer it and runs down the stairs to throw open the door.
“Mrs. Halloran!”
She looks awful, understandably. Puffy, sleepless, possibly unwashed. But she carries a dish in her hands. More crab dip?
“You didn’t have to do this,” Gwen says. “I should be doing this for you.”
“Oh, it helped take my mind off things.” She looks around, as if in search of something.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Gwen asks. “My father is napping, but if he wakes up, he’ll be happy to visit with us.”
“Tea would be nice.”
Gwen takes the plate to the kitchen and peels back the aluminum foil. They are store-bought cookies, she recognizes them from the wake. And not even good store-bought cookies. How had throwing these leftovers on a plate helped to distract Mrs. Halloran from anything? Gwen doesn’t want to be unkind, but there is something hostile about these cookies. She struggles with the etiquette of the moment. What would be ruder: putting them out with the tea or leaving them in the kitchen? Gwen arranges them on an elaborate pink-patterned plate, then washes Mrs. Halloran’s white plastic one while the tea brews. She assumed Mrs. Halloran would follow her into the kitchen, but from the sound of things, she is moving around the living room, probably wondering at the disarray of Clem’s books, still in stacks on the floor. Gwen hopes she doesn’t bother her father, asleep in the sunroom at the rear of the house.
They have tea in the dining room, at the heavy Swedish modern table that was out of style almost as soon as Tally bought it. Now it’s finally vintage.
“So,” Mrs. Halloran says, “I guess the young people had quite a night of it.”
“The young people?” Gwen is honestly confused, assumes that Mrs. Halloran is referring to Tim’s daughters, three steely-eyed beauties who give the impression of having said something devastating about someone else in the room. Go-Go’s children are little more than babies, and Sean’s son did not make the trip from Florida. Neither did his wife, come to think of it. There was something about a commitment on his son’s part, something he couldn’t get out of without ruining it for others—a big game, a performance?—and Sean’s wife stayed behind with him.
“You and the boys,” Mrs. Halloran clarifies. “And that Mickey.”
“Thanks for calling me young,” Gwen says. “But I didn’t go out. I had to check on my daughter. Even though I’m staying here, I drive home to put her to bed each night.”
So don’t gossip about me, Doris Halloran. Of course Mrs. Halloran would be within her rights to speculate about Gwen’s marriage. But she can’t know based on the information available to her, so she would be gossiping.
“I just assumed you were all together,” Mrs. Halloran says. “He said you were all out late, talking about old times, and he didn’t think he should drive, so he stayed over at Tim’s.”
“Sean always was the sensible one,” Gwen says.
“Yes, he’s a good boy.” Doris Halloran sips her tea, takes one of the cookies, but holds it in her hand, as if she can’t remember what it is. “All my boys are good boys.”
Gwen notes the present tense in her voice. It is a lie twice-over. Go-Go is no longer anything, and he was never good, everyone knows that. Not bad, but not good. The statement is like this plate of stale, off-brand cookies. Baffling, challenging, passive-aggressive. She decides to agree. “Yes.”
“You know—” Mrs. Halloran says, then pauses significantly, and Gwen realizes she doesn’t know, that she has no idea what Mrs. Halloran is going to say next and that’s actually unusual in life. Even when she told Karl she was leaving him, he wasn’t particularly surprised. “You know, I called Tim’s wife this morning.”
“Is everything okay?”
“There was a pair of gloves, I thought it belonged to one of the girls. Pink ones. Tim said they might be Lisa’s. The funny thing is that Arlene didn’t mention that Sean had stayed over.”
Gwen feels she’s being taunted, but she’s not sure how or why. The only thing she knows is that she wasn’t with the boys last night. But maybe that’s what Mrs. Halloran is trying to find out? The old loyalties kick in, as automatic and destructive as ever.
“Maybe she assumed that he had called you.”
“Why would she assume that?”
“Because Sean has always been the conscientious one, of all of us. He always does the right thing.”
This, apparently, is what Mrs. Halloran has come to hear, or close enough. She finishes her tea and leaves, taking with her the washed plate, her little Trojan horse of an offering.
Gwen goes into the sunroom, now the sickroom. Her father’s awake, alert, staring into space. It’s the aide who sleeps, dozing in her chair, her head bent at a painful angle.
“Poor Doris,” he says in a whisper, careful not to wake the woman who is supposed to be caring for him. So he knows Mrs. Halloran came to call, probably heard their entire conversation but didn’t ask to join them. “I do feel awful that I couldn’t go to the funeral.”
“That’s okay, Dad. I was there. I represented for our family.”
“It’s unnatural,” he says. “To outlive one’s child.”
Gwen knows he’s right, she said as much at the wake. But there’s a part of her that finds it surprising that Go-Go made it to forty. She sees him in her memories, scurrying along high, flimsy branches near power lines, taking his sled down slopes far scarier than so-called Suicide Hill. There was never any joy in his risk taking, come to think of it. He wanted to fall, to be shocked, to hit a tree. Go-Go has been reaching for things and running into things as long as she’s known him. Could a little boy have a death wish? If so, did Go-Go always have it, or was it something that came later?
“There are no good deaths,” Gwen says, just to say something.
“Oh, no,” her father says, adamant. “There are some. You haven’t known any, yet. But I’m planning on one.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
Her father smiles. “You look so like your mother. You should keep that.”
Gwen glances down. She hasn’t registered the fact that she’s wearing one of her mother’s old cashmere cardigans, truly old, one she must have worn as a teenager, embroidered with pearls and sequins. When the doorbell rang, she was in too much of a hurry to take it off. Now she feels guilty, as if she’s been caught rummaging through things that are rightfully her father’s, not hers, waiting for the good death he has just promised her.
“I didn’t mean—I never realized there was so much of her stuff left, and I thought I might organize it.”
“You should go home, Gwen.”
“I’ll leave in a little bit. No use fighting the traffic.”
“I mean to stay.”
“No.”
“Nothing’s perfect,” her father says. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Karl is. Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you seen his television alter ego, solving everyone’s problems?”
Her father sighs.
“You told me not to marry him.”
“I told you what it would be like to be married to a surgeon. That’s not the same thing. Now there’s a child. Think of her.”
“Maybe I am thinking of her.”
“When we were young, your mother and I—well, not young exactly, I was never young with her, but younger—and you were the only one left at home, there were so many divorces all of a sudden, so many parents who thought their children couldn’t be happy unless they, the parents, were happy. I’m afraid that’s simply not true.”
“You had a great marriage, Dad. It’s not fair to lecture others on marriage, when you had such a good one.”
Her father doesn’t answer right away. “I see your point of view,” he says, forever fair and evenhanded. Later, she will parse these words. Not: you’re right. But: I see your point of view. Was he trying to suggest that his marriage, like hers, might have looked better to those outside it than those in it? But, no, that’s impossible. Everyone knows that the Robisons loved each other madly.
Autumn 1978–Winter 1979
CHAPTER TEN
We would have quickly grown tired of Chicken George except for one thing: he turned out to be mysterious. At least, that’s the way we saw it: He cultivated mystery, excited our curiosity. He was vague in the face of all questions, no matter how benign. How he had come to live in this house, when he had learned the guitar. How old he was. (Go-Go asked the last one. The rest of us knew better than to ask a grown-up’s age.) He avoided all questions and had few of his own, other than: “What did you bring me?” Still, it would have been better, harsh as it sounds, if we had stopped visiting him. It’s nice to think so, at any rate, because if we had tired of him, then things might have gone differently. And this is a story about things we wished had gone differently. Aren’t all stories?
Anyway, Chicken George had a way of disappearing. The first time, it was November, and we assumed it was weather-related. The wind had started to kick up, the pleasant tang of October had given way to a steady dank cold. Weather was more reliable then. This is not memory, but hard scientific fact. The weather of our childhood was part of an unusually temperate time on our planet, with fewer extreme variations. The things we have seen in recent years—the events of just the past year, with almost a hundred inches of snow in Baltimore and floods, not to mention volcanoes and earthquakes, birds falling from the skies—might well be connected to climate change, the wear and tear that humans wreak on a planet. We are not here to argue science. But weather was more predictable then, and when it turned cold, it stayed cold, so cold the pond froze for days, even weeks of ice-skating. It made sense that Chicken George would disappear during such weather. Not that one could tell, by the look of the cabin, that anything had changed. It was as we had first found it, complete with the chickens in the yard and clothing on the line. Go-Go was the one who thought to look for his guitar. That was missing, too.
“What about the chickens?” Gwen asked.
“What about them?” countered Tim.
“They’ll die out here. Animals will eat them.”
“So what? Chicken George was going to eat them, too. What’s the difference?”
“But Chicken George would have been more humane.”
Tim laughed. “You think so, Gwen? You think that snapping an animal’s neck is that much more humane than being snatched up in the jaws of a dog or a fox? Dead is dead.”
Go-Go liked that. “Dead is dead,” he raved. “Dead is dead!” He began throwing rocks at the chickens, then running among them, scattering them. But those chickens were tough. They spread out, giving Go-Go room, but they didn’t disperse.
Mickey and Sean had been quiet throughout, systematically looking through George’s things, trying to find clues. Mickey, although uninterested in school, had a talent for deduction. Gwen’s father, noticing how she examined facts and reached conclusions, had tried to interest her in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, but she had no patience for Sherlock Holmes. Or Nancy Drew, or Trixie Belden, or books in general. She was disdainful of people who read but not in a defensive, anti-intellectual way. She thought reading was a ruse, a completely wasteful activity. If Mickey were the kind of person who trafficked in similes or metaphors, she might have compared reading to rules such as not swimming an hour after a meal, or never going out of the house with wet hair. Instead, she just didn’t read and was baffled by those who did. She didn’t like television much, either. Mickey plain didn’t like sitting still. She wanted to make things happen. She wanted to see if she could jump from mossy stone to mossy stone without falling. She wanted to poke snapping turtles with sticks, and if one snapped, well, that was the point. She would have liked to live like Chicken George—in a cabin, accountable only to herself, although preferably with indoor plumbing.
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