The Most Dangerous Thing (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-eight

T
im hangs
up the phone, looks at Arlene, and lies to her face with an ease that breaks his
heart.

“Work,” he says. “I need to go in to the
office.”

She says: “On a Saturday? Poor you,” and rubs his
shoulders. This is the payoff for being a relatively honest husband all these
years. He can lie to his wife without her suspecting a thing. Interesting how
scrupulously honest people and pathological liars end up sharing the same
advantages. Those who never lie have so much credit stored up. Those who lie all
the time get very good at it. It’s the poor schmucks in the middle, the sometime
liars, who suck at it.

He always had Go-Go pegged as one of the poor
schmucks in the middle. But if Gwen is right—he shakes his head. She can’t be
right.

“I might as well go in now, get it over with,” he
says, grabbing the car keys, ignoring his daughters’ wrathful looks.

“Is it the jewelry store murder?” Arlene asks.

“Sure,” he says. He almost wishes she would call
him on his shit, ask what could possibly require him to go to the office on a
Saturday, short of a cop killing. But she doesn’t pick up on it, only smiles and
pats his shoulder again.

Behind the wheel of his car, he tries to
concentrate on the roads even as he keeps reviewing the time line. If Gwen is
right—if Father Andrew is telling the truth—

I
f. There is another way of looking at this. The old
priest is a liar. And with Go-Go dead, he can spin the story however he wants.
But why spin a story at all? What does he have to gain? With Go-Go dead, he’s in
the clear, assuming he’s the one who molested him. Only he says he’s not, that
he’s never touched a kid, and that he was counting on Go-Go to tell people
that.

He also says that Chicken George never touched a
kid. At least—he didn’t touch Go-Go.

The priest was quite firm,
Gwen told Tim.
Go-Go said he was molested by two
high school boys in 1980. The night of the hurricane—

Was in 1979, not 1980. People
get those details wrong all the time. Trust me, Gwen.

But Go-Go said it was two high
school boys, Tim. Not Chicken George. Why would he tell Father Andrew
that?

Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the
priest is using Go-Go’s death.

Father Andrew, it turns out, is essentially being
blackmailed. A former student is threatening to go public with lurid tales of
sex abuse in the parish. With the statute of limitations long past, he can’t
bring a civil or criminal suit, but he can ruin Father Andrew’s life. The claim
is baseless—Father Andrew says—but as an ex-priest and one who is now living
openly as a gay man, he feels vulnerable. So many people don’t understand the
difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. Yet he refuses on principle to
pay this amoral opportunist. His lawyer started assembling character witnesses,
students who would testify as to his behavior. Go-Go was one of those students,
and he had agreed to give a deposition.

Go-Go was making a clean
breast of things. He wanted to know if he had to talk about other sexual
experiences, in his deposition, and Father Andrew promised him that it
wouldn’t come up. He was only going to be asked about his relationship with
Father Andrew, if he ever saw anything untoward. Go-Go said he was happy to
do it. But then he changed his mind, refused to talk to the private
investigator or Father Andrew.

Did he tell him—

About Chicken George’s death?
No. But he insisted he was molested by two boys, then blamed this older
man.

Tim arrives at his mother’s house. She has a book
in hand, holding her place with her finger, and she looks surprised—really,
almost a little annoyed—at her son’s unannounced visit. It never occurred to Tim
that his mother would prefer anything to seeing one of her sons.

“Sean’s meeting you there,” she says.

“Where?”

“The golf course. He said you were playing golf
this afternoon, but he had some errands to run first.”

Interesting. Why has Sean created such an elaborate
lie to get away from their mother? But Tim instinctively takes his brother’s
back.

“Our tee time isn’t for another couple of hours.
Mom, where did you say you keep the stepladder now?”

“Why do you need the stepladder?”

“I just do.”

She has to think—or pretend that she’s thinking.
“In the garage. I so seldom use it.”

It is the stepladder from his childhood, the one
that used to be kept in the upstairs hall closet, the one that he needed last
month to put away things on the high shelf of the china cupboard. In the event
of a fire, they were to drag the stepladder to Go-Go’s room, lift the
rectangular board that led to the attic crawl space, then proceed to throw a
rope ladder out the attic window and clamber to the ground. The only problem was
that their father never anchored the rope ladder to the sill, which meant it was
useless. If the house ever caught fire, they would have been safer jumping out
the second-story windows than clambering down an unsecured rope from the third.
Still, the stepladder belonged in that upstairs closet. It’s the only way to get
to the attic. He was surprised that his mother had moved it to the garage. Now
he has a hunch why.

It clearly has been years since anyone has pushed
open the door, leading to the storage space under the eaves. Someone—Go-Go, his
father, his mother?—has tried to nail it shut, but it’s a piss-poor job. Tim
pushes it with his shoulder and the nails slide from the thin, splintery
wood.

Tim isn’t particularly tall, but once in the attic
he has to stay hunched to keep his head from grazing the ceiling. He pulls the
chain on the single-watt bulb only to watch it die with a pop. There’s enough
light from the window for him to make things out, though. He begins taking
inventory. On a set of low shelves, he finds the hockey gear that Go-Go wore in
the Fourth of July parade. Hadn’t he said he borrowed it? That was the summer of
1980. It never made sense, Go-Go showing up with that gear. Tim always assumed
he stole it. But if Father Andrew is right—it could fit. Someone could have
given Go-Go the mask, the stick, the padded glove to ensure his silence.
Interesting, but is this reason enough to seal up the crawl space? He pokes and
prods the various cardboard boxes, filled with the most incredible debris,
stained clothes, and broken toys. Tim sees a pile of old sheets in the corner,
yellow with age, wrapped around something, and he moves toward it, keeping his
head low, almost crawling.

A steel guitar.

He rocks back on his haunches, tells himself that
there is more than one steel guitar in the world, that the guitar’s presence
here means nothing. But it is Chicken George’s guitar. Go-Go went back for it,
went back to where Chicken George fell and took the guitar. Why?

Because Chicken George never
touched him. Because it was all a lie. And Go-Go wanted to be caught in the
lie, wanted someone to ask him about it.

When he comes downstairs, his mother is in her
chair, but no longer wrapped up in her book.

“You knew it was up there,” he says, not bothering
with his professional techniques, not setting up a careful path of questions to
which she must answer yes, so she can’t deny the established facts. His father
might not have been handy, but he would have done a better job at nailing that
door in place. Go-Go, too, for that matter. His mother hid the guitar, his
mother nailed the attic up and moved the stepladder, hoping that it would deter
anyone who decided to go up there. How long has she kept Go-Go’s secret?

“Yes,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because I knew it meant something.”

“What? What did you think it meant?”

“Something bad.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

C
lem hears the front doorbell, a conversation between Gwen and a man. Karl? Has Karl relented and decided to let Annabelle spend Easter weekend here? He feels Annabelle’s absence keenly. As much as he wants Gwen to stop being an idiot and go back to Karl, he likes the fact that Annabelle has been here almost every weekend. He has started reading
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
to her, over Gwen’s protestations. Gwen says Annabelle’s too young, which is probably true. But Clem thinks that Gwen’s real problem is that she wants to read the book to Annabelle and he is usurping her. He is. Given his age, there is so much he will never do with this grandchild. He will never run alongside her two-wheeler. He couldn’t carry her even before he broke his hip. He feels as if he has missed out twice-over on being a real grandfather. Miller’s children lived too far away, and now Annabelle has arrived when he’s too old. He might not even see her through grade school.
Gwen might have a little more empathy,
he thinks.

In general, Gwen might have a little more empathy. The problem is, she thinks she does. But Gwen’s idea of empathy is that she knows how she would feel in any given situation. If she fell down and broke something, she would throw herself into physical therapy, do everything right, so why won’t Clem? If she were Karl, she would pursue her runaway spouse, do whatever was necessary to woo her back. Gwen has a good heart, but a person can have a good heart and be self-involved to the point of blindness.

Yet it is Clem who does not register, not right away, how much distress his youngest daughter is in when she enters his room with a lunch tray.

“I thought I heard someone at the door,” he says.

“You did. Tim Halloran stopped by.”

“What did the lummox want?”

“He’s not.”

“What?”

“He’s not a lummox, actually. Not really. He can be crude and coarse, and he was kind of a bully as a boy, but he’s smart and surprisingly . . . ” She does not find the word she’s looking for. “We have to go out later. Tim and I. We need to . . .” Another sentence left unfinished, and Clem finally realizes his daughter is agitated, pale and drawn.

“Gwen, I feel you haven’t been telling me everything.”

“Everything?”

“About Karl. Why did you leave?”

The question catches her off guard. Her thoughts are far from her husband, her domestic situation. She seems almost relieved by the change of subject. She sinks on the chair next to his bed.

“There was infidelity,” she says.

“You said Karl was insistent nothing happened, that he didn’t even realize what that woman on the Facething was trying to do.”

“No, not Karl. I cheated. Just once—no, that’s a lie. I still can’t tell the truth about it. More than once, but it wasn’t what you would call an affair. It was something really stupid I did, but something I can’t take back. Last summer, with someone at the office. Someone much younger. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could be fired over it.”

“And Karl threw you out?”

“No. He doesn’t know, doesn’t even suspect.”

“So why did you leave?”

“Because I don’t want to tell him, but I don’t know how to go forward if I don’t tell him. Yet if I do tell him—”

“He will throw you out.”

Gwen shakes her head. “Worse. He’ll forgive me. If only for Annabelle’s sake. But I’ll be in his debt forever, then. It will be official: I’m the bad one and he’s the saint.”

“Husbands and wives aren’t working off a balance sheet, Gwen. Look, I think it would be OK not to tell him. I really do. This mania for honesty—”

She catches her breath, almost as if she has been hit unexpectedly.

“I’m just saying that people don’t have to tell each other everything.”

“Easy for you to say, with your perfect marriage.”

He takes her hand. “Really? That’s what you saw? A perfect marriage?”

“Yes. You never quarreled. You adored her. You
saw
her, encouraged her, praised her. My husband can’t even pretend to be interested in what I do. And perhaps by the standards of what he does, it is shallow and trivial, and perhaps people shouldn’t have to pretend . . .” Her voice trails off, her point lost even to her.

“Gwen, I’m not even sure your mother truly loved me.”

“How can you say that?”

“We got married because she believed she was pregnant.”

“That makes no sense. Miller was born more than a year after you married.”

“I didn’t say she was pregnant. She believed she was pregnant, but she was terrified of going to a doctor anywhere in Boston, assumed there was no way she could keep the secret from her parents. She all but asked me to marry her.”

“Well, of course you did the right thing.”

“No, you don’t get it. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She was proud. She didn’t want anyone to think she made a mistake, that she wasn’t in absolute control of her own destiny. So we married—and she lived with her mistake the rest of her life.”

“She loved you.”

“To the best of her ability, yes. And she stayed with me after she realized she was wrong. We never spoke of it. She had no idea that I knew. But I did, and there was always that seed of doubt there. I had to wonder if she loved me as I loved her.”

“She was so young,” Gwen murmurs. Excuses, always excuses. Tally trained everyone to make excuses for her. “Karl is older than I am, allegedly a grown-up. But he never thinks about anyone but himself.”

“Gwen—most people don’t think about anyone but themselves and maybe their children. Your mother would have walked through fire for you.” A pause. “As would I. But we don’t ask that of our spouses. Oh, we can ask, but we’re sure to be disappointed.”

Gwen shakes her head. “I’ve lived my whole life believing my mother to be happy, someone who struck a perfect balance before anyone even worried about such things. And now you’re telling me it was a lie.”

“Not a lie, exactly. But I don’t think she ever stopped thinking about the life she might have—what might have been. If she had gone to Wellesley, as she planned, if she had studied painting seriously—well, she couldn’t know who she might have been. The generation of women who came up behind her, girls barely a decade younger, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted. She ended up abandoning the painting she thought would be her masterpiece.”

“The painting of the young couple in the woods. What happened to that?”

“She painted over it, gave up.”

“I sometimes wonder about those paints, their toxicity, that poorly ventilated shed. And then there was all that diet soda she drank. Do you think either one could have caused her cancer?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care, Gwen. Knowing the cause means nothing. She was the love of my life, and I never regretted how our marriage came to be. But I’ll never know if she would say the same thing.”

“What should I do? About Karl? Go home and tell him everything? Go home and tell him nothing? For all the time we’ve been together, I’ve had the small comfort of being the good spouse, the one who made everything work. If I tell him about the affair, I won’t even have that anymore. I’ll just be the one who cheated.”

“I’ve had only one marriage, Gwen. You’ve had two. Perhaps you should be advising me.”

“I felt old,” she says. “And unattractive.”

“Dearest Gwen, there are only so many details I can handle.”

She looks down at her hands, and Clem’s eyes follow. They are shaking. The veins stand out in sharp relief, the skin is dry. He thinks about Gwen’s baby hands, cupping his face. Annabelle’s hands. Tally’s hands, dry and a little coarse from being denuded of paint every day, how she hated to leave a speck behind. His daughter’s hands make him feel so old.

“It’s easier to talk about Karl, what I’ve done, than the thing that’s really bothering me. Daddy—do you remember the night of the hurricane?”

It’s a double blow—the use of “Daddy,” the mention of that night.

“I wouldn’t be likely to forget that.”

“Tim and I—we’ve learned some things since Go-Go died.”

Blabbermouth Doris. Who hasn’t she told by this point?

“It wasn’t true,” Gwen says. “It didn’t happen.”

“Go-Go didn’t die?” He is honestly confused, and that one moment of confusion scares him, as it always does. The inability to follow a conversation—that’s a far more serious indicator of a failing mind than mere memory lapses.

“He wasn’t molested. Not by the man in the woods. He lied, he and McKey.”

“Who?” He decides it’s the sheer anxiety that he feels at the mention of the hurricane that is making it hard for him to focus.

“Mickey.”

“But why—”

“We’re not sure. We—Tim and I—are going over to McKey’s apartment and talk to her. Maybe Go-Go lied to her, too, and she was caught up in it. She was the one who pushed the man—we never told you that part, McKey begged us not to, she was terrified, and it was an accident. That’s when he hit his head. That’s why he died. But we thought—Tim and Sean and I—we really did think he had hurt Go-Go. It was easier to tell only that part. You see—we knew him. We visited his house all the time.”

He looks at
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
on his bedside table, a handsome special edition with illustrations of which he doesn’t quite approve. That’s not
his
Francie Nolan. He and Annabelle haven’t gotten very far, but they have already read the scene in the first chapter, the one about the old man in the bakery, who is gross and unappealing to Francie. Then she realizes that he was once a baby, that a mother loved him, welcomed him into the world with joy. It is just what Clem used to think, walking up Eutaw to Lexington Market, seeing the city’s saddest souls. Everyone was loved once. Everyone was a baby. He knows that not all children are loved, that many come into the world without provoking joy. But most do.

And now the moment has come. He must let his daughter know of his mistakes, his cowardice. No wonder Go-Go drove into a wall. His well-meaning mother had to tell him that his father killed a man, just for him, not knowing that the man was innocent, that she was inadvertently putting the murder on her son.

The chickens have come home to roost.

“Gwen,” he begins. “I can tell you almost definitively that McKey was not responsible for the death of the man in the woods.”

He starts, much as he gingerly made his way down the steep pitch of the hill, watching the swinging arc of light, knowing, yet not wanting to admit, that he is watching a man kill another man. It happened. And only by admitting it can he take the sin off his daughter, the other children. It’s too late for Go-Go, but at least he can spare the others, assume the mantle of guilt that is his, his alone. He will walk through fire for his daughter, at last.
What if it was your child?
Tim Halloran asked him all those years ago. It is.