Laura Lippman: The Most Dangerous Thing

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.