Laura Lippman - The Most Dangerous Thing

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.

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.