Laura Lippman - The Most Dangerous Thing

I t was late July, that point on the calendar where summer has gotten a little old, boring. After two days of heavy rains, the stream was wide and fast in places. Emboldened by our friendship with Chicken George, we had been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods each day, taking sack lunches prepared by Mrs. Robison or Mrs. Halloran. We found what appeared to be a broken concrete dam, most of it submerged in the rushing brown stream, but with a few jagged pieces above the waterline. Tim insisted on crossing there. Mickey scrambled behind him, sure-footed as ever in anything that wasn’t an athletic contest.

Go-Go went next, forever indifferent to the water, no matter how many times we had been told it was polluted and deadly, and his very indifference somehow kept him safe. Sean waited for Gwen to go. She clearly didn’t want to cross, but it was too late to argue against Tim’s plan, and she would have been shamed if she didn’t try. She lost her footing on her second or third step, and although she righted herself, the sleeve of her filmy, flimsy blouse caught on something in the water. If she had pulled back sharply, she would have been fine, but she didn’t want to tear the blouse. She reached down, determined to gently extract the material from whatever had snagged it-and that was when she fell into the water. The horrible, murky water, which we had been told countless times could kill us, the water whose merest contact required tetanus boosters.

She didn’t come up.

In water that brown, it would have been impossible to see blood, but Go-Go pointed, screaming in that way he had, so we couldn’t tell if he was happy or scared. “Blood! Blood!” Gwen bobbed to the surface, floated, like the Lily Maid of Astolat. Not that we knew the poem, but Gwen had read Anne of Green Gables, in which Anne has to be rescued after attempting to re-create the maiden’s fate. We knew a lot of stuff in that secondhand, watered-down way, through cartoons and books and television shows. Which, perhaps, is a way of saying we knew nothing.

Those of us who had crossed to the other bank froze, but Sean plunged into the water. Gwen’s body kept moving away from him, almost as if it were a game. Catch me if you can . The others ran down the bank, shouting contradictory instructions. “Shut up,” Sean shouted through gritted teeth. “Shut up.” He was wading, the water up to his waist, reaching for her, but she kept slipping from his grasp. Gwen might have eluded him forever, but a stick saved her this time, catching her skirt just long enough to give Sean time to catch up to her. He gathered her up in his arms and carried her to shore, then began giving her mouth-to-mouth, which he had learned in swimming classes at the camp the Hallorans could no longer afford.

“She’ll be brain damaged,” Mickey said. “She was unconscious too long, she took in too much water.”

“Shut up,” Tim said.

Go-Go jumped up and down, chanting: “Out goes the bad air, in goes the good air.” That’s how it worked in cartoons. We had all seen it ourselves on the old Captain Chesapeake show. In cartoons, the characters pushed on each other’s stomachs with great force and manipulated their arms.

In cartoons, the people always woke up. Gwen was not waking up.

But after what seemed an eternity, she coughed, spitting up a little water before vomiting a violent brackish stream. Sean sat back on his haunches, but he ended up catching some of it on his ankles.

“Are you OK?”

Tim stood over her. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Sean swatted at his leg. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Three,” Gwen said. “What happened?”

“You fell,” Sean said. “You hit your head, you almost drowned.”

“Drowned!” Go-Go said.

She lifted a hand to her head, but there was no cut, there had been no blood, no matter what Go-Go thought he saw. “I feel a bump,” she said. Sean’s fingers followed hers, probing tenderly. It was hard not to notice that the gauzy shirt, the source of all this trouble, was transparent and clinging now, her bra visible. Gwen crossed her arms over her chest.

“The important thing,” Mickey said, “is to figure out what to tell the grown-ups.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gwen’s soaked, her shirt is torn. Her mother will see that and demand an explanation. They’ll know we had to go pretty far downstream to get to a place where the water runs this fast and deep, and we’ll be in trouble.”

“No one said we couldn’t,” said Tim, the master of the loophole, the king of technicalities.

“Mickey’s right,” Sean said. “No one said specifically we couldn’t go this far, but we never ask, because we know they’ll say no, and if they find out where we were, they’ll make rules against it. We have to get Gwen as dry as possible. When did you have your last tetanus shot?”

“Last summer, after I cut myself on that rusty fence.”

Sean said: “It’s been at least a few years for me. How long do the shots last?”

We didn’t know. We knew the horrors of lockjaw, though. Gwen’s father had covered that for us in great detail.

“I don’t have any cuts, though,” Sean said. “And I didn’t swallow any water. I’ll be okay.”

We thought at the time that Sean was taking one for the team, that he was willing to forgo the tetanus shot if it meant that we could continue to roam the park with no boundaries placed on us.

But Sean’s only concern was Gwen. He was making this heroic gesture for her because she had been unconscious during his true heroism and unable to appreciate it. Or had she been? Some of us wondered.

“Chicken George,” Mickey said. “He’ll help us, and he won’t ask any questions.”

“There’s no shower there,” Gwen said. “And I don’t want to wear his dirty clothes.”

“Trust me,” Mickey said.

We made our way back through the woods, to Chicken George’s house. He wasn’t surprised to see us. He was never surprised to see us. Although our comings and goings appeared random to us and therefore unpredictable, Chicken George seemed attuned to our movements the way he was attuned to his chickens, the seasons, the park. He was never caught off guard. He examined Gwen carefully, with those strange hands, so pink on one side, so dark on the other. He produced a Goody comb, still in its plastic wrapper, and worked it carefully through her wet, matted hair. He gave her a sheet from the line, so she knew it was clean and fresh, told her to go inside and change out of her wet clothes, wrap herself in the sheet as if it were a toga, and bring her clothes out. He actually said toga, and we were surprised he knew the word.

“To-ga, to-ga,” Go-Go began to chant. We had not seen the movie Animal House. We were too young. But it had filtered down into the culture, and we knew the set pieces, some of the lines. It was soon to be the era of trickle-down economics, but if you asked us, we would have said that adulthood, too, was a process of trickling down, that we picked up the scraps of adult life as surely as we went behind our parents at their dinner parties and stole sips from their glasses, bites from their plates. We shook cigarettes free from open packets, took tiny swigs from the bottles in the liquor cabinet. They knew, they had to know, because we know now everything our children do, no matter how sly they think they are. The difference is that our parents approved. They preferred for us to tiptoe into adulthood through these tiny subterfuges. It’s not a rationalization, but a truth: they encouraged us to lie, to keep things from them, to protect them from what we knew. It started small. The forays into the park. Our friendship with Chicken George. Gwen’s near-drowning, the time the truck almost crushed Go-Go. It started small, and then it got so large, so fast, that it swept us all away.