Laura Lippman: The Most Dangerous Thing

Take tonight, his insistence on walking her out to her car, as if there’s any danger in this church parking lot.

“I’m glad you’re back,” he says. “Now we just have to worry about Daisy.”

“Daisy?”

“The older woman who used to bring knitting to the meetings. Very Madame Defarge.”

She stares at him blankly, realizing she should recognize the reference, but not caring if he sees it has gone past her. Just like dinner with the Robisons, all those years ago, all that talk, talk, talk flying around the air. Mickey stared into space, defiantly bored by the Robisons, who thought they were so interesting.

“Big woman,” Dan says. “Wore flowery dresses. Smoked clove cigarettes.”

“Oh, yeah.” McKey doesn’t pay much attention to women because they are seldom of use to her.

“Her sponsor tried to call her, but she’s not answering, doesn’t even have voice mail.”

“Maybe she died.”

“McKey!” Dan acts as if she’s making a dark joke, but she was being merely factual. Daisy’s an old lady, probably alone. She could have fallen in her apartment. She could be lying there right now, dead or dying. Does Dan think all the tragedy of the world is linked to drinking? He probably does. He’s built his life around it.

“Be safe,” he says as she gets behind the wheel.

“I always am.”

It’s a haul, getting back to her apartment. It’s a haul getting almost anywhere from this corner of Baltimore, and she wonders, as she has often wondered, how her mother ended up there. Because of Rick, of course. She met Rick, he worked at the Exxon station, and there you have it. Or was it the man before Rick? Rita followed men wherever they led her, yet now she is living man-less in Florida. This must explain her sudden interest in McKey, the messages on her answering machine. Call me, call me, call me . No thanks. Not my problem you’re alone and bored. I’m alone and never bored.

McKey lets herself into her apartment and goes straight to the refrigerator, pours herself a glass of white wine. Nothing like pretending to be an alcoholic to give one a craving for drink. Liquor is like porn to those people, and after listening to them talk about it nonstop, she can’t wait to have a drink, although normally she can take it or leave it. Wrangling drunks at 30,000 feet puts one off alcohol. It was stupid, telling Sean she was in AA with Go-Go. And he probably blabbed to Tim-boys are the worst gossips-maybe even Gwen. Should they meet again, she won’t be able to drink in front of him. And she wants to see him again. Although it would be nice this time if he weren’t so blotto. He was useless.

She examines herself in the mirror, pleased by what she sees. Her body, like her mother’s, is naturally hard, at least for now. Hard is good. Hard is what she strives for across the board. Hard of body, hard of heart, hard of mind. McKey is a warrior, a survivor. She’s ready-for the plane to go down, for a terrorist to pull a knife, for the world to end, for whatever comes. And, increasingly, it feels like something is coming for her, but she’s sidestepped it for now. She’s pretty sure she’s sidestepped it.

But at night, alone in her water bed-her mother’s old bed, a gift McKey accepted from her half brother because she thought it ironic, although she has lost track of what the irony was supposed to be-at night, on the edge of sleep, it’s hard to stay hard. She ends up crying as she has cried every night since Go-Go died. Even the night Sean was passed out in her bed, when she was finally so close to having the one thing she’d always wanted, she found herself weeping for the little brother of the man lying next to her.

When Sean’s plane touches down at Baltimore/Washington International on Good Friday morning, he is thinking about the first time he landed at this airport, which happened to come at the end of his first plane trip. He was in college, heading home for a surprise Thanksgiving visit after signing up to courier a package, a not uncommon arrangement then. Twenty years old! Duncan has been on a plane at least twenty times, possibly more. He’s on yet another one right now, en route to New Orleans, a place where Sean has never been. “It’s just not on my list,” Vivian had said when he proposed it as a romantic getaway for the two of them a few years ago. “The food is so heavy.”

The airport where Sean landed in the mid-1980s had already switched its name to Baltimore/Washington International from Friendship, an unlikely moniker for any airport in these hostile days. Sean travels enough for work that he is a low-maintenance passenger-shoes off, laptop unsheathed, liquids in the right volume, stowed in a plastic bag of the dictated size. He has little patience for the petulant fliers who treat everything as an affront, who have decided that the security line is the place to throw down for their dignity, to argue for the five -ounce bottle of hand cream, which is apparently made from ground diamonds if it’s really a hundred dollars an ounce, as the woman at the Tampa airport kept insisting. For Christ’s sake, even if you seldom fly, is it so darn hard to get on the Internet and do a little homework? The only people who don’t annoy him are the very old travelers, often infirm, who seem genuinely overwhelmed by the experience. He does the math-people in their late eighties were born before the Depression, knew a childhood in which cars were far from the norm. He thinks people have a right to be spooked by anything invented after they were twenty-one. Commercial air travel is a relatively recent phenomenon. His own mother can’t manage the trip to Florida on her own. Or so she says.

Twenty-seven years ago, when Sean made his first flight, he tried to play it cool. But between the novelty of the plane-a little disappointing, except on landing, not at all what he thought flying would be like-and the responsibility of being a courier and the coiled surprise of showing up unexpectedly for Thanksgiving-oh, how happy he was going to make his mother-it was hard not to be giddy. He checked his bag, a boxy suitcase without wheels, and held the package on his lap throughout the flight, although it was only a stack of legal files that needed to be in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving.

He handed these papers to a local courier who met him at the airport, then realized he had no idea how to get into Baltimore without ponying up for a cab, which probably cost twelve, fifteen bucks at the time. He was Timothy Halloran’s son and couldn’t bear to pay that much for something so simple. He wandered the terminal, found a free hotel shuttle to a place over on Security Boulevard, then caught the bus from there to Dickeyville. Two buses because he couldn’t walk the final mile with that heavy suitcase. In the end, it took almost three hours to get from the airport to the house, while the flight itself had been barely ninety minutes. That was okay. It just heightened the pleasure of the surprise, of the anticipation of walking through the door and saying jauntily, “I’m home!”

But the house on Sekots Lane was empty that day. Empty, yet with a sense of things having been interrupted very suddenly-his mother had clearly been in the early stages of preparing the Thanksgiving sauerkraut, one of those Baltimore customs that Sean didn’t think to question until he ventured out in the world. Cabbage sat on the cutting board, a knife was in the sink. Hours later, the family car, yet another one of his father’s Buicks, pulled into the driveway, and Sean, peeking through the curtains, saw his parents get out, Go-Go between them, almost as if he needed to be propped up.