Laura Lippman: The Most Dangerous Thing

Gwen wants to run, dash out to her car in the parking lot and drive back home. Drive back in time. But how far back will she have to go? How far must she go to escape what has happened? You’re a part of the story- well, she is. But so is Sean, so is Tim, and McKey. Why is she being singled out?

Because she wouldn’t leave it alone. Because she had to go to the private detective, had to pry. Tim warned her not to do this. But how could she know that Tim would grow up to be not only smart but wise? When did that happen?

“Is there somewhere we can go? Somewhere private?”

“There’s actually an airport bar outside security in terminal A,” says Gwen, who has always wondered who drinks outside the security gates in an airport. Now she has one answer. People who can afford to sit while others rush by, people who want to be as anonymous as possible. “Let’s go there.”

“A drink would be nice,” says Father Andrew-no, just Andrew Burke, not a priest, not anymore, which Gwen finds bizarrely comforting. He puts a gentle hand between her shoulders. It’s as if he has had some experience with people who need help moving toward something unpleasant and inevitable.

A s McKey’s flight begins to make its descent into Baltimore, she hears the passengers start the usual patter about what they can identify on the ground below. “There’s Big Lots. Is that Ritchie Highway?” “I see the Applebee’s. The one on Route 175.” The Chesapeake Bay should make it easy for people to orient themselves, yet much of what she overhears is off-kilter, people mixing up east and west. McKey finds the whole ritual strange. Who needs to orient themselves from the sky? By the time you identify where you are, you’re no longer there.

She makes the final pass through the cabin. There’s always at least one person who doesn’t put electronic equipment away after the announcement. This time, it’s a Kindle user, who maintains that the prohibition doesn’t apply to e-readers. Yes, it does, sir. She’s firm but not bossy.

It is almost eleven. The airport will be a ghost town, with all the newsstands and food places closed for the evening. She won’t even be able to grab McDonald’s on the way out. She’ll end up eating canned tuna and whatever she can scrounge from her own fridge. She should shop tomorrow, make it special. No. That will spook him. She’ll have beer and wine-shit, she told him she was in AA. Fuck it, she’ll tell him she realized she didn’t really have a problem. But isn’t that what everyone says? Maybe she’ll tell him the truth, that she was there to watch over Go-Go. But then he’ll ask why. As always, the less said the better.

She picked up Sean’s message in the shuttle on the way to Detroit Metro. “What are you smiling about?” one of her coworkers asked. McKey hadn’t realized she was smiling. She knew he would call her. It has taken more than thirty years, but Sean finally wants to be bad, and he has chosen her. Not Gwen, her . There are some women who would say that’s because Gwen is a nice girl while McKey is not, but McKey doesn’t see it that way. For one thing, she doesn’t think Gwen is all that nice. She cultivates the appearance, as many women do, but Gwen has lots of bad in her. Everyone does. Goodness isn’t natural. All other living creatures put themselves first. Only people try to pretend they’re different, that they have any goals beyond survival.

Sean probably wants a one-off, no complications. That’s what she wants, too. She thinks. She’s pretty sure. God, if he fell in love with her, imagine the headaches. He might get a divorce, which he probably can’t afford, and then there would be his kid and all that shit. McKey is not angling for that . Although it would be cool if he fell in love with her short-term, if he got a little crazy for a while, then sobered up and went home. A prolonged fling would be perfect.

It’s funny to McKey how men think they’re in charge, making these decisions. They never are. If a man leaves his wife, it’s because another woman has finagled him into asking for a divorce. Or he gets kicked out, which wasn’t what he wanted, even if he was having affairs and the like. Rita always engineered the end of her relationships. Shed Rick for Larry, shrugged Larry off to follow that big-talking loser down to Florida. She may not have made the best choices, but they were hers.

McKey could end it here. It’s enough that Sean has called, that he wants to see her. To talk, he said in his message. Right, sure, uh-huh. I bet your wife doesn’t understand you. I bet you’ve grown apart. She’s very cold. She never pays you any attention, never has a kind word for you. McKey has heard all those things over the years. Not long ago she heard them from her ex, who came sniffing around her door, and OK, she let him in one night. No one got hurt. No one ever gets hurt if people are quiet and discreet and mind their own business. It’s the talkers of the world who make trouble.

Tally Robison was a gossip, although she didn’t have any awareness of this, proclaimed to be the opposite. When Mickey sat in her kitchen, waiting for Gwen to return from school on the cute little half-bus that kids took to private school-even her bus is better, she remembers thinking-Tally talked on and on, and all her stories were about how wonderful she was and how awful everyone else was. The drab clothes worn by so-and-so, the awful casseroles the other mothers brought to the church potluck. The wonder of her taste, her style, her knowledge, her wit. She would flip through magazines, sighing. It’s criminal to have the taste without the pocketbook. McKey now thinks Tally overrated herself, but she was mesmerized at the time, nodding raptly over her miniature packets of Smarties and Twizzlers. Oh, the pain of being so beautiful, so bright, so stylish. How do you stand being you, Mrs. Robison?

She always thought it came down to the mothers. That’s why Sean chose Gwen. Because he bought into those fables, the special-ness of the Robisons. True, there was that dramatic rescue, the day he saved Gwen from the stream. But it was merely the climax to a story already written. He was going to choose Gwen no matter what. Mickey saw it coming a long way off, well before anyone else knew. Which was good. It gave her time to practice the art of not caring. An art that, three decades later, she has almost perfected. Being with Sean will obliterate everything else somehow.

Won’t it?

There’s the baseball field. There’s the little park. There are the lights of the runway. Why do people need to narrate their lives? What is the point of all this talk, talk, talk? Words don’t make things more real. Quite the opposite, McKey thinks. The more you talk about a thing, the less real it is. That’s what she was trying to get Go-Go to understand before he died. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP.

He finally did.

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.