Laura Lippman: The Most Dangerous Thing

“Mickey.”

“But why-”

“We’re not sure. We-Tim and I-are going over to McKey’s apartment and talk to her. Maybe Go-Go lied to her, too, and she was caught up in it. She was the one who pushed the man-we never told you that part, McKey begged us not to, she was terrified, and it was an accident. That’s when he hit his head. That’s why he died. But we thought-Tim and Sean and I-we really did think he had hurt Go-Go. It was easier to tell only that part. You see-we knew him. We visited his house all the time.”

He looks at A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on his bedside table, a handsome special edition with illustrations of which he doesn’t quite approve. That’s not his Francie Nolan. He and Annabelle haven’t gotten very far, but they have already read the scene in the first chapter, the one about the old man in the bakery, who is gross and unappealing to Francie. Then she realizes that he was once a baby, that a mother loved him, welcomed him into the world with joy. It is just what Clem used to think, walking up Eutaw to Lexington Market, seeing the city’s saddest souls. Everyone was loved once. Everyone was a baby. He knows that not all children are loved, that many come into the world without provoking joy. But most do.

And now the moment has come. He must let his daughter know of his mistakes, his cowardice. No wonder Go-Go drove into a wall. His well-meaning mother had to tell him that his father killed a man, just for him, not knowing that the man was innocent, that she was inadvertently putting the murder on her son.

The chickens have come home to roost.

“Gwen,” he begins. “I can tell you almost definitively that McKey was not responsible for the death of the man in the woods.”

He starts, much as he gingerly made his way down the steep pitch of the hill, watching the swinging arc of light, knowing, yet not wanting to admit, that he is watching a man kill another man. It happened. And only by admitting it can he take the sin off his daughter, the other children. It’s too late for Go-Go, but at least he can spare the others, assume the mantle of guilt that is his, his alone. He will walk through fire for his daughter, at last. What if it was your child? Tim Halloran asked him all those years ago. It is.

D oris watches Tim come and go until it is almost 2 P.M. He does not tell her what he is doing. He barely speaks to her at all. Why? Why is he mad at her? She did what a mother should do, tried to protect her son. It was no different from washing his sheets.

She found the guitar under his bed a week or so after the night of the hurricane. She knew there was no way that Go-Go could have come honestly by such a possession. She didn’t know what to do. He had been through so much. It seemed wrong to ask him about the guitar. She took it away, put it in the attic. And over the years she was the one who made sure they had no reason to go up there. She moved the stepladder to the garage, put the Christmas ornaments in the basement. By the time she was done, the only things up in the crawl space were the guitar, the hockey costume, some old boxes, and the rope ladder. As far as she knew, Go-Go didn’t even remember it was there.

Something bad, she told Tim. She has always known that the guitar stood for something very bad. But how bad could a little boy be, especially Go-Go, who didn’t have a mean bone in his body? Yet it wasn’t long after the discovery of the guitar that the bed-wetting started. Then he showed up with that hockey stuff, also expensive. She pretended to Tim Senior that she bought it, told him she used money from a birthday check from one of her aunts, withstood his criticism for being wasteful when the household needed every dime.

Something bad . The truly bad thing was when Doris told Go-Go about his father, what he had done for him. Her intention wasn’t only to raise Tim Senior up in his son’s memory. She also-oh, what parent feels like this?-yearned to tear Go-Go down a little, let him know of the sacrifices made for him. She was tired of his brooding, his “poor me, poor me, poor me” routine. He had a house nicer than any Doris had ever known, two beautiful little girls, and a good-enough wife.

All she wanted him to say was thank you, or words to that effect. To say that Tim and Doris did right by him, the best they could. To tell her that it wasn’t her fault that he couldn’t get his life together. Was that wrong? She tried to explain herself to Father Andrew yesterday, without telling him all the details. But Father Andrew isn’t as satisfactory a confidant, now that he’s not a priest. She isn’t sure why that should be, and maybe it’s just her own prejudice, but he seems less wise to her now, and much less sympathetic. He’s of the world now. He has lost his perspective. He wears a turquoise ring.

Tim goes out to his car, carrying the guitar. Good. She should have gotten rid of it long ago.

“Are you going to throw it in Leakin Park?” she asks him.

“Throw it-?” He shakes his head. “Sure. Why not? It’s where all Baltimore’s best dead bodies go.”

“Will you be here for lunch tomorrow?”

“It’s Easter. We’re always here for Easter lunch.”

“So you don’t hate me?”

He could be a little quicker in his reply, but when he does answer, he seems sincere. “No, Mom. I don’t hate you. I know you always had Go-Go’s best interests at heart.”

“When I told him about your father-I thought it would make him happy. Well, not happy, but proud. Loved.”

“I know, Mom.” He kisses her on the forehead. “You meant well. You always meant well.”

“You called me the enemy of fun.”

“What?”

Even Doris is surprised by how this old grievance bubbles up. “Your father, but all of you agreed, behind my back. You didn’t know that I knew, but I knew. You thought I wasn’t fun.”

“Being fun isn’t the most important thing in the world.”

“We’ll have fun tomorrow,” she says. “With the girls and Easter lunch. I have all the usual things. Ham and sweet potatoes.”

“We’ll have fun tomorrow.” Although he’s only echoing her words, and with less conviction than she would like, it has the weight of a promise. They’ll have fun tomorrow. Whatever is happening is happening only now, and it will be forgotten by tomorrow. A person can forget a lot, if she’s willing to try. Doris has always been willing.

G wen finds herself almost laughing-almost-when Tim tells her the guitar is in the trunk of his car.

“Exhibit A, prosecutor?”

“I know,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. But I wanted it out of my mother’s house. She thinks I should throw it into Leakin Park, and maybe I will.”

“So why bring it?”

“Because it’s concrete. Real. Nothing else is. Real, that is. We have our memories, but Mickey is the only person left who can tell us what really happened that night, why she covered for Go-Go.”

“And my father.” She has to ask. “Tim-can he be prosecuted?”

“Legally? Yes. Your father says he witnessed a homicide and didn’t report it. At the same time, he also says he didn’t believe it, not until my mother visited him a few weeks ago. He managed to persuade himself that he couldn’t know, in fact, that my father killed Chicken George. But my dad’s dying declaration changed that.”

“As an officer of the court-are you obligated to tell someone? Someone official?”

“Yes.”

She wants to cry, she wants to pummel him, she wants to throw herself out of the car. It’s unfair, this mess that his father has left behind for hers. Before she can do any of these things, Tim says: “But I’m not going to. We didn’t do anything, Gwen. You, me, and Sean. We agreed not to tell the grown-ups that Mickey pushed Chicken George, or that we had an ongoing relationship with him. But we believed everything we said. My father believed us. Your father, too.”