Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

So no, not breathing. Driving, on the other hand, started off as something that engaged every fiber of your being in the early going, then became unconscious over time. How often had Dale snapped to behind the wheel, the highway sliding effortlessly beneath his humming wheels, with no real memory of the last few miles? And he didn’t think he was unique in this way, far from it. Every day people climbed into these contraptions that you weren’t even supposed to operate while on ordinary cold medicine and never gave it a thought. It was a wonder there weren’t more accidents. Yet here he was, more conscious than he had ever been behind the wheel, and everyone-the cops, Chloe-had kept saying he shouldn’t drive, he mustn’t drive, please don’t drive.

Couldn’t they understand that this errand was his only way of asserting his sanity? Every action-changing lanes, using his turn signal, braking, accelerating-proved he was functioning. Not that he was sure he wanted to be functioning, but what choice did he have? Dale was supposed to be the calm one, the capable one. And while his daughter’s death entitled him to be otherwise, he wasn’t sure he knew how to be anything else.

But if he didn’t have both his hands on the steering wheel-“Two and ten o’clock, Kat, always at two and ten o’clock”-they would be engaged in some form of destruction, he was sure of that. One could literally tear hair, it turned out. And if one could grab one’s hair with enough force to rip it, then it followed that one could rend one’s garments, maybe even tear oneself from limb to limb, like those crazy Greek women, although weren’t they motivated by bliss and joy? The Man-somethings. The Furies? No, that was another myth.

Until today Dale had never really believed that the human body could be shredded by human hands. In fact, he and Chloe had argued heatedly about it after seeing a production of Suddenly, Last Summer at the Mechanic several years ago, which she had found quite affecting and he had found profoundly stupid. (There was their marriage in a nutshell, Chloe responding passionately to things that Dale just didn’t get.) Now such an act seemed as simple as tearing a piece of bread from a loaf. His hands, if allowed, could destroy a person, perhaps even take a building apart. Which, strangely, had been his first instinct. To punch the wall of Deerfield Middle, to go mano a mano with a school, and not even the right school at that.

Chloe, although long out of the habit of caring about Dale’s needs, much less anticipating them, had somehow sensed what he intended to do, grabbing his wrists and holding him, then allowing him to hold her. Chloe looked wispy, but she was a former athlete who could easily withstand the force of Dale’s embrace, as he squeezed and squeezed, taking in all the parts of Chloe that reminded him of Kat. Here was her hair, here were her eyes, except they weren’t and couldn’t be. He would never see his daughter again.

“I need to get to my father,” he said later, at Public Safety Headquarters, where it was becoming all too apparent that he was of no use to the detectives. (Kat and Perri were no longer friends? He had missed that. Was Kat menstruating? What the fuck? Yet Chloe knew. She knew.) “If he hears it on the news, he’ll be devastated.”

“Dale…” Chloe said gently as he stood to go. Sure, she wanted to make up now, wanted to take back her hurtful words. Too late, Chloe. This time I won’t forgive you.

“Maybe you should call,” said the older detective.

“No, it has to be done face-to-face.”

They had cajoled and argued, but they had to let him go, even if Dale was lying through his teeth. His father could watch television all day, hear the headline invoked over and over again-“One dead, two injured in high-school shooting”-and never stop to think it was his granddaughter. Thornton Hartigan had no imagination, absolutely none.

People make that claim all the time-“Oh, I have no imagination”-but it’s almost never true. Who is so dim that he hasn’t daydreamed, for just a moment, about winning a lottery, or enjoying the company of some remote object of desire? However, Dale Hartigan believed that his father’s inability to fantasize was literal. He was like someone missing one of the less obvious senses, taste or smell. He had no vision, no original ideas-and, as a result, no compunction about stealing the ideas of others.

Take Glendale, created when Hartigan began buying acres of Baltimore County farmland in secret, later subdividing it and selling it at ten times what he had paid, building homes in exactly four models, then letting other developers come in and build bigger, grander places. That had just been a page out of Jim Rouse’s playbook, who had done the same thing in Columbia back in the 1960s. Take the suburb’s very name, Glendale . It was coined, disappointingly, for Dale and his twin brother, Glen. When fifteen-year-old Dale had objected, appalled by the wasted opportunity-a town, a name that maps would carry, an amazing opportunity wasted-his father assumed it was only because Glen’s name had gone first.

“I couldn’t call it Daleglen,” he said, maddeningly obtuse as ever.

His old man was tough, his robust health almost frighteningly unnatural. At seventy-six, he could have passed for ten, fifteen years younger. All the widows in Charlestowne had made a move or two on him since he moved in five years ago, and Thornton had been a bit of an asshole about this late-in-life desirability, sampling the most appealing women, then discarding them all, preferring his own company. It was bad enough that men acted that way in their twenties, thirties, even their forties, but their seventies? Dale was embarrassed whenever he dined with his father at Charlestowne, all too aware of the frosty and sorrowful looks cast in their direction. His father, on the other hand, noticed nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t imagination his father lacked so much as curiosity, or empathy. It never occurred to him to think about how things felt to other people. Except perhaps Glen, but then what man doesn’t obsess over his failures?

The one time Dale had tried to caution his father on his ill-advised second act as the Casanova of Charlestowne, his father had simply turned the accusation back on Dale. “At least I’m a widower,” he said. “It’s not like I’m cheating on someone.”

“Dad, I never cheated on Chloe.”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

But he was. People talked about Dale all the time after the divorce, which should be old news four years later. There was no persuading anyone that he had left Chloe without the intention of taking up with Susannah Goode, who had done some consulting work for his company when it was trying to develop some business properties in Washington Village in southwest Baltimore. Pigtown, as the old-timers insisted on calling it. In fact, that had been Susannah’s charge, how to brand Washington Village so the name Pigtown would disappear. Washington Village hadn’t really caught on, but Susannah had. They had worked together closely, and yes, sure, a latent attraction was there. It wasn’t unnatural to notice that a woman was beautiful. But Dale hadn’t slept with her until after Chloe threw him out. Maybe it was a little too soon after-two weeks to be precise-and maybe Susannah had nudged him into it, which ultimately destroyed his chances of putting his marriage back together again. The fact remained: He was separated before he ever touched her.

The irony was, the only person who believed him was Chloe.

“Because you didn’t have the balls to do anything literal until I put you out,” she had screamed at him eight months into the separation, when her lawyer made noises about adultery during one of their endless mediations on the financial settlement. “You were just going to go on having your stupid little crushes, getting moody for a few months, then rewarding yourself with some new toy when you sucked it up and moved on. So I tell you to get out, and what did you do? You fuck some girl!”