Laura Lippman - The Innocents

“And at the house, after. Not everyone is invited, but we want you there. You’re like family, even if it’s been years. It’s funny, I s’pose you come back to see your father all the time, yet I never see you. Even when Gordon moved back home, you didn’t come visit him. Why didn’t you visit him?”

So many reasons. Because he was an angry drunk most of the times. And when he wasn’t angry, he was pathetic, self-pitying. But the main reason was the one that divided them long ago: it was simply too painful to be around each other. They couldn’t talk about it, and they couldn’t not talk about it, so they stayed away from each other.

“When Sean moved away, I lost touch. Mickey Wyckoff, too. And my father keeps to himself.”

“Yes, he always did.”

He did? Gwen remembers her father as gregarious. But, perhaps, a little snobbish about the Hallorans. That’s why the night of the hurricane had been unusual, all the parents together in the Robisons’ house, drinking and laughing late into a weekday night.

“Don’t be a stranger now,” Mrs. Halloran says suddenly, full of fake merriment. “We’ll be seeing lots of each other. Right?” The question feels unusually earnest—and a little threatening.

“Absolutely.”

Sean and Tim finally appear, explaining that they have been speaking with the priest about tomorrow’s service. Sean takes his mother by the shoulders, gently, and begins guiding her to other well-wishers, making Gwen feel as if she is in the wrong somehow, that she has monopolized the grieving mother when it was Doris who insisted on prolonging their contact.

Tim gives her a half smile. “Sorry.”

It seems to be the word of the evening. “No need. I think it’s a miracle she’s standing upright.”

“Sean said your dad had an accident?”

“Yes. As I told your mother, that seems to be the theme of the week.”

Tim’s face is blank. It’s funny, how he looks so much like Sean, yet still isn’t handsome. Everything is a bit fuzzier in Tim’s face. Rougher, coarser, indistinct. It’s like a face drawn by a child, the features slashed in. Plus, he’s allowed himself to get plump.

“Go-Go’s death wasn’t an accident, Gwen. He drove right into the Jersey wall at over a hundred miles per hour.”

“Sean said—”

“Oh, Sean. He’s proper now, careful about what he says. Professional liability since he moved to public relations. He can’t stop spinning things. No, Go-Go aimed his car straight at the barricades at the end of the highway. Probably drunk, so it’s hard to know his intent, but he clearly didn’t try to steer away. We’re waiting for the toxicology reports. Well, we’re not waiting for them. The insurance company is, because they’re keen to deny his kids the life insurance if they can. I can’t figure out if we should root for drunk and claim he wasn’t capable of forming suicidal intent or pray for sober and say the accelerator got stuck.”

“I thought he was in a sober phase.”

“He was, best I can tell, right up to last Tuesday night. Went to meetings every week, seemed to be making progress. We only have Mom’s word for it and she forgave him everything, covered for him whenever possible, but he had been clean for almost two years. He left to go to a meeting, in fact, about seven P.M. Next thing Mom knew, it was two a.m. and the cops were at her door. They had gone to Lori’s first, because that was the address on his license.”

“Lori?”

“His ex, although I guess technically they were just separated. The second ex, the one with the kids.” Tim points to two blondes, tiny things. These girls are not inspecting the dead man in the casket but keeping their distance, clinging to their mother. Even in their sadness, all three are gorgeous. “Only decent thing he ever did for her and those kids was taking out that policy and now he might have screwed that up. All he had to do was hit the brakes, leave some skid marks, but no—”

“Shut up, Tim,” Sean says, joining them.

“It’s just Gwen.”

The words are at once warm and vaguely insulting, conferring a privilege while making it sound as if Gwen is a person of no consequence.

“Gordon did not commit suicide.”

“Look, we’re not going to rat him out to the church, keep him from being buried in consecrated ground. And I’m not going to break Mom’s heart. But among the three of us, can’t we at least drop the bullshit?”

“He was drunk. He called me an hour before, wasn’t making any sense.”

“Probably.”

“If he was drunk, then he didn’t know what he was doing. He was drag racing, like in the old days, and he miscalculated.”

“OK, but—we lived here all our lives. We all learned to drive on that patch of dead-end highway. Drunk or asleep or dead, he couldn’t have forgotten that there were barricades, that it ended.”

“Let it go, Tim.”

“Speaking of drinking—anyone want to?”

They end up at the Point, once a reliably sleazy dive on Franklintown Road. To their horror, it has been yuppified. Live music on the weekends, a decent wine list. The bar food is traditional but prepared with care. It isn’t the kind of experience Gwen—or most Baltimoreans with money, or even the city’s pseudohipsters—are inclined to seek out on Franklintown Road, although Gwen realizes she might find it a handy retreat as long as she’s staying in her father’s house.

The boys drink Rolling Rock on tap, while she has a microbrew.

“Raison D’Être.” Tim pronounces the name of her beer with great disdain. Ray-zohn Det-ruh. “Faggot beer.”

Sean winces at his un-PC brother, but Tim isn’t shamed: “Any beer with a French name has to suck.”

“It’s very good,” Gwen says. “And it’s made in Delaware. Taste it.”

Tim refuses, but Sean is polite enough to try it and say nice things, although he clearly doesn’t care for it.

“You are such a fucking yuppie,” Tim says. A new insult, but in the same vein of all the insults heaped on her when they were children. Gwennie the Whale. Gwen the Goody Two-shoes. Yet Gwen was never as proper as Sean. She wonders if Tim knows that.

She responds, because Tim wants her to and his brother is dead, so she owes him a little good-humored argument. “That term is incredibly dated to the point of being meaningless. When did it come into vogue? The eighties? And who isn’t an urban professional among the three of us? Young we’re clearly not.”

“But you work at that stupid magazine—”

“I edit it, yes.”

“And it’s all about what to buy and what to eat and what to wear.”

“We do a lot of substantive journalism. More than ever, given how the Beacon-Light has been gutted. I’d love to commission an article on the trial you’ve got going, Mr. State’s Attorney. We also still make money. You know why? Because we are business friendly, which kept our advertising stable when the economy bottomed out. And we don’t give all our content away.”

“Best doctors. Best restaurants. Best neighborhoods. Best of the best. Why not—best places to pick up hookers? Hey—why not best hookers? That’s news I could use.”

“I didn’t know you had to pay for it, Tim.”

“I don’t. I prefer to pay for it.”

“He’s kidding,” Sean puts in, ever the PR man, worried that Gwen is going to run off and write a headline: assistant state’s attorney prefers hookers. “Tim’s so straight he doesn’t even drive over the speed limit. And he’s still stupid-in-love with Arlene.”

It’s funny, how quickly they revert to their roles—their roles as they first were, when they functioned as a group with no relationships within the relationships. The only thing different about their interaction is the alcohol. And that they are three, instead of five. They can never be five—the starfish, as Mickey called it—again. Gwen realizes she always hoped they might be, if only for a night, that they would come together once more and confront all the little ragged pieces of their shared story. Other than her father and her siblings, no one in her life knew her as a child. No one has any sense of the totality of who she is. Not even Karl, and certainly not Annabelle. Not her current staff and not her former colleagues from her newspaper days, scattered throughout the city. The Gwen that most people know is the adult Gwen. She wants to be among people who know her. She yearns for her mother, who made her feel special even when she clearly was not, who trusted her to morph into a swan. She even misses Mickey.