The Most Dangerous Thing

Chapter Thirty-five

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.

“Oh-Sean,” his mother said. “I didn’t know you were coming in.”

“I wasn’t,” he said, his happy secret shriveling, dying within him, displaced by whatever accident, tragedy, fuck-up had befallen Go-Go. “What’s wrong with him?”

“A little woozy from loss of blood,” his mother said.

“Loss of blood?”

“An accident,” his father said. “Very common this time of year, according to the ER doctor over at St. Agnes. That place is a sea of sliced thumbs and fingers.”

The bandage was on Go-Go’s wrist. Sean looked at it, looked at his father, and decided not to say anything.

While his parents led their youngest son upstairs, Sean went back to the kitchen, examining the knife in the sink. It was clean. The cabbage may have been left behind, but there was time to wash the knife. Or maybe the knife was innocent. Maybe Go-Go had raked something disingenuous across his wrists just to get attention.

Go-Go wore long sleeves to Thanksgiving dinner. Sean thought of taking Tim aside and saying something, but Tim had brought his girl, Arlene, and was too wrapped up in her, wouldn’t leave her alone for more than a minute or two with either parent, although both seemed to like her. And suddenly it was Sunday and it was time for Sean to fly back to St. Louis, and there was never a time, really, to ask anyone-his mother, his father, Go-Go-what had happened the day before Thanksgiving. To this day, he has never told Tim about the incident. What would he tell? He knows nothing. He supposes that he should be the one arguing that Go-Go’s car accident was a suicide, given what he knows. But he believes it was like the Thanksgiving Day incident-not serious, an attempt at an attempt that caught Go-Go off guard by being successful. He was always trying to get attention.

At least, Sean thinks, getting into a cab that would probably cost forty-some dollars, I learned not to try to surprise my parents . What was the point, really? That was Go-Go’s role in the family.

He arrives to a shining house, a cake on the sideboard, the table set for tea. “You didn’t have to do this for me, Ma,” he says, kissing her papery cheek. He likes being reminded that he’s her favorite, even though he knows he’s no longer deserving of the post. How did he and Tim end up switching places in life? How did Tim become the reliable one? And does that make Sean the loudmouth? Sean thinks it’s the difference between Arlene and Vivian. One wife pushes her husband toward his family, the other drags him away. He wonders how Vivian will feel if Duncan falls in with a girl as relentlessly out for her family as Vivian is, as sure that her family does everything right and Duncan’s does everything wrong.

And if it’s not a girl-but Sean’s mind balks, again. He simply has no idea how that works.

“Oh,” his mother flutters, embarrassed. “It’s not for you. I mean, of course I hope you’ll join us, but an old friend is stopping by. Do you remember Father Andrew from St. Lawrence?”

“Not really. He came after I was already at Cardinal Gibbons, remember? I remember you talking about him, though. He gave you that Waterford pitcher, the one that Go-Go dropped, and he used to come to the house.”

“Once,” his mother says. “Just the once. For tea.”

“Mom-” Suddenly he wants to ask her about that long-ago Thanksgiving. He wants to ask her about everything, all the things that they weren’t supposed to ask. Why was his father so angry all the time? Why is she sad? Was she always sad and he didn’t notice, or is the sadness new? Is he still her favorite? Does he deserve to be her favorite? What would she think if her only grandson-?

He says: “I’ll clear out, after I’ve had a shower, let you two talk over old times.”

Within an hour, he’s sitting at Monaghan’s Tavern, enjoying a beer, watching ESPN. He feels totally outlaw-a beer at 3 P.M. Sitting in the bar where his father used to go, which probably hasn’t changed much in all that time. He takes out his phone, checks e-mail-a note from Vivian, saying that they’ve landed, all is well, although she’s appalled by the hotel the church group has chosen and is trying to rebook; a few odds and ends from work, even though it’s a holiday on the calendar. He calls up a number that he has left on his log yet never stored in his contacts. He summons it up, puts it down, summons it up, hits the wrong button, finds himself making the call that he honestly wasn’t sure he was going to make until this moment.

McKey doesn’t even have an outgoing message. It seems odd at first, this complete void. He could be speaking to anyone’s phone, even though he’s pressing the number that her phone sent his phone last month, almost as if the technology was calling the shots. He decides the lack of a message is reassuring. McKey, unlike, say, Gwen, doesn’t need to put everything in words. You can’t imagine her with a Facebook page or a blog or a Twitter account. He speaks into the space she has left: “I’m in town. We should get together to talk. All of us-Tim, Gwen, me-or just you and me, whichever you prefer.”

He’s pretty sure which she’s going to prefer.

Chapter Thirty-six

G ood Friday reminds Gwen of how deeply Catholic Baltimore still is. Although it’s not an official holiday for businesses, many companies offer it as a flex day. And if schools are not already on spring vacation, students are guaranteed the day off. So she has brought Annabelle to her office, never really a good idea. The place fascinates Annabelle-for about forty-five minutes. Then the whining begins. Gwen has parked her in a conference room with a DVD player, a stack of Disney movies, a stapler, and some scratch paper and asked her to “work” on the paper. Like many children, Annabelle yearns to be useful. She quickly abandons the project, curls up in a chair, and begins sucking her thumb as she watches princesses cavort.

“There will be something,” another parent in Gwen’s group told her when she entered the China adoption program. This woman was going back for her second child, and Gwen initially appreciated her advice and expertise. “What do you mean by something?” she asked. They had met-it seems silly now-in a Chinese restaurant up in Towson.

“Well, in our first group, one of the girls was a hoarder. She hoarded immense amounts of food, trash. She was older, almost two. Another child clearly had medical problems. The question was how serious they were. The family had to take a leap of faith to bring her home.”

“And?” Gwen could not believe how nervous she was about the answer to her question, how invested she had become, in the space of a sentence, in a family about which she knew nothing.

“She was fine.”

“Did your daughter-”

“Lily.”

“Yes, Lily. Did she-?”

The woman stared off into space, but that didn’t keep her eyes from welling with tears. “There was a bonding issue. She was very attached to my husband, but she had nothing for me for a long time. It was hard.” She swallowed, blinked, smiled. “But it turned out great. These are such great kids.”

Inevitably, Gwen started trolling the Internet. She lasted about a week on a forum for prospective parents. It was too much, an aggregation of nightmares and dreams.

In the end, she didn’t really have something with Annabelle, other than the expected developmental delays. She had been warned that Annabelle would think her new parents smelled funny and looked funny, that she would stare at the ceiling when overwhelmed. But her daughter had an indomitable spirit. It was a strange thing to think, but Gwen sometimes finds herself wondering how Annabelle would have fared if she hadn’t been adopted. She believes she would have thrived. She believes her daughter would have thrived anywhere. Though Gwen and Karl are important to her, beloved by her, they’re not shaping her in any way. She is who she is. All Gwen can do is stand by, rather helplessly, and love her to pieces.

This year Annabelle will spend Easter weekend with Karl, by his request, which surprised Gwen. Karl has never been religious and had no desire to see Annabelle brought up in his faith, Catholicism. They have been taking Annabelle to the little Presbyterian church in Dickeyville, a place that Gwen attended until she announced, at age twelve, that she didn’t want to go anymore, and her parents didn’t object. Gwen isn’t sure what Annabelle is taking away from it, but it’s a nice ritual, going to church, then stopping by her father’s house for Sunday lunch.

But this year, Karl’s sister has arrived from Guatemala, and he is putting on a bit of a show for her, taking her to services at the cathedral, making reservations for brunch at one of the downtown hotels. Gwen will be alone. Well, with her father, but alone. She has entrusted Annabelle’s Easter basket to Karl, with careful instructions about where to put it this year. It kills her, not being there, but Annabelle will be out of bed by seven, maybe even six. For a moment, Gwen was tempted to tell her there was no Easter bunny, just so Gwen would have a reason to bring the basket the day before. But Annabelle is only five. She deserves several more years of believing in impossible, lovely lies.

The office, never a loud place, is still today, with most of Gwen’s employees opting for the flex day. If she could drag her thoughts away from Annabelle, she could get a lot of work done. But what she really wants to do is go to the conference room and curl up with her, watch whatever Disney princess is enchanting her. Feminist that she believes herself to be, Gwen has no problem with little girls wanting to be princesses. Want to find the damaged women among you? Look to the ones who had their femininity thwarted at every turn, the poor hulking girls who were asked to play the boys’ parts at their all-girl summer camps or schools. Margery, her most aggressive, ruthless reporter, loves bags and shoes and wouldn’t step out of the house without makeup. It’s not an either-or world. It’s possible to be a feminine feminist.

Becca, her assistant, pops her head around the door, and Gwen is instantly on alert. “Annabelle OK?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s in heaven. She can’t wait until noon, when I’ve told her we can go to the vending machines and pick two items each, as long as one of them doesn’t have chocolate. No, you’ve got a call that came through the main switchboard. A woman, doesn’t want to give her full name, very cloak and dagger, but she says she’s been calling and calling your cell and you don’t answer and she does, in fact, know the number to your cell. Clearly, she thinks this is somewhat urgent.”

Gwen glances down, realizes her phone has been on silent. When Annabelle is with her, there’s no reason to be vigilant about the cell. She touches the screen and sees a series of three calls over the morning, each from a number with the caller ID function blocked. But it’s a number she recognizes, kind of. Local. A number she has dialed recently. She touches it, the phone on speaker, and is amazed how quickly the call goes through, how a voice jumps out of the line like a coiled snake.

“Jesus, about time,” says the voice, which she recognizes as Tess Monaghan’s. “You were on the verge of missing an opportunity.”

Gwen turns off the speaker function and picks up the phone, which only piques Becca’s interest, but so it goes. “An opportunity?”

A pause, a sigh. “My client is in town. And despite the fact that I have advised him strongly not to do this, he wants to meet with you. But the window is very small. He came here to meet with his lawyer. He has to go back home tomorrow, so the only window is early evening.”

“He-so I’m allowed to know the gender now.”

She is teasing, but Tess Monaghan doesn’t seem to enjoy being teased. No one does. “You’re going to know everything soon. Look, there’s a movie theater out on Nursery Road. Meet him in the lobby there.”

“Why there?”

“He can walk there from his hotel. He’s already turned in his rental car, so he’s kind of limited in his mobility.”

“How will I know-”

“He’ll find you. Frankly, I am hoping against hope that he stands you up or backs out at the last minute. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by him talking to you-and much to lose.”

G wen is quite familiar with the movie theater on Nursery Road, which is barely five miles from her house in Relay. It is never crowded for some reason, possibly because of the larger multiplex a few more miles down the highway, which is part of an enormous mall. She, Karl, and Annabelle have come here for virtually every talking animal movie and Pixar film made over the last two years. It is a ridiculous place to try to have a conversation, she thinks, especially as the ticket takers begin to eye her skeptically. Is it so unusual for a woman to wait in the lobby of a movie theater?

An African American man comes through the door, sixty or so, and her stomach lurches. This is it . This is the moment she will be called into account, told that the man they left in the woods to die was someone’s father, grandfather, cousin. She will counter, of course, share the horrible truth about what he did to Go-Go, but it doesn’t balance out, not quite. Unless Go-Go’s death balances it out. Chicken George died in a night. Go-Go spent years dying.

The man walks by, gets in the ticket line. She glances at her watch. The mystery client is going to stand her up after all. She feels relieved for some reason. He doesn’t want to see her. He has nothing to say to her. This has nothing to do with Chicken George.

She checks her e-mail on her phone, checks her messages. Nothing. Now she’s angry. She could have had this hour with Annabelle at the house. They could be sitting in the kitchen, dyeing eggs, baking. She’s getting irritated at this phantom client whose on-again, off-again decisions have affected her. She begins playing a game of Angry Birds, feeling like a very angry bird herself.

“Mrs. Robison?” a man’s voice inquires.

She looks up into the face of a white-haired man, broad shouldered, quite handsome. He is wearing a turtleneck beneath a well-tailored camel’s hair coat.

“Yes.” She doesn’t even bother to correct him, say it’s Ms.

“I’m sorry I’m late. It’s farther than I realized, the walk here. It looked so close on a map. And I felt I was taking my life in my hands, walking along the shoulder. I thought there would be a sidewalk.”

“There often aren’t,” she says, feeling stupid. “I mean-in the newer developments.” She cannot imagine what this immaculately groomed man has to do with Go-Go. Perhaps he senses her confusion, for he extends his hand. He is the kind of man who takes another person’s hand in both of his, holds it, making eye contact.

“I am Andrew Burke,” he says. “Gordon Halloran knew me as Father Andrew, but I left the church several years ago. Last fall I asked Tess Monaghan to find him so he could do me a favor of sorts. He said he would. Then he changed his mind, and now he’s dead. A possible suicide. I feel horrible about that.”

Perhaps because he’s a man who seems skilled at giving comfort, Gwen also wants to comfort him. “No one knows, for sure. If it was a suicide.”

“But you think it is.”

She wants to tell the truth. “Sometimes you can’t know.”

He shakes his head. “True enough. But I feel that I inadvertently pressured him. You see-we spoke, after Tess found him. I wasn’t supposed to call, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m afraid I frustrate her, with my inability to follow her instructions. But I wanted to hear from him-what I needed to hear. He ended up telling me things, things I think I should tell someone close to him. I considered his mother, but I don’t think Doris could bear it. When I heard about you from Tess, I realized that’s who I needed. A friend, someone who cared enough about Go-Go to ask questions after he died. Besides, you’re a part of the story, aren’t you?”

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.

Chapter Thirty-seven

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.

Chapter Thirty-eight

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.

“I might as well go in now, get it over with,” he says, grabbing the car keys, ignoring his daughters’ wrathful looks.

“Is it the jewelry store murder?” Arlene asks.

“Sure,” he says. He almost wishes she would call him on his shit, ask what could possibly require him to go to the office on a Saturday, short of a cop killing. But she doesn’t pick up on it, only smiles and pats his shoulder again.

Behind the wheel of his car, he tries to concentrate on the roads even as he keeps reviewing the time line. If Gwen is right-if Father Andrew is telling the truth-

I f. There is another way of looking at this. The old priest is a liar. And with Go-Go dead, he can spin the story however he wants. But why spin a story at all? What does he have to gain? With Go-Go dead, he’s in the clear, assuming he’s the one who molested him. Only he says he’s not, that he’s never touched a kid, and that he was counting on Go-Go to tell people that.

He also says that Chicken George never touched a kid. At least-he didn’t touch Go-Go.

The priest was quite firm, Gwen told Tim. Go-Go said he was molested by two high school boys in 1980. The night of the hurricane-

Was in 1979, not 1980. People get those details wrong all the time. Trust me, Gwen.

But Go-Go said it was two high school boys, Tim. Not Chicken George. Why would he tell Father Andrew that?

Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the priest is using Go-Go’s death.

Father Andrew, it turns out, is essentially being blackmailed. A former student is threatening to go public with lurid tales of sex abuse in the parish. With the statute of limitations long past, he can’t bring a civil or criminal suit, but he can ruin Father Andrew’s life. The claim is baseless-Father Andrew says-but as an ex-priest and one who is now living openly as a gay man, he feels vulnerable. So many people don’t understand the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. Yet he refuses on principle to pay this amoral opportunist. His lawyer started assembling character witnesses, students who would testify as to his behavior. Go-Go was one of those students, and he had agreed to give a deposition.

Go-Go was making a clean breast of things. He wanted to know if he had to talk about other sexual experiences, in his deposition, and Father Andrew promised him that it wouldn’t come up. He was only going to be asked about his relationship with Father Andrew, if he ever saw anything untoward. Go-Go said he was happy to do it. But then he changed his mind, refused to talk to the private investigator or Father Andrew.

Did he tell him-

About Chicken George’s death? No. But he insisted he was molested by two boys, then blamed this older man.

Tim arrives at his mother’s house. She has a book in hand, holding her place with her finger, and she looks surprised-really, almost a little annoyed-at her son’s unannounced visit. It never occurred to Tim that his mother would prefer anything to seeing one of her sons.

“Sean’s meeting you there,” she says.

“Where?”

“The golf course. He said you were playing golf this afternoon, but he had some errands to run first.”

Interesting. Why has Sean created such an elaborate lie to get away from their mother? But Tim instinctively takes his brother’s back.

“Our tee time isn’t for another couple of hours. Mom, where did you say you keep the stepladder now?”

“Why do you need the stepladder?”

“I just do.”

She has to think-or pretend that she’s thinking. “In the garage. I so seldom use it.”

It is the stepladder from his childhood, the one that used to be kept in the upstairs hall closet, the one that he needed last month to put away things on the high shelf of the china cupboard. In the event of a fire, they were to drag the stepladder to Go-Go’s room, lift the rectangular board that led to the attic crawl space, then proceed to throw a rope ladder out the attic window and clamber to the ground. The only problem was that their father never anchored the rope ladder to the sill, which meant it was useless. If the house ever caught fire, they would have been safer jumping out the second-story windows than clambering down an unsecured rope from the third. Still, the stepladder belonged in that upstairs closet. It’s the only way to get to the attic. He was surprised that his mother had moved it to the garage. Now he has a hunch why.

It clearly has been years since anyone has pushed open the door, leading to the storage space under the eaves. Someone-Go-Go, his father, his mother?-has tried to nail it shut, but it’s a piss-poor job. Tim pushes it with his shoulder and the nails slide from the thin, splintery wood.

Tim isn’t particularly tall, but once in the attic he has to stay hunched to keep his head from grazing the ceiling. He pulls the chain on the single-watt bulb only to watch it die with a pop. There’s enough light from the window for him to make things out, though. He begins taking inventory. On a set of low shelves, he finds the hockey gear that Go-Go wore in the Fourth of July parade. Hadn’t he said he borrowed it? That was the summer of 1980. It never made sense, Go-Go showing up with that gear. Tim always assumed he stole it. But if Father Andrew is right-it could fit. Someone could have given Go-Go the mask, the stick, the padded glove to ensure his silence. Interesting, but is this reason enough to seal up the crawl space? He pokes and prods the various cardboard boxes, filled with the most incredible debris, stained clothes, and broken toys. Tim sees a pile of old sheets in the corner, yellow with age, wrapped around something, and he moves toward it, keeping his head low, almost crawling.

A steel guitar.

He rocks back on his haunches, tells himself that there is more than one steel guitar in the world, that the guitar’s presence here means nothing. But it is Chicken George’s guitar. Go-Go went back for it, went back to where Chicken George fell and took the guitar. Why?

Because Chicken George never touched him. Because it was all a lie. And Go-Go wanted to be caught in the lie, wanted someone to ask him about it.

When he comes downstairs, his mother is in her chair, but no longer wrapped up in her book.

“You knew it was up there,” he says, not bothering with his professional techniques, not setting up a careful path of questions to which she must answer yes, so she can’t deny the established facts. His father might not have been handy, but he would have done a better job at nailing that door in place. Go-Go, too, for that matter. His mother hid the guitar, his mother nailed the attic up and moved the stepladder, hoping that it would deter anyone who decided to go up there. How long has she kept Go-Go’s secret?

“Yes,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because I knew it meant something.”

“What? What did you think it meant?”

“Something bad.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

C lem hears the front doorbell, a conversation between Gwen and a man. Karl? Has Karl relented and decided to let Annabelle spend Easter weekend here? He feels Annabelle’s absence keenly. As much as he wants Gwen to stop being an idiot and go back to Karl, he likes the fact that Annabelle has been here almost every weekend. He has started reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to her, over Gwen’s protestations. Gwen says Annabelle’s too young, which is probably true. But Clem thinks that Gwen’s real problem is that she wants to read the book to Annabelle and he is usurping her. He is. Given his age, there is so much he will never do with this grandchild. He will never run alongside her two-wheeler. He couldn’t carry her even before he broke his hip. He feels as if he has missed out twice-over on being a real grandfather. Miller’s children lived too far away, and now Annabelle has arrived when he’s too old. He might not even see her through grade school. Gwen might have a little more empathy, he thinks.

In general, Gwen might have a little more empathy. The problem is, she thinks she does. But Gwen’s idea of empathy is that she knows how she would feel in any given situation. If she fell down and broke something, she would throw herself into physical therapy, do everything right, so why won’t Clem? If she were Karl, she would pursue her runaway spouse, do whatever was necessary to woo her back. Gwen has a good heart, but a person can have a good heart and be self-involved to the point of blindness.

Yet it is Clem who does not register, not right away, how much distress his youngest daughter is in when she enters his room with a lunch tray.

“I thought I heard someone at the door,” he says.

“You did. Tim Halloran stopped by.”

“What did the lummox want?”

“He’s not.”

“What?”

“He’s not a lummox, actually. Not really. He can be crude and coarse, and he was kind of a bully as a boy, but he’s smart and surprisingly… ” She does not find the word she’s looking for. “We have to go out later. Tim and I. We need to…” Another sentence left unfinished, and Clem finally realizes his daughter is agitated, pale and drawn.

“Gwen, I feel you haven’t been telling me everything.”

“Everything?”

“About Karl. Why did you leave?”

The question catches her off guard. Her thoughts are far from her husband, her domestic situation. She seems almost relieved by the change of subject. She sinks on the chair next to his bed.

“There was infidelity,” she says.

“You said Karl was insistent nothing happened, that he didn’t even realize what that woman on the Facething was trying to do.”

“No, not Karl. I cheated. Just once-no, that’s a lie. I still can’t tell the truth about it. More than once, but it wasn’t what you would call an affair. It was something really stupid I did, but something I can’t take back. Last summer, with someone at the office. Someone much younger. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could be fired over it.”

“And Karl threw you out?”

“No. He doesn’t know, doesn’t even suspect.”

“So why did you leave?”

“Because I don’t want to tell him, but I don’t know how to go forward if I don’t tell him. Yet if I do tell him-”

“He will throw you out.”

Gwen shakes her head. “Worse. He’ll forgive me. If only for Annabelle’s sake. But I’ll be in his debt forever, then. It will be official: I’m the bad one and he’s the saint.”

“Husbands and wives aren’t working off a balance sheet, Gwen. Look, I think it would be OK not to tell him. I really do. This mania for honesty-”

She catches her breath, almost as if she has been hit unexpectedly.

“I’m just saying that people don’t have to tell each other everything.”

“Easy for you to say, with your perfect marriage.”

He takes her hand. “Really? That’s what you saw? A perfect marriage?”

“Yes. You never quarreled. You adored her. You saw her, encouraged her, praised her. My husband can’t even pretend to be interested in what I do. And perhaps by the standards of what he does, it is shallow and trivial, and perhaps people shouldn’t have to pretend…” Her voice trails off, her point lost even to her.

“Gwen, I’m not even sure your mother truly loved me.”

“How can you say that?”

“We got married because she believed she was pregnant.”

“That makes no sense. Miller was born more than a year after you married.”

“I didn’t say she was pregnant. She believed she was pregnant, but she was terrified of going to a doctor anywhere in Boston, assumed there was no way she could keep the secret from her parents. She all but asked me to marry her.”

“Well, of course you did the right thing.”

“No, you don’t get it. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She was proud. She didn’t want anyone to think she made a mistake, that she wasn’t in absolute control of her own destiny. So we married-and she lived with her mistake the rest of her life.”

“She loved you.”

“To the best of her ability, yes. And she stayed with me after she realized she was wrong. We never spoke of it. She had no idea that I knew. But I did, and there was always that seed of doubt there. I had to wonder if she loved me as I loved her.”

“She was so young,” Gwen murmurs. Excuses, always excuses. Tally trained everyone to make excuses for her. “Karl is older than I am, allegedly a grown-up. But he never thinks about anyone but himself.”

“Gwen-most people don’t think about anyone but themselves and maybe their children. Your mother would have walked through fire for you.” A pause. “As would I. But we don’t ask that of our spouses. Oh, we can ask, but we’re sure to be disappointed.”

Gwen shakes her head. “I’ve lived my whole life believing my mother to be happy, someone who struck a perfect balance before anyone even worried about such things. And now you’re telling me it was a lie.”

“Not a lie, exactly. But I don’t think she ever stopped thinking about the life she might have-what might have been. If she had gone to Wellesley, as she planned, if she had studied painting seriously-well, she couldn’t know who she might have been. The generation of women who came up behind her, girls barely a decade younger, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted. She ended up abandoning the painting she thought would be her masterpiece.”

“The painting of the young couple in the woods. What happened to that?”

“She painted over it, gave up.”

“I sometimes wonder about those paints, their toxicity, that poorly ventilated shed. And then there was all that diet soda she drank. Do you think either one could have caused her cancer?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care, Gwen. Knowing the cause means nothing. She was the love of my life, and I never regretted how our marriage came to be. But I’ll never know if she would say the same thing.”

“What should I do? About Karl? Go home and tell him everything? Go home and tell him nothing? For all the time we’ve been together, I’ve had the small comfort of being the good spouse, the one who made everything work. If I tell him about the affair, I won’t even have that anymore. I’ll just be the one who cheated.”

“I’ve had only one marriage, Gwen. You’ve had two. Perhaps you should be advising me.”

“I felt old,” she says. “And unattractive.”

“Dearest Gwen, there are only so many details I can handle.”

She looks down at her hands, and Clem’s eyes follow. They are shaking. The veins stand out in sharp relief, the skin is dry. He thinks about Gwen’s baby hands, cupping his face. Annabelle’s hands. Tally’s hands, dry and a little coarse from being denuded of paint every day, how she hated to leave a speck behind. His daughter’s hands make him feel so old.

“It’s easier to talk about Karl, what I’ve done, than the thing that’s really bothering me. Daddy-do you remember the night of the hurricane?”

It’s a double blow-the use of “Daddy,” the mention of that night.

“I wouldn’t be likely to forget that.”

“Tim and I-we’ve learned some things since Go-Go died.”

Blabbermouth Doris. Who hasn’t she told by this point?

“It wasn’t true,” Gwen says. “It didn’t happen.”

“Go-Go didn’t die?” He is honestly confused, and that one moment of confusion scares him, as it always does. The inability to follow a conversation-that’s a far more serious indicator of a failing mind than mere memory lapses.

“He wasn’t molested. Not by the man in the woods. He lied, he and McKey.”

“Who?” He decides it’s the sheer anxiety that he feels at the mention of the hurricane that is making it hard for him to focus.

“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.

Chapter Forty

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.

Chapter Forty-one

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.”

“What about Rick? He was there as well.”

“He died a year ago. I found his obituary online. I think this is a case where all the lucky ones are dead.”

“You can’t call Go-Go lucky.”

“No-no, that’s true.”

“I wish we could find Sean,” Gwen says. They have both tried him repeatedly, but his cell phone goes straight to voice mail, and they have been reluctant to leave any message beyond “Call me.” Gwen is actually a little hurt by Sean’s inattention.

Tim gives a laugh that’s a good imitation of the sound she made when she heard about the guitar. “I have a hunch he’ll meet us there.”

M cKey’s apartment has a security system that requires visitors to call up. But when Gwen reaches for the receiver, Tim grabs her and sweeps her up in an embrace, pressing her against the wall and pretending to kiss her, although he has his hand over her mouth. Frightened by his odd behavior, Gwen is getting ready to kick him in the shins, then stops when she realizes his intent. He is counting on the person entering the vestibule to be embarrassed and not protest when Tim grabs the open door and hustles in behind them.

“It’s not much of a security system, especially if the apartment number is next to the name,” he says. “They should use random codes, so people can’t find someone if they sneak in as we did.”

“It was a neat trick.”

“Thanks. I stole it from a movie.”

He pounds on McKey’s door even as he presses a button on his phone, sighing when he hears a distinctive ring tone from the other side, a burst of classical music.

“You have McKey’s number in your phone?” Gwen asks, mystified.

“No,” Tim says. He pounds again, speaks in a firm voice. “It’s Gwen and Tim. You have to let us in.” There is no sound on the other side of the door. Tim presses a button on his phone again, the same ring tone sounds from the other side of the door. But what does this prove, Gwen thinks. McKey clearly is not here. She just happened to leave her phone behind.

Tim speaks into the door. “I’ve got Vivian’s number in my phone, too. I’m dialing that one next.”

Vivian?

“It’s a three-one-seven number, right? Is that the cell or the home phone?”

McKey answers the door, wearing a floor-length robe, a bit of floaty lavender far too pretty to be useful. Gwen cannot begin to read the look on her face. Triumphant? Smug? Angry?

“Why did you bring Gwen? Do you think it makes you look less pathetic?”

“I don’t think I’m the pathetic one in this situation. I mean, I’m not the one who had to make up a lie about a golf date so I could cheat on my wife.” He walks over to her coffee table. Gwen sees a bottle of wine, two glasses, both with some dregs.

“I thought you were in AA,” Gwen says stupidly. It’s easier to focus on this small detail than the larger one, the buzz of words from Tim, the details that don’t track. Two glasses. Cheat. Golf date. That robe.

“I was,” McKey says. “Then I realized I’m not an alcoholic, that I was just a little unnerved by some episodes before the holidays. I can drink in moderation.”

“Yeah, two glasses is really moderate,” Tim says. “Look, let’s not drag this out. His phone is here. We heard it ring.”

“He stopped by earlier today. I didn’t realize he left it here. This is awkward. I’m entertaining.”

“I bet you are,” Tim says, holding his phone out at arm’s length. Gwen understands. He can’t read the screen close up without reading glasses. “Here’s Vivian’s number-I wonder if I can set up a conference call among our three phones.”

Sean comes into the living room, fully dressed. Gwen wants to laugh at the silliness of it, this odd little moment straight out of a bedroom farce. Sean proper and composed, as if the fact of his clothing, his combed hair, proves he’s innocent. Yet she’s sad for him, too. Oh, Sean. I wish you had told me what you were thinking. Because I would have talked you out of it. Not out of jealousy, although she admits to herself that she is jealous, that she does feel as if McKey has seized something that was hers. But mainly she’s sad because he’s done something he can never take back. And she knows he’ll want to take it back, whatever the outcome, even if there is no outcome. Her father may be right about people being too honest. But the problem with cheating is that you can never be spared that knowledge about yourself, whether you tell or not.

“We forgot our prop,” she says to Tim, not wanting to think about what’s happening here and now.

“That’s okay. We won’t need it. We might all need alcohol, though.” McKey has no intention of playing the hostess, so Gwen goes to the kitchen, finds it stocked with wine and beer and a healthy array of whiskey, although no food. She brings a selection to the table, with a choice of glasses. She herself selects bourbon. She’s not driving in any sense of the word. Let Tim take the wheel.

“Over the past twenty-four hours, Gwen and I, separately and together, have learned a lot of things that change everything about what we thought we knew about the night of the hurricane.” Tim is in his professional mode. “First-and this is going to be hard to hear, Sean-Gwen’s father says that Chicken George was probably alive when they got to him, but our father killed him, beat him to death with a flashlight. And our father told Mom as much the night he died.”

Sean shakes his head. “If that’s so, it would have been reported at the time. There weren’t so many bodies dumped in Leakin Park that such a thing would have gone overlooked.”

“It didn’t. But the body was out there for a very long time, much longer than anyone could have guessed, washed into a culvert. It was months before it was found, but it happens that there is an open case from the winter of 1980.” Tim looks at McKey. “Was it hard, going back and seeing him there, or had the stream already washed him away?”

Gwen understands that Tim is testing McKey. There’s no reason to believe that she took the guitar, but the accusation might shake something loose.

“I didn’t go back.”

“Someone did. I found the guitar in my family’s attic today. And it’s hard for me to imagine Go-Go going back by himself, to see the body of the man who allegedly molested him.”

Gwen sees Sean’s head snap up at the adverb allegedly . McKey has no reaction, and that’s reaction enough.

But all she says is: “I don’t know why Go-Go did what he did. He’s dead, so I’ll guess we’ll never know.”

“Want to know something interesting about Go-Go’s death, Mickey? A few months ago, an old priest from our parish asked Go-Go to be a character witness for him. A former student had come forward, said he had recovered memories of sexual abuse, seemed to be interested in shaking cash out of the archdiocese or even the priest himself, who comes from a well-to-do family and has pockets deep enough to be attractive to someone angling for a quickie settlement. Go-Go agreed to be his character witness. Then he abruptly backed out, wouldn’t even answer phone calls from the person trying to set up the deposition. Why would he do that?”

“Why do you keep asking me about Go-Go, what he did? He’s not my brother.”

Gwen realizes that McKey is even smarter than she ever knew, careful not to say anything. She has not made a single assertion so far, other than insisting that she didn’t take the guitar, and she may be telling the truth. But she knows Go-Go wasn’t molested by Chicken George.

“Go-Go did tell Father Andrew that he wanted to do this for him because years ago he was molested by two high school boys, but he lied and blamed it on someone else. The weird thing is, based on what he told Father Andrew, he was molested by the older kids in 1980. So what really happened the night of the hurricane? What did you see? Why was Chicken George chasing you, trying to grab you? You, Mickey, not Go-Go. He tried to grab you-and you pushed him.”

“Only because I was closer to him. Go-Go was faster. I went to the cabin. I saw Chicken George touching Go-Go. He chased us.”

“I think you took the guitar that night and that’s why he chased you. It never made sense for him to run after you with it, as you said.”

McKey smiles. Why is she smiling? “Suit yourself. But, as you recall, your brother and I agreed on what happened. What little boy would tell such a story if it wasn’t true? As for the high school boys-I don’t know what that’s about. Maybe Go-Go thought that was more credible. Maybe Go-Go liked sex with men.”

Sean has been listening intently, trying to catch up. He is uncomfortable, Gwen knows, with having the least information of anyone in the group, and now he breaks in. “That’s ridiculous. Go-Go wasn’t gay.”

“I’m not saying he was.” McKey’s tone, when talking to Sean, is earnest, sweet. She’s trying to create teams. With only four of them, they can go two-on-two. “I’m just playing Tim’s game. He’s making stuff up. I’m making stuff up, to show him how ridiculous it is. Look, I’m truly sorry about your dads. It can’t be fun, finding out your fathers are killers. It was easier on everyone when we thought this was an accident.”

“Rick was there, too,” Tim says, even as Gwen tries to parse McKey’s grammar, her tenses. It was easier on everyone- She already knew this part. She knows about what Tim Senior did. Yet Go-Go didn’t even tell his brothers. Why would he confide in McKey? Because she’s as responsible as he is for whatever happened.

“Yes. Well, Rick wasn’t my father. It’s different. Still, they did what they did. Don’t make this about me.”

“Go-Go told Father Andrew-”

“According to Father Andrew. And who knows what Go-Go would say on any given day?”

Something tugs at Gwen’s memory. Tim said something about picking pockets. She hears a squeal of brakes, a woman’s laugh. She is standing on the steps of the private detective’s office. No, it’s not that moment. It was something from earlier in their conversation, something about her methods, which even she found deplorable.

“You went to AA to spy on Go-Go, just like the private detective’s operative did. No, not spy, because obviously he saw you and knew you were there. You wanted him to see you, wanted him to know you were watching him. You wanted to make sure that he didn’t talk in AA, the way he did to Father Andrew. Why did you care, McKey? What secret did you need Go-Go to keep? Chicken George’s death? Something else?”

McKey drops her eyes to her lap and picks at the embroidery on her robe. It’s pretty, feminine, the kind of thing that Tally used to wear. In fact, it’s a dead ringer for an old robe of Tally’s that was in Gwen’s dress-up box. They played dress-up on the rare days they spent indoors, and McKey, who lived in overalls and cutoffs, always chose the frilly, girly items.

Gwen thinks about the cabin, the night of the storm. Why would McKey and Go-Go have gone there together? It has never made sense, McKey stumbling on him there, two of them winding up there independently. No one went there alone-except Sean and Gwen, and she didn’t want to go anymore because she thought someone was watching them. Tim said straight out that he tried to watch them only once, in the Halloran basement. So if someone was watching-

“Did you spy on us, in the woods. You and Go-Go? Did you watch us?”

McKey’s posture is defiant, but she won’t meet Gwen’s eyes. “It was an accident. We went there to play and you were… already playing. Anyone would do what we did.”

“But it wasn’t just the one time, was it? You went back. You went back again and again. You went back the night of the storm, but we weren’t there.” No, she and Sean were in her bedroom, trying to figure out how much they could do without arousing Tally’s suspicions. And Gwen, as always, was the bolder one. Sean was scared to death of being caught.

“You went to watch us, but we weren’t there. We hadn’t been there for a while. What did you do, Mickey?” There is no doubt in Gwen’s mind that Mickey, not McKey, is the person to whom she needs to talk, the one who has the answers. “What did Chicken George see?”

“Nothing.”

“Mickey-”

“A game. Just a game.”

“A sexual game?”

Mickey’s eyes skate, looking for a safe place to land. She decides on Sean. “I guess you could call it that.”

“He was nine. You were almost fourteen.”

“There was no law against it.”

“There is now.” Gwen has no idea if this is true, and she looks to Tim for confirmation. But he and Sean seem mainly bewildered, unsure of how to react. “You had to know it was wrong, otherwise you would have admitted it. Chicken George knew it was wrong. Even Go-Go must have known. That’s why he followed your lead, when you lied and said Chicken George molested him.”

“ He pushed Chicken George. Go-Go. From behind. All these years, I was protecting him.”

But not even Mickey sounds convinced of what she’s saying, and Tim comes back to life. “Oh, come on.”

“He did. I was covering for him. That’s why he was willing to lie, because he was the one who hurt him. We weren’t doing anything bad. We made each other feel good. What’s the big deal?”

“He was nine,” Gwen repeats.

“Most nine-year-old boys would be thrilled to have a girl touch them.” She appeals to the two men in the room. “Am I right?”

Sean starts to stammer something, then stops. “Don’t ask him,” Tim says. “He’d pay a crack whore to initiate his son into sex if it could keep him from being gay.”

“Fuck off, Tim. Duncan’s not-”

“ Out, Sean. Not out. But everyone knows he’s gay. His cousins get it, even our littlest. Mom has figured it out. Everyone but you. Has it ever occurred to you that Duncan hasn’t come out because he can sense you’re less than thrilled, that he’s being solicitous of your feelings?”

Gwen sees Mickey’s eyes gleaming. She has distracted them, divided them. She’s winning.

“What about the boys?” Gwen asks her.

“What boys?”

“The high school boys. The ones that Go-Go told Father Andrew about.”

“As I said, maybe he liked sex with boys.” She tries to give a blithe shrug but can’t pull it off.

“Did it appear that he liked it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you were there. You made it happen. If it was just you and Go-Go, that one time, then he might figure out one day that he really hadn’t done anything wrong, but you had. So you made sure that he had other things to be confused and ashamed about. You came up with more games, knowing that Go-Go would always want to do whatever the big kids were doing.”

Mickey curls into herself. She crosses her arms, brings her feet beneath her. She’s like the turtles she used to torture, poking them with sticks so they withdrew all their limbs, even the snapping turtles. Gwen can tell that she’s not going to talk, not to her. And not to Tim. Gwen looks to Sean, who is flushed and angry. Over the comments about his son or his brother?

Gwen asks: “Why? Why did you do it?”

Although it is Gwen who is pressing her, she addresses herself to Sean. “I didn’t think it was wrong. I wanted to be with you, but you chose Gwen. So I chose Go-Go.”

Tim says: “If you had wanted to fool around with one of Sean’s brothers, I would have been glad to oblige.”

If he meant the joke to distill the tension in the room, he has failed. Not even Tim seems amused by this brief return of his lummox self.

Sean asks: “Is Gwen right, Mickey? About the boys? Did you do that to Go-Go?”

“Hockey mask,” Tim says. “It’s in the attic, too.” Sean nods. Gwen has no idea what they’re talking about.

Mickey shakes her head. “I gave him that. I got the money out of my stepdad, telling him it was for school stuff.” She looks small, sitting on her sofa. Gwen remembers the girl she met almost thirty-five years ago. So pretty, so scruffy, so lacking in things that the others, even the Halloran boys, took for granted. A girl who would be your best friend for a drawer full of candy.

“You know something?” Gwen is speaking to the Halloran brothers. “Go-Go never said anything about Mickey. Even to Father Andrew, whom he told about the high school boys. He lied about Chicken George to protect her. All these years, he’s protected Mickey, for whatever reason.”

“Because they’re responsible for a man’s death,” Sean says.

Mickey-and she is undeniably Mickey again to all of them, so young and vulnerable she reminds Gwen of Annabelle after being caught at something, miserable not at being caught but about being bad, which no one ever really wants to be-picks at the lush, embroidered flora of her gown, which is riotous with green tendrils and scarlet blossoms. Pretty, Gwen thinks again of the silk robe. Not the gown of a femme fatale, but of someone who wants love and romance. She is repelled by what Mickey did but can’t disavow her.

Yet it is Tim, the father of three girls, who goes to sit next to her. “Talk to us, Mickey. Tell us everything that happened. We won’t turn our backs on you.”

“But you did,” she says. “You all did. Except Go-Go. You left me.”

“We’re here now.”

She takes a sip of bourbon-from Gwen’s glass. “For all these years-for all these years-we felt responsible. Chicken George grabbed me, and I pushed him to get away. He fell. It was our fault, even if we didn’t mean to do it. Then this priest comes along and Go-Go wants to tell everything. Everything . For his own sake, not caring what will happen to me. I told him it was too risky to talk at all. We were responsible for Chicken George’s death and that’s something that never goes away.”

“Not legally,” Tim says.

“Not in any way,” Mickey says.

“What about the high school boys?” asks Tim. “The ones that Go-Go told Father Andrew about?”

“I met some guys when I went to the new school. Seniors. They wanted to mess around, and I was cool with it. Go-Go wanted to play, too. You know how he was. He always wanted to do what we were doing. So he wanted to do this, too.”

“No,” Sean says. “That I don’t believe. You forced him.”

“He didn’t know enough to know he shouldn’t like it,” Mickey says. “And, yeah, they gave him money sometimes. Gifts. Bribed him, I guess, so no one would tell. But they were more interested in watching Go-Go and me do things together than in doing things to him. They laughed at us.”

“But they did do things.” Not a question on Tim’s part.

“Nothing-nothing invasive. I mean, you can probably guess. Then they got bored. It was no more than three, four times. And, okay, it fucked Go-Go up a little. But he managed. He kept going, more or less-until your mom told him what your dad did. That’s when he went off the rails. Yes, I went to AA to watch him, make sure he didn’t break down and confess. Mr. Halloran was dead and had nothing to lose. If Go-Go started telling people about what happened-I wasn’t sure where it would lead. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Here,” Gwen says. “We ended up here.”

Tim puts an arm around Mickey, tender and careful. Gwen sees in that moment something she will tell Tim later: She didn’t choose you because she looked up to you, because you were more of a father to her than any of the men who passed through Rita’s life. She needed someone she could control, and that was Go-Go. She was trying to hurt all of us through Go-Go. She did-herself included.

Gwen will tell Sean things, too, when the time is right. That he shouldn’t confess to Vivian what happened here today because, in a way, it didn’t happen today. It happened a long time ago. Today was simply the resolution, a bill that came due. Her father might be right about this modern mania for honesty. It isn’t that we talk too much or talk too little, Gwen decides. It’s that most people choose an all-or-nothing approach. They speak of everything, or they speak of nothing. When we confess, it’s because we need to be absolved, and we don’t care how that affects others.

Yet Gwen decides she will unburden herself to Karl. She will tell him what she’s done, the stupid affair-and forever forgo her role as the perfect, put-upon spouse. She has wronged him in a way that obliterates every slight, every moment of inattention and neglect. Because he’s Karl, he won’t hold it over her head. He will forgive her eventually. He will forgive her, but he won’t ever forget. Sadness will move into their house, an invisible sibling for Annabelle, a quiet, sneaky child who will on occasion misbehave outrageously, if only to remind Gwen that she’s there. It will be hard. It will be worth it. Allowing one’s self to be forgiven is just as hard as forgiving. Harder in some ways. Because to be forgiven, one first has to admit to being at fault.

Mickey needs them. They need Mickey. They will never be five again. They won’t even be four. But there’s no doubt in Gwen’s mind that Go-Go would want them to take care of Mickey, that he wishes her no harm. Go-Go was the most generous of all of them.

Gwen goes to Mickey’s kitchen, pokes around, knowing she will find a stash somewhere. Yes, here are circus peanuts, candy Boston baked beans, and in honor of Easter, Peeps. She puts them on a plate and sets them in front of Mickey, urges her to eat, joins her. Tim and Sean also join in, although without much enthusiasm. It all goes down surprisingly well with bourbon.

Chapter Forty-two

Gwen went home.

We all went home. Gwen to Karl. Sean to Vivian. Tim to Arlene, although there was never any suspense about that. It’s not clear who told what to whom. We no longer share everything. But then-we haven’t shared everything for a long time. It’s possible we never shared everything.

Doris stays in the house on Sekots Lane, where she continues to entertain-or not entertain, depending on one’s perspective-all her grandchildren, including Go-Go’s daughters. There are even visits from Duncan, at Sean’s insistence, three-day weekends carved out of his crammed schedule. That is Sean’s newfound talent, being insistent with Vivian. Duncan has yet to reveal his college preference or his sexual preference, but Sean is trying to find a way to convey that he is comfortable with anything Duncan wants, or is.

Clem left his dream house and has taken up residence at an assisted-living facility in the D.C. suburbs, a mere thirty-five-minute drive from Gwen’s home, as close as many of the retirement communities Clem might have chosen on Baltimore’s north side. He has made a full recovery, although his hip aches on cold, sharp days. The Robison house has not yet sold, and Gwen agrees with Karl that it is wildly impractical for them. It is a unique property, to use the real estate parlance, waiting for a special buyer, someone who values trees, if not light, and a sense of isolation. A new Clem Robison.

We try to stay in touch. Of course Tim and Sean were always in touch, but now Gwen checks in with them from time to time, which is more than she used to do. They talk about their kids and their parents. These are dutiful conversations, full of pauses. If the subject of Go-Go comes up, it’s only in the safest of memories. Remember how he chased the ball into the street that time? Remember how he danced? It’s hard to say how much longer this will go on.

McKey has made it clear that she does not care for speaking on the phone. But a few months after we saw one another last-and that night, in her apartment, was the last time we were together, probably the last time we will ever be together-she sent everyone a note, announcing her marriage to a man she met on one of her flights. A botanist, she wrote, underlining the word three times. The other three talked among themselves about the meaning of that underline. Sean thinks she is excited to have met someone who has made a profession out of the thing she loved most. Tim thinks she just likes to underline things.

Gwen believes that McKey wants us to know that she has been rewarded, which is proof that she never did anything wrong. And who knows, maybe she didn’t. Maybe they were just two children, playing a game, as children always have and always will. Maybe she was as much a victim as Go-Go of the high school boys. Maybe. It is hard not to judge things from where we stand now, by the standards of the present, but we try not to. A girl and a boy played at being grown-ups. Another girl and a boy imitated them. Was anyone right? Was anyone wrong?

We take a step further back, consider our parents. Clem Robison marrying Tally when she was barely out of high school. Imagine how Tim would feel if a thirty-two-year-old man dated his high school daughter. Rita, flitting from one man to another as if they were cheap furniture, things you acquired with no intent of keeping. Was she liberated or merely pathetic? Doris and Tim Senior, left on the sidelines by a quirk of timing, too old to join the fun, too young not to miss it. At least Tim got to march in one parade.

Chicken George remains in the pauper’s grave where he was buried more than thirty years ago, the usual arrangement for a man who dies as a John Doe, with no family to identify him. We are his family. We would come forward to claim him if we knew his real name, but we never even thought to ask his real name. That’s how incurious we were. Our parents allowed us to roam the thickly wooded hillside of Leakin Park, while warning us about its dangers, large and small-hair-matting burrs, the polluted stream, the poisonous red berries on those spiky shrubs, rusty nails, broken glass, the possibility of rabid animals and, after the fact, the alleged pervert in the ramshackle house. They tried, they really tried, to anticipate everything that could bring us harm. But it was us, in our naïveté and heedlessness, who were to be feared. We were the most dangerous thing in the woods.