To The Power Of Three

4

The things we can do without thinking, Dale Hartigan decided, are nothing short of amazing. Breathing, for example. No, that was a bad example, because one didn’t have to learn how to breathe, it wasn’t a skill that one mastered and later did automatically. Breathing was instinctive, from that first whack on the backside, although doctors had stopped doing that, of course. Dale’s generation may have started life with that stern little pat on the rump, but his daughter had arrived in a private birthing room, full of soft colors and kind lights. That was a good day.

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!”

To Chloe’s way of thinking, Dale’s technical faithfulness up to the point she threw him out was just as wounding as a series of affairs would have been. Sharp-tongued and volatile, capable of going months without sex, she didn’t see how his intermittent attraction to women had anything to do with her behavior, and she didn’t see anything noble in his decision, time and again, not to stray. But logic had never been Chloe’s strong point, which was how Kat had ended up with that hideous name on her birth certificate, Katarina.

“It’s important to me,” Chloe said when Dale tried to back her off the name. “Why?” “Because of the 1984 Olympics.” “But Katarina Witt was a skater. You skied.” “You never understand anything.”

Chloe and Dale had been married a year at the time, and her skiing ambitions had been thwarted almost a decade earlier. And it wasn’t as if she had blown out a knee or suffered some other catastrophic injury on the eve of achieving greatness. She just hadn’t been good enough, as she had admitted readily. When Dale met her, she was a hostess at a high-end steak house, talking a good game about graduate school and sports medicine but essentially searching for someone who had the means, or the potential means, to bail her out. Dale had been a city planner then, with no intention of ever working for his father, but Chloe had either seen through his own lack of resolve or known she could nag him into doing what she wanted as soon as they had a child. And what she wanted, it turned out, was life in Glendale. To be married, to be a mom.

This was fine with Dale, better than fine. If only Chloe had really channeled her energy into being a wife and a mother. But those things, once achieved, no longer interested her. She dressed Kat nicely enough, chauffeured her to the endless activities, went through the motions of motherhood with nary a complaint. But that was when Dale knew something was wrong, when he found himself thinking that way: Chloe is going through the motions. She moved with a slow, lazy grace and always seemed to need a beat or two to answer the simplest questions, as if she were under a spell, or suffering from some strange kind of stroke. Oh, she loved Kat completely, he never doubted that. She would have laid down her life for Kat without hesitation. It was in the day-to-day, the quotidian tasks of motherhood and parenthood, that Chloe failed to engage. Cooking, for example. She was simply god-awful, producing meals so bland and tasteless that it seemed a little passive-aggressive. A woman had to try to make food as bad as Chloe did. Even the ready-made stuff she picked up at the nicer markets somehow tasted blah by the time she got it home. And the house was never truly neat, much less clean. What did she do all day? Dale felt as if she were daring him to pick a fight with her, but he wouldn’t. Kat did, though, especially after Dale moved out. She zeroed in on the very things that had so annoyed Dale and blamed her mother for the end of the marriage. Then Chloe would cry and say she wanted to be married, it was Dale who had moved out, going off to work one day and then calling from the office, as if Chloe were just another person to be fired by the Hartigan Group and its subsidiaries.

This was an out-and-out lie, but Dale never challenged it, because the truth was even harder to explain to one’s teenage daughter. Chloe had packed his bags and left them on the porch, announcing she was tired of his “mooning.” She told him to get out and call a lawyer. He did the former but not the latter, and it was less than a week before one of the biggest jackals in Maryland ’s domestic-law bar tried to subpoena his credit card bills. It was all a bluff, a test, but how was Dale to know that? He made the mistake of thinking Chloe was serious, that his marriage really was over. Distraught, threatened with the loss of access to his daughter, he had allowed Susannah to comfort him. After that, there was literally no going back. In front of the marriage counselor, caught up in the promised spirit of honesty and openness, he told Chloe everything that had transpired between him and Susannah-and she had told him their marriage was over, that this was the one transgression that could never be forgiven. “But it’s my only transgression,” he protested. “That’s all you get,” Chloe said.

When Dale looked back on the rest of his marriage, all he saw were petty grudges, the things that couples were supposed to work through. He longed, sometimes, for big problems, for the kind of reasons that made the end of a marriage comprehensible and acceptable. He wished that Chloe drank or had affairs. Or that they had become undone by the fertility problems that had plagued them after Kat’s birth. (Kat had come so easily, and then they couldn’t conceive at all. A mystery, especially given the fact that Chloe was not quite thirty when they started trying to make a sibling for Kat, who yearned for a little brother or sister.) He had loved her once, truly, and she had loved him. And then he didn’t. Some-his brother, for example-had suggested that Dale would have been better off to have an affair, get it out of his system, then go home to Chloe and keep his damn mouth shut. As if everything happened in bed. But it wasn’t just about sex. There was also the intense loneliness Dale felt sitting with Chloe, in their rare quiet moments. Outside of Kat he had nothing to say to her, and she had nothing to say to him. Maybe they never had.

When he saw her today, waiting for him at this middle school-he already knew, of course, had barked at the principal to stop her stuttering nonexplanations and just tell him, precisely, what had happened-it occurred to her that they were now two members of a tiny tribe, the only people who could ever understand each other.

But later, under the gentle questioning of the detectives, she had been cruel again, blurting out, “I wanted to send her to private school.”

“Chloe-”

“I wanted to send her to private school, and you insisted on public school, and now she’s dead.”

“I can’t believe you would bust my balls over that now.”

“But it’s true.”

It wasn’t. Chloe had squawked about private school after the marriage broke up, interested in finding another way to spend Dale’s money. But Kat had been the one to end the discussion, saying she didn’t want to be separated from her friends. Friends-that was good. According to preliminary information, the girl who had shot Kat was her oldest and dearest friend, Perri Kahn. Shot Kat, shot Josie Patel, then shot herself.

“Chloe, that’s not fair.”

She narrowed her eyes, ready to fight, as always, then realized there were witnesses. That was when she had taken his hand, pretended such concern for him, but it was too late. He left her to the detectives, finding a tiny crumb of comfort in having them on his side. Surely they understood now why Kat’s parents had divorced, even if Kat never did.

The drive to Charlestowne was usually torturous, a battle through the worst spots on the Beltway, but the trip went swiftly today, and Dale arrived at his father’s apartment a few minutes past three. A well-meaning resident, a woman with hair only a shade lighter than her lilac dress, held the door open for Dale so he didn’t have to be buzzed through the foyer doors. He wanted to chide her-what good was a security system if the residents let anyone in the building?-but it was probably for the best, as his father would demand to know the purpose of Dale’s mission if he called from the lobby, refusing to grant entry until Dale explained why he was here. (“It’s Dale, Dad. I’m in the lobby, Dad.” “Why?” “Because I have something to tell you.” “What?” “I’d rather do it upstairs.” “I don’t want to spend five minutes waiting to find out what you have to say. Just say it and I’ll digest it, and then we’ll talk about it.” “Kat’s dead, Dad!” “What?” “KAT IS DEAD.” And the women wandering through the lobby would murmur to one another, “Poor boy, his cat is dead.”) No, better to avoid the intercom altogether.

To his surprise, his father’s door was ajar, the usually roaring television muted. And next to his father on the old plaid sofa, a relic from the family’s earliest years, was Glen, his eyes red-rimmed. Sad or stoned? Dale wanted to ask his brother.

“Glennie just got here five minutes ago,” his father said. “He told me everything.”

“Everything?” Dale felt a curious mix of relief and resentment. How could Glen be in the position to know anything? He was just the uncle, not the father.

“Chloe called me,” Glen said almost apologetically. That made sense. Chloe and Glen were still close, bound by their dislike of Dale. And Glen lived just twenty minutes from here, which was probably why their father had chosen Charlestowne in the first place. To be closer to Glen, to keep an eye on Glen.

“He says Kat was shot at school today, shot and killed. Is this true?”

It shocked Dale that his father could speak of it so directly, so unflinchingly.

“Yes, Dad.”

He expected his father to ask how or why, not that Dale could answer those questions just yet, not that he ever expected to be able to answer such questions. What was a motive, after all, what could truly explain such an act? He wished he could say he had always found Perri suspect, or off in some vague way, but she had been a delightful little girl, funny and voluble. He hadn’t seen her much since the girls entered high school, but that had been at his insistence. When he journeyed out to Glendale, he wanted his time with Kat to be exclusive, not spent with Perri and Josie.

“And the girl who did it-they think she’s going to die?”

“She went to Shock Trauma. That’s all I know.”

“If they don’t save her,” his father asked, “then who will we have to blame?”

Dale assumed the question was rhetorical, an old man’s inappropriate blurting. But then he saw the legal pad on his father’s lap, the one he usually used to take notes on his stocks as they marched by on CNBC’s ticker. A list had been started, in his father’s quavery spidery hand:

The girl

The girl’s family

The school

The gun manufacturer

“Dad-”

“We have to stay on top of this,” his father said. “You can’t expect government to work for you. If I had waited for civil servants to do their jobs, Glendale would still be on wells and septic tanks.”

“But thinking about a lawsuit-”

“I’m thinking about everything. All our options. And you should, too. That was my only grandchild.”

“And my only daughter,” Dale said, then realized his father was trying to help. His father was, in fact, offering him a gift of sorts-a project, a place to focus all his grief and rage. This was how he would survive what seemed impossible. Here his numbness would be an asset.

“You bet. Now, you get on that phone and you call my old friend Bert Pierce. He’s the best criminal attorney in the area.”

“Dad, we don’t need an attorney.”

“We don’t need anyone else to hire Bert either. He’s too good. You call Bert, and you tell him you want to put him on retainer, and the first call you want him to make is to the county executive, who might need to be reminded just how much money we’ve contributed to him and his allies over the years. Then Bert might want to talk to the chief of police, too, make sure they know we’ll be looking over their shoulder every step of the way. Someone’s going to be held accountable, Dale. We’ll make sure of that.”

Glen was still there physically, but his mind had drifted away. Dale felt he could almost see it leave-rising out of Glen’s body, pausing at the muted television, then flying out the window, going wherever Glen’s thoughts went these days. They were fraternal twins, and the likeness was not pronounced, but it was always a bit of a shock to see him, like a glance into some surreal mirror. This is what I would look like if I smoked pot all day every day of my lifefor twenty years and dreamed of making it big, even while Dad’s money was propping me up. Dale sometimes suspected that Glen planned to move in with his father, as soon as he reached Charlestowne’s minimum age of fifty. His father would love it. And Glen could sell pot to the glaucoma patients.

“Dale, are you listening to me? Are you paying attention?”

“Always, Dad. Always.”