The Most Dangerous Thing

The Most Dangerous Thing

Laura Lippman

Dedication

For Georgia Rae Simon

Epigraph

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,

For rich repiner and household drudge!

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.

—J
OHN
G
REENLEAF
W
HITTIER
, “M
AUD
M
ULLER
”

Contents

Go-Go

T
hey throw
him out when he falls off the barstool. Although it wasn’t a fall, exactly, he
only stumbled a bit coming back from the bathroom and lurched against the bar,
yet they said he had to leave because he was drunk. He finds that hilarious.
He’s too drunk to be in a bar. He makes a joke about a fall from grace. At
least, he thinks he does. Maybe the joke was one of those things that stays in
his head, for his personal amusement. For a long time, for fucking forever,
Gordon’s mind has been split by a thick, dark line, a line that divides and
defines his life as well. What stays in, what is allowed out. But when he
drinks, the line gets a little fuzzy.

Which might be why he drinks. Drank. Drinks. No,
drank. He’s done. Again. One night, one slip. He didn’t even enjoy it that
much.

“You driving?” the bartender asks, piloting him to
the door, his arm firm yet kind around Gordon’s waist.

“No, I live nearby,” he says. One lie, one truth.
He does live in the area, but not so near that he hasn’t driven here in his
father’s old Buick, good old Shitty Shitty Bang Bang they called it. Well, not
this Buick, but the Buick before, or the Buick before that. The old man always
drove Buicks, and they were always, always, crap cars, but he kept buying them.
That was Timothy Halloran Sr., loyal to the end, even to the crap of the crap of
the crap.

Gordon stumbles and the bartender keeps him steady.
He realizes he doesn’t want the bartender to let go of him. The contact feels
good. Shit, did he say
that
out loud? He’s not a
faggot. “I’m not a faggot,” he says. It’s just been so long since his wife
slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, so long since his daughters put
their sticky little hands around his neck and whispered their sticky little
words into his ears, the list of the things they wanted that Mommy wouldn’t let
them have, but maybe Daddy would see it differently? The bartender’s embrace
ends abruptly, now that Gordon is out the door. “I love you, man!” he says, for
a joke. Only maybe he didn’t. Or maybe it isn’t funny. At any rate, no one’s
laughing and Gordon “Go-Go” Halloran always leaves ’em laughing.

He sits on the curb. He really did intend to go to
a meeting tonight. It all came down to one turn. If he had gone left—but instead
he went straight. Ha! He literally went straight and look where that had gotten
him.

It isn’t his fault. He wants to be sober. He strung
together two years this time, chastened by the incident at his younger
daughter’s first birthday party. And he managed to stay sober even after Lori
kicked him out last month. But the fact is, he has been faking it for months,
stalling out where he always stalls out on the twelve steps, undermined by all
that poking, poking, poking, that insistence on truth, on coming clean. Making
amends.
Sobriety—real sobriety, as opposed to
the collection of sober days Gordon sometimes manages to put together—wants too
much from him. Sobriety is trying to breach the line in his head. But Gordon
needs that division. Take it away and he’ll fall apart, sausage with no casing,
crumbling into the frying pan.

Sausage. He’d like some sausage. Is there still an
IHOP up on Route 40?

Saturday morning. Sausage and
pancakes, his mother never sitting down as she kept flipping and frying,
frying and flipping, loving how they all ate, Gordon and his brothers and
his father, stoking them like machines. Come Saturday morning, I’m going
away. Hey, hey, hey, it’s Fat Albert!

When he moved back home six weeks ago, he asked his
mother to make him some pancakes and she’d said, “Bisquick’s in the cabinet.”
She thought he was drinking or whoring again, assumed that was why Lori had
thrown him out. It was easier to let her think that. Then it turned out it was
easier to
be
that, to surrender to drink and bad
habits.

When it comes down to it, drunk and sober are just
two sides of the same coin, and no matter how you flip it, you are still your
fucked-up own self. It sure didn’t help that his current AA group meets in his
old parish school, now a Korean church. It’s too weird, sitting on the metal
chairs in an old classroom. Drink and the line gets fuzzy. Get sober and the
line comes back into sharp relief, but then everyone starts attacking the line,
says he has to let it go, break it down.
Take down the
line, Mr. Gorbachev
. Boy, he’s all over the place tonight, tripping
down memory lane in every sense of the word. Funny, he has a nice memory
associated with Reagan, but it feels like he was really young at the time. How
old was he when Reagan made that Berlin Wall speech? Sixteen? Seventeen? Still
in high school and already a fuck-up.

But to hear everyone tell it, he has always been a
fuck-up, came into the world a fuck-up, is going to leave as a fuck-up. Then
again, whoever followed Sean was destined to be a disappointment.
Sean-the-Perfect. You would think that with three kids in the family, the two
imperfect brothers would find a bond, gang up on that prissy middle fuck. But
Tim has always taken Sean’s side. Everyone gangs up against Go-Go, the nickname
Gordon can’t quite shake even at age forty.
Go, Go-Go. Go,
Go-Go. Go, Go-Go.
That’s what the others had chanted when he did his
dance, a wild, spastic thing, steel guitar twanging.
Go,
Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go
.
GoGoGoGoGoGo.

Give Sean this: He’s the one person who
consistently uses Go-Go’s full name. Gordon, not even Gordy. Maybe that’s
because he needs two full syllables to cram all the disappointment in. Actually,
he needs four. “Jesus, Gordon, how many times can you move back home?” Or:
“Jesus, Gordon, Lori is the best thing that ever happened to you and you’ve got
kids now.” Jesus, Gordon. Jesus, Gordon. Maybe he should have been Gee-Go
instead of Go-Go.

He thinks about standing up but doesn’t, although
he could if he wanted to. He isn’t that drunk. The beer and the shot hit him
fast, after almost two years of sobriety. He was doing so good. He thought he
had figured out a way to be in AA while respecting the line. They don’t need to
know
everything,
he reasoned. No one needs to know
everything. There would be a way to tell the story that would allow him to make
it through all twelve steps, finally, without breaching any loyalties, without
breaking that long-ago promise, without hurting anyone.

He gets up, walks down the once-familiar avenue. As
kids, they had been forbidden to ride their bikes on the busy street that
essentially bounded their neighborhood, which should have made it impossible to
find their way to this little business district, tempting to them because of its
pizza parlor and the bakery and the High’s Dairy Store. And there was a craft
store with an unlikely name, a place owned by the family whose daughters had
disappeared. He was little then, not even five, but he remembered a chill had
gone through the neighborhood for a while, that all the parents had become
strict and supervigilant.

Then they stopped. It was too hard, he guesses,
being in their kids’ shit all the time and the children slipped back into their
free, unfettered ways. Nowadays . . . he doesn’t even have the energy
to finish the cliché in his head. He thinks of Lori, standing guard at the
kitchen window of their “starter” home, a town house that cost $350,000 and to
which he is now barred entry. Is that fair? Is anything fair? Sean is still
perfect and even Tim does a good imitation of goodness, Mr. State’s Attorney,
with his three beautiful daughters and his plumpish wife, who was never that hot
to begin with, yet Gordon can tell they still genuinely like each other. He’s
not sure he ever really liked Lori and he has a hunch Sean’s in the same boat
with his wife, Vivian, who’s as frostily perfect as Sean. Tim and Sean, still
married to their first wives, such good boys, forever and ever. Hey, he got an
annulment, he’s technically in the clear. Besides, fuck the church! Where was
the church when he needed it? And now it’s Korean Catholic, whatever the fuck
that is, probably Kool-Aid and dog on a cracker for communion.

Where was he? Where is he? On Gwynn Oak Avenue,
thinking about how Sean, of all people, had figured out that if they rolled
their bikes across the bridge to Purnell Drive, they could technically obey the
rule never to ride their bikes on Forest Park Avenue and still manage to get
over to Woodlawn, where the shops are. Or was it Mickey who had figured it out?
Mickey was the one who lived above Purnell Drive, after all. She would have
known the route, too. Even when they were kids, Mickey had been smart that way.
She should have become the lawyer, not Tim. She was the real brains.

He walks for ten, twenty, thirty minutes, willing
his head to clear. He walks down to the stream, where there once were swans and
ducks, then to the public park, the site of an amusement park that closed before
Go-Go was old enough to go there. It survived integration, his father always
said, but it couldn’t beat back Hurricane Agnes. Still, one roller coaster
remained standing for years, long enough for Go-Go to feel thwarted, denied.
Sean and Tim claimed to have gone many, many times, but they weren’t that much
older. Sean would have been seven or eight when the park closed. Maybe they had
lied? It makes Gordon feel better, catching perfect Sean in a potential lie.

Soon enough, the hypothetical becomes real to him,
and he has worked up a nice fury. He gets out his cell phone and punches his
brother’s name on his contact list, ready to fight with him. But his hands
aren’t steady and he fumbles the phone as Sean’s voice comes on, cool and
reserved. The phone ends up on the ground, where the black turtle shape is hard
to find in the dark. As Go-Go crawls around on his hands and knees, he hears
Sean’s voice, disgust evident. “Gordon? Gordon? Jesus, Gordon—”

I shoulda been Gee-Go
.
Does he say that out loud? His hand closes over the cell phone, but Sean has
hung up. Okay, it isn’t exactly the first time he has drunk-dialed his brother.
But he’s had a good run of sobriety, so Sean shouldn’t have been all pissy and
judgmental. Sean has no way of knowing he took a drink. No, Sean expects him to
fail. That’s unfair. And what kind of brother is that, anyway,
expecting—rooting—for his younger sibling to fail? But that’s Sean’s dirty
little secret. His perfection is relative, dependent upon the fuck-ups of Go-Go
and Tim, and Tim isn’t giving him much breathing room these days. In another
family, Sean wouldn’t even be all that. In another family, Sean might be the
problem child, the loser. Especially if he had been treated like a loser from
jump, the way Gordon was. They set him up. Of course he did whatever he was
asked. He was just a little boy. Any little boy would have done what he did.
Right?

His head clearer, he walks to the convenience
store, buys a cup of scorched coffee, and drinks it in his car, his father’s old
Buick, the last iteration of Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, which has survived his
father by almost fifteen years now. He is less than two miles from his mother’s
house. He has to make exactly four turns—two lefts, two rights. There are—he
counts—one, two, three lights? The first one is there, right in front of him,
complicated because there are actually five points at this intersection—five
points, like a star. He sees Mickey making the drawing in the dirt, the stick
slashing down and up, across and down, then up.

He makes it through, heads up the long steep hill.
I think I can I think I can I think I can.
Past
the cemetery, through the second light. Almost home. Almost home. Only it isn’t
his home.

At the next light, he turns right instead of left.
Go, Go-Go, Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go.
Climbs the
freeway entrance ramp just before the Strawberry Hill apartments. Mickey’s
family had moved here right before high school and Mickey’s mother was hot. Sean
and Tim swore they saw her sunbathing topless once, but they probably lied about
that, too. Roller coasters, topless girls—they lied about everything.

Gordon heads west on the highway, then makes a
U-turn before the Beltway cloverleaf, aiming his car back home along the
infamous highway that ends, stops dead. As teenagers, they treated this two-mile
stretch as their own little drag strip, but now the secret is out and others
race here. He wonders how fast his father’s old Buick can go. Ninety, one
hundred?
Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go-Go
. The steel
guitar twangs in his ears, in his memory, sharp and awful. Guy could not play
for shit, much as he loved that damn stupid guitar.
Go,
Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go.
He is dancing, wild and free, his little
arms moving so quickly it’s almost like he’s lashing himself, self-flagellation,
and everyone loves him and everyone is laughing and everyone loves him and
everyone is laughing and he is splashing through the stream, heedless of the
poisonous water, no matter what Gwen’s father says about tetanus and lockjaw,
desperate to get away, to escape what he’s done.
Go, Go-Go.
Go, Go-Go.

By the time he hits the Jersey wall, even the
needle on the old Buick’s speedometer has abandoned him.