The Most Dangerous Thing

Hospital.

“Gwen, I taught geriatric medicine for years. I think I’m up on the facts. Most people don’t die.”

“But a lot do. Almost a third.”

“Still, most don’t. And I’m in good health otherwise. I just have to be disciplined about recovery and therapy.”

“Miller and Fee want you to sell the house, move into assisted living.”

“ That again. And you?”

“I’m holding them off. For now. I told them I would assess your situation.”

They smile at each other, coconspirators. Gwen believes herself to be her father’s favorite, although he would never say such a thing. His denials are sincere when her much older siblings, Miller and Fiona, bring up the contentious matter. “I was just more available when Gwen was little,” their father says. “Less career obsessed.” “Daddy doesn’t have favorites,” Gwen says. But she knows the seven-year gap between Fiona and Gwen is not enough to explain their father’s clear preference for her. There is her remarkable resemblance to their mother, dead for almost twenty-five years. And there is the bond of the house and the neighborhood, Dickeyville, which Gwen and her father love more fiercely than anyone else in the family. As a child, she used to take long walks with him in the hills behind the house, never letting on that she traveled farther and deeper into them when she was with her friends. Miller and Fee, living thousands of miles away, have been trying to get their father out of the house for years, decades, ever since their mother’s death. Gwen, who remains in Baltimore, has done whatever she can to allow her father to stay in the family home. Should the day come that he really can’t live there, it has always been their unspoken understanding that Gwen will take over the house for her own family.

“How are things at home?” her father asks.

It’s an open question, applicable to the physical status of her house and a much larger, if vaguer problem. Gwen chooses to address the physical.

“Not great. The county came out and pushed the ruins of the retaining wall back on our property, but says it’s our job to rebuild it. And even when we do, it won’t necessarily address our foundation issues. The ground could shift again.”

“Why-never mind.”

“Why did we buy out there when our inspector warned us of this very problem? I ask myself that every day. For me, I think it was because Relay reminded me of Dickeyville. Isolated, yet not. A little slice of country so close to the city, the idiosyncratic houses. And for Karl, it was all about convenience-the commuter train station within walking distance, BWI and Amtrak ten minutes away. Go figure-for once, my dreamy nostalgia and his pragmatism aligned and the result is utter disaster. There’s probably a lesson to be learned there.”

“The lesson,” her father says, “is that you have a five-year-old daughter.”

“Don’t worry,” Gwen says, pretending not to understand. “We’ve figured out how to make it work once you come home. I’m going to get up at six A.M. and drive over there, do the breakfast and getting-her-off-to-school thing. And I’ll reverse it at day’s end, be there for dinner and bedtime. But I’m going to spend the nights at your house, so we don’t have to have a nighttime aide.”

“Gwen, I can easily afford-”

“It’s not about affording. And it’s just for a few weeks. Anyone can tolerate anything for a few weeks.” Months, years, her mind amends. It is amazing what one can tolerate, what she has tolerated. “Also, it’s not the worst thing in the world, making Karl curtail his travel, to learn that he’s part of a household, not a guest star who jets in and out as it suits him.”

“He is who he is, Gwen. You went into this with eyes wide open. I told you all about cardiac surgeons. And Karl was already a star. It’s not like this sneaked up on you. Not like the chicken.”

“What?”

“The chicken. That’s why I fell. There was a chicken on the steps, trying to peck at my ankles, and all I wanted to do was avoid stepping on it. I twisted my ankle and went over.”

Gwen tries not to show how alarming she finds this. A chicken? There haven’t been chickens in their neighborhood, ever. Except for-but those birds were far away and far in the past. No, that couldn’t be. Her father must have imagined the chicken. But if her father was imagining chickens, what else was breaking down inside his mind? She would almost prefer there was a chicken. Maybe there was. The past few years have seen a flurry of stories about animals showing up in places where they shouldn’t be-wildcats in suburbs, a deer crashing through the window of a dental practice, and, come to think of it, a chicken in one of the New York boroughs. And Dickeyville is the kind of place that has always attracted crunchy granola types. It is easy to imagine some earnest, incompetent locavore trying to raise chickens only to have them escape from his ineptly constructed coop. Gwen will ask around when she goes by the house this afternoon, to begin preparing for her father’s return.

T he Robison house is isolated, even by Dickeyville’s standards, which in turn feels cut off from much of Baltimore. It is officially the last house on Wetheredsville Road, only a few feet from where the Jersey wall now blocks the street, marking the start of a “nature trail” that one can follow all the way to downtown. The blocked street means Gwen can’t use the old shortcut, through what is properly called a park, but which she and her childhood friends always referred to as the woods. Their term was more accurate. Leakin Park is a forest, vast and dense, difficult to navigate. Gwen and her friends covered more of it than almost anyone, and even they missed large swaths.

Traffic is surprisingly heavy, the journey longer than anticipated, giving the lie to her blithe words about dashing back and forth between here and the house in Relay. Still, the chance to move to Dickeyville, even temporarily, is providential. Maryland law requires a separation of at least one year to file for an uncontested divorce. She learned this during her first divorce, a sad bit of knowledge she had never planned to use again. Does anyone plan to divorce twice? Then again, after that first failed marriage, the fact is always there, incontrovertible. You’re not going to go the distance with one person, your chance at perfection is lost. For someone like Gwen, who is professionally perfect-she edits a city magazine that instructs others how to have the perfect house, children, wardrobe-this is particularly irksome.

Yet even if she can manage to extend her time in her father’s house for a year, it won’t be enough. It is the spouse who stays who can file after one year, on the grounds of abandonment. As the spouse who is leaving, Gwen will have to wait two years if Karl doesn’t agree, and he has made it clear that he won’t, ever. She can’t spend that much time away from Annabelle, but nor can she afford her own place in their current school district. They aren’t upside down in their mortgage, but they have virtually no equity, and home equity loans are hard to get now, anyway. Karl has lots of money, but, again, he isn’t going to use it to let her leave him. And if she spends even a single night back in the Relay house, the clock resets on the separation. Maybe Annabelle will move into the Dickeyville house and they can keep this information from the school?

But the Dickeyville house will be chaotic, once her father returns. A geriatric specialist should have designed a home that would be friendlier to old age, but his house is downright hostile to the idea. There is the first level, the stonewalled basement, with the laundry room and various systems. Then the large glass-and-timber first floor, built to take advantage of the site, but with only a powder room. Yet the top two floors, with its full baths, have narrow halls and tight corners. Their father, appalled at the spiraling costs and delays, skimped on his dream house’s bedrooms. She will have to set him up in the first-floor “great room,” where he will have nice views and space in which to move, if no bath. But then her father will dominate the first floor, and privacy will be found only in the cramped, dark bedrooms above. And how will he bathe? Besides, Annabelle would be lonely, as Gwen once was, and she won’t even have the freedom to roam the woods. What was considered safe in Gwen’s childhood is unthinkable for Annabelle’s.

Her head hurts. It’s all too complicated. Dial it back, as she tells her writers when they are in over their heads on a story. Concentrate on one thing, one task. Get to the house, make sure it’s clean, do laundry, call a nursing service, let the nursing service figure out the best place for her father to convalesce.

Once there, she finds three newspapers in yellow wrappers, several catalogs, but almost no real mail. Her