The Most Dangerous Thing

Starbucks in the Columbia Mall, which is only a few miles from Lori’s town house. The suburb of Columbia came into being as a planned community, and although that plan included abundant green space and man-made lakes, Gwen feels that the seams show. She wonders how Go-Go felt about nature in such an orderly state, if he compared it to the untamed landscape they had known. Whenever she reads Where the Wild Things Are to Annabelle, she thinks about Go-Go, how he, too, would have liked to wear a wolf suit and sail to a place where he was king, commanding all the beasts to follow him in a wild rumpus. In a sense, they had, although only Go-Go danced.

“How did you happen to move out here?” she asks Lori, making conversation as they settle in with their drinks. The Starbucks is opposite an enormous carousel and train, which seem old-fashioned and a little out of place in this cookie-cutter mall.

“For the schools,” Lori says. “And the yards. I loved the city-we had a great apartment in Brewers Hill-but it didn’t make sense when our second one came along.”

“How old are the girls-”

Lori silences her with a hand. “You don’t need to make conversation for conversation’s sake. I know you’re busy, and I am, too. Let me say what I have to say: Yes, I threw Go-Go out. But it wasn’t for drinking, like it was the last time. He was sober and had been doing pretty well, too.”

“What was the reason?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t know.”

“You threw your husband out for reasons not even you know?” It sounds ludicrous. Then again, Gwen is no less ridiculous, using her father’s accident as a way to attempt a trial separation from Karl for reasons she still can’t articulate.

“He was up to something, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. So I told him to leave.”

As a journalist, Gwen is used to hearing people’s life stories in choppy, nonsequential bursts, with much presumption of context on the listener. She will have to guide Lori through this if Lori really wants their meeting to go quickly.

“Back up. When did you ask Go-Go to leave?”

“Right after the holidays. The calls started before then, but I wanted to get through Christmas for the girls’ sake.”

Ah yes, the timetable of the failing marriage. After Christmas, after his birthday, after Valentine’s Day. Gwen is familiar with how it works

“Calls?”

“A woman telephoned the house, looking for Gordon. Very polite, said he knew the reason she was calling and she was hoping to hear back from him. When I gave him the message, he acted weird. Jumpy. He said it was a scam and he wasn’t going to call her back. But then the same number began showing up on his cell phone, several times.”

“And you know this because-”

“Because I check my husband’s cell phone log. And his e-mail. If he had a Facebook page, I’d check that, too.” She gives Gwen a can-you-blame-me look, and Gwen, who continues to monitor her husband’s Facebook page, understands.

“Did Go-Go-Gordon-give you a reason to”-Gwen thinks it best to choose her next words with great care-“keep close tabs on him?”

Lori stares down into her drink, backing away from eye contact for the first time.

“Not really. I don’t think he ever cheated on me, although I know that was an issue during his first marriage. I mean, he looked at porn on the Internet, but so what? I didn’t care as long as he cleaned out the cache and the children couldn’t stumble on those sites. But something was… missing, always.”

Something in Gwen-her stomach, her heart, her throat, it’s too quick to pinpoint-clutches. This is how she feels. Something is missing. But her fear is that it’s in her.

“What do you mean by ‘missing’?”

“It’s like-this is going to sound weird, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. When I was younger, living on my own, I got this video center from Ikea, and one of the parts was missing, or I couldn’t find it in the packaging. But it didn’t seem essential, because I put the thing together and it held. Then one day, without warning, the whole thing came down with a crash. I feel that’s how it was with Gordon. There was some little piece missing, something no one could see, and he finally fell apart.”

What had Go-Go told Lori, if anything? What happened to him was his story to share. But what happened to Chicken George belonged to the others as well. Could he have told Lori the first part without the second? Again, Gwen chooses her words carefully: “Did Go-Go-Gordon, I’m sorry, he’ll forever be Go-Go to me-acknowledge this? Did he see it, too?”

“He wasn’t a talker that way. And, for a long time, there was the drinking. He was an alcoholic, and that explained everything. Then, this latest time with AA, it seemed to take, and yet he was still kind of mysterious, closed off. It was like he was holding a piece of himself back. From me and even the girls, although he doted on them. But he was never fully present.”

Gwen thinks of the boy she knew. His one gift was to be startlingly, insistently there. The boy who ran for the ball, fearless of a truck bearing down on him, while the others stood frozen, debating. The boy who did the wild dance. He was never self-conscious, not then. Then the rumors started, disturbing stories about putting cats in milk boxes, shoplifting, acting out in school. However wild and frantic Go-Go was when they roamed the woods together, it was only after the night of the hurricane that he became wild in a frightening, disturbing way. But Gwen had broken up with Sean by then. Go-Go wasn’t her problem.

“Like, here’s a classic Gordon story,” Lori says. “We had a neighbor, Mrs. Payne, back in the city. And she was a pain. Strange, paranoid. She was the last holdout on the block, everyone else was young, like us, and she hated us all, but Gordon was the only one who cared. She yelled at us for not cleaning up after our dog, and we didn’t even have a dog. Thought we stole her mail, thought we stole her newspaper. And Gordon couldn’t stand it. He had to make her like him. When it rained or the weather was bad, he started carrying her paper up to her door, putting it inside the storm door. With a note! So she would know it was him. One day he came home from the store with our oldest, Mia, in her car seat. She would have been eighteen months or so. And he saw Mrs. Payne dragging her little grocery cart down the street, and nothing would do but he had to get out and carry her groceries and put away the cold things-leaving Mia in the car! He completely forgot about Mia. I happened to come home from the gym and found her sleeping in the car. She was fine, but what if something had happened while he was carrying in groceries for a woman who didn’t give a shit about him?”

Gwen can imagine the scene too well-the sleeping baby, slumped over in the seat, unharmed, while the mother runs through every nightmare that might have happened. In some ways, tragedies averted are even more terrifying than the things that actually occur.

“Jesus,” she says.

“I know,” Lori says. “And all because he’s sucking up to some woman who still didn’t like him. He shoveled her walks during snowstorms, too, put out ice melt crystals, and all she did was complain that it left pockmarks on her steps.”

“It is human nature to chase after those who don’t like us.” Although, Gwen thinks, not Karl’s nature. He’s done very little to encourage her to return home. He has spoken his piece, said he loves her and wants to continue to be married to her, but he sees no reason to repeat himself. He thinks she is acting like a child. She thinks she’s acting like a human being. They both could be right. “I bet Go-Go chased you hard during your courtship.”

“No.” Lori shakes her head, smiling at some private memory. “I pursued him. Everybody said he was no good, but I didn’t see that. I thought he was sweet and funny and a really good time. I converted for him.”

“He was still a practicing Catholic?”

“It was more about his mother, I think. I didn’t care. I loved Go-Go. Doris was part of the package.”

“But wasn’t he married before?”