The Most Dangerous Thing

she thought it ironic, although she has lost track of what the irony was supposed to be-at night, on the edge of sleep, it’s hard to stay hard. She ends up crying as she has cried every night since Go-Go died. Even the night Sean was passed out in her bed, when she was finally so close to having the one thing she’d always wanted, she found herself weeping for the little brother of the man lying next to her.

Pity Us All

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