The Most Dangerous Thing

“We got married because she believed she was pregnant.”

“That makes no sense. Miller was born more than a year after you married.”

“I didn’t say she was pregnant. She believed she was pregnant, but she was terrified of going to a doctor anywhere in Boston, assumed there was no way she could keep the secret from her parents. She all but asked me to marry her.”

“Well, of course you did the right thing.”

“No, you don’t get it. She didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She was proud. She didn’t want anyone to think she made a mistake, that she wasn’t in absolute control of her own destiny. So we married-and she lived with her mistake the rest of her life.”

“She loved you.”

“To the best of her ability, yes. And she stayed with me after she realized she was wrong. We never spoke of it. She had no idea that I knew. But I did, and there was always that seed of doubt there. I had to wonder if she loved me as I loved her.”

“She was so young,” Gwen murmurs. Excuses, always excuses. Tally trained everyone to make excuses for her. “Karl is older than I am, allegedly a grown-up. But he never thinks about anyone but himself.”

“Gwen-most people don’t think about anyone but themselves and maybe their children. Your mother would have walked through fire for you.” A pause. “As would I. But we don’t ask that of our spouses. Oh, we can ask, but we’re sure to be disappointed.”

Gwen shakes her head. “I’ve lived my whole life believing my mother to be happy, someone who struck a perfect balance before anyone even worried about such things. And now you’re telling me it was a lie.”

“Not a lie, exactly. But I don’t think she ever stopped thinking about the life she might have-what might have been. If she had gone to Wellesley, as she planned, if she had studied painting seriously-well, she couldn’t know who she might have been. The generation of women who came up behind her, girls barely a decade younger, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted. She ended up abandoning the painting she thought would be her masterpiece.”

“The painting of the young couple in the woods. What happened to that?”

“She painted over it, gave up.”

“I sometimes wonder about those paints, their toxicity, that poorly ventilated shed. And then there was all that diet soda she drank. Do you think either one could have caused her cancer?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care, Gwen. Knowing the cause means nothing. She was the love of my life, and I never regretted how our marriage came to be. But I’ll never know if she would say the same thing.”

“What should I do? About Karl? Go home and tell him everything? Go home and tell him nothing? For all the time we’ve been together, I’ve had the small comfort of being the good spouse, the one who made everything work. If I tell him about the affair, I won’t even have that anymore. I’ll just be the one who cheated.”

“I’ve had only one marriage, Gwen. You’ve had two. Perhaps you should be advising me.”

“I felt old,” she says. “And unattractive.”

“Dearest Gwen, there are only so many details I can handle.”

She looks down at her hands, and Clem’s eyes follow. They are shaking. The veins stand out in sharp relief, the skin is dry. He thinks about Gwen’s baby hands, cupping his face. Annabelle’s hands. Tally’s hands, dry and a little coarse from being denuded of paint every day, how she hated to leave a speck behind. His daughter’s hands make him feel so old.

“It’s easier to talk about Karl, what I’ve done, than the thing that’s really bothering me. Daddy-do you remember the night of the hurricane?”

It’s a double blow-the use of “Daddy,” the mention of that night.

“I wouldn’t be likely to forget that.”

“Tim and I-we’ve learned some things since Go-Go died.”

Blabbermouth Doris. Who hasn’t she told by this point?

“It wasn’t true,” Gwen says. “It didn’t happen.”

“Go-Go didn’t die?” He is honestly confused, and that one moment of confusion scares him, as it always does. The inability to follow a conversation-that’s a far more serious indicator of a failing mind than mere memory lapses.

“He wasn’t molested. Not by the man in the woods. He lied, he and McKey.”

“Who?” He decides it’s the sheer anxiety that he feels at the mention of the hurricane that is making it hard for him to focus.

“Mickey.”

“But why-”

“We’re not sure. We-Tim and I-are going over to McKey’s apartment and talk to her. Maybe Go-Go lied to her, too, and she was caught up in it. She was the one who pushed the man-we never told you that part, McKey begged us not to, she was terrified, and it was an accident. That’s when he hit his head. That’s why he died. But we thought-Tim and Sean and I-we really did think he had hurt Go-Go. It was easier to tell only that part. You see-we knew him. We visited his house all the time.”

He looks at A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on his bedside table, a handsome special edition with illustrations of which he doesn’t quite approve. That’s not his Francie Nolan. He and Annabelle haven’t gotten very far, but they have already read the scene in the first chapter, the one about the old man in the bakery, who is gross and unappealing to Francie. Then she realizes that he was once a baby, that a mother loved him, welcomed him into the world with joy. It is just what Clem used to think, walking up Eutaw to Lexington Market, seeing the city’s saddest souls. Everyone was loved once. Everyone was a baby. He knows that not all children are loved, that many come into the world without provoking joy. But most do.

And now the moment has come. He must let his daughter know of his mistakes, his cowardice. No wonder Go-Go drove into a wall. His well-meaning mother had to tell him that his father killed a man, just for him, not knowing that the man was innocent, that she was inadvertently putting the murder on her son.

The chickens have come home to roost.

“Gwen,” he begins. “I can tell you almost definitively that McKey was not responsible for the death of the man in the woods.”

He starts, much as he gingerly made his way down the steep pitch of the hill, watching the swinging arc of light, knowing, yet not wanting to admit, that he is watching a man kill another man. It happened. And only by admitting it can he take the sin off his daughter, the other children. It’s too late for Go-Go, but at least he can spare the others, assume the mantle of guilt that is his, his alone. He will walk through fire for his daughter, at last. What if it was your child? Tim Halloran asked him all those years ago. It is.

Chapter Forty

D oris watches Tim come and go until it is almost 2 P.M. He does not tell her what he is doing. He barely speaks to her at all. Why? Why is he mad at her? She did what a mother should do, tried to protect her son. It was no different from washing his sheets.

She found the guitar under his bed a week or so after the night of the hurricane. She knew there was no way that Go-Go could have come honestly by such a possession. She didn’t know what to do. He had been through so much. It seemed wrong to ask him about the guitar. She took it away, put it in the attic. And over the years she was the one who made sure they had no reason to go up there. She moved the stepladder to the garage, put the Christmas ornaments in the basement. By the time she was done, the only things up in the crawl space were the guitar, the hockey costume, some old boxes, and the rope ladder. As far as she knew, Go-Go didn’t even remember it was there.

Something bad,