The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [101]
Gwen wonders if Lori can pick up on how guilty Gwen feels at the moment. About Go-Go, but also about Chicken George. She is remembering how Chicken George came and went without explanation, how he had been missing much of that summer—and how she and Sean had used his little cabin for their own furtive means. As children, they had accepted the mystery of his life as a given. There was much about adults that didn’t make sense to them. They were incurious. The cabin was there, if not the steel guitar, which always went with Chicken George. Who cared why he wasn’t there? Who could possibly notice the boy and girl who visited there?
Now, as someone with experience in the world, it occurs to her to wonder where he went during those absences. Jail? A hospital? A mental hospital? What if Chicken George had a family, who intervened, forced him to get treatment and had to sit back when he signed himself out of the hospitals, never crazy enough to be declared incompetent? And what if those family members lived on and still wonder about their relative’s death? Because, after all, who ventures out on a night of a hurricane, steel guitar in hand?
“Do you still have the private investigator’s number?” she asks.
Chapter Thirty
Annabelle sits on Clem’s bed, telling him a story. He can’t begin to follow it, and for a moment, he feels anxious. It is finally happening. His mind is slipping. Clem knows too much about aging to worry about the occasional grope for a word, the inability to dredge up some name that should be on the tip of one’s tongue. He understands these lapses are “normal” from a relatively young age on. But the inability to follow a complicated story—that’s qualitatively different. He has no idea what Annabelle is talking about, which is worrisome until he remembers—she’s five. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about. She strings together names and events willy-nilly, expecting her listeners to be up-to-date on all the personalities and politics of her preschool, neighborhood, and toy box.
“—and then Mr. Gray put Fred in a time-out but it wasn’t a real time-out because—”
The effect is akin to dealing with Tally when she was excited about something. The one-sided conversation went on and on, but Clem indulged them, because the fast, intense talking days were preferable to the silences. Tally had especially bad postpartum slumps after Miller and Fee, something he has come to understand in hindsight. Then there was a long grace period, until Gwen went to college. Tally, of all people, struggled with having an empty nest. The ups, the downs. Most people would compare it to a roller coaster, he supposes. But on a roller coaster, one has a clear sense of the duration of the ups and downs. The entire trip is telegraphed, the tracks are visible, the safe landing is guaranteed.
But then, everything is understood in hindsight. Hindsight, in Clem’s experience, gets a bad rap. Foresight is the fraud. No one has the ability to predict the future. People have hunches that they remember as wisdom because they happened to be right. They conveniently forget all the times they were wrong. Just as rare is the ability to understand, in the moment, exactly what is happening and how a moment that has already passed will affect one’s entire future. A swinging arc of light, a man’s lifeless body, an angry man, snorting like a bull in strong emotion—how could anyone process that moment and its multiple futures, how that moment would determine the next minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade of life?
“—then Noah got to take the hamster home, which wasn’t fair because he already had a turn and some people haven’t had any.” Annabelle looks wistful. “I haven’t had a turn. Daddy forgot to sign the slip.”
It takes Clem a second to grasp this, too. Sign the slip—why would someone have to sign an undergarment? Oh, slip of paper, permission slip.
“Can’t your mommy sign it?”
Annabelle looks at