The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [102]
“Do you have a book you’d like me to read? Did you bring some books for the weekend?” She is staying here through Sunday, as she does every other week. Clem still disapproves of Gwen’s separation from Karl, but he enjoys the visits from Annabelle. “Or we could read this book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read to your mother.”
“I want a made-up-for-real story.” Again, her syntax confuses him so much that he questions his mental competency. How can something be made up for real? Ah, Annabelle wants an improvised story, conjured on the spot, just for her. She wants to be present for the moment of its creation.
Clem looks out the window. His bed is set up in the sunroom at the rear of the house, so it feels as if he’s surrounded by trees. Spare and spindly at this time of year, but if one looks closely, the leaves and buds are there. Spring is coming. Right now, he can glimpse the edge of Tally’s old shed, its prefab walls badly weathered but still standing. Soon it will be hidden by the foliage, which has been allowed to grow wild around it, the need for light long gone.
“Once there was a little girl who lived at the edge of a forest,” he begins.
“And was her name Annabelle?”
“Why, it was,” he says, and Annabelle bounces with approval, which sends a painful wiggle through the mattress, essentially his cosmos these days. He has not been as faithful as he should about physical therapy, skipping days here and there. Why? It is one of the most mystifying questions in medicine and human nature. Why don’t people do the things they should? He’s not thinking of the hard things, changes required by genuine addictions. He understands how difficult it is to quit smoking and change one’s diet, even when the consequences of inaction are dire. It’s the neglect that otherwise rational people allow—skipping annual exams, declining exercise, refusing to eliminate foods that cause them actual distress.
Tally was casual about her health, not that it would have mattered. No diet, no regimen, no amount of vigilance, no regular checkup would have yielded a different result in her case. She was stage IV at the time of diagnosis. It turned out that she had been experiencing abdominal pain for years and never mentioned it. And that she sneaked cigarettes in her studio. With the paint fumes and the little space heater—he’s surprised it didn’t go up in a ball of fire years ago.
Sometimes he wishes it had. Without her, of course. He considered the shed, Tally’s studio, his romantic rival in some ways.
“And Annabelle had a little house in the woods.”
Clem asked Gwen a few months ago if they should try to make the shed, which stands empty, a playhouse for Annabelle. “A little house in the woods,” he said. “A little house in the woods,” Gwen echoed, her face troubled. A little house . . . maybe it wasn’t the best idea. Or maybe it was. Maybe if one had a little house on the edge of the woods, children wouldn’t press farther into the real woods.
Not that Annabelle would ever think of walking through the woods, even with another child. Gwen wouldn’t allow it. Probably no modern parent would. Clem has always been skeptical of any pronouncement about how times change. Very few things about people have changed in his lifetime. Machines change, people don’t. Yet childhood—technology can’t change it, but technology has been used to plug all those beautiful, empty hours that children once had to fill on their own. What else can children do but stare at screens when the outdoors is denied to them, except in scheduled doses of sports practice and supervised playdates?
Do mores change? Attitudes about profanity and behavior have changed, but the real change is that people speak of that which was