The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [12]
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Halloran. My father would be here, but he broke his hip. I’m staying with him while he recuperates.”
“What happened?”
“Slipped on those steps. They’ve always been a hazard.”
Mrs. Halloran does not let go of Gwen’s hands. Pressing, squeezing. It is a little painful, while Mrs. Halloran’s breath—it isn’t bad, exactly, but old, reminiscent of mothballs and dimly lit rooms.
“So many accidents,” she murmurs.
“Yes. It’s a shame about Go—” Gwen stops herself, remembering Sean’s reaction to his brother’s nickname. “Gordon.”
“Oh.” She seems jolted. “Yes, I suppose that was an accident, too.” Supposes? Gwen assumed that Doris Halloran, always the super Catholic, wouldn’t even contemplate the possibility of suicide. Doris lets go of Gwen’s hand abruptly, so abruptly that her body registers the end of the pain as a deepening of the sensation. It’s as if phantom hands still gripped hers, squeezing, intent on hurting her.
“I know it’s a cliché,” Gwen says, “but it throws the world out of whack when a parent loses a child, at any age.”
“Well, I lost a few, you know.” She lowers her voice. “Miscarriages. Three. Actually four, although that one was so early it barely counted.”
Gwen probably did know this in the vague, indifferent way that children intuit things about the grown-ups in their lives, but this revelation suddenly connects a series of mysterious events—Mrs. Halloran “sleeping” a lot, Mr. Halloran yelling at the boys for making noise, a grandmother who came for a visit that wasn’t at all like the grandparent visits Gwen knew. (No meals out, no trips to the toy store.)
“Do you have children. Gwen?”
“Yes, a little girl. Annabelle. She’s five.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Sorry?” Did she think it was a shame to have girls? Or does she know that Annabelle is not Gwen’s biological child? The senior Hallorans were never open-minded people, they would probably call her daughter a Chink or something worse. Gwen’s color rose, she is on the verge of saying that Mrs. Halloran hasn’t done so well herself, that only one of her boys is worth anything. But where are Sean and, come to think of it, Tim?
Doris is suddenly contrite. “I didn’t mean—I’m taking something. The doctor gave me pills. And I feel like things get mixed up, my sentences come out in the wrong order or I say what people say to me. No, it’s good you have a little girl. I’m happy for you. But daughters are hard. Secretive. I was sad I didn’t have one, but then happy. Then again, daughters stay with you. Sons leave. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.” No.
Mrs. Halloran grabs her hands again. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“At the funeral? Of course.”
“And at the house, after. Not everyone is invited, but we want you there. You’re like family, even if it’s been years. It’s funny, I s’pose you come back to see your father all the time, yet I never see you. Even when Gordon moved back home, you didn’t come visit him. Why didn’t you visit him?”
So many reasons. Because he was an angry drunk most of the times. And when he wasn’t angry, he was pathetic, self-pitying. But the main reason was the one that divided them long ago: it was simply too painful to be around each other. They couldn’t talk about it, and they couldn’t not talk about it, so they stayed away from each other.
“When Sean moved away, I lost touch. Mickey Wyckoff, too. And my father keeps to himself.”
“Yes, he always did.”
He did? Gwen remembers her father as gregarious. But, perhaps, a little snobbish about the Hallorans. That’s why the night of the hurricane had been unusual, all the parents together in the Robisons’ house, drinking and laughing late into a weekday night.
“Don’t be a stranger now,” Mrs. Halloran says suddenly, full of fake merriment. “We’ll be seeing lots of each other. Right?” The question feels unusually