The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [129]
“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