The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [39]
But the real problem was that Gwen and Sean fell in love. As five, we were mighty, the points on a star. Remember learning how to draw a star? When you are little, it seems impossible, out of reach. You draw lopsided, lumpy things. Then one day, someone shows you the secret. Mickey taught it to Go-Go: one line slashing down, a second shooting up in a diagonal. Straight across, diagonal down, diagonal up. A mere five lines, but when you have finished, there are six shapes within the one: five triangles clustered around a pentagon. Yes, there are even more, you can add and subtract lines, creating more shapes. But if you are true to the integrity of the lines you have drawn, there are five triangles and a pentagon. The pentagon was what grounded us, a magnetic field that held us together. Some might say the pentagon was Chicken George, but it was our talent for secrecy, our sense of ourselves as a single community. Once we five joined, truly joined, it was never boys against girls, or Hallorans against the other two families. No, it was Sean and Gwen who destroyed us. Two of our triangles cut themselves off and ran away together, and we were never whole again. Never.
Less than a week after Chicken George gave Gwen a sheet and dried her clothes by his fire, he disappeared again. And this time, he seemed to be gone gone—his cupboards bare, the line empty of wash, the chickens pecking at our ankles in a newfound desperation, but we had no feed to give them. You couldn’t say the place was clean. It would never be clean. But it was neat, emptied out. Even Chicken George knew that an era had ended. The five of us stopped going to his cabin.
But Gwen and Sean still went. All summer long, they slipped away to that cabin, never dreaming that anyone was watching them.
Chapter Thirteen
“And he—” Giggle.
The sentence and the giggle ends before Tim comes through the swinging door into the kitchen and confronts three sets of round, blue eyes. Round with innocence, which, he’s pretty sure, is fake. But also round with cold, if such a thing were possible, like the mass-manufactured ice found at buffets. His daughters have taken to regarding him with round, cold eyes these days, as if by widening them they could empty them of all hints, all clues to their existence and inner thoughts. However, he is pretty sure that their thoughts run something like this: boys boys boys boys shoes boys. And maybe, although he hopes not, partying, although he is unclear if partying is simply a by-product, a place to wear shoes and find boys, or if the partying is the destination, the boys and shoes the vehicles. Even the littlest one, only eight, is in on the act. They are three of a kind, thick as thieves. Identical blue eyes, long blond hair, worn straight and parted down the middle, heart-shaped and heartbreaking faces.
“Good morning,” he says. He knows better—now—than to ask about the interrupted, overheard comment. He knows not to ask anything. Move along, nothing to see here. His daughters remind him of the salamanders he and his brother hunted at the old springhouse. Salmon pink with tiny spots, they were easy enough to see in the clear, rushing water. But to grab one—almost impossible. Only Go-Go had been quick enough, and even he could never hold on to the little buggers. Tim can observe his daughters, but he can’t hold them, not anymore.
“Can I have the car today?” asks the oldest, Michelle. “I have to go to Mary’s.”
“I was going to play golf.” He is careful not to say no immediately, to offer the reason before the rejection. The mere sound of that syllable, no, seems to drive his daughters insane, triggering