The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [41]
Michelle having sex. Lisa maybe smoking pot, or friends with a stoner. He wonders what Karen has up her sleeve. Only eight, one of those drunken mistakes that married couples make on their anniversary nights, she should be Daddy’s little angel, years away from breaking his heart. But with Michelle and Lisa as her role models, she is clearly ready to raise some hell as soon as she figures out how. Just last week, he caught her playing a kissing game with a neighborhood boy. Only kissing, not doctor, but still. He wishes, not for the first time, that St. Lawrence was still open for business, that he could send his girls to a school where the nuns knew how to terrify children into behaving. But the problem isn’t that his old parish school has closed. There are, after all, other parish schools, although fewer of them each year, thanks to the financial troubles that never end for the archdiocese. No, he needs his girls to go to his school in the past. Circa 1950 might work.
“Girls have always had sex,” Arlene said when he confided his retro fantasy. “The difference is that they used to get pregnant and ruin their lives.”
“Really? Where were all those girls when I was seventeen?”
Arlene laughed, punched his arm, assuming he was joking. But Tim was a virgin at seventeen, which wasn’t unheard of in 1979, although kind of a torture when you thought your younger brother was getting it.
The summer Sean and Gwen started going together, Tim had been obsessed with their sex life. It was weird, given that she was not quite fourteen and Sean was fifteen, but his imagination had been inflamed by the possibility they were doing it. He decided they must be doing it because Sean never wanted to talk to him about it. He tried to follow them when they escaped to the woods in the afternoons and weekends, even agreed to drive them to the mall and attend the same matinees, in hopes of seeing what they did with—and to—each other. But they mainly watched the movie, attempting no intimacy greater than sharing popcorn.
Once, however, he stumbled on them by accident, down in his family’s basement, a room marooned somewhere between its utilitarian origins and his mother’s dream of a rec room. The dream basically began and ended with a plaid sofa, carted down there after his mother bought a new living room set. Tim had been in the walk-in pantry, searching the metal shelves for an air pump when he heard them come in. He stilled himself, waiting to see—or at least hear—what they did alone. He hadn’t done it himself yet and he was dying to see someone do it, even if it was Sean and Gwen. He waited for what felt like ten, fifteen minutes, listening to their whispered giggles, then the long silences. “Oh,” Gwen kept saying in a soft breathy exhale. “Oh.” They had to be doing it. He allowed himself to creep up to the door, crouching so he would be eye level with the old sofa. To his disappointment, they were sitting side by side, kissing very softly, lightly. His brother took his time. No, his brother wasn’t even trying to make a move. Although he had his hands inside Gwen’s shirt, he wasn’t trying to go any further. To Tim’s amazement, it was Gwen who seemed to be moving things forward. She pulled away from Sean, but it was to lift her top. Wow, she was pretty built for her age. Tim raised his head slightly to get a better view and his elbow struck something on the shelves by the door. It wasn’t a big noise, but it was enough.
“What was that?” Gwen asked. “Your mom?”
“She’s not home,” Sean said, but he was helping Gwen back into her shirt, buttoning it, leading her out of the basement. He seemed almost relieved by the interruption.
That night, as they were drifting to sleep, Sean said suddenly: “Tim, were you in the basement today?”
“What?” He felt like there was an appropriate level of surprise in his tone. Surprise, but nonchalance. He shouldn’t be shocked by the question, or indignant in his innocence. If he hadn’t been there, if he had no context, he would find the question odd, nothing more.
“Were you in the basement this afternoon?