The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [85]
Only he wouldn’t. That’s the difference between him and the Tim Hallorans of the world.
Dead when they got there. Sure, why not? Could be. The man was dead when Clem had gotten there, and wasn’t that all that mattered? He hadn’t done anything except agree to a reality that meant a little less pain for everyone. Go-Go would never have to speak to strangers about what happened to him. Tim would not be called into account for his actions, whatever they were. Clem and Rick would not be labeled accessories. And the women and the children were allowed to sleep the blissful sleep of the ignorant, protected by their men, which is what men are supposed to do, first and foremost.
He turns back, looks at the funny little cabin, comically small and lopsided from this distance. Funny, how they never connected it. The grown-ups drove past this cabin, saw something shameful, a man living like a sharecropper only a few miles from downtown Baltimore. The grown-ups saw the past, complicated and cruel. Their children saw a playhouse. The man who lived here saw a potential victim in Go-Go.
What if it were your child? Tim had asked Clem that night. To this day, Clem thinks: It wouldn’t be. He knows that’s wrong. He understands intellectually that anything can happen to anyone at any moment. Even in his world of medicine and science, there are no absolutes. People smoke their entire lives at no seeming physical cost, while someone who has never so much as held a cigarette can get lung cancer. But he has to believe that his own daughter is immune to such danger, that she never would have allowed herself to let a stranger touch her as this man touched Go-Go.
He probably was dead when Tim got there. He slipped, he fell, and his lungs filled with water when the children ran to get help. Who can fault them for not staying with him on that dark rainy night? Who would ask them to administer first aid to that monster, lying in the creek? Yes, there was the strange arc of the flashlight going up and down, instead of side to side—Stop, he tells himself. Believe what’s easiest to believe. There’s no harm in it.
He is home now, or almost there, at the peak above his house. Your dream house, as Tally always says. It is. He built a house to his taste on a site that he loved, assuming his wife and children would love it, too, but only Gwen shared his affection for the place. Now even she wouldn’t object to moving, as long as she could continue to be the queen bee of her social set at Park School.
Someone—Clem has no idea who—called children and wives hostages to fortunes. He will never see it that way. His wife and his children are his real contributions to the world. He isn’t demeaning what he has accomplished professionally. He’s good at what he does and enjoys it, the best of all possible combinations. But there is always someone to take one’s place in any profession, no matter how singular or vital. There’s no shortage of men who want to be president or discover vaccines or explore the Amazon. Only Clem can be Tally’s husband, father to Miller, Fee, and Gwen. Only he can love them as he loves them.
As he descends the hill, he realizes that as much as he hates Tim Halloran, he envies him, too. Because Halloran proved he would do anything for his children, whereas Clem couldn’t even give up this jury-rigged, imperfect house. What Halloran did was savage. But it was also love, immutable, enormous love. He killed the man who touched his boy. If a police officer ever shows up on Clem’s doorstep, Clem will sell the others out in a heartbeat, cut a deal for himself. But their silence, their pact, was not simply about avoiding discovery. When they agreed that night to say nothing to anyone else about the man’s death, they condoned what Tim did. He avenged his son. He was a real man.
Something wraps around his ankle, and he starts. It