“I just assumed you were all together,” Mrs. Halloran says. “He said you were all out late, talking about old times, and he didn’t think he should drive, so he stayed over at Tim’s.”
“Sean always was the sensible one,” Gwen says.
“Yes, he’s a good boy.” Doris Halloran sips her tea, takes one of the cookies, but holds it in her hand, as if she can’t remember what it is. “All my boys are good boys.”
Gwen notes the present tense in her voice. It is a lie twice-over. Go-Go is no longer anything, and he was never good, everyone knows that. Not bad, but not good. The statement is like this plate of stale, off-brand cookies. Baffling, challenging, passive-aggressive. She decides to agree. “Yes.”
“You know—” Mrs. Halloran says, then pauses significantly, and Gwen realizes she doesn’t know, that she has no idea what Mrs. Halloran is going to say next and that’s actually unusual in life. Even when she told Karl she was leaving him, he wasn’t particularly surprised. “You know, I called Tim’s wife this morning.”
“Is everything okay?”
“There was a pair of gloves, I thought it belonged to one of the girls. Pink ones. Tim said they might be Lisa’s. The funny thing is that Arlene didn’t mention that Sean had stayed over.”
Gwen feels she’s being taunted, but she’s not sure how or why. The only thing she knows is that she wasn’t with the boys last night. But maybe that’s what Mrs. Halloran is trying to find out? The old loyalties kick in, as automatic and destructive as ever.
“Maybe she assumed that he had called you.”
“Why would she assume that?”
“Because Sean has always been the conscientious one, of all of us. He always does the right thing.”
This, apparently, is what Mrs. Halloran has come to hear, or close enough. She finishes her tea and leaves, taking with her the washed plate, her little Trojan horse of an offering.
Gwen goes into the sunroom, now the sickroom. Her father’s awake, alert, staring into space. It’s the aide who sleeps, dozing in her chair, her head bent at a painful angle.
“Poor Doris,” he says in a whisper, careful not to wake the woman who is supposed to be caring for him. So he knows Mrs. Halloran came to call, probably heard their entire conversation but didn’t ask to join them. “I do feel awful that I couldn’t go to the funeral.”
“That’s okay, Dad. I was there. I represented for our family.”
“It’s unnatural,” he says. “To outlive one’s child.”
Gwen knows he’s right, she said as much at the wake. But there’s a part of her that finds it surprising that Go-Go made it to forty. She sees him in her memories, scurrying along high, flimsy branches near power lines, taking his sled down slopes far scarier than so-called Suicide Hill. There was never any joy in his risk taking, come to think of it. He wanted to fall, to be shocked, to hit a tree. Go-Go has been reaching for things and running into things as long as she’s known him. Could a little boy have a death wish? If so, did Go-Go always have it, or was it something that came later?
“There are no good deaths,” Gwen says, just to say something.
“Oh, no,” her father says, adamant. “There are some. You haven’t known any, yet. But I’m planning on one.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
Her father smiles. “You look so like your mother. You should keep that.”
Gwen glances down. She hasn’t registered the fact that she’s wearing one of her mother’s old cashmere cardigans, truly old, one she must have worn as a teenager, embroidered with pearls and sequins. When the doorbell rang, she was in too much of a hurry to take it off. Now she feels guilty, as if she’s been caught rummaging through things that are rightfully her father’s, not hers, waiting for the good death he has just promised her.
“I didn’t mean—I never realized there was so much of her stuff left, and I thought I might organize it.”
“You should go home, Gwen.”
“I’ll leave in a little bit. No use fighting the traffic.”
“I mean to stay.”
“No.”
“Nothing’s perfect,” her father says. “Nobody’s perfect.”
“Karl is. Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you seen his television alter ego, solving everyone’s problems?”
Her father sighs.
“You told me not to marry him.”
“I told you what it would be like to be married to a surgeon. That’s not the same thing. Now there’s a child. Think of her.”
“Maybe I am thinking of her.”
“When we were young, your mother and I—well, not young exactly, I was never young with her, but younger—and you were the only one left at home, there were so many divorces all of a sudden, so many parents who thought their children couldn’t be happy unless they, the parents, were happy. I’m afraid that’s simply not true.”
“You had a great marriage, Dad. It’s not fair to lecture others on marriage, when you had such a good one.”
Her father doesn’t answer right away. “I see your point of view,” he says, forever fair and evenhanded. Later, she will parse these words. Not: you’re right. But: I see your point of view. Was he trying to suggest that his marriage, like hers, might have looked better to those outside it than those in it? But, no, that’s impossible. Everyone knows that the Robisons loved each other madly.
Autumn 1978–Winter 1979
CHAPTER TEN
We would have quickly grown tired of Chicken George except for one thing: he turned out to be mysterious. At least, that’s the way we saw it: He cultivated mystery, excited our curiosity. He was vague in the face of all questions, no matter how benign. How he had come to live in this house, when he had learned the guitar. How old he was. (Go-Go asked the last one. The rest of us knew better than to ask a grown-up’s age.) He avoided all questions and had few of his own, other than: “What did you bring me?” Still, it would have been better, harsh as it sounds, if we had stopped visiting him. It’s nice to think so, at any rate, because if we had tired of him, then things might have gone differently. And this is a story about things we wished had gone differently. Aren’t all stories?
Anyway, Chicken George had a way of disappearing. The first time, it was November, and we assumed it was weather-related. The wind had started to kick up, the pleasant tang of October had given way to a steady dank cold. Weather was more reliable then. This is not memory, but hard scientific fact. The weather of our childhood was part of an unusually temperate time on our planet, with fewer extreme variations. The things we have seen in recent years—the events of just the past year, with almost a hundred inches of snow in Baltimore and floods, not to mention volcanoes and earthquakes, birds falling from the skies—might well be connected to climate change, the wear and tear that humans wreak on a planet. We are not here to argue science. But weather was more predictable then, and when it turned cold, it stayed cold, so cold the pond froze for days, even weeks of ice-skating. It made sense that Chicken George would disappear during such weather. Not that one could tell, by the look of the cabin, that anything had changed. It was as we had first found it, complete with the chickens in the yard and clothing on the line. Go-Go was the one who thought to look for his guitar. That was missing, too.
“What