The Innocents. Laura Lippman

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      “Would you like a cup of tea?” Gwen asks. “My father is napping, but if he wakes up, he’ll be happy to visit with us.”

      “Tea would be nice.”

      Gwen takes the plate to the kitchen and peels back the aluminum foil. They are store-bought cookies, she recognizes them from the wake. And not even good store-bought cookies. How had throwing these leftovers on a plate helped to distract Mrs. Halloran from anything? Gwen doesn’t want to be unkind, but there is something hostile about these cookies. She struggles with the etiquette of the moment. What would be ruder: putting them out with the tea or leaving them in the kitchen? Gwen arranges them on an elaborate pink-patterned plate, then washes Mrs. Halloran’s white plastic one while the tea brews. She assumed Mrs. Halloran would follow her into the kitchen, but from the sound of things, she is moving around the living room, probably wondering at the disarray of Clem’s books, still in stacks on the floor. Gwen hopes she doesn’t bother her father, asleep in the sunroom at the rear of the house.

      They have tea in the dining room, at the heavy Swedish modern table that was out of style almost as soon as Tally bought it. Now it’s finally vintage.

      “So,” Mrs. Halloran says, “I guess the young people had quite a night of it.”

      “The young people?” Gwen is honestly confused, assumes that Mrs. Halloran is referring to Tim’s daughters, three steely-eyed beauties who give the impression of having said something devastating about someone else in the room. Go-Go’s children are little more than babies, and Sean’s son did not make the trip from Florida. Neither did his wife, come to think of it. There was something about a commitment on his son’s part, something he couldn’t get out of without ruining it for others—a big game, a performance?—and Sean’s wife stayed behind with him.

      “You and the boys,” Mrs. Halloran clarifies. “And that Mickey.”

      “Thanks for calling me young,” Gwen says. “But I didn’t go out. I had to check on my daughter. Even though I’m staying here, I drive home to put her to bed each night.”

      So don’t gossip about me, Doris Halloran. Of course Mrs. Halloran would be within her rights to speculate about Gwen’s marriage. But she can’t know based on the information available to her, so she would be gossiping.

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ