The Innocents

“So you’re rich,” Mickey said, eyes never leaving the water. Did crawfish really live there? Gwen could not imagine it. But Mickey insisted they were there and that, furthermore, she was going to take them home and eat them. If she caught any. She had a net at the ready, but it didn’t look up to the job. It was tiny, the kind of thing used in tropical aquariums. Even one small crawfish would test its capacity.

“He’s the kind of doctor who teaches.”

“My dad owns the service station, up the hill. Well, he’s not really my dad, but my stepdad. He’s good-looking. He looks like Tom Selleck.”

“That’s cool. Him owning the service station.”

“No, it’s not. Because when I want a soda or a snowball or something from the pharmacy next door, I can’t go there because someone from the station will rat me out. And there’s nowhere else to go. There used to be a store here in the neighborhood, where they sold penny candy, but they stopped. Do you have treats at your house?”

“What?”

“Treats. Ice cream and cookies and candy and soda? I suppose not, your father being a doctor.”

“Oh, no, we have—treats. My mother goes grocery shopping once a week, and each one can choose whatever snacks we want. But that’s it, for the week. If you eat it all up right away, you have to wait until the next week.” Gwen did not add that she had learned all sorts of ways of making treats last. She nibbled 5

Avenue candy bars, plucking off the solitary almond, then slowly removing the chocolate with teeth and tongue, leaving behind an unsheathed bar of peanut butter. She ate peanut M&M’s by cracking the chocolate shell, removing the peanuts, then placing the peanuts in a bowl, to be gobbled in a handful. She was proud of these maneuvers but aware that others considered them gross. Besides, she was pudgy and desperate to pretend candy was not particularly interesting to her, that her condition was glandular.

Mickey sat up. “Would you get circus peanuts sometimes?”

“Peanuts?”

“Circus peanuts. The big fluffy ones. Kind of like Peeps, only not so sticky.”

“Sure.”

The next Friday, on her mother’s weekly shopping trip, Gwen put a bag of the orange peanuts into the cart. “Really?” her mother asked. “You hate marshmallow.” Gwen nodded. The next day, she took the treats to Mickey. Over the course of the summer, she brought Mickey Smarties, candy buttons, Pixy Stixs. Necco Wafers. Now and Laters. Gwen’s mother figured it out within a week or so, but she didn’t care. In fact, she complimented Gwen on her selflessness. But it didn’t feel selfless to Gwen, more like a necessary tribute. Mickey was valuable. Mickey knew things. You couldn’t have access to all she knew without making some sort of contribution.

Mickey had been roaming the wooded hills around Dickeyville since the age of eight, when she persuaded her mother to let her walk home from the public elementary school on the other side of the hill. She acted as if she owned every inch of it, and we didn’t contradict her. We never got lost when we let Mickey lead the way, while the rest of us could get turned around quite easily.

Yet Mickey was the only one of us who didn’t live in Dickeyville. Her family lived above it, in the town houses called Purnell Village, on the other side of Forest Park Avenue. Most children would not have been allowed to cross that street, much less walk to school alone, but Mickey had permission. Or said she did. Mickey was not always the most reliable person when it came to herself. Her stepfather, for example, was not her stepfather and did not own the gas station. He managed it. He did, however, look a little like Tom Selleck.

Caught in a lie or a contradiction by the rest of us, Mickey would shrug, as if the misstatements that flowed from her were incidental, a slip of the tongue, like mixing up facts you knew perfectly well. And because Mickey was beautiful, despite her wild bush of hair and grubby clothes, we came to believe that was one of the perks of beauty, the freedom to lie and not be called on it. Who wanted to fight with someone as pretty as Mickey? She was prettier still for not being able to do much about her appearance. She wore jeans and T-shirts, often the same ones two days running, and her hair was never quite brushed. Sometimes, Gwen’s mother would say, “Let’s play beauty parlor,” and Gwen understood it was an excuse to pull a brush through Mickey’s matted hair, which would shine and gleam under her mother’s care. Later, when we became a group, a unit, the boys wished they could have Mrs. Robison pull a brush through their hair, short as it was. Not that they ever said anything. Well, maybe Go-Go did. Go-Go never understood that there were things he shouldn’t want, desires he shouldn’t express. He would watch Tally Robison work on Mickey’s hair, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as it often did, as if he thought something tasty might fall from the sky at any moment and he didn’t want to miss it. Sometimes Go-Go would try to climb Tally Robison, would literally start to shimmy up her body, trying to force her to unfold those thin arms and hold him.

But that was yet to come. That first summer, 1976, there was only Gwen and Mickey, Mickey and Gwen, best friends along with everything that being best friends entailed, all the wonder and closeness, all the pain and resentment. We didn’t have the term BFFs back then, and even if we had, it wouldn’t have been accurate. Mickey and Gwen fell well short of forever. But that summer, it felt like forever.

Tally Robison died in Gwen’s senior year of college. She had been too ill to see her daughter accept a prize for her college journalism, too ill to tell her daughter that the gorgeous college sweetheart to whom she would soon become engaged was too gorgeous. Gwen kept assuming Mickey would get in touch. Whatever had happened, all those years ago, did not change the fact that her mother had been good to Mickey, kind and generous. Certainly, Mickey must know of Tally’s death, must have heard from someone, even if her family had long ago left the town houses of Purnell Village, which had become exceedingly rough, even as Dickeyville continued to be its placid, sui generis self. Gwen was just shy of her twenty-second birthday, much too young to lose a parent, especially a parent as lovely as her mother had been. But we were all young then, unaccustomed to death and its rituals, how important the smallest gestures were. Only Sean—forever Sean-the-Perfect—wrote a note, and it was a little stiff, almost grudging, as if he felt that Gwen’s mother had died in order to force him to contact her daughter.

Five years later, the two former best friends met face-to-face on a plane. Gwen was in first class, upgraded on her husband’s miles. Mickey was the flight attendant. Still beautiful, but there was a hardness to her now, a sense that the real person was layers and layers down.

“Mickey,” Gwen said brightly when offered a beverage before takeoff. A blank stare. “Mickey. It’s Gwen. Gwen Robison.”

Mickey continued to stare blankly. No, she stared through her, which is quite different. “It’s McKey now.”

“Mick Kay?”

“Think of it this way—I dropped the i, capitalized the K. McKey.”

“Legally?” A bizarre response, but Gwen couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You always were a stickler for rules,” Mickey—McKey—said. “Can I get you anything?”

The other passengers, businessmen accustomed to life in first class, were growing impatient with this trip down memory lane. They wanted their drinks, their hot nuts, whatever small treats their status entailed. But Gwen couldn’t let her old friend go.

“It’s been so long. I hate that we lost touch. In fact, I thought I might hear from you when my mom died. She died, did you know that? Five years ago, from bladder cancer.”

“I heard, but not right away. I’m sorry.” The words had all the intimacy of champagne or orange juice?

“You heard from—” Foolish to extend the conversation, and what did it matter how McKey had learned?

“From Sean.”

“You’re in touch?” She couldn’t decide if what she felt was jealousy or—stickler for the rules she was—a sense of betrayal. They weren’t supposed to be friends anymore. That was the price they paid for the horrible thing that had happened.

“Sometimes. He sends Christmas cards.”

“He told you about my mom in a Christmas card?” Not challenging Mickey—McKey—but honestly astonished, confused.

“Look, I’ll come back and chat later in the flight, okay?”

She didn’t.

CHAPTER THREE

Gwen was spared funerals as a child and accepted this practice, as she accepted so many of her parents’ practices, as the inarguably right thing to do. Certainly, it has not occurred to her to bring Annabelle to Go-Go’s visitation, and she is shocked to see how many young children are here. More disturbing, they are gathered around the open casket, inspecting Go-Go with a respectful but palpable excitement. A dead person! This is what a dead person looks like! In the face of their bravery, how can Gwen not come forward and look as well?

A dead person this may well be, but it is not the boy she remembers and not only because he is thirty years older than the Go-Go who lives in her memory. This person is too still, his features too composed. Go-Go was never still.

“Gwen.” Doris Halloran holds her hands tightly, peers into her face, as if nearsighted. “Pretty little Gwen. You look wonderful.”

She does? She doesn’t feel as if she looks wonderful. True, she is thin. She has no appetite as of late. But she is pretty sure that the lack of food has made her face gaunt, her hair dull and dry. Then again, maybe it’s all relative. She looks better than Go-Go, for example. And better than Mrs. Halloran, whose face is white and puffy in a way that cannot be explained by mere grieving. Her eyes are like little raisins deep in an uncooked loaf, her mouth ringed by wrinkles.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Halloran. My father would be here, but he broke his hip. I’m staying with him while he recuperates.”

“What happened?”

“Slipped on those steps. They’ve always been a hazard.”

Mrs. Halloran does not let go of Gwen’s hands. Pressing, squeezing. It is a little painful, while Mrs. Halloran’s breath—it isn’t bad, exactly, but old, reminiscent of mothballs and dimly lit rooms.

“So many accidents,” she murmurs.

“Yes. It’s a shame about Go—” Gwen stops herself, remembering Sean’s reaction to his brother’s nickname. “Gordon.”

“Oh.” She seems jolted. “Yes, I suppose that was an accident, too.” Supposes? Gwen assumed that Doris Halloran, always the super Catholic, wouldn’t even contemplate the possibility of suicide. Doris lets go of Gwen’s hand abruptly, so abruptly that her body registers the end of the pain as a deepening of the sensation. It’s as if phantom hands still gripped hers, squeezing, intent on hurting her.

“I know it’s a cliché,” Gwen says, “but it throws the world out of whack when a parent loses a child, at any age.”

“Well, I lost a few, you know.” She lowers her voice. “Miscarriages. Three. Actually four, although that one was so early it barely counted.”