She moved in front of the window, a small figure but with a woman’s voice. It was impossible to make out her face.
Then Darius was standing next to her. “This is McGee.”
Turning to Michael Boni, she said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
He could feel the pellets turning to powder in his fist. “Are you crazy?”
Darius brought her closer, slowly, as if he were the father of the bride. “She wants to help.”
“You’re inviting fucking strangers—?”
“She’s not a stranger.”
Michael Boni tipped his palm back into the sack and dusted his hands clean. “She is to me.”
He could see her a little better now, a white girl—a kid. Hoodie, faded jeans. On a field trip from Ann Arbor, maybe. “What is it with you and teenage girls?”
“It’s not like that,” Darius said.
“I’m not a teenager,” she said.
Michael Boni could see that now, but so what? He set the hammer down.
“Don’t be mad at him,” the girl said. “It was my idea. I’m on your side.”
“This isn’t the Salvation Army,” Michael Boni said. “This isn’t a canned food drive.”
She was peering into the fertilizer sack. “I know what it is.”
The girl was standing among the crates, lifting the tarp with the toe of her boot. “Do you really know what to do with all this?”
“We haven’t tried yet,” Darius said.
Michael Boni tugged the cloth free and put it back where it was.
“I broke into HSI,” the girl said. “Me and my friends.”
“Right,” Michael Boni said, certain clouds parting in his head. Darius had mentioned it. The vague outline, at least, conveniently leaving out the part about knowing who was involved.
“And how’d that work out for you?” Michael Boni said.
Darius and the girl exchanged a glance, and there was no warmth coming from either direction.
But what it all meant, Michael Boni didn’t care. He said, “I’d leave that off your résumé, if I was you.”
“They got lucky,” she said.
“These photocopiers store everything now,” Darius said. “What’s being copied. When.”
Michael Boni leaned in closer. “They went to a lot of trouble to make you look stupid.”
The girl turned away, looking toward the window. “He told me about Constance, about the garden. About your grandmother.”
It was a good thing Darius wasn’t in arm’s reach, that Michael Boni wasn’t still holding the hammer. “You don’t know when to keep your mouth shut.”
“We all want the same thing,” she said.
“I doubt it.”
She shrugged. “Our interests overlap. Even if our reasons don’t.”
She was so small standing before him, toe to toe. Michael Boni could see the holes blooming along the seams of her shirt.
Outside there was a flash of purple, Constance passing into the window frame, wading in a reef of waist-high lettuces.
“This isn’t a club,” Michael Boni said, returning McGee’s gaze. “We’re not open to new members.”
Her eyes didn’t waver. “The secret ends with me,” she said. “I’ve got no one left to tell.”
Maybe she was just a kid, but Michael Boni already saw more guts in her than he’d ever seen in Darius.
Out in the garden, Constance was staring cockeyed at the sun, as if daring it to do something.
Meanwhile Darius stood several paces away, half in the light, half in the shadow, looking to Michael Boni as if he were measuring the distance between himself and the door.
Twenty
It was ten-thirty in the morning, and Violet was wearing only one shoe as she burst out of the apartment to all the usual pandemonium—shouting and banging and the motherfucker directly below whose God-given right it was to blast his bass so he could feel it in the shower. But right now she couldn’t care less about adding to the racket, slamming the door behind her, glad at last to have a solid object between herself and her mother.
Solidish. Cheap, hollow wood. And her mother’s voice still carried through. Raised you … Never forget. The missing words easy enough to fill in. She’d heard them a thousand times in the last two days alone. That’s how long it had been since her mother had gone fishing for something in her purse and found ten bucks missing. Two days for ten bucks! Not that Violet wouldn’t have been pissed. Ten bucks was two hours work, after taxes and all that. But was it worth two days of crazy?
Violet had never pretended she was an angel. There was the time she was nine, the bracelet with the turquoise stars from the display stand at the drugstore. But to steal from her own mother? It was just easier to yell at Violet than to accept the obvious, that the ten bucks had disappeared the same way everything else disappeared from the apartment—crumpled bills and pocket change and anything still in a box that could be returned; and the old broken watch and the hideous old necklace that had belonged to Violet’s grandmother, neither of which was worth the effort of pawning, except to somebody already beyond help, like Victor.
Everyone in the building knew about Victor. But still they had to play this game. When her mother shouted, for all the neighbors to hear through the cardboard walls, what an ungrateful thief of a daughter she had, the only thing for Violet to do was to pop in her earbuds and wait it out. But sometimes she couldn’t help wondering what exactly her mother gained from this drama, why she thought it was better for the neighbors to believe she had two fuck-ups for children, rather than just one.
With the door closed behind her, Violet could choose to imagine the crazy voice inside the apartment belonged to someone else, someone with a good reason for this despair, someone, ideally, she wasn’t related to, didn’t even know.
But now she was about to be late. Hopping on one foot, she reached down to pull on her other shoe. That was the moment she realized she’d grabbed the wrong one. A black clog and a white sneaker. Not even close.
She was so exhausted, her first thought was Fuck it. Go back to sleep. Rest her head right here on the mangy carpet, stare at the bug-bottomed globe of the ceiling fixture, pretend her mother was screaming a lullaby.
It had been only six hours since Violet had finished the closing shift, her third that week. Five hours since she’d gotten into bed. But Sheree was sick, and someone needed to fill in for lunch, and an hour spent at work, no matter how dead on her feet, was an hour Violet didn’t have to spend here. And when she got in, she could stick her mouth under the Mountain Dew dispenser until everything on her twitched.
On the other side of the door, the shouting had faded. Ear to the keyhole, Violet calculated how quickly, how quietly, she could duck in, get the other shoe. It didn’t matter which one.
“What is it this time?”
She nearly jumped at the sound of the voice, spinning around to find Darius sitting on the top step at the end of the hall. He was still dressed in his work clothes.
“What’d he take?” Darius was all scrunched up, hunched over, as if he’d been huddled there for hours.
“What are you doing here?”
“I got in late,” he said. “Everyone’s gone. Sylvia, the kids.”
Violet pulled on the black clog. “I’m going to be late.”
“Nothing worse than an empty apartment.”
“Want to trade?”
“I haven’t seen you in a long time.” Darius’s eyes were red, his shirt half untucked.
If she didn’t know him better, she might have thought he was drunk. “That’s what happens,” she said, “when you tell a person you don’t want to see them anymore.”
She hobbled forward, her feet at different heights. Just as she reached the banister, she heard something new coming from behind the apartment door. Something almost too soft to catch over the rest of the noise vibrating up from the lower floors.
“She’s crying,” Violet said. And crying, unlike everything
else her mother did, in a way not intended to be overheard.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m late.”
Darius stretched his legs out across the top stair, and Violet stepped over them.
“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?” he said.
She reached the landing. “Not really.”
“I’m in trouble,” Darius said.
From down here, he looked even more pitiful. She could no longer hear her mother crying. “Why don’t you tell Sylvia about it?”
Darius rose on unsteady legs. “I made a mistake.”
Maybe so, but Violet had done exactly what he’d told her to. For almost two months now she’d stayed away.
“I’ve got to go.”
But now he was coming toward her down the stairs, and then she felt his heaviness on her, and then she was holding him. He was nearly limp, all arms and dead weight.
“Something bad’s going to happen,” he said. “Something—”
“It’s going to be fine,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
At his door she felt in his pocket for his keys.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “I didn’t realize—”
“Go to bed,” she said. “Get some sleep.”
His arm was still around her shoulders. “Don’t leave.”
“We agreed,” Violet said. “You were right.”
He took her hand. “Please.”
From his bed, a half hour later, Violet texted Sheree: :-( sick 2.
Fall
Twenty-One
April didn’t know if the cancellation had anything to do with the weather. It was just as possible the bus had broken down somewhere. The other, more irritated passengers speculated more wildly; they suspected a cover-up. Why was no one from the station volunteering information? At this hour, most of the employees had gone home. The public address system simply informed the irritable occupants of the waiting room that their bus wouldn’t be coming. The hurried, monotone voice offered no explanation. It suggested they return in the morning, and then the station fell into silence.
The people around her took out cell phones. April could hear them making their apologies for calling so late, asking for a ride home, a place to spend the night. A line formed at the pay phone. There was a bustling trade in bills for coins.
April took out her cell, looked at the time, then let the screen go dark again.
Inez had dropped her off an hour before. She’d been so upset, she wouldn’t return April’s kiss. Didn’t even take the car out of gear.
“Don’t do this,” she’d said.
“I have to,” April had told her.
The car was Inez’s first, a subcompact that stalled whenever she slowed.
“One thing,” Inez had said, one hand on the stick, the other on the wheel. “Just name one thing you’ve done for her you didn’t come to regret.”
“It’s complicated,” April had said. Everything with McGee was always complicated.
There was nothing comforting about the nearly empty station. But April found she appreciated the ambiance of the place, its high ceilings and buttresses and columns hiding doors that never seemed to open. She guessed the station hadn’t always been a station. It had been constructed at another time, for another purpose, with a clientele in mind that would appreciate such excesses. Half an hour before, the room’s deep acoustics had echoed and preserved every one of the other passengers’ curses—toward the bus company, toward its employees, toward the rainy late-August night. There was something about the station’s impractical dimensions and ostentatious design that made the place seem almost holy. In their simplicity and arrangement, the rows of oak benches looked like pews. Replace the ticket counter with an altar, and April could have imagined herself sitting in a church. She hadn’t been in a real one since she was a child. She’d forgotten how intimidating they could be.
She would spend the night. That would be easier than going through everything all over again with Inez.
Through the narrow windows, April could see the rain pouring down, but the thick stone walls muddled the sound to a soothing drone.
Three other people remained in the station. She couldn’t be sure if they were passengers or if they’d come in to get out of the rain. There was a woman talking to herself by the pay phone, agitated, jerking her head and sighing. By the restrooms, an old bearded man in a folding chair appeared to be reading. The obese guy in the shrunken fatigue jacket beside the windows looked as though he were asleep.
As she paced the imaginary boundary of her quarter of the station, April read and reread McGee’s letter.
Thanks so much for writing. It’s nice of you to offer to come and visit my parents with me. Things are always so difficult with them. I’d rather not have to do it alone. Uncle Xavier put together a package and asked me to ask you if you can bring it with you when you come. He’ll drop it off sometime soon, if that’s alright …
No matter how many times she read it, the letter made no sense. It was the first April had heard from McGee in the nearly three months since she’d left. What was April supposed to have written? She didn’t even know where McGee was, aside from the Detroit postmark. And McGee hadn’t seen her parents in years, even though they lived only a couple of miles away. Things between them definitely were difficult; that much was true. But there was no Uncle Xavier, at least not that April had ever heard of.
Then there was the simple fact that McGee had written a letter. An actual, physical, pen-on-paper, stuffed-in-an-envelope-and-stamped letter. Who did that anymore? But no return address on the envelope, just instructions about when and where they would meet upon April’s arrival.
April had tried to find out what was going on, but no one else seemed to know anything either. Myles hadn’t heard from McGee. Neither had Holmes or Fitch. But April wasn’t surprised.
Everything had fallen apart so quickly.
In custody, the morning after the fiasco at HSI, they’d refused to give their names. But the men who’d arrested them already knew their names. These were guys straight out of the movies, cheap suits and mirrored sunglasses. Were they federal agents? Cops? Private security? April never thought to ask. The men who’d arrested them already knew everything, carrying out their interrogations only as a matter of course. After just a few hours, Myles and McGee and Holmes and April and Fitch were free to go, like children caught shoplifting. No charges. The men who’d arrested them didn’t say why, but they didn’t need to. The company didn’t want the publicity. For their effort, the five of them received only a warning. Next time, and the kindly agents sincerely hoped there wouldn’t be a next time, each of them would pay for everything he or she had ever done—of which the men were well informed—and for a few other things as well.
The rest had unraveled in stages. Inez had been applying to grad schools. After what happened, she couldn’t get out of town fast enough. And given the long, exhausting battle April had had to wage to win Inez’s forgiveness, how could she not go with her?
The move to Portland had originally been Fitch’s idea. But he didn’t have a hard time convincing Holmes to come along. Myles hadn’t planned to join them. Not at first. He was going to stay in Detroit, work things out with McGee. But within a month, the two of them were hardly speaking. At the bookstore he finally hung a sign saying it was closed for good.
McGee had been the only one who stayed, but she’d left the loft and no one knew where she’d gone. Other than underground. But why?
The one thing the letter didn’t say was the one thing April understood: McGee was in trouble and needed help.
Inez had been incredulous when April told her she had to go back to Detroit.
“What does she think you’ve got left to give her?” Inez wanted to know.
April had no answers. McGee had made her into some sort of spy, extracting orders from a complicated code.
Back at the apartment, April had been pac
king her bag when there’d been a knock at the door. A pale man with a puff of a moustache had stood in the hallway in cutoff jeans, his legs little more than bones and completely hairless.
“She wanted me to make sure you’re coming,” he’d said.
“Who are you?”
“Xavier.”
He’d handed April a small package tied with a green ribbon. Then he’d stalked away on his birdlike legs.
So April had become a courier too. But whatever the package was, neither McGee nor Uncle Xavier had said anything about not opening it. And now, here in the station, she had nothing but time.
The ribbon was knotted. She had to use her teeth, her fingernails chewed down to nubs. Beneath the paper was a white cardboard box. April untucked the flap and lifted the lid. Inside was a lump of aluminum foil. A clump of chocolate chip cookies.
“What the fuck?”
“Do those have nuts?”
April looked up with a jerk into a bearded, smiling face—the man who’d been reading by the bathroom. From up close he was decades younger than he’d seemed across the station. He reached into the box and took one, biting into it tentatively.
“Good, no nuts. I’m allergic to nuts. Peanuts, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, walnuts. All kinds. Doctor once told me to stay away from nuts unless I wanted to end up in the hospital again. Been back to the hospital plenty of times since then. Had nothing to do with nuts, though. These are good. Make them yourself?”
“No,” April said uncertainly. “Uncle Xavier—”
“Your uncle makes a good cookie. Nice and soft. Lots of brown sugar.”
April watched him swallow, not knowing what to expect. It crossed her mind that he might choke on something hidden in the batter and she’d have to save him.
“Aren’t you going to have one yourself?”
She wasn’t, of course, but she couldn’t think of any easy explanation. Taking up the box and paper, she struggled to put the package back together. When she got to the ribbon, he offered his finger. Around it she tied a bow.
“Think nothing of it,” he said, though she was too flustered to thank him.
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