Angels of Detroit

by Christopher Hebert

  Anyone observing them from a distance, Garland supposed, might think them strangers, stranded together by something as unspectacular as inclement weather. There was more truth to that, he thought, than in his daughter’s apparent ease.

  Rearranging the mushrooms on her chicken, Muriel lifted her eyes and with a voice gone dry said, “So how does he like the investment business?”

  The words fell like raindrops in the desert, making Garland all the more aware of just how silent the house had been—not a noise, except for the baritone murmurs of the anchorman on the television he’d left on in the den.

  From a stack kept warm under a folded cloth, his daughter selected a roll. As she split the bread in two, she happened to glance up, and she seemed surprised to find Muriel waiting for her to reply.

  “Who?” their daughter said, butter knife still raised in the air. “How does who like the investment business?”

  In the space of a moment, Garland watched his wife suddenly show her age, advancing ten years in as many seconds. Her eyes squinted as she tried to read her daughter’s face, searching for an explanation, fissures appearing in the powder across her brow. It was as though she were trying to assure herself that this woman—whom she’d never really known as a woman—was, in fact, her own flesh and blood. Garland imagined her trying to fill in the years between the girl she remembered and the woman in her late twenties now sitting opposite her at the table. On the credenza there was a picture, a seven-by-ten, of his daughter at her high school graduation. His eyes were no longer what they’d once been, but Garland could make out the royal blue robe and the matching cap dangling by one corner from her fingertips. Her hair was streaked with orange, in her nose a silver ring. It was the last picture they had of her. Since then, her face had grown more stern, losing the last of its roundness. The grass at her feet in the photo was almost too green to be real. A day in late spring, and the sky at her back was perfectly clear, but she was unhappy. Garland didn’t need to be able to make out her face to recall she’d been unhappy. She’d always disliked having her picture taken. Perhaps that was it. She was simply expressing her objection. The picture was the closest thing Garland had to a tool for measuring the time that had passed, and it indicated only the physical changes, which he realized now were almost irrelevant. Who she had been in that picture he felt he would never know, any more than he could ever hope to know the person she’d become. Without either of those reference points, how could he possibly understand what had changed?

  “Your fiancé,” Muriel said at last. “Is it Myles?”

  Garland regretted the way his wife said the name as though there were something dubious about it. But he could understand Muriel’s impulse to draw her out, using what little information their daughter had provided over the phone. And he was glad, as well, that it was Muriel, not he himself, taking charge. He’d never excelled at these conversations, these silence fillers.

  What they knew—what their daughter had allowed them to know—was that suddenly she was engaged. Suddenly she lived in Portland, a yoga instructor, her fiancé a financial analyst. To Garland and Muriel, everything could not help but seem sudden, coming as it did completely out of nowhere. But for all they knew, these facts had all been true for a long time now. It had been seven years since there’d been anything from his daughter other than terse e-mails assuring her worried father she was indeed still alive. The call that had come through two nights before was not the one he had long expected, not the one Garland had been spending these years preparing for. It didn’t come from a jailhouse. It didn’t come from the police. It didn’t come from the FBI. She had not been arrested for dumping sugar into the gas tanks of bulldozers. She had not been attacking whaling ships or driving spikes into trees. She was not wanted for questioning. Most important of all, she was not dead, killed by a concussion grenade or by something similar of her own making. Even when she was a child, even from decades off, he had thought he could see these ends coming. And yet despite all the things he’d thought he understood about his little girl, here she was, not just alive but also well, healthy, a picture of inexplicable normalcy. How could Garland not feel baffled? How could he not wonder if, all this time, he had been the one who misunderstood?

  When it came to this fiancé, this Myles, it was hard to know what to say. Never before had their daughter told them about a boyfriend. Never before had they met one. When they were all younger, Muriel had processed this slight in the only way she could, as evidence that their daughter had something to hide. And as for that secret, Muriel had assumed the worst thing she could imagine, an orientation of which she would never be able to speak in front of her friends. Far better that, Garland had always believed, than what he considered the far more likely truth, that it was them their daughter had wished to hide. From embarrassment or shame, who knew? She was their only daughter—their only child—and they’d had no practice with romantic things. Garland found it difficult to contemplate her love life now without wanting to start from the beginning, imagining the woman in front of him was not twenty-eight but twelve, and this Myles, whoever he was, merely a first fleeting crush.

  But for Garland, such questions as these were idle curiosities at best. Who cared what the man did? Let him be a puppeteer, a traveling circus performer. What difference did it make? Why sit here and pretend that this absent man whom they had never met was more a stranger than the girl, the woman, sitting now before them, pretending all was well?

  “Right,” their daughter said. “Myles.” And then she flashed an ambiguously crooked smile. “It must be the wine,” she said, though she’d taken no more than one or two sips.

  Muriel said, “Where did you two meet?”

  His daughter stabbed for a potato and missed, scraping her fork against the plate. “A long time ago,” she said. “Seattle.”

  “And”—Garland had to pause to clear his throat, startled to suddenly find himself speaking—“have you been together all this time?”

  In his chest, Garland felt something simmer. He wasn’t sure what it was. There was an element of relief, perhaps, a comfort to be found in knowing she hadn’t been alone all these years, that she’d had someone to care for her, someone to love her, someone to protect her. Though as for the last, she would no doubt say she had no need.

  But the relief, if that was what it was, played only a part. There was also something hotter, something sharper, something more painful. His fingers cramped around his fork. How could Garland not feel resentment?

  His daughter wiped her mouth and laid her crumpled napkin on the table. “The food was delicious.”

  She reached out to pat Muriel’s hand.

  Garland was in the living room watching a movie a short time later when his daughter came out of the kitchen, where she’d been helping her mother with the dishes. She set her wineglass on the coffee table and lowered herself onto the couch, adjacent to Garland’s chair.

  “What are you watching?” she said, tucking her dress beneath her knees.

  “I’m not sure,” Garland said, taking a moment to gaze at the screen. “I was watching something else, and then that ended and the movie came on …”

  “What were you watching before?”

  “I don’t remember exactly,” Garland said. “I wasn’t watching, really, just glancing at the set off and on. The TV was just noise to keep me company while I read.”

  “What are you reading?”

  Garland glanced in his lap. “Oh, a book.”

  His daughter peered at the cheap paperback cover. “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, it’s complicated,” Garland said. “Something … it takes place in Russia.”

  “I’ve been hearing a lot about Russia,” his daughter said. “Crime syndicates and all that. Is your book … ?”

  “My book?” Garland said. “Well, it’s complicated. Maybe it has something to do with that.”

  “Maybe it’ll make more sense later,” she said.

  “No, well, I’ve
read it before,” Garland said, regretting the words even as they left his mouth.

  “It must be very good if you’re reading it again,” his daughter said.

  “Yes, I suppose,” Garland admitted, “if you’re into that sort of thing.”

  Garland picked up the remote and turned on the news.

  “Have you been following the elections?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “The playoffs?”

  Not that either.

  “This thing with the Russians?”

  “Someone must have told me about the Russians,” she said.

  It was just as well. Garland didn’t know how he would’ve followed up, had she answered any of these things affirmatively. Every word of it was fluff. After all this time, would they really let the entire evening pass without saying a single thing that mattered?

  Garland leaned back in his recliner, looking to see if Muriel was still in the other room. When he saw that she was, he lowered his head, and in a quiet voice, he said, “It’s just that none of this is what I expected.”

  As he hoped she might, his daughter nodded. Not by way of response, but merely, it seemed, to indicate she understood. “I thought you’d be happy.”

  The remote nearly sprang from his hand. “Oh no,” he said. “That’s not what I meant.” But he wasn’t sure how to explain what he was trying to say, what words to use that wouldn’t give offense. He had been waiting for this day for more than seven years, and yet now that it had arrived, he was afraid he understood less than ever.

  “Do you live together, you and your fiancé?” Garland said, and then he waved off the need for a reply, turning embarrassedly to face the television.

  “We do,” she said, but Garland shook his head, wanting to insist it didn’t matter. He wasn’t trying to be the protective father. He said, “It’s just, you were always so …”

  “Independent?”

  Garland raised his finger, an exclamation point. “Tell me,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Your house—what’s it like?”

  His daughter crossed her legs and straightened her dress across her knees. “It’s sort of … a loft,” she said. “Wide open, big windows. In the heart of the city.”

  Over the years, not a day had gone by in which he hadn’t thought about his daughter and wondered what she was doing, what her life might be like. Left to his own imagination, he’d pictured her living in all sorts of places: an old farmhouse, a cabin in the woods, a rundown warehouse, everything she owned secondhand or homemade. Wherever it was, the home he saw in his mind was full of bohemians and radicals who came barefoot to the table and ate with their hands from mismatched plates. Not once had he considered, not once imagined, that she might rise each morning to an alarm clock, engaged to a banker, that the warehouse might be one of those fashionable galleries of polished granite and steel. The people on those dramas Muriel loved lived in such places. They had wine fridges and espresso makers. He never would have guessed his own daughter even owned a TV.

  Garland could never admit such a thing to Muriel, but he had always admired his daughter for having had the strength of character, even as a child, to do what she wished, what she believed in. So to hear now that for so long he’d been so mistaken saddened Garland more deeply than he could ever have thought. If she hadn’t left her parents to pursue a life she felt they couldn’t understand, then why had she left? Was it that she hated them? He knew he’d failed her, but could she really hate him that much?

  Having tried out the sentence internally in several different ways, neither of which fully satisfied him, Garland finally turned to his daughter and asked, “Are you happy?”

  The slightest bounce came into her knees.

  “That was—I’m sorry. I’m sure you are,” Garland said. But he wasn’t sorry.

  Looking almost apologetic herself, his daughter glanced at her shoes, light summer pumps. “I don’t know. Sometimes … I don’t know.”

  “Of course,” Garland added. “I only meant …”

  “That’s okay …”

  In silence they watched a commercial for laundry detergent, pretending to be entranced by a kick line of leggy bubbles.

  When it was over, Garland turned back toward his daughter. “You haven’t said what brought you to town.”

  Now she was tapping her shoe against the base of his chair. “Business …” she began, and then she seemed to decide against saying anything more.

  Yoga business? Fine. She could have whatever reason she wished. Garland was so close right now, he could touch her.

  “It’s too bad,” he said, “that Myles couldn’t come with you.”

  His daughter smiled. “I think you would’ve liked each other.”

  It was a mistake, he knew, to study each word so carefully, but they were all he had, and it disappointed him to hear her say you would have, as if they had already missed the only chance they would ever get. Surely there would be another, even if Garland had to wait another seven years. He didn’t dare ask if he would be invited to the wedding. The answer, he feared, would be more than he could bear.

  “You’ll be flying back out tomorrow?” he said. “Back to Portland?”

  His daughter lifted her eyes, and then she paused and raised her wineglass, seeming to study the streaks of red. She held the glass so long before her mouth that Garland gave up on a response, which he understood now would only make him feel even sadder. It made no sense to him that his daughter had left them and remained in silence for so many years, only to return with blond hair, wearing a sundress covered in flowers.

  His daughter was still staring at her wineglass. Garland thought he could see some sort of dread in her eyes, perhaps of the questions still to come, the ones Garland was still struggling to formulate. He felt sorry for her. He hadn’t meant for this to become an inquisition, but there was still so much he didn’t understand. Garland had been gathering questions throughout his daughter’s life, as if in anticipation of this very moment. Finally the moment had arrived, and Garland saw he had only two options, for there could be no middle ground: either he must ask every one of the questions, no matter how naïve, no matter how egregiously they might reveal his failings as a father—and then accept the answers. His other option was to ask none at all.

  Twenty-Eight

  a forty percent chance of rain and on Wednesday a high in the seventies and a low of sixty dollars a barreling through the finish line to the delight of delegates from around the world meeting to discuss decreases in production and then it’s not what Jesus Christ can do for you but what you can do for a ninety-eight mile-per-hour fastball and a slider that’s been absolutely phenomenal improvements in breast augmentation during the last half hour I’ve been talking with a representative of everything that’s misguided about their tour bus was attacked by hysterical fans and

  Round the voices went with the radio dial. After a while, McGee found, they all started to sound the same. Same inflection, same modulation—male and female, it didn’t matter. She’d come to regret every second of attention she paid them. She was encouraging their incompetence, these mindless mouthpieces who did nothing but read. And yet still her ears followed each voice as it went by, clinging to some vague hope that it might manage to say something important, something that mattered, something to take her mind off the wait.

  She’d been in the parking garage for four hours. But those four hours had begun to feel like something more, like days at the bottom of a mine shaft. All she could see of the sky was the rough trapezoid framed between the descending ramp and the concrete headers hanging above. That sliver of sky had been blue when she arrived. Now it was black.

  It was nine o’clock. For the last forty-five minutes, not a single person had arrived. No one had left. The elevator and the stairwell doors remained mute before her. The half-dozen cars still parked here were all luxurious compared to hers.

  The truck was Michael Boni’s. That the radio functioned at all was nothing short
of a miracle. She’d spent the first hour sitting in silence. It wasn’t just the six levels of cement above her head that made her assume she’d get no signal. Nothing in Michael Boni’s truck looked as if it could possibly work. There was duct tape holding together the dashboard and the mirrors were missing and the windshield looked like it had caught a brick. One of the window cranks lay on the floor mats, and the tape deck was vomiting ribbon. On the radio itself there wasn’t a single knob. What had Michael Boni done with them? What had he done to the truck? She couldn’t dream up explanations for anywhere near this much wreckage. He was temperamental; she was aware of that. But if she’d realized before what a gift he had for destruction, would she still be here now?

  The antenna was about the only thing on the truck that remained intact. Higher up on the dial there was country and pop and Motown and pop and country and pop and Christian and pop. Then back down again to the bottom for the news.

  At least Michael Boni kept a pair of pliers in the cup holder. With them it was possible to turn the tuner stem. Possible, but not easy, and the longer she spent waiting, the harder it got. Her body had grown tired of sitting still. A restless twitch was running up and down the backs of both knees. She needed two hands to steady the jaws of the pliers, making the orange band lurch slowly ahead.

  minimizing the threat of an attack by rogue nations already developing weapons of mass mailing and other fund-raising strategies that appeal to a higher power, and if that happens there’s little question from a caller, go ahead caller, yes you’re on the air

  Followed by sports scores and oil prices again and weather, weather, and even more weather. Why all this mania for weather? Did it really matter, sixty-four degrees or sixty-eight? Were there oddsmakers taking bets on the probability of rain? And traffic! She’d been sitting here so long she could’ve mapped the flow in and around the city. At rush hour, cars had been jammed heading out of downtown. She’d been just about the only one coming in.

  In the next aisle over, a reserved spot beside the elevator doors, was the shiny black Cadillac, the one Darius—before he’d abandoned them—had told her about. The car hadn’t moved in four hours. She’d had all the time in the world to study the lines on the trunk, the tread on the tires, the numbers on the license plate, the way the overhead fluorescent lights puddled on the finish. That the old woman drove a Cadillac was something Darius had mentioned in passing, not knowing how the information might come to be useful. McGee hadn’t known either, but she’d made a point of remembering.