Angels of Detroit (36 page)

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 packing 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.

The obese camouflaged man in the pew across the room was still asleep. The agitated woman by the pay phone seemed to have dozed off, too, her head resting on the plastic-bound yellow pages. Nowhere in the enormous station was there a single excuse for getting up. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, and April didn’t want to offend someone who had so far done nothing but invade her space.

“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” the man said, sitting down beside her. “I was sitting over there watching you. You’re a very pretty woman. You probably hear that all the time.”

He must have noticed the look in her eyes, because he shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. It’s just you seem like a very nice person. You can tell even from across the room. But I should know better than to bother a pretty lady all alone in the middle of the night. Lord knows you meet enough crazy people when you ride the bus.”

“It’s okay,” April said, forcing a smile. “It’s all right.”

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “usually I don’t find pretty people all that worth talking to. They’re usually so dull. But there’s something about you. You see people all the time, walking around, thousands of them a day, and what do you know about them? Nothing. Not a damn thing. You live in the same city, walk the same streets, breathe the same air. It’s a shame we should all be such strangers. You shouldn’t need to know a person by name to say hello. You shouldn’t look at someone suspiciously just because he asks how you’re doing. Do you know what I’m saying?”

She nodded.

“It seemed to me there’s no good reason for you and me to be sitting all alone. Especially in a place like this.” He gestured with his hands toward the ceiling. “It reminds me of the church I went to when I was a kid.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” April said.

“One of those old-fashioned churches, so big and heavy it seems like it must’ve been built by giants. The kind of place where you really feel the presence of a higher power. Do you know what I’m saying? You feel like you’re in the hands of a mighty god. Not like these new churches you see around, with the neon signs and the vinyl siding. They look like dentists’ offices. What sort of god would hang out in a place like that? Do you know what I’m saying?”

April nodded noncommittally. She was wary of the direction the conversation was turning. She looked out the windows onto the dark platform, imagining herself climbing onto the bus.

“It’s these benches,” she said. “They look like pews.”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.” And then, after a pause, he added, “I remember one time talking with a minister from one of those dentist-office churches. We were talking about sin. He asked me how I decided what was right and what was wrong. A minister, of all people.” The young man shook his head. “But that’s what happens when you preach in a building covered in vinyl siding. I remember saying I was surprised to hear him ask such a thing. He should have known it wasn’t for me to decide. What’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong. I would have expected him of all people to understand that. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in God?” the young man asked.

April looked off into the corner, where the young man had been sitting just moments before. He’d left no luggage there, hadn’t brought any over with him.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You should.”

He reached into his pocket, and even before he extended his hand, she was shrinking away.

He held out a roll of mints.

She declined.

“Nothing lonelier than a red-eye,” he said, mint clicking against his teeth.

After that, neither one of them seemed to know what to say, and April sat in nervous silence, waiting for whatever would come next. But aside from occasionally asking her the time and smiling mildly, the young man kept to himself, quietly reading beside her, apparently comforted just to have her near him.

Throughout the night, the station grew colder by degrees. Every time she awoke, April’s pulse set off pounding in her collar. But everything was always fine, her bag and the cookies still at her side, the others still in their corners.

Not long after daylight, just after the first new passengers arrived with the dense scent of the cool morning in their clothes, the station suddenly filled. Employees seemed to materialize at the ticket counter. An old lady with a loose cough settled in behind a coffee urn and a display of packaged Danish.

Among the crowd April recognized several faces from the night before. They seemed less angry now, but they still insisted on speaking brusquely to the clerk—a different one from last night—in order to convey their right to be irritated.

On the bus, April rolled a pair of jeans into a pillow and placed them against the window. Stretching her legs across the empty seat next to hers, she closed her eyes. It was worth a try, and for several minutes she could hear other passengers coming on board and pausing at her row before moving on.

She must have dozed off for only a moment. When she awoke again, the bus still hadn’t started moving. A boy with softly spiked blond hair was standing in the aisle staring at her. He must have been twelve or thirteen, his nose scrunched up as if he were trying to keep a pair of invisible glasses from falling off his face. A lumped, overstuffed backpack rested at his feet. He held a pile of poorly folded newspaper sections in his hands.

“Could you hold this for a thanks—” Without waiting for a response, the boy dropped the papers into April’s lap. She pulled her legs reflexively toward her chest, and the boy took that opportunity to flop down into the seat beside her.

“I was afraid somebody’d be sitting here. I kept telling my brother we had to get to the station, but he had diarrhea or something and he was in the bathroom for hours, and I kept telling him we’d miss the bus, but he said there’s no way he’d let me miss it. I like to show up early to get a good seat. I’m R.J.”

He’d already finished shaking her limp hand before she registered what he was doing.

“Your papers,” April said, lifting them for him to take.

“See that guy over there—?” R.J. pointed out her window to a hefty middle-aged man, bald on top, smoking beside a pickup, eyes fixed to his watch.

“That’s my brother Franklin. I don’t think he can see me waving. You can wave, too, if you want. He’s not even looking. See, we’re directly in the middle. Twenty-second row. Twenty-one in front of us, twenty-one in back. If we get in an accident, we’re the least likely to get crushed.”

April swallowed the news in bewilderment.

The door of the bus creaked shut. The air brakes released. They started to move.

“Would you mind taking—?” April dropped the pile into R.J.’s lap, and he commenced flipping through the sections.

“I was just reading about this train crash where all these people
died. The train just like fell off the tracks. I mean, have you ever seen train tracks? They’re like just these little pieces of metal. I’m surprised trains aren’t always falling off.” He paused and pointed out the window again. The bus passed a billboard upon which a jet was rising majestically over a palm-tree-lined beach,
ESCAPE IS NOT AS FAR AS YOU THINK
spelled out in bamboo lettering.

“I’ve never flown before,” R.J. said. “It’s like a hundred times safer than riding in a bus, even though it’s the plane crashes you always hear about. Probably because they’re so bad when they happen. I mean, a plane crashes, and you’re pretty much … well, I mean, what good is a life vest when you’re about to crash into a cornfield or something? Most people get hung up on that and forget how rare it happens. People die like every second in car crashes.”

April rose up slightly in her seat and scanned the other rows. There wasn’t a single empty seat. She watched the posts of the guardrail flick by as the bus merged onto the highway. The rain had picked up again. Cars passed on the wet pavement, and the sound was like paper tearing. The grassy median seemed to draw nearer. April imagined she could feel the bus losing its traction. She thought of herself back at the station, lying on the pew. She thought of being home, of Inez’s new blackout blinds, which sealed the bedroom off from every ray of sunlight.