Angels of Detroit (43 page)

Bark rubbed away below the crotch where the ladder leaned.

Long enough that the rag fell.

A few wedges cut into the arms from the stress of the frame.

The mechanic coming back out of the house looking mussed.

I can no longer remember if it was intentional.

Not mussed the way one would expect a mechanic to look.

Until finally I decided what to do.

Dad sleeps on his side, knees slightly bent, hands pressed together beneath his cheek, as if …

As if what?

Starting with the shingles on the little roof.

Then the mechanic closing the hood, getting into the passenger seat, and sitting, waiting, tapping the dashboard to the music.

Never, as far as I can remember, actually looking at the engine.

Camp must have been wonderful. Quote unquote.

Push the piano into the lake.

Which, of course, I considered.

An awe that what he might have seen in there would have made sense to him.

Why didn’t Myles just burn another copy?

The moonlight, the darkness, the sheen of her nightgown, the shine on his forehead.

Mother had changed into a pair of blue shorts.

But the piano was wider than the doorway.

Dad at work, Mother inside, me sitting on the upper branches, prying shingles off with a stick.

Mother wearing dark sunglasses much too big for her head.

My head where the window used to be.

And yet.

My feet in the doorway.

Myles could’ve made a thousand new copies, as many as he wanted.

Even especially things we’ve grown attached to.

I just don’t understand: it’s as if the tree house is shedding shingles. Quote unquote.

Leaving the front door unlocked behind her, Mother getting behind the wheel and driving off with the mechanic singing.

I should have brought an extra layer.

The yellow shorts she didn’t stop me from removing one summer afternoon when we were sixteen.

A different pair.

Maybe the mechanic was only listening?

For grinding, whining, knocking?

Recitals.

Sound, again, and its memories.

Sliding off the roof, twisting to the ground, some landing flatly, others on their corners, bending, snapping.

I nail them back in place, and then it happens all over again. Quote unquote.

And what does it all amount to?

A scorn for acquiescence.

Leaving the greasy rag on the driveway.

A test drive, merely?

Maybe it’s the tree trying to tell you something, I said.

At which they frowned.

Why didn’t Myles just burn another copy?

Strumming, drumming, cooing.

In my memory, only music and singing.

At the time all my reasons seemingly sound.

A final concert.

And every Saturday him climbing up the ladder and nailing the shingles back into place.

Up perplexedly and back down smiling, self-congratulatorily.

Leaving the greasy rag in the driveway, where Dad would find it several hours later.

A rag to wipe greasy fingerprints away.

All those years living with that bag, Myles never once asking what was inside.

While I watched from my tree.

Performing for the parents.

Even on the lake the awful noise.

Music, supposedly.

In thanks for footing the bill.

The blue sheets and blankets.

Grade-schoolers playing free jazz.

Sitting in the tree, watching Dad examine the mechanic’s rag.

This side, that side, all of it greasy.

Teenagers shrieking off-key concertos.

The pianist playing this key, that key, all of them sour.

Until finally I buried his hammer in her flower bed.

By September, this time of year, half the tiles having disappeared.

Looking and looking for the disk, until Myles finally gave up.

Keeping the little window open rain and shine.

Especially rain.

Motivations never having thought to question.

Removal of screws from the hinges of the little door.

And me never letting on I’d watched his video once, let alone a hundred times.

Only a few a day, clandestinely, so as not to arouse their suspicions.

Inside the little door, a little straw mat the color and shape of a sunflower.

The barricade, the riot cop, and the girl, her turquoise shirt with the giant daisy.

New, never having been stepped on.

A need to believe in the attainment of ideals.

The riot cop and the girl, and their embrace.

Rain.

Rotted, having been rained on.

And then the cop’s violent shove.

By the end of the month, the little shutters, loosened, blowing off.

All winter, from my bedroom, my childhood furniture, watching the little tree house fill up with snow.

The little curtains, white with daffodils, rotting.

In the spring, rain coming through the little windows.

Barefoot.

The embrace.

Dad and his ladder and an armful of shingles.

And a new hammer.

The shove.

Rotten particleboard crumbling.

Shingles sliding off by themselves.

Floorboards beginning to warp and rot.

The embrace.

Destruction being a form of dissection.

Inside, a little three-legged table with two little pale blue chairs.

The shove.

Now, all these years later, no trace the house was ever here.

Except for the nail holes, grown over, filled in.

The embrace.

A fluorescent green dog to guard my keepsakes.

And certain things I will continue to believe.

The shove.

Inside, the little walls all one color.

Blue.

He’d always said her nose was her mother’s. Her forehead too. Her mouth, her chin, her cheekbones, all her mother’s. But Garland hadn’t seen her in so long that he was surprised, after all this time, by her unexpected resemblance to himself. He couldn’t have explained why, but it made him smile, such a superficial thing. And he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he saw the similarity. Not in specific features. Her eyes didn’t come from him, but neither did they come from her mother, though perhaps he could see traces—the same walnut shade of brown, the same alertness. Nowhere in the family albums was there anything like them, so big, so round, like a pair of orbiting moons. Always one to take control of an uncomfortable situation, her mother had been the first to declare her a positively ugly baby, and with such insistence that she would challenge anyone—Garland included—who stubbornly insisted upon finding her cute. She had always been a bright girl, and he thought her moon eyes lent her a sort of omniscience.

Around the table they approached the meal from whatever direction best suited their disposition: Garland caught himself meeting every forkful with a contemplative tilt of his head; Muriel chewed slowly, glancing distractedly around the table, as if afraid of missing something important. She prodded skeptically at the food on her plate, although she had cooked most of it herself. As always, Garland had made the salad dressing, his own special recipe. In between bites, his daughter’s eyes were surveillance cameras, sweeping every object in the room, every move of her parents’, every stain in the carpet. Had she not been his daughter, Garland might have thought she was casing the place. He marveled that she seemed so relaxed, as if the years between them had simply been erased now that she no longer had a use for them.

His daughter wore a dress, of all things. Garland never would have guessed she owned one. Despite the season, it was a light summer dress—pretty in a way, but also disappointing. Not until she arrived had Garland realized he had been awaiting a girl in frayed jeans and sneakers with the soles worn low. An image born not of simple nostalgia, though, but from a profound sense that there was no other way for her to be.

In the days leading up to this dinner, Garland and Muriel hadn’t been able to stop speculating about what it meant, this sudden, enigmatic reunion. Their daughter had offered no real explanation. Despite his wife’s skepticism, Garland hadn’t asked for one. She had said she was calling from a hotel, of all places. Nearby, in Detroit. She’d said she wanted to come for dinner. She was bringing a friend, a girl named April. In the end, the girl hadn’t been able to make it, but their daughter had. And here she was.

Her hair didn’t have her mother’s waves or his—admittedly thinning—curls. She had dyed it. Blond. Every time he caught a glimpse of the color, he felt something seize in his heart.

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?