Angels of Detroit (44 page)

“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.

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.

None of this was what she’d expected.

and rain increasing interest rates another quarter of an hour we’ll be talking with the head of the American Way, a think-tank with close ties and two losses leading into the play-offs but the team doctors say

Oh, what do they say? she wondered with extravagant indifference.

She was reaching out again for the pliers, to turn them once more, when she happened to notice, out of the corner of her eye, the light above the elevator door. It was moving.

McGee reached for the ignition, but she turned the key the wrong way. Instead of silencing the radio, she nearly started the engine, catching herself just as the few working dashboard lights flashed on.

She slipped out of the truck as the elevator doors were parting.
After four hours of waiting, everything suddenly seemed to be happening all at once, before she was ready.

Out of the elevator stepped a gray-haired woman with her head in her purse, searching for her keys.

“Mrs. Freeman? Ruth Freeman?”

The old woman stopped, lifting her head from the mouth of her bag. She didn’t answer, but she stopped. And as she watched McGee come toward her, she seemed to tense. If McGee had been a man, she wondered, would the old woman have kept moving, instead?