Angels of Detroit (35 page)

“My grandmother,” Darius said. “She had something just like that.”

Michael Boni put a hand on his back, pressing him forward. “Down the hall. Toward the back.”

Darius took a step and lifted his nose, trying to make sense of what he was smelling.

It was a straight shot down the hall, but along the way they passed the bedroom. Inside, the chicks were chirping. A few feet farther, Priscilla was flinging what Michael Boni guessed were his grandmother’s earrings against the door.

“What is that?” Darius said, edging toward the far wall.

Michael Boni kept walking, never looking back.

With the lights turned off, the garage felt like a cave. Michael Boni led Darius into the far corner. There he lifted up the tarp.

Each of the components was in a separate crate, and in the middle was the sack. Michael Boni reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of small white pellets. “It’s not what I expected,” he said. “Like tapioca.”

Darius took a step backward, knocking over an empty can of acetone.

“Fertilizer,” Michael Boni said. “It’s just fertilizer.”

Darius squinted into Michael Boni’s palm.

“Go on.” Michael Boni came forward. “Touch it.”

“I believe you.”

“You think it’s going to explode?”

Darius cast his eyes over some unfinished cabinet sections sprawled on the floor. “You made these?”

“You’re afraid.”

Darius fell silent.

“You’re afraid,” Michael Boni said again.

Darius put his finger to his lips, tilting his ear toward the door. Outside, a robin was whistling unevenly in the hickory.

Then Michael Boni heard it, too. Footsteps, and they were just outside.

He froze.

Before he could think of what to do, the door to the shop was creaking open. A triangle of light cut across the floor. A shadow head poked through the opening. Michael Boni tried to make out the silhouette, expecting to find a mess of red curls.

“Hello?” she said. A girl, a woman.

Not Constance. Not Clementine. Not the other great-granddaughter, either. She was peering into the darkness, hadn’t spotted them yet.

Michael Boni reached out and picked up his hammer.

Darius took a step forward. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

The woman let out a gasp, reaching out for balance. “I wasn’t expecting a surprise party.”

Michael Boni looked from Darius to the girl and back again. “What the fuck is this?”

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.

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.

Solid
ish
. 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
.

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.