Unburying Hope (20 page)

“Oh no, I don’t like that look on your face,”
Frank shook his head.
 
“What are
you going to get us into?”

She stared at the screen but didn’t see him.

“Celeste,” Frank said, “we are getting
squeezed out.
 
It’s time for us to
leave home.
 
I know it’s not what
you want, but,” his voice tapered off.

“I’ve got a good one, Frank.
 
A plan.”
 
She cleared her head and looked at him.
 
“Give me an hour, I’m going to make a
new stencil.
 
I’ll meet you at the
bus terminal, it’s going to be utterly empty at night.
 
Except for sleeping homeless, but they
won’t care what we do.”

“Alright,” he said sheepishly.
 
“It’s like we’re an old married
couple,” Frank added, “except that you have a hot Army boyfriend.”

“He is hot,” Celeste said, guiltily wishing he
were there.

“So, let’s go,” Frank said, “you sign off.”
 
This was their favorite game, a modern
version of ‘you hang up first’.
 
So
many times, neither of them would hang up, they’d each absentmindedly leave
their apartments, laptops on, to find their Skype open hours later when they’d
each return to their own places.

This time, Celeste reached for the off button,
just in case Eddie did the unthinkable and came home while she was gone.

“You are NOT going to hang up on me, are you?”
Frank snorted, real pain visible in his face.
 
“How about I put a picture of something non-threatening in
front of my camera,” he said, “so he knows you’re not out with a strange
man?”
 
He pulled a travel magazine
from his bookshelf and stood it up in front of his camera.
 
“I mean a man who wants to get in your
pants,” she heard him laughing behind the magazine but knew that he was hurt to
have to consciously limit their open involvement.

“He knows you’re not a threat,” Celeste said,
suddenly realizing the sting of that double-edged sword.
 
“I’ll see you in an hour, I’ll go out
to grab a cab.”

“Not in your neighborhood,” Frank pulled the
magazine away, looking straight at her.
 
“Call for the cab, then I won’t worry.”

“It’s not that bad a neighborhood,” she said.

“They’re ripping it down all around you.
 
It’s so bad that the government is
bombing you.
 
So call the damn
cab.”

“I’ll see you in a while,” she said,
impulsively turning off Skype and her laptop by unplugging the power cord from
the wall.

The apartment was quiet.
 
It felt so empty that she tucked the
laptop under a sofa cushion to hide it from potential intruders.
 
She went to the coat closet and pushed
aside her winter coats, reaching for a black artist’s portfolio container
hidden against the back wall.
 
Even
before Eddie, she’d hidden it.
 
Didn’t want anyone to know that her only way of communicating was with
shaped cardboard and spray paint.
 
She penciled a drawing on an unused piece of cardboard and then cut out
the inverse of shapes she’d drawn.
 
It was a longer message than usual.
 
Her kiss goodbye.
 
She’d pack up and move, forced out by demolition and no transportation
out of her gasping, broken-down neighborhood.

She grabbed her purse, phoned for a cab and
was out the door in minutes, closing the door after checking to see that she’d
left a side lamp on in her bedroom and the stovetop light on in the
kitchen.
 
The place felt warm and
sleepily inviting when she came in late at night to soft lighting, but as she
turned her head, she wondered if the building would be standing in a few weeks when
her lease was to renew.

Millions of dollars were being channeled in an
almost desperate attempt to sweep away the reminders of community
impoverishment, and she now saw what she had not wanted to see, that her future
needed a dramatic redrawing.
 
She’d
held out longer than most of the people she used to nod to as she walked to and
from the bus to work.

She walked towards the arriving taxicab and
climbed in, looking back at her apartment building.
 
It was losing its hold on her.
 
The old people were gone from the neighborhood; there were
no longer mothers and strollers clogging the sidewalks.
 

It felt good to be out in the evening, heading
to party with Frank, hoping Eddie would return the next day.
 
Driving to a restaurant for dessert
with Frank and his expensive champagne bottle, she realized that she’d somehow
found her way to the dream part of the life she’d wanted but not known how to
conjure.
 
Moving would mean that
her own third of her life would now grow, she might actually think through what
she wanted for her future and take steps towards it, instead of living with
feet of concrete keeping her in the same old habits, unable to lift her head
above the rut of everyday life.

But the bus station and downtown called, and
she leaned back in the taxi, resting her head on the seat, grateful that she
was not home alone.
 
She felt like
a phoenix, escaping the void of her withering past, rising out to a new life
with places to go, beloveds to see, paint in her purse.

Chapter
Twenty-Three

Boarded up storefronts lined darkened sidewalks
sparkling with the sand-sized bits of glass from generations-ago broken windows.
 
Sad little stripping joints sat quiet with
no one at the door barking out to entice customers to the yellow lights, canned
music and nakedness inside.
 
The
bus terminal was the only building with any lights on, and they flickered
weakly.
 

She stepped quietly onto the sidewalk and
sidled up to the front door.
 
No
one was around.
 
She walked through
the lobby, it was deserted, chain link fences were installed in three of the
corners.
 
Offices behind the fences
were abandoned, empty and dark.
 
The
walls were covered with printouts declaring re-routes and service cuts.
 

She walked lightly towards the bus yard, still
no one in sight.

She heard Frank’s low voice, “We’d better not
get busted.
 
They never make you
look good in mug shots.”

She laughed as quietly as she could, “We could
make it your new Facebook profile pic, but your dad would kill you.”

He motioned a strangulation with both hands
around his neck, “You’re right, I could never go home again, the first criminal
in the family!”

She pushed aside a hurricane fence, making
herself as thin as she could, easing into the yard sideways thru an opening
just large enough for her.

Frank was squeezing himself through when she
barked, “No,” at him.
 
“I do this
alone, Frank.
 
It’s me and my
city.”

He nodded and turned, scanning the interior of
the terminal.

She snuck over to a parked bus, the line that
went up and down Michigan Avenue.
 
 
She put her purse down on the ground and
quickly extracted and unfolded her new stencil.
 
She grabbed it with one hand, tucked the spray paint cans
into her shirt neck and wedged first one foot, then the second into the small
opening between the bus bumper and the bus body, grabbing onto the windshield
wipers to stabilize herself.
 
She
placed the cardboard on the right window and pulled out the red can, spraying a
broken heart onto the large window.
 
She pulled out her white can and sprayed through the ‘We need each
other’ stencil underneath the heart, then sprayed a small HOPE with blue paint
as her signature.

She tucked the cans back into her shirt and
jumped nimbly off the bus bumper, heading over to the next bus parked in the
darkness.
 
She clambered up onto
its front end, wondering how many front windows she could deface in the few
minutes she had before someone, anyone had to find their way into the
terminal.
 
It was radio silence
from Frank, so she knew she was safe.
 
She sprayed, jumped down and kept going down the line of soon–to-be
mothballed buses.
 
She stopped
counting at 11, but kept going for a few more.
 
Some of these buses might not do routes tomorrow morning, so
she knew she’d have to cover enough to ensure that someone saw her
message.
   

When she ran out of red paint, she knew it was
time.
 
She stood, quietly, her
faith gone.
 
Her mother would be
heartbroken, she knew, to see the depths of Detroit’s downfall.
 
Her mother relied on the buses, as did
she.
 
The poverty of the city was
now going to crush its citizens, leaving them no chance of getting to far away
jobs, since there were no jobs in their neighborhoods.
 

Tears floated in her lower eyelids.
 
Her time here was done.

She walked softly into the light of the
terminal, motioned to Frank and headed to the front door, pushing the glass
door open to the street.
 
It
squeaked loudly.
 
Aged in its
hinges, it hung a quarter inch off kilter, just enough to ensure it couldn’t
close properly.

They walked quietly a few blocks, hand in
hand.
 
She edged up to a trash bin
and stealthily dumped the spray paint cans into the bottom, reaching in to
cover them with a left behind newspaper.

She motioned to Frank and he led her another
block or two away.
 
There were no
open businesses.
 
Clearly Frank’s
lovely memory of a restaurant nearby was just that.

The neighborhood was desolate except for nearly
invisible homeless people sleeping in closed store doorways, covered by tarps
and cast off cardboard which could not be expected to ward off the looming cold
weather.

Not,” he said, tripping over a foot jutting
out from a street stairwell, “our crowd.”

‘The cab driver said it’s a bad neighborhood.”

“And he left you?”

“He thought I was either Mother Theresa or
shopping for drugs,” she said.
 
“I
told him I was down here for champagne and dessert and I didn’t understand why
he kept looking at me from his rear view mirror.”

“He thought you wanted coke,” Frank
laughed.
 
He mimicked shorting
coke, “when you said dessert, he thought you meant sugar.”

“Oh, my god,” Celeste said.

“You’re such an innocent,” Frank said.
 
“How would you ever survive without
me?
 
I shudder to think.”

They walked block after block, shaken by the
emptiness.
 
The buildings were
dour, the sidewalks dirty with weeds growing through broken concrete.
 
The streetlights lit from twenty feet
above their heads, casting eerie glows as though expecting customers and
residents that would need their lights.
 

But no one moved.
 
The few people there were asleep on the hard pavement,
covered so that Celeste couldn’t be sure they were human.

The blocks all looked the same, Celeste
thought.
 
Utterly decrepit.

Six or seven blocks later, they began to
encounter small groups of people stumbling out of bars, loitering in front of
liquor stores.

“They’re ruining my buzz,” Frank said.

“Did you really bring your bottle?” Celeste
asked.

Frank pulled open his heavy wool black pea
coat, showing the bottle clutched underneath.
 
“I don’t know that we’ll find anywhere decent around here,
though.”

“No cheesecake for you,” Celeste said,
mimicking their favorite line from a sitcom they’d watched together
online.
 

She scanned the now-forming crowds.
 
They blended in with one glaring
difference.
 
She and Frank were the
only people speeding to get somewhere.
 
Everyone else loitered, leaning on walls, standing on sidewalks, no
momentum at all.

“I’m getting my creepy feeling, it’s how I
feel when I get out into the suburbs,” Frank said, “They’d just as soon shoot
you with their hunting rifle and stuff you and hoist you to a special spot
above the fireplace.
 
Here, it’s
worse.
 
It’s like zombies waiting
for a wakeup call.”

“Don’t scare me,” Celeste said.
 
“We should have stayed home.”

“No way.
 
I finally get a night out with my girl.
 
And your hair looks good.”