Angels of Detroit (32 page)

Mrs. Freeman raised her glass to her mouth, and then she seemed to smirk—or was it a smile? Tiphany couldn’t tell. She’d long ago lost track of what Mrs. Freeman was saying, and she’d been sitting in terror for several minutes, dreading the moment when she’d have to respond. Uncertain what to do, she raised her salad fork to the light of the candle between them on the table and rubbed her thumb over some imaginary watermark.

When she looked again at Mrs. Freeman, Tiphany saw it was a
smile
on the old woman’s face, and she understood the moment had come, the final reckoning. But she also realized the moment brought with it one final chance. If she could just figure out the right thing to say, Mrs. Freeman might perhaps forgive her. Maybe they could, after all, put everything else behind them.

But nothing came. Not the right thing. Not even the wrong thing. Tiphany kept rubbing the fork, as if a magic genie might pop out to save her. She couldn’t imagine Mrs. Freeman having floundered like this when she was her age—when she was any age, for that matter. The old woman must have thought her a complete imbecile.

And so it was with great relief that Tiphany looked up just then and saw the waiter approaching. She took that opportunity to glance once more at her menu, and she settled at last on the coq au vin. She
didn’t know what the
coq
was, but she was certain she needed as much
vin
as she could get.

Mrs. Freeman ordered the same thing, but the words rolled off her tongue as if she’d been saying them all her life. When the waiter left, Mrs. Freeman also seemed to have forgotten what they’d been talking about. In retrospect, Tiphany didn’t remember much else about the meal, perhaps because she’d worked so hard to repress the many ways in which she’d embarrassed herself. Unnecessarily, entirely out of kindness, Mrs. Freeman had given her a second chance. Tiphany had blown that one too.

Embarrassment was Tiphany’s principal recollection of that entire trip. Embarrassment and disappointment. Disappointment because she discovered she liked Mrs. Freeman even more than she’d expected. She liked Mrs. Freeman so much, in fact, that in the years following the convention, as she grew more settled into her position, she ceased to debate with herself about whether it was right for her to be working for a company that profited from pollution and war and destruction. As Mrs. Freeman said, they were the conscience.

Mercifully, the old woman had let her keep her job. She’d even reimbursed her the ten dollars she’d tipped the bellhop, without Tiphany having to ask. And yet it was clear to Tiphany that the old woman’s feelings for her had changed. The more she tried to make up for her mistakes, the more Mrs. Freeman seemed to resent her.

The morning the investigators showed up at Tiphany’s apartment, the trip to New Orleans was two years in the past, but for the last hour she’d been able to think of little else. She wasn’t surprised to see the men in their dull gray suits, though she wasn’t quite ready for them either. It was eight-thirty, and she hadn’t bothered to dress for work. Sasha had already left for his studio. Tiphany was still trying to understand the story she’d seen on the news. Last night, extremists—terrorists of some sort—had broken into HSI. They’d taken the
guards hostage and barricaded themselves on the third floor.
Her
floor. When Tiphany had left for the day, Mrs. Freeman had still been working there. Tiphany had left her all alone.

“Is she okay?” Tiphany said, looking from one man to the next. “They didn’t hurt her, did they?”

One of the investigators opened his briefcase and took out some photos. They were mug shots of five or six people, all close to Tiphany’s age.

“Have you seen any of them before?” one of the men said.

“Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?” said the other.

Was it possible, Tiphany wondered, that she’d somehow failed Mrs. Freeman again?

Sylvia remembered the first time, waking in the night, thinking
something’s missing
.

Looking at the empty half of the mattress beside her, the discolored pillow, thinking,
There was something here that’s gone
.

And then, in the morning, she found him asleep beside her, breathing through his mouth, like the boy she once knew.

But still there was that feeling:
Something is missing
.

All day long at work, on her feet, trying to understand what it might be.

He mistook the sound at first for birds. He was blocks away when he heard the chirps, several of them at once, floating in from different directions.

But on second thought, the sound was too dull, the edges of the notes too static. There was no music in it. And it was the middle of the night.

As he drew closer, he saw the forklifts, crawling through the streets, pushing and pulling pallets stacked high with produce, beeping as they went.

It was Saturday, market day. Dobbs had lost track. The sun was nowhere near risen yet, but the overhead doors of the hangar-like buildings were open. Inside he could see vans and panel trucks and pickups. Harsh fluorescent light leaked out from every opening. Everyone was busy, brigades of exhausted-looking people ducking in and out of the backs of trucks.

One of the enormous sheds was in the process of being transformed
into a greenhouse, waist-high terraces of pink and white and yellow and red, all in rows, stretched out like the stripes of some exotic flag.

In the other buildings, in the open-air stalls, there was so much produce, it hardly seemed like food. Potatoes were tossed together like rocks; the unwashed carrots and turnips looked like grotesque deep-sea creatures, with their tentacle roots.

No one seemed to notice Dobbs. His exhaustion was indistinguishable from theirs. From the sidewalk he picked up a small, empty crate. As he went, he filled it. Something here, something there. He didn’t know what half of it was. His hands did his thinking for him. No one thought to stop him.

This time the note was stopped up in an empty water bottle, cast onto the porch, as if it had made the voyage here by sea.

Dobbs fished the slip of paper through the neck.
Delay
, it said.
Four weeks
.

He tossed the note into the corner with the others.

It was late June. By now Dobbs was supposed to have been done and gone.

But there’d been problems. First it was
ten days
. Then
two weeks
, then
three
. What did they even mean when they said “delay”? It wasn’t as if they were running a factory. There were no raw materials to run out of, no supply lines to get tangled, no labor disputes, no bureaucratic holdups at customs. The entire business had only one piece: take people from here and move them to there. What did that leave? It didn’t take months to change a flat tire.

He’d already spent almost all the money they’d given him in advance, the setup funds. There’d be no more until the shipment arrived.

In the meantime, he’d done everything he could with the warehouse. Sweeping alone had taken weeks. A strange, dense dust had filled the place: crumbling block, flaking paint, shards of rust and glass.
His broom had moved across the floor like a shovel through mud. It was as if the floor were made of this—sediment and nothing more.

And he’d spent more weeks clearing away the junk and rubble: cable spools as tall as he was, piles of rusty disks and rebar. Everything was deceptively heavy. Even scraps of wood seemed to have doubled their weight from the damp.

In addition to the mattresses, he’d gathered food, every dented can he could find within twenty square miles. And he had half a dozen syrup barrels, swiped from a bottling plant. He’d filled them with water at the sewerage department.

And now he had four more weeks to wait.

He dreamed he was in an ice cream shop. It was a clean white space. Lots of small tables, matching chairs. Every seat was full. The customers were men, each one dressed in the same tan linen suit. There must have been at least twenty of them, identical but for their ties. The ties came in reds and blues and burgundies. None of the men were eating. They sat perfectly still, brown paper napkins draped across their laps, as if waiting to be served.

Dobbs was minding his own business, bent over the ice cream case, trying to choose what he wanted. But he didn’t recognize a single flavor. The names were typed onto plastic cards, but they made no sense.
DON’T BE AFRAID
, one of them said. Inside the tub was an orangey soup. Deep within the next tub Dobbs saw a forest, a copse of trees bending in the breeze.
LOOK BEHIND YOU
, the label read.

It was the girl from the bookstore, from the demonstration. McGee. She was directly behind him. She was even smaller than he’d remembered. There were butterflies now beneath the glass, flitting among the ice cream tubs.

When Dobbs looked again, the men in the tan linen suits had gotten to their feet. They stood shoulder to shoulder now, brown
paper napkins tucked awkwardly into their collars. Side by side with their backs to the counter, Dobbs and McGee were surrounded.

“Don’t be afraid,” McGee said, patting his arm.

Beside the cash register was a Lucite box. Inside the box, on the very top shelf, a row of cardboard cups were arranged by size, from small to large. On the shelf below sat a pair of cones, one sugar, one waffle. As McGee reached inside, Dobbs saw the cones weren’t real. They were plastic, for display only. McGee placed the sugar cone in her palm, pointy side up, and then she turned to the nearest man, driving the cone into his open mouth, impaling him with a single jab.

“What do you have against light?” she said.

Dobbs opened his eyes, and the chair teetered beneath him. He caught his balance just in time.

The ice cream shop had vanished. He was back in the house, sitting at the table, a small pile of carrot tops in his lap.

Clementine stood in the doorway to the kitchen, sun blasting at her back, book bag slung over her shoulder. Dobbs hadn’t seen her in more than a month, since the run-in with her mother.

He closed his eyes again, but McGee was gone.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Clementine let her book bag slip to the floor. “Afraid you’ll get me grounded again?”

He stood up, carrot tops spilling to the floor. “I was thinking more of myself.”

He walked over to the crate. He’d already eaten the more appealing things. Among the remains were some sort of bulbous purple root and something big and green and leafy that didn’t quite look like lettuce.

“I wanted to make sure you’re still alive.”

Dobbs rooted around until he found a cucumber, something that could at least be eaten raw. “Want any of this?”

Clementine lifted her bag. “Come on,” she said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Not this again.”

She came over and grabbed the cucumber and dropped it back into the crate. “Trust me.”

It was too easy to forget how young she was, like a tiny adult in cheerful clothing. He still couldn’t bring himself to disappoint her.

She didn’t run this time. There was no treasure hunt through the weeds and brambles. Instead, Clementine led him in a straight line across the field from his house.

Over the last several months, the lots had turned into meadows of wildflowers, tall green stalks wearing tiny lace caps. The foundations and even much of the trash had disappeared. The trees that had surprised him when he first arrived had swollen into pockets of plush green jungle. In the early spring he’d been able to go upstairs and see for miles, but now the view was everywhere interrupted by explosions of foliage and vines.

Evening was coming across the sky in streaks.

Clementine had come to a stop. “What do you think?”

They were standing beside a garden. The last time he’d followed her they’d passed this way. But since then everything had gone from brown to green.

At the far end of one of the garden rows, an elderly black woman was backing out of a tangle of little red balls, the tiniest tomatoes Dobbs had ever seen.

“May-May,” Clementine said.

The old woman tilted her head in their direction. Then May-May was ambling toward them in rubber boots and a long summer dress, a dubious expression on her face.

“Our neighbor,” Clementine said.

When the old woman brought her hands together, they sounded like sanding blocks. “Your grandpa told me.”

That was Dobbs’s cue. Digging his heel into the ground, he pivoted back in the direction from which they’d come.

Clementine grabbed his arm, holding him there. “He needs food.”

“Thanks,” Dobbs said. “But I’ve got everything I need.”

The old woman came forward, handing him a bucket. Inside, a head of lettuce poked out of a web of green beans.

“Come back if you need more.”

“I will,” he said, knowing there was zero chance he would.

§

His clothes that night came off like Band-Aids, sticky with sweat. He sat on the mildewed tile of the water and sewerage department locker room, a frigid rain falling on him from the showerhead.

Wake up, he told himself. Wake up. Think of the cold, the numb in your toes, the goose bumps prickling your arms.

Hunger is temporary. It’s all a test, to see what you’re made of.

He reached up to turn the handle, but the cold was already open as far as it would go.

He dried off with a fresh jumpsuit from the supply closet, leaving his own clothes soaking in the sink.

In the van he ate the last four green beans from the bucket.

§

He was leaning against a wooden pallet when she found him.

“Sleep well?” she said.

The sun was up, puddled in the arms of a sprawling oak at the edge of the lot.

Dobbs had a vague memory of a chase on top of a moving train, leaping from car to car. Who’d been doing the chasing, he wasn’t
sure, but he was certain McGee had been there beside him, her clothes stained with someone else’s blood.

But the dream seemed far-fetched now, down here in the dirt.