I had to pass the evening somehow.
The last thing that I wanted was to have to think.
Chapter 14
Reunion
She was due to meet me at the airport. New York to Detroit: one hour, twenty minutes, clean out of my life.
After so many air miles, I should have found a better way to pass the time. I used to read—the heavy stuff, Tolstoy, Dickens, Sartre—but this time, all I did was flick through a magazine, doze a while, and watch a sitcom with the sound turned off.
One day, I thought, I want that dead time back. Every flight, every bus ride, every train journey. Put in an expenses claim: five years in transit. Please recompense.
We landed. Disembarked. I scooped my luggage off the carousel and stumbled back into the real world.
Angel was there, leaning on a wall outside Arrivals, wearing an old black hoodie, faded jeans, and a Red Wings cap. She was watching something on her phone, her hip stuck out, her body in a graceful, athlete’s curve, and I wanted just to hang back in the crowd a moment, amazed that I even had a link to this extraordinary woman. I wanted—almost—just to slink away, to leave the scene as perfect as it was, before I’d had the chance to say the wrong thing and to ruin it.
I’d said the wrong thing lots of times before.
And done the wrong thing, too.
I’d walked out on her once—a long time back, but not too long for either of us to forget.
I had an awful sense of the fragility of life, how quickly and easily the good parts can slip between your fingers, gone before you’ve even noticed, and I teetered there, trapped in my own unease.
Then she looked up, and she saw me.
And she gave a big, big grin.
“Hey!”
I ran over. I dropped my bag. I threw my arms around her, felt the muscles moving in her back, and she hugged me like she was trying to squeeze the life out of me.
“I missed you. Riff missed you too.”
Riff was her pet pit bull, a grown dog with delusions of puppyhood.
“He gave me a message for you,” and she pulled back, just a moment, and I could see the mischief in her eye.
Then she stuck her tongue out and she licked me on the nose.
“Is it as bad as everybody says?”
“Detroit? Depends.” She pulled the car out of the parking lot. She wore shades and the cap and little gold studs shone in her ears. I had the coolest-looking chauffeur in America. “Depends on where you are. Who you are. Some’s worse, some’s better.” She spun the wheel. “Years since I was last there.”
“Didn’t inspire you musically?”
“Ha.” She hit a rhythm on the wheel with her hand. “Baby lo-ove, my baby love . . .”
She was very precise, very classical. I said, “You need to make it breathy. And, like, slur your notes more. Yeah?”
“Listen to you!”
“I’d have been a great music producer. I’ve got loads of hidden talents.”
“Like what, then, Mr. Music Producer?”
“Oh—I dunno. I bet I could play the piano. Or guitar, or something. I just never tried, that’s all.”
“Yeah. I bet you could, too.”
“Ooh. Sarcasm.” But then I said, “I’m glad I’m here.”
“Well, me too.” She gave me a sideways look. “You OK?”
“No. Don’t think I am.”
It happens, every now and then. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, and nothing will ever get to you again: something does. It’s that kind of a job.
Mostly you skate over the top of it. Things go the way they go, you deal with them, you move on. Then you see or do something, and it just gets inside your head and messes up your brain and nothing in the world can shake it loose.
I left the job once, for a few years. Found out I wasn’t all that good at anything else, and that I liked the independence and the perks of Field Ops much too much to quit.
But I never saw somebody kill themselves in front of me. Or had anyone embroil me in the run-up to it like that, either.
We drove in a sort of cloudy silence for a while. Then we broke for coffee and I started telling her about what happened, and once I’d started, I just couldn’t stop. She listened. She was good at that. She didn’t comment or try being helpful, just nodded, said, “Uh-huh.” Stopped me when I said something she didn’t understand, but that was all.
It took another hour to get to Angel’s parents’ place. A neat lawn sloped down to the street and a row of various ceramic owls guarded the porch. The house looked big to me, a great, wood-fronted, yellow and white mansion, but then, I’m English, and the scale of things is different here. As we headed in, she warned me, “Watch out for the canine cannonball.”