Megan Abbott - Detroit Noir

“Charles, really! I didn’t hide behind you. I hid behind the car seat.”

But I was in the car seat . “Look, you were acting instinctively. Instinct is impersonal. You acted to save a baby, and yourself. You had to save yourself in order to save the baby. It must be like suddenly realizing you can swim.” Charles spoke slowly, as if the idea were only now coming to him, a way of seeing the incident from a higher moral perspective. “A boat capsizes, you’re in the water, and in terror of drowning you swim. You discover that you can swim.”

“Except you don’t, Charles. You don’t just ‘swim.’ If you don’t already know how to swim, you drown.”

“I mean it’s nature, impersonal. It isn’t volitional.”

“Yet you seem to resent me.”

“Resent you? Camille, I love you.”

The truthful answer was yes. He did resent her, unfairly. Yet he knew he must not push this further, he would say things he might regret and could not retract. You don’t love me, you love Susanna. You love the baby not the father. You love the father but not much. Not enough. The father is expendable. The father is last season’s milkweed seed blown in the wind. Debris .

Camille laughed at him, though she was wanting to be kissed by him, comforted. After her acrobatics in the car, after she’d demonstrated how little she needed him, how comical and accessory he was to her, still she wanted to be kissed and comforted as if she was a wistful girl of about fourteen. Her smooth skin, her face that was round and imperturbable as a moon, maddening at times in its placidity. Charles had been attracted initially by the calmness of the woman’s beauty and now he was annoyed. Camille was thirty-six years old, which is not so young, and yet even in unsparing daylight she looked at least a decade younger, her face was so unlined, her eyes so clear. Charles, forty-two, had one of those fair-skinned “patrician” faces that become imprinted with a subtle sort of age: reminding Charles, when he had to consider it, of calcified sand beneath which rivulets of fresh water are running, wearing away the sand from within.

He was a corporation lawyer. He was a very good corporation lawyer. He would protect his clients. He would protect his wife, his daughter. How?

“Camille, don’t misunderstand me. Your instinct was to protect Susanna. There was nothing you could have done for me if one of those kids had fired the gun.”

“If you had been shot, we would have crashed anyway.

We might all be dead now.”

Camille spoke wistfully. Charles wanted to slap her.

“Well. We’re not, are we?”

Instead, they were in their bedroom in Bloomfield Hills. A large white colonial on a hill in Baskings Grove Estates, near Quarton Road. Leafy hilly suburb north of the derelict and depopulated city of Detroit where, years ago as a boy, Charles had lived in a residential neighborhood above Six Mile Road near Livernois until his parents, afraid of “coloreds” encroaching upon them, had panicked, sold their property, and fled. They were now living in Lake North, Florida. Charles thought of them as he tugged off his noose-necktie and flung it down. Some of them, they’d kill you as soon as look at you. They’re crack addicts, animals.

In the car returning home, Camille had tried to call 911 but the cell phone hadn’t worked, and now that they were home, and safe, Charles debated whether to report the incident to Detroit police, now that the emergency had passed. No one had been hurt, after all.

Camille objected, “But they — those boys — might hurt someone else. If they play that trick again. Another driver might really panic seeing the gun aimed at him, and crash his car.”

Charles winced at this. Really panic. As if he, Charles, had panicked only moderately. But of course he had, why deny it? Camille had been a witness. The swarthy-skinned boys laughing like hyenas in the rear bus windows had been witnesses.

While Camille prepared their dinner, Charles made the call. He spoke carefully, politely. His voice did not quaver: … calling to report an incident that happened at about 4:15 this afternoon on the Chrysler Freeway headed north at about the Hamtramck exit. A very dangerous incident involving a gun, that almost caused an accident. High school boys. Or maybe junior high … Charles spoke flatly describing in terse words what had happened. What had almost happened. Having to concede he hadn’t seen a license plate. Had not noticed the name of the school district. No distinguishing features on the bus except it was an old bus, probably not a suburban school bus, certainly not a private school bus, very likely an inner-city bus, rust-flecked, filthy, emitting exhaust. No, he had not gotten a very good look at the boys: dark-skinned, he thought. But hadn’t seen clearly.

In the kitchen, Camille seemed to be opening and shutting drawers compulsively as if looking for something that eluded her. She was in a fever, suddenly! She came to a doorway to stare at Charles who had ceased speaking on the phone, which was their land phone; he stood limply, arms at his sides, staring at the carpet at his feet. Camille said, “Charles?”

“Yes? What?”

“Didn’t whoever you spoke with have more to ask? Didn’t he ask for our number?”

“No.”

“That seems strange. You weren’t on the phone very long.”

Charles felt his face darken with blood. Was this woman eavesdropping on him? She’d left him to die, abandoned him to jeering black boys with a gun, now she was eavesdropping on his call to the police, staring at him so strangely?

“Long enough.”

Camille stared. A strand of hair had fallen onto her forehead; distractedly she brushed it away. “‘Long enough’ — what?”

“On the fucking phone. You call, if it’s so important to you.”

In fact, Charles had not called the police. Even as he’d punched out the numbers on his phone, he’d broken the connection with his thumb before the call went through. He hadn’t spoken with any police officer, nor even with any operator. None of what happened that afternoon seemed very important to him now. The boys (Hispanic? Black?) were punks of no consequence to him, living here on Fairway Drive, Bloomfield Hills; his revenge was living here, and not there, with them; his revenge was being himself, capable of dismissing them from his thoughts. The gun had (probably) not been a real gun and whatever had happened on the Chrysler Freeway … after all, nothing had happened.

“But I didn’t get a good look at them, Charles. As you did.”

There was nothing on the local Detroit news stations, of interest to them, at 6 p.m. But at 11 p.m. there came BULLETIN BREAKING NEWS of a shooting on I-94, near the intersection with Grand River Avenue: a trucker had been shot in the upper chest with what police believed to be a .45-caliber bullet, and was in critical condition at Detroit General. The shooting had occurred at approximately 9:20 p.m. and police had determined the shot had been fired by a sniper on an overpass, firing down into traffic.

Camille cried, “It was him! That boy!”

Charles switched stations. Film footage of I-94 near Grand River Avenue was just concluding. “Why should it be I-94? An overpass? The boys on the bus were headed in the other direction. They’d have been off the bus, wherever they were going, hours before. And miles away. It’s just a coincidence.”

Camille shuddered. “Coincidence? My God.”

“You still love me. Don’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“ Don’t you?”

“Shouldn’t I?” A pause. “I’m so tired …”

Knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he must sleep, he had an early meeting the next morning: 8 a.m., breakfast. At his company’s headquarters. Must sleep. They’d gone to bed, exhausted and creaky-jointed as an elderly couple, and Charles lay now stiff as a wooden effigy, on his back. He’d dismissed the incident (urine-colored school bus, smudge-skinned young punks, the ambiguous long-barreled weapon) from his mind, it was over. Beside him Camille lay warm-skinned, ardent. Wanting to push into his arms, to make love, with him, or wanting at least to give the impression of wanting to make love, which, in a long-term marriage, counts for the same gesture, in theory. See? I love you, you are rebuffing me. Charles was polite but unreceptive. What pathos in lovemaking, in stark “physical” sex, when life itself is at stake! Civilization at stake! Charles’s head was flooding with images like the screen of a demonic video game. (He had never played such a game. But he’d observed, in video arcades.) The ugly lumbering school bus he’d been trapped behind. The stink of the exhaust. How had it happened, had Camille been speaking to him? He’d become distracted, hadn’t seen the bus in time to switch to another lane, and if he’d done that, none of this would have happened. Seeing now the rear window of the bus: craning his neck upward, to see. What were those boys doing? The rear window was divided into sections and only the smaller panes could be cranked open. The pane at the left, directly in front of, and above, Charles, had been opened and it was through this window that the long-barreled revolver had been pointed. No! Don’t shoot! Not me! Now Charles saw vividly, unmistakably, the faces of the boys: They were probably not more than twelve or thirteen years old, with dark, demonic eyes, jeering grins, oily-dark hair. As he stared up at them, pleading with them, the gun discharged, a froth-dream washed over his contorted face like an explosion of light. Was he already dead? His face was frozen. And there was Camille screaming and pushing — at him — trying to get away from him, as he restrained her. Brake the car! Get away! He’d never heard his wife speak in so hoarse, so impatient a voice. For the baby was somewhere behind them, and nothing mattered except the baby.