Megan Abbott - Detroit Noir

When the detectives left, I rushed from the kitchen to find Mrs. O’Leary still seated at her favorite table near a pile of magazines she’d quickly gathered when she saw them enter.

“I only needed her dead,” said Mrs. O’Leary. “Poor lad.”

She shifted the papers before her, and that’s when the image assaulted me. That’s when I saw the article I’d read the month before only to satisfy her, the one in which casino chairman Terrance Lanni’s wife denies having an affair with a handsome local, the one that speculates she will lose her fortune if the affair is confirmed, the one that’s wrapped around a color photo of a woman with a thick bowl of black hair sprouting from a sharp widow’s peak, blunt red talons, a smile like a blade in her teeth.

Did Mrs. O’Leary know that the following month Terrance Lanni would resign as MGM Grand’s CEO after his wife was strangled to death in their Riverfront Towers apartment, that Bruce Donegan would bleed to death in a dark corner of the prison’s laundry room after being stabbed twenty-six times? “It was bound to happen,” was all she’d say, though I still wonder if things would have been different had I not turned that fateful card, if I’d refused to continue the reading, left my post at the table and ran home under a black sky that would bleed ice for the next two days. If, if, if. Despite her visions and machinations to save Detroit, the following year Mrs. O’Leary’s tearoom closed as the casinos opened, and she packed her china sets and her wooden plaque for the long journey back to Cork.

Her obituary said she was a member of the Gaelic League and a secretary of the local Preservation Society, known for the cuisine she served at her long-term Irish tearoom in Cork-town. She will be missed , the article stated, for her kindness, her generosity, and her willingness to help everyone who crossed her doorstep. Mrs. O’Leary died yesterday, and today I can tell a different story.

East Grand Boulevard

It was a hot sun and breezeless day. Solar rays pressed relentlessly against the fourth-floor nursing home window facing East Grand Boulevard. The home really had no recourse from the sun in its treeless section of what was called convalescent row only a spit north of Belle Isle. The rays penetrated the panes, boldly thrusting themselves far down the hall, some almost to the utility room. Some reached just to the nursing station, located midway on the floor, weaving over and under papers and medications on the countertop. Others lingered on the edge of the bare ceiling-almost-to-floor window where all of them had entered. Some settled by the exit door just by the window. But one wide and gentle ray curled around the corner of the first resident room, where it crept up on the bed of a sleeping fawn-colored old man and flopped across waiting for him to rouse.

As it waited, strands of it began wrapping around the old man’s toes and his fingers and caressing his lightly whiskered face. He whispered, Ooooh aahhh, and rubbed eyes crusty where the sands of sleep lodged; he hadn’t been bathed yet. He passed his hands up and down his cheeks and for no reason at all called out softly to his wife, the woman he called Mummy in life and in death, and she called him shuga-plum. She had been wife and mother to him and was good to their only child, a son who had become a world traveler; Lord in heaven knows where he is now. Mummy, you see how I come? Dog betta dan me.

But if Mummy were alive, not even she could have understood his stroke-slurred speech, further hampered by a tongue lightly purpled and slightly swollen from lack of use. The stroke took him quick and left him slumped and drooling in a pool of his own urine in the stairwell of the building he migrated to after his wife died. Tang God for the man who came by and found him.

Mummy would have said, Tang God , but that’s not what he thought through stroke-laced brain waves as the ambulance personnel arrived to carry him off. Oh Mummy, how could you leave me like this ?

Then, as they strapped him on the stretcher, Oh Lorse, take me now, he silently pleaded with the heavens.

I comin, Mummy, as the ambulance rolled toward Henry Ford Hospital. I comin by you.

But he didn’t meet Mummy then. The medical staff kept him from her, tidied him up and released him to the nursing home, where he hasn’t spoken one single intelligible word to one living soul since, except for silent prayers to his Mummy, beseeching her to come for him. He spoke not an intelligible word to the rotating crew that fed him the nursing home pap through his feeding tube and changed his dydee after feeding, not to the head nurse who often came in to pinch his big toe for a sign of life. In response he would grunt words she couldn’t understand, What de ass you want in here now? To the Catholic priest who came weekly to pray with him, he moaned. But he communicated fluently to the motes that swirled around in his room on sunny days as he mumbled messages for them to carry to Mummy.

More awake now, he blinked; the sun was so bright. Wait, nuh, where am I? Is as if, wait, nuh; where de hell am I? he asked a cluster of dust that settled on the back of the wide sunray; then he slipped into a dream of pelau on a Sunday beach and the crab he would catch between platefuls of the rice dish. He was seeing himself in this dream, nice and slim and handsome, catching the eye of a young Mummy rushing out to meet the waves at Mácuri Beach, between his legs getting hot as he chased after her, and just then a crab came from nowhere and bit his toe.

— What are you smiling at old man? It was the nurse pinching his toe. He cheups. Why de ass she can’t leave me alone?

She scanned the room as he eyed her through slits. Ah, chut, what she want now? Then he drifted off again to rejoin Mummy on the beach; she was dishing out the pelau and he was holding a bottle of peppa sauce waiting to dash it on the rice. It was he and Mummy for so long. She giving the peppa ; he getting the sauce. And now he was on this bed in this shit-ass nursing home waiting to rejoin Mummy.

All of a sudden the dream shifted to the dusty yard of his boyhood home in Oronuevo Village. His brother Toli comes along with a flat stick whittled from the coconut tree in the front of their house, and running up to him is their friend Alfonso, bowling a ball he had fashioned from a rock and some twine. Toli hits the ball but Winston, another friend from down the road, picks it up, pivots magnificently, and breaks the wicket. Well played, bhai! Alfonso yells out to Winston. Well played. Yuh finally break a wicket, bhai. The three of them, all early teenagers, smile big at the sexual innuendo and wave at the old man. Then Toli says, You’re up, brother, and the old man, who appears in his youth, is now batting. He is younger than Toli and taller; Toli is fairer; both are slim. Alfonso turns his back to the old man in the bed and begins running toward the young man, chest thrust forward, head high, ball in his right hand, left touching it, and almost leaps into the air to begin the hand-over-hand movements that add thrust to the bowl. Perfect, perfect. Yes, buddy, I can well remember those days as if dey were yesterday.