Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Everything was gone. Hudson’s, where she’d spent almost as many hours as she had at school, had been imploded years before, 2,800 pounds of explosives turning the twenty-eight stories — more than two million square feet — into 330,000 tons of rubble.

The Gratiot Drive-In, where Francis Statler had finally kissed her, was a strip mall now. It was hard to say if that was better or worse than remaining an abandoned hulk, a freestanding waterfall run dry.

And the cars, which had been all anyone cared about then — the city largely imported them now. They were someone else’s pride and joy.

There were more than ten thousand empty houses in the city. Her childhood home in Palmer Woods was one of them. The last time she drove by — for no reason other than curiosity — the roof wore an immense blue tarp, and the glass was gone from the windows, even in the small dormers in her brothers’ old bedrooms. She couldn’t bring herself to stop. A few other houses in the neighborhood looked just as bad, but as a whole Palmer Woods was still one of the best neighborhoods in the city. On the way back out to Woodward, she passed Francis Statler’s house. It, at least, was as presidential as ever, the lawn still perfectly manicured. Someone else owned it now.

For weeks after that drive through Palmer Woods, Ruth had debated buying her old house on Balmoral Drive. She’d gone as far as to have a contractor acquaintance of her husband’s go through it to see what it might take to restore the place. Nearly half a million dollars was his estimate, all for a house that in her lifetime would never be worth even a fraction of that. David, her second husband, would never agree to live there. She knew better than to ask.

For David, there was no city. As far as he was concerned, the whole place had been bulldozed decades ago, leaving nothing but an immense blank he sometimes needed to pass through to visit friends in Grosse Pointe. That Ruth consented to come here every day to work was for him just another mark of her eccentric character. Her colleagues would have been mystified to learn that at home she was in this regard the hopeless romantic, and that David, despite his full-time devotion to leisure and exotic produce, was the practical one.

Ruth was not ashamed to admit that part of her lived in the past. David was content to live in the eternal present. Nothing was permitted to remain in his life longer than a couple of years. Periodically he would cast away every last piece of furniture, and she would come home to find last year’s Asian transformed into this year’s rustic modern. He’d never worn down the heel of a shoe or the tread of a tire. Things came and went. It was a wonder he hadn’t yet grown tired of her, although without her he could never have afforded such profligacy.

She rarely complained.

At thirty-three, Ruth Freeman had decided to remake her life. And unlike the city, she had succeeded. And that was why she sat here now, in a walnut-lined boardroom surrounded by a phalanx of balding men in boxy suits impatiently waiting for her to sign off on the proposal before her, to add her rubber stamp to theirs.

The presentations were over, their case laid out. All they needed, all they had wanted for the last hour, was her okay. She could not blame them for their irritation. For decades she had been training them to imagine they had her agreement, her consent. Without that, she never would have made it to where she was, the only woman among their ranks.

But it was impossible for her not to think back on her old life. And on the other lives she might have lived. If not with her first husband, whose vision of her was only as large as the kitchen and the bedroom, then with Francis Statler, that strange, gentle boy. Sometimes she wondered if he had ever found a world in which he fit. His family had moved away while Francis was in college back east, and Ruth lost track of him after that. He never resurfaced for reunions, never appeared in any corporate profile. She could have found out, of course, if she had wished, but in truth she liked it better this way. She wanted to leave the past as it was, as it remained in her memory, with Francis showing up at her door unexpectedly at the end of August 1958, the week before he was to leave for college, and announcing it was over.

“We’ve had a lot of fun,” he said, reaching out for her hand. “But it’s time to move on.”

And as he strolled back down her walkway, she wept, quietly at first so he wouldn’t hear. But as soon as he was gone, she let it all go, burying her face in her pillow, glad for once of the din of her brothers in the room next door. That letting go was the first of many, and it was important to her that it be preserved.

She let go of the house on Balmoral, too. Some things were beyond saving. By now it was probably gone for good, scooped into Dumpsters, another blight erased. As if somehow emptiness could hide what had been there before. And now the neighbors who remained tossed grass seed onto the filled-in foundation and tasked their children with keeping the lot mowed. They did not want to think about the contagion, that with every passing year their own homes were worth less and less.

Where did it all go, the rubble they swept away? Where was there a landfill big enough to swallow an entire city? What sense would they make of it, archeologists two hundred million years from now trying to sift through these layers of sediment and reconstruct what had happened here?

Almost nothing remained, but it wasn’t nostalgia she felt for the city of her youth. Nostalgia was for coping with the passage of time, with the inevitability of decay. Nostalgia was the Motown they played on the radio. But nostalgia had no answers for a tragedy of this scope. That was what David couldn’t seem to understand, the way her heart prickled sometimes at the thought that things could have been different, that in some ways she felt herself to be at fault. And that she and everyone else she had known back then had awakened too late, and by the time they realized the destruction they’d set in motion, all the accent walls and fresh coats of paint in the world could not undo it.

From her teenage years, only the cherry-flavored ginger ale remained, that dreadful stuff. It still made her tongue curl.

And the other executives continued staring at her, waiting for her to complete the circle of ayes.

“The factory’s redundant,” Arthur was saying yet again. “And given what it would cost to repair and modernize, we don’t have any other choice.”

“What about the city?” Ruth said, her eyes drifting back to the shuttered island out the window. “What about that?”

“There comes a time,” Arthur said, “when you’ve got to accept you’ve done everything you could.”

“A drop in the bucket,” Ruth said. “An investment, PR.”

Arthur frowned with fatherly disappointment. He was eight years younger than she. “We’ve talked about all that, the costs and benefits.”

Quietly in the corner, pencil poised as she took the minutes, Tiphany was nodding.

“You have all the votes you need,” Ruth said. “If you want to shut it down, shut it down.”

“The board prefers consensus.”

“Well,” Ruth Freeman said, rising from her chair and letting her pen clatter to the table, “they’re not going to get it.”

Huddled together in the still, dark night, staring off at the same distant point, they must have seemed they were waiting for something exciting to happen. Thirty yards away, down the alley behind the HSI Building, the door of the loading dock was open, its shadow slightly shortened by a single overhead bulb.

April had discovered it was hard to maintain her balance, biting her nails while squatting. Her legs had grown so wobbly, she wondered whether she’d be able to get up and move when called upon to do so.