Clarity shot painfully through my brain. We didn’t have what we needed in Europe Town, not because it wasn’t available as we were led to believe; we didn’t have it because the government didn’t want us to have it. I wondered if my parents knew the truth, and then it occurred to me that my father saw wealth and plenty every day when he came to work and never said a word.
“Does anyone work in your family?” John asked, frowning. “I mean, it’s clear they work. But does your father have a job in the city?”
“His father is a bus driver, Dad. You know that,” Jackie said. “’Every head of household who is physically able must work.’”
“He drives dignitaries around town,” I said.
I was proud of my dad, yet there seemed to be an undercurrent of derision about my family, and it succeeding in making me feel a sense of shame.
“Well, this cake is wonderful,” Darleen said, changing the subject. “And for breakfast, we’ll have pancakes.”
It would be gluten filled evening, with cookies for my bedtime snack.
While I lay in bed thinking about all of this, my finger throbbed from a paper cut. John had given me a glossy magazine filled with photographs of cars displayed at what he called the Auto Show and leafing through it, the heavy stock sliced my finger. “I’ll get a Band-Aid,” Darleen said.
“Don’t get blood on the magazine now,” John said, reaching for it.
“Here. I bought him a Mickey Mouse,” Darleen said, laughing.
“Where the heck did you get that?” Jackie asked.
“I gave it to her,” Miri said. “Dad found a box in the chest when he was setting up your old room for Steve.”
Peeling paper off the bandage, I’d never seen Mickey Mouse. “Who is it?” I asked.
“He’s a famous cartoon character,” John said. “You wouldn’t know him, but someone maybe five or ten years older than you would.”
Laying in that soft bed, the slight fishy smell of the lake, the fog horns blasting occasionally and the rumble of my stomach not accustomed to the rich desserts, waves of sadness combined with an emotion I couldn’t identify immediately rolled through me. I looked at my finger in the dim light, at the smiling mouse with the red shorts looking up at me. Turning to the wall, I started to weep, and when I was all cried out, I realized the other emotion I felt was guilt. Comfort, cake and Mickey Mouse combined, my possibilities had increased exponentially by the simple act of leaving my family.
***
Tuesday, I didn’t get up until after ten. There’d be no school for me all week, the time allotted for acclimation into a new environment. As the family relaxed around me that morning, I heard the buzz words; trite acronyms and euphemisms the government and its members used that were supposed to unify them in a single cause; honoring the leadership above all. CFA, Coalition First, Always was one of the most annoying. Jackie repeated it constantly. If he made a faux pau, usually something negative that seemed unrelated to anything, he’d sing in everything give thanks…to the Coalition.
“I think we’ll go downtown,” Darleen said. “Jackie has the day off to spend with us. We can go to Greektown and have a Coney dog for lunch. Would you like that?”
“What’s a Coney dog?” I asked.
“I thought you were Greek,” Jackie said. “It’s a hot dog with chili on top.”
“I am Greek, but I never heard of a hot dog,” I said. “Is that a Greek food?”
“You never heard of a hot dog? You’re freakin’ kidding me, right?” Jackie said, losing patience.
“Jackie,” Darleen warned in a low voice.
“Oh, right! In everything give thanks…to the Coalition!”
I thought whatever dude. The reason behind Jackie’s deescalating behavior was becoming apparent, even to a twelve-year-old. He was jealous of the attention Darleen gave me. Used to two women doting over his every need, now he had to share them with me. I didn’t think that bode well for the future since we hadn’t even been together twenty-four hours.
“I’d like to go,” I finally answered. Anything to get out of sitting and conversing with these two. “Will Miri and John come with us?” I’d failed at hiding the anxiety in my voice.
“Would you feel better if they did?” Darleen asked.
“Well, I guess,” I said. Having the old people tag along would temper Jackie’s growing hostility.
“Let’s go!” Darleen said.
We tromped out to the car, John sitting in front this time and me squashed between Miri and Darleen.
John gave a geography lesson on the streets of Detroit as we drove downtown. “The city planned by Woodard in perfect geometry, with rectangles and triangles intersecting, their points cut off to form the parks around the city.”
“It’s confusing,” Darleen said. “I can’t drive because all I do is go around in circles.”
John pointed to a street sign. “This is Michigan Avenue. You can take that across the entire state. It was named for the state…”
“Dad, careful,” Jackie warned.
“What’s Michigan?” I asked, acting innocent but aware Jackie was trying to shut his father up. I’d stir the pot a little bit. Darleen had mentioned Michigan just the day before.
“This is Michigan! We’re in it right now. It was a portion of land that along with forty-seven other portions made up the United States of America.”
“Is this something I was going to learn in school once I turned thirteen?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” Darleen said. “So best not to say it out loud to anyone but us.”
“Next thing you know, they’ll teach the kids the earth is flat,” Miri said.
Jackie turned off the street into an alley. “I have to run into the office for a bit. Traffic sucks and I don’t think we’ll get any closer to Greektown than this. We’ll park in the garage and take the elevator,” Jackie said.
“Have you ever been to City Hall?” John asked, looking over the back of the seat at me.
“Dad, how would that have come about?” Jackie asked, annoyed. It appeared no one was safe from Jackie’s mood today.
“Right,” John answered. “We should take him inside.”
“Not this trip,” Jackie replied. “All the leadership converged for a meeting last night right next door. There’s probably another event there today. I don’t want to risk running into Razor.”
“Does he live here?” I asked.
“Nope. This is Coalition headquarters, no one lives here.”
From my center seat, I couldn’t see the building until he was right next to it, and then it was just a concrete slab of the parking garage. It looked like the same garage where Billy parked his government car.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve been in this garage before,” I said.
“When you arrived yesterday and came to see me?” Darleen asked and I nodded my head. “No dear, that was the apartment garage. You’ll find lots of garages in the city.”
“He sure will. This town used to be called Motor City,” John said. “The birth of the auto industry started right here.”
“What’s the auto industry?” I asked, remembering the rusted out hulks piled up along the route to Detroit when I was in the car with Billy and Connie.
“Why, it’s the manufacturing of cars! It used to be that every household had two or more cars.”
The idea was unfathomable to me. “No one has a car in Europe Town.” But then I remembered something. “But my uncle has the stick shift from a ’67 Chevy Two.”
“No way!” John said.
“Dad, didn’t you have a Nova?” Jackie said, parking the car.
“I did,” he said, sighing. “It was a fine car.”
“Bright yellow!” Mira said. “We looked so good in it, didn’t we dear?”
“Let’s get out,” Jackie said. “Take the elevator down and wait across the street. We’ll catch a bus over to the restaurant.”
�
��Mira, John, you take Steve,” Darleen said. “I’m going to go up with John. I just remembered I need to sign my leave of absence form.”
“Why do you need to do it now?” Jackie asked, whining.
“Because I won’t get paid if I don’t meet the deadline,” she answered.
That was enough for him. “Yes, by all means you’d better come up!”
They walked toward the staircase and Miri led us to the elevator. “Jackie told me you liked riding down in the car.”
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling foolish over something a five-year-old would like.
We climbed on but the ride down wasn’t as exciting the second time. The door opened onto the street packed with people. I noticed the clothing worn right away; although I saw uniforms like what Darleen and Connie wore, most people wore regular clothes, similar to what we wore at home but not as raggedy.
Rose and her few dresses came to mind, the care she took maintaining them, her nylon stockings mended with flesh-colored silk threads my grandmother had saved from some forgotten time, washed out carefully and hung in her bedroom so to not expose the rest of the family to her laundry.
Miri reached for my hand as we crossed the street.
“Wow, look at the building!” Across the street, to the south the majestic towers of the Renaissance Center stood. “What’s that place?”
John opened his mouth to speak when a whizz of gun fire could be heard behind us, followed by screaming.
“What was that?” Mira said as she swirled back around toward City Hall.
“That’s machine gun fire,” John shouted, grabbing her hand. “Come, let’s get out of here.”
“We have to wait for Jackie,” Miri screamed.
“No! We’ll catch up with him later,” John said, dragging us along. We reached the next street and crossed against the red light with a mass of people pushing and shoving,
The screaming intensified as more machine gun fire echoed throughout the streets, and people started pouring out of City Hall, running west.
“Where should we go?” Miri cried. “Where is it safe? Maybe we should turn around and go home.”
“Trust me, Miri. The west gates are the evacuation gates. They’re the exit gates.”
She pulled back, not wanting to go too far from her son, worried they’d get smashed in the stampeded of people. Suddenly, a blast shook the ground so violently; those on unsteady feet fell to the ground.
John grabbed us in bear hugs as we waited for the tremors to stop.
“Don’t look!” he screamed.
Others continued running, but a few looked back and reported what they were seeing.
“Oh God! The Renaissance Center!”
A second blast, this one closer, set everyone in motion again, this time running as fast as we could toward the westside gates on Michigan Avenue. Miri started crying, worried about her only son, Jackie.
We were all out of breath, but I had to hand it to John, he didn’t slow down for a man his age, he was probably only sixty but at the time, but he seemed ancient to me. Almost sprinting, dragging us slower two behind him, his fear was palpable.
“We’ll talk when we get out of town,” John said. “It’s imperative that we get the hell out of town.”
“Is it terrorists?” Miri said.
“No,” John gasped, out of breath. “Not like the terrorists we had back in Oklahoma, or later, in New York and Washington. These will be home grown, you mark my word.”
“Where’s that?” I asked, the places he rattled off foreign to me.
“I’ll tell you later,” John said, pulling me to him with Miri on his other side. “We’re almost there.”
The crowds had thinned out, people walking instead of running now that the west gate was in sight. I saw people sitting on the curb, crying. There was a man laying on his side in the street, his back to me.
“I think that guy is dead,” I said.
“He could be,” Miri said. “God rest his soul.”
“I know about Tiresias,” I retorted, getting their attention. It suddenly felt important that I tell them.
As soon as we had left the house for our hot dog lunch that never was, I thought of Penelope. When the blast hit, I thought of her again, glad that she was safe behind the fences.
“We know you know. That’s why you’re living with us. Or were going to live with us. It looks like we might be leaving the city for good.”
We turned around just in time to see an enormous fireball that appeared to zip from across the river and hit what was left of the riverfront downtown. The roar of humanity, those terrified, like we were, grabbing onto each other and crying out, and those at ground zero, who were murdered in the bombing, echoed across the city.
“Oh no!” voices screamed.
“Jesus, it came from Windsor,” someone sobbed.
“No! It came from a boat on the river,” another shouted.
“Come on,” John cried out. “Let’s go.”
We started running again. At the gate, a makeshift message board was set up at the guard house. “We need to leave a message for Jackie,” John said. “We need to leave him an address. Do you think your folks would mind if we dropped by?”
They waited for my answer, looking at me with expectation while I considered their request. I could see the irony of the situation. “No. I think they would be happy.”
I’d be seeing my mom and dad in a few hours. The knowledge energized me.
Someone had retrieved notepads of paper from the guard house and John took a piece and wrote a note to Jackie, giving him my street name only. “We don’t want hundreds of people to show up on their door step.”
Taping it on the window, I didn’t see how Jackie would find it among the hundreds of others. Then I had an idea. “John, you should stick this bandage on the note. No one will touch it because it’s so gross and Jackie might remember it’s mine.”
“That’s a great idea,” John said.
Miri helped me peel it off my finger, the character with the ears distorted now from all the pulling. Teasing me, John took it at the edge, grimacing.
“Ew! Gross!”
In the midst of death and destruction, we were able to find some levity. It would be a defining moment for me.
Stay Tuned for Parts Six Thru Ten
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#13 Meet Me at the Beach Pam, Lisa, Nelda, Sister Mary and Sandra seek hints of their destiny.
Memory of the Color Yellow Page 17
