Page 8 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“W hat do you think?”

“This is…what is this place?” I asked.

“My friend August and I used to come here,” Levi explained. “We spent way too much time in this exact spot rather than having our asses in desk chairs in the high school down the street, where we belonged.”

It felt a little like we were in the middle of the wilderness, but we were actually somewhere either in the city of Detroit or just at the limits of it. He had driven for a while and then started to cut down some side streets and we had ended up next to a large park.

“I can’t walk very far yet,” I’d cautioned but by holding onto his arm again, I’d managed to reach this destination.

“Is that a natural spring? How can that be?” I asked now, looking at where water bubbled out from between two large boulders.

“It’s either that or a broken water pipe that no one has bothered to repair for at least fifteen years. Here, you can sit.” He helped me lower down to rest on one of those rocks, and I was not going to be able to rise again without a lot of help.

It was so peaceful here, as if we weren’t in the city at all. The water gurgled and I heard birds and insects, too. It reminded me of my childhood. “We lived out in the woods, far away from everything when I was a kid,” I heard myself tell him.

“So does my little sister. She loves it.”

“All I wanted was to get away. I thought I’d live in a big city and work in biotech.” I’d had a lot of ideas about my future life, how I’d drive a convertible and have an apartment with a terrace. I hadn’t done any of that except for getting near a city. Optimism...

“You hated being in the woods that much?”

“No, I liked the woods. I like being here, too,” I answered.

He looked around and breathed deeply. “It’s not too bad,” he agreed.

“Is this what you do all day? You just hang around?”

He looked at me and I got the feeling that he was going to say something, but then he only shrugged.

“Wouldn’t you feel better if you were out of your sister’s basement?” I asked. “Wouldn’t your life improve if you had a job and a direction?”

“Who says I need to feel better?” Levi asked me.

“Why would you have bothered to send me the picture of a chicken if things were going so well? You would be busy with other stuff on a Thursday instead of meeting a stranger.”

“Yeah, I guess I would. How did you describe yourself? You’re desperate,” he recalled. “I guess that means your presence here is something else that doesn’t speak well for me.”

“It’s totally reasonable that you would feel bad when everyone else in your family leads normal, productive lives,” I encouraged.

“Damn.” He looked up at the sky. “Yeah, thanks.”

“We could help each other.”

Now he looked at me. “What? How?”

“I need to have more contact. More friends,” I explained again. “Bonds. I can go for days without speaking to anyone except for my cat and she doesn’t really like me. When my neighbor visited his daughter for a month, I went to the grocery store just so I could see people.”

He squinted, almost like my words had hurt him. “That’s pathetic.”

“I know,” I agreed. “So you could be a point of contact for me.”

“And what would I get out of it, except for the pleasure of your company?” Levi wondered.

“I could help you.”

“How?” he asked again, extremely skeptical. But I really could.

“I got my last boyfriend his job,” I explained. “I put his finances in order, too, and now he’s debt-free with a retirement account. His parents were very happy about it.”

“This is the guy who dumped you while you were recovering from your car accident? Wait a minute, who was driving?”

“He was. It was his car,” I said. “You can come to my apartment every day, like you’re going to a job, and I’ll make you work for real.”

“You’re thinking that I’ll scam my sister into believing that I’m productive.”

“You actually would be productive,” I corrected. “It’s dumb that you’re not doing anything and you don’t have a place of your own to live.”

“Thanks,” he said again.

“But I could help you with that. Why wouldn’t you want to be someone better?

You could be a person that your sister Ava talks about at the orthopedic surgeon’s office in a proud way, rather than telling a total stranger how she’s worried and then fixing you up with that same unknown woman. Obviously, she’s desperate too.”

He swallowed, a reflex which I was now noticing a lot after that whole chicken deal. “Yeah, she’s clearly grasping at straws,” he said. “She’s cornering patients in pain to trick them into dating me.”

“Well—”

“I really had no idea how far I’d slid,” he said.

“What the hell happened? Life came at me so fast. I was having fun in high school, I was going along ok in college. And then, all of a sudden, it was time to get a job and everyone I knew was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve applied to forty-two different companies and had three interviews, looks like I’ll get hired soon.

’ I’d done nothing except go to class and go to bars. What was I waiting for?”

I shrugged because I didn’t know, but I’d seen exactly this scenario before.

“The same thing happened to my boyfriend Grant and it was worse because all his friends were rich and connected, so their parents got jobs for them. He hung out with them but he wasn’t a part of their world, not really, and he had a lot of challenges that they didn’t.

It wasn’t just a lack of initiative and intelligence.

He also lacked the resources, but we were able to overcome all that. ”

“How?”

I explained how I’d fixed Grant’s CV, how first we’d found him an internship which he’d done while I’d worked to support us, and then how the internship had led to permanent employment.

“It wasn’t a cakewalk, but we got there in the end,” I said.

“He wasn’t used to being on a schedule or putting in effort, because his family wasn’t wealthy but they’d spoiled him.

His mom worked nights so she could take care of everything in his life during the day, I think including his homework.

I don’t know when that woman ever slept. His dad had two jobs.”

“And what about now?”

“I haven’t talked to his parents since before the accident,” I said.

“I mean that boyfriend,” Levi clarified. “Is he still working, still doing well?”

“I think so. He seemed to be the last time I checked, but one of the other things that the therapist told me before she quit was that I had to stop looking him up all the time.” She’d explained that I was hurting myself when I did it, and she was right about that.

I’d been enlarging the pictures of Grant, zooming in on him enjoying life with his friends, and I’d found myself crying a lot. “I’m over him,” I noted.

“If you say so.”

There had been a whole lot of doubt in those words. “No, I really am. Right before we hit the wall, I had a moment where I understood everything.”

“Really?” He stared at me. “Like cosmic connections?”

“It was a lot smaller and more personal.” I had understood that Grant and I shouldn’t have been together; I recognized that I’d wasted five years of my life on someone who didn’t love me and that the bond I’d wanted so much had never been real.

I knew that we had to break up and that I had to move on.

“Then we collided with the concrete and I got knocked out, and after, I was confused and in a lot of pain. But I remembered the feeling. It was all so obvious.” I shook my head.

“I’m also not supposed to talk about Grant. ”

“I had no idea that therapists gave so much direct instruction,” he commented.

“I came up with that on my own. I was boring my cat and I think that’s one of the reasons she hates me and runs away.”

Levi smiled and then he started laughing softly, too. “This is the weirdest date,” he noted, but that was better than what he’d said before, when he’d called it the worst. “Are you serious about us forming this working relationship?”

“Yes. Why wouldn’t we try it? Like, what do either of us have to lose?” I asked. “Aren’t we both floundering? What could be worse?”

One thing: at that moment, we realized that we’d been sitting almost on top of an ant hill, and he jumped up and started brushing himself off. He pulled me up, too, and I did my own brushing, and then we decided to walk back to his car.

“Is this hard on your hip?” he asked.

“It’s not supposed to be. I’m supposed to be better by now.” My hand was on the joint, though, because it did hurt.

“What are you doing to help it? Exercises? Stretching?”

“I should get out and walk.” I had planned to do that with Coral but she had hid under the bed for more than twenty-four hours when I tried to put a collar and leash on her.

“I’ll go walking with you,” he said. “We could do that rather than sitting in your apartment all day.”

“Oh, I didn’t think you were interested,” I said, surprised. “I thought you were saying no to my idea.”

“It seems like I have to do something, since I’m unproductive and abnormal. That’s how you described me and my current existence,” he answered.

“You said that I was desperate and pathetic,” I reminded him.

“I apologize for that.”

“No, I agree,” I said. “I’m also abnormal, but I am productive on most days.” I had to be, since I wanted to eat and pay my horrible bills.

Neither of us said much else for the rest of the way to my apartment building, up until I opened the car door. Then I just sat there.

“Do you need help getting out?” Levi asked.

“I can do it. You should send me your CV and any and all documents which relate to your prior education and work experience.”

“Sure,” he answered, but it was in a way that didn’t sound sure.

“Are you really going to come here tomorrow?” I asked him.

He leaned forward and looked at my building. “This is what my life has become,” he said. He sounded surprised and slightly appalled, too. “I could spend my time sitting in a strange woman’s apartment, hiding out from the world.”