Brenna, Brat (Detroit ABCs)

Chapter 7

H oly Mary. This wasn’t what I’d meant by “helping,” and it was certainly not the way to become indispensable. It was the way to disappear out of someone’s life forever.

“I can’t believe this happened,” I said, and the feelings of powerlessness and indignant anger almost made me cry. It was exactly like when my first pair of Schone boots had turned up missing—except, of course, that this was a lot bigger in scale. At the rink, I had walked around looking under all the benches, getting more and more frustrated as the seconds ticked past and the realization set in that they were actually gone.

And I’d done the same thing this morning. I’d stood for a moment on the sidewalk, looking at the open area next to the curb. Then I’d strode up and down the block, hurried around the corners at either end, and walked back and forth again, checking and rechecking with my eyes huge and disbelieving…

It was gone.

“I shouldn’t have parked it out here for the night,” Campbell said. “This is my fault.” He didn’t even sound that angry, but I was.

“This is totally and completely the fault of the people who stole it!” I insisted, and it certainly felt better to blame them instead of myself. After all, I was the one who’d encouraged him to stay over. I’d said that it was a safe neighborhood, that leaving his car in front of my building was fine. I’d even put my own car right behind his, so close that it would have been nearly impossible to extract either one of them. My bumper was now streaked with black paint, but his beautiful vehicle?

It was gone.

I turned to look at him to see if he was stomping off and glaring, the way I might have acted at the rink when my boots had gone missing. But instead, Campbell was looking at his phone. “Let’s go back upstairs so I can sit while I file all this paperwork shit,” he said, and now I thought that he sounded just…glum. Like, if things hadn’t been bad enough with his dad as a criminal, his job gone, and his future in tatters, now his freaking car had been stolen, too?

We trooped up to my apartment, which felt even smaller and stale, somehow. He took the couch and typed for a while before he looked up at me. “I should have known better,” he commented. “It was stupid to leave it out there.”

“I didn’t think this would happen.”

“No, me neither.” He rubbed his fingers over the stubble on his jaw and glanced around, taking in the small space. “I was thinking I’d leave and get home before the news crews showed up there. It’s always a little strained the morning after, anyway. Not that it’s that kind of morning after,” he added, finally looking at me.

I understood what he meant, and no, it wasn’t a typical morning-after-sex. Yes, now it felt weird, but he had stayed tucked into my bed and I’d curled up a few paces away on the couch. This was only a morning-after-sleeping and nothing more, but since I also felt the strain, I nodded. “I can drive you to the nearest precinct,” I told him. “You have to report auto theft in person.”

“Do you know that from sad experience?”

“It’s not unheard of for vehicles to go missing in a big city,” I said, as if I had to defend Detroit.

“No, it’s not. That’s why I said at least three times that I’m not surprised and that I shouldn’t have done this.” He gestured toward the bed. “I should have gone home and faced the music, but this is what I get.”

“I don’t think you’re being punished,” I told him, and he shrugged. He ran his hand over his hair, which was now a lot messier than I was used to seeing, even when we’d gone ice skating—but he wore it very well. I liked it a little crazy with some wave where it had been mostly straight. It made him look younger and…well, he was handsome all the time.

But there were more important things than Campbell’s hair, so we did go to report the crime, and then I drove him home. It was near-silence in my car as we went north on Woodward Avenue. I certainly didn’t mind that, and it made sense to me that he wouldn’t have wanted to talk after the shock of everything that had happened in his life over the past forty-eight hours.

“Or, was it a shock?”

“Huh?” Campbell looked over at me, and I realized that I had spoken out loud. I’d gotten into a little habit of that by conversing so often with Cleo.

“I was wondering if you were actually surprised when you heard about all these problems with your company,” I explained.

But he shook his head. “I already told you that I didn’t—”

“I know that you weren’t part of stealing any money and I know that you weren’t willingly taking part in a fraud,” I said. “I meant, did you ever suspect anything? Did you have any idea, or were you as shocked as everyone else by your dad’s legal issues?” Because he’d seemed worried before when we had talked about his job and specifically about his father.

He was quiet as I continued to drive, but as we crossed the city limit at Eight Mile Road, he spoke again. “The first I heard for sure was the night you were over for dinner. One of our in-house lawyers called and said I needed to come to the office immediately, and that was when they told me that an indictment was imminent. I was in shock. The thought of Ghregg going to jail…”

He stopped for a moment and I glanced over to see him staring out the window but not, I thought, seeing very much.

“For the past few months, I’ve had a strange feeling,” he continued. “I kept telling myself that I was imagining it. My dad had started acting the same way he did before I had a big game, like he was full of nervous energy. It always made me think that he was gearing himself up for a letdown.”

“He used to prepare himself to be let down by your performance in games?” I asked, and he nodded. “He was really invested in your hockey career.”

“Funny that you would call it a ‘career,’ because that’s what he always said, too. Ghregg would tell me that I needed to put in the necessary time and energy to guarantee my success, just like I’d have to in my job someday. Or, I guess that instead of working hard, I could have cheated like he did.” He turned to look at me again. “I may have suspected that something was wrong, but I didn’t know for sure. If I had, I would have done something. I would have…” But he stopped again, and shook his head. “That’s easy to say now, that I would have been the hero. I have no idea what I really would have done if I’d had the facts and not just a bad feeling.”

“None of this seems very easy,” I said. “But you don’t have to try to convince me of anything. I don’t know about your dad and your sister, but I’m already sure that you’re not a criminal yourself. Obviously, you’re not.”

Those were the words that Sophie zeroed in on later that afternoon, because I repeated them to her when she called (again) to ask me about any developments. I didn’t have much to say, which made her annoyed. I didn’t tell her that Campbell had spent the night in my studio, or that I’d driven him home, slowing as I turned the corner onto his street and we’d both seen the news vans parked in front.

“Just pull into the driveway. No, wait,” he’d said, and had taken off his sunglasses. “You should wear these so you won’t get recognized.” They were huge on my face when I put them on and he smiled slightly. Despite the presence of the cameras pointed at him when I’d stopped, he’d paused. “Thanks, Brenna. Thanks for letting me stay and thanks for believing me.” Then he’d gotten out and slammed the door fast, but I’d heard questions yelled from the direction of the sidewalk. They hadn’t blocked my way as I’d backed up—not that I was showing any signs of stopping, if they were considering it—and I’d driven to Detroit, to my atelier. That was where I’d been when Sophie had called and this time I’d picked up right away. I’d hoped that she had some more information for me but in fact, she was on a fishing expedition herself.

Several questions in, though, I hadn’t told her much except that I was sure that Campbell wasn’t involved, which she took issue with. “I don’t understand why you’re dead set that the Bates siblings are innocent. And no, I’m not trying to pin this on Carrington,” she told me. “But how did Campbell manage to convince you?”

“First of all, I’m not making a judgement about Carrington’s part in it. She’s a lot more suspicious.” She was, after all, the girl who used to trip others in their races, and behavior like that didn’t stop once you got older. For all of her flaws, my sister Juliet never would have tried to sabotage another swimmer in the pool. She’d never splashed her arms or jumped on the lane line to celebrate, and she’d always shaken hands after she beat them, too.

“But you’re sure about Campbell Bates and that he isn’t guilty,” Sophie stated, and I said yes, absolutely. “How? Why?”

“He’s not like that,” I told her. “He’s not the kind of person who would steal. When we went ice skating, a little boy ran into us and we all fell hard. Campbell even hit his head, but the first thing he did was pick up the kid and make him feel better.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” She sounded exasperated.

Well, it wasn’t exactly proof of his innocence, just like that story about rescuing a dog on the freeway hadn’t proved that his dad was, either. I just didn’t believe that the kind of person who would bump fists with a boy when he himself had a brain bleed, the kind of person who would seek out special boots for someone else, the kind of person who didn’t get angry about his beautiful car going missing and blame others for the loss because she’d been the one who’d said to stay…

“He’s just not the kind of person who would steal,” I informed my sister.

“I looked him up. Only a little,” Sophie said. After some problems with running her investigation business, she had mostly stopped pulling together damaging dossiers on strangers. But she still dipped her toe into background research when she thought it would help family, and I was instantly and insanely curious about what she’d found.

“Did you?” I asked casually. “Anything interesting?” I gripped the sponge in my hand as I spoke. I’d been trying again to remove the mold, but the result was mostly me getting lightheaded due to the fumes from the cleaning products.

“He was a good hockey player,” she offered.

I knew that. “And?” I prompted, a lot less casual now.

“And he seems fine,” Sophie answered. “Normal.”

What? This wasn’t like my sister at all. She had always compiled files on all our boyfriends and even potential ones, and the information she’d handed over to us had been unflinching and meticulous. She’d never shied away from anything, even when the results were embarrassing and what Addie called mean. Sophie had discovered that Nicola’s prom date had a bed-wetting problem, for example, and Juliet’s college boyfriend enjoyed folk music concerts. “You can’t bring that into our family,” Soph had written in her cover letter, which JuJu had angrily shared with the rest of us.

“Campbell seems fine?” I echoed. “That’s it? What’s going on? What aren’t you saying?”

“Sugar, Brenna! Don’t jump down my throat,” she snipped back, which sounded a lot more like my sister. “I’m just saying that there wasn’t a whole lot to impugn his character. He doesn’t have any arrests, just a speeding ticket. One ticket, and it wasn’t for going that much over the limit, and it wasn’t near a school or anything like that. He got his college hockey team involved in a big charity drive for a children’s hospital and he does the same thing here, too. They do a tournament and get some of the patients on skates. Those kids are cute.”

Sophie was softening up, and I didn’t think it was to her credit. “That’s great,” I said impatiently. “And?”

“He’s not big into social media but he does appear in other people’s stuff,” she said, which I knew because I’d looked at his mom’s and sister’s accounts. “Women have posted about him, but almost everything was deleted later.”

But being Sophie, she’d been able to find it anyway. “What does that mean?” I demanded. “What are you holding back? Stop trying to be cagey.”

“I’m not,” she said, and added, “I’m only saying that he’s a popular guy.”

That was something I already knew—but then I understood what she was trying to imply. “He’s been with a lot of women who deleted their posts about him when they broke up. Why didn’t you just say that?” I asked her, and she mumbled something. I walked closer to the window, both to get some fresh air and because the cell signal seemed to work better there. “You cut out for a second. What did you say?”

“I didn’t cut out, I just didn’t say it very loud,” Sophie told me. “I felt bad about it.”

“What? Why do you care about Campbell Bates?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I was remembering when I looked up Danny and saw the women he’d been with while we were apart for all those years. I was also thinking of seeing Carrington’s car parked in front of his house at night, and still there in the morning. It felt like crap,” she clarified.

“I already told you that I’m aware of your unhinged jealousy about your husband’s prior relationships.”

“Brenna, you’re such a brat!” she yelled, and that came through the phone loud and clear. “I was trying to avoid hurting your feelings, too, but never mind. Campbell has been with more women than I can count and they’re mostly gorgeous model-types who make me feel like I should be living under a bridge rather than participating in society. But he hasn’t been with any of them for more than a few months, not ever. Not even the girl who wrote that he was the love of her life, and that’s still pinned on her page. I have no idea why she wouldn’t have taken down that embarrassing crap after he dumped her—”

“How do you know that he’s the side doing the dumping?” I interrupted. “It could be that he’s looking for someone to settle down with but just has terrible taste. There’s no reason to assume that the breakups are all his fault.”

“Is this really what’s important when your boyfriend is facing seizure of his assets and a prison term?”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I told her, “and you brought it up. What else did you find out? What makes you think that he’s the one who’s breaking hearts?”

She hesitated more but then said, “I’m not saying that he’s a heartbreaker, but there’s enough evidence of angry women to make me believe that he was the one taking the wheel in the breakups. And I’m usually right about this kind of stuff. You know I did my job for a long time and I also did it very well.”

She was six years older than I was, so yes, she had more experience, but I couldn’t let her get away with the self-congratulatory crud. “Didn’t you have to quit your job because, by mistake, you started investigating the Russian mob—”

“Brat!” she interrupted, and hung up. But then, maybe out of spite, she did send me the file she’d prepped on Campbell. She’d omitted her usual cover letter but the attachment was huge, anyway, and it was all screenshots of social media posts. I scrolled quickly. There were at least twenty pages, and each page consisted of four or five pictures of him with various women and a lot of gushing captions, embarrassing emojis, and cringey hashtags. No, it hadn’t been #forever and he wasn’t #theone, not for any of them.

I scrolled and tried to count them, all their beautiful faces. Could that have been right? Were there actually almost ninety women represented here? No, no, I must have been wrong. If he’d started when he was sixteen, he’d only had twelve years…I opened the calculator app. Assuming he had roughly ninety posts disparaging him and/or deleted, that meant he’d averaged seven and a half girlfriends per year. He’d been with someone new just about every month and a half. I tapped my nails on the screen, thinking harder. I’d met him in January, when he’d come in to buy the birthday gift for Carrington. Now, it was March.

If I looked at it that way, then I had already beaten the average. I was still here, except, of course, that I wasn’t a girlfriend. He hadn’t once done anything besides acting friendly. He just didn’t want to sleep with me, like a line of guys that had come before him…actually, no one had come at all, not them or me, not in a sexual way. I remembered one of my would-be partners pulling on his pants and remarking that he’d rather sleep with a rabid fox than spend another moment with me. I’d told him that I would be happy to look for that animal for him, and that I hoped he enjoyed hydrophobia.

All those women, and Campbell hadn’t even wanted to kiss me, not even when I was lying on a couch about a yard away. He wasn’t interested in us having any physical interactions, although he must not have minded being physical with all those other women. I flipped through their pictures again. Yes, Sophie had been right. They were all pretty, and when I looked them up more, I found that a lot of them were also accomplished…oh, holy Mary. One even worked for one of my favorite designers in New York.

This was ridiculous, so I put down my phone and resumed scrubbing. Why was I thinking about sex right now, when someone who was possibly and kind of a friend had so many problems? Well, maybe because I’d been a little preoccupied with the idea of touching him, ever since he’d lain down in my bed. I’d watched the outline of his body in the glow of the nightlight that I always flicked on, because I didn’t care for absolute darkness.

Campbell had fallen right asleep, but I’d watched him and no, it hadn’t been pervy. I’d been worried because he’d started to murmur words and phrases under his breath, things that were hard to decipher. He’d definitely said “no” quite a few times, and I thought “Dad” and maybe something that sounded like his sister’s name.

Mostly he’d just sounded upset. It was upsetting to hear, as well, and I’d sat up and thought about waking him out of those dreams. I’d reached over, hesitated, and had left him alone.

I wondered how he was doing now. I picked up my phone to ask, then decided he’d heard enough from me. Right now, he was associating my name with his stolen car and a whole lot of extra problems. My idea about becoming indispensable could quickly turn into a roadmap of how to annoy someone if I wasn’t careful. So that was why I waited, mostly patiently, until Sunday evening before I sent just one message saying hello. He got back to me the next day: “Good news, they found my car.” He didn’t have time to talk, he said, but it was “pretty much drivable.”

That was…good?

“I’ll come by the gallery,” he wrote, and I got the feeling that he didn’t want to use his phone too much.

“Why are you standing there smiling?” Dion asked me the next day as I stood behind the lacquer table. I had planned to go over the budget, because tax day was around the corner and I had doubts about Alecta’s ability to pay what she owed for her business. But I hadn’t gotten very far besides trying to make her old laptop turn on, and it was possible that I had been standing here just as my coworker had accused.

“Did you start organizing the basement like I asked you to?” I responded, and I made sure that if I had been smiling, I wasn’t anymore.

He didn’t look happy either. “That’s full of loads of shit.”

“I know,” I said, patient as always. “That’s exactly why I told you to go clean it, obviously.”

“You’re not my boss,” he informed me. “Just because you tell me to do something doesn’t mean that I have to do it. I don’t even have to consider it.”

He mostly refrained from working even when his real boss, his aunt Alecta, directed him, and I hadn’t actually expected him to accomplish anything in that nasty basement. It had been more of a ploy to get him out of my—

“Oh, shit!”

Dion had screamed those words after a huge bang sounded in the street, like maybe a truck had dropped a dumpster and it made an echoing, metal clang. But he reacted like it was something else and as he yelled, he dropped onto his stomach and covered his head with his arms.

“Dion!” I ran around the side of the table and checked the road, but there was nothing. “What are you doing?”

He was now getting up and brushing himself off, and if the floor was dirty? Well, that was his own fault. He was supposed to have done the cleaning on Friday afternoon but he had gone home instead, and he hadn’t completed any of the items from the opening checklist this morning, either. “What is this?” he asked me, picking a nasty object from his sweater.

“That’s a hairball,” I said, and batted it back onto the floor. It was red hair, mine, because I’d been in the bathroom doing a lot of styling. “Why did you just hit the deck like that?”

He had edged to the window and was peering out as well, craning his skinny neck back and forth to see what had caused the noise. “There’s nothing,” he told me.

“I know that. Why did you flip out?”

But now he was fine, so he shrugged and shook more grime off his pants. “It startled me a little.”

“A little?” I’d never seen him move so fast, not since one of the artists had set fire to a garbage can in the alley and he’d bolted out the front to leave me to deal with the problem.

But again, Dion had moved on. “Alecta texted me that she’s coming in,” he mentioned.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It’s her gallery,” he reminded me. “I think she said something about electricity.”

I glanced anxiously at the lights, which were still illuminated above us. But all these scary murder videos constantly playing must have used a lot of power, and maybe she thought that I would have trouble paying the bill when it came in. I also checked the account online and yes, the amount due for the next cycle was going to be a lot higher. It was just very unusual that she would have looked at that herself.

And it turned out that Alecta was having trouble with the electric company, but it was the service at her own home that was the problem. “It feels like they should give you more notice before they turn it off completely,” she complained when she arrived at the gallery a little while later. No one else had come in to see anyone here, not yet. “Like, maybe they could blink the lights a few times so that you’re aware of the problem. Then you could do something about it. Do you guys like this?” She patted her new wig.

I ignored that question. “If you want your power to stay on, then you’re supposed to do something when you get the bills,” I commented. “You’re supposed to pay them. Didn’t they send a shut off notice? Don’t they have to?”

Behind her, her nephew nodded yes, but our boss shook her head. “I had no idea this was going to happen,” Alecta answered solemnly, but then brightened a lot. “Did I tell you that I’m going to Lima? The one in Peru, not Ohio.”

“Why?” I asked, but she ignored me and went to fiddle with the screens, making one get out of focus and turning another off completely so that both Dion and I had to intercede to try to fix the installation.

“You could go and look around the basement while you’re here,” I suggested, in order to get her out of our hair. It hadn’t worked on Dion, but maybe it would on her. “It’s a mess down there and it should be organized.”

“It’s all my mom’s shit,” she said vaguely. “I think there’s stuff upstairs, too.”

There was. I loved going to the second floor, actually, because it was a little like a time capsule. It had been her mom’s atelier where she’d designed, met clients, and sewed. It looked like Chic Cathay and her assistants had walked out one day, meaning to return, but had just forgotten. There was a big, paper desk calendar turned to May 1987, and it was covered in hand-written notes about appointments and reminders of things to do. That was when she had abruptly closed down her business and flown to Mexico, where she’d lived on and off for a few years before returning to Detroit. Someone had cleaned out (or stolen) the fabric and notions from the back room, but I had found a pair of shears (which I had kept) and some Chic Cathay business cards, which I had put in a little frame and planned to hang in my own atelier. As soon as it stopped raining inside there, I would do it.

Alecta preferred not to help in the basement, on the second floor, or anywhere else. Instead, she went to her office (our breakroom) and forced Dion to help her move her ridiculously sized and empty desk back into the center of the room. Then she proceeded to talk to her friends, telling them loudly and in minute detail about the guy she’d had sex with the night before. It was enough to say that they hadn’t done it in the usual way…no, it was very far from anything that I had considered doing or what my sisters had done, as far as I knew. Even Dion started to get annoyed and maybe disgusted, and he put in his earbuds so he wouldn’t have to hear her. He also couldn’t hear me telling him to vacuum; the floor really was nauseating.

Since there was a lot of my own hair and since I didn’t want to hear Alecta either, I took up the task instead. Dion started singing, too, and all that combined with the snarling, bone crunching, and bloody squelching noises from the videos made it get loud in the gallery.

That was why I didn’t hear the scream signaling that the front door had opened. I screamed myself, though, when a hand fell onto my shoulder.

“We’re going to have to stop doing this,” Campbell told me. “I don’t think that my heart can take it.”

My own heart was trying to leap out of my ribcage, so I knew what he meant. “Hi,” I said, but I definitely gasped it.

“You ok?” he asked, and I nodded. “What the hell are these videos?” he wondered next. “Is that a saber-toothed cat wearing a human costume?”

I didn’t have time to explain the latest exhibit before Alecta came out of her office. Her eyes widened when she saw Campbell. He looked great in his suits but he wore these jeans very, very well, and she noticed, too.

“I’m Alecta Alberne,” she introduced herself as she walked quickly forward. “I don’t think we’ve ever met, because I’m sure you would have remembered me.”

He blinked but recovered fast. “No, we haven’t met. Campbell Bates.”

She smiled at him, showing every tooth back to her second molars, and I thought that Alecta was actually a very pretty woman. She looked a little strange, since she was pushing fifty and dressed more like she was in her early tweens, and her greenish-yellow wig didn’t do a lot for her pretty skin. But despite those problems, she didn’t have a problem attracting men and it wasn’t only her promises of free drugs that drew them in. I looked up at Campbell to see if he was effected by it, but he was mostly staring around the gallery at the small screens showing the decapitations and other mutilations.

“This is interesting,” he said.

“She’s a very promising talent that I discovered,” Alecta told him, and then she stepped forward and linked her arm through his. “Let me show you around my gallery. It’s mine,” she reiterated, in case he’d misheard her or in case he hadn’t noticed the name on the sign outside. Since no one ever kept up with building maintenance, the “A” and “L” from Alecta and the “G” and “Y” from Gallery had fallen off and it wasn’t totally legible. I’d told her to talk to her mother about fixing it…

Campbell glanced over his shoulder and smiled at me, and despite my anger at being supplanted by my boss, I was glad to see him do it. The last time we’d been together, he hadn’t looked very happy, which made sense due to—

“Oh, shit!” Dion screamed for the second time that day, but I didn’t react as strongly as I had when he’d done it before.

I should have. When I looked away from Campbell, I saw the front door whip open and then I spotted the flames. We’d had grill accidents at my parents’ house before and fire had gotten somewhat out of control, but I’d never seen anything like this. There was a sudden and violent burst of orange and red and, before I even knew what was happening, choking smoke filled the gallery.

“Brenna!” I heard Campbell yell, and I was already moving, grabbing my purse so that I had keys to drive us away from here and then pushing Dion into action. I took Campbell’s hand as I ran for the back door, and the Alecta Alberne Gallery?

After that day, it didn’t exist.