Unburying Hope (12 page)

She noticed, for the first time, honestly, how
gray the neighborhood was.
 
There
were ‘For Lease’ signs on broken store windows, the detritus of dead businesses.
 
The corner market was the only
storefront where people still entered and exited, and many of those customers
were ragged homeless souls carrying out brown paper bags of liquor to drink a
few blocks away at the unfriendly, dirty remnant of a park where mothers and
fathers no longer took their kids to swing and slide because dogs and humans used
the playground to defecate.

She’d walked into her corner market after work
the other day, hoping to find fresh lettuce for a salad and wandered through
the aisles to the back table where a few sorry potatoes sat, pushed aside by
stacks of sugary juice substitute in large bottles.
 
She rotated the potatoes absent-mindedly, then carried one
to the front counter.
 
“No lettuce?”

“Why do you even ask?
 
Cigarettes I got, lettuce I don’t got.”

“This is the same potato I’ve seen since
June.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Why isn’t it sprouting?”

“What?”

“It’s supposed to sprout those green branches,
to grow more potatoes if you put it in water.
 
But this one doesn’t have any eyes on it.”

“Yeah, they spray them.”

She brought the potato close to her nose to
sniff.
 
“It has no smell.”

“Potatoes don’t smell.
 
Why are you bugging me?
 
Take the damn potato.
 
Go.”
 
He shooed her away.

“There’s never anything fresh here.
 
I want fruits and vegetables but you
only have a few mutant potatoes.”

“No one wants fresh things.
 
That’s why those potatoes sit.
 
I only buy what people want.”

“If you’d carry fruit, I’d buy most of it,”
Celeste said.

“I carry what people buy.
 
I stopped the fruit a couple of years
ago, you know that.
 
I carry what
people pay cash for and that’s sodas, liquor and cigs.
 
You want something else, move on.”

Celeste put the potato down and waved him off.

“Seriously,” he said, “You never buy anything,
you just complain about how I run my business.”
 
He came around from behind the cash register and crossed his
arms at her.
 
“Come back when you
want more rum.
 
You’ve even stopped
buying my rum.”

She walked out and stood in the cold air on
the gray sidewalk.
 
There was a
thin layer of soot, she noticed, on the unkempt buildings, both the apartment
buildings and the decrepit closed office buildings on either side of the street.
 

Her apartment, contrary to her new warmth and
internal spark, was sad, holding on in the face of massive bloodletting, of exodus,
lease breakings and foreclosures.

Somehow, when she had felt gray herself, she
hadn’t noticed.
 

But now, she saw keenly her own clinging to the
dream of a life that had passed a decade or more ago.
 
Jobs had left her beloved city, businesses and creativity
and innovation were beaten into paralysis by economic stress.
 
Not gone, but absent, as though their
existence had not been able to leave enough of an energetic charge behind.

She turned in her office chair, facing
Frank.
 
It was inconceivable, the
thought of leaving Detroit.
 
But
there was no life here except for the scrappy souls who refused to abandon
their mother city.
 
Like the
sprayed potatoes, nothing seemed to sprout into new growth.

Chapter
Fourteen

Eddie either met her at the bus stop after
work or knocked on her front door each night after she got home from work.
 
He helped cook dinner with groceries
that he brought at a farther away superstore, he ran her laundry, throwing in
his t-shirt and jeans or camouflage pants and boxers while they slept, then
dressed again in the fresh clothes out of the dryer in the morning.
 
He left when she left, didn’t ask for
an apartment key.
 
He texted back when
she wrote to him during the day.
 
It suddenly felt comfortably sweet, as though they were in love and had
known each other for years instead of simply being the right-shaped puzzle
piece for each other.
 
Not
necessarily the right piece, just the right shape for now, to obliterate the
longing for the one and only piece that fit and completed the picture.

He was different from other men she’d been
with.
 
He didn’t work all day and
drink all night.
 
He’d go to the
library and bring home books on the ocean.
 
He’d go to a metal shop, to a gas station, studying
compressed air.
  
He took the
used scuba tank he bought online and dove all around nearby Lake St. Clair,
coming home sometimes with leaves from underwater trees in his hair.

He handed her an orange prescription bottle
one work morning, and without making eye contact, asked her if she could refill
it for him, saying softly that it helped him sleep sometimes.
 
She held it for a few seconds, weighing
her desire to read the typed label against her fear of his distancing body
language.
 
She pocketed the bottle
in the side depths of the burgundy dress she wore and kissed him goodbye at the
bus stop as usual.
 

Hours of boredom passed at work until a mother
yelled loudly at Celeste for asking for full payment, her flat-faced child glaring
through the plexiglas like a zombie.

Celeste felt the hardness of the small plastic
prescription bottle as she turned sideways on her chair to avoid the little
girl’s eyes.
 
She stood up quickly
from her desk, signaling to Frank to cover for her.
 
She’d take her break and fill his prescription.

She walked to the back of the nearby trauma
center, to the pharmacy entrance, and stood for a moment outside the automatic
door, her breath short in surprise, seeing something through the foggy gray
light reflected on the glass door in front of her.
 

It looked like Eddie, standing too close to a
middle-aged nurse with her brown hair flipping out of a short ponytail.
 

It looked like him, but the man had on a heavy
black coat that she’d never seen and his face was gaunt.
 
The nurse looked around cautiously and
handed him a few bottles, prescriptions, maybe.
 
He pocketed them in breast pockets inside the coat, then
turned quickly down a receding corridor.
 

Celeste pushed herself forward, setting off
the automatic door to enter the scene she hadn’t clearly seen.
  
Confusion bit at her brain, questions
that made simple sense rose as she moved indoors.
 
Why would Eddie be here?
 
Why would he give her a prescription and then get his own?
 

The nurse stood alone, composing herself until
Celeste stood directly in front of her, looking down on the short woman with an
uncomfortable mix of jealousy and embarrassment.

“Were you just talking with my
boyfriend?”
 
Celeste tempered her
voice, holding back her desire to screech.

“That was a customer, lady.”
 
The nurse fumbled some folded money around
a puffed up baggie into her shirt pocket.

“He looked like my boyfriend,” Celeste
said.
 
“What were you giving
him?
 
Pills?”

“Mind your own damn business, bitch, and get
out of my face,” the clerk’s face went red and her eyes narrowed.
 
“If he’s your boyfriend, you deserve
each other.”

Celeste propelled herself past the nurse, who
cringed, raising both hands in self-defense, twisting out of Celeste’s way.

Her running some nights under the starlit sky
with Eddie had brought her back to her healthy pace from her high school years
and she careened around the corner, speeding up when she saw the strange man in
the black coat nearly at an exit.
 
“Eddie,” she yelled.

His shoulders tensed up and he slammed himself
through the aluminum doorway, disappearing from view.
 

She was at the door seconds later, pushing herself
into a hallway littered with long abandoned, broken parts of hospital
machinery.
 
She could see pounded footprints
on the dusty floor leading to a back door, so she launched herself again,
frantic in her head, needing to know whether or not it was Eddie, unable to
slow herself down.
 
She raced
towards the back door and ran out into a side parking lot, half empty with old
cars.

The man, it wasn’t Eddie, was fifteen feet
away, leaning between two cars, pushing something from his fingers into his
mouth.
 

She couldn’t help it, she needed to see his
face up close, to erase the terror that it might be Eddie running away from
her.
 
She ran over and grabbed his
arm, exposing his gaunt face, his unblinking eyes.
 

He fought her off like a bear trying to escape
an unexpected sharp-edged trap, ripping his body right and left to free his feet.
 
His hands formed crescent circles, his
long dirty fingernails curved to scrape her with the full force of his own fear
and pain.

She ducked one round of battering, keeping
herself steady on her low heels.
 
If she twisted sideways, he’d press himself against her and dig into
her, fueled by his drug-addled blindness.

As he swayed over her in one frantic push, she
timed her ascension from her crouch and grabbed at his neck with both her
hands, pulling him down to his knees, her own leg quickly, violently slamming
him in his crotch, bringing him crumpled half onto her, easy enough to push
over onto the concrete ground of the parking lot.

She heard shouts and scuffling sounds as two
building security guards loped over, a tall slender woman and an average height
but stocky older man, both were brandishing their nightsticks, ready to wail on
the now reinvigorated man under her grip.
 
She could not hold him much longer, she thought.
 
He had scrambled sideways out from under
her and the only grasp she maintained was her fingers around his rattling
throat.
 

He gasped.
 
And fought.

She let go when the stocky guard sat himself
onto the man’s now vulnerable back and the slender woman made a quick job of
shackling his feet, twisting his wrists behind him, pulling plastic twining
handcuffs around his wrists to incapacitate him.

Still, the man seethed.

“What the hell is wrong
with him?” Celeste asked, catching her breath.
 
She rubbed her fingers, they were still strong from all those
years of gripping a tennis racket.
 
She’d never expected that such an oddly fitting sport in such an
inhospitable moment would protect her, but it had.

“He’s tweaking,” the woman
said.
 
“Did you see which car he
was getting into?”

“I’m not sure,” Celeste
said, standing up.
 
There were
several small dark sedans parked in the back hospital lot.
 
It looked like a convention of broken
down, unmarked police cars.
 
She
walked a few feet into the driving lane.
 
Which one had he leaned on?
 
“Can’t you open these cars?
 
There can’t me that many,” she asked.

There were 4 dark cars, 2
gray cars, 1 old yellow station wagon and a rusted red pickup truck in the lot.

“No we can’t,” the tall
guard sneered.

“Yes we can,” the stocky
guard said.
 
“Patriot Act.
 
We can do whatever the hell we have to
do.”

The woman pointed her
nightstick up to two corners of the buildings surrounding the parking lot.
 
“Cameras, dumbass.
 
I’m not getting fired, we’re not
popping open all these cars.”

Celeste jumped in fright as
the handcuffed man snapped out of his coiled position, trying to straighten
himself out.

“It was a dark car,” she
said.
 
“If the cameras are on,
can’t you look at film to see what car he was opening?”

“That would take too long,
he might have a buddy who’d come get the car and drive off as soon as we drag
him out of here.
 
Besides, Detroit
PD is on the way,” the woman said, just as the sound of a siren blasted into
the parking lot, two police cars suddenly parked sideways to block the exit.