Unburying Hope (14 page)

“The prescription, your
boyfriend’s prescription.”

“That’s personal.”
 
Celeste leaned back.
 
“That has nothing to do with this.”

“Alright, you are sure it’s
the 5’4” brunette with the pony tail, green patterned shirt with leaves on it,
blue eyes?” the cop said, standing up.
 

“Yes, that’s her.
 
How did you see all that?
 
She’s behind a wall.”

“I don’t get paid for
mixing up my boyfriend, lady.”
 
He
signaled his partner to move towards the pharmacy door.
 
“You can go.
 
We’ll call you.”
 
He reached for his holster and inched stealthily towards the window.

Celeste could see the
ponytailed clerk suddenly jerk backwards and rush behind a shelf unit.
 
There was a flurry of sounds, doors
opening, shouts, plastic storage boxes knocking over.

She grabbed Frank’s hand
and yanked him out the sliding doors, running again at top speed.
 
This time, she headed back to the
office, where a few hours of boring, plexiglas-protected conversations with
strangers would calm her nerves.
 
She’d get Eddie’s prescription filled elsewhere, maybe in a farther away
neighborhood where he could have some privacy.
 
She’d look up a Veteran’s Hospital and try to fill it there.
 
That would probably be a safe
place.

Chapter Sixteen

Later that night, Celeste woke up, her back
comfortingly pressed against the cold bedroom wall.
 
The window was open and the sycamore leaves outside rustled
in the night wind.

Eddie stirred next to her, jerking his arm out
from under the covers.
 
She reached
for his hand and gently placed it on the pillow near his face, cooing softly by
his ear.
 
It was soothing having him
here, even with his sleepy staccato grunts.
 
She lay for enough minutes to hear him snore back into a
rhythm before releasing herself into a deep sleep.

In her dream, something was slipping
away.
  
She was standing on a
snow-covered city street alone, looking out but not seeing much through the
white blindness that surrounded her.
 
Someone important to her, she couldn’t name who, struggled to reach her,
pushing against icy winds, plodding through the snow until Celeste could feel
the nearness and a feeble connection building, a silver spark of
recognition.
 
She still couldn’t
name the person but suddenly they were there and she gasped at the deep
completeness that came over her, a fullness she’d never experienced
before.
 
Then, in one horrifying
moment, the snows gave way and the figure tumbled into a sinkhole, frantically
reaching for her.
 
Her brain
misfired out of shock, she grasped for the disappearing arm, the clutching
hand, its cold desperation flailed into the closing hole in the snow and she
felt alone again, this time a shell of herself, her heart ripped apart by
grief, her brain hijacked by confusion.
 
What just happened?
 
Who was
that?
 

She woke up in a cold sweat.
 
Eddie snored a few inches away.
 
She pressed her back to the wall,
feeling its solidity against her skin, breathing into it until the panic
subsided.
 

And sleep came again.
 

Chapter Seventeen

The scuba diving equipment took up the
carpeted area in her small living room.
 
It wasn’t just the tanks, it was the harnesses, the mouthpieces, the
webbed belts, the wet suits, the flippers.
 
A tower of metal and fasteners and latex and neoprene lay
across the crusty shag carpet.
 
Suddenly,
after a few Fed Ex deliveries, her lonely apartment was filled with the
aggregation of one life’s interest.

He had bought two of everything.
 

But Celeste had no interest in suiting up and
going below water.
 
A vague early childhood
memory invaded her brain whenever the hot water in the shower ran out and cold
water poured over her head.
 

Fishing with her father.
 

At least she thought it was her father.
 
It could have been an uncle or a friend
of her mother’s but part of her repressed personal myth was that it was her
father.
 

She remembered wearing a pair of cotton pants
that stopped right above her small sports shoes.
 
As a toddler, she loved the shoes because they had pink
lights in the heel that lit up whenever she’d footfall but as they grew older
and she grew out of them, they only lit when she jumped in the air and landed,
which she did frequently with utter delight in the darkness of her
bedroom.
 

Her bedroom.
 
She realized abruptly that this bedroom, the one in her head
that had appeared like a cinematic flash on a dark screen, this bedroom of the
light-up shoes was not the one she’d grown up in with her mother, in the
rooming house.
 

She watched Eddie fumble with the tanks on the
carpet.
 
He sat cross-legged with
his head down, intent on straightening out the tubes between the tanks and the
breathing apparatus.
 

She stayed in that other dimension, in the
memory that wafts into your brain, when you slow down time in the image, not
saturating or evaporating it with too much thought.

Maybe there was a time that she’d been happy,
that she’d had a father?
 
She
remembered the little light-up shoes, standing next to a tall man out at the
side of a river, looking at worms that wiggled in a small plastic container
whose lid she secured while biting her lip in childish repulsion.
 

If she let her vision go blurry, listening
more than watching Eddie in his machinations, she could feel the sense memory
of that warm day by the river.
 
But
she wanted to go further back, she wanted that other memory, the one on the earthy
brown wood floor, the jumping in the little shoes in the darkness, in a
different room than the one where her mother lay with this man?
 
Did he live there?
 
Maybe she’d been part of a family.
 
Maybe she’d had shoes that were new and
not neighborhood hand-me-downs or thrift shop specials.

But the memory wanted to dissipate; she could
not flesh it out.
 
It taunted her,
sat on the outer ridges of her sanity.
 
It occurred to her that maybe her solitude had arisen because she
couldn’t solidify any memory except the lonely memories of the rooming house,
living with her mother.
 
She knew
that it had been enough to live with her mother, to feel her close, to smell
the savory scents of her restaurant job or the chemical smells of her assembly
line job in her hair, to see the delight in her tired eyes when they were
reunited every evening before bedtime.

But there was this other memory.

The clanking of Eddie’s scuba equipment
brought an old clamminess to her skin, a prickling fear back into her head.

The soggy moss on a rock, combined with her
usual squirming had conspired in her slipping into the cold river waters.

The flow felt like a torrent on her little
body and she remembered the simplicity of the situation.
 

Her lungs filled with water.
 
Where there should have been air, there
was instead cold, numbing liquid.
 
She flailed a bit, touching nothing, then thrashed against an underwater
rock.

She felt her leg being sucked into the space
between two large rocks, where the water propelled itself downriver, some
roiling over the rocks, some suctioning through the small space.
 
Her leg was trapped.
 
Just the one leg.
 
The other one was bent and she pushed
against that foot, trying to release her now imprisoned leg.
 
But she was too little and her brain
was turning off, distracted by the crushing in her chest.

She let herself be battered, she couldn’t
breathe, she couldn’t control her body.

And then she was again in the air and her
unfocused eyes could see trees, the flannel shirt of her father as he pulled
her to his chest, his eyes frantic, his arms gripping her, his voice breaking.

She remembered an ambulance coming, called by
nearby fishermen.
 
She remembered
the man receding as the police and the firefighters converged over her.
 
She remembered moving soon after that,
and the depth of loneliness that accrued each day in her life since that moment
on the stretcher when she watched the man half wave to her, his eyes broken
with sorrow.

Maybe he’d been married, she thought.
 
Not to her mother.
 
Maybe he was afraid of losing whatever
life he deemed more valuable than the bouncing lit shoes dancing in the dark.
 

Anyway, that’s when her memories of the
rooming house began.
 
Of her mother
being so tired, working so hard.
 
From then on, she knew, it was all on her mother, the raising, the
providing.
 

That river had washed her into a small trap,
her leg caught like a wolf’s, and it had demanded its pound of flesh,
figuratively, when she was pulled to safety.

No, going under cold water with a heavy tank
on her back was not something she wanted to do.

But Eddie cajoled her, went painstakingly
through the description of each mechanism until she felt the webbing of the
belt just tight enough across her chest, sucked on the mouthpiece long enough
to feel the air release from the tank into her lungs, and then shut off.
 
She had to time the out-breath so that she
got enough oxygen on the in-breath, it was similar to the breathing her mother
had taught her in order to forestall the panic she’d grown up with as a child.

Eddie pulled her hand.
 
“Come on, let’s get you under the
shower.”

“No way!” She balked.
 
“Not with all this stuff on.”
 

“Seriously, Celeste.
 
Buck up.”
 
He
grabbed her hand again and pulled her down the hallway towards her bathroom.

She had the flippers on too, the wetsuit, the
head hood, the tank, the mouthpiece in her mouth.
 
“I feel like a penguin”, she said, as she tripped over the
large plastic flippers in front of her toes.
 
It was like walking in crazy clown shoes.

He turned her around.
 
“You have to walk backwards with the
flippers.
 
Then you just look
uncoordinated,” he laughed, “not ridiculous.”

She frowned; walking backwards was not much
easier.

“I won’t lie to you”, he said, smiling, “you
look like a seal.”

“A Navy SEAL?”

“Nope.
 
The kind of oily skinned seal that sharks like to eat for lunch.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said sarcastically,
backing into the bathroom.

He turned the shower water on but she shook
her head.
 
“Look, I almost drowned
in a river when I was little.
 
This
scares me.”

“But you’re with me.
 
You’re safe.
 
It’s
what I do best.”
 
He put his hand
under the warm shower water, then touched her hand with his wet hand.
 
“See, it’s warm.
 
Not like a river at all.”

Celeste stepped backwards into the shower,
pushing the glass door to make sure it stayed open.
 
The sound of water against her neoprene suit and the tile
floor resonated like the sound of dirt being thrown on a lowered coffin, she
thought.
 
Her skin could feel the
force of the water but she stayed mostly dry.
 
It was strange.

When she leaned back under the showerhead, the
warm water ran down her face and she took in a deep breath when Eddie nudged
the mouthpiece into her mouth.

“You can’t use your nose,” he said, “Breathe
only from the tank.”

The water blinded her, its rivulets splashing
through her eyelashes down her cheeks.
 
She pulled her facemask on over her eyes and her nose, the first breath
came fast, a huge gasp in.
 
Much
better with her eyes protected.
 
There
was a clunky closing of the air valve on the regulator when she breathed
out.
 
It was freaky, she
thought.
 
The air came to you if
you asked it to by breathing in.
 
It stopped coming to you if you signaled that it wasn’t needed by
breathing out.