Unburying Hope (23 page)

She reached over and laid
her hands on his, “It’s time.”

He shook his head
vehemently,
 
“Why?
 
Why now?”

“I saw all your
prescriptions.”
 
She couldn’t keep
her fear inside her head, it had to come out of her mouth if she wanted to work
her way through this.

He lurched off the bed
towards the bathroom, a clean jerk away from her, the plate of noodles upended
on the comforter.
 
“You’ve been
going through my stuff?” he asked with panic in his voice.

“I didn’t mean to, I was
trying to look for my own meds.
 
I
looked through yours.
 
I don’t want
to have a black veil between us anymore.
 
I want to know who you are.”

“You know me,” he scoffed, moving
cat-like to the doorway between the bedroom and the bathroom.

“Haven’t I been
trustworthy?”
 
She asked gently,
patting the bed next to her.
 
“Come
back and sit with me.”

He held himself solidly
separate, reticence in each step away.

“Eddie, I’ve been blind for
too long.
 
I want to see.”

“You’ll see perfectly fine
in a few days.”
 
His voice was strained
yet compassionate.
 
He walked into
the bathroom and she heard sounds, the jostling of the two small toiletry
bags.
 
He stalked past her, out
into the living room, where she heard rustling cupboard doors open and close,
the front closet door open and close.
 
Then he stood again at the bedroom door, she could feel him fighting
back anger and embarrassment.

“Sit with me, Eddie.”

He returned, tentatively
picking up the fork she’d overlooked, picking up errant noodles, then laying it
on top of the plate on the side table, tines down.
 
He moved close to her, and she laid her head on his
shoulder.
 
They were both facing a
mirror on the front of the armoire across the carpet from the foot of the bed.
 

“What do you want to know?”

“What happened around you
that made you need those pills?”

His voice cracked, “I
didn’t get them all at once.
 
I
don’t even need them.”
 
His voice
had a childish petulance and dripped with a shame she’d never heard from him.

“I know you don’t.”
 

She felt his triceps tense
up against her arms.
 
Better not to
show her full hand, all that she knew.
 
“Tell me about your parents.”

“You being Oprah?”
 
He shook his head.

“No, I just want to know
where you came from.
 
About your people.”

“My dad was in the
military.
 
My mom said they moved
around a lot.”

“But you grew up here in
Detroit, didn’t you?”
 

“She stopped moving with
him.
 
She wanted to put down
roots.
 
She bought a house in
Livonia and he came home when he wasn’t deployed.
 
Then he stopped coming home, when I was in grade school.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I thought he had a
girlfriend.
 
I hated him and
refused to go visit him.
 
He lived
in an apartment a couple of towns away.
 
He was always late to pick me up for our dinners together and finally we
just parted ways.”

“That must have been
tough.”
 
She couldn’t imagine
letting a father slip away, but, she thought, horrified, she did have a father
somewhere and she had let him slip away.
 
She had never tried to find out who he might be.
 
Even now, she had no desire to know
anything about him, as punishment for his lack of courage and utter abandonment.

Eddie was sitting still,
letting her questions prod him to speak.
 
She felt the moment of expectancy, so she asked, “How is your mother?”

He hunched over a bit.
 
“She’s okay.”

“Do you ever see her?”
 
Celeste felt the question was risky.

“Not really.”
 
He twitched.
 

“Who did you say goodbye to
when you first went to Afghanistan?”

“I don’t even
remember.
 
It’s worlds away.”

“What made you join the
military, after breaking off from your Army dad?”

“You should be a shrink,”
Eddie said softly.
 
“I thought that
was the way to become a man.
 
Which
is funny, because I didn’t like the man that my dad was.
 
But the guys in the recruiting office,
I liked them.
 
They had integrity.
 
They dressed sharp.
 
They wanted to better themselves.
 
I thought I’d like to grow up to be
like them.”

“What do you remember most
about your first tour?”

He sat silent for a few
minutes.
 
Celeste worried that
she’d reached a point in his memories that he had slammed fully shut.
 
Her memories sustained her.
 
They colored her soul.
 
He’d receded so far from his that she
was afraid of bringing them up, but she knew that his history would tell her
whether or not she could stay with him.
 

Then his voice appeared, the
sound so melodious that she looked sideways at him, sitting still, his hands
open on his lap.

“The trees in the mountains,
I told you about them.
 
It was
crazy.
 
I grew up with streets of
concrete, buildings.
 
Maybe one
tree every block and the only cool thing about each tree in D-town was watching
to see how much bird shit would hit cars parked on the streets underneath.
 
Because there weren’t enough trees for
the birds in the city, so they had to hang out in packs in one tree on every
street.
 
We’d laugh so hard, my
buddies and me, to see some idiot park unsuspectingly under the pretty tree on
Woodward Avenue, or 6 Mile.
 
But in
Afghanistan, there were thousands of super tall Sequoias and Redwoods.
 
Primeval forests.
 
When we’d hike though them, even in our
heavy gear, I spent half my time staring up at them.”

“How pretty.”

“Yeah.
 
My first tour was great.
 
We only took shelling a few times.
 
The rest of the time we were digging
out flat areas on the hills, building concrete buildings for other troops
coming up behind us to use as ops centers.
 
I was a glorified builder.”

“That’s not so bad.
 
What about your second tour?
 
Did your mother mind that you were
called up again?”

He shook his head.
 
“I never was called up again.”

“What?”

“I re-upped.”

“You signed yourself up for
three out of four tours?”
 
She was
shocked.

“Yep.
 
What else was I going to do?”

“Did you ever come home?”

“Between the first and
second and the third and fourth.”

“How was your mom each
time?”

“She thought I was running
away, trying to make myself into a man.”

“Which you kind of said you
were doing, wanting to grow up like the guys in the recruitment center.”

He was thoughtful.
 
“I guess so.
 
But it sounded so judgmental coming from her.
 
She was a good mom, but I was a fuck-up
to her.
 
I always felt like I
couldn’t make her happy.”

“Maybe she was just unhappy
at life.”

“Nah, she was a pretty
happy lady.
 
Smiling all the time.
She took me all over the state to explore when I was a little kid.
 
We had a lot of fun together.”

“What changed that?”

“I was smoking weed in high
school, getting wasted on 40s with a couple of guys from my neighborhood.
 
She was worried I was going to end up
like my dad.”

“Your dad was a
drinker?
 
Is that why you don’t
drink much?”

“I try not to do anything
my dad did.
 
Let’s leave it at that.
 
I wonder if you realize how lucky you
are not to have had a screw-up for a dad.”

“I did have a screw-up for
a dad,” Celeste found herself saying.
 
“He ditched my mom and me.
 
Actually,
I’ve never bothered to think about him.
 
I mean, I thought about him at school when other kids talked about their
normal dads, but what kind of man leaves his kid?
 
I never wanted to find the man who left my mother.
 
And me.”

“Same thing for me.”
 

Eddie leaned Celeste
forward a few inches and raised his arm, putting it around her, then pulled her
back into his embrace.
 
“Thank you
for giving a shit.”

“I wonder what started you
getting all those pills.
 
What are
they all for?”

He froze again.

She softened her
voice.
 
“You must have needed
them.
 
You must have broken in some
way and needed the help getting yourself back home.”

She could feel the
tightness in his throat as he leaned his head over to hers, kissing her gently
on her forehead.

“My second and then my last
tours.
 
Shit happened.”

“Were some of them for your
injury?”

“Maybe.
 
Maybe some of the brain meds.
 
But I think some of them were for the
internal injuries.”

“Were you ever shot?
 
Did you fall?
 
What internal injuries?”

“Not the real ones.
 
The ghost ones.”
 
His voice was vacant.

“Hmm,” she said, not
understanding.
 
“How many are you
taking now?”
 
She decided to go
online later, to the local pharmacy chain’s website where she could input the
prescription names and see whether or not they had bad drug interactions, side
effects that she could peg to his anti-social moments.

“I had to take some of them
for seizures for a while after I got hit in the head.
 
Some of them were after the second tour when my platoon got
ambushed.
 
The shit hit the fan and
I think I couldn’t wash the blood off for months.”
 
He shivered.
 
“Celeste, I don’t think I can talk about this anymore.”
 

She looked at him and he
was staring at himself in the mirror.
 
He looked like a lost, overlooked homeless teenager, like the faces of
runaways she’d seen over the last few years, hovering back in darkened doorways
of abandoned buildings.

She wasn’t worried so much
anymore about the insane amount of meds and prescriptions and pills she had
found in the bathroom.
 
She was worried
about the rips in the fabric of his life, the damage done by repeat
deployments.
 
Just because he had
signed himself up over and over again did not mean that he could handle the
experience or the after-effects of what he did and saw when he was in uniform.
 

As though he were reading
her mind, he said, “The hardest part was coming home in uniform.
 
Some people clap you on the back and
thank you, as though anything I did made up for the loss of all those poor
people in the Twin Towers.
 
Other
people beg me to quit and come home, they don’t want me killing innocent
civilians.
 
But they don’t offer me
any help.
 
No job, no home.
 
My dad came out of World War II and got
a GI bill, he went through college, got a GI home loan for the house my mom
ended up raising me in.
 
But guys I
served with, the ones who got out of the service after one or two
deployments?
 
What did they come
home to?
 
They went back to their
high school bedrooms, to no jobs in their towns, no college funds.
 
They either did any drug they could get
their hands on or blew their brains out.
 
Or they lived on the streets after their parents threw them out because
they couldn’t sit quietly at church anymore.”

“I see guys in uniforms come
into the office,” Celeste said, “when they come back.
 
And then in a month or two, I see them again but they look
really confused, like they can’t figure out what to do with themselves.”