Unburying Hope (42 page)

What Frank saw was his withdrawal, his
decline, his scraping bottom, his headlong search for another high.

Wanting so desperately to tap in to his
preternatural energy, she shielded her eyes and her heart from the ugly
truth.
 

He was an addict.

She needed his energy, when he was high, to jumpstart
the dead battery of her own hopes and dreams.
 
To awaken her from the heaviness of the responsibility she
imposed on herself day in and day out at home.
  
To believe that joy could again be part of her
life.
 

But she sat now, devastated.
 
Devastated that an energized,
hope-filled life was only an illusion.
 
Devastated that she had allowed her own goals of a lovely home and a man
to be craftily changed into a nightmare thousands of miles from home, mothering
an un-mothered daughter.

Celeste’s rage withdrew, like an ocean wave
that had crashed against broken rocks at the shoreline.
 
She stood up at the side of Rosalinda’s
bed, aware that she had a choice now.
 
She could leave him, leave Rosalinda, go back to Detroit.
 
Or fly to South Carolina.
 

The veil that she had put between herself and
his reality had receded.
 
In the
depths of her heart, she worried that there was too much emotional distance
between what was real and the roles they had each played out to each other.

Maybe the occasional multi-night disappearance
had caused cracks in her hopes and dreams for the future.
 
Maybe the fissures were deep.
 
She did not know.

A sorrow that she had never seen flooded into
his face and he cried out, a primal stifled cry.

“I’m such a fuckup.”
 
His voice was shaky.
 
He stammered, his voice rasping.
 
“I want to talk to you before I have to go with them.
 
It started in Afghanistan.
 
We were out in the field for a couple
of weeks, they wanted us awake for more than 12 hours, so we’d get high at the
start of a shift and go 2 or 3 days.”

Celeste was confused.
 
“Are you saying the military gave you
drugs?”

“It’s not like it was when my dad fought in
Korea and Vietnam.
 
Contractors
need places secured.
 
We do the
long shifts.”

“How did you really get that dent?” Celeste
knew she’d never believed the story of him being hit by an unexploded mortar.

“I was hit at close range.”
 
His eyes closed.

Celeste stood at the side of Rosalinda’s bed,
letting the heavy minutes pass until Eddie opened his eyes again to look at
her.

“It’s why I refused the Purple Heart.
 
And why I fucked myself over and got a
Dishonorable.”

“Look, you can either keep telling me lies or
you can tell me the truth, you decide,” Celeste said, shaking the cobwebs of
old stories out of her head, “But I’m not sticking around for lies.”

“What do you want to hear?”

She seethed.
 
“The truth, damn it!
 
I changed my whole life to move here.
 
I believed in your dreams!
 
I let your damn dreams become my dreams!
 
Frank was right when he said I didn’t
do it for myself.”

He cringed reactively.

“Now you’ve left me alone to raise your
daughter.
 
And I never wanted a
kid!
 
And she tells me that you
promised to bring her here with a new mommy and isn’t it so damn convenient
that you met me?
 
But I’m not Mommy
material, so damn you for tricking me into thinking this move was about our new
life.
 
This was your own puzzle
that you fit me into.”

“No, Celeste, no,” he sat up.
 
“All the stupid shit I’ve done in the
last few years, none of it had anything to do with you.
 
I’ve been trying to get clean, for
you.
 
For us.”

“So how did you get the dent?” her voice was
still cold.
 
She so desperately
wanted to believe that she could have a real life, like the velveteen rabbit
story her mother had read to her late at night when she couldn’t sleep as a
child.
 
She wanted to believe that
he was a wounded hero.
 
That his
strength could coax hers out.
 
That
they could carve out a life together that would involve her dream house and a
kitchen that was warm with the smells of baking, that had wafting scents of
lavender and gardenia coming in from the open windows.
 
She wanted to find a way to make a
living that could sustain this dream.
 
And she wanted his truth, not just his story, to jibe with her dreams.

“Our platoon went in,” his voice became
detached as though from a tape recorder on playback.
 
“We wrecked part of a village looking for the damn Taliban,
but you can’t find them, they look just like the civilians.
 
Poor, really dirt poor, sitting in
their robes, kneeling before little flames, making tea.
 
You don’t know if they’re hiding guns
under their robes, or under sofa cushions, so we had to go balls out.
 
There were kids there,” his voice grew
metallic, “kids.”
 

She sucked in a breath, terrified that she’d
hear something she could never unhear.
 
“You killed kids?”

“Not on purpose,” he closed his eyes.
 
“You’ll never know what I’ve seen.
 
I don’t know how to get rid of the
memories.
 
They haunt me.
 
They crawl under my skin.”

Celeste found herself crying, his face was
lost in terror, so boyish.
 
Her
mother’s face came to her now, the silence in her skin, the endless emptiness
in her lifeless cheeks in her coffin.
 

He’d made a few passing comments about dead
bodies piled outside of low ceilinged stone houses, but she hadn’t been able to
listen.
 
The thought of a forced
abandonment of the carrier of her mother’s soul was more than she could stand.

This might be part of his pain, she realized,
the inability to adequately acknowledge the loss of each human life.
 
It must seriously damage you, disconnect
you from that part of yourself that would, in another setting, have you leap in
to save the same person from drowning in flood waters or have you running into
a burning building to save that person or his children from engulfing flames.

She looked at the sorrow coursing through
Eddie’s face, it pulled in an undertow from his forehead to his eyes, from his
cheeks to his lips.
 
It sucked all
the energy out of him and then vehemently crested, swelling, crushing it all
back in.
 

He touched his dent, “We actually found the
guy we were looking for,” he said, “which never happens.
 
He was hiding in the play area, an open
ground where the kids kick a goat head around as a soccer ball, or draw art
with sticks in the dirt.”

Celeste watched as he tried to gain control
over his face and his body.
 

“I was the third one around the corner, I came
as the mark grabbed a kid and used him as a shield.
 
My first guy around the corner, he was messed up.
 
We all were.
 
We were higher than kites.
 
We’d been up for two and a half days.
 
My first guy, in two seconds he was
dead, his face blown to pieces, his bulletproof vest had kept his heart from
being shot but his neck was bleeding out.
 
The second guy had his fucking gun out and he was sharpshooting, trying
to hit our mark and not hit the kid.
 
And I saw what had to be the kid’s dad, he flew out of nowhere, saw the
shit that was going down and he did the right thing, he fucking pulled that
bastard off his kid and my guy killed him, not seeing the change.
 
They all fucking looked alike, with
fucking beards and brown hair, and eyes that would fucking rip your heart out
if they could.
 
So I popped the
mark, who was trying to grab the kid again.
 
I popped him.
 
Blew his fucking head off.
 
And the kid, he just crawled over to his dead dad, sobbing, and I
couldn’t understand a thing he was saying.
 
I was just watching, trying to coax him to come with me, so
we could get him the hell out of the battle zone, but he wouldn’t come.
 
I had to grab him, pull his hands off
his father’s robes, and I physically lifted him, yanked him away, put him over
my shoulder and got out of the play yard, threw him into a house where some
women were hiding.”
 
Eddie shook
his head, bereft.
 
“I’ll never
forget his face, it was dusty and blackened by streams of tears, he wouldn’t
show he was crying though.
 
He
looked me right in the eye and fucking flipped me off.
 
I didn’t kill his dad!
 
But I was with the guy who did, who
couldn’t see straight.
 
We were all
so fucking high.”
 

His chest rocked, sobs pushing their way out
of his torso, through his neck, out of his mouth.
 
He was fighting hard to keep them in, Celeste could see.

“We got the mark.
 
The IED bombs were silenced for about ten days, we got the
guy who was crawling into camp and setting them up, but we killed this kid’s
dad and he blamed me.”

Celeste nodded, wondering how you feel watching
someone shoot the wrong person dead.
 

“And because I’d stopped outside the doorway
to stare back in at the kid for five seconds, I got it, right in the head, hit
by a fucking unexploded mortar shot off by one of the women.”
 
He touched the dent.
 
“I should be dead.
 
If that thing had gone off, the kid,
the women, we’d all be blasted to fucking high heaven.”
 
He turned to her.
 
“They wanted to give me the Purple
Heart.
 
My number one guy, the one
who went in front of me, I went back and dragged his headless body off the open
yard, then I got my second guy out too, before I collapsed.
 
Our backup came in and found me with
two dead Afghanis, two dead of my own men and me, alive and hallucinating
because of the impact on my head.
 
I didn’t deserve a fucking Purple Heart, and I turned it down.”
 

His voice grated, “Which of course pissed the
brass off.
 
They want to shine
their medals.”

Celeste wiped her tears, “You saved a
kid.
 
That’s worth a medal.”

“It’s no kind of war if you’re killing
innocent men in a kids’ playground,” Eddie said, “I don’t want a fucking
medal.
 
I wanted my fucking friends
back.
 
I wanted that kid to grow up
with his dad around.
 
Christ, that
guy took a bullet, he took on his own tribe, yanked his kid from a powerful
mullah.
 
And he died for it.
 
He should get the fucking medal.”

Celeste was shaking.
 

The fact that Eddie had stuffed this story down
into the unreachable part of his soul had helped him come back home in one
piece, helped him get up every day since, looking for some semblance of a
meaningful life.
 
But it had
shattered him inside.
 
She could
see that the release of this story was physically changing him.
 
His eyes were clouded with the memories
but he had a presence, he inhabited his face and his body in a way that she
hadn’t seen before.
 

“This is what you hide from?” she asked
softly.
 
“This is what makes you
leave me for a few days, when you go away in the middle of the night?”

“It’s just one story in a whole collection of
misery,” he said.
 
“I’d rather die
than have you go where I’ve been.”
 
He gently took her hand, his forehead still creased with pain and
self-loathing.
 
“I don’t know how
to live with it.
 
I can’t get rid
of it.
 
The faces explode in front
of me, I can hear the shelling, I can smell the death.”

“We’ve got to get you some help,” Celeste
begged.
 
“Please.”

“I tried.
 
I went to a shrink in camp.
 
But he checked off the ‘personality disorder’ box on my
recommendation form, instead of PTSD.
 
That way, it was my fault that I broke, not the war’s fault.
 
That’s the Army’s trick so that they
could disqualify me from disability.
 
You can’t admit you’re fucked up or they bury you.
 
You either die in combat, kill yourself
at home or die every day as you remember the shit you did.”