by Mary Wallace
“It’s better for you anyway,” Celeste answered. “The last thing we need is you groggy and addicted.”
Frank put his head towards the camera. “I’ve been like Rip Van Winkle, sleeping but my hair’s still growing. I’m going to need my roots done.”
Celeste smirked half-heartedly. It was tough to see him wounded.
“Seriously, though,” Frank said, “thank you for getting me out of there. That explosion didn’t get me, hitting the bottle on the car did. It knocked the wind out of me, I couldn’t breathe.”
“I know.” Celeste moved towards her own screen. “I felt so bad for you.”
“Aw, you’re the best non-wifey ever,” Frank cooed. “Twisting hurts my muscles but I’ve got to get back to the gym or I’ll lose my most valuable assets,” he said, lifting his shirt again to show his chest and abs.
“How are you going to explain that bruise?” Celeste asked, pointing at the screen.
“I’ve already been thinking about that.”
“Of course you have,” Celeste laughed.
“How about I say I couldn’t wait for a bar to open, or I had a slip and fall while carrying champagne to a date.”
“Not very manly.”
“Um, I want to date manly,” Frank huffed. “I don’t need to be manly. I think it’s a perfect statement of who I am, more of a playboy.”
“You are that,” Celeste agreed. “I’d think that bruise is a good sign, you clearly know how to party.”
“Speaking of partying,” Frank said, holding his side to take a deep breath.
“Yes?”
“Do you think you-know-who is taking your pain pills?”
“What?” Celeste bristled.
“I wonder why Eddie’s being so frugal. As much as I joke, the doc gave me a prescription because a bottle broke between a metal car and me. I could have shattered all my ribs. I didn’t, but this hurts so damn bad.”
“He says they make me too groggy.”
“Me too.”
“Well, check your bottle.”
“It’s in the kitchen. I’m too tired now.”
“Well, check later.”
“I will,” Celeste said. “Did you check your bottle?”
“I can’t see enough to count them yet,” Frank leaned in, “I feel like shit saying anything because he’s so nice to check on me and get me food. But you should keep your eyes open, Missy.”
Celeste bit her lip. She didn’t want to get up and rifle around the house looking for her painkillers in front of Frank but she now felt an urgent desire to climb out of bed. “So, I’m going to sleep,” she said, “Check in with me when you wake up.”
“You’re going to hang up on me, aren’t you.”
“I have to, I need to sleep,” she said, “don’t take it personally.”
“Okay, I’ll sleep too. TTYL.”
“Sleep well.” She pushed the disconnect button and pulled herself out of the bed, intent on tracking down her small prescription bottle. Her eyes were tired but she stood up, balancing herself against the wall. Hopefully she had a few minutes before Eddie returned.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The fluorescent bathroom light was too bright for her eyes, they still felt rubbed raw. She stood in the half daylight, no window in her bathroom, seeing herself in the mirror, a shadowy face and slumped shoulders. The explosion had wounded her heart as much as her head, she knew. Detroit was unraveling and she was caught up in its reality. She couldn’t lie to herself any longer.
Sitting on the counter next to two plastic toiletry cases, a large white plastic bottle sat with its top open. Ibuprofen, hundreds of blue gel capsules lay inside. These were what Eddie had been pumping her with, two every four hours when she was awake.
There was another prescription bottle sitting at the top of her case. She opened it and found large white pills. Ultram, the pharmacy sticker said, 100 mg, 3 times a day for 10 days. She counted out twenty-four pills. It had been a week. Eddie had been parceling them out to her, two a day for the first two or three days and she hadn’t had one in days.
Eddie’s toiletry case sat right next to hers. It was brown and eight inches tall, it looked like an old fashioned doctor’s bag, and it had his name stenciled across it with a Sharpie pen. She gingerly unzipped the top. It was always closed when they were in the bathroom together and it had never occurred to her to rifle through it. Having not grown up around boys, she assumed it had some shaving cream and supplies, but his toothbrush and toothpaste were on the sink counter, next to hers.
The plastic of his case crackled as she opened it with the pads of her fingers, careful to not jostle the interiors or to move the case on the counter. There was a rag on the top. She lifted it out and folded it, placing it next to the case. It had covered the expected can of shaving cream and a blue plastic razor. She lifted out the can and the razor and placed them carefully on the folded rag.
It was hard to breathe, looking into the bag at its contents. A clumsy pile of orange prescription bottles lay in the bottom six inches of the bag. She couldn’t count how many, they were all jumbled in one mountain of orange and white.
She reached in with her thumb and forefinger to surgically pull one bottle up. Adderal. She shook the bottle gently, listening to the clunking of chalky pills against the plastic bottle. Then she pulled up another bottle, Haldol. Then another. Zoloft. Then Oxycontin. Then Percocet. Then Topomax. Then Klonopin, .5 mg, 3 times a day. Then Ambien. Then Valium. Then Flexeril. Then Seroquel. Then Neurotin, 800 mg, 3 times a day. Then Clonodine, .1 mg, 3 times a day. Then Ultram, her own medication, but with his name on the pharmacy sticker, 100 mg, 3 times a day. Then Elavil. Then Trazodone. Finally, she pulled out empty bottles for Risperdol, Lyrica and Celexa.
The bottles stood like sentinels, lined up next to each other on her laminate countertop. Sixteen filled prescription bottles and three empty prescription bottles.
She lifted the Adderal bottle and read the label; it had been filled out of a military pharmacy in Germany. She placed it carefully down, and then lifted another bottle, reading the label from the same medical center, Landstuhl. It occurred to her to separate the pills out by pharmacy locations and she soon found herself with eight separate collections of his bottles. They had been prescribed from different locations. And the bottles from the same locations came from different doctors. No doctor prescribed more than one prescription.
Each bottle was on a refill, but she couldn’t see how many times each had been refilled. Most of the refill dates were within the last year. Some of the bottles were nearly empty. She opened the Klonopin, there were four pills left. Then Neurotin, there were twelve pills left out of 90. Every single bottle had a warning label saying that drowsiness could result.
She stood in a cold sweat. How could she tell Frank? What could she say to Eddie? She had never seen this many medicines in one place. Her mother had been averse to pills, to the point that when she died, her doctor had whispered to Celeste at the funeral home that he wished she’d just once filled the prescription he’d given her for high blood pressure, as though she could have prolonged her life if she’d just swallowed a plain old pill every day.
But this was insane. There were hundreds of pills here and she had no idea what they were for. She knew the Ultram was for pain, she knew the Ambien was for sleep, because she’d laughed with Frank at the commercials that had a lilting voice describing the blacked out sleep you’d have on the medication and then a deep, stentorian voice came on for the last five seconds with a long, hurried, scary list of dangers associated with the drug, including suicidal thoughts, perhaps failed organs and maybe inability to keep sane.
She walked backwards out of the bathroom to get a pad of paper and pen and quickly returned to write down the names of each drug, the prescription and the place the prescription was filled.
She carefully placed the bottles back into the toiletry bag, trying to jumble them in the same order she’d pulled them out, but since she ha
d organized them by location, she knew they weren’t going in within the same order that they came out, which vexed her. She pulled them all out again and read each label closely, putting them back in the order of original prescription date, figuring that he hadn’t recently touched the older meds and they would be on the bottom of his case.
She heard a key turn in the lock at the front door and she panicked, picking up his case, zipping it shut. She slammed the bathroom door shut and turned on the water faucet, noticing that she’d forgotten to replace his shaving things.
“Hey, babe,” his voice rang through the apartment.
“I’m in here, I’ll be right out,” she called. As silently as she could, she unzipped his case, shoved his shaving cream can and razor into an indentation in the pile of bottles, unfolded his rag, placed it over the shaving things and zipped the bag closed. She placed it carefully right next to her own.
“I brought you some lunch,” he said. “Your market doesn’t have anything, as usual, so I went to the Thai place and got noodles.”
She could hear him in the kitchen, opening cupboards, taking out plates. She stared at her face in the mirror. Should she say anything? Should she watch him? She hadn’t counted the pills in each bottle; it had been too intimidating to think about cataloging them anymore than she had.
She pinched her cheeks, trying to get color into them. Her eyes hurt again. She had forced herself to look closely at small writing, reading the labels of his bottles. The headache pain was now back.
She opened the bathroom door, “I want to rub my damn eyes,” she said, moving towards him. The smell of a light peanut sauce, the Pad Thai noodles warm on a plate, wafted towards her.
“I’ll get you some ibuprofen,” he said. “Lie down and I’ll feed you. You’ve got to close your eyes when they hurt.”
“I don’t want to close them,” she countered. “I want to see things.”
“Well, you might see too much and then not be able to open them for a while,” he said gently, steering her back towards the bedroom. “Sometimes, it’s best to be blind so you can eventually see again. It’s not going to be much longer but if you don’t take care, it could get worse and you’d have to wear the gauze like Frank for half the day.”
Knowingly blinding yourself, Celeste thought, what a terror. Shutting your eyes, sitting in your skin, the world going on around you. It was a recipe for a nervous breakdown. She’d survived the decade with her preternatural ability to watch everything going on around her.
But then she hadn’t really seen. She had been voluntarily blind.
Sitting on her bathroom counter, an inch from her own transparent container of all things that prettied up her life, was a brown, crackled case that held so many mind-altering drugs that she couldn’t imagine how someone on them could soberly be present in their own life.
“You close your eyes, babe.” He moved close to her on the bed, both of them leaning their backs up against the bare wall behind their pillows.
She followed his lead, closing her eyes. She could hear his fork as he twirled noodles on the plate, ‘here you go,” his voice said softly. She opened her mouth and took in a lovely bite of soft rice noodles, a salty peanut taste clinging to the lightness of the food.
“Thank you,” she said, after she chewed a bit. “You have no idea how hard it is to be stuck like this.”
“Oh, I know, Celeste.” His voice faltered.
She opened her eyes a tiny bit, peeking at him as though she were a young girl on the playground, trying to read the face of the boy next to her before he took off to play hide and seek.
His face troubled, he was preparing another forkful of noodles for her. His brow was furrowed and his lips were tight and she felt sorrow, not fear, looking at him as the receptacle of all those drugs. She had no idea what he was taking, or when. Whether he was on anything now.
But his softness. His kindness. They were there in his face.
As he raised the fork, she tightened her eyelashes against each other, blinding herself into darkness, aware of the scent of the food, the tenderness of his movements.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Eddie,” she said quietly.
“Yes?”
“I don’t want you to hide from me anymore.”
He laughed, “Why would I be afraid of you?”
She cocked her eyebrow at him, “I want to know who you are.”
He balked, his facial expression turning dark. She could see his shoulders tensing.
“I know you’ve been to war for years and years.”
“Yes,” he said, suspiciously.
“It’s time for you to tell me about it.”
“No,” he turned away.
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 wa
s 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.”