by Mary Wallace
“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.”
“I know. Really. What job am I going to do after the crazy shit I saw and did in Afghanistan?”
“You could be a building contractor.”
“No one is building in D-town. It’s only demolition, and only of broken down buildings or houses overgrown by bushes. And now the city is using bulldozers, no need for workers. I want to work for myself. I think I can be a success, because everything will depend on me.”
She smiled at him, “You’re wonderful. I bet you could have your own business.”
“You are the only one who sees it.” He said ruefully.
“What about your mom?”
“We don’t talk.”
“Is she still in that house?”
“Nope,” his voice choked. “Lost it to a bank.”
“Damn. That is terrible.”
“Yeah. She lived in it for twenty-eight years and always paid her mortgage on time but the bank sold off the note and the new bank called the loan when it didn’t get payments from the old bank. No one gave her the new bank’s info, so she kept sending in the money to the old bank, who kept the money and didn’t pass it on.”
“That should be illegal. Can’t she fight it?”
“You can’t fight banks. They lose paperwork, point fingers. She was evicted a few years ago. I’d been sending her my paycheck since my 3rd deployment, since…” His voice wavered and fell silent. ”But she said she wanted to live simply, that an old lady didn’t need a big rambling place.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well she thinks I’m a fuck-up anyway, so I don’t go around to see her much anymore.”
Celeste kissed Eddie’s cheek. She wondered if he could outgrow the leave-taking, the walking out the door. Could he ever feel safe enough to stay home with her? Maybe in a different home that didn’t reek to him of all the things that tore him up.
“What about you?” he asked, cocking his head sideways.
“What do you want to know?” She had told him so many things about her childhood, there wasn’t much left to say.
“You had stencils in your purse,” he said.
She froze.
“You can’t be the HOPE person, can you?” His voice was incredulous. “Is it Frank?”
She shook her head. “Are you going to tell the cops?”
He laughed out loud. “Are you kidding me? Cops? I don’t interact with cops. They’re glorified MPs. Out to fill up their prisons, keep their pensions coming.”
She lowered her head.
“Was it really you? You’ve pissed off the Detroit Department of Transportation,” he said. “I heard they’re gunning for whoever defaced their buses right on their o
wn property. They threatened to release video from lot security cameras.”
She choked in fear.
“But they ain’t got the money to have security cameras, I went by after I found your stencils. They didn’t have any way to videotape the lot. They were just bluffing. You made the New York Times, though. I clipped the article for when you can see and read again.”
Her shoulders relaxed just a bit, but her stomach was a knot.
“Look, I know I’m broken,” he said, breathing warmly on her forehead. “But I try to keep it together. For our sake. I had no idea I was hanging out with a felon, though,” he said thoughtfully. “But your secret is safe with me.”
“I’m a little tired,” she said, her eyes sore again.
“Rest a while.”
“I’m afraid you’ll leave,” she said truthfully.
She felt the sorrow in him, it was visceral in the coat of sweat that erupted on his skin.
“It’s not you, I’m not leaving you. Or us. I just have to get outdoors.” He stood up and pulled back the covers. “Celeste, I sleep in your buildings,” he said, touching her eyelids and then his own heart. “I’m not leaving you and I want us to grow old together.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“He knows, Frank,” Celeste said, seated at a side table at the Italian restaurant near the office.
Frank’s eyes widened. “Oh, crap,” he said. “How? I knew he’s a spy.”
“No,” she answered, “he found my stencils when I was home in bandages. To be honest, I forgot all about the tagging when I couldn’t see. It’s funny how being aware of blindness, wanting to see again eclipses all other thinking. I totally forgot about my papers in my closet. I heard him going into the closet a few times but I was too focused on what I couldn’t see to think about what he could.”
“Is he going to report you?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t really tell what he thinks about it but he’s not going to tell. And he doesn’t know you were with me. Actually, he couldn’t believe it was me, he kept thinking it was you!”
He smiled wanly, “I guess I come across as a badass.”
They both laughed softly.
“I feel like I’m losing you, “ Frank said. He smoothed the white tablecloth on the restaurant lunch table. “We don’t party anymore.”
“I know,” Celeste responded. “It’s a Catch-22. I wanted a boyfriend so badly but now that I’ve got Eddie, I forget what it was like when I didn’t race home.”
“I see that he’s hot. He’s got that yoked body from the Service.” Frank signaled the waiter for two drinks, “Let’s just have one cocktail to celebrate being back at work together, even if we get fired soon.”
Celeste laughed giddily, “I know! He’s got a six-pack! When we were out on sick leave, I started doing sit-ups when he wasn’t looking. I hated being blind, but I felt so out of shape.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Frank grinned, “men want women to be soft. If they want a super hard body, they should be gay and go to a gym.”
“I’ve never said it, Frank, but I love your body. You look good in a tight shirt.”
He winked. “You’re finally noticing my hotness!”
Celeste blushed, pushing away the newly delivered glass. “No thanks.” She hadn’t had anything to drink in weeks, shaking her head when Eddie offered her a beer or a glass of wine, hoping and noticing happily that he didn’t drink if she didn’t. She had read all about the prescriptions on her phone in spare moments at the office when Frank wasn’t looking, and she knew that any liquor would set Eddie down a steep slope to depression and possible addiction.
“You have to! It’s the only partying we have left.”
She winced. It was true. She hadn’t gone drinking at night as his wingman in eons. “I know. How bad is that?”
“Well, I’ve never dropped you for a boyfriend, I’ve always carved out one or two nights a week for you,” he said.
“Yes, but you hate being in a relationship,” she parried. “I’ve been looking for this for years, way before I met you. I don’t want to pop the bubble and have him go away.”
“A good relationship should be able to handle one night a week out with a friend. Unless he’s jealous of me. And my hotness.” Frank tapped on the tabletop.
“I don’t want him going out, to be honest.”
“So you don’t go out yourself?”
“It feels like a fair trade to keep him from finding someone else.”
“He can meet someone while you’re at work.”
She cringed.
Frank leaned forward, saying “To be honest, Celeste, I know why you’re doing it, why you’ve cut off our nights out. And I love you enough to want for you what you want for yourself.”
She smiled sadly. “This is so hard.” She reached for her cocktail and clinked her glass against his, “To doing what it takes to keep a relationship going.” It was their lunch break but she could use a drink to soothe her still present headache.
“You’d better be toasting our relationship, Missy!” he teased.
They ate and drank in silence, and she didn’t refuse the second round of cocktails brought by the waiter at Frank’s request.
“Frank,” Celeste leaned in, “I found a bunch of meds that Eddie’s been prescribed. Some of them are old. Some were filled in Europe before he got home.”
Frank looked at her, “I knew it!”
Celeste reached into her purse and pulled out the schematic she’d made from the list of prescriptions in Eddie’s toiletries bag. There were 19 prescription drug names, combined into 11 categories. Adderal was under the heading ‘ADD’. Haldol was under the heading ‘Anti-psychotic’. Zoloft was listed under ‘Anti-depressant’. She had clumped Oxycontin, Lyrica, Percocet and Ultram under ‘Pain’. Valium, Topomax, Flexeril and Neurotonin were under ‘Spams, Anti-convulsants, Anti-Seizure’. Clonodine was for blood pressure but was prescribed for withdrawal. Ambien was for ‘Sleep’ but Seroquel was jointly listed under ‘Sleep’ and ‘Anxiety’, along with Klonopin and Valium, which was also under ‘Pain’.
Her chart had started as a clinical list and ended up becoming an octopus of overlapping arms, interconnected, repetitive prescriptions for multiple disorders. Pills to go downward, pills to go upwards, pills to make you sleep because the upward pills had worked too well, pills for anxiety because you couldn’t remember all the pills you were supposed to take. She didn’t know which pills helped the part of his brain that must have been slammed or crushed by the dent in his skull.
She showed the chart to Frank, her heart in her throat, taking a last chug from her drink, returning the empty glass to the table.
“Holy shit, that explains everything.”
She spit out a bit of her drink, interrupting her swallow. “What?”
Frank leaned in, “Don’t you notice him changing?”
Celeste thought for a moment. Eddie met her at the bus stop every day after work and they walked together to the apartment. He was short tempered sometimes but she was sure that was because he couldn’t find a fulltime job. He was distracted, but the fact that he was always at the street corner was a good sign to her. He was stable.
“Something is nagging at him. Does he drink a lot?” Frank asked.
“No, he never drinks.”
“Hmmm, well when he first came to the office, he had that hard body plus what I call ‘happy flab’ on his face. He was obviously eating.”
“He doesn’t eat that much,” she said.
“His cheeks are thinner.”
“He takes really long walks some nights,” she said halfheartedly, knowing that he wore the same clothes when he met her bus that he did when he walked her to it in the morning. “What are you getting at?”
“I think he’s an addict.”
She sat back, stunned. “That’s a terrible thing to say! He’s not an addict. He doesn’t drink; he’s just not eating a lot these days. All these pills,” she said, quickly fo
lding up her diagram and shoving it into the pocket of her jacket, “they’re older prescriptions. Some of the bottles are empty.”
“I’m sorry,” Frank lowered his voice, “I didn’t want to say anything. But now you’ve got the proof in your own hands. Your boy is messed up. Time for you to break it off.”
“How could you?” She pushed back from the table.
“Celeste, I’m worried that by being so close to your dream relationship, you’re not seeing the whole picture. He’s been really on edge lately when he’s stopped by the office. And he took both of our legit meds away from us.”
Celeste crossed her arms, distracted. “He calms down when he’s with me, so he visits sometimes.”
“What does he do all day?” Frank signaled for another round of drinks.
“No, I’ve had enough,” she snapped.
“Come on, let’s not fight. We’ve got another 20 minutes, we can have one more and then spend all afternoon laughing at Jeannie.”
Celeste smirked, memories trumping her pain for a flash of seconds. Those were good afternoons, breezily helping customers while signaling to each other as Jeannie dealt with the old ladies and collected their gifts. They’d lean over and sample the brownies or hard candies until the afternoon wore on and they tired of it, clocking in each customer in the hopes that they would soon hear the closing bell. An empty exhaustion would end their day and they’d hug, say goodbye and head to their now separate evenings, Celeste to the bus, excited to see Eddie, and Frank to the gym. Those afternoons made up for the evenings that they no longer whiled away together.
But his words still stung. “You know, Frank, that someone could say we’re addicts because we used to drink whenever we were together.”
“What?” His eyes flared. “We barely ever get drunk anymore.”
“Yeah, not since Eddie.”
“Hey, if you can’t handle the truth about your boyfriend, you don’t have to take it out on me.”
“I’m just saying. You’re quick to slam him for losing weight.”
“His face is gaunt, Celeste. Why don’t you see that?”
She bit her lip in anger. “Now you’re just being an ass.