Unburying Hope

by Mary Wallace

  “Don’t touch me, young lady,” the cop growled, “or I’ll have you in the holding tank faster than you can pull that foreign drivers license out again. And I want you to pull it out, so I can copy it for our files.”

  Celeste’s eyes narrowed. He was playing chicken, she thought. She knew he’d cringed when she said she lived locally, so she stood her ground. “Sure”, she said as she pulled out her license again. “And you’ll need my proof of residency,” she pulled out the school envelope she still carried around, deftly removing the copy of her lease. She held it tightly in her hands, hoping suddenly that she wouldn’t have to show him her rent amount, the cottage’s address, Malia’s name and address.

  He took the lease, though, wrote down the address and handed it back to her. “So he’s living here, huh?”

  “Who?”

  “Your boyfriend.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Yeah. He’s in there.” The cop motioned into the hospital room.

  “We’ve moved here.” Celeste moved closer to the door, frantically trying to see Eddie in the darkened room.

  “Why Hawaii?” He held up his arm to block her.

  “Tired of the cold.” She pushed against his arm.

  “Sure it wasn’t for ‘business’ opportunities?”

  “We’ve got a dive shop, in Kihei.”

  “Watch out,” the cop said. “You’d better hope he’s not part of the Mexican cartel.”

  “He’s Irish,” Celeste said, confused.

  “I’m Irish too,” the cop said. “The cartels hire anyone, don’t think you’re safe just because you’re not Hispanic.”

  “I know all about the damn cartels,” she said, “it was all over the papers in Detroit. They’re evil, yada, yada. Let me see Rosalinda.”

  “If dumb ass Americans weren’t always high, there’d be no market for evil.”

  She looked at him, her hands on her waist. “Why are we talking about this? Are you going to let me in there or not?”

  The cop lowered his arm and she walked quietly into the darkened room where Rosalinda was still asleep on her bed.

  When she saw Eddie standing at the bedside, she gasped with a mixture of sorrow and the shock of seeing him in shackles.

  He stood tall, looked right at her with a flash of regret. “I’m sorry, Celeste,” was all he said.

  “What the hell happened? Why is there a cop outside and what’s with the cuffs?”

  “How’s Rosalinda?”

  “Having a hard time, you idiot. Anything you do to me is one tenth of the pain of what you do to her.”

  His shoulders slumped. His eyes darted around and she watched as he stared at the open doorway with the hulking police officer in shadows.

  “Your bodyguard?” she quipped. “Now they have our address, so that’s not good.”

  “Cops are good, Celeste. I want them knowing where you two live.”

  “You’re supposed to live there too, with us,” she snapped. “What the hell is going on?

  He lowered his voice. “The shop used to be a meth lab.”

  “I know that,” she said. “The cops told me a few days ago when you went walkabout.”

  “I didn’t go walkabout, Celeste.”

  As silence settled into the empty space between them, Celeste took a moment to look at him with clear eyes. He looked better than he had at home. He looked rested. And sober. There was a light in his eyes she hadn’t ever seen.

  “I’m so sorry, Eddie, but your mother died.” She watched his face, he hadn’t been expecting that.

  His shoulders crumpled and he lowered his head, slow sobs rose from his solar plexus through his throat, past his stifling jaw to escape into the room, weighing heavy in the darkness.

  She held him, as he leaned against her, his hot tears soaking the skin of her clavicle and shoulder.

  “Frank went to get the custody papers and she’d died a few days ago. I didn’t get a text from anyone about it, did you?”

  “My phone fell into the ocean a few days back, I haven’t gotten texts or calls.”

  “Where have you been? Why didn’t you come home?”

  He motioned to the door, to the cop.

  She couldn’t read anything in his eyes. But she knew she couldn’t take his silence anymore.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Part of her knew that she had watched him closely over the few months he’d intermittently appeared in Detroit to pay his bill. She had indeed noticed that he was declining but it was hard to admit what she was witnessing, his resilience needed to be honored and she knew she had created a false altar to it, skimming over nagging questions.

  Now she knew he’d probably been high the first few times she’d seen him.

  When she finally phoned him and they became lovers, she unconsciously quashed the stories in her head. Sometimes, when he was super energetic after she got home, they’d made love like two stars combusting together, creating light out of their mutual darkness. They would go for a run together through the abandoned streets in the moonlight. They they’d go home to sleep. Or, she now saw, she slept while he lay agitated next to her. Maybe he needed another high at that point, she thought, because that was always right before he’d disappear for a few days time.

  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 eve
ry day as you remember the shit you did.”

  “But we’re here now, we’re living in Eden,” Celeste said, bending towards his head, kissing his skin and dented skull. “We’ll find someone who can help, have a shrink come to the house if you don’t want anyone to know. I’ll,” she paused, “Rosalinda and I will keep things stable. We’ll let the cops clear the meth dealers out and then we’ll build up the store in the next few months. We’ll take time together, stay in our safe place, garden like you like to, putting in plants. We can live off my savings for a year or two,” she said, noting the rising hope in his eyes. “Rosalinda’s going to recover, they said this will be a forgotten memory in a few months. They did an MRI. Eddie, your kid deserves to have you live, like that kid deserved to have his father live. “You HAVE to live,” she said, “to undo the cycle of dying.”

  “Is she okay?” He summoned all his strength to reach for her arms, pulling at her.

  “I think so. They had to see if she had brain inflammation but I think she’s okay. She’s got stitches, right above her ear. She can’t play for a couple of weeks, but she’s a strong little girl. We don’t have health insurance for her, do we? I bet this hospital bill is going to break us,” Celeste said, suddenly worried about the bill they’d be faced with after the she was released.

  “Celeste,” he said, his voice vehement enough to shake her out of her dream.

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to unbury some things.” He looked right to left, as though there were enemies behind the curtains.

  “Dig something up?” Her lip curled, the word burying reminded her of cemeteries.