Unburying Hope Page 10

  Suddenly, she realized that the shape was a sailboat hull. Half a sailboat, crashed at the bottom of the lake, standing straight up. Because it was fiberglass, it was half of a whole, except for the jagged edges dug into the ground.

  She gasped. It had been eight or nine halting breaths. She reached Eddie and ran her hand across her throat in the ‘out of air’ signal he had forced her to learn.

  He pulled out his mouthpiece, pushed hers aside and let her breathe his air.

  Yes. He had enough oxygen, it flowed freely. She took a few deep breaths and he pulled her mouthpiece in to his own mouth. She’d staved off the panic until now but it was creeping into her through the sticky water trapped against her skin by the unbreathing neoprene.

  She let go of the mouthpiece and shot upwards, gasping, pushing herself, reaching for the arms that had magically and dramatically yanked her out of danger in her childhood but no arms came from above and her chest ached, her body stressed as she rose too fast, fear propelling her.

  She felt Eddie’s arms around her waist and felt his strong kicks pushing her faster until finally she broke surface and took in breaths so deep that her lungs hurt.

  Back in the apartment, silent in the warm shower, Eddie rubbed her arms, soothing her.

  “It was the regulator on your tank. There’s something wrong with it, it released too much air early on. I’ll go on eBay and I’ll get my money back. I’ll get you one that works, I promise. That’s my fault, I should have tested it better.”

  “I don’t ever want to do that again.”

  “You have to, Celeste. Please, I want you to.”

  “You don’t know what that was like for me. I can’t ever do that again.”

  “I’ve had that happen. My own tank didn’t work once in the Indian Ocean and I had to buddy breath. We both were way the hell out in the water, but we did our training and made it back.”

  “Did you dive in the war?”

  “No.” His answer was curt but he held her forearm gently, placing it against his chest.

  “Why not?”

  “I got injured,” he said, pointing to his skull.

  “Why did that stop you?”

  “Crazy doctors said I can’t be deep underwater, pressure on the concave part of my skull might cause a stroke.”

  “What? Then why do you want to dive? Why would your life dream be to put yourself underwater where you could die?”

  “It’s the one thing I don’t want the war to take away from me.”

  “It’s not safe, though,” Celeste said, looking into his eyes.

  “I want to swim underwater more than I want to be safe. Safety isn’t a tradeoff I’m willing to make. We can do it again, we won’t go deep.”

  “Why would I ever do that again? It was cold, I could barely see. And that creepy hull, what happened to that boat?”

  “Yeah, that sailboat must have gone down in a storm, must have broken in half when it was slammed to the bottom.”

  “You think anyone died on it?”

  “Doubtful.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The other half was about forty feet away, dug in sideways. It was close enough to shore that sailors could swim to land. Someone just doesn’t want to pay to dredge it out. In Hawaii, they sometimes sink wrecks to make artificial reefs.”

  “See, water is dangerous.” She pulled her arms to cover her breasts and leaned against his chest.

  “But it’s important to me.” He turned the showerhead so that the warm water poured down her neck and her back, soothing her. “It’s the only place I feel like myself, underwater.” He pulled her wet hair off her face. “I want us to be together that way.”

  She grimaced.

  “Look, we’ll go to Hawaii. It’s different when you’re warm, we’ll see eagle rays, turtles, schooling fish,” he said.

  She looked up at him, his face serious, his eyes worried, water pooled at the bottom of the dent in his skull, dripping to the side of his eyebrow down his cheek by his ear.

  It was touching to see him want her. She leaned closer, kissing his lips, her arms circled his neck and she pulled him under the warm water for a deep, full body kiss.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Celeste awoke frozen in the darkness. She felt fabric under her hands, her sheets crumpled next to her. She realized she was in her bed.

  But Eddie was not lying down.

  He was standing on the edge of the bed, facing out towards the doorway.

  She sat up very slowly, so as not to surprise him.

  He was holding himself absolutely motionless, half crouched, arms forward, anticipating something unseen.

  Her ears perked, she listened for his breathing which was steady, methodical. Was he asleep? She was frightened by the strangeness of the moment, afraid of touching him or speaking to waken him from his primal stance.

  “Eddie,” she said quietly.

  He didn’t move.

  “Eddie,” she said again, her voice soft and comforting.

  He turned his head an inch or so, not taking his gaze off the bedroom doorway.

  She was afraid to put her hand on his leg but his breathing was changing, she couldn’t tell whether he was going to be a danger coming out of a nightmare or a was in a waking memory. The tension around his body was palpable. Some kind of war play was being re-enacted, it felt like he’d found a position of mixed suspension of consciousness and an alertness that came from the fear of some foreign place.

  If she moved around the bed, or moved in front of him, would he accidentally attack her, not knowing where he was?

  She took a deep breath and crept back into the corner of the bed and said again, this time more gently, “Honey, Eddie. It’s Celeste, you’re home now. Lie down and go back to sleep.” Maybe he’d go out on a night walk, as he’d done a few times in the last few weeks. Clear his head by moving.

  She waited in the darkness, sensing a change in him, like the tigers at the zoo who had just stared at you as though they’d eat you before you could scream but then looked at you sideways when you spoke to them, soothing them, as though they were trying to understand you.

  He stepped off the bed, with jerky motions, stood staring into the darkness towards her.

  “Eddie, come back to bed, the pillow is still warm, the sheets are nice and warm.” She calibrated her voice, not too loud to awaken him, but just enough to bring him back to the physicality of the bedroom.

  He moved slowly, his hands looking for the sheets and she reached out, opened up the bed sheets, patted the bed. He followed the sound of her hands on the cotton fabric, slipping under the covers, the tension leaving his muscles.

  He was covered with sweat, she felt, her hands wet when she reached gingerly for his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, you’re here with me,” she said.

  His voice was gravelly, lost, “I’m okay.”

  “I know you’re okay. What just happened there?”

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “But you were half asleep?”

  “I’m never more than half asleep.”

  “Don’t we sleep together? Don’t you sleep when I sleep?”

  He jostled himself, “I haven’t slept in years. Not really slept. I can’t sleep unless I take the sleeping pills. And I hate taking those, they black me out for 6 hours. Anything could happen, and I wouldn’t be able to protect you. That’s not sleep, that’s death.”

  She rubbed his shoulder, pulling him close, kissing his forehead and his cheeks.

  “Is that why you leave sometimes in the middle of the night?

  His body continued to relax, the danger was passing. “I never really got back on U.S. time. Sometimes I wake up and I’m back in the desert and I can hear the shelling, all hell is gonna break loose and it’s daylight in my head. So I get the hell up because I don’t want to be ambushed. I get myself outside. And my brain gets confused because it’s dark outside but my eyes see daylight, so I walk and walk until th
e real sky matches what I see in my head.”

  “Why don’t you just stay in bed, close your eyes and imagine being a kid again, try to place yourself somewhere you were happy.”

  “Can’t do that. These things create a reality in my skull.”

  “I’m worried about you,” Celeste said. “Maybe you have Post Traumatic Stress.”

  He shook his head vehemently, his voice was tired. “It’s just my screwed up internal clock. It can be daylight in Detroit but in my head I’m in some souk looking under tables and behind leather-faced old men, trying to find a suicide bomber who wants to get with virgins for taking out me and my company. Why the hell does he want to kill me? We were supposed to be the good guys.” His voice tapered off, half asleep again.

  “Well, you are, aren’t you? You’re getting the bastards who bombed us in 9/11.”

  “It’s not clear anymore. When we first went in, it was clear. We’re taking out the tall guy who put together the terrorist cells. But ten years later they finally take him out, SEALS did it. I wonder if they found his dialysis machine. I never did hear about that.”

  Celeste was relieved that he was talking. Maybe the darkness was freeing for him. “What do you mean, dialysis?”

  “He’s huge, like almost seven feet tall. And he’s got kidney failure. So he’s got to do dialysis, he has to be hooked up to a machine that pulls all your blood out, cleans it and then sends it back into your body. If he didn’t get a kidney transplant, he should have been easier to find.”

  “But didn’t all those countries train the terrorists?”

  He shook his head, tired, he said quietly, from having to tell the truth again, he was just one soldier up against a battalion of bad press. “It’s about Saudi Arabia, who we are friends with. Our President held hands with the Saudi King, he kissed him on the mouth. The 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, not Afghanis or Pakistanis.”

  “Then why are we in those countries? Aren’t they next to each other?”

  “We’re there because they have huge oil pipelines. We’re really there to protect the private guys.”

  Celeste wondered what to do besides listen. It was the most he’d talked about his past since their first meal in the diner when he’d told her about his camp dog. His skin had stopped sweating and he was lying on his back, staring in the darkness at the ceiling. “Who are the private guys?”

  “We safeguard the private guys, the contractors. The private guys get paid more to knock down than they do to build up, but then they get paid to build up what they’ve knocked down, it’s crazy. We sleep on bunk beds we make by hammering 4x4s together, in tents on the dirt, and the contractors live in walled compounds with lawns to throw footballs around on. We drive bombed-out jeeps with no doors that we can’t afford to leave behind, they drive the newest SUVs that they walk away from if they get shot up. I bet Detroit is still in business because we’re making cars for the compounds.” His voice was tight. “That’s why I want to get the hell out of Detroit. We don’t realize we’re delivering big cars while the peasants just want clean water. My platoon stands in long mess lines for meals while contractors eat indoors in air-conditioning. I went once to give a Sit Rep, a Situation Report, to tell them what we’d been up against out on the plain we were hunkered down on. We eat crap while they eat seafood flown in and chilled and heaped on tables. They eat when they feel like eating. We’re sitting ducks at the mandatory chow time, in a line in the desert, a bunch of grunts waiting to be picked off by planes with infrared, we show up every day at the same damn time. A guy in my platoon had his legs blown off, standing in line for chow.”

  “Did you want to quit when you saw their place?”

  “You never go rogue, never.” Eddie lay with his eyes open, staring at the half darkness of her bedroom doorway. “All we’ve got is our discipline and chain of command. So you trust your CO. Until he’s blown apart and you carry back enough of him to bury. “

  Eddie rolled on his side facing her, his voice low and enraged, “Then you find out that the Army’s not in charge of the military. The contractors, they move a couple pieces on the chessboard they got in their war rooms and then a new CO comes and he does what he was taught at West Point until he’s called into the compound and fed some bullshit about how important his company is and he’s given a packet of pills to give us, to keep us awake. They cheerlead, so you know you’re in the right, you represent America, you’re avenging the murders of 3,000 people in New York City. It makes it easier to storm through a village to find one bad guy in a crowd of 40 men that all look the same.”

  Celeste took in a sharp breath. Here was an explanation that made sense of his mood swings, he’d gotten started on some drugs on his deployments.

  His voice came out of the darkness, pouring slowly like molasses.

  “I wish I’d grown up around other kinds of people. I know those men are each different, but because I only grew up with white and black people, I don’t know how to read brown people. I can’t tell the difference between two bearded men. And my buddies’ lives depend on me finding something different, when I don’t know how to. So I stare at their noses, their mouths, their eyebrows to see if I can match it to the description we’ve been given of a 30ish brown man with a beard and brown lined eyes. That’s every damn man in the village over 20. And the young guys, they all try to grow beards to prove they’re men, so suddenly we’re killing the young guys too, thinking they might be a 30 year old.”

  He was silent for a few minutes.

  Celeste knew he wasn’t falling asleep, but he was quieting on a deeper level, somehow finding peace in his unlivable story. “When did we get to be the bad guys?”

  Celeste listened as his voice droned on, she could hear the mental unwinding, his mind releasing strings of thought that were knit so tightly together that they had strangled him in his previous silence.

  “And now they want war to move to the skies. And not the skies of my grandfather’s war. They want to kill with drones, no human contact needed at all. A bunch of old white guys with x-box controllers, playing with bombs in space.”

  Celeste lay on her back, staring at the ceiling herself. “You remember that old gaming arcade on Cass Corridor? I think we should set up a war room that’s an x-box gaming system and turn the lights down and give them comfy chairs and then set off some explosion lights on a map wall. Let them go at it. Against a machine, instead of real people. Have all the monitors showing war up in space but take the batteries out of their controllers.”

  He laughed sardonically. “That would be funny. A bunch of old guys.”

  “The Generals.”

  “No, it’s not the Generals. They don’t run wars anymore. It’s been out of their hands for years. It’s the private guys. The guys in suits. They get the money from their buddies in Congress, they take them to hunt lions on closed preserves, or they go on unbelievably expensive vacations to the Caribbean and shake hands and then money flows from the government to the private guys.”

  “That is so screwed up,” Celeste said softly, not knowing how to console him.

  “When I’m out walking in the middle of the night here, Celeste, my body takes over and my brain stops and I can breathe easier. I’m not so gripped. I can walk for hours and hours from the jet darkness into the daylight and it’ll feel like just a few minutes’ walk. Sometimes I tuck into those broken down old buildings that have been taken over by trees, or vines that no one is around to cut back. And I try to sleep near that smell, the smell of green things living, the smell of the dirt that lets them grow wild since no human is around.”

  Celeste listened as his breathing calmed, she looked and saw in the bare light that his eyes were closed. He had his arms crossed over his chest, his hands tucked into the opposite armpits. She leaned over to kiss his cheek and he said quietly that he was going to close his eyes for a few minutes but he quickly fell into a fitful sleep.

  She could not sleep now, he’d painted too many pictures of his pain.


  Eddie in his uniform, jacked up on amphetamines, wandering a rock strewn hillside, weighed down by a heavy backpack, the waist pack he’d shown her, guns, ammunition, his heavy metal helmet covered with ripped camouflage fabric, bits of metal sticking out, a piece of tape across the front with the words ‘forward to the enemy’ written above his brow with a Sharpie pen.

  Chapter Twenty

  Eddie had been out walking at night lately after his nocturnal talks with her, so he probably wouldn’t be there in a few hours when she woke up. It was Saturday though, and she knew that meant she might be spending her days off alone. That would not be fun, she thought, as exhaustion crept into her brain, her arms still warm around Eddie’s shoulders.

  Celeste thought about the differences between the ways that Eddie slipped away from her.

  Sometimes, and she felt fine about this leave-taking, he’d look at her sideways, cock his head to acknowledge her, then pat his shirt down and tuck it in to his pants, wipe any sweat from his face and wipe it on his pants, hunch his shoulders forward so that he got smaller in size and, with a half strong voice, he’d say, “I’ve got to get some air.”

  She didn’t feel scared those times. Because it felt like he didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t know how to go, but he had to force himself out.

  When he came home from those trips, he smelled like bacon, or burnt food. And his shoulders were still slumped.

  “Come here,” he’d say, and he’d pull her tight, leaning his head against her hair, eyes closed in the middle of a storm of thoughts.

  The first time, she had asked “Who did you hang out with?” but his momentary terse, fearful shake of his head told her not to press. So she didn’t, because he seemed to come home more committed to her than he had left.