Unburying Hope Page 5

  In the winter months after her mother died, Celeste would climb into bed sometimes with wool socks, thermal underwear, sweatpants, a sweatshirt and a down vest, and be asleep in minutes like a bear.

  Part of her heart had gone into hibernation, she felt, and she couldn’t for the life of her find a way to awaken it. So she completed high school, went to college, worked, came home every day with a gauzy blindness that kept her in her routine, unthinking and unfeeling for months on end, dreaming of a home that could become a sanctuary for her, a place for new hopes.

  Her longing for a home came from her high school years. It was probably odd to have been a good tennis player in as frozen a state as Michigan. But she was. When she was a little girl, in the humid summer months, her mother hit balls with her against a wall behind the apartment building with two racquets she’d found at a yard sale, and sometimes when she didn’t work weekends, they’d play on a real court a couple of neighborhoods away. Her mother had been a local star, she once admitted, playing statewide before she’d gotten pregnant with Celeste.

  In her public high school in the inner city, Celeste was the only student who could play tennis. She had teammates sometimes, whenever a kid from a warmer state transferred into her district. But their families wouldn’t last long into the next winter, when the ice got so thick on car windows that they’d have to pour hot water from a tea kettle onto the windshield just to be able to see through enough to drive.

  Her life opened up the Spring before her mother died, as a diesel bus slowly took her to her first off campus tennis tournament, far into the suburbs of Bloomfield Hills, to a private girls’ school where she was the lone public school entrant. She stared out the window as her transit bus crossed into a greener world, past huge house after huge house, front lawns, trees bigger than buildings in her neighborhood, giving her a sense of what she could wish for in her own life.

  That’s when she first really wanted a house. A home. Walls that weren’t shared with strangers. Quiet that wasn’t broken by loud TV or other people’s fights.

  But she also hated that bus ride because being poor wasn’t something she had ever noticed. She got off that public bus and walked, passed by cars driven by mothers with their blond dyed hair up in pony tails who handed juice boxes over the seat to their kids who in turn stared out the window at Celeste, walking alone on unused sidewalks, wearing her baggy t-shirt and gym shorts.

  She had walked up the main path to the brick school building that looked like all the mansions in the neighborhood outside the school gate. She made her way to the tennis courts, knowing that her mother had taught her the skills to deserve to be there, and that she’d even taught her how to fit in, in the way that she was always a little more comfortable with the people she served in her jobs than she was with those with whom she worked.

  The ride home was worse, even though she had the 1st Place Varsity trophy tucked into her backpack. Celeste walked back to the bus stop, torn between her new dream homes and the terrible sorrow of being driven to her own blocks where she had to watch for glass shards from broken liquor bottles or dog excrement on the sidewalk. She went to bed quickly that night. Tightened her eyes to close out the memories, hardening her heart to the trees and the lawns and the huge windows that did not look out onto four neighboring apartment buildings. Someday, I want a home, she had whispered so silently that her mother hadn’t heard, until she fell asleep and woke up the next day with the comforting inability to fully remember the sorrow of the bus ride.

  She leafed through the interior décor magazines on the dinette table and a smile crept across her face, ah, the still-fulfilling joy of seeing lovely comfortable places to call home. Somewhere warm all year round, she thought, as she sipped the mellow sweetness of the grenadine in the rum of her Mai Tai.

  She considered calling Eddie and scrolled through the contacts list on her cell phone until she saw his name come up. She’d never phoned him, but she did log his number in when he first asked her to. He was so sincere and yet vulnerable.

  She looked at the bank screen again, at her savings account. She was proud of herself. She’d paid off her college debt and saved from every paycheck for the eventual day when she’d set up a house. Her eyes wandered around her dusky apartment. She was doing the right thing by being frugal, she thought, living in this already-furnished place. Because some day, soon hopefully, she’d be sitting at a large wooden kitchen table she picked out and paid for herself, her husband grinding sardines and squeezing lemon juice, grating cheese for the freshly made Caesar salad she found herself craving these days. She wouldn’t be drinking fruity drinks to remind her of her tropical dreams then, she thought. She’d uncork some meaningfully expensive white wine and sip from a real wine glass, when she had a house.

  Frank, on the flipside, had a perfect condo, tall ceilings, and windows overlooking a small park near the Detroit River. His bed had perfect navy sheets and a big white damask comforter, the accent pillows had navy ribbon trim. His cooking was amazing and he, too, she thought, would be best suited with a husband.

  Frank, however, disagreed with her. He said he was happy with his own place and liked when a boyfriend left for the last time as much as he liked when they came over for the first time. If escrow closed, he’d be moving soon, she knew. Forcing her to rethink her own future.

  Another swallow of the rum mixture and she scrolled through her cell phone screen again, until ‘Eddie’ came up.

  She looked around her clean but sparse kitchen, her dark and empty sitting room and she pushed the button, phoning him for the first time. Why not, she thought, the apartment could use the scent of an interested man.

  Chapter Nine

  His voice was smooth on the other end, probing for who she was, how he knew her and she choked, realizing that she had blocked her name and phone number on outgoing calls, so he didn’t know who was calling.

  He might not even know her full name, she didn’t remember ever formally introducing herself to him through the plexiglas. She stuttered but he cajoled until finally she blurted out the phone company connection.

  “You’re calling about my bill? The phone’s back on, right? I mean, you’re calling it, right?”

  She laughed quietly and said ‘Yeah, sure, it’s on. You told me to call you sometime.”

  “Of course I did, darlin’. I’ve got something going right now, doing some business, but I can swing by maybe around 9 tonight? Where do you live?”

  And that is how easily Celeste found herself about to be ‘not alone’ again, in a hot shower, then dressing again in her new clothes for a date.

  Swing by?

  Celeste felt a lump in her throat. She didn’t need a one-night stand.

  Why hadn’t she put him off, asked to meet for coffee over the next few days, maybe brunch. No, not brunch, because she didn’t want to infect her weekend with the togetherness and loneliness of different agendas, her longing for a boyfriend and a man’s potential attempt at easy sex and his inevitable withdrawal if his needs weren’t met.

  Eddie walked into the office so intermittently anyway, it wouldn’t be too painful to see him again in a few months, or maybe, like some men, he’d just disappear leaving his cell phone or landline, and her, behind.

  Her mind raced, but the intimate high fives he gave her against the glass made him different from most men she met at the bar. His camouflage pants did not hide him in the whitewashed office as he waited in line to see her. With his growing-out buzz cut, his military solidity, he reeked of connection, integrity and that’s what attracted her. He walked towards, looked at and interacted with her as if she mattered to him. As if, when he walked out the double doors, she had left a shadow image on the inner movie in his head.

  So she wasn’t crazy, she thought, she’d had maybe five or six conversations with him. He always waited for her, always half smiled. Frank sometimes said that Eddie looked beaten on by life, but Celeste didn’t see it that deeply. He seemed to energize himself when he c
ame towards the window and any exhaustion that Frank picked up on came across to her more as a softness, a care, a presence.

  When he knocked later, she opened the door, stood awkwardly, wondering whether to lean against the doorjamb or to stand upright. She felt like she was fourteen and the neighbor boy had knocked to give her a book she’d need for homework after a sick day. With her mother sitting at the square bridge table behind her, she had blushed and dug her toe into the ground, making small talk until the boy’s energy burnt out and he walked backwards with a half hearted wave, “I’ll see you at school then.”

  Eddie stood still himself, saying perfunctory hellos.

  Feeling the heat of the new cashmere on her prickled skin, she stepped aside and invited him in, a lovely warm sweat on her cheeks, a flush in her lips.

  She’d made them both a cocktail. He’d stopped at one so she poured them each a glass of water.

  He was shy, looking around her apartment like he was scouting a stakeout but then he relaxed. They laughed a bit and then came closer physically on the sofa, Celeste felt an electric shock between them when they both mentioned living in the tropics some day.

  Eddie told her in a quieted voice that the heat of the flatlands between the mountains in Afghanistan had not been what he’d expected as a born and raised Detroiter. He’d expected to feel warm there with some humidity but the bone dry dust, the oppressive heat, then the quick change to freezing weather in higher altitudes, along with the deafening shelling had obliterated any sense of similarity, any connection to the hot and humid summers of his childhood.

  “Were you homesick?” Celeste asked.

  He pulled his head back like he had been poked, she thought. He sputtered and looked away, unable to communicate. It was as though he was reticent to talk about anything he didn’t bring up himself.

  Celeste sat, took a deep breath in. She reached for his hand and said, “Have you ever been to Florida, or Hawaii or the Caribbean?”

  His eyes lit up and a smile crept across his face. “No, I haven’t. But I want to have a dive shop and I’ve read about lots of places and I think I want to move to Hawaii.”

  As he told her about Florida tornadoes and Caribbean tropical storms that ruled out those locales, she breathed more easily. He was brought back to life by talking about his dreams.

  She found herself interjecting what she knew, about storm windows, about coastal cottages and their ability to withstand high winds. She heard herself tell him about the cottage she wanted to live in some day, surrounded by trees with the sweet oxygenated air she had read about on the Hawaiian islands.

  He’d looked around her apartment and said ‘How do you survive here, then? Why are you still in East Detroit? Family?”

  This time, she felt herself deflate, her dreams punctured by the heavy weight of her own lack of momentum, her paralysis, her inability to animate her own dreams.

  Her mother was dead, the old lady was dead. She had Frank. And she had her steady job. Maybe she’d never have the courage it would take to buy a plane ticket, pack up and leave behind what she had known all her life, even with Frank leading with his already strong vision of moving to South Carolina. She felt the betrayal of her inner voice that spun warm, creative dreams, not knowing if she’d ever be able to make simple, devastating changes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “there’s nothing wrong with you living here. I just felt we were so alike.” He enveloped her with his arms. “Maybe we can push each other, get ourselves off our asses, out of Detroit, to Hawaii. Unless you have family here, I can understand staying for family.”

  “No, my mother died a long time ago,” Celeste said, feeling the words with a gingery lightness.

  “So what’s your plan?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is your signpost? What do you need to have, to get yourself to move? Money?”

  “No. I could move. I’ve got my buddy Frank, though. I’d miss him. And I don’t know what I’d do there.”

  “You’d go out with me,” he said, pulling her close. “You’d go for runs with me on the beach. We’d hike, we could surf. I bet you’d look hot in a bikini.”

  Celeste blushed. Wearing tight clothes was already stretching her comfort zone. Walking around with her breasts and belly and bottom hanging out of skimpy swimsuit material would take some getting used to, even if it was probably too hot to wear heavy sweaters and jeans in Hawaii. It seemed innocent and safe talking about moving with him, there was something solid about how he carried himself, but she did blush at the growing intimacy.

  The lightweight emerald green cashmere sweater lay meltingly on her chest skin, it didn’t sit pronounced against her like her old navy wool blends had.

  Shopping with Frank had in unglued her, trashing her old coverings like the falling off old siding on abandoned houses in Detroit, replacing her threadbare clothes with silky, soft fabrics that made Celeste feel full, appealing, to herself if not to men. Could new clothes really shake her to her core as it felt like it had?

  The stylish body conscious lycra dress to go with a new pair of brown riding boots with a short stacked heel, or with the two pair of short pumps – kitten heels, Frank had called them. Short enough to walk four blocks from the bus to the office but still sexy from the side and back view. She’d never thought of herself from a side and back view, and that’s probably how the years had slipped past her, eyes blindered forward, no real goal in sight except for buying a house someday, saving from every paycheck, not knowing how or when but propelled gently from work day to work day with hardwood floors, a cottage exterior and high ceilings in her day dreams.

  “You ever think you might be root-bound here?” Eddie asked.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Celeste said, a little embarrassed.

  “It’s when a plant’s been forgotten so long in its pot that its roots grow around and around instead of out. Plants need to be re-potted into bigger pots with fresh soil every once in a while, or put into the ground so their roots can grow outwards instead of strangling inward on each other.”

  “Well, that’s a pretty vivid description of my life,” she said, looking closely at his face. She could see a little boy in his tired manly face and she could see the mask he was wearing, sitting in her living room. It wasn’t a mask to inspire fear in her, it was more a mask to hide his own. She watched as he thought a bit about whether or not he had hurt her.

  “I used to help in my grandparents garden out in Livonia”, he said. “And we’d get plants from the nursery that were more expensive than they were worth and my grandfather showed me how they’d been uncared for so long that there was almost no dirt left in the pot, the roots had taken up all the space.” he said.

  She felt him lean in to tentatively kiss her. His chest was rock hard, his jaw line angular but he pressed into her in a rounded way that blunted the physicality of his strength. As though he was positioning himself to not be an aggressor. He moved intently but calibrated to her responses, which were, to her surprise, warming at a deep level. She could feel his tension. He wanted to get closer but he held himself back in a gentle way, like a boy who didn’t yet know whether his touches were welcome.

  She heard her own voice, entreating the kindness she knew was in him, ‘I’m not ready to sleep with you.”

  “That’s cool,” he said, pulling his hands away from her, holding them in the air as if she had a gun and was robbing him.

  “I figured you came for sex.”

  “Look, I know I’m hot”, he said jauntily, “but I’d be an ass if I just came over for sex.”

  “But you said you’d swing by. At 9:00 at night.”

  “That’s what people say when they don’t want you to know how much they want to see you,” he nudged her. “They get their butts over when they’re invited, they don’t wait a couple days, they show up pronto.”

  Celeste blushed. “Be serious.”

  “I am,” he said, “I’ve been trying to d
ate you for months. But you’re attached at the hip to your buddy at work, so I never figured you’d call me.”

  “Why didn’t you ever call me?” Celeste asked, “Christ, I’m old fashioned,” she said with embarrassment.

  “You’re a good girl, you never gave me your number” Eddie said.

  Celeste choked on a denial.

  “I don’t give a shit who you’ve slept with, I’m talking about your character,” he said. “You’re a good person.”

  “I feel like I’m being interviewed for a job.”

  “So now we’re stalemated,” he said. “You’ve got your ‘I’m not ready’ wall up and I’ve met you with my ‘I can wait you out’ hillside gun spots.”

  “What?” she giggled.

  “I’m gonna wait until your wall wants to be breached.”

  “That sounds hot.”

  He leaned in and lifted the bottom of her green cashmere sweater up an inch away from her skin.

  “You’re sweating,” he said.

  Celeste felt her heart throbbing. He was wearing his soldier mask but she could see that he wasn’t really at war, he was working towards a diplomatic opening of the gates.

  Chapter Ten

  “Let me take you out to get something to eat,” he said, standing and offering her his hand. “I know it’s late, but we can get a bite and get to know each other.”

  It was his gentleness that wooed her, she thought. A huge juxtaposition against his muscles, his jaw set in perpetual seriousness.

  “What’s the red all over your hands?” he asked.

  She looked down and saw the flakes of the spray paint, she must have gotten some of the wet paint on her hands when she peeled off the gloves earlier in the dusk with Frank. City Hall was large, a big stone building and she’d painted thirty four red electric cars with tears and done a big black slash through the HOPE letters around it exterior. “I was doing a little painting,” she said, her voice halted.