Unburying Hope Read online

  He looked around the apartment, and she shook her head, “Not here, I was helping a friend. I’ll go wash up, then I’ll be ready.”

  She walked into her small bathroom and closed the door, scrubbing the five or six paint freckles from her skin, then cleaning under fingernails and washing all the shreds down the sink. She’d have to be more careful, next time. It was strange to think that what she was doing, the graffiti, was something she’d have to hide. It had been her alone for so long, then a comfortable sneaky thing helped by Frank’s lookout duty. She wasn’t sure someone in the military would appreciate defacing public property, so she scrubbed until her hands were pink from pressure then returned to her living room.

  He called a taxicab and opened its door, motioned her in. When they arrived, he paid the cabbie and again held the car door for her, then held her hand as they walked towards a late-night diner.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said suddenly. She watched him run ahead to the restaurant door, kicking and holding it open with one leg, grabbing the handles at the back of an old lady’s wheelchair, gently raising her wheels over an awkwardly placed doormat. An old man had been fumbling with the glass restaurant door and his wife’s wheelchair, also holding the leash of an elderly service dog, a Labrador wearing a green harness with some kind of patch on it. The man patted Eddie on the back and shook his hand in the restaurant vestibule, saluting Eddie with a stiff, from-the-elbow motion.

  Celeste felt a flush of tenderness towards both Eddie and the stranger who stood at attention in front of him, his frail body rocking unsteadily forward, leaning against the equally fragile dog. As Eddie walked back out to her, he looked away shyly, took her hand again and led her into the diner.

  A waiter tapped the old man’s shoulder and led him and his wife and the compliant dog to a nearby table where his wife could comfortably dine. The waiter returned and motioned to Eddie to follow him to a table in the center of the room.

  She was surprised at Eddie’s frantic head shaking, rejecting the table.

  “Sorry, sir, we’ve only got the one table available.” The waiter didn’t understand Eddie’s reticence.

  “On the side, we have to be on the perimeter.”

  The waiter nodded, eyeing Eddie more carefully. There was an elevated sense of alarm, Celeste could feel it.

  “I’ll get that corner table cleared for you, if you want,” the waiter said, motioning to a table cocked sideways from a back wall.

  “That’s great,” Eddie’s voice calmed and he put his hand on the small of Celeste’s back and held it there until they were free to sit down.

  “You are such a gentleman,” Celeste said.

  “Not so much,” he said.

  Celeste thought of her own acts of kindness towards the old lady across the hall in the rooming house within which she’d been raised. Sometimes, you act before you think, because the vulnerable can’t or won’t ask for help.

  “How many tours did you do in Iraq?”

  His face clouded over but he answered with a quiet pride. “Four. I was in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  She didn’t know what to say, she’d never spoken with a soldier before and knew nothing of wartime. “Do you ever have nightmares,” she asked, remembering a magazine story about soldiers coming home unable to process their experiences.

  He shook his head but didn’t answer with words.

  “You,” he said, “let’s talk about you. Detroit born and raised?”

  “Yes,” Celeste beamed. “How about you?”

  “Kind of. Township kid, myself. Moved once or twice. How about you?”

  “I lived with my mom in an old boarding house out by Wayne State. A few years after she died, I moved into my own apartment. They ripped the old boarding house down six months after I moved out, all the old tenants had died and the owner couldn’t pay his mortgage so he brought in a back hoe and a tractor and all three floors collapsed after just three pushes. Made me wonder how it had stood for so long, but I think its rickety walls wanted to stand tall as long as the old people were alive. It didn’t have any attraction to new tenants, though. No granite countertops, no double pane windows you find in newer buildings. The only people who loved it as it was were the old folks who couldn’t afford and honestly couldn’t care less about the shiny amenities in new units. I inherited that,” she said. “I dream about an older cottage, peaked roof over an old painted door, corbels, gables.”

  “Sounds like you want to live in the South,” Eddie said. “Those houses all fit your bill.”

  “My buddy Frank and I have a crazy escape dream,” she said, watching a sudden change in Eddie’s attentiveness. Frank’s name, a man’s name, set Eddie on alert, she noticed, delighting her. A quiet expression of interest.

  “If Detroit shuts down, which it never will,” she said, breathless with sureness, “we talk about moving to the Carolinas, getting farmland by the ocean. It’s funny to talk with Frank about it, because I’ve never grown so much as a little green houseplant. I have a brown thumb, I’m sure.”

  “You’re involved with someone?” Eddie asked, sitting bolt upright.

  “Heck no,” she said. “Frank is my work buddy. We have no interest in each other, but he’s my closest friend here. Everyone else in our office has been furloughed and it’s down to just us and a rotating temp worker.”

  “Just to clarity, then,” Eddie said, his hands clasped on the table, “you are single, not involved with anyone.”

  “Of course,” she said, her brow furrowing at his directness. “Not involved with anyone. You can meet Frank, he’s really funny. But I haven’t dated anyone in months.” She pushed a stray hair off her cheek. “What about you? Seeing anyone? Married?”

  He cringed, then shook his head. “Nope. Never married. Not seeing anyone.”

  “This feels so stilted,” she said, smiling at the strangeness of mapping out their dating statuses.

  “In the military, I did tactical work. It’s what I do best. I analyze places or relationships very quickly and I have to plot how to get through them with as little loss as possible.” He looked around the restaurant and said quietly, “ten tables, 30 chairs, 26 people, 2 exits, 4 windows and a skylight. So poorly set up that if a bomb went off, only a dozen could get out smoothly, those people at the 4-tops along the side wall.”

  She looked at the diners at the three tables he pointed towards, then at the other tables around them.

  “Two service tables set up to help the busboys actually impede traffic, so those four 2-tops would be cut off from what looks like an easy exit. And I bet you $100, none of those people have thought even once about their egress from this place.”

  Celeste looked at the diners at the smaller tables, including the old couple, the wife in the wheelchair haplessly unaware of Eddie’s analysis. “Nothing is going to happen here,” she shooed the air with her hands. “I’m impressed but you can let down your guard here.”

  His face fell, but he shook his head. He leaned over his plate, coming close to her. “Do you know the one thing that quadruples your survival rate on an airplane going down, in a mountain lion attack, or a small building bombing?” His voice was on edge.

  “No,” she said. As much as he was agitated, there was a slim vein of sorrow in his demeanor and she found herself looking into his eyes. What was his truth? How had he survived four tours in war zones?

  “Attention to detail. When you walk on a plane or into a room, note all the exits, note the obstacles, note the people around you. Know what part of town you’re in, notice the hills around you if you are hiking. If you operate from knowledge, then you stand a great chance of being the one that comes home alive.”

  She nodded and softly said, “You came home alive.”

  His eyes wavered, his mouth shook for an instant before he fought it back under control. For a split second, she thought he might cry but then he sat upright, his emotions shrouded.

  “Yes,” he said abruptly.

  They sa
t silently for a few minutes. She could feel the confusion in his posture. There was a military bearing that spoke wordlessly of competence, courage. But under that cloak, there were the sorrows of a man who had seen or done things that were unimaginable to her. What was the cost of the expertise, the ability to count exits? “Well, I’m happy that you’re here.”

  “Me too,” he replied. He took her hands into his.

  “I feel safe,” she said, “knowing that you’ve got those… skills,” she stumbled, choosing her words carefully.

  “Combat is a tough thing to shrug off,” he said. “But I did those tours so someday I could sit in peace at a place like this with a pretty gal like you.” He winked at her and she couldn’t help it, she blushed at his intent stare.

  “I’m not a real sitter, though,” he said. “I’m not comfortable unless I’m moving. So we can go running along the waterfront, or I’d love to take you scuba diving. Are you certified?”

  “This is Detroit,” she laughed. “Why would I get certified? It’s not the tropics, the water’s cold here!”

  “I’ll take you to Lake St. Clair.”

  She shivered unexpectedly. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Their dog is almost as old as they are,” she pointed back at the elderly couple, changing the subject.

  “I know. Who is helping who there?” Eddie’s face softened.

  “I never wanted a dog, but that one is cute.”

  “The old man needs the dog,” Eddie said. “He’s got vision problems. I don’t know how he juggles the chair, the dog and seeing for himself but he’s out on a date with his wife, so more power to him, I guess.”

  “You ever want a dog?” Celeste wondered if Eddie’s hard edges might be blunted by the adulation of a reserved dog like the Labrador, who now tucked itself under the table, out of the way.

  “I never had a dog here in Detroit, but we had one in Al Anbar,” he said quietly.

  “We?” she asked.

  “My platoon. In camp, we took in a dust-colored puppy, fed him from our own MREs. The flop eared mutt took turns sleeping in bunks with whoever was most homesick or had nightmares,” Eddie said tentatively. He placed his order after she did, and then continued, “We came back from a two-day patrol and I fell onto my bunk, waking up to my face being cleaned by the scratchy licks of the little puppy. It was easier to roll off my sleeping pad and head to the showers to wash the pup’s squirmy body and short furry legs, he made it easier to reconnect with being back in camp. I made it halfway through my first deployment praying that the dog would be alive when I returned from patrols, because sometimes the guys I went out with weren’t.”

  “Oh my,” Celeste said quietly.

  “We named him Scrub. He fit into the back pocket of our knapsacks when we first found him, but we couldn’t risk him barking as we headed out. So we’d leave him by the tent and find him there when we’d return, even if it was days later.”

  “That’s so sweet,” Celeste nodded.

  “Iraqis don’t treat the wild dogs like pets, we discovered, so we had the advantage in keeping him in camp. You’d tap him on his nose when he’d whimper, to calm him down. And I’m pretty sure that the attention of so many tired soldiers soothed Scrub because he’d just romp around, he didn’t bark.”

  “Did anyone bring him home?” she asked, not realizing the danger of her question until it was out of her mouth.

  He shook his head.

  She waited in silence, in case he wanted to talk about what had happened to the pup.

  “The only time Scrub barked,” Eddie remembered, “it was the black of night, and this deep husky growl woke us up, then he bayed like crazy, and the platoon jumped out of bed and we were able to fight off a raggedy group of villagers who were sneaking on a hillside outside our camp to lay IEDs, land mine things.”

  He put his hands under the table onto his knees. “They took Scrub out the next night. They must have had infrared and been looking for him. He was such a good little guy. Just a couple of pops and we were all out of our tents with our guns, blasting into the hills. They killed Scrub to stop him from protecting us, to mess with our minds.”

  “That must have been horrible!” She could see a crack in his hard fought reserve.

  “Scrub’s death destroyed a kid from Wisconsin who’d been lost almost from the day he arrived in country. He rocked back and forth for days after the truck dropped him off to us. Walked patrol and then he’d rock himself to sleep. Rocking, eating, rocking. After a bad day on patrol, Scrub put his head on the corporal’s lap and just lay there. The rocking would slow down and even the cheesehead would scoop Scrub up and hug him for a while. It killed a part of each of us to find Scrub that night with one clean shot through his head, long distance execution style.”

  She reached out her hands across the table and he looked at her, his eyes heavy with sadness. He pulled his hands slowly to the tabletop and touched hers cautiously.

  “We were the walking wounded for a while. Scrub was the only thing that resembled home, America, to each of us, no matter where we’d come from. He was the only normal thing in our day. Our medical officer rationed out some anti-D’s after that, anti-depressants. Most guys needed something to get over the hump of that loss. We buried him, then poured concrete over his grave so the Taliban couldn’t mess with our minds by desecrating his body. We were pretty crazy by then. We were thinking about things we knew we’d never touch again: our bed pillows at home, the soft fur on the head of that damned hero dog that stole our hearts.”

  The food came and they ate quietly. She held his right hand with her left, until he pulled himself back into the present moment.

  “Let’s go back to my place, after dinner,” she said. “We can hang out?”

  “It’s not that damn emotional,” he said, waving his hand. “Seeing that service dog just brought up a wish that Scrub could be an old dog too.”

  His protestations were weak, she could sense a deeper truth in the connection between the loss of the puppy and some bit of brokenness in him.

  Chapter Eleven

  She hadn’t intended to let down her guard so quickly, it wasn’t her way. Or was it? She had been single for as long as she could remember, like her mother. Was that a choice, she wondered? Or fear. She made it through her days, her weeks, her months by staying closed, keeping an invisible wall between herself and the world. Except for Frank, she’d been pretty successful. Until tonight.

  He quickly regained his composure in the diner. She had wondered if he’d have money for the meal and she’d put two twenties into her pocket just in case she could help pay. Turns out, he had some cash, told her he was spacey about paying bills, it wasn’t that he didn’t have money.

  When you look for someone to date, she thought, someone to give a part of yourself to, you look for someone who can see or feel things on a deep level. Not someone pandering to you or someone so drunk that you know they find you beautiful now with their hazy eyes but you also know that they will cringe when they look at you later in the daylight. You’re not ugly, but they were drunk. All the dreams they brought to that moment with you had nothing to do with you. They were in a hormonal rush, or they had thought up a whole story about you that was in their head, that you couldn’t possibly know or fulfill. She’d learned that the hard way once or twice, took it personally. She’d become a hermit for many nights afterwards.

  Was she only attracted to his brokenness? It was as much a part of him as his eyes, or his muscular torso, or the dent in his head, which she hadn’t noticed in hours. Funny, how our most vivid wounds become invisible when we show our true selves, she thought.

  They were again sitting on her sofa, but closer this time.

  He was quiet, present.

  The moment unfolded. First, she saw him look into her eyes. There was pain in his expression. Something in him was questioning his own ability to contribute. It made her smile with sadness. It’s like they each had different sides of the same wound, though she di
dn’t know how to breach the gap.

  There was no fumbling, as there had been with other men. Just his eyes, his past, the things he couldn’t tell her and the things she might never know about him. She’d been on her own so long that she understood how you stockpile parts of yourself, your feelings, unsure that you’ll ever be able to share them, afraid that they might topple under their own weight before you find a partner.

  She found herself to be unbearably hot, a physical manifestation of her own desire to explode out of the silence she’d held herself in for years. She reached down to the drops of sweat on her flat stomach, tamping them with the emerald green cashmere sweater fabric, then suddenly she yanked the sweater up off her hot chest, over her head, stripping it provocatively off of each arm.

  His eyes widened and he grinned. “Um, I am trying to wait until you’re ready, ma’am, but your skin is so warm.” He reached over and gently massaged her neck.

  “Must have been the sweater. It made me hot,” she laughed.

  “And the soldier didn’t?” Eddie asked, tracing her clavicle with his index finger.

  She reached down for the bottom of her black camisole and stared deeply into his eyes. “A few hours ago, it was chilly in here, but not now,” she methodically danced the camisole up over her head, slithering first her left then her right arm free.

  “Christ, you have a gorgeous body,” he exhaled hard.

  Celeste giggled again, standing up, fumbling for the button at the waist of her pants. She realized that she was wearing the new jeans that Frank had so indelicately called ‘GPS for a bed.’ The lycra in the cotton clung to her heated skin but she smoothly sashayed out of them, letting them stay crumpled at the side of the sofa.

  “The Signal Corps can’t read the incoming signal, there’s one message on the radar and another over the walkie talkie,” Eddie said, holding tightly on the bottom of his own t-shirt. “Is this an ambush?”

  Celeste leaned closer to him, licked his ear lobe and sucked gently, listening as he shook his head moaning. “I’d say the coast is clear,” she said, then she stood up, took his hand, pulled him to standing and led him into the partial darkness of her bedroom.