Unburying Hope Read online

  “Why do you even ask? Cigarettes I got, lettuce I don’t got.”

  “This is the same potato I’ve seen since June.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Why isn’t it sprouting?”

  “What?”

  “It’s supposed to sprout those green branches, to grow more potatoes if you put it in water. But this one doesn’t have any eyes on it.”

  “Yeah, they spray them.”

  She brought the potato close to her nose to sniff. “It has no smell.”

  “Potatoes don’t smell. Why are you bugging me? Take the damn potato. Go.” He shooed her away.

  “There’s never anything fresh here. I want fruits and vegetables but you only have a few mutant potatoes.”

  “No one wants fresh things. That’s why those potatoes sit. I only buy what people want.”

  “If you’d carry fruit, I’d buy most of it,” Celeste said.

  “I carry what people buy. I stopped the fruit a couple of years ago, you know that. I carry what people pay cash for and that’s sodas, liquor and cigs. You want something else, move on.”

  Celeste put the potato down and waved him off.

  “Seriously,” he said, “You never buy anything, you just complain about how I run my business.” He came around from behind the cash register and crossed his arms at her. “Come back when you want more rum. You’ve even stopped buying my rum.”

  She walked out and stood in the cold air on the gray sidewalk. There was a thin layer of soot, she noticed, on the unkempt buildings, both the apartment buildings and the decrepit closed office buildings on either side of the street.

  Her apartment, contrary to her new warmth and internal spark, was sad, holding on in the face of massive bloodletting, of exodus, lease breakings and foreclosures.

  Somehow, when she had felt gray herself, she hadn’t noticed.

  But now, she saw keenly her own clinging to the dream of a life that had passed a decade or more ago. Jobs had left her beloved city, businesses and creativity and innovation were beaten into paralysis by economic stress. Not gone, but absent, as though their existence had not been able to leave enough of an energetic charge behind.

  She turned in her office chair, facing Frank. It was inconceivable, the thought of leaving Detroit. But there was no life here except for the scrappy souls who refused to abandon their mother city. Like the sprayed potatoes, nothing seemed to sprout into new growth.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Eddie either met her at the bus stop after work or knocked on her front door each night after she got home from work. He helped cook dinner with groceries that he brought at a farther away superstore, he ran her laundry, throwing in his t-shirt and jeans or camouflage pants and boxers while they slept, then dressed again in the fresh clothes out of the dryer in the morning. He left when she left, didn’t ask for an apartment key. He texted back when she wrote to him during the day. It suddenly felt comfortably sweet, as though they were in love and had known each other for years instead of simply being the right-shaped puzzle piece for each other. Not necessarily the right piece, just the right shape for now, to obliterate the longing for the one and only piece that fit and completed the picture.

  He was different from other men she’d been with. He didn’t work all day and drink all night. He’d go to the library and bring home books on the ocean. He’d go to a metal shop, to a gas station, studying compressed air. He took the used scuba tank he bought online and dove all around nearby Lake St. Clair, coming home sometimes with leaves from underwater trees in his hair.

  He handed her an orange prescription bottle one work morning, and without making eye contact, asked her if she could refill it for him, saying softly that it helped him sleep sometimes. She held it for a few seconds, weighing her desire to read the typed label against her fear of his distancing body language. She pocketed the bottle in the side depths of the burgundy dress she wore and kissed him goodbye at the bus stop as usual.

  Hours of boredom passed at work until a mother yelled loudly at Celeste for asking for full payment, her flat-faced child glaring through the plexiglas like a zombie.

  Celeste felt the hardness of the small plastic prescription bottle as she turned sideways on her chair to avoid the little girl’s eyes. She stood up quickly from her desk, signaling to Frank to cover for her. She’d take her break and fill his prescription.

  She walked to the back of the nearby trauma center, to the pharmacy entrance, and stood for a moment outside the automatic door, her breath short in surprise, seeing something through the foggy gray light reflected on the glass door in front of her.

  It looked like Eddie, standing too close to a middle-aged nurse with her brown hair flipping out of a short ponytail.

  It looked like him, but the man had on a heavy black coat that she’d never seen and his face was gaunt. The nurse looked around cautiously and handed him a few bottles, prescriptions, maybe. He pocketed them in breast pockets inside the coat, then turned quickly down a receding corridor.

  Celeste pushed herself forward, setting off the automatic door to enter the scene she hadn’t clearly seen. Confusion bit at her brain, questions that made simple sense rose as she moved indoors. Why would Eddie be here? Why would he give her a prescription and then get his own?

  The nurse stood alone, composing herself until Celeste stood directly in front of her, looking down on the short woman with an uncomfortable mix of jealousy and embarrassment.

  “Were you just talking with my boyfriend?” Celeste tempered her voice, holding back her desire to screech.

  “That was a customer, lady.” The nurse fumbled some folded money around a puffed up baggie into her shirt pocket.

  “He looked like my boyfriend,” Celeste said. “What were you giving him? Pills?”

  “Mind your own damn business, bitch, and get out of my face,” the clerk’s face went red and her eyes narrowed. “If he’s your boyfriend, you deserve each other.”

  Celeste propelled herself past the nurse, who cringed, raising both hands in self-defense, twisting out of Celeste’s way.

  Her running some nights under the starlit sky with Eddie had brought her back to her healthy pace from her high school years and she careened around the corner, speeding up when she saw the strange man in the black coat nearly at an exit. “Eddie,” she yelled.

  His shoulders tensed up and he slammed himself through the aluminum doorway, disappearing from view.

  She was at the door seconds later, pushing herself into a hallway littered with long abandoned, broken parts of hospital machinery. She could see pounded footprints on the dusty floor leading to a back door, so she launched herself again, frantic in her head, needing to know whether or not it was Eddie, unable to slow herself down. She raced towards the back door and ran out into a side parking lot, half empty with old cars.

  The man, it wasn’t Eddie, was fifteen feet away, leaning between two cars, pushing something from his fingers into his mouth.

  She couldn’t help it, she needed to see his face up close, to erase the terror that it might be Eddie running away from her. She ran over and grabbed his arm, exposing his gaunt face, his unblinking eyes.

  He fought her off like a bear trying to escape an unexpected sharp-edged trap, ripping his body right and left to free his feet. His hands formed crescent circles, his long dirty fingernails curved to scrape her with the full force of his own fear and pain.

  She ducked one round of battering, keeping herself steady on her low heels. If she twisted sideways, he’d press himself against her and dig into her, fueled by his drug-addled blindness.

  As he swayed over her in one frantic push, she timed her ascension from her crouch and grabbed at his neck with both her hands, pulling him down to his knees, her own leg quickly, violently slamming him in his crotch, bringing him crumpled half onto her, easy enough to push over onto the concrete ground of the parking lot.

  She heard shouts and scuffling sounds as two building security guards loped
over, a tall slender woman and an average height but stocky older man, both were brandishing their nightsticks, ready to wail on the now reinvigorated man under her grip. She could not hold him much longer, she thought. He had scrambled sideways out from under her and the only grasp she maintained was her fingers around his rattling throat.

  He gasped. And fought.

  She let go when the stocky guard sat himself onto the man’s now vulnerable back and the slender woman made a quick job of shackling his feet, twisting his wrists behind him, pulling plastic twining handcuffs around his wrists to incapacitate him.

  Still, the man seethed.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” Celeste asked, catching her breath. She rubbed her fingers, they were still strong from all those years of gripping a tennis racket. She’d never expected that such an oddly fitting sport in such an inhospitable moment would protect her, but it had.

  “He’s tweaking,” the woman said. “Did you see which car he was getting into?”

  “I’m not sure,” Celeste said, standing up. There were several small dark sedans parked in the back hospital lot. It looked like a convention of broken down, unmarked police cars. She walked a few feet into the driving lane. Which one had he leaned on? “Can’t you open these cars? There can’t me that many,” she asked.

  There were 4 dark cars, 2 gray cars, 1 old yellow station wagon and a rusted red pickup truck in the lot.

  “No we can’t,” the tall guard sneered.

  “Yes we can,” the stocky guard said. “Patriot Act. We can do whatever the hell we have to do.”

  The woman pointed her nightstick up to two corners of the buildings surrounding the parking lot. “Cameras, dumbass. I’m not getting fired, we’re not popping open all these cars.”

  Celeste jumped in fright as the handcuffed man snapped out of his coiled position, trying to straighten himself out.

  “It was a dark car,” she said. “If the cameras are on, can’t you look at film to see what car he was opening?”

  “That would take too long, he might have a buddy who’d come get the car and drive off as soon as we drag him out of here. Besides, Detroit PD is on the way,” the woman said, just as the sound of a siren blasted into the parking lot, two police cars suddenly parked sideways to block the exit.

  “It’s this car, I think,” Celeste said, walking around the front of one navy blue 4-door sedan. “Then he pushed me and we fought and we ended up over where he is now.”

  The woman steered two approaching police officers to the junky navy car, its paint was peeling off near the bottom of the chassis and its windows were each half opened, the driver’s door had a dent in it.

  “You sure?” one of the Detroit cops asked. Celeste could feel his cagey caution, his quickly gloved hands were ready to open the car to start a drug search.

  Surprised at how little detail she’d noticed about the car when the man raced out to it from the closed off hallway, she walked over and quickly reenacted her attack by the now handcuffed man, taking the three or four backwards steps as she’d tried to avoid his crazed clawing, then she showed how she’d tripped him, gotten a lock on his neck and then kneed him in the groin.

  “Damn, you’re a ninja,” the antsy cop said, yanking the blue car door open. He pulled a long flat tool out of a leather holder hanging on his belt. It looked like half a crow bar, half a nail file. He opened the glove compartment, which was empty.

  Celeste wondered if the car would be clean.

  Within seconds, with his tool, the cop had jimmied off the plastic dashboard, side panels of the doors and then yanked up the soft underbelly of the blinker housing and the floorboard near the seats.

  The second officer had a small video camera out, trained on a now visible bag of white powder next to a crunched mess of hundred dollar bills.

  The first cop moved deftly out of the car, kneeling to pull white filled bags out of each of the four wheel wells.

  “Quite a fucking haul,” the camera cop said. “What do you think, $300,000?”

  Celeste gasped out loud.

  “Get out of here, get back in the hospital,” the cop motioned to her, holding his camera down towards the ground, its green light switched to flashing red. “We’ll come in to take your statement.”

  Celeste felt her arm grasped by the tall slender security guard, who was now grinning from ear to ear. “Jesus, you probably got us promoted. That dumb bastard must have had a quarter million bucks worth of meth in there.”

  “So what happens now?” Celeste asked, turning for a last look at the now jubilant cops who were manhandling the drug addict into the backseat of one of the police cruisers.

  “Suspicion of possession and transportation of methamphetamines, importing a controlled substance into the state. He’s going away for a very long time.”

  “How do you know he’s not local?”

  “Plates on the car say Wisconsin. And he’s got two window stickers for parking lots in Florida. There are pill stores in Florida where you can get months of prescriptions filled, addicts go there to stock up.”

  “You noticed all that?” Celeste stood as the automatic doors opened up. Thank god, she felt the thought crush her windpipe, it hadn’t really been Eddie. She wouldn’t have grabbed him, she would have let him go. But it wasn’t him. It wasn’t. The similarity had been in the fallen cheeks, the exhaustion in the eyes.

  “That’s my job. At least you didn’t screw up picking out the car. You would have looked like an idiot if DPD had been rifling through a couple of cars. Some of the doctors who park here would have been pissed off to come out to find their rides ripped to hell.”

  “Doctor cars don’t carry drugs,” Celeste scoffed.

  “You are too naive,” the guard said, motioning her to a seat outside the pharmacy. “Sometimes, it’s who you least expect.”

  “I found this bottle, he dropped it after he took a few, before he started fighting. It fell on the ground.” She reached into her dress pocket, careful to extract the unlabeled bottle, not Eddie’s. There was no white label stuck to its exterior. She picked up a few of the pills and looked closely at them. They had a word imprinted on them.

  The tall security guard stood and walked with Celeste towards the plexiglas window of the pharmacy. The ponytailed nurse came to face them.

  “Who was that?” Celeste asked.

  “A patient. You are here for a prescription?” The nurse cocked her head.

  “No,” Celeste leaned in, “What’s his name?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, honey.” The nurse turned away and nervously pushed wayward hairs flat against her head, redoing her ponytail.

  “What is Percocet?” Celeste opened the palm of her hand where she was holding three white pills, ‘Percocet’ spelled out on each pill.

  A pharmacist walked behind the clerk and looked through the window past her to the security guard, said ‘It’s a narcotic pain killer, you do have a prescription for those, don’t you? They’re a controlled substance.”

  “Oh no, I don’t,” Celeste said, “they were on the ground outside in the parking lot.” She stared at the nurse, who turned as pale as the pills Celeste held.

  “Crap,” the pharmacist said, “damn druggies are selling their pills again.” He motioned for her to pass the pills to him and he grabbed at them as they clattered into the pass-through well at the plexiglas window. “You’d better get the cops on this,” he motioned to the security guard.

  “They’re already outside,” the guard answered. “Don’t touch that pill bottle, it’s evidence.” She extracted the pill bottle carefully with gloved hands.

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” Celeste rubbed her forehead.

  “Nope, you’re sitting here. Until DPD comes in to chat with you.”

  Celeste texted Frank, ‘please please tell bossman I got into something with DPD, I’ll be back as soon as they question me. I caught a perp stealing drugs, turned out he’s loaded with meth.”

  “WTF?”
Frank texted back.

  “Can’t talk,” she replied. She leaned back in her chair, remembering the confusion she’d felt as she’d launched herself down the first hallway, angry that Eddie might be two timing her, hitting on the lying pharmacy employee with the bad ponytail. Who’d probably, she was sure, do some hard time herself.

  “I’m coming over,” Frank texted her.

  “Don’t get fired, I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  “I told bossman you with police, he said I could sit with you so I’m coming.”

  She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her sweaty palms onto her pants. How would she tell this story to Eddie?

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What’s your experience with cops?” Frank asked her.

  “I used to flirt with them in my early twenties. A man in uniform is a beautiful thing, especially when they wear those black boots.”

  “Yeah, looks aren’t everything though,” Frank said. “I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth, but I’m serious. I’ve been shoved aside too many times, they run by you to bust someone and it’s like a swarm of locusts. There’s no one and then suddenly there are four or five of them, eyes forward, tasers or guns out. Anything can happen.”

  “I know what you mean,” Celeste nodded. “Once I saw three cops slam a guy’s head on the ground, like on a TV show, and the guy started bleeding. When they lifted his head, I could see it was an old homeless guy. One cop rifled through an empty battered guitar case the guy was carrying. The other cop yanked everything out of the old guy’s backpack and there was nothing there but a sleeping bag. They manhandled him like he’d robbed a bank at gunpoint. It was so out of proportion.”

  Frank held her hand, “I can’t help it, cops scare me and I didn’t want you to be alone.”

  “You are so sweet,” she said, her voice quavering. “It’s not over though, they’re going to have to pick off that chick inside the pharmacy window. The one with the ponytail. She was giving him meds. I’m scared now, she keeps looking at me. Why hasn’t she taken off? I’m going to have to tell the cops about her when they come in. She should leave.”