Unburying Hope Read online

  Frank’s face turned imperceptibly towards the windowed wall to Celeste’s right. His gaze downward, he caught a glimpse of a shadowy woman staring out at them. “Look, I know we need cops, but street drugs are so damn common that half the city is already in prison. So what do you do? Do you have to tell them about her?”

  “Don’t I?”

  “I had a cop boyfriend once. He loved being a cop but he didn’t like the way people looked away from him, people avoided him. So he took his breaks near schools and stood out in the playground during recess. He left his guns and taser locked in his squad car and he’d play foursquare or climb those geodesic domes with little kids. That way, when he was on duty later on in a burger joint or walking down the street between calls, kids would shout out to him.”

  “Did he do it so kids would tell him things?”

  “No, that kind of informing is only in the movies. Neighborhood loyalty runs deep. Those kids would never invite him in for dinner. But at least the little ones didn’t spit at him. He told me his favorite kid was a little girl who’d walk along with her brothers and her eyes would brighten when she saw him, and then she’d hold up her middle finger as a salute. He thought it was so funny! She had this little two inch finger, flipping him off, then she’d pass with her brothers and turn around and wave at him when her brothers weren’t looking.”

  “What a little badass.”

  “I know. Queen of the Hood, he called her.”

  “That’s the only kind of kid I’d like,” Celeste laughed, relieved for a moment.

  “Of course you would, the devil’s spawn. No ordinary kid for you.”

  Celeste felt a prickly current race up her spine as the whooshing sound of the automatic sliding doors caught her attention. The two police officers were walking over to her.

  Frank tensed up, holding her hand.

  “So, how did that go down?”

  Celeste, aware that both cops were wearing their tasers and their small caliber pistols on their belts, looked one more time towards the pharmacy window, thinking that she still had Eddie’s unfilled prescription bottle in her pocket but that she hadn’t said his full name to the clerk with the ponytail.

  She answered their questions, telling the story starting with her confusion about who the man was.

  “You thought he might be your boyfriend? Flirting?” The cop was incredulous. “You chased down a perp thinking he was your boyfriend?”

  “No, that’s not it,” Celeste said, realizing how jealous that sounded. “He was getting prescriptions, she wouldn’t tell me who he was, so I followed him. I only fought him when he started attacking me.”

  “Did you know then he wasn’t your boyfriend?” The cop smirked, “Jesus, I’m glad I’m married. Don’t have to be chased down by crazy single girls anymore.”

  “That’s just rude,” Celeste said.

  “What were you doing here at the pharmacy?”

  “Filling out a prescription for my boyfriend,” Celeste said sheepishly.

  The cop put his hand out, waiting expectantly.

  Celeste looked at Frank, then at the cop. “What do you want?”

  “The prescription, your boyfriend’s prescription.”

  “That’s personal.” Celeste leaned back. “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “Alright, you are sure it’s the 5’4” brunette with the pony tail, green patterned shirt with leaves on it, blue eyes?” the cop said, standing up.

  “Yes, that’s her. How did you see all that? She’s behind a wall.”

  “I don’t get paid for mixing up my boyfriend, lady.” He signaled his partner to move towards the pharmacy door. “You can go. We’ll call you.” He reached for his holster and inched stealthily towards the window.

  Celeste could see the ponytailed clerk suddenly jerk backwards and rush behind a shelf unit. There was a flurry of sounds, doors opening, shouts, plastic storage boxes knocking over.

  She grabbed Frank’s hand and yanked him out the sliding doors, running again at top speed. This time, she headed back to the office, where a few hours of boring, plexiglas-protected conversations with strangers would calm her nerves. She’d get Eddie’s prescription filled elsewhere, maybe in a farther away neighborhood where he could have some privacy. She’d look up a Veteran’s Hospital and try to fill it there. That would probably be a safe place.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Later that night, Celeste woke up, her back comfortingly pressed against the cold bedroom wall. The window was open and the sycamore leaves outside rustled in the night wind.

  Eddie stirred next to her, jerking his arm out from under the covers. She reached for his hand and gently placed it on the pillow near his face, cooing softly by his ear. It was soothing having him here, even with his sleepy staccato grunts. She lay for enough minutes to hear him snore back into a rhythm before releasing herself into a deep sleep.

  In her dream, something was slipping away. She was standing on a snow-covered city street alone, looking out but not seeing much through the white blindness that surrounded her. Someone important to her, she couldn’t name who, struggled to reach her, pushing against icy winds, plodding through the snow until Celeste could feel the nearness and a feeble connection building, a silver spark of recognition. She still couldn’t name the person but suddenly they were there and she gasped at the deep completeness that came over her, a fullness she’d never experienced before. Then, in one horrifying moment, the snows gave way and the figure tumbled into a sinkhole, frantically reaching for her. Her brain misfired out of shock, she grasped for the disappearing arm, the clutching hand, its cold desperation flailed into the closing hole in the snow and she felt alone again, this time a shell of herself, her heart ripped apart by grief, her brain hijacked by confusion. What just happened? Who was that?

  She woke up in a cold sweat. Eddie snored a few inches away. She pressed her back to the wall, feeling its solidity against her skin, breathing into it until the panic subsided.

  And sleep came again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The scuba diving equipment took up the carpeted area in her small living room. It wasn’t just the tanks, it was the harnesses, the mouthpieces, the webbed belts, the wet suits, the flippers. A tower of metal and fasteners and latex and neoprene lay across the crusty shag carpet. Suddenly, after a few Fed Ex deliveries, her lonely apartment was filled with the aggregation of one life’s interest.

  He had bought two of everything.

  But Celeste had no interest in suiting up and going below water. A vague early childhood memory invaded her brain whenever the hot water in the shower ran out and cold water poured over her head.

  Fishing with her father.

  At least she thought it was her father. It could have been an uncle or a friend of her mother’s but part of her repressed personal myth was that it was her father.

  She remembered wearing a pair of cotton pants that stopped right above her small sports shoes. As a toddler, she loved the shoes because they had pink lights in the heel that lit up whenever she’d footfall but as they grew older and she grew out of them, they only lit when she jumped in the air and landed, which she did frequently with utter delight in the darkness of her bedroom.

  Her bedroom. She realized abruptly that this bedroom, the one in her head that had appeared like a cinematic flash on a dark screen, this bedroom of the light-up shoes was not the one she’d grown up in with her mother, in the rooming house.

  She watched Eddie fumble with the tanks on the carpet. He sat cross-legged with his head down, intent on straightening out the tubes between the tanks and the breathing apparatus.

  She stayed in that other dimension, in the memory that wafts into your brain, when you slow down time in the image, not saturating or evaporating it with too much thought.

  Maybe there was a time that she’d been happy, that she’d had a father? She remembered the little light-up shoes, standing next to a tall man out at the side of a river, looking at worms that w
iggled in a small plastic container whose lid she secured while biting her lip in childish repulsion.

  If she let her vision go blurry, listening more than watching Eddie in his machinations, she could feel the sense memory of that warm day by the river. But she wanted to go further back, she wanted that other memory, the one on the earthy brown wood floor, the jumping in the little shoes in the darkness, in a different room than the one where her mother lay with this man? Did he live there? Maybe she’d been part of a family. Maybe she’d had shoes that were new and not neighborhood hand-me-downs or thrift shop specials.

  But the memory wanted to dissipate; she could not flesh it out. It taunted her, sat on the outer ridges of her sanity. It occurred to her that maybe her solitude had arisen because she couldn’t solidify any memory except the lonely memories of the rooming house, living with her mother. She knew that it had been enough to live with her mother, to feel her close, to smell the savory scents of her restaurant job or the chemical smells of her assembly line job in her hair, to see the delight in her tired eyes when they were reunited every evening before bedtime.

  But there was this other memory.

  The clanking of Eddie’s scuba equipment brought an old clamminess to her skin, a prickling fear back into her head.

  The soggy moss on a rock, combined with her usual squirming had conspired in her slipping into the cold river waters.

  The flow felt like a torrent on her little body and she remembered the simplicity of the situation.

  Her lungs filled with water. Where there should have been air, there was instead cold, numbing liquid. She flailed a bit, touching nothing, then thrashed against an underwater rock.

  She felt her leg being sucked into the space between two large rocks, where the water propelled itself downriver, some roiling over the rocks, some suctioning through the small space. Her leg was trapped. Just the one leg. The other one was bent and she pushed against that foot, trying to release her now imprisoned leg. But she was too little and her brain was turning off, distracted by the crushing in her chest.

  She let herself be battered, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t control her body.

  And then she was again in the air and her unfocused eyes could see trees, the flannel shirt of her father as he pulled her to his chest, his eyes frantic, his arms gripping her, his voice breaking.

  She remembered an ambulance coming, called by nearby fishermen. She remembered the man receding as the police and the firefighters converged over her. She remembered moving soon after that, and the depth of loneliness that accrued each day in her life since that moment on the stretcher when she watched the man half wave to her, his eyes broken with sorrow.

  Maybe he’d been married, she thought. Not to her mother. Maybe he was afraid of losing whatever life he deemed more valuable than the bouncing lit shoes dancing in the dark.

  Anyway, that’s when her memories of the rooming house began. Of her mother being so tired, working so hard. From then on, she knew, it was all on her mother, the raising, the providing.

  That river had washed her into a small trap, her leg caught like a wolf’s, and it had demanded its pound of flesh, figuratively, when she was pulled to safety.

  No, going under cold water with a heavy tank on her back was not something she wanted to do.

  But Eddie cajoled her, went painstakingly through the description of each mechanism until she felt the webbing of the belt just tight enough across her chest, sucked on the mouthpiece long enough to feel the air release from the tank into her lungs, and then shut off. She had to time the out-breath so that she got enough oxygen on the in-breath, it was similar to the breathing her mother had taught her in order to forestall the panic she’d grown up with as a child.

  Eddie pulled her hand. “Come on, let’s get you under the shower.”

  “No way!” She balked. “Not with all this stuff on.”

  “Seriously, Celeste. Buck up.” He grabbed her hand again and pulled her down the hallway towards her bathroom.

  She had the flippers on too, the wetsuit, the head hood, the tank, the mouthpiece in her mouth. “I feel like a penguin”, she said, as she tripped over the large plastic flippers in front of her toes. It was like walking in crazy clown shoes.

  He turned her around. “You have to walk backwards with the flippers. Then you just look uncoordinated,” he laughed, “not ridiculous.”

  She frowned; walking backwards was not much easier.

  “I won’t lie to you”, he said, smiling, “you look like a seal.”

  “A Navy SEAL?”

  “Nope. The kind of oily skinned seal that sharks like to eat for lunch.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said sarcastically, backing into the bathroom.

  He turned the shower water on but she shook her head. “Look, I almost drowned in a river when I was little. This scares me.”

  “But you’re with me. You’re safe. It’s what I do best.” He put his hand under the warm shower water, then touched her hand with his wet hand. “See, it’s warm. Not like a river at all.”

  Celeste stepped backwards into the shower, pushing the glass door to make sure it stayed open. The sound of water against her neoprene suit and the tile floor resonated like the sound of dirt being thrown on a lowered coffin, she thought. Her skin could feel the force of the water but she stayed mostly dry. It was strange.

  When she leaned back under the showerhead, the warm water ran down her face and she took in a deep breath when Eddie nudged the mouthpiece into her mouth.

  “You can’t use your nose,” he said, “Breathe only from the tank.”

  The water blinded her, its rivulets splashing through her eyelashes down her cheeks. She pulled her facemask on over her eyes and her nose, the first breath came fast, a huge gasp in. Much better with her eyes protected. There was a clunky closing of the air valve on the regulator when she breathed out. It was freaky, she thought. The air came to you if you asked it to by breathing in. It stopped coming to you if you signaled that it wasn’t needed by breathing out.

  “You’re doing it!” Eddie crowed. “This is great! We can go to Lake St. Clair this weekend.”

  She breathed in slowly, methodically listening to the burst of available air and then again she heard the shutoff. The warm water smoothed the wetsuit against her skin. It was like waking up in a sweat, her skin steamy but sheets stopping the wetness. “Is the lake warm?”

  “Nope. It’s cold.”

  “Then why do you want to do this?” Her skin got clammy at the thought of icy water pushing against the wetsuit.

  “You’ll like it, it warms up a bit,” he said, turning the shower water off. “It’s like Mars or something. You float around and see whole other universes. When you get the hang of it, we’ll maybe go to Hawaii and do it in warm water. You’ll love that best, because fish and turtles swim up to look you in the eye.”

  Her heart warmed. He wanted to travel with her! She’d never left the state and he wanted to take her to the tropics. She determined to get through her fear, to get to the other side of it so that she could be floating weightless next to him some day in warm salty waters, waving to a hard shelled turtle that swam by.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the cold air, suited up again two days later, she put her mask on and walked backwards to the shoreline to stand next to him as he pulled his neoprene hood over his head, exposing his grenade dent when his hair was tucked away. His tan was fading and the near-winter sun painted him more water-colored than usual.

  He patted her on the arm. “You follow me.”

  “How cold is it?”

  “Very.” He walked a few feet into the water, turned around and dove in.

  Celeste breathed in on the mouthpiece and stepped backwards a few feet into the lake, feeling the bracing water sneak into her wetsuit. She looked through the mask to see Eddie’s head above water, motioning her to come in farther.

  The strangeness of the cold between the neoprene and her skin, the rhythmic r
elease of the air soothed her and she dove in, submerging herself in the murky water. She floated to the top and breathed on the tank even though her head was above water.

  He swam over to her. “Damn, you’re a beast, Celeste,” he reached out a hand in the air to high five her. “Look at you, you’re not living small any more!”

  Each breath anchored her, staving off the panic that should have already engulfed her.

  “We’re going down. Follow me.” He pointed out farther in the lake. “There’s a big drop about forty yards out, we’ll swim down it and look around. Visibility might be bad. You won’t see the munitions I used to see when I dove in my Officers Course, but you’ll see something that will blow your mind, I bet.”

  She nodded and followed him, submerging again. He went slowly, signaling to her and she tried to stay close but going deeper was a challenge. Her arms were pulling, her legs were kicking but something in her was holding back and he got enough ahead of her that she couldn’t clearly see his whole body. She propelled herself forward, fighting the clamminess of her childhood memory, telling herself that this time she was knowingly moving herself forward, deeper, she was doing it to be with Eddie in this alien landscape that was comfort and home to him.

  He swam exuberantly back to her, smiling through his mouthpiece, eyes wide with delight and he pointed downward. He looked like he was a bird effortlessly flying in the thermals, he swam a few feet up then kicked and dove full body downwards as if he’d taken off from a high dive.

  She followed him, watching only his flippers, using them as a point of reference and she breathed in every time he did two kicks and out when he did two more.

  Suddenly, she felt something close in on her and she realized they’d bottomed out near the shoreline lake floor. She looked up, unable to see any sky through the murky water.

  Near her was a strange object, an A frame shape, white. Her throat was tight, her breaths weren’t bringing in the oxygen she’d grown accustomed to. She slowed her breath, slower, slower, to get oxygen. The shape was foreign; it pointed straight upward and was 15-20 feet high. Eddie swam around it while she gagged on her mouthpiece, now there wasn’t enough oxygen being let in even if she sucked in a few extra seconds.