Unburying Hope (22 page)

“I
can’t see enough to count them yet,” Frank leaned in, “I feel like shit saying
anything because he’s so nice to check on me and get me food.
 
But you should keep your eyes open,
Missy.”

Celeste
bit her lip.
 
She didn’t want to
get up and rifle around the house looking for her painkillers in front of Frank
but she now felt an urgent desire to climb out of bed.
 
“So, I’m going to sleep,” she said,
“Check in with me when you wake up.”

“You’re
going to hang up on me, aren’t you.”

“I
have to, I need to sleep,” she said, “don’t take it personally.”

“Okay,
I’ll sleep too.
 
TTYL.”

“Sleep
well.”
 
She pushed the disconnect
button and pulled herself out of the bed, intent on tracking down her small
prescription bottle.
 
Her eyes were
tired but she stood up, balancing herself against the wall.
 
Hopefully she had a few minutes before Eddie
returned.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The fluorescent bathroom
light was too bright for her eyes, they still felt rubbed raw.
 
She stood in the half daylight, no
window in her bathroom, seeing herself in the mirror, a shadowy face and
slumped shoulders.
 
The explosion
had wounded her heart as much as her head, she knew.
 
Detroit was unraveling and she was caught up in its
reality.
 
She couldn’t lie to
herself any longer.
 

Sitting on the counter next
to two plastic toiletry cases, a large white plastic bottle sat with its top
open.
 
Ibuprofen, hundreds of blue
gel capsules lay inside.
 
These
were what Eddie had been pumping her with, two every four hours when she was
awake.

There was another prescription
bottle sitting at the top of her case.
 
She opened it and found large white pills.
 
Ultram, the pharmacy sticker said, 100 mg, 3 times a day for
10 days.
 
She counted out twenty-four
pills.
 
It had been a week.
 
Eddie had been parceling them out to
her, two a day for the first two or three days and she hadn’t had one in days.

Eddie’s toiletry case sat
right next to hers.
 
It was brown
and eight inches tall, it looked like an old fashioned doctor’s bag, and it had
his name stenciled across it with a Sharpie pen.
 
She gingerly unzipped the top.
 
It was always closed when they were in the bathroom together
and it had never occurred to her to rifle through it.
 
Having not grown up around boys, she assumed it had some
shaving cream and supplies, but his toothbrush and toothpaste were on the sink
counter, next to hers.

The plastic of his case
crackled as she opened it with the pads of her fingers, careful to not jostle
the interiors or to move the case on the counter.
 
There was a rag on the top.
 
She lifted it out and folded it, placing it next to the
case.
 
It had covered the expected can
of shaving cream and a blue plastic razor.
 
She lifted out the can and the razor and placed them
carefully on the folded rag.

It was hard to breathe,
looking into the bag at its contents.
 
A clumsy pile of orange prescription bottles lay in the bottom six
inches of the bag.
 
She couldn’t
count how many, they were all jumbled in one mountain of orange and white.

She reached in with her
thumb and forefinger to surgically pull one bottle up.
 
Adderal.
 
She shook the bottle gently, listening to the clunking of
chalky pills against the plastic bottle.
 
Then she pulled up another bottle, Haldol.
 
Then another.
 
Zoloft.
 
Then Oxycontin.
 
Then Percocet.
 
Then Topomax.
 
Then Klonopin, .5 mg, 3 times a day.
 
Then Ambien.
 
Then Valium.
 
Then Flexeril.
 
Then
Seroquel.
 
Then Neurotin, 800 mg, 3
times a day.
 
Then Clonodine, .1
mg, 3 times a day.
 
Then Ultram,
her own medication, but with his name on the pharmacy sticker, 100 mg, 3 times
a day.
 
Then Elavil.
 
Then Trazodone.
 
Finally, she pulled out empty bottles
for Risperdol, Lyrica and Celexa.
 

The bottles stood like
sentinels, lined up next to each other on her laminate countertop.
 
Sixteen filled prescription bottles and
three empty prescription bottles.
 

She lifted the Adderal
bottle and read the label; it had been filled out of a military pharmacy in
Germany.
 
She placed it carefully
down, and then lifted another bottle, reading the label from the same medical
center, Landstuhl.
 
It occurred to
her to separate the pills out by pharmacy locations and she soon found herself
with eight separate collections of his bottles.
 
They had been prescribed from different locations.
 
And the bottles from the same locations
came from different doctors.
 
No doctor
prescribed more than one prescription.

Each bottle was on a
refill, but she couldn’t see how many times each had been refilled.
 
Most of the refill dates were within
the last year.
 
Some of the bottles
were nearly empty.
 
She opened the
Klonopin, there were four pills left.
 
Then Neurotin, there were twelve pills left out of 90.
 
Every single bottle had a warning label
saying that drowsiness could result.

She stood in a cold
sweat.
 
How could she tell
Frank?
 
What could she say to
Eddie?
 
She had never seen this
many medicines in one place.
 
Her
mother had been averse to pills, to the point that when she died, her doctor
had whispered to Celeste at the funeral home that he wished she’d just once
filled the prescription he’d given her for high blood pressure, as though she
could have prolonged her life if she’d just swallowed a plain old pill every
day.
 

But this was insane.
 
There were hundreds of pills here and
she had no idea what they were for.
 
She knew the Ultram was for pain, she knew the Ambien was for sleep,
because she’d laughed with Frank at the commercials that had a lilting voice
describing the blacked out sleep you’d have on the medication and then a deep,
stentorian voice came on for the last five seconds with a long, hurried, scary
list of dangers associated with the drug, including suicidal thoughts, perhaps
failed organs and maybe inability to keep sane.
 

She walked backwards out of
the bathroom to get a pad of paper and pen and quickly returned to write down
the names of each drug, the prescription and the place the prescription was
filled.
 

She carefully placed the
bottles back into the toiletry bag, trying to jumble them in the same order
she’d pulled them out, but since she had organized them by location, she knew
they weren’t going in within the same order that they came out, which vexed
her.
 
She pulled them all out again
and read each label closely, putting them back in the order of original
prescription date, figuring that he hadn’t recently touched the older meds and
they would be on the bottom of his case.
 

She heard a key turn in the
lock at the front door and she panicked, picking up his case, zipping it
shut.
 
She slammed the bathroom
door shut and turned on the water faucet, noticing that she’d forgotten to
replace his shaving things.
 

“Hey, babe,” his voice rang
through the apartment.

“I’m in here, I’ll be right
out,” she called.
 
As silently as
she could, she unzipped his case, shoved his shaving cream can and razor into
an indentation in the pile of bottles, unfolded his rag, placed it over the shaving
things and zipped the bag closed.
 
She placed it carefully right next to her own.

“I brought you some lunch,”
he said.
 
“Your market doesn’t have
anything, as usual, so I went to the Thai place and got noodles.”

She could hear him in the
kitchen, opening cupboards, taking out plates.
 
She stared at her face in the mirror.
 
Should she say anything?
 
Should she watch him?
 
She hadn’t counted the pills in each bottle;
it had been too intimidating to think about cataloging them anymore than she
had.
 

She pinched her cheeks,
trying to get color into them.
 
Her
eyes hurt again.
 
She had forced
herself to look closely at small writing, reading the labels of his
bottles.
 
The headache pain was now
back.

She opened the bathroom
door, “I want to rub my damn eyes,” she said, moving towards him.
 
The smell of a light peanut sauce, the
Pad Thai noodles warm on a plate, wafted towards her.

“I’ll get you some
ibuprofen,” he said.
 
“Lie down and
I’ll feed you.
 
You’ve got to close
your eyes when they hurt.”

“I don’t want to close
them,” she countered.
 
“I want to
see things.”

“Well, you might see too
much and then not be able to open them for a while,” he said gently, steering
her back towards the bedroom.
 
“Sometimes, it’s best to be blind so you can eventually see again.
 
It’s not going to be much longer but if
you don’t take care, it could get worse and you’d have to wear the gauze like
Frank for half the day.”

Knowingly blinding
yourself, Celeste thought, what a terror.
 
Shutting your eyes, sitting in your skin, the world going on around
you.
 
It was a recipe for a nervous
breakdown.
 
She’d survived the decade
with her preternatural ability to watch everything going on around her.
 

But then she hadn’t really
seen.
 
She had been voluntarily blind.
 

Sitting on her bathroom
counter, an inch from her own transparent container of all things that prettied
up her life, was a brown, crackled case that held so many mind-altering drugs
that she couldn’t imagine how someone on them could soberly be present in their
own life.
 

“You close your eyes,
babe.”
 
He moved close to her on
the bed, both of them leaning their backs up against the bare wall behind their
pillows.
 

She followed his lead,
closing her eyes.
 
She could hear
his fork as he twirled noodles on the plate, ‘here you go,” his voice said
softly.
 
She opened her mouth and
took in a lovely bite of soft rice noodles, a salty peanut taste clinging to
the lightness of the food.

“Thank you,” she said,
after she chewed a bit.
 
“You have
no idea how hard it is to be stuck like this.”

“Oh, I know, Celeste.”
 
His voice faltered.

She opened her eyes a tiny
bit, peeking at him as though she were a young girl on the playground, trying
to read the face of the boy next to her before he took off to play hide and
seek.

His face troubled, he was
preparing another forkful of noodles for her.
 
His brow was furrowed and his lips were tight and she felt
sorrow, not fear, looking at him as the receptacle of all those drugs.
 
She had no idea what he was taking, or when.
 
Whether he was on anything now.
 

But his softness.
 
His kindness.
 
They were there in his face.

As he raised the fork, she
tightened her eyelashes against each other, blinding herself into darkness,
aware of the scent of the food, the tenderness of his movements.

Chapter Twenty-Five

 
“Eddie,” she said quietly.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want you to hide
from me anymore.”

He laughed, “Why would I be
afraid of you?”
 

She cocked her eyebrow at him,
“I want to know who you are.”

He balked, his facial
expression turning dark.
 
She could
see his shoulders tensing.

“I know you’ve been to war
for years and years.”

“Yes,” he said, suspiciously.

“It’s time for you to tell
me about it.”

“No,” he turned away.