Unburying Hope (28 page)

Celeste felt her spot on the back seat
suddenly crush in on her, the small body next to her was not weighty but the
air around her felt unreal.
 

A child.
 
In the taxi.
 
With them.

“Are we still going to the airport?” she asked
in confusion.

He nodded, refusing connection, looking at her
peripherally, then looked out his window.

“And her?”
 
She couldn’t bring herself to look directly at the figure
next to her.

“This is Rosalinda.”

Celeste looked down at the worried face and
the tightness in her chest melted a bit.
 
She stuck out her hand slowly to shake and said quietly, “I’m Celeste.”

The little girl gingerly pulled her hand out
of her sweatshirt pocket and warily touched Celeste’s fingers, then withdrew
back into herself.

Celeste looked over the girl’s long dark brown
braided hair to Eddie.
 
“Who is
she?
 
Is she coming with us?”

His voice was sad, “She’s my daughter.”
 
He crossed his arms, jostling away from
both of them, facing towards his window and the view of the approaching
airport.

“She’s coming with us?
 
Or is someone meeting us to take her?”

He shook his head, refusing to engage.
 
“I’m worried about my mom.”

She leaned forward around the girl and grabbed
his arm, “What’s happening to Rosalinda?”

“She’s with us now.”
 
He gruffly turned away.

“What was in the brown paper bag?”

“Money.
 
I gave my mom some money.”

Celeste felt no guilt this time as she openly
jostled through her purse on her lap, yanking no longer useful apartment keys and
packets of tissues out of the way to grip the pill container, pulling out two
pills and shoving them into her mouth.
 
Enough not to think.
 
To
sleep on the plane.
 
To wake up in
a new place.
 
Where she hoped her
courage could re-right itself, like a buoy on the water, rocked by the insane
waves of the small hurricane that sat silently between them in the cab as it
pulled up to the departure gate.

Chapter
Thirty

Driving away from the beachside motel in
Kihei, on the island of Maui, in the small sedan Eddie had bought used from a
clerk at a gas station the day before, Celeste realized that it had been almost
two years since she’d sold her car in Detroit, tired of scraping ice and snow
off windows in the winter, frightened by one too many slides on black ice in
heavy storms.
 

It was such a relief to be in a warm place, in
a clean car that wasn’t rusted on the bottom from years of crusted salt thrown
from city trucks in an attempt to dust the roads and beat back any snow that
dared stay.
 
Celeste found it
absurd that a city known for making hunks of steel into cars couldn’t stop their
inevitable rusting.
 
She had finally
sold the car when she realized that renting a garage would cost as much as
renting another bedroom in an apartment.
 
She’d laughed at the line of people waiting to pay for a room for their
car when a local locked garage space came up for rent.
 
Taking the bus had been an easy choice
from then on.

Eddie had gone for a walk while she napped
after getting off their plane, and he’d phoned the number posted on the car,
which turned out to be the gas station attendant’s cell phone a few feet away.
 
Within minutes, the attendant had the
cash he needed to pay off his tuition bill so he could continue in college, and
Eddie was driving back to the motel with a huge grin on his face for Celeste
and Rosalinda to see.
 

The Toyota drove smoothly.
 
It had 117,000 miles on it but was
clean and got good gas mileage, he’d been told.

House hunting did not interest him, however,
and he offered to keep Rosalinda with him, which was a relief to Celeste.
 

The girl was quiet but Celeste couldn’t
imagine getting in and out of the car over and over again with a kid following
her.

She had her list of twelve available rental
units, culled from online listings.
 
She started northwest in Kanapaali and Lahaina, walking through open
houses at condominium complexes.
 
The interiors were similar to her Detroit apartment, the exteriors were
similar except for the views of either tropical trees or courtyards filled with
green flowering bushes.
 
Much nicer
to walk into, she realized, when you smell gardenias in the wind.
 
She phoned Eddie, who seemed
disappointed.
 
No houses?

The fifth place was a house in the flat part
of Lahaina behind the tourist strip of art galleries and restaurants near the
beach.
 
For a few hundred dollars
more a month than the condos, you could rent a small, one story ordinary
suburban house with low ceilings, one old fashioned bathroom and an alley
kitchen that had dark cabinets and no windows.
 

She drove away towards the upcountry, checking
her watch.
 
Three places in the
hills, then back down to the more industrial area around the Kahalui airport
for two condos and then near Kihei to two small houses in the flat area where
the higher paid employees of the fancy hotels lived.
 
She’d driven through that area and spotted both houses but
she knew now that they would probably be similar to the non-descript Lahaina
rental house.
 
They didn’t seem
worth the extra rent.
 
She’d rather
have a condo that had been updated but she thought it would be safer to tell Eddie
about how ugly the ranch houses were before settling on a condo that she knew
he wouldn’t like.

The winding hillside road seemed to call to
her, to lure her to slow down to look at the dramatically changing view.
 
She pulled over at a turnout and
parked, got out of the car and looked around.
 
She could see down to the sun-besotted beach but her eyes
were drawn upward and she gasped at the necklace of clouds that lay in the sky
above the rolling green flanks of the mountain.
 
A sign said that the mountain was a volcano, Haleakala.
  
She spoke the name to herself a
few times, the lyrical vowels danced on her tongue.
 
A volcano?
 
Better than Midwestern tornados, but not by much if it was ever active.

The hills around her were ranches, farms, and
small towns not unlike the sprawling flatland farms she’d driven to in Michigan
to pluck fresh grown apples out of trees in the fall.
 
For a city dweller, those annual treks had seemed like
walkabouts to an alien planet.
 
You
could see the earth, not concrete smothering the land.
 
You could smell the dirt when you
walked among the apple trees; it was a primal scent that was at once foreign
and comforting.
 
She hadn’t spent
much of her life in nature.
 
Comfort came instead from smallness, the repetition of what she knew.

The first house in the upcountry was at a very
low rental price and she knew why when the open house sign led to a smaller
shed behind a small house.
 
It was
an ‘Ohana’, a one bedroom/one bathroom building on the back of the lot.
 
She couldn’t imagine living in
someone’s backyard, and Rosalinda would have to sleep on a sofa in the
hallway.
 
So she shook her head and
wandered back to her car, noticing the eucalyptus and flowering trees that
proliferated as she drove up the mountain.

She drove through a quaint little town,
Makawao, which looked like a cross between a hippie town and an Old Western
town from cowboy movies.
 
She
parked and walked onto a rickety old porch and through a tall door into a bakery,
breathing in caramel sugar smells.

“What is that?” she asked, staring hungrily at
a plate being prepared for another customer, four pastries piled high.

“Long Johns,” the clerk said.
 
“We make them fresh.
 
Long custard doughnuts.”

“I’ll take three,” she said, “1 for here, 2 in
a bag to go, please.
 
What kind of
juice do you have?”

“Carrot, beet, celery or carrot, orange,
ginger.
 
Both with a bit of
pineapple and orange.”

“What?”

“Carrot, beet celery or carrot orange ginger.”

“No apple or plain orange?”

“You’re in Hawaii, we have real juice here.”
The young man smirked.

“I don’t even know what carrot juice would
taste like.
 
I’ll just have water,”
she said.

“Sure,” the clerk reached into the glass front
cabinet that was steamed up from the fresh warm doughnuts.
 
“You sightseeing?”

“No, looking for a house to rent.”

The clerk straightened up, with a smile on his
face.
 
“What are you looking for?”

The bakery felt so warm and inviting, snuggled
in between pretty art galleries and small, cozy restaurants.
 
The other customers bantered with each
other and smiled at Celeste, then went back to their conversations.
 
She felt safe.
 
And welcome.
 
“Two bedrooms, one bath.
 
A house, hopefully.”

“You looking from online?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he smiled more broadly, “I know a
house that’s not listed on the internet.”

“Why isn’t it online?” Celeste asked
curiously, suddenly wondering if there were a slew of available houses that she
didn’t know about.
   

“We don’t want lookey-loos.
 
Tourists wander around thinking about moving
or having a second place but they never follow through.
 
We want to rent it to someone who will
be part of the community.”

Celeste smiled.
 
“My boyfriend is opening a dive shop.
 
And there is a little girl who is
looking for a good school.
 
We want
to stay.”

The clerk came around the counter, bringing
her a plate with her doughnut and a bag with the two others.
 
“Have a seat,” he said, “I’ll bring my
Grandma down, it’s her property.
 
It’s got a nice garden.
 
She
grew up in the house, bought it from her parents.
 
She rents it out and her tenants just moved out two days
ago.”

As Celeste enjoyed the honey custard taste of
the Long John, a small, elderly Japanese woman sidled up to the marble top
table.
 
Her face was soft and
smooth, her hair gray and curly.
 
She sat down on the chair opposite Celeste, her lips parted in a mischievous
smile.
 
“My grandson say you have
good aura.”

Celeste snickered, putting her hand to her
mouth to cover the unexpected sound.
 
“He said what?”

“Your aura.
 
Your life energy.”
 
She pointed her finger around Celeste’s body.
 
“You do, you know.
 
It change from frozen blue to warmer.
 
It try to be orange.
 
You do well to live in upcountry, it ground you, let your aura
develop.”
 
She looked closely into
Celeste’s eyes, “You been holding your life too tightly.
 
Time for you to trust.”

“My Grandma has a third eye,” the clerk said,
as he brought her glass of iced water to the table.
 
He placed a linen napkin underneath it, to absorb the sweat
from the cold glass.
 

Celeste felt comfortable sitting with this
elderly lady.
 
She reached out her
hand and introduced herself.
 
The
lady tenderly took her fingers and shook them, laughing delightedly.
  
“So formal.”
 
She stood up and leaned over the table,
“better to hug.”
 
She wrapped her
thin arms around Celeste’s neck and squeezed, surprising Celeste with her
strength.
 
“Everybody call me
Malia.“
 
She sat down and put her
hands flat on the table.
 
“Not for
just anybody, my house.
 
For the
right people.
 
My last tenant was Korean,
not that I mind, I’m Japanese and my husband was Korean, but they buried kim
chee around the yard and I don’t know where it is, so my gardener, she careful
when she put new flowers in ground.”

“What’s kim chee?”

“Spicy pickled lettuce in clay pot.
 
Bury for weeks to ferment.
 
Hitting one of those with shovel make
big mess.
 
It stings the earth,
makes it hard for plants to grow.
 
Very vinegary soil.
 
Maybe I
put blue hydrangeas in when we hit one of those pots.”
 
She frowned slightly, “You wouldn’t
bury pots of kim chee, would you?”
 
She winked.