Unburying Hope (29 page)

“I don’t know the first thing about gardening
and wouldn’t even know how to work a shovel.”
 
Celeste was embarrassed.

“Ah, City Girl.
 
Where are you from?”

“Michigan.
 
Detroit.”

“Car country.”

“Used to be.”

“Who you going to live with?”

How to label Eddie and his daughter to a
potential landlord, she wondered.
 
“With my partner and daughter.”

“You lesbian?”

“No.”
 
Celeste smiled, she hadn’t expected that as a response to her evasion.

“You said partner.
 
I don’t care if you lesbian.
 
I have lesbian niece.
 
No biggie.”

“I just don’t know what to call him.”

“Boyfriend?”

Celeste blushed, “Yes, boyfriend.”

“Want him to be husband?
 
I can feng shui the house, make him
propose,” Malia smiled slyly.

“No, no, no,” Celeste protested, putting up
her hands.
 
She shook her head
nervously, “Can you do that?
 
Do
you have the power?”

“I got the power, honey.
 
You tell me when you want me to use
it.
 
I get you married in six
months.”
 
Her cool, crepe-y hands
enveloped Celeste’s.
 
“First we go
look at house.
 
We walk, it’s on
road behind bakery.”

“You live there?”
 
Celeste wondered if it was another Ohana shed-like building.

“No, I live above bakery.
 
Happy and warm, day and night.
 
My grandson work for me, go to college.
 
He live in another house I own
down in Lahaina, easy for him to drive to college.
 
Need to keep him in school so he can get a good job, then he
can have his own real estate dynasty like me,” she waved her hand towards the
back of the bakery.
 

Celeste followed her lead, stood up and walked
out the door and up a dirt road, Malia giggling at her own audacity.
 

“Watch out,” Malia said, pushing Celeste back
onto the dirt side of the road.
 
“Crazy bikers in little spandex shorts will knock you on your
bottom.
 
They speed down from
volcano.”
 

Celeste looked up the road just as a group of
cyclists rounded the corner careening their lightweight bikes towards
them.
 
She stepped back with Malia,
finding her hand comfortably held in Malia’s cool grip.
 

“I don’t know what’s worse, worry about dying
by bicycle, or having to see mens’ little packages in those spandex shorts,”
Malia snorted in laughter, surprising Celeste with her spunk.
 
The old lady tugged her towards a long
wall of tightly knit boxwood, eight feet tall, standing stiffly to mark the
outside perimeter of the rental property.
 

It was easy to stop paying attention and be
led by the heady scent of roses somewhere nearby.
 
Celeste walked slowly, looking at how dense the boxwood had
grown together.
 
It reminded her of
the live front fencing of Bloomfield Hills when she walked through to her
tennis tournament.
 
To be so close
with no reason to rush, she stopped and stooped over to look at the bottom of
the boxwood to see how they were planted.

“Why you stop?” Malia said curiously.

“I’ve never seen such dense trees.”

“They are shrubs.
 
My husband trained them into trees.”

“You must have put them in every foot or so to
make them so tight.”

“No these very old, they grew together.
 
Every three feet.”

“How old are they? Celeste stood up and
touched the twigs and leaves.
 
Compared to the anemic boxwood in front of her Detroit apartment, this
was wild and animalistic.
 
Each
part of it was alive, holding itself as secure as if it were a wood fence.

“Who knows?”
 
Malia answered.

The smell of roses wafted towards Celeste
again and she saw fifteen or twenty feet ahead, a white wooden arbor covered
with vining roses.
 
Like the solid
wall of living boxwood, the arbor was alive with green leaves, twining thorned
stalks and miniature effusively flowering roses.
 
It was a tumult, controlled by the underpinning of a pretty,
white, upside down u-shaped structure.
 
A half gate hung open and Malia went through first.

For no reason, Celeste felt her heart soar, as
though it, like the miniature roses, could escape the stricture of expectations
of her past, of the way things had always been.
 
And before she even saw the adorable cottage, she knew in
her soul that she’d never want to live anywhere but here, even if she had to
curl up like a snail in a small corner of its land.

“Why you so white?”
 
Malia grabbed her hand.
 
“You feel okay?”

“I’ve never been somewhere like this”, Celeste
shook herself a little to try to reorient in the physical world.
 
Her feet were on a brick path that
twisted in an S-shape up to the front steps of a cream colored house with a
bright red door.
 
There was a jungle
of trees, bushes, flowers around it.
  
Lush, but somehow with space in between.

“Island be good for you, you live too much in
city.”

“In Detroit, it’s all walls and chain link and
cracked concrete.”
 
She put her
hand out and gingerly touched different trees and blossoms, half expecting them
to shrivel up and disappear, her dreams along with them.

“There’s sickness, you know, when you don’t
know nature.
 
You have sickness, I
think,” Malia said, nodding at her.

Celeste stood, deep in her own confusion.
 
It felt so lovely, so comforting, like
her mother’s huge hug some days when she wasn’t too tired.
 

Malia walked her over to a circular stand of
redwood trees, where a few dead stumps within were used as seats.
 
She lowered her elderly body onto one
and craned her neck back to look up to the heights of the trees.

Celeste joined her, amazed at how very tall
the trees were.
 
They closed into a
small circle that let in a bit of blue sky.
 

It felt like home.
 

A home you’ve never lived in, never seen,
never been able to imagine but that simply unfolds in front of you, its gentle
perfection called into existence by some unformed longing in your soul.

Malia spoke reverentially, “I know,” as though
she were reading Celeste’s mind.

After a few minutes of quiet, Malia led her
back to the brick walkway, towards the front door.
 
They walked between stands of overgrown rose bushes.
 
“I call it the Rose House,” she said
happily.

Celeste froze.
 
She felt her heart beat too hard, one strong beat after
another, her breath slowed, her lips went numb.

“What?
 
You see a ghost?
 
No ghost
here.”
 

“You call this house what?”
 
Celeste barely whispered.

“Rose House.”
 
Malia’s wizened face became placid, “What’s little girl’s
name?”

“Rosalinda.”
 
Celeste felt like she was on too much painkiller, spaced out
of her mind.
 
But she hadn’t taken
anything since the flight, when it was her only bridge to her new life.

“Of course.”
 
Malia cocked her head and smiled.
 
“Little girl send you to find house named after her.
  
She like this house too, and your
boyfriend,” Malia said the word boyfriend with a happy lilt, “he like it
too.
 
Very homey for your
family.”
 

Celeste felt the blood begin to warm in her
chest and she followed Malia’s gaze to the center of the path ahead, to the
center of the lush property itself.

The cozy cottage sat in the middle of a small
forest of trees and bushes.
 
“Banana tree”, the old lady said, “hollyhock, eucalyptus, pine,” she
named all the trees that edged the property.
 
“My cabbages,” she said proudly, pointing to a head of
cabbage that was as big as a beach ball.
 
“That’s what they used to make the kim chee.
 
Onions, they are as sweet as apples,” she said, motioning to
a raised garden bed.

There were so many rose bushes that Celeste
couldn’t count them, but their heady perfume wafted around her, mingled with
the primal scent of dirt that she remembered from the Michigan apple farms, and
the savory smell of what she now knew were onions.

“Foxgloves, daisies, lilies.
 
They all grow in Spring, with the
strawberries.
 
You cook?”
 
Celeste could feel Malia watching her,
beaming with delight at Celeste’s childlike rapture.

“I do.”
 
Celeste felt a joy that she could not regulate.
 
The land was alive, lush, green,
flowering.
 
The trees that
surrounded it created a walled Eden, she thought, and the house, her heart leapt
when she looked at it more closely.
 
It had elaborate Victorian trim, like the houses on Mackinac Island in
the Upper Peninsula where she’d driven every summer to see art shows.
 

“My grandfather built it.
 
For his mother.
 
It been in my family for 120 years,”
Malia said.
 
She pulled on Celeste’s
hand, ‘Come inside.
 
I redo kitchen
and bathroom.
 
I’m not old lady in
my head, just in my body.
 
Very
stylish.
 
You like it.”

“I already love it,” Celeste said
truthfully.
 
“But I don’t know if I
can afford it.
 
It’s too lovely.”

The old lady stopped at the front door.
 
“We see.
 
I have ten houses around island, all rentals.
 
Idiot banks messed me up though, so
making payments is most important so I don’t lose another house.
 
Lost one already, dumb bankers.
 
But I have bakery and this house with
no mortgage.”
 
She waved her hand,
pushing Celeste through the doorway to the pretty hardwood floor entryway.
 
“What can you pay?”

Celeste told her what she had paid in Detroit
and what she had seen in Lahaina and, no surprise, the old lady cocked her head
seriously.
 
“This much better than
those.”

“This is the Taj Mahal compared to that boring
cinderblock house down in the flats!” Celeste exclaimed.

“You good lady.
 
House wants you.
 
Trees want you.
 
Wind blew
gently when you came.
 
This work
out good for both of us.
 
You pay
me Lahaina rent.
 
My bank bothering
me about a couple of my mortgages around the island, so if you rent and stay a
while, I worry less.”
 

She flipped on a light switch, but she didn’t
need to, the windows and skylights brought in enough light.
 

The house was small, but it shone.
 
Celeste couldn’t tell if it was light
bouncing off the white walls but it seemed alive and welcoming.
 

She put her purse down on the floor by the
front door and felt a comforting gravitational pull.
 
How could she walk out of this house, ever?
 
She knew she had to go back to the
motel, but all her energy would stay parked here, in this little cottage on
this thriving land, waiting until she and Eddie and even Rosalinda could come
to live.

Chapter
Thirty-One

The recession had hit Hawaii, too.
 

In Detroit, Celeste watched year after year as
stores closed.
 
First the specialty
places owned by retirees who realized that they were losing their savings by
keeping their hobby or decorations store open. Then the clothes and shoe
stores, then auto supplies, hardware stores, restaurants and banks.
 
Finally, there was only a big
superstore miles away and the downtown was lined with For Lease signs.

Maui was similar, but instead of stores, art
galleries were closing.
 
Vacation
condos were empty with For Lease signs taped into their windows.
 
There were several storefronts for rent
in Lahaina, but the cost per square foot was ridiculously high, landlords had
to pay their unmoving mortgages to banks regardless of how much value they’d
lost on their property during the prolonged economic contraction.