Unburying Hope (36 page)

“It raises your serotonin, helping your
brain,” he clarified.
 
“But not
today, Celeste.”
 
He opened her car
door, held it while she climbed in to the front passenger seat and then closed
it gently, not talking until he got to his side of the car.

“Today, I’m just going to do the work myself,
I just need some fresh air to think.”

Celeste hunkered down in her seat.
 
“Sure she didn’t ask you to bury any
bodies in the yard?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” he answered, his voice
suddenly tremulous.
 

“Okay,” she said, “but I saw you carrying some
jugs in.
 
What were those?”

“Christ, do you sleep with your eyes
open?”
 
He looked at her, his eyes
blazing.

“You don’t have to be mad, it’s our house,
remember?
 
I came all this way to
do things with you, not be alone.”

“Yes, we’re together right now, but sometimes
we need to do things separately.”
 
He drove the car off the gravel sidewalk and out onto the road, doing a
U-turn to head towards Rosalinda’s school.

“We’re separate too much.
 
I’m really tired of it.”
 
She crossed her arms, working through
her desire to be petulant.
 
She
didn’t want to let her feelings slip into melodrama that could be swept
aside.
 
She wanted to connect with
him.
 
“What were the jugs?”

“Fertilizer.”
 
He stared intently at the road.
 
“Shall we take her for ice cream after?”

“Sure,” Celeste said.

“I’m trying to get her to try a new flavor, it
eats at me to see the same white ice cream cone over and over.
 
She needs to stretch out what she
exposes herself to, try new things,” he said.

“She’s always trying new things,” Celeste said
defensively.
 
“She’s in a new
school, new house, new place to live.
 
Let her order the damn vanilla.”

Eddie nodded his head, looking at her for a
moment.
 
“You’re right.
 
Thanks.”

“So what’s the fertilizer for?”

“The garden,” he said, without missing a beat.

“And I can’t get my hands into the dirt with
you?”

“Tomorrow,” he said.
 

“I didn’t come here to be alone,” she
said.
 
“I left my huge city, where
if I felt alone I’d just walk out my front door and be surrounded by people.”

“Not really,” he said.

“Well, a few years ago before the economy
tanked.
 
But here I walk out and it’s
just plants.
 
It’s creepy.”

He burst out laughing.
 
“You’ve got nature deficit disorder.”

“Malia said that, too.”
 
She noticed a twinge on his face when
she mentioned the old lady.

“Malia’s a pretty smart woman,” he responded,
his voice quiet.
 
“Look, I came
here to be with you.
 
You’re the
most amazing woman I’ve ever met.
 
You have dreams, like I do, and you had the guts to speak out through
your paint, at home when everything was falling apart.
 
You were able to be hopeful.
 
I look up to you, I came here to start
a new life with you.”

“And your daughter.”

“Yes, I came here to raise my daughter away
from all the crap that was dragging me down in Detroit.
 
But I also came here to be with you,
where you want to be, so let’s start working on that.
 
I don’t want to be one of those guys enslaved by my work.”

“Or a secret life.”
 
Celeste was shocked at her own audacity.

“What secret life?” he slowed the car.

“I don’t know, it seems like people get secret
lives once they become a couple.
 
I
thought we’d be together more, working together at the dive shop.
 
But you keep going off on your own.”

“Well, what’s your secret life?” he said,
turning the tables on her.
 

“You know I don’t have one anymore!” she said
angrily.
 
“I landed here and
immediately had to take care of a little girl and I have no skills for that!”

“What do you want to do with your life?”

“I have no idea.
 
I just want to stay in bed and sleep all the time but I
can’t because I’ve got to get a kid up and drive her and make her meals.
 
Somehow I pictured this differently
when you asked me to move here with you.
 
Now I find myself in some middle class suburban at-home-mom nightmare.”

Eddie pulled the car off the road.
 
“You have no idea how lucky you are to
be complaining about that.
 
You
aren’t addicted, you haven’t lost your mind, at least you have skills.”

“Who is addicted?”

“I mean, I went to the VA here to check in and
I see guys who are barely able to keep their home lives together, let alone any
work life.
 
You’re a smart girl,
get off your butt and figure out something to do.”

“Hey, I’m raising your daughter!
 
You keep disappearing,” Celeste
spat.
 
Then she took in a deep
breath.
 
“That’s not what I’m upset
about.”

“What are you upset about?
 
Make it clear.
 
I can’t solve something that isn’t
clear.”

“I don’t need you to solve anything, I need
you to be with me.”
 
Celeste
sighed.
 
“I was talking to Frank
before we left about starting a website of all the non-profits that provide
services to old people in Detroit.”

“Now you’re talking,” Eddie said, a smile
creeping across his face.
 
“You’re
such a sweet girl, move on that.
 
Get Frank on board.
 
You can
do so much of that from here.
 
We
should get you an iPad so you can go around the island and find out what’s
working here and see if there are any similarities.
 
That way you’d be out and about here but helping out at
home, I mean D-town,” he said, realizing his gaffe.
 
“This is our home now, I know.”

“Frank and I aren’t speaking.”

“Why not?”

“I think he’s mad I left.”

“But wasn’t he going to move to some island in
Georgia anyway?”

“He talked about it, but he wanted me to go
with him.”

“Hey, I was very clear at that bar that you’re
MY girl,” Eddie said, squeezing her knee as he pulled into the long line of
cars waiting for the school doors to open and disgorge the small horde of
exuberant children.
 

She smiled.
 
“I miss you when you’re gone.”

“I know.
 
Me too.
 
I just have a few
loose ends to tie up and then we’ll live fifty long and boring years together
here on the island.”

“How could you have loose ends when you just
got here?”
 
She looked at him,
unsure of how to shunt aside her loneliness so Rosalinda wouldn’t pick up on
it.

He turned away.
 
“There she is,” he waved through his open car window,
pulling the car forward bit by bit until they were the front car.
 
Rosalinda’s teacher opened the back car
door, scooted Rosalinda in and helped her with her seat belt, then closed the
door, leaving the three of them alone in the car, one little girl overflowing
with happiness, Eddie again in his own thoughts and Celeste walking the
tightrope between her own feelings, trying not to squash the dreams of a
chattering girl, a wounded soldier and herself.
 

She needed to make clear her own life path,
she knew that.
 
By making herself
emotionally healthy, by finding a life challenge, she’d better weather the
waves of disconnect and overconnect of these two new people in her life.
 
But that meant she’d have to reach out,
Skype Frank, ask for his help in setting up the webpage.
 
She knew she needed to get to him very
soon anyway, to have him check on Eddie’s mother’s legal custody
documents.
 
She bit her lip, not
hearing the banter between Eddie and Rosalinda as they headed out of the school
parking lot.
 
Reaching out to Frank
might be harder than digging the big shovel into the salty air-hardened pan of
earth out in the garden.
 
But
setting up connections between the people who worked to save Detroit would
soothe the overpowering combination of homesickness and loneliness that she
felt here as the other two found their way without her.
 

Chapter
Thirty-Eight

Another night came and went without Eddie in
their bed.
 
She drove Rosalinda to
school and wandered down the mountain, stopping for a cup of tea at a small
bookstore where she bought a book about webpages.
 
It was going to be daunting, she knew, to start that kind of
thing by herself.
 
It would be
better if she could reach out to Frank, she knew.
 
She’d turned on the laptop and sat in front of the camera
but she hadn’t had the courage to turn on the Skype software, to see if Frank
had his account open, ready to reconnect.
 

Later, driving past the dive shop storefront,
she saw no lights on.
 
She parked
and walked to the front door.
 
It
was locked and she couldn’t see any sign in the store that someone was there.
 
The back storage room wasn’t visible
from the front window.

She went next door to the surf shop and walked
in, asking Rusty, the Japanese sales clerk, whether or not anyone had been next
door in the last day.

“Nope,” Rusty said.
 
“But the cops were here last night, an alarm went off after
midnight, waking up the whole neighborhood.
 
We weren’t hit, and the deli wasn’t, but the cops were here
at store opening to tell me about the alarm.”

Celeste bristled.
 
“An alarm?
 
What
alarm?”

“Yours.
 
The dive shop’s.”

“I didn’t know we had an alarm system.”

Rusty walked her outside to the back door and
pointed above the dive shop’s door to a small black speaker.
 
“It’s connected to the front and back
doors.”

“The front door looked fine.”

“But look at this,” Rusty fingered a gauge
mark on the door.
 
“Someone wanted
to get in.
 
The cops said the back
door was open but no one was around.”

Celeste tried the door handle but the door was
locked.
 
“Rusty, can you put a note
under your register to phone me if something like this ever happens again?” She
wrote her cell phone number on a piece of paper from her purse and tore it off
to hand to him.
 
She looked up at
the speaker above the back door and squinted her eyes to read the alarm company
name and phone number, logging them into her cell phone.
 
She walked with Rusty back into his
store, relieved that he went right to a roll of tape and taped her phone number
near the phone.

“So, you haven’t seen Eddie today?”

Rusty looked at her with distrustful sympathy
and said quickly, “No.”

Celeste stood still for a moment and then retreated
when Rusty moved forward to help a customer.
 
“I’m going next door,” she motioned to him, but he waved and
went back to his selling.

The front door of the dive shop looked
unmolested, the windows had the new logo painted in gold, a diver with a scuba
tank on, a big turtle swimming right in front of the diver’s mask.
 
Eddie had told her he’d paid one of the
loitering homeless men to paint from a stencil he created, and it came out very
well.
 

No lights, no unusual mess inside.
 
She went a bit farther up the sidewalk,
walking into the deli, confused about what to do next.
 
She would ask what had happened and
then walk out and call 911 or the non-emergency police number.

Adolfo, the deli owner, walked her to the back
of his store to show her his own untouched door.

“Why do you think they only messed with the
dive shop?” she asked him.

“There was a very bad element there,” he said.

“Still?”
 
Celeste asked, “Now that we’re opening the store?”

“You?”
 
Adolfo looked at her, incredulous.