Unburying Hope (39 page)

“Go where, you say?”
 
He leaned forward in disbelief.

“Hamtramck, you heard
me.
 
She lives in a trailer park
there.
 
She’s either left the
papers under the front mat in an envelope or she’s got them with her inside the
trailer.”

“I’m supposed to knock on a
trailer in Hamtramck?
 
And why
wouldn’t she be there?”

Celeste’s voice lowered,
“She might be in the hospital.”

“Oh.”
 
Frank sat upright.
 
“But seriously, me?
 
You think I’ll be safe there?”
 
He leaned forward to show his head to
his laptop camera.
 
“I’ve dyed my
hair.
 
I’ll get the crap beaten out
of me.”
 
He pointed to a streak of
blue in his spiked hair.
 
“And you
would NOT send me into a trailer park, would you?
 
Really?
 
Can’t
you call Fed Ex?”

“Frank, I know I’m asking a
lot,” she started.

“Hell, yes!
 
You ditch me, you don’t check in for
weeks and then you want me to go out to a township to get some papers from your
new daughter’s grandmother?
 
Will
she even be there?
 
Will anyone be
around?”

Celeste saw the dangerous
situation she was sending him into.
 
It wasn’t the town so much as getting a city person out into a township
where unemployment was high, money was tight and people were already mad.
 
A city boy with a blue streak in his
hair might easily become the lightning rod for their unrest.
 
“If I could, I would go myself,” she
said.

“And you can’t
because...”
 
He left the question
hanging.

“Because Eddie isn’t around
and I have to take care of Rosalinda.”
 
There, she’d said it.

Frank’s face fell.
 
“He left you?”

“No,” she said slowly.
 
“It’s just that thing where he goes
walkabout for a few days.”

“And you’re alone with a
kid.”

“Like I said, she’s an okay
kid.”

“What does she look like?”
Frank asked.

“She’s got pretty brown
eyes and really good black hair with chestnut streaks in it like she paid for
them, fluffy, down below her shoulders.
 
We’re going to grow it out, she’ll be so pretty with long hair.”

“We?”

Celeste blushed, “She.”

“I missed you,” he said
softly.
 
“And here I thought you’d
replaced me with that hot military thing of yours and instead, it’s so much
worse.
 
You’ve left me,” he fake
sobbed, “for a kid!”

Celeste laughed nervously,
“I know, it’s strange.”

“I did not see this
coming.
 
But this is good,” he
said, putting his hands together, fingers pointing upwards.
 
“My little girl is growing up.”

“Frank, don’t go all
melodramatic on me,” Celeste said, rolling her eyes.

“Okay, I’ll do it.
 
I’ll get in a cab and go out
there.
 
But you owe me!”

“I’m afraid to ask,” she
said.

“I get to be Uncle Frank.”

“You?”

“I could say the same
thing, Missy.
 
YOU?”

“Alright, truce.”

“Text me the address so I
have it with me.”

“Frank?” Celeste asked
quietly.
 
“Why are you leaving
Detroit?”

“This place is dead without
you,” he answered gently.

“I really miss you too,”
she said.

“Did I say I miss you?” he
responded teasingly.
 
“Besides, the
sun and sea beckon.
 
I’m going to the
shores of South Carolina, back with my people.
 
I’ll live there a little while until global warming melts
all the icebergs and it’s underwater.”
 
  

“Then you can move here.”

“Right, islands.
 
You’ll be underwater too.”

“No, we’re up in the
mountains, you should see it Frank,” she said, her voice filled with
pride.
 
“It’s a Victorian cottage.”

His jaw dropped.
 
“You didn’t!”

“I did!” she said,
betraying her deep sense of joy.

“Then I’m happy for you,”
he said.
 
“It was time for both of
us to re-pot, I guess.
 
I just
didn’t think it would be so sudden.”

“I know.
 
I think that bombing did me in,” she
confessed.
 
“I jumped at Eddie’s
offer after that.”

“That did it for me too,”
he admitted.

“How are you?
 
Any other bombs?”

“Nope, it’s been oddly
quiet.
 
Two gangs have idiotically
massacred themselves and each other.
 
They’ve blown each other to bits.
 
So it’s been quiet since you left.”

“That’s good,” she
said.
 
“I’ve been worried about
you.”

“Then why haven’t you Skyped?”
he asked.

“I thought you hated
me.
 
I didn’t know how to make
amends.”

“Just Skype, for god’s
sake,” he said.
 
“I’ll go get your
baby papers but, like I said, I’m Uncle Frank and I get to do Skype hair with
her like I did,” he corrected himself, “like I DO with you.”

“Thank you,” Celeste said, “from
the bottom of my heart.”

“Which, apparently, much
like the Grinch’s, has grown more than a few times in one day.”

“Oh, don’t kid yourself, it
took more than a few days.
 
It’s
been really trying.
 
But she’s a
good kid and everyone around her is dying or leaving.
 
So I want to get the custody papers so she’s Eddie’s before
his mom passes.”

“I’m on my way,” he said.

“And Frank?”

“Yeah?

“Thank her for me and tell
her that Rosalinda’s so happy in her new school.”

“Alright, Missy.”

She smiled wanly and, with
great effort, clicked the hang up button on her laptop.

Chapter
Forty-Two

She sat at the corner table of the bakery,
typing all her notes about Detroit’s elder care organizations into her laptop,
making a spreadsheet with business names, addresses, phone numbers, websites,
divided into four or five neighborhoods in both East and West Detroit, out to
the townships.
 

She could show Frank the storyboarding she had
done for each page of the webpage.
 
As much work as she could do from far away, she would definitely need to
have him do the design work and the technical setup.
 
Needing him helped her overcome her fear of his anger at
being disconnected for so long.
 
She thought for a moment, sipping a hot mint tea, that they could meet
as equals in a new friendship, each in their homes but still connected as
closely as they had been from their separate apartments.
 
The thought warmed her and she scanned
her laptop screen again, checking to see that all the information was plugged
in from her handwritten notes on the papers in front of her.
  

The frantic ringing of her cell phone startled
her.

“We don’t want to worry you, but Rosalinda
hurt herself today out in the play yard and she was just taken by ambulance to
the hospital.”
 
Mrs. Lokalani’s
voice was urgent.

Celeste held the phone tightly to her
ear.
 
“Where is the hospital?
 
What happened?
 
She hurt herself?”
 
Words tumbled out of her mouth and
images of Rosalinda’s little face, gray with pain, maybe bloodied, washed over
her.
 
She grabbed the car keys and
wrote down the hospital address in the margin of her notes.

“She fell from the top of the playground climber.
 
She’s got an open gash over her ear.
 
She’s not in Kula, she’s down by the
airport at the Kahalui hospital.
 
Better trauma unit there.”
 

Celeste stood at the table, shutting the
laptop and jostling her papers into her purse with one hand.

“I’m so glad I got a hold of you,” Mrs.
Lokelani was no longer calm, “I couldn’t reach your husband.”

Even in her panic, Celeste instinctively bit
her tongue and did not correct the school secretary.
 
“He’s starting up a new business out in the water and he’s
hard to reach,” she said.
 
“Tell
Rosalinda that I will be right there!” she said.

“She’s already gone in the ambulance, you’ve
signed the release form,” the secretary said.
 
“You should get there when she does, if you leave right
now.
 
The school nurse is with her,
Mrs. Donahoe.
 
She’s trying to keep
Rosalinda peaceful. Rosalinda stopped crying to hear about the hedgehogs that
visited a few months ago, so she’s in pain but has a great big heart, that
little one of yours.”

Celeste hung up the phone and ran out of the
bakery, then drove down the mountain into the flat area, balancing the need to
be vigilant about bicyclists with her fevered desire to speed to Rosalinda’s
side.
 

The hospital was near the shopping center, she
knew, but in the daylight she saw that there were small malls every few blocks
and she grew frantic, looking for signs for the trauma center.

When she found it, she pulled into the nearly
full parking lot, distracted by the wail of an ambulance.
 
She had to look both ways and inch forward
until she got out of the driving lane and then she parked, forgetting to grab
anything more than her purse.
 
The
five seconds it would take to look at the car key to see which button to push to
lock the car didn’t seem worth it and she raced through the emergency room
door, then to the windowed check-in nurse and said, “I’m hear to see little
Rosalinda O’Halleran, who fell off her school playground equipment.”
 

Celeste suddenly felt desperation, with a plexiglas
wall between her and aid.
 
Having
that kind of power, when you don’t know what it’s like to be powerless, it
sickened her to think she might have been so unfeeling all those years in
Detroit.
 
She wanted to cry and
bang on the window like the angry customer that got her fired.
 

The nurse’s face was kind and she motioned to
the door.
 
“You’re here for your
daughter?”

“She had an accident,” Celeste said.
 

The locked door buzzed open and Celeste walked
through.
 
The nurse gently took her
arm and led her in to a small cubicle behind the first curtain where Celeste
found Rosalinda on a bed, her small body taking up only a little bit of the
twin mattress.
 

A tall, dark haired woman stood up from a
chair, extended her hand and introduced herself as LeAnn Donahoe, the school
nurse.

Rosalinda had tears in her fazed eyes and she
yelped with pain, reaching for Celeste, pulling her into a fragile hug.

“How are you,” Celeste asked, worriedly pushing
Rosalinda’s hair off her tear-stained face with a feathery touch.

“They’re going to put her into the MRI in a
few minutes.”
 
Mrs. Donahoe said, “and
they need family to approve treatment.
 
We’ve got Rosalinda’s emergency form from school but it’s always better
to have mom or dad or grandparents in case they have to do any surgery or keep
her overnight, which they are already saying they need to do.”

“Surgery?”
 
Celeste felt Rosalinda grip her waist.

“I wanna go home,” her little voice was soft
with fear.

“I know you do,” Celeste said, “but we need to
make sure you’re okay, first.”
 
She
lay her arm carefully over Rosalinda’s waist to comfort her.

“What kind of surgery?” Celeste asked LeAnn.

“If the MRI shows brain swelling,” LeAnn
whispered intently, “they sometimes lift out part of the skull to let it heal
itself.”

“But she’s awake.”
 
Celeste straightened up, feeling a growing mix of terror and
helplessness that Eddie was not around.

“You’re right.
 
I’m sure she’s fine.
 
They’re just doing the MRI as a precaution.”
 
Mrs. Donahoe sat down, looking away.
 
“I shouldn’t have scared you.
 
I watch too many hospital shows.”