Unburying Hope (41 page)

“Half the day is gone here,” he said.
 
He stumbled a bit, “Celeste, I went to
Hamtramck.
 
The papers.
 
They were there, I got them.
 
In an envelope, the front door mat, I’m
so sorry,” his voice cracked.

“Thank you so much,” she responded.
 
“That will help us.”

“Celeste, I’m so sorry,” he repeated.

“What is it?” she asked.
 
She held the phone up so she could look
straight at him.
 
“What are you
sorry about?”

“Eddie’s mom had already passed away.”

Celeste’s heart sank.
 
“You got the papers, but she’s dead?”

“I got to her place.
 
There were a couple of day’s worth of
newspapers piled up, like no one had picked them up after morning
delivery.
 
I knocked but no one
answered.
 
When I looked down, I
saw the envelope sticking out from under her doormat.
 
So I opened it.”

Celeste felt an incredible sorrow welling up.

“She’d put the papers in it, with a house key,
so I let myself in.
 
She’d left
notes all over the house,” he raised a small sheaf of yellow pad pages, all
hand written notes.
 
 
“She really must have been adorable,
Celeste, you should read these things.
 
I’ll Fed Ex them to you with the custody papers.
 
She wrote a lot of little stories about
how Eddie used to watch out for her when he was little.
 
They are love notes to Eddie and
Rosalinda, and even to you.
 
You
said you never met her?”

“No,” Celeste answered.
 
“She wrote to me?”

“Maybe Eddie told her about you, then.
 
Anyway, they are the kindest writings
I’ve ever read.
 
And you never told
me that you are going to be Rosalinda’s mother!”

“I’m not,” Celeste shook her head.

“Oh yes, you are, Missy.
 
The custody papers name Eddie and then
you.
 
She’s your kid if something
happens to Eddie.”

“That’s crazy.
 
I saw a note she wrote with Rosalinda’s birth certificate
asking me to make sure someone nice raises her.
 
I think that’s how she put it.”

“Well, the court documents say you’re the
custody holder if something happens to her father.
 
She must have seen so much death around your little girl
that she wanted to make sure there were other options.”

Celeste asked, “How do you know she
died?”
 
Maybe Frank was wrong, it
just wouldn’t be fair to Rosalinda if her grandmother couldn’t send her
birthday or holiday cards.

“A neighbor came to the door, she thought I was
Eddie.
 
She told me that an
ambulance had come a few mornings ago to take his mom to the hospital.
 
She didn’t make it.
 
She died in the ambulance.
 
I’m so sorry.”

Celeste felt her skin get clammy.
 
Why was she here in this darkened
room?
 
Why was a constellation lit
up on the ceiling?
 
Nothing made
sense, her brain was misfiring.
 
“Frank, this is too much for me.”

“Well, I’ll send all this to you before close
of business tonight.
 
I’m on a
flight tomorrow, my parents are meeting me at the airport back home.
 
Do you want me to fly out to you,
instead?”

“That’s not necessary,” she said, working back
through how she got here.
 
Rosalinda was in a room in the hospital.
 
Eddie hadn’t texted her back.
 

She slipped off the chaise and stood up.
 
“Frank, I’ve got to go.
 
I’m so sorry, Rosalinda’s in the
hospital, she fell off a climber in the school playground.
 
She got a bunch of stitches in her
head.”

“Holy crap,” he whistled.
 
“I should come!”

“No, don’t.
 
I’d love to have you come but go home first and I’ll get things
settled here.”

“Are you sure?
 
I’m family, you know.”
 
He put his face close to the screen and kissed it.
 
“You’re my family, Celeste.”

Her heart pounded.
 
“I love you too, Frank.
 
I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

She hung up the call and moved quickly out of
the room, into the corridor, propelling herself back towards Rosalinda, whose
beloved grandmother was now dead.
 
How would she tell her?
 

Chapter
Forty-Five

An imposing police officer in a navy blue
uniform with brass buttons hulked outside Rosalinda’s hospital room door.
 
Another officer stood down at the end
of the darkened hallway, staring out the small windows on a pair of closed
swinging doors.

“ID?”
 
The tall cop put out his hand when she tried to pass him into the
doorway.

“Why?” she challenged.

“Don’t ask questions, just show me an ID.”

Celeste pulled out her Michigan driver’s
license.

“Where’s your Hawaiian drivers license?” the
cop huffed, his voice bitter.
 

“I didn’t know I had to get one.”

“Of course not, you tourists never know,” he
sneered.

“I’ve been here for weeks,” she protested.

“About time to trudge back to the airport,” he
said, making little walking legs with his two pointer fingers.

“You’re not very welcoming.”

“The hospitality office is back at your
hotel.”

“I’m not staying at a hotel.
 
I live here,” she said, “in Makawao.”

He stiffened, “You can pronounce it, yippee
for you.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she stood her full
height, still a half foot shorter than his bulk.
 
Without thinking, she pulled her hand out of her purse where
she’d put her drivers license and, her anger flaring more at being kept from
Rosalinda than having to deal with this neanderthal, she took her own pointer
fingers and walked them emphatically up his chest, her words biting from an
inner well of confusion and fear, “Look, I am here to see my,” her words choked
but she recovered quickly, “Why are you here, anyway?
 
She’s a little girl.”
 
She stepped back, unsure.
 
“Maybe they moved Rosalinda?”

“Don’t touch me, young lady,” the cop growled,
“or I’ll have you in the holding tank faster than you can pull that foreign
drivers license out again.
 
And I
want you to pull it out, so I can copy it for our files.”

Celeste’s eyes narrowed.
 
He was playing chicken, she
thought.
 
She knew he’d cringed
when she said she lived locally, so she stood her ground.
 
“Sure”, she said as she pulled out her
license again.
 
“And you’ll need my
proof of residency,” she pulled out the school envelope she still carried
around, deftly removing the copy of her lease.
 
She held it tightly in her hands, hoping suddenly that she
wouldn’t have to show him her rent amount, the cottage’s address, Malia’s name
and address.

He took the lease, though, wrote down the
address and handed it back to her.
 
“So he’s living here, huh?”

“Who?”

“Your boyfriend.”

“Eddie?”

“Yeah.
 
He’s in there.”
 
The cop
motioned into the hospital room.

“We’ve moved here.”
 
Celeste moved closer to the door, frantically trying to see
Eddie in the darkened room.

“Why Hawaii?”
 
He held up his arm to block her.

“Tired of the cold.”
 
She pushed against his arm.

“Sure it wasn’t for ‘business’ opportunities?”

“We’ve got a dive shop, in Kihei.”

“Watch out,” the cop said.
 
“You’d better hope he’s not part of the
Mexican cartel.”

“He’s Irish,” Celeste said, confused.
 

“I’m Irish too,” the cop said.
 
“The cartels hire anyone, don’t think
you’re safe just because you’re not Hispanic.”
 

“I know all about the damn cartels,” she said,
“it was all over the papers in Detroit.
 
They’re evil, yada, yada.
 
Let me see Rosalinda.”

“If dumb ass Americans weren’t always high,
there’d be no market for evil.”

She looked at him, her hands on her
waist.
 
“Why are we talking about
this?
 
Are you going to let me in
there or not?”

The cop lowered his arm and she walked quietly
into the darkened room where Rosalinda was still asleep on her bed.

When she saw Eddie standing at the bedside,
she gasped with a mixture of sorrow and the shock of seeing him in
shackles.
 

He stood tall, looked right at her with a
flash of regret.
 
“I’m sorry,
Celeste,” was all he said.

“What the hell happened?
 
Why is there a cop outside and what’s
with the cuffs?”

“How’s Rosalinda?”

“Having a hard time, you idiot.
 
Anything you do to me is one tenth of
the pain of what you do to her.”

His shoulders slumped.
 
His eyes darted around and she watched
as he stared at the open doorway with the hulking police officer in shadows.

“Your bodyguard?” she quipped.
 
“Now they have our address, so that’s
not good.”

“Cops are good, Celeste.
 
I want them knowing where you two
live.”

“You’re supposed to live there too, with us,”
she snapped.
 
“What the hell is
going on?

He lowered his voice.
 
“The shop used to be a meth lab.”

“I know that,” she said.
 
“The cops told me a few days ago when
you went walkabout.”

“I didn’t go walkabout, Celeste.”

As silence settled into the empty space
between them, Celeste took a moment to look at him with clear eyes.
 
He looked better than he had at
home.
 
He looked rested.
 
And sober.
 
There was a light in his eyes she hadn’t ever seen.

“I’m so sorry, Eddie, but your mother
died.”
 
She watched his face, he
hadn’t been expecting that.
 

His shoulders crumpled and he lowered his
head, slow sobs rose from his solar plexus through his throat, past his
stifling jaw to escape into the room, weighing heavy in the darkness.

She held him, as he leaned against her, his
hot tears soaking the skin of her clavicle and shoulder.
 

“Frank went to get the custody papers and
she’d died a few days ago.
 
I
didn’t get a text from anyone about it, did you?”

“My phone fell into the ocean a few days back,
I haven’t gotten texts or calls.”

“Where have you been?
 
Why didn’t you come home?”

He motioned to the door, to the cop.
 

She couldn’t read anything in his eyes.
 
But she knew she couldn’t take his
silence anymore.

Chapter
Forty-Six

Part of her knew that she had watched him
closely over the few months he’d intermittently appeared in Detroit to pay his
bill.
 
She had indeed noticed that
he was declining but it was hard to admit what she was witnessing, his
resilience needed to be honored and she knew she had created a false altar to
it, skimming over nagging questions.
 

Now she knew he’d probably been high the first
few times she’d seen him.
 

When she finally phoned him and they became
lovers, she unconsciously quashed the stories in her head.
 
Sometimes, when he was super energetic
after she got home, they’d made love like two stars combusting together,
creating light out of their mutual darkness.
 
They would go for a run together through the abandoned
streets in the moonlight.
  
They they’d go home to sleep.
 
Or, she now saw, she slept while he lay agitated next to her.
 
Maybe he needed another high at that
point, she thought, because that was always right before he’d disappear for a
few days time.