Unburying Hope (45 page)

Celeste whistled, remembering Frank’s morbid
need to read every drug violence story aloud from the morning newspaper, the
previous night’s battles woven tightly into an escalating barrage, engagement,
assault, havoc.
 
The hostility is
what drove Frank south, she realized, what drove her so far away from home.
 

“Eddie cause whole war,” Malia said, a quiet
pride in her voice.

“How?”
 
Celeste leaned in, gently massaging Malia’s cold, shaking hands.

“He make bomb.
 
But not real bomb to hurt.
 
He make sound bomb.”

Celeste’s eyebrows raised in wonder.
 
Frank had read aloud about the explosions,
they had rattled the drug lords who thought that for sure there was a hidden
contaminant released.
 
They were
sure they were being gassed, since they couldn’t see any physical damage around
the blasts.
 
They were insane with
worry, the Detroit Free Press had said.

She told Malia about the articles that Frank
had read to her.
 
How the drug
lords expanded their internecine war to dozens of large meth labs in broken
down buildings abandoned by the creeping poverty that had strangled Detroit in
the last ten years.

“He brilliant.”
 
Malia’s face was stony.

Celeste shook her head.

“Your Eddie,” Malia said, patting Celeste’s
cheeks.
 
“You know, you send boy to
war, he not know how to come home and be peace.
 
Sometime he broken,” she said, “in here”, tapping her head,
“and in here,” tapping her heart.
 
“Eddie broken.
 
He find way
to use murder he learn, but he no murder.
 
He scare and they murder themselves.”
 
A bitter smile came to her face.
 

Phantom bombs.
 
Jesus Christ.
 

“So he gone?”
 
Malia fold up the newspaper and looked at Celeste.

“Yes.
 
But, Malia,” Celeste interjected, “Our dive shop.”

“Yes?”

“It used to be a meth lab.
 
There was a break-in there, while Eddie
was gone.
 
I talked to the cops
after the break-in.”

Malia looked at her, stricken, as though one
more challenge, one more fear would unseat the calm she so assiduously
cultivated.
 
Malia looked side to
side, as though scanning for eavesdroppers.

Celeste felt prickly heat on her skin.
 
The wrath of the Detroit drug lords had
known no bound. They had trapped, gagged, tortured and shot each other,
decimating multiple lucrative drug businesses.
 
All out, self-induced paranoia had flowed.
 
Paranoia that Eddie had
exacerbated.
 
Orchestrated?

And here she was, on the front steps of her long-dreamed-of
haven, in charge of a recuperating, unrelated child, sitting with an elderly
woman who was carrying an inner grief, the death of her own daughter from the
drug from which Eddie was fighting to extricate himself.
 
The phantom bomber working to break the
hold of his own phantom wound.

Chapter
Forty-Nine

“Why you sitting?”
 
Malia’s voice pierced Celeste’s foggy thoughts.

“What am I supposed to do?
 
Rosalinda just got home from the
hospital.
 
She needs to rest.”

“You get up and look for him.”

She turned to Malia and asked, “Where do I
look, Malia?”

“My house,” she said, her voice as dark and
slow as molasses.

“The bakery?”

“No, house I told you that bank wanted.
 
My daughter die there.
 
I keep it empty.
 
In Hana.”

Hana was a big enough town, a few resorts, a
flat area of businesses, and hillsides of overgrowth with too many tiny
dwellings to count.
 
There were a
few large homes but many small roofs peeked through the trees and climbing
brush.

“What did you and Eddie do?” she asked, her
voice resigned to the task of uncovering what she did not want to hear.

“I tell him he do his car city trap in my
house.
 
He so smart.”

“Is anyone living in the house?”

“I can’t rent it, it still drug place.”

“Do the police know?”

“I don’t know.”
 
Her head fell forward.
 
“That house evil.
 
It claim
so many.
 
I tell him he can get
them there.
 
I have others.”
 

 
Celeste looked back at the front door and then out to the garden.
 
“How am I supposed to do the right
thing, how do I even find out what the right thing to do is, when there’s a kid
involved?”

“You take one step at time.
 
Get Rosie up.
 
Bring pillow in car.
 
We go together.”

“To find him?”

“Of course.”

“How will we know where to look?” Celeste
asked.
 

“He at my house in Hana.
 
He told me.”
 
Malia stood up and started towards the arbor.
 
“I be at car.
 
You get your daughter.”

Celeste opened the front screen door to find
Rosalinda standing just inside like an upright sack, immobile but looking
straight into her eyes.

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked,
startled.

“Is my daddy dead?” Rosalinda asked, walking
tentatively out onto the porch.

Malia turned around, her face awash in shock.

“No,” Celeste said, pulling gently at
Rosalinda’s hand.
 
“Wait right
here.”
 
She walked into the foyer
and lifted two soft pillows off the loveseat, tucking them under one arm.
 
Tears rolled down her cheeks, her fear
finally made physical.
 
She wiped
her face dry, straightened her shoulders with a welling inner strength and
walked outside.
 

She took Rosalinda by the hand and lifted her
gently into her arms against the pillows.
 
She was heavy.
 
It was like
carrying a chair, unwieldy with her arms and legs jutting out.
 
Celeste had never carried a child and
Rosalinda didn’t squirm but Celeste could tell by the stricken look of mordant
humor on Malia’s face that she looked absurd.
 

She reshuffled Rosalinda in her arms to
protect her bandaged head and barreled down the path, through the arbor, gently
placing Rosalinda into the back seat of the car, comforted by the two soft
pillows.

“We 3 Musketeer,” Malia said, with a bare
twinkle in her eye.

“How you can be light hearted through this,
I’ll never understand,” Celeste said with a confused anger in her voice.

“What choice we have?” Malia said softly.
 
“Anger blind you.
 
Take over your brain like drug.”
 
She patted Celeste’s arm.
 
“Have to keep light for little one.”

She felt Malia’s cool hand on hers and heard
her insistent voice, “We go now.”

Celeste looked at her, seeing sureness and
wisdom that she did not understand.
 
But that she trusted.

She pulled the car onto the road headed over
the hillside.

“Hana,” Malia said.

Celeste looked at her.
 

“We’ll go to Hana,” Malia said, looking back
at Rosalinda.

The endlessly winding road would be torture,
but that was the other location they’d considered for the dive shop.
 
And where Eddie had gone to ask
questions from the aging hippie whose own dive shop was successful.
 
When Eddie was gone for a few days, he
said he’d camped out in the lush forests of tropical trees on the hills above
Hana, reconnecting with the peace he’d found in the mountains of
Afghanistan.
 
Hana was a land out
of time, with magical waterfalls and secret water pools for dipping on hot
days.
  
It was the last
inhabited spot before an invisible demarcation line where the North Eastern
side of the island reclaimed itself, wild, windy, foggy, dense with life, Eddie
had told her.
 

Malia looked nervously at Celeste.

Celeste held the steering wheel with both
hands, her mind going faster and farther than the car.
 

They drove north for forty minutes on the
highway along the western coastline of Maui.
 

“He’s been hanging out at a dive shop in
Hana,” Celeste said.

“We can’t go this fast, the road crazy,” Malia
yelped.
 
“Rosie will throw up.
 
Maybe bad idea.”

“I saw a map, it’s half an hour away, right?”

“No.
 
It long, long windy road.
 
You drive off cliff if you go this fast.”

“Well, I need to find him,” Celeste said.
 
She toughened her shoulders into a
solid block, leaning back against the car seat.

“You love my daddy,” Rosalinda piped up from
the back seat.

Celeste looked quickly in the rearview, moving
the mirror down so she could see Rosalinda’s face and still catch sight of part
of the empty road behind her.
 
She
didn’t know what she’d do when another car approached from either direction,
the curves were beginning to disturb her.
 
“Of course I love your daddy.”

“I do too,” Rosalinda said quietly to herself.

“Well, don’t worry, he’s fine.”

They drove in silence.
 
Celeste watched as Rosalinda’s worried
eyes looked out the window, her head dodging above and below the window line.
 
The little girl’s face was going gray
as nausea from motion sickness hit her.
 
The windows were all down, Malia had pulled out a plastic headscarf and
put it on her hair, looking away from Celeste, “I no ruin my blowout.”

Celeste nodded wanly.
 
The road was so much more winding than
she had expected that she had to stay intensely focused, always calibrating her
speed to the angle of the turns.
 

Massive, primordial ferns and large leafed
shrubs that had grown unchecked by the roadside entombed the concrete road.
 
It looked like an overgrown adaptation
of the feral abandoned homes in Detroit, where vining greenery had eaten
through rotten wood and overtaken the entire structure of buildings.
 
She felt like an off-kilter fly,
dangerously nearing venus flytraps on all sides.

Her two passengers slipped again into silence
and she let herself think.
 
What
would she do if she couldn’t find Eddie?
 
Why did she think he would leap frog the island to this out of the way
place?
 
Hana was really only a
precursor to the real wildness that lay ahead, unmapped.
 
It might have been a better place for
them to have a dive shop except for the remoteness and the crazy winding road
she was now forced to navigate.
 

Drug dealers probably preferred the remote
location, though, she shook her head morosely.

“No where to run, if they there,” Malia said.

Celeste wished she’d had somewhere safe to
leave Rosalinda, but on a deeper level, she wanted to safeguard Rosalinda
herself.
 

She checked her cell phone but saw that it had
‘no service’ where the bars would show that she could use it.
 
Not that she suddenly expected a
check-in call or text from Eddie with someone else’s phone, but then again
everything felt so strange that she hoped for one nonetheless.

How could a bomb make sound but not do
property damage?
   
She’d
heard the stories in Detroit but not understood.
 
Fertilizer bombs left residue, made fire, she thought.
 
She remembered the containers Eddie’d
carried to the back of the garden, cagily avoiding telling her what they
were.
 
She hadn’t bothered to
follow up, hadn’t gone to see the containers herself.
 
Her sense that she was incompetent at gardening had kept her
from answering her own worried questions over the last few weeks.
 

She remembered Eddie telling her that scare
tactics did more psychological damage than actual wounds.
 
It was hard for soldiers to come home,
he said, to hear the backfire of an old car and not flatten themselves reaching
for guns that they no longer carried.
 
In a world where TV shows have more coroner gurneys than baby strollers,
scaring someone to death might not just be hyperbole.