Losing Hope (8 page)

For the second day in a row, I came home weary, wounded, and tired. Only this time, instead of heading back out to church, I was sinking in my tub filled with baby blue bubbles.

I love the ocean, and anything that remotely reminds me of saltwater and sea breezes is usually enough to carry me away.

Usually.

Tonight, with Roman locked away in his room in silence, and my brain, heart, and head hurting, the ocean-scented bath bubbles reminded me only of the man who had bumped into me the night before.

Brother Scott. He had smelled like sweet escape.

Lying back on my bath pillow with my eyes closed, I thought of the bubbles that had zinged up in my stomach the moment I looked into his face.

RiChard
.

Of course no one would ever compare to him. . . .

Somewhere, somehow, not surprisingly, my bath stopped being relaxing.

I pulled on my pajamas and tucked myself into my granny robe. Yeah, I looked like a little old woman with my floral-printed gingham ensemble, but who really cared?

Still seeking solace from the long day, I headed to the kitchen for something sweet. The only thing that was there was the plate of chocolate chip cookies Officer Leon Sanderson had brought over the night before. I warmed up a couple of them—okay, six of them—in the microwave and gulped down a cold glass of milk.

Perhaps Leon could help get the ring back....

It was a fleeting thought, but the more I considered it, the more it made sense. According to Skee-Gee, a gang of boys had it. Leon Sanderson wore a uniform, so he had some kind of authority. Perhaps he had friends in that district who could pull some strings.

I knew as I thought it that nobody was going to risk rocking the boat with a group of young wannabe gangsters over a ring. But maybe it would be worth a try.

Rocking the boat.

Seemed like that was all I was doing lately.

My workbag lay sideways on the kitchen table. Folders, papers, and notes fell out of it, as I had never made it back to the office to type up and turn in everything.

For no reason other than wanting to find a distraction from myself, I pulled out Dayonna's file.

Rocking the boat.

Ava didn't seem to think there was cause to be suspicious about Dayonna's claims or the Monroes' evasiveness, but it just wasn't adding up right to me.

I'd been through Dayonna's chart before, but I started flipping through it once again. Pouring through the pages of her topsy-turvy life gave me a feeling of stability, like I was once again back in control of something.

I started at the beginning of her chart, my notepad next to me. The only thing I knew I was looking for was a sense of peace. Nothing about her case so far had allowed me that small indulgence. I began writing down every name, address, and phone number I could find.

She was born at Maryland General, weighing slightly over three pounds. There were so many drugs in her little newborn body that she spent over four months at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital. From there she entered her first foster home, a Sheila Lipscomb in Pikesville. She stayed in Ms. Lipscomb's home until just before her first birthday, when the elder lady apparently decided to go back home to Tennessee. For the next year or two, she bounced between four foster homes before being briefly reunited with her mother.

Crystal Rose.

I wrote down Dayonna's mother's name. Her address at the time was in Murphy Homes, high-rise projects that I knew were torn down back in 1999. No telling where Dayonna's mother was now. Then again, with her extensive drug history, which showed up in Dayonna's veins, no telling if the woman was still alive.

The reality of a life addicted.

I flipped through the rest of the pages quickly. More foster homes, some emergency shelters, and, as I already knew, visits to a couple of in-state and out-of-state residential treatment centers, facilities that offered more intensive twenty-four-hour care for children with severe emotional disturbances. There were several Department of Social Services caseworkers listed throughout her years. The current one was out on maternity leave, I noted. I jotted down all their names.

I worked my way up to Dayonna's entry into the Monroes' home. A week and a day ago. She'd just come back from a residential treatment center somewhere in Florida.

Something was not right. It didn't add up.

I flipped through the last few pages of the chart again, trying to figure out what I was missing.

She entered the facility in Florida three months before her thirteenth birthday. The pages before that date had her in an emergency shelter, with an AWOL date a full five months before she went to Scenic Brook Center in Florida. I checked and rechecked the pages, trying to make sure I had not missed anything. Obviously, a page or something was missing, I decided.

I noted the DSS caseworker she'd had around that time. Deirdre Evans. In the long list of DSS caseworkers I'd jotted down, I starred and circled Deirdre's name.

Five months was a long time to go unaccounted for in the system.

“Sienna, you really need to talk to your sister. You know I don't like you two fighting.”

I could tell my mother was at work. The voices, taunts, laughs, and cries of countless children nearly washed out her voice over the phone.

“Where are you? In a classroom or something? Left the quiet reserve of your office?”

“I'm checking on the before-care program held in the cafeteria, but don't try to change the topic, Sienna. The two of you need to sit down and talk.”

It was first thing in the morning. I was on my way to visit a client I had been putting off for several days, and I did not have time to talk about Yvette and her ignorant son.

Not even to my mother.

I had let my mother's phone call roll to voice mail as I circled the inner loop, but had quickly called her back on her cell phone.

I had a little bit of sense left.

My mother was the principal of an elementary school in West Baltimore that had failing marks before she came on board. If I did not catch her now, I would probably not get through until the end of her school day.

And that was too much time for her to be focused on why I had not answered her initial call.

“Mom, Yvette and I aren't fighting. You know your youngest child and her children. Just some little bumps in the road we need to smooth out—and we will.”

Even I knew I was understating how I felt at the moment, but where did I even begin trying to explain the continual void left in both my and Roman's life from RiChard's absence?

First the ashes. Now the ring.

The only thing I had left was my sanity, and even that seemed like it was slipping away on some level.

“Well, while you're calling it a small fight, Yvette is crying catastrophe. She said Roman beat up Sylvester over some jewelry. What is going on with him? That's not like my grandson.”

“It was a ring from his father,” is all I could say.

“Oh,” is all she said.

That had made things quiet real quick. Since that Thanksgiving dinner when I announced I was dropping out of school to marry and travel the world, my mother had had very few conversations with me about RiChard. When I thought about it, I couldn't even remember the last time she even said his name. Neither she nor my dad—nor, really, anybody in my life—knew what had become of my marriage to the man who had changed some core part of me.

I knew my mother was waiting to hear the story, that she would be patient another ten or twenty years if necessary. All for the right to say, “I told you so.”

I refused to give her that pleasure. I had my pride. Actually, not pride, I realized in that moment.

Hope.

I was bereft of all pride, dignity, and confidence when it came to the secret places in my heart. I'd loved one man, and he left me, he said, because he loved me so much that he could not let the world I lived in be a place in which evil could prevail. I guessed that was what he wanted me to tell his son. So that was what I'd spent the last fourteen years doing. Trying to convince a young boy that it was okay for his heart to bleed in the name of global peace and justice.

Justice.

What did that even mean?

The rooms in my heart had been swept clean and left bare, waiting for RiChard's return. No pretty pictures or fancy furniture to fill the space. All I had left was a little bit of hope that one day the rooms would be filled with something again. I wasn't even sure what that something was, but I knew that if I ever lost hope, I'd lose whatever else I had left going for me.

It made sense now why the past two days had left me so winded. My hope was leaving me, leaving me slowly like air in a balloon with a pinprick hole. Active deflation. Hope that my life and the rooms in it would be filled again. Would mean something beyond the nine-to-five grind. The daily monotony. The broken dreams. The shattered promises.

The love found and then lost.

I'd worked hard—exceedingly, painfully hard—to get to where I was.

And my life still felt so empty.

It had taken a while to realize this: I was losing my hope that I would one day feel full again.

Feel purposed. Like I had a reason to really be here. Like the world was truly different because I had been born. Like I had the power to change things—to heal, to help, to hold.

That was what RiChard had made me believe. About me, about himself. About everyone having that potential.

And then he left me.

He left me.

He. Left. Me.

Hope was leaving me. Hope that what he'd said, that what I'd chased, that what I'd believed had not been a lie.

Mrs. Monroe had said that just yesterday, and the pronouncement felt familiar to me, as if the words that had been bouncing around randomly—endlessly—in my empty little spaces had just finally come together to make perfect sense.

“I'm going to find Hope.” The mission formed even as I spoke it.

I did not know if Hope Diamond was a real person or just a broken fragment of Dayonna's scarred imagination, but finding Hope, whoever or whatever that was, now felt like a singular mission for me to fulfill.

Finding Hope gave me purpose.

“Sienna, are you even listening to me?” my mother flat out yelled into the phone. “I said I want you and Roman to come over for dinner on Sunday. I'm going to tell Yvette to come with Sylvester too. I can't have my family fighting each other, and we're going to reconcile all these differences over my chicken and dumplings.”

My mother did not know the half of them. But she knew she had me hooked. Nobody in their right mind ever turned down Isabel Davis's chicken and dumplings, even if it meant ducking and dodging questions I knew I was not going to answer.

“Okay, Mom. I love you. I'll see you Sunday. I gotta go.”

“Mmm—hmm.” My mother's version of “Good-bye.”

I disconnected the call and pressed my foot down on the accelerator. The traffic on 695 was starting to break.

I was on my way to finding Hope.

I had a lot on my plate—calls to make, clients to see, Dayonna to check on—but I wanted to take a moment to absorb my newfound mission.

Or rather attempt to understand it.

My life felt like a whirlwind, and I needed some calm within the storm.

It had been years since I'd walked around Lake Montebello in Northeast Baltimore. A little over a mile around, the picturesque reservoir was a popular spot for bicyclists, joggers, walkers, and stragglers. On any given day, you could see everything from moms pushing strollers filled with toddlers sipping from juice boxes to dogs yapping and running alongside their owners, to bicyclists in spandex and bright helmets, looking like they were preparing for the Tour de France. If the weather was good, it was not unusual to catch a turtle basking on the large rocks that jutted out of the murky water along the stretch closest to Morgan State University.

Today I was not going to walk. I pulled my car into a shady area outside of the walking/biking lane. A few cars were scattered around me. Some of them were getting washed in the warm September sun. Others were providing a respite for solitary drivers flipping through newspapers and magazines. All of them were blasting music, mostly rap and light jazz.

I shut off the ignition and rolled down my windows just as a warm breeze stirred. Clean sunshine. That was what it felt like. That was what I needed. I sat there for about fifteen minutes, enjoying the clash of songs blasting from car stereos, the pounding of the pavement by nearby runners, the squeals of children, the casual chitchat of women and men walking in pairs. I took it all in with no thoughts or fears or concerns interrupting my quiet time. I could not remember the last time I had just let my mind go.

No, I did remember. Just the other night, during the relaxation exercise at Second Zion Tabernacle. I imagined again the arms of Jesus holding me, strengthening me for the next leg of my life's journey.

My life post RiChard.

Whatever that meant.

I took out my cell phone and keyed in the international phone number once again. It was more of a rote exercise, I knew, as I closed my eyes and laid my head back on the headrest, preparing to hear the other line ring incessantly.

“
Olá?
”

My head almost hit the ceiling of my car as I jerked forward in my seat.

“Hello? I mean,
olá.
” Stunned to actually get an answer, I scrambled for something to say. “Uh, uh, is this the . . . the Crematório Rodrigues?”

“Desculpe-me?”

“
Parlez-vous anglais,
I mean, English?” I wanted to kick myself for resorting to my ninth grade French. I knew the woman was speaking Portuguese, but I was so thrown off that I didn't know what language I was supposed to be speaking.

“
Desculpe
-me?” the woman said, sounding just as confused as I did.

Finally, I remembered something.

“Beatriz? You said your name was Beatriz.”

Silence.

Then a loud click and the line went dead.

Beatriz, or whoever she was, had hung up on me.

“Oh no, you don't.” I punched the numbers back in and waited. I felt too close to some real answers about RiChard's—or his ashes?—whereabouts. This woman knew something, and I needed her to tell me. The phone began ringing again, but this time, it did not stop. I hung up and dialed again. And again.

“I need answers!” I yelled, loud enough that an elderly lady power walking nearby with hot pink dumbbells in her hands looked my way. I realized my heart was pounding and sweat was forming on my forehead and just under my nose as I dialed the number a fifth time.

This time a man answered, his words unmistakable.

“No call here again!” The line went dead once more.

I dialed again, anyway, and kept doing so until I lost count. It was no use, I knew. Nobody was going to answer the phone. I threw my cell on the passenger seat, closed my eyes, and laid my head back.

But I was far from relaxed.

I reminded myself that I was on a new mission.
To find hope. To find Hope,
I told myself.

And to find closure.

I wasn't going to find what I needed from that woman or that man, so I was going to have to come up with another plan.

I grabbed my cell phone again and went online. After I had Googled and searched through several Web sites, a smile gradually eased onto my face. A new class in Portuguese had just started at one of the local community colleges. Only one session had been held so far. Within the next five minutes, I had registered for session number two, scheduled for Friday night.

Tomorrow.

I was not so interested in learning how to speak Portuguese. I wanted only to talk with someone who already could.

I left Lake Montebello with a smug sense of satisfaction. I had the makings of a plan in place. It might not work. It could backfire or make me fall flat on my face. It did not matter. It gave me a little hope.

For the moment, that was enough.