Unburying Hope (40 page)

Rosalinda turned her head sideways and closed
her eyes, tears clinging to her eyelashes.
 
She opened her eyes and looked hazily at Celeste, who
stopped and looked back in fear, Rosalinda was physically fading in front of
her.

“They gave her a little sedation,” Mrs.
Donahoe said, “it makes the MRI easier for kids.
 
They sometimes fall asleep in that machine, the clicking of
the cameras will be soothing for Rosalinda, I hope.”

          
“Mommy,
mommy, mommy,” Rosalinda mumbled and Celeste felt something inside her
move.
 
It wasn’t physical, it
wasn’t intellectual.
 
It was
primal.
 
Some part of herself stood
up to be counted, and she leaned forward, whispering into Rosalinda’s ear, “It’s
me, honey, it’s going to be okay, you go to sleep now and I’ll be with you.”

The little girl’s face relaxed and her
mumbling grew louder and then faded, “Momma, momma, Celeste,” until she gave
herself over to the chemical sleep that was now coursing through her veins.

Celeste looked up and realized that the orderly
and the nurse, and even Mrs. Donahoe were all sure that the plaintive ‘mommy
momma Celeste’ was all one call but Celeste knew in her heart that it
wasn’t.
 
Rosalinda, half asleep,
spoke out to her dead mother, and then to her.

Chapter
Forty-Three

“We ask all of our families to consider
donating blood.
 
Especially since
we’re on an island and trucking blood in on short notice isn’t possible.”

Celeste craned her neck to find the source of
the voice.
 
She was surprised to
see an elderly man in a striped apron staring intently at her, handing her a
clipboard with an authorization form.

“Me?” she said.
 
She’d given blood at the office a few months back.
 
It was a big deal to roll up your
sleeve to be punctured by the very sharp needle with its tubing connecting you
to an enlarging collection bag.
 
Frank talked her into it.
 
He
lay back and cracked jokes, saying he should have brought his almond scrub mask
or hired a pedicurist to loofah his feet while he sat for the blood draw.
 

She didn’t know why, but the blood technician
always felt the need to tell her that she’d have regular draws when she got
pregnant, so donating was good practice.
 
She’d said a few times, ‘um, over my dead body am I having kids’, but
the techs never took her seriously.
 
Apparently her youth implied an obligation to continue the species.

The old man pushed a brochure towards
her.
 
“You go up to the lab by the
pharmacy.
 
They’ll get you taken
care of, with a guarantee that you won’t wait more than half an hour to start.”

“I don’t think so,” she shook her head.
 
“I’m going to be too worried to leave
her side,” she reached for Rosalinda’s warm hand and clasped it
defensively.
 
Rosalinda’s stitches
were in, they were keeping her overnight as a precaution.
 
The MRI had shown very little
inflammation.
 

“Okay, but it might be your family member who
needs blood someday and you’ll wish you’d been generous.”

“I’m not being selfish.
 
I’m here to take care of her.”

His eyes flashed with anger.
 
“That’s what they all say, but, boy,
when you need the blood, you suddenly go crazy when the hospital doesn’t have
your type.”

“What are you talking about,” Celeste rose in
anger, aware that Rosalinda was trying to open her eyes.

A nurse pulled back the hanging curtain and
saw the look on Celeste’s face.
 
She shooed the old man away, but not before Celeste spat out, “How dare
you!” and he responded with, “Selfish!”

The nurse looked at the bag of clear liquid
hanging on the IV pole and she punched a few buttons on the machine that
monitored Rosalinda’s vital signs.
 
“It’s a bad time, I know, and he’s got no social skills, but his wife
died and after her car accident he’s convinced we didn’t have enough of her
blood type available.”

Celeste breathed out her anger.
 
“Did you run out?”
 
She could still feel the old man’s
crepe hands shoving the pamphlet at her and she wondered if maybe he’d been at
his wits’ ends, as she felt now.

“Well, like our little girl here, she had the
rarest blood, AB+.
 
And we were
low.
 
But the sad truth is she bled
out within minutes of being thrown through the windshield, she didn’t have her
seatbelt on, and she was barely alive when she got here.
 
She lost her pulse within minutes of
the first blood we gave her.”

Celeste, in her exhaustion, blurted out, ‘I’ve
got that blood type too!’ with such surprise and strength that the nurse
stopped and looked at her quizzically.
 

“Well, of course you do, honey,” the nurse
said, and she repositioned Rosalinda on her pillow, gently brushing Rosalinda’s
bangs off her face to look at the huge goose-egg bump on her temple.

“The stitches are strong, her hair will grow
back,” she said, feathering a hair or two back into the bobby pin that pulled
Rosalinda’s hair away from the shaved area and the stitches.
 
“Giving blood should definitely be your
priority,” she said, looking at her watch.
 
“I’m just about to give her a light pain killer so she’ll
sleep through the night and not twist and touch the stitches.
 
“Why don’t you go to the lab?”

Celeste felt a chill in her lungs.
 
Leaving Rosalinda, laying down to bleed
into a tube alone in the dark felt undoable.
  

Then there was always the terrible chance that
a blood draw would cue up a DNA mismatch.
 
What if she stood up from the blood draw and returned to a sleeping
Rosalinda, only to be arrested for impersonating a relative?
 
Could they do that?
 

Her mind raced.
 
Right now, in the cool dark with the backlit machines and
Rosalinda’s breathing slowing down from its frantic rattle to a gentle rowing
sound, Celeste realized a terrible truth.
 
Beautiful in its perfect horror.

Eddie hadn’t responded to her calls and texts.

She was all Rosalinda had.
 

Rosalinda didn’t know that, though, and
Celeste had kept up the chatter that Eddie was on the other side of the island,
offshore doing some oceanographic diving, finding places to take out a boat of
tourists.
 

So far, everyone nodded and stayed present to
Rosalinda’s immediate needs.
 
First
they had staunched the bleeding, then sedated her for stitches, then shaved
part of her head and sewed together the ripped flesh after cleaning playground
pebbles out of the sinewy flesh under her skin.

Celeste’s heart ached as she thought about how
lonely Rosalinda must have felt when the treatments happened.
 
She stroked Rosalinda’s hand as the
little girl went into a medicated deep sleep, her brown face relaxing from its
frozen fear, her mouth opening into a sweet half smile, her little teeth barely
flashing.

“Come on, Missy,” the nurse cajoled her.
 
Celeste gasped, remembering the
endearment Frank called her.
 
She
missed him fiercely.
 

“Get yourself up to that blood bank, your
little girl needs you there more than here.”

Celeste felt her muscles freeze as if in rigor
mortis.
 
“I don’t think I can,” she
bleated.

“None of that, now, it’s bravery time.
 
Your daughter needs you.
 
She really does.
 
If she has brain inflammation and we
have to go back in and do a couple surgeries, we might really need your
donation.
 
If it will make you feel
better, I’ll sit here with her until you get back.”

“I just can’t,” Celeste said.
 
“I faint when I see blood.”

“No you don’t, you’re a very strong
mother.
 
When she was afraid and
crying, you were great.
 
You stared
right into her eyes and got her to breathe better.
 
That hyperventilating can cause problems in little
kids.
 
I mean, it’s understandable,
but it makes it harder for us when kids are out of control.
 
She’s the first little one in a while
that we didn’t have to straightjacket in the MRI.
 
You can be very proud of yourself.
 
That was all your doing.”

Celeste looked over at Rosalinda, sleeping so
soundly that she didn’t move or twitch when Celeste let go of her fingers.

“She’s really out for at least 6 to 8
hours.
 
Go.
 
Now.”

Celeste stood up slowly, her own head
pounded.
 
“I’ve never done it
alone.”
 
That was not true of so
many moments in her life, she suddenly realized.
 
She’d trusted her own solitary momentum on an almost daily
basis since she was small.

“Well, it’s dark and lovely.
 
They play music quietly at night; it’s
like a planetarium show if you ask them to turn on the ceiling projector.
 
You can lay in the dark and watch
constellations move across the ceiling.
 
It’ll be over in the blink of an eye and you’ll be back down here with
your little girl.”

“Okay,” Celeste forced the affirmative thought
up her throat, “I’ll go.”
 
She
stumbled a bit but righted herself by leaning on the steel bars at the end of
Rosalinda’s mattress.
 
“I have a
question.
 
Can she use the rare
blood donated by strangers?
 
I mean
people who aren’t related to her?
 
Or does it only work if it comes from blood relatives?”
 
She averted her eyes as she pushed off
the bed frame, steering herself out of the little hospital room that had
eclipsed her life in the last few hours.

“Oh, silly!
 
Blood from anyone will do.
  
Now get along!
 
I’ll rustle up a blanket and pillow so you can rest better when you come
back.”

The hallways were cool with a sterile smell,
lit by all-seeing fluorescent lights.
 
She lowered her head and said a silent prayer to her own mother not to
be caught taking care of a daughter that she could not legally claim as her
own.

She found her way to the empty blood lab, let
the technician settle her into a chaise lounge.
 
She put her feet up and covered them with the light quilt he
gave her, turning her head away so she didn’t have to see the needle going
in.
 
She couldn’t ask any of the
jumbled questions gumming up her brain, about platelets and blood types, connectivity
and DNA and family similarities.
 
She couldn’t get the dull thud of worrying about Eddie out of her own
temples.

With a silent flip of a switch, the tech
turned on a golden blue light that danced and dissipated on the ceiling.
 
Thousands of little filament lights
masqueraded as stars, cosmic confusion gathered as clouds every few
minutes.
 
It was an exquisite show
and Celeste fought to keep her eyes open, wondering if her mother could
intercede for her through the electricity flashing over her head.
 
Could she?
 
Could she take a little scalpel and cut and paste Celeste’s
DNA so that it would be close to Rosalinda’s?
 
She smiled a tiny smile at the thought, and felt her
mother’s arm around her shoulders like when she was little.
 
She looked at a momentary shock of pain
at her elbow.
 
The needle lay
straight but she had crooked her arm, pulling at it.

She thought of Frank and knew that he would
want to be there with her too, staring up at the almost hallucinogenic blue
cosmic clouds and golden points of light morphing above her head.
 
A few deep breaths and she herself fell
asleep, deep breaths replacing her quickened inhalations.
 
The stars took her, she felt, letting
her black out into her own exhausted darkness.

Chapter
Forty-Four

Her phone vibrated on her lap and a shrill
bell rang, waking her up.
 

The blood draw was over and the technician was
sitting off to one side of her lounge chair, reading a magazine under a
pinpoint light.
 

She sat up and pushed the button to answer,
but it wasn’t a phone call coming in.
 

It was Skype.

“Frank,” she said, shock woke her up.
 
“It’s 4 a.m., what are you doing?”