Unburying Hope (44 page)

She cleared a circle around the base of the
plant and pressed her weight onto the metal part of the shovel, allowing it to
dig in a few inches away from the perimeter of the hole created by Eddie’s and
Rosalinda’s seemingly innocent yard work.
 
The earth loosened easily and she grasped the trunk of the young plant,
pulling it and its root ball out of the soft loam within which it had been
cradled.

She looked around, nervous that she’d be
seen.
 
The yard was quiet, empty
except for her heartbeat, which was deafening.

She propped the plant against the shovel,
keeping it upright, not knowing if she’d condemned it to death by pulling it
out of its safe spot.
 
She reached
down into the hole, digging into dirt that was collapsing to the center.
 
She couldn’t feel enough with his
gardening gloves on, the thick fabric disconnected her brain from the sensors
in her fingers, so she yanked off the gloves and scratched into the loam with
both hands, hoping suddenly that she wouldn’t unearth a mini scorpion or some
other frightening creature.
 

Within seconds, she felt something slow her
progress, a cloth that felt different from the breakaway granules of the dirt
and fertilizer that Eddie had put into the bottom of his hole.
 
She dug around it and quickly released
it, pulling rolled up, ripped up camouflage fabric that was rubber banded
around something the shape of a medium sized rock, four inches by four inches.
 
She had wondered why he’d started
wearing jeans, finally shirking off the military pants, and now she knew.
 
He’d used the threadbare camouflage
pants that had protected him through his deployments to now protect what
represented his future, these wads of cash.
 
She removed two rubber bands and stripped the fabric swatch
from the wad of money.

The roll was solid, so many bills that they
felt like one hefty thing, easily unrecognizable when it was hidden within its
wrapping.

She unfolded the bills, which were doubled
over in half.
 
$100 bills, so many
that she couldn’t count.
 
She
looked right to left, expecting to see cops glaring at her, guns pulled on her,
no surprise on their faces.

But the only sound was wisps of wind that
tickled the leaves of the trees above her.

She pocketed the wad, putting the dirty shred
of fabric over the bills.
 
Before
standing up, she again held the hydrangea plant in her hands, placing it gently
into the hole, digging back the fallen dirt to make room for it.
 
She pressed it in, gently patting the
potting soil around at the ground line, making it at home again in the spot
chosen for it by Eddie and Rosalinda.

Should she put something on it, so that they’d
know it didn’t have its stash underneath anymore?
 
Tie the camo fabric around its base?
 
No, that might identify it for drug
dealers or cops that might search the property.
 

She walked back to the house and stepped
lightly up the side porch steps, slipping into the hallway, washing her hands
in the bathroom, cleaning the dirt from under her fingernails.
 
She sat on the edge of the bathtub,
unrolled the bills and counted them.
 
$15,000.
 
He’d said he’d put
$50,000 under each bush.
 
She
hadn’t bothered to dig further, once her hands had found this wad.
 
There could very easily be a few other
wads buried directly under where she’d found this one.
 
She shook her head at the thought of so
many little treasures hidden under plants in this sanctuary of theirs.
 
It was consoling and terrifying.
 
She had plenty of cash in the bank to
help them stabilize for a while, but this kind of cash meant a more secure
future for them.

There was no way that she would put this cash
into her bank account, though.
 
She
knew that would jeopardize Rosalinda’s safety.
 

The voice of her mother’s quiet prayers came
to her, the nightly supplications for hope, for protection and courage.
 
She wrapped herself with the audible
soothing of her mother’s repetitive entreaties.

Chapter
Forty-Eight

“Eddie is missing,” Celeste answered.
 
She felt the words steal out of her
mouth, past the tension in her jaw, which she’d clenched as soon as she saw
Malia rocking back and forth just inside of the arbor.

She stayed still, seated at the top step of
the cottage front porch, willing herself to calm the tornado in her heart.
 
But hearing Malia’s wavering voice,
‘Where’s Eddie?” she had lost her ability to stabilize and her fear tore out of
her, in the frantic words that escaped her mouth.

She saw Malia freeze and stumble, her crepe
cheeks wrinkled with worry.
 
“What
do you mean?” her small voice asked searchingly.
 
“He leave you?”
 

She shouldn’t have said ‘missing’, she
realized.
 
She saw that she’d
raised questions in Malia’s eyes.

“So when you see him last?” Malia asked,
cannily.

“This morning,” Celeste blurted.
 
“I saw him at the hospital.
 
We found out that his mother died.”

“Aw, so sad.
 
Rosalinda know?”

“Yes,” Celeste answered.

“I see, you love him.
 
I do good marriage feng shui for you
when he come back,” there was an almost imperceptible flash in her worried
eyes.

“Nah, I don’t think marriage is the
solution.”
 
Celeste breathed out
with sorrow.
 

Malia slowly lowered herself to sitting, onto
the bottom step.
 
She looked up at
Celeste.
 
Her bony knees stuck out
of her simple cotton frock and Celeste noticed how pale her little legs were,
like matchsticks, with short beige socks and brown comfortable shoes on her
feet.
 
“You in trouble?”

Celeste felt a sob escape her throat but she
gripped hard, stifling her neck muscles, willing herself to silence.
 
She would not betray Eddie, give the
old lady any reason to evict them.

“You hold yourself too tight.
 
I tell you that first time we
meet.
 
You need island to relax
you.”
 
The lilt in her voice did
not match the tension in her small hands, gripping papers that she was crushing
in her fragile fingers.

“What’s that?” Celeste asked.

“Eddie asked for them.”
 
Malia’s voice tapered off.

“Really?”
 
Her chest ached.
 
God, he’d been nice to the old lady, she thought.
 
“You can leave them with me.”

“No.
 
I sit here with you a few minutes,” Malia said.

Celeste closed her eyes.

They were silent.
 
The only sound came from the creaking of tree branches in
the light wind that buffeted fifteen feet off the ground.

Celeste opened her eyes, surprised to see
Malia looking directly at her.

“You know your boyfriend very well?”

Her first response was the truest.
 
“Yes.”
 
She knew him, the depth of his kindness and his brokenness,
his deliberate battle to live in integrity, to be a man for her.
 
And his daughter.
 

She looked at Malia, sensing finally, that
Malia was here because she too knew Eddie.

“What do you have there, Malia?”
 
She felt her voice come from a deep
place in her own strong soul.

“Celeste,” she said quietly, “I lose my
daughter to drugs.
 
My grandson, he
live with me, I raise him because my daughter lose her mind.
 
She lose her pretty face,” Malia’s eyes
welled up with tears, “she lose her pretty teeth, they rot in her mouth, her
pretty white teeth.
 
She lose her
cheeks,” she tenderly touched her own cheeks.
 
“So young, but her cheeks more hollow than mine.”

“I’m so sorry,” Celeste moved down two steps
to sit next to her.
 
“Does she live
here on Maui?”

“No, I bury her down the hill with my husband,”
Malia waved her hand towards the street.
 
“I feel her here.”
 
Her left
hand gripped the papers, her right hand shook.
 

“I understand,” Celeste said.
 
“You miss her.”
 
She felt a warmth for Malia and she
gently palmed Malia’s quavering right hand into her own hands and moved closer,
putting her arm around the angular softness of Malia’s shoulders.
 
The repetition in her life of tender
elderly feminine energy was not lost on her, she felt the pattern in this
moment.
 
And she felt the elder
feminine energy in the redwoods that lined the property.
 
She could understand on an unspoken
level, how this place was healing for Malia.

With a deep kindheartedness, she reached into
Malia’s hands and released the papers, two pages of newspaper clippings.
 
Articles about an influx of
methamphetamines on Maui.
 
Her
heart clenched.
 
“Why do you have
this?”
 
She felt her head clearing
a bit.

“This the drug that took my daughter.”
 
Malia turned to her, straightening her
back.
 
“I see Eddie has same face
my daughter had at beginning.
 
I
came to talk to him about it, talk him out of it.”

“Ah,” Celeste said, feeling her own crushing
stress.

“And he say he no use meth anymore.”

“He really wants to be a good father to his
daughter,” Celeste answered.

“You start to say ‘our daughter’,” Malia
admonished.

Celeste felt a full body tremor.
 

“You going to be family with him? You have to
take the child.”
 
Malia pursed her
lips in sadness, “Like I take the boy.
 
You no good at mother, but when world stops, you stand up, get world
going again.”

Celeste had no answer.

Malia took the newspaper clippings.
 
“Eddie like spy.
 
He go after gang,” she said.

Celeste had only half-heard the small voice.

Malia looked at her.
 
“You no know that, eh?
 
He fight it.
 
He feel how it
try to kill him.
 
He see my
grandson, he ask about his mother, he see pictures grandson carry in his
pocket.
 
One his mother at his age,
so precious in college.
 
The other,
she have no teeth, wrinkle in her face and neck, at police station when they
book her.
 
Eddie understand and he
come to me, he ask about how she get drugs.
 
He tell me he broke up gang in your car city.”

“How did you hear this?”
 
Celeste shook the cobwebs from her
brain.

“He buy from them when he get home from
war.
 
But he see young kid in drug
place.
 
He think kid dead but guy
he buy from wake kid to get him to,” she put a hand on her nose and sniffed
uncertainly, “take drug.
 
He get
angry, he tell me.
 
He try to get
clean but he know he have to get rid of bad men.
 
Like in war.
 
He
hide in wall of closed place, restaurant, school, movie place.
 
Business closed because no money, so no
good people go in anymore, only drug people.
 
He hide in wall.”

“He hid?
 
Why?”

“He go before daylight, he climb into broken
wall, he hide.
 
He listen, then he
set up tricks,” she smiled wanly, “You be proud.”

“Eddie told you this?”

“You no know?”

Thousands of miles from everything she’d ever
known, she could feel on a visceral level that this place was a safe place, so
she told the truth, “Malia, I only know part of this.”

Malia sized her up and straightened her own
shoulders again.
 
“I tell you
then.
 
He create war.”

“With what?”

“Eddie know if he kill them himself, he go to
jail.
 
And, after war in desert,”
Malia touched her temple where Eddie had his wound from those far away military
battles, “he no want any death by his hand.”
 
She laughed hoarsely, “so he play on them.
 
Make them afraid each other want to be
drug king.
 
He make bomb.”