Unburying Hope (47 page)

“What?” Rosalinda sobbed, “My daddy’s up
there?”

Celeste pulled her own mask off and twisted
out of her seat to reach Rosalinda.
 
“Keep your breather on, Missy,” she said vehemently.
   

The acrid smells, the invisible combination of
solvents and ammonia raked her nostrils and throat, choking her until she
gagged.
 
She shook her head to
clear her eyes.
 
Her mask dropped
away and she stared, her burning eyes fixated on the mountainside destroyed by two
incendiary explosions.

She felt Malia pull her back into her
seat.
 
“Your mask first.
 
If you die, we all die.
 
Momma protect child by protect
herself.”

Celeste sped the car out of the now blackened
downtown, pulling hard on her own mouthpiece, pacing her driving to the frantic
bursts of air that both Malia and Rosalinda were pulling with their own mouth
pieces.

Her heart tore open and she sobbed, blinded as
much by the acid in her eyes as her tears.
 
But her tears cleared her vision, washing away some of the
chemicals.
 
And so she drove,
carefully but methodically through the turns with just enough banking and
breaking to ricochet the car into the next turn, letting the tears pour out in
torrents, fed by the oxygen flooding into her burnt esophagus until the car
crested the insane curves and hit the downward highway home.
 

Rosalinda had rolled into a ball in the back
seat, crying inconsolably and Malia was pounding one fist into her other hand,
yelling in Japanese something that Celeste could not understand.

Grief engulfed them all, corrosive like the acidic
air they had just escaped.

Sirens screeched and fire trucks, ambulances,
police cars all barreled towards and past them, racing to take the road to Hana
at breakneck speeds, leaving Celeste to limp along in the car, heading to a
home that would feel terribly empty without Eddie.

Chapter
Fifty-One

Celeste sat on the front porch again, far more
wounded on the outside than she had been on the inside when she sat with Malia
before heading to Hana.
 
Her heart
was as heavy as her inflamed eyelids, which were burning inside and out.
 
She’d ruled out going to the hospital,
because she couldn’t stand the sterile rooms in this gripping state of grief.

Malia sat next to her, crying as though she
were mourning many deaths.
 
Eddie’s, but probably also the echoes of her daughter’s, Celeste
knew.
 

Her own heart was so numb that she felt
blinded both in her swollen eyes and her inability to feel anything but a deep,
deep desolation around her.
 
The
garden did not speak, the trees stood silent in the bleakness, wrecked by the
landslide of human emotions coursing from the front steps of the cottage.

Celeste’s mind began to click, listing things
to worry about.
 

She’d Skype Frank.
 
That might release tears, connecting with her old friend,
the tenuous connection to home and all of its severed memories.

Malia’s voice shook, “Not supposed to be
fire,” she wailed.

Celeste heard the words but her head felt like
it was battered by waves of the black smoke they’d left behind an hour before.

“To see fire in house, it kill me.
 
I let him die!”
 
Malia pounded her chest.

 
Celeste could hear the rickety sound of her fist thumping her
bony frame.
 
She reached out and
held Malia’s hand, “It’s not your fault.”

Malia collapsed against her and Celeste moved
closer on the stair to hold her.

The screen door creaked open cautiously.
 
Celeste did not turn around.
 
She knew it was Rosalinda.
 
She patted Malia’s head, gently pulling
her closer and they sat there for an endless count of minutes, the air moving
through the trees in a ghostly dance.

She had never felt so alone.

Malia’s grief was intense, many years of held
sorrow that she released here, now that she was in Celeste’s arms.
 
Celeste knew that Rosalinda was sitting
behind her, but she faced forward until Malia reached a place of such inner
emptiness that she went silent, breathing imperceptibly for another eternity.

Then she shook herself out of Celeste’s embrace
and straightened her spine.

Celeste closed her eyes and breathed, trying
to find the verdant scent of the garden, which seemed to have expanded towards
them, leaves and branches lengthening their breadth, their range, reaching out
in shared awareness of the bereft sorrow on the front porch.

The vapors had burned her nose but she caught
a bit of the essence of the redwoods and she looked up at three sentinels that
had stood for nearly a century soaring in front of her.
 
They’d long ago crested the hillside tree
line and probably could see and interact with taller trees all over the
mountain, up to the volcano and down to the ocean.
 
They stood here, unmoving, content to withstand the wind.

She thought about her options.
 
She wasn’t employed, so had no
income.
 
She could live for a year
or two on her savings, she knew.
 
But where?

Whole blocks around her apartment in Detroit
were being leveled by bombs similar to the one that blew apart the hill in
Hana.
 
Legal implosion bombs set
off by the city government in a long view attempt to save and revitalize
Detroit for another generation.
 
Probably wouldn’t let off the damaging chemicals of the exploded meth
lab, but there would be dust and destruction.

The phone company office was closed.
 
Frank was already home with his family.
 
She had no emotional connection to
the South, it had no call for her.
 
Detroit was all she knew.

She’d already made the break, she knew, the
one that hurt the most.
 
She’d
packed up, walked out of her apartment, not looking back to see how dingy and
decrepit it really was.

She had chosen life.

And here she was, surrounded by it.
 
The small fragile life next to her and
the unseen one behind her.

She rubbed Malia’s back, sitting herself up
straight next to her.
 
When she
felt Malia carrying herself in her own frame, Celeste turned, expecting to see
Rosalinda curled up in a ball of her own solitary sorrow.

But she wasn’t curled up.

She was sitting, rod straight, staring out at
the redwoods herself, barely visible.
 
In front of her sat her shiny black trash bag, overflowing with her
clothing thrown haphazardly in, scrunched down but still erupting out of the
bag.

Rosalinda’s hands absent-mindedly held the
edges that were to be tied together.
 
She either didn’t know how to tie a knot with the trash bag or she had
stopped midway through the act.
 
Her new clothes were sticking out as she stared forward aimlessly,
caught in a moment between thoughts, between acts, grief-stricken.

“Rosalinda, what are you doing?” Celeste asked
quietly.

Rosalinda’s eyes trained on her but Celeste
could see that her thoughts did not follow.
 
The bandage on her head needed to be replaced but it held
over her stitches.
 
“I’m leaving,”
she said, with a beleaguered voice.
 
Her face was stripped of emotion but her eyes held her confusion.

“Where are you going?”
 
Celeste asked.

Malia also turned to face the little girl.

“Well, my mommy is dead.
 
And my guinea pig died.
 
And my grandma died.
 
And now my Daddy died.
 
I think I’m an orphan,” she said the
word with a bereaved curiousity.
 
She quietly listed off all the deaths again, “First mommy, then grandma,
now Daddy.”
 
Looking out at the
trees again, her voice distressed and disconnected, she said, “I’ll go to an
orphanage now.”
 
She spurted the
last words out and they rang off the porch into the garden.

Celeste sat motionless.

Malia’s cool, aged hands reached, stroking
Celeste’s cheeks.
 
“Little one, she
need you,” she whispered.

Celeste stood up and went to Rosalinda but did
not touch her.
 
She sat by her side
and faced out to see what Rosalinda was staring at.

The trio of redwoods.
 
One tall in the center.
 
One old on one side, its growth
slowed.
 
The other was green and
sprouting branches as it grew skyward.
 
Someday it would grow taller than its family, she thought.

She turned to Rosalinda and said, “No
orphanage, honey.”

Rosalinda didn’t take her eyes off the
redwoods.

Celeste bounced gently on the bench.
 
One bounce.

Rosalinda flinched.

Another bounce.
 
She crept next to Rosalinda, bouncing a third time.
 

An innocent half-smile crept across
Rosalinda’s face, her eyebrows furrowed in bewilderment.
 
“What are you doing?” she asked,
chagrin in her little voice.

Celeste bounced one more time, taking
Rosalinda’s hand.
 
“Come on, one
two three”, and both of them bounced in the air at the same time, Rosalinda
looking at her, disoriented but not too flustered to smile a confused childish
smile.

“How about this?”
 
Celeste put her arm around Rosalinda’s shoulders, pulling
her into the embrace within which she had contained Malia’s grief just moments
before.
 
“I have your papers.
 
Your Grandma gave them to my buddy
Frank and he’s Fed Ex’ing them to me.
 
You’re already enrolled in school here.
 
You are legal here.
 
You and me,” she said, caressing Rosalinda’s hair, “we’re all each other
has.
 
How about we become a
family?”

Rosalinda’s eyes focused on her, Celeste could
see her thoughts cascading in her head.
 
They were connected side by side but separated, as each of their minds
raced.

“You don’t like kids,” Rosalinda said.
 
“I heard you say it.”

Celeste swallowed those words hard.
 
In order to process her own life’s
emotional confusion, she’d tangled up all her thoughts verbally like a web that
wasn’t constructed properly or constrained.
 
She’d spun out story lines so she could imagine and process
them, not thinking about the collateral damage of her own words.
 
Did she still not like kids?

“I don’t know if I like kids or not,” she said
honestly.
 
“But I know that I love
you.
 
And I loved your dad.
 
And we belong here, you and me.
 
He brought us here.
 
We should stay here.
 
This is our home.”
 
She looked down at the jet black eyes
searching her face.
 
“I’m in, if
you’re in,” she offered her hand.

“You’ll be my mommy?” Rosalinda asked shyly.

Celeste caught her breath at the audacity of
life, scooping her out of her own grief-soaked life in Detroit, bringing her
out to the Eden of her dreams, no longer a hollow shell.
 
With a smaller version of herself
seated next to her, wondering if she would ever have a family.

She gave Rosalinda a heartfelt embrace and a
vehement kiss on her forehead.
 
“You
had a good Mommy.
 
I’ll be your
Momma and you are my little girl,” she said.

A tornado of love surrounded her, little arms
grasping at her shoulders and she felt herself in the center of a long, long
embrace, Rosalinda’s hot tears on her neck.
 
She circled her arms around Rosalinda and held her, not
needing to pull away, resting in the explosion of love.

“And I be Grandma,” Malia said from the
steps.
 
“I be Angelina Jolie of
Maui.
 
With my golden daughter and
black wavy hair granddaughter.”

Celeste pressed Rosalinda into her shoulder,
turning to look at Malia’s implanting herself into the new grove of family that
they were creating out of their grief.
 
Each of them would grow stronger, like the redwoods that grew symbiotically
in front of them, anchoring the whole garden with generational stability.

Chapter
Fifty-One