by Mary Wallace
“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.”
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.
The right to left, left to right driving motions gave her little room to think. They would pull into town, she plotted. They’d go first to the dive shop there, it had to be close to the ocean. She’d leave Rosalinda and Malia in the car and walk in and look around, waiting to see who was there before saying Eddie’s name. If it was safe, she could bring Rosalinda and Malia out of the car, she thought, more eyes to case the area. If it was all quiet, then they could drive up to Malia’s house in the hillside, the house where her daughter had died.
Chapter Fifty
Hana was a sleepy place. All the trellised lanais, the shake roofs blended in with the natural setting, unlike the flat tourist towns of Western Maui that glared with stucco and unnatural colors. The lush greenery lent a dark cast to the area and she drove in to the downtown on the left, away from the jungle of overgrowth that seemed to majestically swallow up the hills and mountain on the right.
She drove slowly, steering towards the water. Rosalinda sat up and Malia was also on high alert, her face looking quickly around.
“I been here years ago,” her voice softly said, “my daughter lost here.”
Celeste turned her head to Malia, “Lost?”
“She ran away here.” Her lips pursed, her face overcome, Malia lowered her voice to a bare whisper, “Lost here.”
“I’m so sorry,” Celeste answered. “I should not have brought you. Either of you.” She looked in her rearview mirror at Rosalinda who stared intently back at her. “Rosalinda, I should have left you at home,” she said apologetically.
“You good mother,” Malia said, patting Celeste’s hand with compassion.
“I don’t know about that,” Celeste said, still looking at Rosalinda in the rear view.
Rosalinda’s eyes rose and color came to her cheeks.
She pulled into a parking spot in front of several storefronts, one of them a dive shop. “Stay here,” she said, loping from the car. A few feet away, she heard her car doors open and she spun to see Rosalinda stumbling out of the car, Malia scrambling out of the front seat to grab the girl and right her. “Get back in the car,” Celeste said in a gruff, quieted yell.
“I’m sick,” Rosalinda said.
Malia waved Celeste on, “I take her to bathroom.” Malia supported her. Just a head taller than Rosalinda, she was not as fragile as she looked, Celeste realized.
Knowing that speed and time were her allies, she moved forward, into the quiet dive shop.
A longhaired man stood up behind the counter. He wore a beige t-shirt with a silver beaded necklace weighted down onto his barrel chest by medallions that looked Native American. Metallic drums, feathers, totems hung from leather straps, tangled in his curly gray chest hair.
“You going diving?” he said, looking at her quizzically. “Boats have already gone out. Your hotel should have told you that.”
“No,” Celeste said, looking around the shop, wondering how she could ask about Eddie.
“You want a t-shirt?” he asked, pulling a bright yellow t-shirt onto the counter with HANA printed in garish royal blue, “A souvenir for your kid?”
“I live here,” Celeste said, disdain in her voice. It wasn’t so offensive that he was trying to sell her, it was that he’d so definitively pegged her as a tourist with glaring taste.
A cop walked in the door behind her, clad in a dark navy blue uniform with a huge reflective DEA sewn on the front and back of his button down shirt. His shirt was tight and Celeste could see the outlined bulge of a bulletproof vest underneath.
The clerk stiffened, “Get you something, Officer?”
The cop w
alked deliberately towards the clerk, glancing only cursorily at Celeste and Celeste retreated, hoping that he too thought she was here as a tourist.
“I’m not looking for any ice, if that’s what you’re asking,” the cop said under his breath.
“You know I’m clean,” the clerk protested.
“Yeah,” smirked the cop. He turned and Celeste followed his gaze to see his partner standing imposingly in the doorway, listening to a headset attached to a walkie-talkie on his belt. She wondered if she’d come a few minutes too late, just in time to be in the middle of a drug bust.
“Shit’s going down,” the back cop called out, his voice booming. “There’s half a dozen cars headed up into the hillside, it looks like a fucking Hollywood Mafia showdown.”
“I’m clean, I swear it.” The clerk fingered his medallions as though he were praying with rosary beads.
“I know you don’t want to go back to prison.”
“No way, I’m clean,” he protested vehemently.
“Where do I get meth? “ The second cop stepped into the store, wearing the same DEA shirt, the letters shimmering under the store’s recessed lighting.
“What?” The clerk looked surprised.
“Where’s the fucking dealer in this town.”
“Not here,” the clerk said, asserting himself. “Up in the hills,” he said, pointing out the front door.
The closest cop pulled out his gun, brandishing it.
Celeste gasped and both cops looked at her, recalculating quickly to take her unexpected presence into account.
“Lady, get back to your hotel.”
“She’s,” the clerk started to speak.
“Leaving,” Celeste blurted out. She willed her body to move towards the hulking cops, unsure she’d be able to muscle past them to the door out to the street.