by Mary Wallace
Malia pushed past the larger cop, thrusting herself and Rosalinda, whom she held close to her chest, through towards Celeste. “Come on, honey,” she said, toddling over to Celeste, “I want to eat, let’s go to buffet.”
The cops stared at her, a small Japanese woman holding tight to a long black haired girl with a bandage around her head, walking towards Celeste.
Celeste felt their tension, they wanted her gone.
“Address?” the cop spat at the clerk, reholstering his gun.
In a low voice, the clerk stumbled to say an address, spelling it out.
Celeste felt Malia bristle next to her.
The cops backed out of the store, turned and raced to their car, gunning their engine, peeling out of the quiet street.
The clerk rubbed sweat off his face, pulled his hair back into a ponytail. He fingered his medallions and Celeste could tell that he would have run himself if she and Malia and Rosalinda weren’t still standing there. But he would have run in the other direction, she thought, anywhere away from the sudden influx of federal officers.
She had been torn herself. She found herself hugging Rosalinda, sheltering her in her arms before taking a chance and moving forward to talk to the frozen clerk.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said, watching as his eyes focused and engaged hers. His eyebrows were overgrown, she saw, long black and gray hairs sprouted out of his forehead, framing deep, dark eyes that looked at her with pain. His story was bad, she could feel, but he looked at her with more compassion than fear and she felt suddenly that this was the man that Eddie had told her about, with whom he’d considered partnering before deciding to open the Kihei place himself.
“Yeah,” his voice softened and he looked at each of them, his eyes warming between their heights, his face losing its abject fear to a recognition that he nodded into.
“We’re looking for Eddie ----,” she said, watching his face for a response.
“He’s not here,” the clerk blurted, looking from Celeste to Rosalinda, then to Malia. “You okay, Grandma?” he said, coming around the desk to stand close to Malia. “Those bastards shouldn’t have pulled their guns out.” He gently patted her back. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Malia said, giving him a hug.
“You two know each other?” Celeste was stunned.
“Everyone knows Grandma here.”
“I own lots of property on island, I tell you,” Malia said to Celeste, “You no think I Donald Trump but I am. I own this building.”
“Everyone knows you?” Celeste was confused. “Those cops know you?”
“No, they’re Feds, they shouldn’t be here,” the clerk said. “Time to hide out, I’d say. Something big and bad is going down and you do NOT want to be wandering the streets if the DEA is canvassing. You’re Eddie’s old lady,” the clerk whistled. “And his baby girl.” He leaned over and offered his hand to Rosalinda for a shake.
“Have you seen him?” Celeste asked, no longer able to hide her desperation.
“No, I heard from him a couple of days ago though. He said the meth dealers are about to go all-out war on each other. And they can poison and blow up neighborhoods with their chemical shit. You won’t see those DEA guys looking like that much longer.”
“What do you mean?” Celeste asked.
“The Haz Mat suits are coming out, I’d say. First responders have to wear protective gear so they don’t get burned by the chemicals in the air.”
“There are going to be loud boom but no chemical,” Malia corrected him. “We get out of town.” She shooed Celeste and Rosalinda towards the door.
“Tell Eddie we’re okay and heading home,” Celeste said, “if you can contact him. Tell him to come home,” she begged.
The clerk looked at Rosalinda, “I’m sorry, bad things are going down. Get out of here.” He turned to Celeste, “The fumes alone from a meth lab will send you to the hospital and scar your lungs and eyes and skin. And I don’t have any gas masks, but” he said, but his eyes widened, “I do have these.” He grabbed two scuba tanks and three masks, following them out of the store. He rushed them into their car and said, “If you smell fumes, use these. I assume you know how? Since your old man’s a diver?”
Celeste was grateful that she’d worn the gear into hideously cold and murky Lake St. Clair back home because she recognized the buddy tubes and the masks. With great care, she put one on Rosalinda’s mouth and chin and opened the valve on the tank, pulling the tabs to size the straps so that they were nearly tight on her little head.
From the hillside behind them, a sound shattered the air around them, thunder erupted and, as they turned instinctively to see what was happening, a fireball rose from the hillside in front of them.
“Get the fuck out of here,” the clerk shouted, pushing Malia gently into her passenger seat in the car. He strapped her seatbelt on her and got Rosalinda’s on her as Celeste turned the car ignition on.
“Could Eddie be up there?” Celeste asked, her voice tremulous.
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “He could be. You get out, I’m heading up there.”
The air became saturated with a burning ammonia smell that hurt Celeste’s nasal passages and lungs as she breathed, fear ignited hyperventilation in her chest at the memory of the nighttime explosion outside the bar in Detroit.
Malia screamed in fear, clutching her heart. “That my house!”
Celeste pulled the straps on Malia’s mouthpiece over her fluffy hair, adjusting the air valve on the tank on the floor at Malia’s feet. “My house! Eddie in the wall up there! But not supposed to be fire! Supposed to only be sound!”
Black smoke billowed down the hill into town and screams broke out all around them.
“If Eddie’s in Hana, he’s up there. And if he’s up there,” the clerk said, looking up as a second fiery blast took out enough of the hillside to create a crater of red dirt with flames obliterating any remaining vegetation around the black flashes of fire, “he’d want you out of here. Drive, god damn it,” he yelled, slamming his fists on the now closed car door. “You owe it to him to live, if he can’t.”
“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 h
er 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
Rosalinda’s clothes were neatly folded back into her three drawers. Pants were in the bottom drawer, sweaters, t-shirts and sweatshirts in the middle, socks and underwear in the top drawer. There was a threadbare, too-small bathing suit that would need to be replaced before Rosalinda could swim in the surf down at the beach.
Celeste had said quietly, “I don’t see any dresses,” when she was unpacking the black trash bag and folding the clothes earlier in the evening.
Rosalinda said, “No, Grandma told me not to climb up where boys could see my underwear but I always climb, so ‘no more dresses’, Grandma said.”
You have those lycra shorts you wear for PE class?”
“Yes.”
“Wear them under a dress. That way you’re always private.”
Rosalinda nodded thoughtfully. “I can get into PE class easier, if I already have my shorts on.”