The Right Stuff

by Merline Lovelace

  Cari shot her a quick look. "Most of them?"

  The missionary blew out a breath. "Turns out the folks who applied to adopt Paulo are in the middle of rather nasty divorce proceedings."

  "Oh, no!"

  "Unfortunately, they didn't bother to notify our church adoption agency that their marriage had fallen apart. The agency is scrambling now to find another home for Paulo. It might take a while, though, given the expensive surgery he's facing."

  Cari's glance went back to the boy. The Whites must have told him the news. He stood a little apart from the others, observing but not participating. The sparkle had gone out of his brown eyes and his face was once again a sullen mask.

  "INS is insisting they have to take him into protective custody pending deportation," Janice said quietly. "He's not particularly happy about the prospect."

  Neither was Mac, Cari discovered when he wheeled back down the corridor with Rosa still perched in his lap. Tomas followed the squeak of the chair, his sneakers beeping out a merry rhythm. The other kids tagged along, as well. All except Paulo, who maintained his distance.

  Mac's gaze lingered on the boy for a moment before meeting Cari's. "Janice tell you about Paulo?"

  "Yes. What a bummer."

  "Did she also tell you about the INS detention centers?"

  "They're supposed to be administrative holding centers," the missionary said when Cari shook her head. "The kids put into these centers don't know lhat, though. Most of them think they're being punished. They don't speak English, don't understand I heir rights and, unlike adults detained by the INS, uien't eligible for release after posting bond. They spend weeks or months until deportation in bare cells, sometimes with local youths accused of violent crimes."

  The thought of Paulo locked in with young toughs spawned a sick feeling in Cari's stomach. The boy had endured so much in his own country. Now, just when he thought he'd found a safe haven in the United States, he'd be thrown to the sharks again.

  "The Berks County Youth Center in Pennsylvania serves as the INS detention center for the East Coast," Janice continued, her voice grim. "They had the kids doing push-ups for every infraction of the rules. It took a class-action suit to make them admit most of the children couldn't understand these so-called rules."

  Mac's jaw set. His eyes went flat for a moment, as though he was seeing things he'd rather forget.

  "It's not going to happen," he said flatly. "I want to talk to this INS official."

  "She wants to talk to you, too," Cari told him. "She took statements from the rest of us yesterday afternoon and said she'd come by for yours today."

  "Fine. I'll have a thing or two to say to her."

  Cari didn't doubt it, but she knew as well as Mac that talking wouldn't hack it with the INS. She was turning over possible options in her mind when the charge nurse swooped down on the small group.

  "Your surgeon will be making rounds soon, Major. I refuse to let him find you in the hall doing wheelies. You need to be in bed."

  "We'll leave," Janice said, lifting Rosa into her arms. "The kids just wanted to see for their own eyes that Major Mac was all right."

  Cari stayed her with a quick request. "Can you hang loose a few minutes?"

  "Sure."

  "I'll be right back. I just need to make a phone call."

  She was back some moments later and relayed the gist of her conversation to Janice, who hustled the kids out of the ward so she could in turn relay the news to her brother.

  Cari waited until the nurse and an aide had Mac settled before entering his room. He was stretched out on the smoothed white sheets, his face turned to the dazzling October sunlight streaming in through wide windows. They gave a sweeping view of the naval base and the aquamarine waters of the Gulf of Mexico beyond.

  She guessed from Mac's fierce frown that he wasn't concentrating on the view. He confirmed as much when he turned at the sound of her footsteps on the tiled floor.

  "Paulo's not going into a detention center, Cari. Not if I can help it. I know the kind of scars they can leave on a boy like him."

  The kind that faded, but never quite went away, she guessed.

  Mac had never talked about himself in the months they'd spent together in New Mexico, had never men-lioned his family that she could recall. Cari had picked up only bits and pieces of his background.

  As chief of security for the Pegasus project, Jill Bradshaw had access to the complete security dossiers on all assigned personnel. Jill took her responsibilities too seriously to ever divulge details from those dossiers. Kate, on the other hand, had experienced no qualms about activating her informal intelligence network to come up with tidbits of essential information. Like the fact that Mac had joined the marines before linishing high school. That he'd never married. That he'd been wounded twice, once in Afghanistan, once in the Iraqi War.

  This was Cari's first hint that he'd been wounded well before he joined the corps. She wanted to probe, to learn more about the man who'd bulldozed his way into her heart, but the closed, tight expression on Mac's face didn't invite questions. Saving them for later, she perched on the edge of his bed.

  "I think I might have won Paulo a reprieve."

  "How?"

  "I called my sister, Deborah. She and her husband are currently raising two dogs, two cats and four kids, with another about to make an appearance. Their house has all the calm of Grand Central Station during peak rush hour, but Deb insists there's room for Paulo until the Whites' church locates another family for him."

  The grim expression on Mac's face eased into one of relief tinged with only a shade of doubt. "Sounds like the perfect place for the kid. Think he'll be able to make himself understood in that crowd?"

  Cari laughed. "Paulo doesn't seem to have much difficulty making himself understood in any crowd. Deb said she and Jack will drive down from Shreve-port as soon as he can get someone to fill in for him at work. We'll have to hold off INS until they get here."

  Mac's eyes glinted. "I think we can manage that. In the meantime..."

  "Yes?"

  He reached up with his good hand, snagged the lapel of her khaki uniform shirt. "I have this hazy recollection of talking to you last night. And a promise of later."

  "Remember that, do you?"

  "Oh, yeah."

  Bracing her hands on either side of the bed to make sure she didn't jar his injured shoulder, she leaned over him.

  Chapter 10

  Cari spent the next few days in a whirl of worry and frenetic activity.

  The Pegasus team holed up in their mobile command center to evaluate their craft's performance in actual operations and prepare a detailed report for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Captain Westfall was scheduled to deliver the report in person the following week.

  Mac drafted his input in his hospital room and gradually began to make brief forays to join the rest of the team at the command center. He regained strength daily, if not the use of his right arm. Fretting at his impaired movement, he was forced to await an evaluation from orthopedic surgeons as to when they could replace his shattered shoulder joint before being discharged from the hospital.

  "It's more a question of if they can replace the joint, not when," Doc Richardson confided to Cari after escorting the increasingly restless patient back to the hospital. "The procedure requires sufficient bone to anchor the replacement joint. Given the damage that bullet did to Mac's shoulder, he may not be a candidate for the surgery."

  Side by side, they walked out of the hospital into the bright October sunlight. The stiff breeze blowing in off the Gulf carried a salty tang, but Cari paid no attention to the scent that usually stirred her senses.

  "Will he regain use of his arm without the surgery?"

  "Some use, certainly."

  For anyone else, "some" might be enough. But not for her all-or-nothing, one hundred percent, gung ho marine. Concern over how Mac would adjust to a future that might include limited capabilities to perform his duties nibbled away at the e
dges of Cari's overwhelming relief that he'd beat the odds and survived the bullet.

  She knew the choices that lay ahead of him. If surgery to reconstruct his shoulder wasn't an option, Mac would go before a military medical evaluation board to determine his suitability for continued service. The eval board could decide to retain him on restricted duty or recommend him for a disability retirement.

  A tight knot formed smack in the middle of her chest at the thought. The Pegasus team had already lost one of their own to medical retirement. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Thompson, the original air force rep to the cadre, had suffered a heart attack after contracting the virus that had swept through the isolated site. As a result, he'd been yanked off the team and replaced by Dave Scott.

  "How long before Mac learns whether he's a candidate for the surgery?" she asked Cody.

  "The surgeons here sent his X rays and records to two of the country's top orthopedic surgeons who specialize in shoulder replacements. Hopefully, we'll hear something back within a few days."

  In the midst of Cari's worries over Mac and her work on the report detailing Pegasus's seaworthiness, officials from the adoption agency run by the Whites' church flew in to iron matters out with the INS. They also expedited legal proceedings and helped with the first meetings between the children and their prospective parents. The couples themselves flew in from all parts of the country, some nervous, all excited. One by one, the children departed with their new families. The departures were a wrenching mixture of joy and wariness as the kids exchanged the familiar if bleak past for an unknown future.

  Paulo remained with the Whites, who delayed their departure from Corpus until his situation was resolved. Faced with the combined resistance of the missionaries, the Pegasus team and one very determined marine, INS held off taking the boy into custody pending evaluation of Cari's sister and brother-in-law as temporary guardians.

  Deborah and Jack drove down from Shreveport late Friday afternoon. They arrived with all four kids and, thankfully, only one household pet in tow. Trading her uniform for a pair of floppy sandals, comfortable slacks and a red-checkered blouse, Can met them at the beachside condo on Padre Island she'd rented for them. It sat near the northern tip of the island, close enough to watch the fishing fleet putting out from Aransas Pass but far enough away from the docks to avoid the fish aroma that permeated the air when the fleet returned.

  When the Hamilton family piled out of their SUV, laughter bubbled up in Cari's throat at the chaos that ensued. Her two nieces and two nephews whooped with delight at being released from their seat belts and car seats. They treated their aunt to bear hugs and wet, sloppy kisses before making a beeline for the sandy beach. The chocolate-colored, full-sized poodle Deb had tried to pawn off on every one of her relatives lumbered alongside the kids, emitting earsplit-ting woofs of joy.

  "No going in the water without one of us there to supervise!" their father shouted. The kids swerved in time to avoid the surf. Pierre the Poodle plowed right in.

  Undaunted by the prospect of coping with a wet animal the size of a small horse, Deb levered her very pregnant self out of the car and enveloped her sister in a fierce hug. She and Cari were about the same height, with the cinnamon dark eyes and glossy mink-brown hair that ran in their family, but the similarities ended there. Deb dabbled in watercolors, loved any and all sweets and had married her first and only love right out of high school. She took vicarious delight in her sister's adventures in uniform, but shuddered at the thought of being subjected to anything resembling military discipline herself.

  Cari returned her hug and that of her big, ham-fisted brother-in-law. It had always amazed her how perfectly her petite sister and this high-school-football-star-turned-math-teacher fit together.

  "Thanks for coming to the rescue like this. I owe you, Jack."

  "Don't think I won't collect, too." His blue eyes laughed down at her. "Deb and I plan to dump kids, dogs, cats, parakeets and gerbils on Aunt Cari one of these days and take off for a blissful week of soli lude."

  "Any time. Just give me a little advance notice."

  "Advance warning, you mean. You'll need at least twenty-four hours to batten down the hatches and do whatever else you coast guard types do before a hur-ricane hits." Waving aside her offer of assistance, he shooed the two women toward the condo. "You girls go on inside. I'll bring the bags and the rest of the tribe."

  Hooking her arm in her sister's, Cari escorted her to the beachside cottage. It was an airy, four-bedroom unit with additional sleep sofas in the living room, a fully equipped kitchen and a breathtaking view of the Gulf. It was also, Cari had been assured by the rental agent, kid- an'd dog-proof. Evidently this particular condo catered to families on vacation as well as the sun-seeking and often rowdy college-age hoards that descended on Padre Island every spring break.

  "Oh, man," Deb breathed when she viewed the dunes rolling right to the sliding glass doors. "The kids are going to love this place. They'll also bury this carpet in about six inches of sand."

  "Not to worry. I suspect that's why the rental agency put in sisal carpets. It's tough enough to withstand sand and wet feet. I stocked the fridge for you. Want some Triple Fudge Ripple?"

  "You sweetheart!" Keeping one eye on her kids through the sliding glass doors, she sank into one of the chairs grouped around a glass-topped table. "Pile a bowl full for both of us and tell me more about Paulo."

  "We don't know much about his background," Cari said as she heaped ice cream into two bowls. "Janice White—one of the missionaries who brought him out of Caribe—says he just showed up at their mission a year or so ago, half starved and sporting a set of vicious bruises. From what they can gather, the rebels killed his mother. There's no record of his father. There's no record of Paulo, either, which adds to the complications of his,, uh, precipitous departure from Caribe."

  "A departure you had something to do with, I take it."

  "Right. I can't go into details, just that Mac and I were sent in to extract the Whites. The kids came with them."

  "Who's Mac?"

  "A marine I've been working with for the past few months."

  She didn't use any particular inflection, but Deb's spoon paused halfway between bowl and mouth.

  "A few months, huh?"

  "We've been assigned to a special project."

  "Is he cute?"

  "Cute, no. Rugged and compelling, most definitely."

  "I see." Catlike, Deb swiped her tongue along the back of her spoon. "Just out of curiosity, where does your lawyer friend fit into this equation?"

  "He doesn't," Cari admitted. "I broke things off with Jerry."

  "Thank goodness!"

  Startled by her sister's emphatic response, Cari blinked.

  "None of us in the family thought he was right for you," her sister confided. "We also thought you were crazy to give up a career you love to become a stay-at-home mom."

  "That's interesting, coming from a woman who takes such joy in doing just that."

  "Isn't it?" Complacently, Deb downed another spoonful of ice cream. "But then I never wanted anything else. You, on the other hand, decided to join the coast guard almost the first week the family moved to Maryland."

  That was true. After investing in a home on a spit of the Chesapeake's eastern shore, their parents had purchased a sailboat. Before they'd let any of their lively brood set so much as a toe aboard the sleek twenty-four-footer, however, they'd enrolled them in a water-safety course conducted by the local coast guard auxiliary. The tanned, curly-haired sailor who'd conducted the course had fascinated the thirteen-year-old Cari. The bits and pieces she'd learned about the coast guard's mission had come to fascinate her even more. She'd applied to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, had been accepted right out of college, and never looked back.

  Until the urge to nest had started to ping at her, that is. Now she wanted it all. Her career. A family. Mac.

  Almost the instant the thought formed, Cari rejected it. Sometime in the past
few weeks, her priorities had inexorably altered. The order of importance was now Mac first, a family and her career second.

  The realization hit her with gale force impact. She wanted Mac. Period. In any way, shape or form she could get him. Everything else would have to fall in after him.

  Now, she thought wryly, all she had to do was determine what Mac's priorities were.

  She got her first inkling later that afternoon, when she escorted her sister to her first meeting with Paulo. Jack stayed with the kids, having decided it was best not to bombard the boy with their whole tribe right away. Instead, Deb brought pictures of the family and their home in Shreveport to show Paulo.

  They arranged to meet the Whites and their charge at the hospital. Harry and Janice were in the waiting room when the two sisters arrived. With the Whites was one of the counselors from their church's adoption agency.

  "Paulo's down the hall with Major Mac," Janice explained. "We wanted a chance to talk with you first, Mrs. Hamilton, and answer any questions you might have about the boy."

  Nodding, Deb lowered herself into one of the waiting room's armchairs. The missionaries took seats lacing her, the official from their church just behind them. He was a slight, scholarly looking gentleman in neatly pressed tan Dockers, a blue oxford shirt, and a red polka-dot bow tie. Introducing himself to Cari and Deb, Henry Easton explained a little about his mission and the difficulties of placing children with disabilities such as Paulo.

  "You understand he was born without a larynx."

  "Cari told me. She also said an artificial voice box could be implanted."

  "That's correct," Easton confirmed. "Our church had arranged to share the costs with the couple who'd applied to adopt Paulo, as their insurance wouldn't cover preexisting conditions. Now, of course, we'll have to put the operation on hold until we screen other prospective parents for the boy."