Hawaiian Medic to Rescue His Heart

by Annie O'Neil

  It had been a turning point for the pair of them.

  Fear brought out the worst in some people, the best in others, and his wife had proactively walked across a line he knew he could never cross.

  Lulu shook her head, as if absorbing it all was physically weighing her down. “What did you do?”

  He’d taken a lot of long walks with Harry asleep in the stroller. Talked with his friends down at the station house. His parents. Harry’s doctors. Strangers... It felt like he’d walked every inch of Manhattan and talked to every soul he’d met, trying to figure out what the hell to do.

  “Hanging on to the rage wasn’t an option. There was no way I could raise my son with my blood running cold every time I thought of Harry’s mother. So...” His eyes caught on Lulu’s mouth as her teeth pressed down on her lower lip, its deep red turning white from the pressure. He looked away and continued. “After some pretty deep soul-searching we opted to call a truce, cite irreconcilable differences as the reason for a divorce, and go our separate ways. Try to hang on to what good memories remained.”

  Lulu harrumphed in a way that suggested she would’ve found it every bit as tough as he had to find any good memories among the ashes of their short-lived marriage.

  “Irreconcilable differences was a pretty apt way to describe it in the end. My ex didn’t want to find out if she had the strength that parenting a disabled son would require, and I couldn’t imagine not digging as deep as I could to do exactly that.”

  “But...” Lulu’s voice cracked as she swiped at tears glossing her eyes. “Harry’s great! I love that kid. I’d hang out with him every day of the week if I could.”

  Her voice was filled with fire, compassion and a need to defend a little boy who wasn’t able to do it for himself. As if the little boy who had been rejected was her own.

  Their eyes met and clashed, cinching in a shared disbelief that anyone could treat Harry in that way.

  She’d never spoken so freely. So passionately. But now that she had he saw that it was true. She was always popping by for a quick surf lesson. Suggesting places to take Harry for burgers, shaved ice and who knew what else. Volunteering to cover for his parents if errands called.

  Neither of them had put a name to what she’d become to them, their little tribe of two.

  There was only one word for it.

  Family.

  But she had to know that his son was his priority. “Harry... Harry’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said.

  “And...” Lulu paused, visibly nervous about how to phrase her next question. “Does his mother see him at all? She must find it hard... You being so far away from New York.”

  The truth pressed against his chest and demanded oxygen. “She doesn’t want to be a mom to a disabled kid. We’ve only been away for a few weeks, but from the day the divorce was finalized she’s taken every overseas job offer going. Harry’s not seen her for over a year.”

  Lulu looked as if this cruel slight to Harry had reached out and slapped her. “Gosh.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Gosh...” He traced his finger around a watermark on the table, then confessed, “It’s probably been harder for me to wrap my head around than for Harry.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s never really been a hands-on mom. We had my parents’ help at the beginning, of course. And specialists so we could understand just how much Harry’s condition affected him. She would take him out on runs and things...you know, in his stroller. But as soon as she started working again, meeting up with her friends, I realized she only spent time with him when she absolutely had to.”

  Lulu whispered a heartfelt curse.

  Zach nodded. “I know. I feel the same. But hanging on to that anger doesn’t do Harry any good.” He looked down at his hands, then back up into her eyes. “It’s why seeing the friendship between the two of you develop has been so amazing.”

  He saw Lulu’s gaze sharpen. They hadn’t even defined whatever it was that was happening between the two of them, let alone what Lulu’s relationship with his son was, but he knew she needed to know. “You’re important to him. He talks about you all the time.”

  “He’s a great kid.”

  Her voice was scratchy, and if he wasn’t mistaken her eyes glossed over once again before she swept a palm across her face.

  A whistle sounded and the emcee from last night’s team-building games appeared at the edge of the dining room.

  “Wheels up, everyone! Games commence in T minus ten!”

  Lulu gave herself a wriggle, as if trying to clear herself of everything they’d just talked about, and when she looked at him there was something stronger, fiercer than in the looks they’d shared before.

  “We’re going to win these,” she said, with a level of determination an army would’ve struggled to crush. “We’re going to win these for Harry.”

  * * *

  “Two more minutes!” Lulu insisted, one hand on top of the other, her body exhausted from the rhythmic compressions she’d been giving the “patient” they’d finally located far off the hiking trail.

  It was well beyond the nine minutes of CPR most humans could receive without enduring severe and irreversible brain damage. Probably double that. Standard practice was to call time of death at twenty minutes, but there were some remarkable cases of thirty, forty and even fifty minutes of CPR preventing that crucial separation between life and death.

  “Let me have a go.” Zach held his hands over hers, ready to take over.

  “No,” Lulu growled, even while silently welcoming the heat of his hands above hers.

  She wasn’t cold—she was exhausted. But she couldn’t stop. Not now. It was her fault it had taken them so long to find the CPR mannequin, cleverly kitted out with a device that allowed it to simulate having a heart attack. If she was successful a green light would ping on over its heart. If not the red light, already on, would turn black.

  “Lulu...” Zach was using his Be reasonable voice. “If you exhaust yourself doing this, how are you going to have enough energy for the rope challenge?”

  It was a good question.

  Manhandling ropes in real life was tough.

  Manhandling them in front of her giant of a brother after she’d drained all her strength on this exercise would be plain old humiliating. Especially when she’d have to throw them from one side of a ravine to another to “save” her partner.

  Then she thought of Harry. Of how many hurdles he’d confronted during the course of his life. And another surge of strength replenished her waning stores.

  Zach sat back on his heels, grim-faced, and watched her. He could’ve read her the riot act. Reminded her that this wasn’t what the games were about. But something told her he knew why she was persisting. This mannequin represented a life. A real life they might very possibly have lost.

  Two minutes later, the light on the mannequin’s chest turned black.

  The color seemed to fill her own chest with a cold, hollowed-out feeling that only equated with one thing: failure.

  “Do you really think he’s dead?” she asked, still giving syncopated compressions to the dummy’s chest.

  She was grateful for the rain, because she didn’t want Zach to know she had begun to cry. She was furious with herself for having insisted they follow a line of broken palm fronds that any idiot could’ve seen were because of a fallen tree, not the trail of clues they were meant to have followed.

  “I do,” Zach said, pulling out a pocketknife. He stood up and started sawing a thick piece of bamboo.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Making a stretcher,” he said, as if it was the most logical thing in the world.

  Her respect for him doubled. They were going to carry back the “body.” Offer it to its family along with the respect they deserved by giving them a chance
to say goodbye to their loved one.

  Despite the black light, she continued compressions as he worked, until eventually a small sob of despair escaped her throat and she fell back onto her heels, arms as limp as noodles, her energy stores utterly zapped.

  “Hey!” Zach was by her side in an instant, pulling her into his arms, holding her so close she could feel his heart pounding against her palm. “You did everything you could.”

  “No!” she cried. “It wasn’t enough.”

  She’d been wrong. This was her fault. Little Miss Mini-Menehune had insisted her knowledge of reading the jungle was better than Mr. Urban Jungle’s.

  Too tired to fight, she let Zach pull her closer, weeping into his saturated top. The rain was pummeling them as if its sole purpose was to remind them that they were mortals up against the might of Mother Nature and that sometimes—exactly like with her parents—all the search and rescue skills in the world would never be enough.

  “Hey,” he soothed. “It’s only a game.”

  “It’s not!” She pulled away from the warm comfort of his arms and began compressions again, ignoring the pain, ignoring the ridiculousness of it all. “It’s so much more than that!”

  “Tell me?”

  Something about the openness with which he asked the question uncorked years of pent-up sorrow and frustration. Perhaps it was because Zach had pulled the Band-Aids off his own wounds this morning. Perhaps it was being on the Big Island, where her parents had first met. Perhaps it was falling in love with someone when she’d least expected it—two someones, father and son—and feeling as though she had absolutely no control over it.

  And then, of course, there was the here and now. Not saving the life she’d been charged to save—the culmination of her biggest fears.

  Her answers poured out of her in a torrent as she persisted with the compressions.

  It was about her parents. About losing them so young. About spending a lifetime trying to prove to herself that if she’d been old enough she could’ve saved them. Could have swum harder, longer, stronger than anyone else, even though she knew it was both stupid and impossible, because sometimes “stupid and impossible” worked.

  It was about her brothers. Trying to crawl out from underneath the endless safety precautions they’d put in place to look after her. Precautions she found suffocating rather than comforting. Stifling instead of enabling.

  It was about having to fight and claw for every inch of progress she’d made in her career. And realizing, once she’d got there, that being at the top would never bring her parents back.

  “Were their deaths preventable?” Zach asked, when she finally paused to take a breath.

  “Yes!” Lulu wailed, unable to hold back the one thing she’d never been able to say out loud. “They could’ve stayed on the shore with me!” Her tears ran in hot, angry streaks down her cheeks and she didn’t even care. “They could’ve chosen me and my brothers, but they didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  In short, choky bursts she began, “My mom was working that day. As a lifeguard.”

  Zach nodded, readjusting his stance in a way that said he’d listen for as long as she needed him to.

  “My dad had brought me down to the beach with a couple of my brothers to pick her up. An alarm went off—a surfer had gone out too far and was caught in the build-up of a storm. My—” The words snagged in her throat until she forced them out. “My mom went out to get him, even though they told her it wasn’t safe. When she didn’t come back, my dad told my brothers to look after me...he was going to get my mom. Neither of them ever came back.”

  The story sat between them as if it were an actual living thing. In a way, it was. Her parents’ deaths lived in her every waking moment. Even in her dreams. The dreams where she got on her surfboard, beat the ocean at its own powerful game of chance and returned, triumphant, with both of her parents—only then she woke up in the darkness, still alone, still the choice her parents hadn’t made.

  It struck her that perhaps her own past was why she had taken to Harry so much. She hadn’t been rejected by her parents in the way Harry’s mother had walked away from him, but she certainly hadn’t been their first choice. Her respect for Zach and his decision to take a job that was more desk-based than life-and-death-based went up about a thousand notches. He’d chosen his son over his job. Forever and always.

  Zach was the first to break the silence. “You do know you’re not to blame, right? That you’re worth loving?”

  She looked at him as if he was mad. “They chose death with each other over a safe life with us.”

  Zach shook his head as if he disagreed, but instead of saying as much he asked, “Why did you choose the same lifestyle? The same risks?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I wasn’t enough for them, so how on earth am I ever going to be enough for anyone else? I need to prove I can survive anything! Rescue whoever needs help, no matter what. I know it sounds insane, and that it’ll never bring them back or change how people think about me, but I feel like I can’t stop until I know in here that enough is enough.”

  She pressed her hand to her heart, feeling as raw and as vulnerable as she ever had. What she was about to say could get her fired...

  “I’m not there yet—I’m simply not there.”

  Zach didn’t shake his head. Didn’t laugh or mock. Instead, he got up and handed her his pocketknife. “I guess you’d better let me take over the compressions for a while. You finish the stretcher.”

  She did as he instructed, grateful for the activity. She’d exposed so many pent-up fears she was feeling overwhelmed by a sense of openness she hadn’t felt before. Of possibility. There was a huge space inside her chest that she could choose to fill with hope or despair.

  She looked at Zach, drenched to the bone, diligently giving compressions to a mannequin they both knew was “dead.” He wasn’t being insulting or derisive. Nor was he furious that they weren’t going to win the games when he knew his boss had all but demanded a red-letter day.

  He had held her. Comforted her. Refused to judge her. Even when she had literally led them down the wrong path and arrived too late to “save” their patient.

  Her brothers would’ve berated her for not listening to them if, like Zach, they had suggested an alternative route and been shot down. But, rather than humiliate her, Zach’s response to her mistake intimated that he knew the job wasn’t black and white. It was about choices. Most of them good. Some of them bad.

  And she was going to have to find a way to live with the bad ones—because while she’d never yet lost a patient in real life, it would happen. She could let it plunge her into a depression or she could take the ego-blow and learn the lesson. And in this case, the lesson was Don’t let your ego overpower your ability to work as a team.

  She’d grown too confident after this morning. The first contest had been a relatively easy rescue from a capsized boat about a kilometer offshore. While the other teams had wasted time flinging ropes and buoys and, courtesy of a choppy ocean, failing, she’d grabbed a buoy and dived into the sea, bringing the tie line directly to the capsized boat.

  Much to her brother’s annoyance, she and Zach had been able to shoot their flare two whole minutes before his team had.

  But she’d made the decision to dive in on her own.

  It should be a bitter pill to swallow. Realizing how selfish she’d been. How myopic. Instead, Zach was giving her the space to learn that she could trust him. And with that came acceptance.

  “Zach?”

  He looked up, his shoulders steadily moving down and up, down and up, the fluid movements unrelenting even though they both knew it was pointless.

  “I think we should call time of death.”

  “You sure?”

  There wasn’t a trace of scorn in his voice. He had her back. She felt the moment deeply,
as if he had just offered her a part of himself in the same way she believed he’d offered himself to his son. Without reservation. With an abundance of love.

  They called the time of death. Logged it into their phones. Loaded the “body” onto the stretcher.

  She squatted down and stared at the mannequin. “It’s hard not to feel like a failure.”

  Zach’s eyes shot to hers. “You are a lot of things, Lulu Kahale, but a failure is not one of them.”

  She wanted to believe him. She really did. And the fact that the words came from him meant the world to her. But it was as if he could sense that his words weren’t quite penetrating deep enough.

  He beckoned her to him. “C’mere, you.”

  She gratefully crossed to him, letting herself be fully absorbed into his comforting embrace. As he held her a soft glow of optimism warmed the open space in her chest. Trusting someone didn’t have to be a place of fear. It could be a place of resilience. Possibility...

  If she let it.

  She looked up at him, wanting to put words to the gratitude she felt, but she couldn’t.

  He cupped her cheeks in his hands and dipped his mouth to hers. It was the softest kiss she’d ever known, instantly turning her insides liquid. Each kiss that followed felt potent with meaning, with strength. And with that strength she felt her resolve return. They had exposed their raw wounds to one another. Their biggest vulnerabilities. Their greatest fears. It added a new layer to their obvious attraction to one another. A depth to the supercharged lust that had been fueling their interactions.

  Somehow they managed to pull apart from one another. “Should we get back to the base?” she asked.

  From the heat in his eyes, she might as well have asked, Your room or mine?

  They made quick work of hoisting up the stretcher, then followed the path they’d broken through the undergrowth. They made it back to the hiking trail with the mannequin strapped beneath a heat blanket, and just as the sun broke through the clouds they reached the finish line.