Hawaiian Medic to Rescue His Heart

by Annie O'Neil

  She gave her shoulders a shake and then asked the EMT dispatcher, “Have you heard anything about him? About Duke?”

  The fact he was on the island at all was rare. They’d made plans to meet up now he’d got back from a film set somewhere in Africa, but had yet to make good on it. She cursed herself for not having made it a priority.

  He’d always been one of her favorite big brothers, but perhaps that was because he was the one she knew the least. He was ten years older and rarely on the island, because his work took him round the world doing stunt work for some of the world’s most famous action stars. Her memories of him were mostly from when she’d been a little kid. She’d always thought of him as the fun one. The one who’d throw her on his back and run her round the backyard, neighing and whinnying like he was a horse, when she’d gone through her I want a pony phase. The fact he’d become a stuntman had been a surprise to no one. Tall, muscular and fearless, he was every action film director’s dream come true.

  She couldn’t begin to imagine a world that didn’t have all that energy in it.

  She felt her face muscles twitch as reality hit. No matter who she went to, how many favors she tried to beg, she was going to hit wall after wall after wall. The only thing she could do was what the rest of her family was doing. Wait for news.

  She found Makoa and Pekelo at her grandmother’s house. The three of them were staring blankly at tall glasses of iced tea, ice cubes long melted. Her grandmother filled her in. Laird was on a flight over from Maui and Kili, the navy SEAL, was being kept updated by his admiral on the aircraft carrier he was posted on somewhere on the other side of the world.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?” Mak asked.

  What little composure Lulu had left crumpled.

  “Hey!” Her brother was up and by her side in an instant. “What’d he do to you? Want us to run him back to the mainland? He’s still on probation, right?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s me. I’m the one who messed up,” Lulu said, tears finally surfacing and trickling down her cheeks.

  “What’d you do?”

  “I quit. I quit my job.” She could barely believe she’d been such a stupid idiot.

  “Why?” Pekelo asked.

  “He grounded me.”

  Mak snorted in disbelief. “Lulu, you got problems.”

  “Yeah? Tell me about it, Mr. Perfect!” she snapped.

  He rapped his knuckles on the table, commanding their attention. “It’s how it works, Mini. You don’t get to pick and choose which rules to follow. They exist to keep us alive, yeah? You think I want to be here when I know I’d be more helpful up there? I won those search and rescue games for a reason. I’m the best there is. And they’ve grounded me. If I didn’t know in my heart that those rules are right I’d be up on that hillside trying to dig my brother out with my bare hands!”

  Lulu nodded and buried her head in her hands, ashamed of having taken Zach’s decision so personally. And, yes, of course she knew exactly what Mak was talking about. She’d be doing exactly the same if she was allowed. They all would. But instead they were having to find the same faith the general public placed in them when they set out to rescue their loved ones.

  I trusted you.

  The words played on a loop in her mind, over and over, grating against all the other decisions she should have made.

  How on earth was she going to fix this?

  When she looked up, Makoa was waiting for her, expectant. “What’s really going on, Mini?”

  It was a good question. One that had got so tangled up in the melee she hardly remembered where all her churned up feelings had begun. And then, clear as a bell, she remembered Casey, sitting on that picnic table, as casual as could be, wondering aloud when Lulu would leave Zach.

  Her stomach turned as she realized just how beautifully Casey had put a name to her predictability. How it had proved true so quickly. It had taken...what? Two minutes? Three? A tiny earthquake had cracked her world in two. One decision that she knew Zach had struggled to take and she’d snapped like a twig. She’d taken everything she felt for him and his son and shoved it in his face as if they meant nothing to her.

  “I messed up,” she finally admitted.

  Makoa pulled another chair up to the table they were all gathered round and had her sit down. She poured her heart out to them. Told them everything. How she’d not been sure about Zach at first, how they’d seemed to clash so much, but how, eventually, she’d seen how similar they both were. She told them how they’d been fighting off deeply embedded fears and overcoming them. Together. And then she’d gone and ruined it all when she’d wanted to fix something she never could.

  No matter how many rescues she went on, her parents would never, ever come back. She saw that now. Saw the futility of her misplaced anger. The destructiveness it had wrought in her life. Never enabling her to establish deep, enduring friendships or relationships until...until she’d gone and done it with the single most wonderful man she’d ever met. Zach Murphy.

  Her grandmother, who had sat silently throughout her emotional outpouring, took a long drink of her tea, then said, “‘A humble person walks carefully so as not to hurt others.’”

  “I think I already messed that part up, Gran,” Lulu said miserably. “Got any other sayings that might help me out of this mess?”

  Her grandmother’s lips softened and twitched lightly into a smile. “Quite a few.”

  “Lay ’em on me. All of them.”

  Her grandmother gave them each a thoughtful inspection. When her eyes landed on Lulu she said, “‘A child behaves like those who reared her.’”

  Lulu and her brothers sat up at that. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You’re all headstrong! Tempestuous. Too quick to decide upon a solution to a problem.”

  Lulu huffed out a dark laugh. “Jeez, Gran. Kick a girl when she’s down, why don’t you?”

  Makoa gave her a light fist bump, but because they all loved and respected their grandmother they fell silent as she cleared her throat to continue.

  “There’s another side to those traits all of you possess. Bravery. Strength. Wisdom. Especially you, Lulu. But it’s up to you which traits you most want the world to see.”

  The comment landed where it had been meant to. In her heart.

  She knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she loved Zach. She would eat a thousand humble pies—more, if it would fix what had happened between them. He had a son he cared for more than himself. He knew exactly what sacrifice was. What trust was. And she’d all but spat on the trust she knew he held sacred.

  She wasn’t sure he would ever forgive her for it. But she had to find out. And there was only one way to go about it.

  Earn both his forgiveness and his trust.

  “I’ve got to go.” She gave her brothers each a hug, and her grandmother an extralong one. “Thanks, Gran. Wish me luck.”

  Her grandmother pulled back, her arms still around her, and smiled. “You don’t need luck, child. You need to do what you’ve taken a lifetime to realize.”

  “Which is?”

  “Look to the future. It is the only way to make peace with the past.”

  And in that instant Lulu suddenly understood how her grandmother was able to have such a Zen-like relationship with life. She’d been as hollowed out by grief as the rest of them when Lulu’s parents had died. But she’d had six grandchildren to help raise, their futures to think about. Being consumed by the pain of loss would never have helped anything or anyone.

  Lulu had fallen victim to exactly that. Pinning the urgency of each and every rescue to some sort of scorecard she’d made with the universe. If, one day, she got enough points, she’d get the top job at work and her dream house. Neither of which would mean anything without Zach and Harry by her side.

  She gave her gr
an’s cheek a kiss, then said, “I’ll meet you all at the hospital in a bit.”

  Mak frowned at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Duke’s going to need us there. Whether he’s in surgery or just suffering from a bruised ego. And we’ll be there for him.”

  Pek frowned, and started to say something, but she cut him off. “If Duke’s not there...we’ll be there for everyone else. Yeah? Like he’d want us to be.”

  Their frowns turned into soft smiles and nods of affirmation.

  She held up her phone. “Keep in touch, yeah? I’ve got to put a few things right.”

  “Are you going to answer it this time?” asked Mak.

  “Every time,” she said, meaning it.

  She wouldn’t ignore her family, her friends—the people who loved her most—anymore. It was time to become the woman she’d always wanted to be. A good one.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE LANDSLIDE WAS BAD. Real bad.

  The only way the two of them would’ve stood a chance of surviving was to have been thrown beyond the crush of iron soil, rock and tree roots.

  The helicopter was doing its best to navigate the ravine, where any survivors would be found.

  “Lower,” Zach instructed as he eagle-eyed the sun glinting off a bit of silver. He was sure he could see it now. The handlebar of a quad bike. “A couple more meters, Stew.”

  Stewart’s voice crackled through his earpiece. “That’s as far as I can get the chopper down, Zach. You’re either going to have unclip and risk having to hike out, or we need to find somewhere else to put you down.”

  He thought of Lulu’s face. The way it had drained of blood as she’d heard the news about her brother. The way tears had poured down her cheeks as she had performed CPR on the “dead” mannequin back when they’d been in the search and rescue games. She didn’t give up. Not until she had to. And he was a long way from having to.

  “I’ll unclip.”

  “Is that wise?”

  No. It wasn’t. But there weren’t an awful lot of rational thoughts going through his head right now. What he should’ve done was taken himself off the job, too, but right now he needed work like he needed oxygen. It was his go-to coping mechanism—slapping the blinkers on, closing off the rest of the world, so that his brain had a chance to absorb whatever the hell it was that had happened and do something positive. Something helpful.

  Guilt pierced through his focus.

  Exactly like Lulu.

  If she wasn’t helping, all her demons swarmed in. And he’d left her there on her own, with nothing but her fears and a demand for her resignation as companions.

  As he unclipped the stretcher, and then himself, dropping to his knees for a body roll to take the impact of the fall, realization dawned. This was his pattern. If he screwed something up he had to go fix something else. Anything but the actual problem. When his dad had got sick after 9/11 he’d retrained as a medic. When his son had been born with a disability he’d started running marathons for the cerebral palsy charity instead of spending time where he should have. In his marriage.

  Cause and effect. Cause and effect.

  He’d fallen in love with Lulu. It had scared the hell out of him—not having control over her, not being able to predict her next move. Or, more to the point, keep her safe.

  He’d cornered her into quitting. Forced her hand when he knew better than anyone that being handed a shovel and told to dig would’ve been a kinder, more loving thing to do.

  But he’d seen red and walked away. Had wanted control of a situation he had no capacity or right to control.

  Letting his wife go had been the safest option for his son.

  Letting Lulu go...

  Every pore in his body was telling him it had been the wrong decision. A cowardly way of making her take the fall for a situation that scared the hell out of him. Loving someone who knew her own mind. Her strengths. Her weaknesses. And his.

  She’d read him like a book and when he’d shown her his true colors, his fears masked as machismo, she hadn’t wanted any part of it. He didn’t blame her.

  He felt the ground shift beneath his feet as he tried to stand. There were tens of thousands of tons of earth here. Displaced soil and rock from the cliff... And one handlebar from a quad bike.

  He shot off a flare gun, hoping the fire and rescue crew hiking in from the coast would see it through the jungle canopy, then dropped to his knees, pulled his collapsible spade from his backpack and began to dig.

  A few minutes later the ground crew arrived. Perimeters were marked out. Trajectories calculated for how far Duke and the other quad rider—a stuntwoman called Jessica—would’ve been thrown. They dug and dug and dug as if their lives depended upon it. Theirs might not, but Duke’s and Jessica’s did.

  A shout went up. They’d found Duke.

  Zach was by his side in an instant. He’d unearthed more than his fair share of survivors from collapsed structures and the odd sinkhole. He knew one false move could make the difference between life and death.

  With infinite care, they unearthed him, relief flooding through the group like the sun coming out from behind a storm cloud when they discovered he was alive. He’d obviously sustained some internal injuries—that was made apparent by his low, thready pulse—but the fact he’d been wearing a helmet had played a massive role in his survival. From the angle of one of his legs, there would be at least one compound fracture to tend to as well.

  After carefully securing him to the stretcher, Zach put a neck brace on him, checked for any outward signs of bleeding or additional compound fractures that needed immediate attention, and then, fairly certain that the only thing holding him together was his cleverly designed costume—a padded motorcycle suit sewn into a business suit—left him intact.

  Zach radioed Stewart, asking him to try to get the cables down one last time before they made the decision to walk him out. The half hour or so it would take to carry him to the nearest road was time that might mean the difference between life and death. And there was no way Zach was going to tell Lulu they hadn’t done everything humanly possible to ensure the outcome they all wanted.

  It took Stewart a minute or two longer than it normally would have, but he did it. Zach clipped himself to the safety basket and rode up with Duke, telling him over and over how much his family was looking forward to seeing him again...how much they cared...how he should hang on because help was close at hand.

  When they landed on the roof of the hospital, emergency medical staff were there to take over, but Zach ran in with them, anyway.

  “You can’t come in, man,” said one of the doctors, his eyes on Zach’s dirt-covered uniform. “Operating room has to stay sterile.”

  Zach backed off, the swinging doors of the OR practically hitting him in the face. He felt his phone vibrate. He grabbed it out of his safety vest. Twenty messages were sitting there. The phone buzzed again. Twenty-one. All of them from Lulu.

  She was here. In the hospital. He wasn’t to worry, but—

  He jammed the phone in his pocket and took off for the emergency room entrance at a run, heart pounding, brain buzzing with too many possibilities—all of them dark—to let just one take purchase.

  He scanned the busy waiting room. He saw Harry first, and then Lulu. They were playing a board game on a little table in the children’s play area. Lulu was keeping Harry actively engaged while sending yet another text under the table out of Harry’s eye line.

  Zach didn’t know what he felt. Relief. Gratitude. Fear. They weren’t here for the fun of it.

  “Duke’s in surgery,” he said.

  “Your dad’s had a heart attack,” Lulu said at the same time.

  “He’s going to make it.” They spoke simultaneously. Then again. “You go.”

  Nervous laughter filled the space between them until Zach
gestured for her to speak.

  “Your dad had a heart attack. He’s alive. I got some aspirin into him straight away, which helped. He’s getting a couple of stents put in, but other than that he should be good as new. Your mom’s with him now.”

  Harry grabbed his dad in a waist-high hug and beamed up at him. “Lulu saved Grandpa!”

  Zach shook his head, not understanding. “Were you in the ambulance?”

  “No. I was over at your parents’.”

  He gave her a blank look.

  She lowered her voice, giving Harry’s head a little scrub. “I owed this little man an apology for running out on him. And your parents. And you.” She winced and gave an apologetic smile. “I might’ve said a few things I didn’t mean...”

  “You had every right. I was thinking more like an overprotective boyfriend than a boss.”

  She opened her mouth and goldfished, a sheen of emotion glossing her eyes.

  “Don’t cry, Lulu!” Harry dug into his pocket and handed her a tissue.

  She thanked him and looked across at Zach, as though she wanted to say something but couldn’t.

  Harry jumped in and explained how Lulu had come over and apologized to them all for leaving the barbecue. “She said she was scared for her brother, and needed to see her family, but that made her realize she felt like we were family, too! She said she loved you, Daddy. That you made her a better person.” He started singing a little song, the lyrics composed of three words. “Lulu loves Daddy... Lulu loves Daddy...”

  Their eyes met, and the connection was so strong between them that Zach felt as if she had actually handed him her heart.

  Lulu still loved him.

  Harry tugged his hand, keen to finish his story. “And then Grandma and Grandpa were so happy they said we better have ice cream. So Grandpa went to the freezer, but he fell down, and Lulu pressed on his chest until the ambulance came, and now he’s okay.”

  Again his eyes snapped to hers. “You did CPR on my dad?”

  She nodded. “And you dug my brother out of a mountain.”

  And there it was. Love in a nutshell. You did whatever you had to do, whether or not you knew that your love was going to be returned.