by Edie Claire
Makani was another matter. His wavy black hair was streaming with blood and his body was still and lifeless. My dad and Zane loaded him carefully onto the board and the whole group immediately began moving towards the rescue team that was already wading out from shore. Even Lacey was obviously kicking her heart out to keep the board moving as fast as possible while she clung to its tail.
Things started happening fast. Swimmers and surfers already in the ocean converged upon the small convoy from all sides. The rescue team reached Makani and went right to work, starting CPR even as they brought him in. A crowd formed instantly on the beach, cutting us off from where the team came ashore. Sirens blared on the streets. Multiple jet skis approached on the water. An ambulance pulled up on the grass.
“Zane!” I called out. But I couldn’t see him anymore, much less reach him. We couldn’t reach any of them. The crowd had become a mob.
My mom, Kylee, Tara and I stuck close together, pressing forward toward the ambulance. “The paramedics will probably want to check Lacey out too,” my mom reasoned. “I’m sure they’ll all stay together.”
“Do you know—” I asked Kylee, but she shook her head.
“The ghosts were happy when Lacey got him up,” she reported, practically needing to yell, even though we were moving shoulder to shoulder in the jostling crowd. “They were even happy when Zane got Lacey up. They practically had a party. But then it was like their energy was spent. They faded and I couldn’t see them anymore.”
“Doesn’t that mean—” Tara said hopefully.
“I don’t know what it means,” Kylee interrupted, her usually chipper voice choking up a little. “All I know is how awful Makani looked, and the way he was—”
“He wasn’t underwater as long as it seemed,” my mother shouted back. “And his head was still bleeding. Did you see that? He must have had a pulse.”
A ray of hope shot through me. Yes. He was still bleeding!
“Everyone stay back!” a forceful voice ordered through a megaphone. “We need space to work here, do you understand? I need everyone to back up at least ten feet!”
The crowd grumbled with complaint, but complied. We began to lose ground, but my mom was having none of it. “My husband is at the ambulance,” she kept telling people as she elbowed them aside. “Excuse me, my husband is with EMS!”
A little literary license, I suppose, but I wasn’t going to argue with her, because it worked. The rest of us stuck to her like a conga line and slowly but surely, we all worked our way forward. “Aw, look,” a man near the front said sadly. “More than one of them’s drowned. That’s a shame.”
My heart went spastic again. Had Lacey swallowed more water than I knew? What about my dad? The Colonel had been solid as a rock in his day but the man was no spring chicken and his cholesterol was high. And God only knew what havoc the remote viewing had wreaked on Zane before he decided to paddle himself to exhaustion… before he had fully recovered from his own near-death experience!
Five more seconds, and I swear I would have lost it. Lucky for me, I caught sight of those wonderful, beautiful, fantastically gorgeous dripping-wet dark blond curls in three. “Zane!!!” He was standing to the side of the ambulance with my dad.
“Mitch!” I heard my mom yell in front of me. It was all I could do not to make a beeline for Zane by running straight through the clear zone in which Makani was being treated, but I had to fight my way around through the crowd instead. I wasn’t sure whether our cries were heard, but the second Zane saw me, his green eyes lit up with a tired, but brilliant smile.
His arms opened wide and I flung myself into them. His chest was wet, and the water was cold. But the arms around me were strong, and the beat of his heart was the most amazingly fabulously glorious thing ever.
Bliss.
For a moment, no one else existed. “You’re all right,” I stretched up to whisper in his ear, needing to confirm the fact. “You came back.”
“I told you I would,” he said with a hint of amusement, still hugging me tight.
I wanted to say, “Then why did you wait till that moment to tell me you loved me? Were you trying to rip my heart out? Were you trying to give me a heart attack?”
But I didn’t say any of that. I knew that he loved me. I knew because he acted like it, even if he hadn’t said it before. And I could hardly fault him for withholding the words when I’d done the very same thing. I’d loved him for ages, and I’d confessed it ages ago too, but I’d never been quite sure if he’d heard me or not, seeing as how he was in a coma at the time. More recently, I’d just been scared. I didn’t want him to feel like I was pushing him. But I had liked it when he said it.
“I love you, too,” I whispered back.
A roar arose from the crowd. At first it was a general increase in chatter, but then it escalated to cheers and whoops of joy. I rotated in Zane’s arms and looked over to see the paramedics loading the stretcher onto the ambulance. The stretcher’s occupant was coughing.
Coughing!
Makani was curled up on his side, his face and hair still bathed with blood. He gasped, spewed, and spit.
The crowd had never seen anything more marvelous.
Tara and Kylee collapsed into each other’s arms. “He’s going to be okay,” Tara announced, her voice choking up. “He really is.”
“We did it!” Kylee agreed with a nervous laugh. “All of us!”
“Mitch,” I heard my mother say worriedly, “are you sure you’re all right?”
“Diane,” my dad replied with a growl, “if you ask me that one more time—”
“All right, all right!” she conceded.
I looked up at Zane with a smile, but said nothing. He smiled back. He knew that I had freaked out earlier because I was worried about him. And that I was worried about him because I loved him. Apparently, he was okay with that.
Which was good, because it looked like he’d have to get used to it.
The paramedics finished loading the stretcher into the ambulance. Only then, to my shame, did I remember Lacey. She hopped out of the back of the ambulance with the aid of an EMT with whom, oddly enough, she appeared to be arguing.
“I swear to God, I will go to the ER,” she insisted. “But I don’t need an ambulance. I’ve got to find my friend, first. He can take me.”
“We’ll take care of her,” my dad spoke up. “We’ll take her straight to Honolulu. Her parents can meet us there.”
They haggled a few more moments while the medical crew finished loading up, but ultimately Lacey prevailed, and the ambulance screamed off with its siren wailing. The crowd remained a mob scene, with everyone still nervous and distressed despite Makani’s rally. Every second another newcomer raced up to find what was going on and three witnesses were eager to tell their stories. The police had arrived on the beach as well, which was fortunate, since the stand-up paddleboarder who had used no leash was less than popular at the moment. The crowd became so thick that even after the ambulance pulled out we could no longer see either the ocean or the parking lot for the mass of humanity around us.
“Lacey, you were amazing,” I said gratefully, giving her a heartfelt hug. I made sure it was a gentle one, however, because she truly did look terrible. Her eyes were bloodshot, her complexion was pale, and her usually springy blond locks were plastered to her neck and dulled brown with murky seawater.
Her only response was a cough.
“Lacey! Where are you? Lace!!!” We could hear the voice, but we couldn’t see the speaker. Matt was somewhere out there, lost in the crowd. His tone was hoarse and he sounded just short of panicked.
“Can someone else answer him?” Lacey rasped faintly. “I’m not sure—”
Six other voices shouted back at full volume. After a good thirty seconds of Marco Polo, we at last caught sight of Matt hustling toward us. He was still shirtless and now dripping wet and barefoot besides. Given when he had disappeared and how long he’d
been absent, I was sure that he’d swum out with all the others when it looked like the only way to save Makani would be a random dive-a-thon. He might not be a surfer, but his favorite sport next to football was water polo, and I knew he was a powerful swimmer. Still, right now, he looked as exhausted and pale as I’d ever seen him.
I watched his expression as he recognized each of us in turn, and I could tell the exact second he located Lacey. The alert, determined look in his eyes melted to puppy-dog joy right in front of me. He barreled through the remainder of the crowd like it didn’t exist, swept her up in his arms and held her there, her feet dangling well above the ground.
“Matt!” Lacey laughed, beating on his broad back. “Put me down! I can’t breathe!”
He dropped her quickly, but did not let go. His blue eyes bore into hers. “It was you, wasn’t it? I heard that a girl pulled him up. They said she almost drowned. Somebody said she did drown. And then I couldn’t find you anywhere.” His voice roughened. “I couldn’t find any of you.”
“Sorry about that.” Lacey smiled at him apologetically. “But I am a trained lifeguard, you know. I’d be pretty proud of myself if it weren’t for the small fact that I would have drowned if Zane and Colonel Mitchell hadn’t gotten to us when they did.”
“Don’t say that,” Zane protested. “What you did was incredible!”
“It was a team effort,” my dad proclaimed. Then he winked at Lacey. “But you were definitely our MVP.”
Matt’s face beamed down at her. He still hadn’t let her loose. “I’m not surprised.”
“Hey!” A skinny boy of eleven or twelve fought his way over to us. He smiled broadly at Lacey and pointed behind him. “This your board?”
We looked to see a half dozen other boys crowding behind him, one of whom held Lacey’s lost egg board. Her face broke into a grin. “Oh, you found it for me! Thank you! My brother would have killed me if I’d lost it.”
The boys handed the board back toward Lacey, but since Matt still wouldn’t let her go, Zane took hold of it for her. The boys beamed at her as if she were a rock star and peppered her with questions.
“How’d you know to look way over there?”
“How’d you get Makani up? ”
“How’d you see him?”
Lacey looked a little uncomfortable. She shot the briefest of looks at Kylee before smiling back at the boys. “My friends on shore thought he might be drifting my way,” she answered. “So I decided to take a look. I saw him because of all that beautiful dark hair of his. It made him easier to spot. But he was pretty deep, and he was heavier than I thought. I got him halfway up once and then ran out of breath. I had to let him go and come up for air. But then I caught him again and the second time I didn’t have so far to pull him. When I got him to the surface my friends were there to help me, which was good because I couldn’t swim much longer. I was beat.”
The boys chattered excitedly among themselves a moment, chorused a round of thanks to Lacey for helping Makani, and scampered off.
“We need to get you to the ER, Lacey,” I reminded.
“What?” Matt demanded.
“That’s what the paramedics said,” I explained.
“I’m all right,” Lacey protested, coughing again. “It’s just that as a precaution, they—”
Lacey’s feet were off the sand again. This time, Matt swept her up sideways, carrying her in both arms against his bare chest. Interestingly, he did not look tired anymore. “What hospital do you think?” he asked my dad.
The decision was made, and we all headed for the parking lot.
“Let me,” I insisted, watching Zane attempt to carry both surfboards. I took Lacey’s egg board away from him and tucked it under my own arm, and he didn’t protest. We stepped a little bit apart from the others and I spoke where he alone could hear me. I couldn’t help it. I was still worried about him. “When Makani first went under, you looked confused. What was going on?”
To my surprise, he huffed out a breath with a smile. “Um… let’s just say we owe it all to Baldy.”
“Baldy?”
Zane chuckled under his breath. “The ghosts were all trying their best to help. But, well, it’s not like dying made them any smarter than when they were alive, if you know what I mean. The old woman kept gesturing to me, but then she would disappear. I don’t mean fade out, either — I mean she’d drop really low behind a swell, where I couldn’t see her. A couple times she even went underwater. And the other two seemed to be giving me different directions. I finally figured out that Jabba wasn’t giving me directions at all and that I just needed to follow Baldy. He was great. He had a surfer’s instincts. He kept an eye on the crowd and he helped me navigate through the people as well as the currents.”
“Well, what was Jabba doing if he wasn’t guiding you to Makani?” I asked, amazed.
Zane’s green eyes sparkled at me. The color had returned to his cheeks and he seemed, finally, to look more like his old self. “Beating up all the people who were in my way, of course. How else do you think he’d contribute?”
I laughed out loud. “Well, hey,” I pointed out, “at least he was on our side!”
I wondered if I should feel as happy and as relieved as I did, knowing that Makani was still being rushed to the hospital. But deep inside I knew that not only would he be okay, he would eventually make a complete recovery. I knew it in my bones.
Kylee hustled up to my side. “Kali, what are we going to do?” she asked in a hushed tone. “What am I supposed to tell Lacey when she asks me how I knew where Makani was? I don’t think it’s possible to see that far down from where we were. Is it?”
“Probably not,” Zane answered. “But she can’t know that he wasn’t closer to the surface when you saw him.”
“If you saw him,” I reminded, feeling too good to be dragged down by technicalities. “Does it really matter, Kylee? If you don’t want to lie, all you have to do is be vague and avoid the question while you’re here. But I think that at some point, I can tell Lacey at least part of the truth. Like, ‘Kylee just had a feeling he was there. Sometimes she does that.’ Then we’ll see how it goes.”
Kylee studied me with admiration. “You know, Kali, when it comes to the supernatural, you’ve come a long way from ‘I’m a freak and no one will ever understand and it’s worthless so I’m just going to ignore it.’”
“Well, I do still feel like a freak sometimes. But real friends understand,” I answered, smiling at her. Then I shot a smug look at Zane. “And I was definitely wrong about the worthless part.”
“Matt, please!” Lacey fussed at full volume now, kicking her feet in the air. “I am perfectly capable of walking!”
“I’m sure you are,” he replied. “Now be quiet and hold still.”
Lacey growled. “Since when do I take orders from you?”
“Since never.” Matt continued to plod along over the uneven ground, carrying her as if she weighed nothing at all.
“So who do you think you are?” she demanded.
“Good question,” he snapped back. “Hey, Lace. You want to go out with me Saturday night? Like, on a date?”
Kylee, Tara and I all whipped our heads around. Lacey’s pale cheeks blossomed with crimson. Her feet stopped kicking and she went a little limp.
“Yeah,” she said after the briefest of pauses. Her voice still sounded angry. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do!”
“Well, good!” he answered in a voice that was equally cross, although it was obvious he was fighting hard not to smile. “It’s about time you dated a real man.”
Epilogue
“I mean it, Kali. You don’t have to go through with this if you’re not feeling it. Only do it if you really want to,” Zane said seriously. He was looking deep into my eyes with that mesmerizing gaze of his, the one that could melt my every defense into a puddle. I wasn’t sure if he knew how much power that gaze had over me, but if he didn’t, I had no
intention of telling him. Not that I feared he would ever use it against me. Right now, for instance, I knew he felt pretty guilty about all the pressure he’d laid on me the last twenty-four hours.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to,” I answered, a little more sharply than intended.
“You don’t exactly look happy about it, either,” he replied.
I took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. It was a gorgeous day in Hawaii, as usual. Azure sky, spotty clouds, warm sun, light winds. Somewhere nearby, palm trees were rustling and roosters were crowing and feral cats were prowling and children were playing in the sand. But I wasn’t there. I was out in the middle of a friggin’ cold ocean bobbing around on a piece of fiberglass.
A rousing chorus of cheers met my ears, and I looked to see Tara standing nearly erect on her board, arms stretched out to either side, riding a nice, cooperative little wave practically all the way into the shallows. I tried hard to be happy for her while the figure on the beach with the megaphone pumped a fist with excitement. I was genuinely happy for her the first time she managed to stand up on her board. The fifth time was a little much.
“That was so awesome, Tara! You are a natural, girl!” Makani gushed into the megaphone. She could probably hear him shouting without it, but since his doctors had strictly forbidden his getting in the water yet — and we suspected he probably wasn’t even supposed to be out of bed — he had gotten used to calling out instructions from the comfort of his beach chair.
“She does have an amazing sense of balance,” Zane commented, floating on his board beside me.
“Et tu, Brute?” I said uncharitably. My English Lit teacher would be proud.
But Zane only looked at me curiously. “This isn’t a competition.”
He was right, of course. “I know. I’m sorry,” I apologized, feeling petty. I should be enjoying myself right now. Everyone else certainly was.
Tara had been floating around in her own personal paradise ever since Makani had called her cell phone from his hospital bed. He had no idea at that point that Tara even knew the mysterious female surfer who had pulled him from the water. But he remembered that Tara was only in town until Saturday and had wanted to watch him surf, and he was calling — so he said — to let her know that wasn’t going to happen. After Tara told him the whole story (well, the non-supernatural version, anyway), he had insisted on taking the whole group of us out on the waves as soon as he was released.
