Somewhere on Maui (an Accidental Matchmaker Novel) (8 page)

“Okay. Did you grow more with a coach who babied you or one who pushed you?”

“One who pushed me.” Adam gazed at her, felt a grin pull up his mouth. “So
you’re my coach.”

“I find coaching a helpful framework for working with
men,” Dr. Suzuki said primly, folding small ivory hands in her lap. “Most men hate therapy, but under that is fear. Fear of being vulnerable, of being judged. Especially by a female therapist.”

“You might be onto something
there.” Adam unwrapped his second musubi. “Okay, Coach Suzuki.”

“So tell me about this chemistry with you and this
woman and why that was noteworthy.”

“I saw her eyes, and I felt it. A connection like a lightning bolt. Amazing.” He grinned, shook his head. “Haven’t had a moment like that since high school, when just a glance at Malia Jones had me walking around uncomfortable for hours, if you know what I mean.”

Dr. Suzuki smiled. “I think you should try a few more Internet dates. See if you get this feeling again. But I suspect it doesn’t happen that often.”

He picked up his apple, bit in, chewed. “I’m not sure Internet dating is for me. You know who my top match was? My cousin Tami. And I’m already pretty sure we’re too close to be a thing. Seriously, I need to get a handle on this anger, deal with Mrs. Lepler, find a way to see my kids, make sure my mom’s okay—and when all that’s under control, maybe I’ll get back in the dating game again.”

“Great.” Dr. Suzuki smiled. “But you might find that lightning never strikes twice. Our time’s up. I’ll see you in a few days.”

“Thanks, Coach.” He packed up his lunch box and smiled. “I like you as my coach. You can be as hard on me as you want, and I promise I won’t run away.”

“And I like it that you can take it like a man and come back for more.” Dr. Suzuki followed him out, waved goodbye from the door.

“Coach Suzuki,” he muttered as he turned the truck on. “Lightning never strikes twice, huh? I wonder if
you’re right.”

Zoe noticed the patter of rain on the roof the next morning. She’d ended yesterday as a good writing day, shaking off the earlier angst after a nap—but this morning she’d hoped to get an exercise walk in. Well, it wasn’t like it was cold and she’d melt, she thought, swinging her legs out of bed. Maui on a bad weather day was still warmer than California on a sunny one.

She put the coffee on and dressed in her bikini under a pair of nylon athletic pants, a tank top, and a parka shell. Sylvester, seeing evidence of an oncoming walk, danced a little doggy jig by the back door.

Zoe filled her travel mug with coffee, picked up her trash bag for the beach, and trotted through the splashing drops to her Beetle. She drove them to nearby Baldwin Beach, and the great swath of golden sand was deserted in the rain.

She let Sylvester off his leash and picked her pace up to a barefoot trot, feeling her spirits lift as she and the dog ran beside the ocean, dimpled with rain. The ironwood trees, usually shushing with movement, dripped silently, and off in the distance violet layers of cloud wreathed the clefts and valleys of the lush green
West Maui Mountains with mystery. The ocean surged and retreated, translucent and turquoise, expending itself again and again on the sand in a timeless rhythm that matched her heartbeat.  

The patter of the drops on her nylon parka, the happy bounding of her dog, and the wide-open glory of the beach combined to create a moment of perfect bliss. Zoe laughed out loud and ran as fast as she could for as far as she could, and when she walked back, she felt more peaceful
than she had in years.

They returned to the car. Tired, happy, and sopping wet, Zoe still felt an afterglow of the exercise high or whatever it had been. As they drove out of the park, she reached for a water bottle that had rolled off the seat—and ran the Beetle into the truck in front of her.

Adam lay in bed, feeling heaviness in his mood as he awoke. He heard the drumming of rain on the tin roof and stared at the old-fashioned lath-and-plaster, the dim blue light of morning casting cool shadow on the ceiling.

Rain. Great.

His mind ticked over all the tools and supplies on the job site; ever mindful of the possibility of rain, he always made sure any perishable materials were covered and all tools were locked up in the steel storage shed, so the site should be okay.

After his meeting with Coach Suzuki, the combination of detail work, dealing with suppliers, and putting in his own hours pounding nails made the rest of the day fly by. At home last night, Mama had still seemed down and low energy, so he’d joined her watching TV and over reruns of
That ’70s Show
, she’d seemed to perk up. Still, he hadn’t liked her color and how slowly she’d walked back to bed.

Now, with it raining, he’d be able to see about taking her in to the doctor to get checked out. She’d said last night that she felt a little sick to her stomach and dizzy, “probably something I ate.”

He considered getting up, glancing over at the clock. Six thirty a.m. already. He was usually up at six a.m.—but he just didn’t want to get out of bed.

There
wasn’t one thing he could think of right now that brought any sense of anticipation. What his life had become was such a far cry from the dreams he’d had at college—working in his own business, alongside his father’s company. Designing environmentally sustainable buildings, where people grew their food and cleaned their air through careful venting and greenhouses, and inner spaces were lit with sunlight. Buildings that gave back as much as they took from nature.

He folded his arms under his head and stared at the ceiling, listening to the rain. Ever since he was a kid, the sound of rain had filled him with a contentment he couldn’t put into words. Rain meant no outdoor chores. Enough rain meant he wouldn’t have to go to school. Rain meant
their father had the day off from his construction jobs and would stay home and play with him and his sisters, and rain usually meant Mama spent the day indoors, cooking delicious things.

Now rain just meant lost hours working, potential damage and setbacks on the job
site, and staying home with Mama, whom he loved but was worried about.

He shut his eyes, picturing what he wished rain meant.

Mama healthy and happy, talking to his wife in the kitchen—a wife who’d let him sleep in. Diego and Serena, knowing rain meant he’d be staying home, blowing the door right open and running in to jump on the bed for tickles and hugs.

His wife. He didn’t believe in living together without a commitment.
There was not a question in his mind that he’d get married again—it was just that he was going to wait for the right woman this time. No matter how long it took. He’d gone in too fast and for the wrong reasons with Cherisse.

This imaginary
woman was someone kind, someone who loved kids and his mom, someone who laughed and cried easily, someone who made his hands want to tangle in her hair. Maybe he could wish her into being. When he shut his eyes and wished, what he saw was a pair of green eyes.

Adam sat up abruptly, spooked, and
threw the covers off. He was worse than a chick, lying in bed daydreaming of a life that would never happen instead of dealing with the realities of what was.

He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, frowning at his stubbly face, hair all directions, boxers drooping off his narrow hips. He heard his mom in the kitchen, rustling around, turning on the water to make coffee.

He decided to shave. No sense looking like hell just because he felt like it. He lathered up his face, dragged the razor down, the song of the rain accompanying the scrape and tap of the razor. He was blotting his face with a towel, wondering when Alixia Lepler was going to make her next move, when he heard a crash from the other room—the distinctive sound of someone falling.

Adam followed the ambulance, his hands sweaty on the truck’s wheel. He tried to get close enough to ride its wake, ignoring red lights and other vehicles. The white square vehicle with its nightmare cry and strobing lights outraced him, and he found himself stomping on the brake way too far into an intersection.

He cursed and backed up behind the line, ignoring another driver’s angry honk. He used the moment to speed-dial Charl. “Mama fell. Something with her heart. I’m following the ambulance.”

“Oh no! Did you call Mele?”

“She’s next. See you at the hospital.”

He held down the speed-dial for his youngest sister. “Mele? Mama’s been taken to the hospital. Something with her heart.”

“Oh my God! Is she okay?”

“Obviously not. I’m chasing her ambulance.” Mele, the youngest, always seemed to need everything explained a second, sometimes a third time when she heard something she didn’t like. “See you at the hospital.”

He hung up on her excuses. She’d come eventually. He didn’t need to sit
there listening to her process of adjusting to the situation that had already broken over him like the storm that was slanting hard rain onto the truck’s windshield.

The light changed and he lurched forward, speeding past Ka`
ahumanu Center on the left. Maui Memorial Hospital was only a few miles farther.

He remembered his mother’s face, drained of color, her hands curled against the breast of her house muumuu. The knot on her forehead where she’d hit her head on the corner of the stove had swelled immediately. Her gasping breaths and gray color were the stuff of nightmare.

She’d been conscious but unable to speak when he’d roared in from the bathroom, already calling 911 on his ever-present cell phone. He’d propped her head on a pillow, elevated her feet, and chafed her hands until the paramedics got there.

Thank God he hadn’t had to do CPR.

The EMTs had been very interested in the situation yesterday and told him that she’d probably had a small heart attack already. The nausea and tiredness she’d felt were lesser-known but common symptoms of heart attack in women.

He pulled into the parking lot, cruising up and down the packed parking area searching for a spot and finally took one marked “Doctors Only.” Let those well-paid assholes drive around looking for a parking spot; they were just going to work while he was trying to find out what had happened to his one remaining parent.

He jogged into the emergency room and up to the admissions window. “Hi. I’m Adam Rodrigues. My mother was just brought in by ambulance.”

“Oh good. Glad
you’re here. We had her information on file. Here are some admission forms for you to fill out.”

“Do you know anything? How’s she doing?” He took the clipboard and pen.

“I’m sorry.” The admissions nurse seemed to be doing her best to be understanding. “The team took her straight to the back, and they’re doing the best they can for her.”

“Okay.” He turned away—and faced a roomful of wailing babies, hunched street people, and anxious parents.

Emergency room hell.

He walked back outside, the automatic doors whisking open. He sat on a rock wall abutting the entrance under the canopy where the ambulances drove in and did some relaxation breaths. Remarkably, they seemed to help.

He stared down at the clipboard.

God. His mom. He knew that in many other places in the United States, young
men with sisters didn’t usually end up taking care of their mothers—but this was Hawaii, and in his Portuguese-Hawaiian family, caring for parents was an honor and a matter of course. As the oldest and an unmarried man, he was the natural choice to be her caregiver.

It had never been as hard as this moment. He began filling out the particulars on his mom—her birthdate, social security, insurance, current symptoms, past surgeries. He didn’t know everything, but maybe one of his sisters would.

Mele was the one to waddle up to him first, her husband, Pat, trailing.

“Adam!” Mele’s face, a softer, prettier version of his own, was distorted with crying. She was wearing a bright green sleep T-shirt with a smiley face that bulged over her pregnant belly. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. They arrived before me and took her straight into the back. They’re working on her. The waiting room is a little full. I needed some air.”

“Oh God.” Mele covered her face, hunching her shoulders on fresh tears, and Adam reached out an arm. “C’mere, sis.
It’s okay. Don’t get stressed. It’s bad for the baby.”

Pat nodded vigorously. “I’ll take the papers in if
you’re done with them, Adam, see what I can find out.” Clearly relieved to hand off his emotional wife to her brother, he took the clipboard and hurried inside.

Mele sobbed on his shoulder as Adam rubbed her back, patted the tumble of her long black hair. Mele had been the apple of
their father’s eye and had taken his death harder than any of them. The thought of losing their mother too, along with pregnancy hormones, was clearly more than she could handle. He felt bad for his impatience earlier.

“
It’s okay. She’s going to be okay,” he soothed, rubbing her shoulder, kissing her forehead.

That’s when he glanced up and saw Zoe with the green eyes walking toward him.

He froze, staring at her. He could tell she’d seen him kiss his sister, and he could tell she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion by her narrowed eyes, by the way she clutched her little silvery dog tighter and literally lifted her nose in the air as if she smelled something bad. She passed him, walking stiffly into the emergency room.

What was she doing here? And what the hell could he do about it now? Did he even want to?

His gut told him he did want to do something about it. In fact, in spite of everything, his heart rate had jumped to double speed at the sight of her.

Mele had stopped sniffling and sat back upright. “Thanks, Adam. I don’t know how you do all you do. I’m such a wreck right now.”

“It’s being pregnant. You get a pass.” Adam smiled at her, tweaked her nose as he’d done since she was a kid. “Get yourself together. Mama wouldn’t like you being upset. You know she’d tell you it’s bad for the baby.”

“I know.” Mele rubbed her belly in an unconscious gesture as old as time, smoothing the ridiculous smiley face design over the mound. “Just another month. I can’t wait for this part to be over.”

Adam’s mind was still on Zoe, wondering what had brought her to the emergency room and wondering what the hell to do next.

Zoe went
through the lobby of the emergency room, feeling like she was underwater. The sight of Adam, Mr. “Be True,” with his arm around a pregnant woman, was the next scene of a nightmare that had begun after her beatific beach walk in the rain. Even on the day she lost the babies, on the day Rex left her, she’d had her mom and girlfriends to cry with—but here she was on Maui after a car accident, and the only one there for her was Sylvester.

She still couldn’t even see a pregnant
woman without a stab of pain to her womb reminding her of all she’d lost. Seeing Adam kissing that woman’s forehead, rubbing her back—she couldn’t put words to the grief it brought roaring up. Sylvester licked her chin and pulled her back into her aching, stiff, shocked body as she stopped at the admission desk. “I need to see a doctor.”

The nurse glanced up, frowned. “No dogs allowed in here.”

“I got in an accident.” The accident hadn’t been bad. Her hood was dented, but her air bag hadn’t deployed, and she’d been able to talk to the other driver and hand over her insurance card—but then the stiffness in her neck had set in and she’d driven to the hospital. Her mind seemed unable to think of what to do with Sylvester but hold him. “He was in the accident too.”

The admissions nurse pushed a clipboard at her. “What are
your symptoms?”

“I think I have whiplash. I felt okay when it happened. I talked with the other driver and he drove off, and so did I—but I started feeling funny.” Her beloved Beetle’s hood bore a big crease, but the truck she’d hit had been unmarked.

“Okay. Fill this out. Have a seat and someone will see you—but we are on a triage system here, so we are going in order of severity of need.”

In other words, Zoe didn’t rate a doctor anytime soon. Zoe took one of the molded plastic chairs, gradually realizing the room was packed with people, all in varying levels of distress, pain, and anxiety. The collective misery was overwhelming.

Sylvester lay unresisting across her lap and let her prop the clipboard on top of him to write, a highly unusual behavior. She found she could hardly tip her head. Her neck had gone so stiff. Gripping the pen was challenging, as the muscles of her hands had spasmed into cramps when she’d squeezed the wheel so hard on the moment of impact.

The airbag failed to deploy,
she thought as she filled in the little boxes.
I wonder why the airbag didn’t deploy.

One of the toddlers who’d been wailing escaped from his mother and ran toward Zoe, sticky little brown hands grabbing Sylvester’s silvery coat. He put his curly head on her dog’s side.

Zoe set the clipboard aside, knowing Sylvester’s patience was severely strained by the child’s impulsive gesture, but her dog remained passive, even turning to expose his belly. The mother, wearing a bright-patterned homemade skirt and blouse, had chased the child across the lobby, chastising him in a foreign language filled with liquid syllables.

Zoe smiled, made a gesture to stop the
woman. “It’s okay. He can pet him.” Immediately, every child in the emergency room left their parents’ side and clustered around Sylvester, stroking him and exclaiming. The first toddler, clearly sick in some way with flushed cheeks, put his little face on Sylvester’s belly and hugged the dog with both arms. Zoe found her eyes filling as the mood of the room was transformed by Sylvester, who’d closed his eyes in bliss and surrendered to worship by various humans.

The toddler’s mother smiled, stroking her child’s head. “Thank you. My baby, he sick. He so unhappy.”

“He obviously likes dogs. Do you have a dog?”

“We come from
Micronesia, the island of Yap. We come, and we leave our dogs at home.” Their eyes met. “We miss home.”

“Yes,” Zoe said. “Me too.”

The nurse called the toddler’s name, and his mother scooped him up. He let out a healthy-sounding bellow to be separated from his new friend as the woman carried him off to be seen by the doctor.

The rest of the kids, an older girl holding her arm against her chest, a young boy and another toddler, a little guy not more
than a year old, clustered around Sylvester, petting him and asking questions: “What’s his name?” “How old is he?” “What kind of dog is he?” “Where did you get him?”

She was fully occupied with the children until a shadow fell over them, and a pair of long, tanned arms reached in to pluck the toddler off of Sylvester, where the child had begun an intimate investigation of the dog’s ear.

“Hi, Zoe. I see you’ve met my nephew, Kaden.” Adam handed the toddler to a frazzled-looking young woman who shared Adam’s striking golden-brown eyes. “The family’s all here. This is my sister Charlotte.” Charlotte gave Adam a curious glance—
Who is this
? that glance said more clearly than any words—but she smiled at Zoe.

“Hi.
Your dog is very sweet to put up with all this mauling.”

“I know. He’s not usually this patient.”

The pregnant girl had come in, and she sat down beside Zoe. “Any friend of Adam’s is a friend of mine.” Her face was puffy with tears. Zoe shook the hand she extended automatically. “I’m Mele.”

“Hi.” Zoe felt her throat close up. This was Adam’s wife or girlfriend. His very pregnant
woman. She couldn’t put words to her feeling. Embarrassment? Surprise? Disgust? It was some paralyzing combination. She glanced up at Adam.

Adam cleared his throat. “Our mom had a heart attack. We’re waiting to hear the news.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Zoe’s throat unlocked enough to get the words out.

Sylvester had finally had enough and flipped over, leaping off her lap. The older boy found a ball in his pocket and
threw it for the terrier, and general hilarity ensued as Sylvester barreled after the ball, skidding to a stop and running into a man’s legs. The man, grinning with missing teeth, found the ball behind his feet and tossed it, causing the dog to do a mad scramble toward the other end of the room.

Zoe kept her eyes away from Adam’s, smiling as she watched her dog work his happy magic on the room.

“What’s wrong? Why are you here?” His voice was pitched so deep and low it might have been for her ears alone. The concern in it brought tears prickling again. He must think her such a basket case, always crying—the cheating bastard.

“Got in a little fender bender. It was nothing big. I drove here, but my neck is beginning to be really stiff. I can’t turn my head. And look at my hands.” She held them out. They had curved into claws that echoed the shape of the steering wheel.