Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3) Page 3

  “Hemi. I . . . I . . . It’s Koro.”

  It was still heat-wave warm outside, and the gooseflesh had risen on my arms all the same. “Tell me.”

  “I just . . . he’s alive. But I should have called you. Why didn’t I call you?” Her voice was high, nearly out of control.

  “Hope.” I put all my command into it. “Stop. Take a breath. A deep one. Let it out, then take two more. Don’t talk. Breathe.”

  I heard the sharp inhalation, then silence, and finally, in a slightly calmer tone, “OK.”

  “Right. Now tell me. What happened?”

  “He didn’t come to get me. I thought he must have forgotten, or got the date wrong, or changed his mind. I couldn’t reach him, and I couldn’t think what to do, so I just came anyway. And all these hours . . .”

  The pitch of her voice was rising again. I said, “You don’t have to tell me that now. You don’t have to think about that now. Just tell me what happened.”

  “He said he fell. He was saying something when we were waiting for the ambulance. Muttering something. He was coming to get me, and somehow, he fell. He broke his arm, too, I think, or his shoulder, because it was all . . . wrong. Twisted wrong.” Her voice wobbled on the words. “And he hit his head on the corner of the dresser. So hard. He bled so much, and the paramedic said he was in shock. It’s cold here, and it was a long time. He’s been taken to the hospital, and Tane—he’s taking me there now. We’re going, and he’s called some other people. Your family. He saw the ambulance and came over. But Hemi.” There were tears, now. “He’d been lying there for eight hours. I’m so . . . I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t know. And you did find him, and got him help, too.”

  “If I’d called you, you could have had somebody check on him. He wouldn’t have been there all this time.”

  “And if I’d called somebody else when I couldn’t reach him,” I said, “he wouldn’t have been lying on the floor for eight hours. I didn’t call, because it would’ve hurt my pride to do it. And you didn’t call me because it would’ve hurt yours. How did you get there? To Katikati?”

  “On the bus.” Her voice was thready, so exhausted and distressed, and I felt a surge of worry to go along with the fear for Koro.

  “Have you slept?”

  “Not . . . not much.”

  Tane’s voice, now, practically vibrating the phone out of my hand. “Cuz. You’d better get your arse out here. Koro’s not too flash, and Hope isn’t much better. Why the hell did you let her come like this, without taking better care of her? And why didn’t you or Koro tell us she was coming? One of us could’ve gone to collect her, instead of her getting here dripping wet and dead tired, and Koro lying there with his head split open.”

  “I’m coming now,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

  Hope

  I was more tired than I could remember ever being, at least since the worst times with Karen, but I couldn’t sleep.

  I was in Hemi’s bed, in Hemi’s teenage bedroom. But there was no Hemi to put his arms around me and tell me it would be all right, or that I hadn’t done everything as wrong as I knew I had. Or maybe it was that there was no Karen for me to be strong for. For the first time in my life, I not only had nobody to comfort me—which was the normal state of affairs—but, so much worse, I had nobody to comfort. Because I’d left.

  And every time I tried to shut out all the confusion, to close my eyes and find the sleep I craved more than any drug, I saw Koro.

  Sprawled face-down across the bedroom floor, his pants half-on, his bathrobe askew around him, his body so still, it froze me, too. I’d struggled to turn him onto his side, thinking in some dim corner of my mind, Recovery position, while I’d thought about heart attacks and strokes. I’d seen the blood that had covered his face and flowed onto the floor, that was still seeping out from a gash in his scalp. I’d felt the iciness of his skin, and it had turned mine just as cold.

  I’d felt frantically at his outflung wrist for a pulse, but hadn’t been able to detect it beneath my numb, shaking fingers. But he was bleeding, and dead people didn’t bleed.

  It was only when I’d pulled out my phone that I remembered that it was dead. I spotted the old-fashioned corded landline by the bed, lunged for it, dialed 911 . . . and got nothing. I hung up and dialed twice more before I figured it out. There must be a different emergency number in New Zealand, and I didn’t know it.

  My breath sounded loud and harsh in the room, competing with the wind and rain lashing the little house. When I heard myself whimper like a child, though, I pulled myself together. There’s nobody else here. Deal. Cope. You can’t call for help? Then get help.

  I thrust my feet back into my boots and ran. Back out in the rain, in the wind, down the hill to a neighbor, too far away out here in the country. Up a long driveway, where I pounded on a door, waited, and heard nothing. Another dash to another house, and it was the same. I kept running, stuck in a nightmare, the kind where you try and try and you can’t get there, can’t get closer. Until, at the third house, I found somebody at home, and I was gasping out an explanation, and a woman was calling for the ambulance. Then I was running back up the hill again, my boots squelching with water, my hair streaming with rain. Back into the little house, and back to Koro.

  I knelt by his side, held his hand, and waited for a siren. I covered him with a blanket, because that was all I could think of. Now, I was just trying to hang on and wait for somebody to get here, somebody who’d know what to do.

  I wanted it not to be true. I wanted to go backward, to start over, but there’s no rewind button for life.

  When he opened his eyes, I nearly dropped his hand.

  He looked straight at me, but his eyes didn’t focus, and his voice, when it came, was cracked and dry. “Fell . . . down. Got to get up. Get . . . Hope. Hope’s coming.”

  “I’m here, Koro.” The tears I’d suppressed until now were trying to choke me. “It’s Hope. I’m here. You fell, but you’re going to be all right. You’re going to be fine. Help is coming right now.”

  Finally, I heard the wail of the ambulance, and then Tane was in the doorway, big and solid as Hemi. I hadn’t remembered until that moment that he and June lived up the hill. I’d run the wrong way. I scrambled to my feet, and as we watched the paramedics settled Koro gently onto a gurney, I asked, “Could you take me to the hospital with you? Please?”

  Tane looked at me as if I were insane. “Course you’re coming. But you’ll need to change first.”

  It took me long seconds to realize what he was talking about. That everything I wore was soaked, all the way down to my underwear and boots, and I was shivering.

  I changed once again, nearly passing out at the smell when I opened my suitcase, hardly believing that being airsick had mattered a few hours before. I called Hemi on the way to the hospital, which was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. And then we ended up someplace that was all too familiar, even though I’d never been in this particular waiting room before.

  After that . . . after that, the hours wore by, sitting without news while family came and went and, mostly, stayed. Men and women, old and young, babies and children, many of whom I’m never met, until there were nearly a dozen people filling the chairs. Being introduced as “Hemi’s Hope,” and not knowing if it was true. Or maybe it was just that my brain still seemed to be outside my body, that I was running way past empty now, barely able to process.

  One person, I did remember from before. Matiu, Tane’s younger brother. As tall as Hemi, but slimmer and finer-featured, with eyes that gleamed with intelligence and humor. He sat beside me during the hours that followed, his long legs stuck out in front of him, and did something on a laptop. He had that in common with Hemi too, I guessed.

  Me? I just sat, stared ahead of me, and thought, Koro, please don’t die. Also, Poor Hemi, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Not exactly the world’s most productive thoughts.

  When the doctor
finally came out to see the family, it was Matiu, not one of the elder Te Manas, who went to talk to him while the rest of us waited, the anxiety level cranked up another notch as we looked at Matiu’s back, the doctor’s serious face.

  When Matiu came back, he announced, “He’s had surgery in his shoulder, but he’s come through it OK, the stubborn old bugger,” and there was a scattering of relieved laughter, and then some eyes briefly closed, lips moving in silent prayer. “Got a pin in his upper arm,” Matiu went on, “but that’s not too bad. Had an MRI on his brain, and that’s the one they’ll be watching, checking for swelling. Badly concussed, but he’s a tough nut, eh. To last through the shock like that? Yeh, I’d say so. And that he doesn’t have a bleed now—that’s good. Not out of the woods yet, but lucky it wasn’t a stroke after all, just an accident. And that Hope found him before he was worse.” Making me feel better, probably, than I deserved.

  Thank God, I thought, and not in that casual way you say it. In the real way. From down deep. What would it have done to Hemi to lose his grandfather? Koro was Hemi’s father figure, his rock and his conscience and his stability. I knew it.

  “Can we see him?” Tane asked.

  “Soon as he’s in recovery. One person. Reckon that should be you, Auntie,” he told a sixtyish woman. Flora, I thought. “And then, when he’s in a room, you can take it in turns to sit with him, whoever can stay. No kids. Just quiet, eh. Touch his hand. Have a word. Let him know you’re there.”

  The talk swirled around me. I was getting that fading-in-and-out thing again, and Matiu came back to sit beside me and studied my face before saying, “He has his whole whanau with him. I’d say your bit’s done. Why don’t you go home for the night? I’ll give you a lift.”

  “Oh.” I was extraneous, I realized. Not family. Maybe I shouldn’t have come in the first place. “Sure. I’ll just . . . I’ll go.”

  He smiled at me, something sweet in it that reminded me of Hemi at his most open, and I realized yet again why Karen had been so taken with him during our previous visit. “Nah,” he said. “It’s not that you’re not welcome, just that you’re knackered. Come on. I’ll drop you. I have to go to work anyway.”

  “Where do you work?” I asked him when I was in his car, heading north toward the much smaller settlement of Katikati. I was trying to focus, to make conversation instead of sitting like a lump. “It’s a night shift?”

  “Tauranga Hospital.”

  “Oh. Wait. Isn’t that where we just were?”

  A flash of white teeth through the dark for that. “Nah. That was Grace, the private hospital. That’s your boy Hemi. I knew he’d have said ‘only the best for Koro,’ and Grace is all about the orthopedics. I told Tane to bring him straight there. Me, though . . . nah. I’m on the sharp end where the excitement happens. ER.”

  “Oh. You’re a . . .”

  “Doctor. What, you thought Hemi was the only one of us with anything to show for himself? We don’t quite measure up, maybe, but we don’t do so badly.”

  “I never . . . I didn’t . . .” I stumbled over the words.

  “Never mind.” He pulled up to the house. “Twelve hours tonight, for my sins. No rest for the wicked, eh.”

  When I went into the house again and flipped on the lights, feeling as if I’d left it days, not hours earlier, I saw what I’d missed then. A vase of lavender roses on the dining-room table, and in the midst of them, a tiny white envelope held on a stick.

  Hope, it said, and when I opened it, it said more.

  E te tau, toku aroha. Please rest now. If you need me, call me. I love you. Hemi.

  My darling, it meant. My love.

  I knew he must have arranged to send them before he’d known about his grandfather. The flowers had to have arrived the day before, in fact. And all the same, it felt as if he could see me. As if he’d been listening to me after all. I held the note, looked at my flowers, and cried at last. From relief. From fatigue. From confusion and longing and aching need. From everything.

  Now I was in bed, and none of it would leave. I should have eaten, but I’d only managed some crackers and cheese, and a shower had seemed about the limit of my capabilities. The thoughts came and went as if I were caught in a whirlwind, and I couldn’t escape them. The sheets felt cold, and I couldn’t warm up, even though I was wearing pajamas. Finally, I got out of bed, pulled on socks and a sweater from the suitcase I’d finally managed to unpack, crawled back under the covers and pulled them tight around me, and curled into a ball for warmth.

  I tried not to think it. I thought it anyway. Hemi, please come. Please come now. I need you.

  Hemi

  It was after four on a New Zealand Friday afternoon by the time the jet touched down in Tauranga, and nearly five by the time I was walking into the small ward of the private hospital with Karen at my side.

  I hadn’t intended to take her. Or, rather, taking her hadn’t entered into my thoughts at first. I’d changed my mind for a few reasons. First, she’d demanded to come. Second, I hadn’t wanted to leave her alone, not with Noah the Unattached Buddhist hanging about. Third, I thought Hope would want to see her, and that Hope would realize how much she’d missed her sister, how much she needed to be with her again. To live with her again.

  I was determined to use any ammunition I had, you see.

  I wanted to see Hope more than I could remember ever wanting anything. But I needed to see Koro.

  When I walked into the room, he was lying in bed, his eyes closed, his arm in a sling, the white bandage around his head contrasting with his gray-tinged skin, and he had tubes running from an IV bottle into his arm. Koro, who’d always stood tall and strong despite his age, lying there shrunken and wrong, like a mighty kauri fallen in the forest.

  I knew that a man in his eighties couldn’t live forever, and I needed him to all the same. Nothing else was thinkable, but seeing him like that forced me to think it.

  And then there was Hope. Sitting beside him with a newspaper in her hands, her sweet voice saying, “Police urge members of the public to be vigilant . . .” When she saw us, she stopped reading. The paper fell from her hand and onto the bed, and Koro opened his eyes.

  You read sometimes about the worst kind of dilemma. A shipwrecked man, maybe, treading water, with two people he loves struggling beside him and only one he can save. It was the type of question philosophers loved to pose, the type that had always seemed pointless to me. But now? That was how I felt. There was my Hope, pregnant with my baby, and all I wanted to do was take her in my arms and hold her tight and never let her go. But beside her was Koro, and he was alive.

  I tried for words, but none had come by the time I was across the little room to Koro and taking his uninjured hand gently in mine.

  He said, “Hemi. My son,” but it didn’t sound a bit like Koro. No strength to his voice, and his eyes weren’t focusing right, either.

  Neither were mine, for that matter. The tears were threatening to spill, and I still didn’t trust my voice. Instead, I leaned down, pressed my forehead and nose gently to his in a hongi, breathed his breath, and thought, Thank you, God. Thank you for my Koro.

  Across from me, Karen was hugging Hope, who’d sprung to her feet. I stood upright, still holding Koro’s hand, hard and calloused from a lifetime of work. He said, his words slow and slurred, “I took a tumble in the dark. Silly old bugger.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Bit clumsy, maybe, that’s all.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’d have told you not to come, but I reckon you were glad enough of the excuse.”

  “Too right I was. And no worries. I was always going to come.”

  “Should’ve fallen ages ago, then,” he said, and I had to squeeze his hand again and swallow past the lump in my throat.

  I looked across the bed at Hope and saw the compassion and understanding in her eyes, and the lump may have grown even bigger. She wasn’t going to be starting up with me again. Just now, she cared about Koro, she cared about Kar
en, and she cared about me. I could see it in her as if I could see her heart, because I could. Hope was an open book. I just hadn’t bothered to read it.

  “Eh, sweetheart,” I managed, then couldn’t think of what else to say, where to go with it.

  The moment stretched out until Karen heaved a sigh and said, “Could you guys just hug or something?”

  “Yeh,” I said. “Yeh. We could.”

  Hope came to me this time. Straight around the end of the bed and into my arms, sliding into place like my missing piece. I held her tight, lifted her off her feet, and said, “I love you.”

  It wasn’t the most eloquent declaration ever, but it seemed to do the business, because she wrapped her arms around me even more tightly as I set her down, then tucked her head under my chin and laid her cheek against my chest, seeming to need to inhale me the same way I was inhaling her familiar flower scent, the softness and the strength of her. Everything I’d missed. Everything I needed most.

  “Good,” Koro said. “Take the two of them and go. Tane and June are coming after work. Any minute.”

  “Came to see you, didn’t I,” I said, though I hadn’t let go of Hope. “I’ll wait until they arrive, at least.”

  “Nah, you won’t. I’m tired, and I want to sleep. I saw you. Go away.”

  Karen laughed out loud. “Koro’s as bossy as you, Hemi. That’s awesome.”

  I hesitated a moment longer, but Koro closed his eyes and said, “Ignoring you. Bring Karen tomorrow.”

  I smiled, took his hand once more, and said, “We’ll be back first thing in the morning. See you then.”

  After that, Karen, Hope, and I were walking out the main doors into a chilly winter evening, and I was trying to figure out what to say next.

  Karen, of course, beat me to it. “Let me guess. I’m going to get dropped off to get something to eat while you and Hope talk. I’m psychic like that.”

  “No,” I said. “We’ll go home and have something to eat. It’ll be good to be together.” I meant it, too. It was good. “And then I’ll take Hope for a bit of a walk, maybe, and a chat.”