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I don’t know; I’m not a healer.
I bit my lip, struggling to keep my breathing even. I’m scared, Kona. I’m really scared.
I know you are, baby. He walked around the bed until he was standing behind me. Then he slid an arm around my waist and pulled me back against the comforting warmth of his body. “It’ll be okay,” he whispered in my ear and in my head at the same time. “If anyone can help him, Zarek can. ”
I just want him to be okay. I need him to be okay. I buried my face against Kona’s chest, breathed in the sweet, salty smell that was a combination of the water he loved and the sunlight that danced across the waves.
He stiffened a little, and I froze, hating this new awkwardness between us. Then his hand came up, rested on the back of my head as his fingers absently sorted through my curls. Just a little longer, he told me. Let Zarek work a few more minutes.
It was more like forty than a few, but eventually Zarek lowered his arms and opened his eyes. He was sweating profusely and the shaking had spread to his entire body. I reached out a hand, grabbed him seconds before he fell.
“Are you okay?” I demanded.
“Just drained,” he told me. “I’ll be fine after I sleep. ”
“And Moku?” my father asked. “How is he?”
Zarek started to answer, but at that moment one of the monitors attached to Moku’s chest started to beep.
“What is that?” I asked, panicked.
Kona pulled away, turned me to face the bed where Moku lay. And that’s when I saw it. His eyelashes fluttered briefy.
“Moku?” I called, clutching his hand excitedly in both of mine. “Moku, it’s Tempest. Can you hear me?”
He didn’t answer.
“Moku, please come back to me. To us. ”
“Come on, Moku. We miss you. ” My dad added his own hoarse entreaty to mine.
Our pleas must have gotten through, because the limp little fingers laying so passively in my hand suddenly squeezed mine. A smile stretched across his little face. And the monitors, all around him, went crazy.
“Moku?” my dad asked, leaping forward to grab his other hand just as my baby brother opened his eyes.
Chapter 24
“Tempest?”
“Yes, baby?” I leaned over and smoothed Moku’s hair back from his face. It was the middle of the night and he was having trouble sleeping, drifting in and out of awareness.
After he’d woken up from the coma yesterday, the doctors had run about a billion tests. They were all shocked at Moku’s incredible recovery. When all the results came back, Moku was pronounced healthy, yet they hadn’t been quite ready to release him, seeing as how he’d been in a coma many of them had begun to consider unrecoverable.
So he’d been downgraded, put in a regular hospital room for forty-eight hours, and if he had no relapses, we would be able to take him home. We were about thirty-six hours into that forty-eight-hour stretch and I’m not sure which one of us was more anxious. My dad had wanted to send me home and spend the night himself, but from the moment he’d woken up, Moku had not wanted me out of his sight.
Which was okay with me, as I felt exactly the same way.
We’d played games, eaten pizza and ice cream delivered by Mark, played a new Pokémon game (also from Mark) on Moku’s DS, watched enough TV to burn my retinas, and basically had as good a time together as we could manage with him in a hospital bed. The nurses had even let me take him out to play basketball a little bit this evening. I’d hoped it would tire him out enough that he could sleep, but he kept having nightmares. Whether from the MRI and all the other tests they’d run or from his near-drowning experience, I didn’t know.
“Are you going to leave again?” he asked, his voice tinier than I had ever heard it.
“No, sweetie. I’m not leaving this room until you get to come home with me. ”
“That’s not what I meant. ”
“Oh. Right. ” I sighed. “I don’t know how long I’m going to stay, Moku. ”
“So you are leaving again?”
“Eventually, yes. ”
His lower lip poked out just a little and tears filled his eyes. He tried to blink them back, but that only made me feel worse.
“Don’t go. Please. Everything’s awful when you’re not here. ”
As I reached for his hand, guilt was a suffocating weight on my chest, pressing down a little harder with each tear that rolled slowly down his cheeks.
“Oh, baby, I wish I could stay forever. ”
“Why don’t you? No one is making you be mermaid. ”
I laid my head down on the bed next to him, tried to think of a way to explain things so that he would understand. Which was pretty much impossible, as half the time I didn’t even understand the life I was living or the choices I had made.
“You’re right,” I finally told him. “No one made me be mermaid. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t need me or depend on me now that I am. If I stay here, who’s going to help them?”
“If you leave, who’s going to help me do my homework? I’m going to have really hard homework this year because I’m in third grade. Dad’s always busy and Rio’s mad all the time. He says really mean things and if you don’t stay, he’s going to think all those things are true. ”
“Baby, Rio’s just upset at the world right now,” I said, and while it was true, I still had an overwhelming urge to kick Rio’s ass. He could be as big a jerk to me as he wanted, but he needed to lay off Moku. It made me sad to realize things between them were worse than ever.
“No, he’s just mad at you. I don’t want him to be mad at you anymore. ”
“Moku, sweetie, it’s not that easy. Even if I came back for good, things would be different than they used to be. ”
“They don’t have to!”
How sick was it that even as I was trying to convince Moku that I couldn’t go back, not really, I was halfway wishing I could? My life would be a million times easier if I didn’t know about Tiamat or Hailana or my mother’s relationship with both of them. If I’d never heard of that stupid prophecy or learned of the power I could wield.
The idea wasn’t a revelation to me, but for the first time since I became mermaid I really thought about it. If I could change everything—if I could wave a magic wand and have everything about these last eight and a half months disappear—would I?
Would I give up being mermaid?
Give up knowing what really happened to my mother?
Give up Kona?
If it meant keeping my family safe and together, would I really be willing to give up all the good things that I’d gained?
It was the million-dollar question—one I didn’t have an answer to. Not now. Not anymore.
Before I could say anything else to Moku, there was a knock on the door and I grabbed on to it like the lifeline it was. “Come in!” I called brightly, rushing over in case the nurse decided to come back later. The last thing I needed right now was to be left alone with Moku and more of his questions—if things kept going at the rate they were, I’d end up a basket case before the night was done.
But it wasn’t the night nurse on the other side of the door. It was Kona.