The Doctor's Unexpected Family: (Inspirational Romance) (Port Provident: Hurricane Hope) (10 page)

“I brought her home with me from the church. She’s dancing with that game again right now while I finish up the last few details we need to officially open The Grace Space by the end of the week.”

“So it’s really coming together quickly?” Her voice took on a slightly higher pitch, a glimmer of hope breaking through the stress.

“It is. I’ve gotten so much cooperation from my contacts at Provident Medical and the medical school plus the people on the mainland that I contacted. Everyone wants to feel useful right now and this is giving them a great chance to help out and use their skills.”

“Sounds wonderful. Maybe between your project and mine, we can finally get things moving on the island and bridge that gap between disaster and whatever normal is going to look like going forward.”  She paused, and Pete could hear voices in the background. “I have to go—our break is over. But thank you for watching Celina this evening. I guess I owe you again.”

Pete didn’t need to be thanked for spending time with Celina. The little girl had bloomed practically overnight. He could barely believe that the dancing, singing rockstar in front of him was the same clingy, wary girl he’d met only a few days ago.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said, his mind slipping back to that lightning-quick embrace she’d given him last night.  It had been a long time since an unexpected emotion had jumped through his being. If he could collect anything in return from Angela, it might be another opportunity to know— even for a short moment—that he could still feel.

Angela said good bye and hung up. Pete stared at the phone in the palm of his hands.  He’d always thought there’d never be enough time to process all he’d lost when he lost Anna. But if he was honest, he’d now lost his job and place of employment and much of the town he currently called home. He was determined to rebuild those things, to envision life differently—not as a doctor delivering babies, but as a doctor doing meaningful work on behalf of people around the world. He could see his life moving from Port Provident to some far-flung corner of the world. He had embraced the idea of leaving the clinic behind and setting up shop in a tent or some other mobile facility.

If he could envision all of that, why couldn’t he envision his emotions differently?

He didn’t have the answer. And part of him didn’t like that a two-second hug and a brush of hair had him questioning all of this. He tried to steady all of the forts he’d built around his heart he’d realized there’d be no wedding to Anna and no happily ever after. He wasn’t ready for those barriers to crack or crumble.

Pete looked from the phone to Celina. He didn’t have the answer to these bigger emotional questions about where his future might lead, but he did have a box of microwaveable quick-cooking mac and cheese in the kitchen and some fishing poles down in the garage.

Besides, he reassured himself, he didn’t have to have the answer because in a few weeks it would all be a moot point anyway. He’d be gone to wherever Mercy Medical Mission was sending him, and he’d never have to see the multi-colored look of warm maple syrup in Angela Ruiz’s eyes again. He wouldn’t have to question why he cared about how he felt last night when her arms wrapped around his shoulders.

“Hey Celina?”

She stopped her dance of perpetual motion at the sound of his question.

“Hey Dr. Pete. What’s up?”

“Have you ever been fishing?”

Her eyes grew as large as those on the sand trout he soon hoped to be catching. “No, never. Mama doesn’t really like slimy things, and fish are kinda slimy.”

Pete chuckled. “That they are, Celina. But they’re also pretty tasty. What do you think of some quick mac and cheese and then we can walk down to the end of the street and see what we can find out in the bay?”

Celina nodded, a much more satisfactory answer to a much more important question than anything else he’d been pondering in the past few minutes.

Pete’s soul had always been soothed by the bobbing of the water. But he had no idea how much seeing a simple fishing trip through a child’s eyes could make him smile as well.

Celina loved everything about their fishing adventure. She wanted to look in the marsh grass and see small minnow-sized fish hiding in between the blades. She stood at the water’s edge, looking studiously for crabs or other meandering crustaceans. She even made up a song that consisted liberally of the line “Hey, fishy fishy! Come and swim on by!” sung over and over.

There was late day sun, a gentle breeze that ruffled the hair which stuck out below his baseball cap, and a sense of peace that he hadn’t felt since long before the storm.

Pete took a half-step back and raised his arm, then cocked it back and cast his pole. The line curved in a perfect parabola and landed right in the deepest part of the small finger that marked the border of the Seagull Cove community.

Now to just wait for the tug of a fish at the other end of the line, which was perfect, because for now at least, Pete felt like he had all the time in the world.

“Pete! I thought that was you. But who’s this?” Dr. Gordon Patterson and his black Labrador retriever slowed as they came around the curve of the sidewalk. Dr. Patterson was chief of the division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Provident Medical, and he’d become a mentor to Pete during the years Pete had run the birth center at the edge of the large teaching hospital’s shadow.

“Hey, Gordon. This is Celina Ruiz. Her mother is City Councilwoman Angela Ruiz. I’m watching her for a bit this afternoon while her mother is in a meeting with FEMA and the city regarding temporary housing arrangements.”

Gordon gave the leash a little slack so his dog could sniff at the edge of the marsh grass, not too far from Celina’s perch. “I heard they had to move everyone back to the shelter at the high school.”

“There was a shooting. Angela and Celina actually came to stay in my downstairs apartment after that.”

Gordon nodded.  “A shelter is no place for a child. She looks like she’s enjoying Provident Bay life just fine.”

Pete gave the pole a gentle pop to keep the line moving and hopefully catch the eye of an interested fish. “Most definitely. I’ll certainly miss it myself, once I’m gone.”

“Heard anything back yet?”

“No, but I’m expecting something any day now. I was told it was just a matter of getting some things moved around and finding a slot to put me in. It’s more or less a done deal.”

“So, how long are you going to be gone for?” Gordon adjusted his sunglasses as the sun shifted a bit in the sky.

“I don’t know. I don’t really have a timeframe. As long as they need me, I suppose. But with all the heartache around the world, I guess they’ll always need me.” Pete gave a bit of a shrug. He hadn’t given too much thought to coming back, just to going.

“Well, you can’t stay forever, Pete. Or you’ll miss out on moments like this.” The older man pointed at Celina, studying the crawl of a crab in the muddy shallows.

Pete turned slowly and looked back at his mentor. Gordon gave a little wave. “Well, I guess you could definitely get married and have a family anywhere in the world. Just whatever you do or wherever you go, don’t isolate yourself. Work can do that to you. I was so focused on medical school, residency, fellowships, the pursuit of excellence in medicine that I lost track of a whole other part of my life. I lived to work. I didn’t work to live. When I married Olivia, I was past forty. When we started having kids, I was forty-five. I’d spent so many years thinking of my job first that when I realized Liv was the one thing in my life I couldn’t do without—well, nobody likes to say this, but I had some regrets about how I’d prioritized things over the years. But I used the opportunity to take a hard look at myself and where I was going and I think I’ve got it right. There’s a balance there, and I wouldn’t have missed this second phase of my adult life for the world.”

Woof.
Gordon’s dog let out a low, bass rumble.

 “Enjoy the fishing Pete. It was good to see you—it’s been too long. No matter where you wind up, don’t be a stranger, okay?” The dog let out another woof, as punctuation to his owner’s sentence. Gordon gave the leash a quick tug and took a step. “It sounds like he’s ready to go.”

“It does indeed. Good to see you too, Gordon.”

Pete watched the dog trot ahead, as far as his leash would allow him to go. Gordon was right. The dog was ready to go. And until this very moment, Pete had been ready to go too. He shifted his gaze from the black Lab back to the little girl who had made the afternoon so fun and full of memories.

He’d once talked of marriage and family like it was a given in his life. Then those dreams had been pulled away, and he’d refocused his life and his goals in the wake of unexpected tragedy.

Pete couldn’t deny—didn’t want to deny—that he’d been called to serve others. But as he’d baited Celina’s hook and pointed out crabs and little fish to her, he also couldn’t deny something had stirred way down in the bottom of his heart. Something he thought he’d packed away forever.

And he hadn’t seen Gordon in months, so it couldn’t have been coincidence that he just happened to be walking his dog on this stretch of sidewalk by the bay and drew the conclusion about the afternoon that Pete had been hesitant to draw for himself.

He’d just wanted to create some memories for Celina—every kid on an island needed to know the joy of casting a line in the water.

But had he unexpectedly created some questions for himself?

Angela had finally gotten her car out of the parking garage where she’d left it during the storm. Now that she was commuting between Seagull Cove and downtown Port Provident, she needed it again. Once she’d made it back to Pete’s, she parked her car between the pilings of the beach house, near her temporary downstairs apartment home. She climbed the stairs and went to the door and knocked, eagerly anticipating one of Celina’s all-encompassing hugs.

But there was no answer. And strangely, she didn’t hear any noise from the other side of the door, either. No danceable pop music blaring from the TV and no sounds of dinner, like the clink of silverware on a plate.

Angela’s breath came short. Pete had said he would take care of her little girl and feed her dinner. How stupid could she be to assume that meant they’d stay at the house. How stupid could she be to leave her daughter completely alone—without at least the watchful eyes of the
abuelas
at
La Iglesia
—with someone she barely knew.

She would have kicked herself, but that would take time away from digging in her purse for the key that Pete had given her. She found it in the corner of the zippered pocket at the back of the bag, and with a slight tremble in her fingers, she forcefully pushed the key into the lock and turned.

The door opened and revealed that she’d been right. The house was empty. Angela felt a boulder avalanching through her chest as her heart pounded wildly out of control.

Where were they?

Where was her precious Celina?

Quickly, she ran through the house, looking for any clues to where they might have gone, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary or out of place. In the corner of the living room, she stopped. Placing her hands on her hips to steady herself, Angela looked out the window blankly, racking her brain for some idea of what to do.

A car driving past on the street below caught her attention. Her eyes followed as it headed for the bend at the end of the street. As the red sedan rounded the curve, Angela noticed two people sitting atop a concrete picnic table underneath a flat metal shelter. The hair on one head was mostly covered by a baseball cap, but she could see a mix of brown and premature silver mixing under the edge of the white cap. The other head was covered in thick black hair, held in a sturdy ponytail high atop the crown of the skull.

As she waited for her breathing to flutter back down to a more normal rate, she watched the scene below. Pete pointed up at a seagull cruising past on the breeze. Celina leaned toward Pete as though she were saying something. Pete tipped his head back laughing, and put his arm easily around Celina’s shoulders and gave her a gentle squeeze.

Moments before, Angela would have sprinted to the ends of the earth to find her baby. Now, she stood in the corner of Pete’s small living room, her feet rooted to the hardwood flooring below as she took in the full scene.

Fishing poles rested against the side of the picnic table, and a tackle box sat nearby. Angela could see the back-and-forth of little tennis shoes as her daughter’s feet swung happily off the edge of the table.

But most of all, Angela saw something she’d never before seen in Celina’s life—the glimpse of a father figure. Someone who would teach her to cast a rod and ride a bike and put a bandage on a scraped knee when she slid too hard into first base. Celina’s biological father left when he decided a child was going to get in the way of his television career. And while Angela tried to be everything to her little girl, she knew there were limits to how much she could do in any given day.

Since Celina’s arrival, Angela hadn’t dated, and there weren’t any other people who were true caregivers for her daughter outside of a few close family members. No one filled the shoes left by Celina’s absentee father, but Angela had never pushed it.