Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale (14 page)

Chapter Thirty-Three

John woke to the sight of a gutted room. Mike’s side had been stripped of all luggage. His bedding lay folded in a corner. It was Christmas Eve and thunder boomed like the prelude to a B-List horror flick. With the window cracked, a single sheet of paper took flight, gliding from the writing desk to the floor.

John clamored to his feet, picked it up, and went over to Mike’s open closet.

Emptied out. The nightstand clock next to the stripped bed said 9 a.m., though outside it looked closer to midnight.

With the note in hand, John took a seat on the edge of Mike’s bed.

John,

By the time you read this, I’ll be on the first flight out. My plans are to travel until something feels like me. For so long, I’ve chased what others wanted and what it seemed like I should have. I no idea who I am. I have no idea what I like. It like Shakespeare once said, “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.”

I don’t know when you’ll hear from me again. I don’t know what I’ll say when you do. Convince the family that I love them and that it is best for me to be away. I am sorry. There’s more on the dresser. Read it. Burn it. Forgive me.

Mike

John went over and pulled a wad of papers from the nightstand. On it were a laundry list of deeds, listed in Mike’s tight and orderly script. Toys purposely broken. Mean words said. Lies told. And at the bottom were the things he’d done to Deena in her sleep and what he’d done to the maid.

John sat with the papers as lightening illuminated the room. John sat with the papers as thunder quaked and windows rattled. He read them once more. Afterward, he ventured down to the kitchen and lit the sheets one by one on the stove.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Tony rose in the morning to the sight of his bedroom door wide open. In the adjacent bathroom, running water and Lloyd’s nasally falsetto, meant that his temporary roommate was up and ready to start his day. Maybe the open door was a sign that he had made amends with his father. After all, he had saved Mike’s life. Or alerted others to do it. Same thing, he figured.

Lloyd emerged from the bathroom, freshly spritzed in a fragrance Tony knew. His cousin extended tree branch arms and grinned.

“Eh? Eh? Look good, don’t I?” he said.

“You’d look better in your own possessions,” Tony said.

Lloyd went for the closet.

“Hardly. Especially when yours are so much more expensive. I mean, look at all these Jordans. Half of these I’ve never even seen before.”

“They’re custom made.”

“Custom—?” Lloyd looked from him to the closet. “Wow. Just wow. Kids in my neighborhood knock off heads for a used pair off sweaty feet. Meanwhile, you’ve got Air Jordan himself knitting some for you.”

Lloyd went back to admiring the two neat rows of gym shoes. Tony wouldn’t tell him that those were his Aruba collection, only a fraction of what he kept at home.

“I tell ya,” Lloyd said. “One shift in the gene pool and it would have been me with the Jordans and you trying to figure out next semester’s tuition bill.”

“Your tuition isn’t paid?” Tony said as Lloyd disappeared into the closet. “What happened to basketball?”

His cousin attended Florida International University on a basketball scholarship. He’d been a flamboyant point guard who missed as many shots as he made, though seemed not to notice.

“Coach cut me,” he said from what sounded like a cavern. “I’ve been off the team since last spring.”

“But you can borrow money, can’t you? Enough to—”

Lloyd emerged with Jordans in fire limestone green. He held them up to his face for inspection.

“These are nice. Brings out the green in this shirt. Flashy, but I like it.” He looked over at Tony as if remembering he was there. “You can only borrow money when you make progress. And I haven’t.”

Lloyd dropped down on the edge of his bed and jammed a foot into Tony’s sneaker. They were identical in height at 6’1” and apparently identical in shoe size at 12.

“See that? We could be twins. With me being the much handsomer one, of course.”

“You should ask my mom for help,” Tony said. “Tuition can’t be much. She could write—”

“You going to open up those letters you hide in the drawer or you want us to bury you with them when you die an old man?”

Tony followed Lloyd’s gaze to the desk drawer where four envelopes sat. One from Harvard, one from Julliard, one from Yale, one from Berklee.

“You act like nobody raised you,” Tony said. “Like you haven’t got respect for property.”

Lloyd looked at him expectantly. Tony released a weighted sigh.

“I can’t bring myself to open them, okay? They’re the best schools in the world. I was dumb to apply.”

“You’re dumb for not reading them.”

Lloyd marched for the desk and snatched it open. Tony leap frogged to grab his arm.

“I’m serious! Don’t—”

They fell into wild grappling, with Lloyd reaching and Tony slapping. Slapping at arms, slapping at hands, until the two tumbled to the floor. It was Lloyd, the athlete, who found his footing first, snatched up the envelope and waved it triumphantly.

“Lloyd, please—”

“Open them or I tell everyone in the house.”

“No.”

“Remy! Damien! Come see what Tony’s hiding!”

Tony rushed for the door to lock it.

But it was the wrong move.

Now Lloyd had all the letters.

“Lloyd, please.”

How could he explain Old Tony and New? Or the difficulty of not knowing whether he belonged? All decadence and jet setting for the boy who’d once found meals in the trash. Here was the dilemma of his life. In those letters were stark truths: that he was a charlatan and pretender, an upstart waiting to fall down.

He wasn’t ready to fall just yet.

Lloyd cleared his throat, letter open.

“Dear Mr. Tanaka—”

“Don’t!”

“Dear Mr. Tanaka—”

“I won’t listen.”

Tony headed for the door, with vomit building like stacked Legos. Higher and higher it all went towering, until—

“You got in.”

He hadn’t heard that. He hadn’t heard this cruel attempt at—

“You got in, dipshit. Are you listening? Big surprise, you got in.”

It wasn’t true. Another of Lloyd’s tricks at his expense. Another game he didn’t want to play.

“Listen,” Lloyd said and Tony heard the crinkling of paper. “In the real world, nobody gives a shit if you spend your nights in dumpsters. Well, your girl might, but that’s about it.”

“That’s not something I joke about.”

“Whatever.”

Lloyd sat down at the desk, where he opened more envelopes.

“Like I was saying before you forgot your manners, talent is a pretty good equalizer. Somewhere in this world is a kid with thirteen years of music lessons to your seven. That kid just got rejected to Harvard, Yale, Julliard, and Berklee.”

“Why would you say that?”

Lloyd held up the letters, grinning shamelessly.

“Because you got into all of them,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Rioting set off the morning of Christmas Eve. Shouts and the thundering of a thousand feet rocked Deena’s bedroom. She had the skull howling pain of a wine hangover, Tak had an attitude, and now this. Ingrates traipsing like a buffalo herd. No question as to who it was.

Deena jammed her feet into slippers and marched out the door.

Tariq’s children were making a racket again. Three of them rushed up and down the hall, hooting in bare-faced glee while banging every door they encountered. They dog piled one on top of the other with Tony at the bottom, toppled into the wall and repeated.

Deena stalked to the end of the hall, where they jammed like 5 o’clock traffic.

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “And I’ve had enough. Enough of—”

“They’re letting dummies into Harvard!” Remy hooted. “Loons into Yale!”

“Hooray one time for Tony!” Lloyd cried. “Hooray two times for a fool!”

Deena blinked. “What?”

Tony stood with considerable effort, shoving older, bigger cousins off his body.

“They mean me,” he said. “I got in. Early decision at that.”

“You got in where? Harvard?”

“And Yale,” Remy said.

“Julliard and Berklee, too,” Lloyd supplied.

Deena stood up straighter. Frowning.

“But how do you know?”

“Pardon me, Mrs. Tanaka, but is it possible—”

Deena whirled to see a tall, slim woman with liver lips and a thin smile. She wore the black and whites of a housekeeper.

“Whatever it is will have to wait,” Deena said.

“But miss—”

Deena turned back to her son.

“How do you know your admission status? I mean, you’re here.”

“That idiot’s been carrying the letters around for days,” Lloyd said, just as the maid departed with a surly look in their direction. “He’s been too afraid to open them.”

Deena shrieked and her head paid the price. Still, she shrieked some more. For Tak, for Mia, she even shrieked for Noah. Then she swept Tony up. He was his father’s height and well over Deena, but she choked him to her bosom just the same.

“Mom, don’t—don’t cry,” he said and twisted in her arms. Even that word, ‘mom,’ made the tears fall freer.

Meanwhile, he’d turned the color of rich rhubarb and stayed like that till Tak extricated him.

“Harvard,” she said. “Yale, Berklee, Julliard.”

Tak let out a low, impressed whistle.

“Top shelf,” he said and messed Tony’s hair.

They exchanged a quiet, intimate sort of smile, before Tak snatched him in, too.

Deena felt it then: the thing always between the two; the thing that had her as a perpetual third wheel, sitting in on a conversation among friends in a language she didn’t know. Words passed between them in their embrace, words that no one else heard, and once apart, Deena saw both their eyes glistening.

She headed back for their bedroom alone.

She loved that they loved each other so. She loved that they were indivisibly close. Whenever contrariness about it came to her, she reminded herself of these facts and repeated as often as necessary.

Deena dropped down at the stool of her vanity and gave herself a good hard look. Her son—and that’s who he was now—was 18 years old and on his way to college. His transgressions over the years didn’t even hint at the possibilities for wrong. Breaking curfew, too much time on his cell—those were the infractions her son had committed. And the possibilities for bad? Endless. All the wrong choices lay before him on an ever-intersecting path of realities. But her son had made his own way: the right way. She could only find joy at the thought.

Tak came in, closed the door and leaned against it. Like always, he looked at her with eyes that knew too much.

“You okay?” he said.

She wanted to snap ‘yes,’ yes, of course.

Except her mouth wouldn’t comply.

The bed creaked under the weight of her husband.

“He looks like him. More and more everyday, I think,” Tak said.

There was no need to say who or even why they were talking about that.

Still, Deena didn’t trust herself to answer.

“Sometimes I ask myself if I could ever let Kenji go,” Tak said. “If I could ever be okay without my doppelganger.”

“And what did you realize?”

He looked at her. “That I hope to never know.”

He rose and pulled her over to the bed, where they sat together.

“He needs you, too,” Tak said. “He needs a mother. I can’t be that.”

Deena dropped her gaze, scarlet illuminated her cheeks.

“I know.”

She thought he would kiss her there. It was such a Tak thing to do.

Instead, he rose and went for the door.

“Breakfast,” he said. “Because the sooner we start the day, the sooner we can finish it.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

After leaving Mike on the roof he’d gone and put his wife to bed, locked the door, and headed to the billiards room for a drink. Eventually, Tyson had joined him. They had drinks, talked movies, and insulted each other’s sports teams. It was almost as good as being with John—John before the divorce, that is. Tyson, who mentioned Ash a few times, seemed to be feeling wistful himself. They’d parted on a good note.

Tak had slept that night with his wife in a vice grip, her head on his chest and both his arms around her. More than once, he woke with his pulse skittering, only to have it calm at the sight of her sleeping still. His dreams had been filled with Mikes. Mikes raping and confessing and pillaging and plunging to his death. And when at last Tak gave up on sleep, he took a chair to watch his wife dream of Aubree Daniels.

Her name was like a broken whisper in the dark, a swept cobweb, a bit of shattered glass. Tak knew no more and no less, only Aubree Daniels, said once.

Then there was her, a phone that held secrets.

It gave him childish wants, that phone. It gave him impulses. He wanted to rummage through it, smash it, and stomp it in abandon. He wanted to spit misogynistic things at her, to remind her of what her bible said about her husband’s role in her life. But none of that was him.

He hadn’t been honest with her. Not when he retrieved her sleeping body from the upstairs sitting room. Not when she woke from her dozing in the middle of the night. Everything was fine. All was alright. That was what he’d said.

He’d made up his mind not to tell her. Whether it was best for her, he couldn’t say. Only, that it wasn’t possible for him to say the words—words that meant Mike had touch her without permission, violating her. His throat constricted at the thought, as if to squeeze his Adam’s apple up and out.

She would be okay, he told himself. She was obviously okay.

Downstairs, breakfast had already begun. There were great heapings of meat and breads, complimented by cheeses, eggs, and Belgian waffles with two dozen options for toppings piled high on table after table, a spread worthy of Buckingham Palace. Tak sat with his wife, alone. When Noah came over, Tak ushered him downstream with a tilt of his head, where he fell in with a few Hammond kids.

John came next but sat down gingerly, as if the seat itself fueled his discomfort. He had food before him but he didn’t eat, and promptly told them that Mike had gone.

Tak and John exchanged a careful look, only to find Deena studying them.

“I’ll leave you two to your breakfast,” John said. “Anyway, I hear there’s a knucklehead I need to congratulate.”

Deena spoke the second he’d gone.

“You two look as if something happened,” Deena said. “Although, I suppose my telling Mike off is something happening.”

Tak buried himself in his juice, one gulp, then another, until Tony entered and the room. It exploded into whoops and jeers and a dozen or so clamored around him. When at last he emerged again, his cornrows had frizzed and his shirt twisted, and lopsided.

Tak took in Deena’s bewildered look.

“What?” he said.

She looked at him as if trying to focus.

“It’s just…it was nothing like this when I went off to college. No one cared. No one.”

He wanted to tell her that these were different people; that her grandfather was dead and Caroline was but one in the crowd now. No family was the same at any two points in time, anyway. Families shift, grow and shrink, while priorities and how they perceive life changes with them.

“Mr. Tanaka?” a maid said.

“Not now,” Tak said.

“But Mr. Tanaka—”

“Is it possible for me to have one meal with my wife without being interrupted a hundred friggin’ times? Unless you’re coming to tell me which one of you has been lifting all the liquor, I don’t want to hear it. And who stands over people when they eat, anyway?”

“Tak—”

“Sir, it’s only that—”

“Take the day off,” Tak said and turned back to Deena. “Take more if you like.”

The maid snorted, mouthed off something he couldn’t make out, and stalked away. Tak stared through the plate before him.

“Baby?”

Boy was that an annoying look. The one people gave when they wondered if you’d finally succumbed to the voices in your head. Tak looked pointedly at Deena.

“What?”

She saw it. That his question wasn’t even a question. It was a statement, a command. Leave me alone, was what it should have said. But like everything, it softened for her. I need a second, was what he’d told her.

He felt a mountain atop them, a mountain of misunderstandings, lies and secrets. But this was no mere peak of stone, therefore scalable. This was comprised of that so delicate, one cinder could ignite it all.

“Tak?”

He returned to his food, smashed the eggs around a bit, and shoveled some in his mouth.

Cold.

He added it to his list of disappointments.

***
*

Tony’s father had granted him a last minute reprieve after news of his college acceptance. The second he’d done so, one word whispered in his mind: Lila. A phone call, a shower, hurried breakfast, and three thousand claps on the back had brought him to that moment. Tony climbed from the sedan like a man jumping bail.

She stood at the spot they always met at: the cluster of squat adobe fixtures, in turquoise, pistachio, and white.

Lila ran to meet him. A tall, raven haired figure pressed into a fitted blank tank and tights. She threw arms around him and showered him with pecks, body sinking into his so tightly that he felt every curve, every hint of flesh. She murmured something in Dutch and pulled back long enough to grin. Then the kisses started in for a second time, one long and luxurious after another. Tony’s arm found her waist and cinched it, mouth against hers and working.

“Somebody’s been lonely,” she said and unraveled from him with a teasing grin.

“You mean me,” he said and felt the smile slip from his face.

“Yes you,” she said and tousled his hair.

Tony took her by the wrists and placed her arms aside. Only one of them had been lonely? He pushed the thought from his mind.

“How’d you get free?” Lila said. “That man seemed so angry. Who was he, anyway? Kinda cute for an older guy.”

“My dad,” Tony snapped.

Her face went slack, as if presented with an insurmountable problem. Then it brightened. “Oh! So, you’re…adopted?”

He didn’t like the way she said it, as if it were something subject to xenophobia, some puzzling otherness she hoped never to have the misfortune of catching. There was some vague pity there, too, alongside the implication that he must be deprived of the truth concerning his identity.

It occurred to him that they didn’t talk much. That she knew nothing of his home life, of how he grew up, of what he wanted. She’d never even heard of Lizard or Wendy, though they knew something of her.

Lila batted over long lashes at him and it wrapped her arms around his waist.

“I’ve ruined the mood,” she said. “But I know how to make things fun. Let’s go shopping. Then you can spoil me.”

His mouth curled down on an exhale.

“How about we talk?” Tony said. “Or take a walk on the beach?”

She cringed.

“Really? You sound like an online dating profile.”

“Fine. You think of something. But I didn’t earn early release just to take you shopping.”

She coiled up to him again, slipped an arm around him, and let red painted lips brush his ear.

“We could go behind that building over there.” She tilted her head in the direction of an evening café. “Have a little fun.”

Despite his better judgment, Tony’s breath caught as the thrill of arousal snaked up and down his body.

“Outside?” he breathed, and like that, his flush of abandon evaporated.

Outside. An image of Lila topless, of him on her, of his father stepping from the shadows turned him cold, all titillation forgotten.

“Yes, outside,” Lila said, to which he extricated himself a second time. Unlike the first, she held on, resisting his urge to be free. With his hands on her wrist, he was able to forcibly remove himself and give her a hard, bewildered look.

“What’s with you?” he said.

“What’s with you? You’re all into me one second and throwing me off the next. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t love me.”

She crossed her arms and huffed, bottom lip springing out before stealing a cautious glance his way. They’d never talked of love—love wasn’t possible—hell, he didn’t even know where she lived.

“You don’t love me,” she said, in what she only thought was a voice tinged in hurt. Instead, she sounded like his kid sister, back when she lugged eyeless baby dolls around. She’d lose them and demand his help, which grew tiresome quick. When he stopped, she’d accuse him of not loving her.

Except, he did love Mia, so that always worked, whereas with Lila, he felt only…urges.

“So, you love me?” Tony said and held eye contact. “You’re honestly trying to say that you love me?”

They didn’t keep in touch when he left Aruba, they didn’t write, they didn’t call, they didn’t email.

She swelled at his question, chest rising, chin rising, eyes lit.

“I can’t believe you have to ask,” she said, but as she said it she dropped her gaze.

His mouth thinned in irritation. It tended to do that whenever people avoided his questions.

“So,” he said. “Just to recap, we’ve established that the answer is ‘no.’ I don’t love you and you don’t love me. We’re just two kids having a good time.”

“That girl you call when you think no one’s looking,” she said. “The one back in Miami. She’s the one you love.”

Tony started down a side street toward a row of shops; Lila fell in step behind him.

“Where are you going?”

“Away from you. You’re annoying me.”

“You’re annoyed because you’re hearing the truth?”

He stopped. They stood in the shadows of a two story building. A YMCA, he realized belatedly.

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You’ve never even met Wendy. You didn’t even know her name until I just said it.”

“I know she must be pretty important.”

She looked proud of herself, as if she’d made some great point.

“Yeah? So?”

A Honda hatchback rolled by. Tony recognized it as belonging to Tito, one of Lila’s best friends. As inseparable as him and Wendy, last summer there’d been only a few occasions where they’d been without him.

Tony watched him drive off.

“Are we meeting him?”

She pursed her lips at the question, snapping off an “of course not,” that seemed unduly irritated.

“You’ve picked the worst time to start an argument,” she said, making him wonder who had done what. “If you knew what I needed to talk to you about, you’d feel horrible for how you’ve been treating me.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed.

“I think you should let me be the judge of that.”

She took a deep breath and extended a hand to him. He let it hover, staring.

They stood like that, with traffic milling by and the sky rolling toward darkness.

She’d let it hang forever, it turned out. So with a sigh, Tony accepted her hand.

She looked up at him with eyes that were more honey than brown and wider than he recalled. Mixed with a thousand things, he thought. All the islanders seemed to be.

Against his better judgment, he pulled her in by the hand and took her into his arms. His body responded to her even if his mind didn’t, and soon their mouths met. She responded to him as expected, their heat never ceasing.

“I’m pregnant,” she said between kisses.

He ran a hand under her shirt, then froze before pulling away.

“What?”

“I’m pregnant, Tony. I’m carrying your baby.”

His cloud of lust abated, making room for understanding.

“How can you be?”

Her mouth curved into a smile. “Tony, be serious.”

“I am being serious!” He turned, as if to leave, only to double back. Dumb shock had blazed to fury.

“I am being serious!” he yelled again, because he could think of nothing else to say.

But then he took in her features: her bloodless face, her searching gaze. His reaction shocked her, but why it did, he didn’t know.

“Tony, don’t be mad. I mean, I know it sounds like bad news, but—”

“It sounds like bullshit.”

“What?”

“I said, that this is bullshit. That you’re on some bullshit.” He roped in a thousand thoughts organized on a deep breath, and moved forward. “You may be pregnant,” he said. “But you’re not pregnant by me.”

“Are you really doing this?”

“It’s not possible, Lila. What’d you do? Conceive on Monday and call me on Wednesday? Good scam, I can see you thought it through.”