Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale (20 page)

Chapter Forty-Five

The sky smoldered a cobalt blue and streaked in fitful bouts of lightening, as they stood on the terrace boarding back windows. The wind was fierce. An old fierce, as ancient as God.

John was a menace at carpentry. He’d hold a plank and affix it with a single ill placed nail, then balk when it swung and crashed to the floor.

“The one side has to hold so I can get to the other. What kind of wood is this?”

Of course, Deena thought. The type of wood. The chemical consistency. That was the problem.

Thankfully, others worked faster, which meant that Tak found the means to help John. Which meant that two bumbled for the price of one.

“Oh really,” Deena snapped in a moment of impatience. She took the hammer and nails, stuffed both in the pocket of her skirt, and snatched the bit of wood out John’s reluctant hands. A well placed nail and a few snaps of the wrist had her protection up on one side. Quickly, she moved to the other and repeated the same. Rain sprinkled her.

“Showoff,” John muttered.

Deena turned to demand more wood and her phone rang.

She saw it then. The tense crease of her husband’s mouth. The set of his shoulders. They’d been reduced to this, she realized. Not trusting. Suspicious of even a phone call. Deena thought of her conversation with Daichi.

A slight peek into her pocket revealed that Allison called. Deena snatched it out, as thunder rocked the room.

“You’re still here?” she said.

She turned her back to John, who stood waiting with his next piece of wood. Tak, stoic as he watched, had both hands loose at his side.

“Deena,” Allison said breathlessly. “They’ve cancelled all remaining flights, including the one I was on. We’re marooned and I’m terrified.”

Deena shot a look at John, who wore his crumpled white shirt for yet another day.

“Come here,” she said.

“I can’t. After all that’s happened—”

“Come here, now, Allison.” John snapped to attention. “This is your safest possible option. Of course, John would want you here.”

Now neither John nor Tak moved. Deena, whose heart beat with the insistence that she’d been too bold, too presumptuous, pushed the thought from her mind.

“You need to get here any way you can. Bribe someone. I don’t care. It’s getting scary out there.”

“There’s no one to bring me.”

“No one to bring you? There must—”

“Where is she?” John demanded.

Deena paused. “I don’t know if—”

“Where is she?”

Hurriedly, she told him the hotel. John tossed the last of his wood and bolted for the door.

“John’s on the way,” Deena said and hung up the phone.

“The driver hasn’t left yet,” Tak explained. “He’s waiting as long as he possibly can, in case we need something. John will probably have to drop him off and sort it out with the chauffeur company later. He’s a lawyer, though. He’ll think of something.”

Deena retrieved John’s discarded plank.

“They better hurry,” she said. “We’ll have to bolt the doors soon.”

In simulated recreations, hurricanes were always disciplined circles of torment traveling in a neat, predictable path. Tony knew, because he’d studied every storm that had formed in the Atlantic Ocean since his moving to Miami. “Studied” seemed too mild a word though. He agonized over those storms, writhed over them. He imagined every one as the one—the one that would shred every manmade structure in its path, hack at every human limb. This storm, he told himself at every single one, would raise the floods of Noah and bring locusts to their mangled bodies.

His phone sirened every time a smidgeon of a signal fought its way through. Lizard and Wendy checking in on him again. Tony texted them when he could, but found that every word, every act in reaction to the mania outside only fueled the pump-pump of his heart and the nonstop swallowing he kept up.

The wind shrieked its hysteria. Glass doors, doubled down with planks of wood and reinforced with duct tape, might as well have been wisps of white lined paper. Every bit of glass in the house rattled like the barred cells of the innocent, rabid creatures on the other side, wild in the need to unhinge.

Dinner on Christmas Eve was to be an elaborate event, a 12-course meal dwarfed only by the 21-course one scheduled the next day. Now, family sat huddled together in the ballroom, scarfing down cold soup and lukewarm duck, all the hired help from the island now gone. Everyone that remained cast dark, expectant glances at the boarded up windows. Where endless banter and wild whoops had been the norm, plate scraping silence now dominated.

Tony looked at his cell, unable to help himself as he force fed. There, he found a message from Wendy.

Wish I were with you.

With him. Not in safety, but with him. Selfishness struck Tony and he wrote:

I wish you were too.

Not Lila, he realized, but her. He wanted Wendy there with him, desperately.

Tony knew what it meant. Not only that, he knew what his anger about Gage Sawyers meant and hers about Lila. He could go so far to say that he had always known what it all meant.

He was in love with his first and truest friend. And she was in love with him.

Simple as that, the last puzzle piece of his life fell into place.

****

So far, they’d had only howls and threats. With nightfall descending and the true storm hovering in the distance, Deena and her husband eked out their last moments alone together in bed. It was their final stab at privacy, while privacy was still an option.

Deena laid on her side, studying the silent figure beside her. He was stiff in a way that felt foreign to her, in a way that followed no fight they’d ever had. Something occupied his mind.

“Are you worried about the storm?” she said. “I know the preparations were rushed but—”

“No,” he said gruffly.

“Then what?”

Tak’s lips parted before a puff of air escaped.

“Tyson,” he finally said.

Deena blinked. They’d fought over so much that week. What happened between her and Mike in the bathroom. The extent of his relationship with Aubree Daniels. Tony. She didn’t even know that her husband knew her cousin’s boyfriend.

“What about him?” Deena said.

Tak stared at the ceiling, stared through it, if that were possible.

“I don’t want to say.”

“Please do.”

“Why?”

He looked at her.

She had no right to say what she was about to say, no right to assert anything given the fierceness with which she’d guarded her secrets. Still, she felt the need to try.

“Because we’re married,” she whispered.

“Married.” He snorted at her words as if they were mere conjecture.

An afternoon of silence passed between them.

“He tried to kiss me,” Tak said.

“What? Like a Frenchman?”

“No, Deena. Not like a Frenchman. You know what? Forget it.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“The man’s gay, that’s what I’m telling you. He was hoping I’d be gay with him.”

“Well, he can’t be gay, he’s with Crystal!”

Tak sighed. “Tell him, not me.”

Deena stared at her husband. He had all the rigidness of someone expecting a cobra strike. She ran a hand along his arm and trailed fingers to his, laced them, and heard him exhale.

“I’m not—a homophobe,” he said as if the point had been pressing him. “It was just…I’m sitting there doing bro time. I don’t expect one of the bros to try and tongue me.”

Deena smothered the urge to laugh, then thought about her cousin and felt it dissipate altogether.

“What should I do? Talk to Crystal?”

The idea nauseated her. Five years they’d been together and Deena could shatter that with a few words.

“I told him to tell her or I would,” Tak said. “But by me, I really meant you.”

Deena looked at him.

“Maybe it was a mistake,” she said hopefully. “You know how you guys are with your zealous masculinity. Tyson violated some unspoken code and now you think it means something it doesn’t.”

Tak looked at her, his mouth a single thin crease in his face. All the blood had rushed away, leaving him blanched in its wake.

“The man thinks I look like his dead lover, Deena. He wants me to replace him and not tell you. You don’t need it clearer than that?”

Her mouth rounded out to a lower case ‘o’. Her husband snapped up like a rubber band, snatched on a tee and crumpled jeans. Deena followed him with her gaze.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Checking on Tony. You know how he gets about these things.”

He gestured vaguely to the atmosphere before stepping out the door. It slammed soundly behind him.

Outside the wind howled like a legion of the damned. Deena closed her eyes and focused on the pummeling rains, a tempestuous brew of turbulent, roaring showers. An insane urge came over her to run out, throw her head back and let the rage have her, full on as it came through.

Deena pulled on clothes and rushed out the door. She intersected with Tak as she passed Tony’s room and ignored his calls for her.

Downstairs, only two doors remained unsecured. They were strategically identified escapes should the storm make departure necessary. She headed for the one that served as the servants’ entrance and threw it open. It battered back shut in her face. When she shoved it a second time, it took both hands to keep it wide.

Blustering winds beat her to blindness with the first step, whipping and tearing at her hair, plastering it with rain to her eyes. Midnight descended like a cloak. The sound of rain filled her ears to capacity, water pouring on concrete, ceaseless, resolute.

Minutes of stillness had her drenched and shivering, with storm water running arctic currents down her face, flooding her mouth, and painting clothes to every curve and crevice of her body.

“What are you doing?” Tak yelled from the threshold.

Deena shot him a grin and let the storm engulf her.

With all life’s planning things happened, the heavens opened and destruction found a way in. All that lived came to die. All that was one day ceased to be. Every moment of her life had bathed in meticulousness, the careful work of a girl craving order. But that meticulousness, that careful planning had carved none of who she came to be. Wife. Mother. The things important to her. Even planning had its limitations.

And so, she’d stepped out into the storm, threw her head back and her arms heavenward.

Never had Deena done something so reckless.

Never had she felt so free.

Chapter Forty-Six

At midnight a window exploded, leaving the sound of cannon fire blasting into the mansion. Those who had been upstairs rushed down to see the damage, before Tak and Daichi ushered everyone into the drawing room.

“It ripped the boards straight off, I swear,” Lloyd was saying as Tak gave him a shove in the back, parting him from a horror-stricken Tony. “It was like peeling steel off a skyscraper. Those winds must be like, 400 miles per hour.”

Tony stared, wide eyed and rooted to his place.

“We’ll be fine,” Deena said and squeezed her oldest son’s shoulder. “Better than fine, in fact.”

They were the first words between them since the blowout and both seemed to be testing the waters since then. Deena with her words of comfort and careful touch, Tony with his look of latent remorse.

Noah careened past them as they spoke and cheered as another clash of thunder rocked the room. Mia came in sullen, not far behind, skateboard under her arm, no doubt sour at the closed in space. Any place that wasn’t big enough to skate was bound to put Mia Tanaka in a foul mood.

Tanakas, Hammonds, and the hired help that had traveled with them, pressed into the room, a room with a single, wide-paned, boarded up window. Grandma Emma, parked by Aunt Rhonda in the corner, had already begun muttering scripture.

“Behold. God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid.”

Tony found a seat at her feet.

“For yah, the Lord is my strength and song. He has also become my salvation.”

Mia sat down next to Tony; skateboard in hand, and said something for his ears only.

He smiled.

“Therefore,” Grandma Emma continued. “With you joy, you will draw water from the wells of salvation.”

Her gaze stopped on Allison as she entered.

“Glad you could make it,” Grandma Emma said.

Allison’s cheeks flushed an enthusiastic purple.

John entered next. Allison looked up, as if not knowing he was so close behind, and glued her gaze to her husband.

There was no one else in the room. No one else on the planet. Even their hurricane melted away in the look those two gave each other, a silent want mingled with naked pain.

John said nothing. Allison said less. Deena waited, spurring her on in her mind. Go to him, do something, fix this, she thought, even as her own problems mounted in a rearview mirror. The singular nature of adultery seemed so simple compared to the problems that she and Tak faced. Forgive or not forgive the one act; that was what needed to be decided. But for Tak and Deena, half a dozen, two dozen grievances, stacks upon stacks it seemed, stared back at them—more than either could hope to address.

Someone coughed. Allison crossed to Deena, saying not a word to her husband.

“Thank you for letting me come,” she said. “After all the flights were cancelled and the hotel was evacuated, I wasn’t sure what to do. Even the taxi cabs had stopped running. I swear, it was like this storm…came from nowhere.”

She was babbling, babbling because she had the attention of everyone, babbling because she wanted to look at her husband and didn’t want to look at her husband, less he realize how much she wanted to look at him. But the lights flickered out and all that was forgotten.

A whirring sound sliced through the groans. A promise of lights followed that—there and then gone and then there once again. Electricity returned.

“Thank God,” Deena said. “Let’s get the matches and stuff together. In case the backup generator goes out.”