Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale (24 page)

Chapter Fifty-Four

No matter how Caroline baited her, Crystal refused to say another word. She laid there in the dark feigning sleep, until sobs racked her body and silenced her mother. Aruba had been a nightmare for Crystal. A dead gay boyfriend, a secret child, and a chance of dying before sunrise. The evening was rich, even by Hammond standards.

Deena stared blindly at the ceiling, heart like a brick in her chest. For the rest of the night she kept company with Crystal’s tears, aware that with Tony, Noah, and Mia between her and Tak, they would lay no closer. Ever again.

Morning brought the ceasing of the rain.

Tak sat up. Black hair tousled, gray tee rumpled, he had the look of a man who’d just left a woman’s bed. He had the look of never ending desirability.

“Do you think…”

This question was meant for her. It was obvious, not because he looked at her, but because the uncertainty in his eyes was so clear.

She shoved back the desire to embrace him.

He hovered, searching her face, before his shoulders slumped, defeated.

“I’ll check the water level,” he said and rose up on two sneakered feet.

Three strides had his lean physique in the door, with a hand on each side of the frame, muscles flexing in his back as he leaned out. Half a head separated him from the top, maybe less with his hair looking like that. With a cursory look Deena’s way, Tak stepped out and started down the hall. Already she knew where he went.

“The house is a nightmare,” Tak said on return. “The water’s at the top stairs, half the windows are smashed out and there’s hardly a place to walk without breaking something or getting tangled.”

“At least our water worries are over,” Crystal said.

“They’re probably just beginning,” Deena said. “It’s not just the interior of the house that’s brimming with water. Outside could look just as bad.”

Tak waded through the tangled web of bodies, most still sleeping, until he found his way to the window.

“Yeah. Either we moved,” Tak said. “Or the sea did.”

Deena slipped in beside him for a view and the bottom fell out of her belly. Ocean waves beneath her feet, lapping at the second floor window.

****

Tak strode for the corner of the room that held their meager supplies—bottled water purified with nine drops of bleach, a handful of candles, matches, a few plastic utensils, and a mountain of canned meats, vegetables and fruits.

Soon, he had the order he needed. John came to his side and they divvied up the food so that everyone had, at the very least, a bit of potted meat and fruit for breakfast.

It was disgusting. Vile cold sludge sloshed around in Deena’s mouth until she swallowed it with the aid of held breath. Brandon refused to eat his, as did Noah, until Kenji admitted that such food was the secret to his performance on the field. Noah scoffed it down then, which made Brandon do the same, both clamoring for seconds.

“It’s like Hurricane Katrina,” Tariq said. “Trapped in a house with rising water, hoping somebody will rescue us. And we all know how that turned out.”

“Right,” Lauren snapped. “Why didn’t we evacuate again?”

“Because we didn’t know to,” Deena said.

“Well, it’s official. Worst vacation ever.” Lauren hugged her legs to her chest, chin pressing knees. Her food sat uneaten.

“Next time try paying for your own,” Deena said.

Lauren choked out a bitter laugh.

“You don’t actually expect us to be grateful do you?”

“Quiet, Lauren,” June warned.

“Do you?” she pressed.

Her eyes stood wide in expectation and challenge. Were Deena not in a broken relationship with Tak and facing the distinct possibility of death should the waters not recede, she might have been more tolerant of Lauren’s frustrations. She might have even expressed some sympathy. But she’d had bullets of sorrow lodged in her heart. There was no room for other’s pain.

“I expect you, Lauren Tanaka, to be as ungrateful, argumentative, obnoxious, and self-serving as you’ve always been,” Deena said. “I expect you to continue masking self-loathing in an outward disdain for everyone and everything around you, including the parents that love and care for you even when you treat them poorly. And I expect you to keep pretending you’re not pregnant.”

Bull’s eye.

Lauren gasped. Every head snapped to face her.

“What are you talking about?” June whispered. “If my daughter were pregnant, I’d know.”

“PharmaCare,” Deena said. “Is a prenatal vitamin. I took it with Noah. That’s why she was so bent on having it. That’s why she looks so plump.”

“You bitch!” Lauren scrambled to her feet. “You had no right to open your mouth.”

She strode for Deena, only to be cut off by Tak, arms spread wide.

“Shut your mouth Lauren and go have a seat.”

“No! You sit here and let your—kakujin—”

“Careful now,” Deena said, also on her feet. “People will think you mean it.”

“What’s a kakujin?” Tariq mused.

“It means a ‘black,’” Mia spat and shoved a Vienna sausage into her mouth, gray eyes narrowed on her cousin.

“Funny,” Jayden said. “She wasn’t minding kakujins last night.”

“The consensus in this house is that she prefers ‘em,” Lloyd said.

Yoshi sat in the corner, weak as a wad of wet tissue, slumped like a man who’d bled too much.

June stared at her daughter.

“Is it true, Lauren? Are you really—”

Lauren threw up her arms. “Oh don’t look at me like that! Like you weren’t practically a child when you had Michael.”

June stood, green eyes wide and wild.

“So, you are pregnant?”

Lauren’s dark eyes searched her mother’s face, contempt spreading with each sweep of the gaze.

“I am so not having this conversation.”

“Uh yeah,” June said. “You are. It should be easy enough.”

Anger held onto Lauren as she stood her ground, seeping out with each passing second that her mother did the same. Finally, the daughter exhaled.

“Yeah.”

“And do you know whose it is?”

It should have been an insulting question. It should have earned all the fire and rancor Lauren had in her soul. Instead, the girl dropped her gaze.

“No,” she said. “You know I don’t.”

“Lauren, I told you the last time—”

“The last time?” Yoshi echoed.

Deena wanted to burn the house to the ground. She wanted whatever madness had crept in to be eviscerated, purged.

Yoshi rose and faced his wife, fever in his face.

“The last time, June?”

Yoshi Tanaka had half a head’s height on his wife. Broad shouldered and pot bellied, he dwarfed the slight yet wide-hipped woman. She looked up at him with the uncertainty of one handling damage control by wielding a single pistol in the face of a mob.

“Yoshiaki, you know how free spirited our daughter is.”

“It’s not the word I’d use,” Yoshi muttered.

June nodded in the way people did when they were hurrying on to something else.

“It was a long time ago. And it was…handled.”

“Handled?” Yoshi cried. “What the hell does that mean?”

“This conversation belongs in the hallway,” Daichi said. He rose and placed a hand on the shoulder of his younger brother and another on his sister-in-law, before leading them and Lauren out.

Shouting exploded from the corridor. Yoshi blaming June for lax rules, June blaming Yoshi for the need to keep secrets, Lauren screaming that both of them needed to get out of her life. Daichi’s attempts to referee and reprimand went so poorly that soon he was neck deep in the shouting, with June sobbing and accusing him of never thinking she was good enough for his brother. Meanwhile, Yoshi demanded to know what he’d done so wrong that Lauren had become a whore.

Deena sat, eyes wide, and eventually realized that John was staring. At her.

“Happy?” he snapped and fixed her with a grim smile.

He stalked out of the room, only to fall headlong into the argument with his parents, sister and uncle.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Deena disappeared down the hall. Tak watched her go, watched her walk that same Deena walk, as doubt, determination, and want fought a bloodless battle to dominate him. How many times since she said she was leaving him had he opened his mouth only to choke on concern, clamp down on despair, bottle up the mounting need to touch her? She was there, always there with him, and yet so far away. Raw emotion ate at him, smothering from the inside out. He’d had enough. Never had he wanted out. He needed a way back to before. Misery scorched like the desert sun, taunting him with the mirage of the wife that wouldn’t have him again.

Tak tried to imagine a life without Deena and found emptiness instead. There was nothing apart from her. No thing he wanted, no thing he wished for. She bore his name, his children. He couldn’t see a way to him without them.

He stood without knowing it. Found her in their bedroom without knowing it. Went to her, without being able to help himself. She was busy doing nothing, staring out at a window she couldn’t see through, thoughts so distant she didn’t bother to blink.

Tak lifted his hand, hovered, and then touched her arm. Just fingers, fingers, brushing her shoulder and then tracing down.

So many years. So many years, and still, she inhaled at his touch. His own chest rose and fell, as everything he saw, felt and knew, came down to his skin on hers. He didn’t know if they’d ever see home again. He didn’t know if they’d perish there, marooned, dehydrated, dead. But what he did know was that if he died on that day or another, there was no way he could go in peace without knowing that she loved him still.

With her forehead pressed to the glass, her chest rose and fell in uneven bursts, as if forgetting how to breathe then remembering, only to forget again. He thought of the first time he made love to her. Back then, they called themselves friends, but it was the sort of friend that roused bitter jealousy, that sparked flashes of loneliness in their absence, and stabs of want in their presence. The sort of friend that was never really just a friend to begin with.

So they were those kinds of friends when she saw him with another woman. Their gazes met through the window of a New York restaurant and Tak knew couldn’t figure out how to breathe anymore. Deena stared back at him, eyes glittering, a riot of emotion on her face. Tak toppled both his agent’s lunch and his, in his hurry to get to her. But she ran like she hoped never to be caught and he’d chased her down because he needed to. Chased her down and backed her into their bedroom, whispering all the little things he’d been too stupid and too cowardly to say. He wouldn’t be stupid anymore.

“Deena—”

“Tak.” She suffocated on his name. “Don’t.”

Thick lashes swept her cheeks once, twice, before she closed her eyes altogether.

Don’t.

Don’t think. Don’t breathe. Don’t be. Those commands were just as reasonable as what she asked of him, of what she wanted from him.

“I can’t help it,” was what he wanted to say.

“I need you,” was what he should have said.

Tak wanted to argue with her. He wanted to scream. All the compromises in the world, all the promises were hers, if only she could let them be. Why was she doing this? Why was she wrenching a stake through them both even as tears tracked her cheeks?

“How do I fix this?” he said. “Tell me.”

But it was the wrong thing to say.

She whirled on him, fury painting her face and darkening her features.

“There is no fixing life. There is no fixing what is. People are born, live miserably short lives, and die. Who are you to begrudge the amount of happiness you’ve been allowed? All things come to an end. You should have expected this. I did.”

Words wouldn’t come. Not for this…this confidence in the worthlessness of their love, this certainty that their vows would eventually mean nothing.

He left. Left her to her tears or muted screams or whatever it was that people who expected the worst out of life did when they got it.

He made up his mind not to care about her or their worthless marriage.

Chapter Fifty-Six

The rain came back in a whirlwind.

It seeped in under the door, slow but persistent, until they stood, upright as the carpet grew irretrievably wet. Hours passed with nothing but anger to linger on and the dawning realization that no one knew where they were, that no one knew to come, and that the wind would peel back their roof and the water would swallow them before any rescue would happen.

In an odd twist of fate, Tak and Deena stood shoulder to shoulder without touching, while Allison contented herself with John’s arms wrapped tight around her. Tak’s mother, who had hardly uttered a word since the storm began, sat pasty and drenched in sweat, the rigors of withdrawal having set her to shaking.

Tak swept Noah up into his arms, soothing him with soft tut tuts before rubbing his back in a circular motion. When his arms grew weary, he placed Noah on his shoulders. John did the same for little Elijah as Kenji’s torn rotator cuff prevented him from holding him up with Brandon on his back.

Water sat at their ankles, then at the hind part of their calves, inching upward as the children whimpered. By candlelight, Deena studied the water that pooled at her legs and thought too dark, too cloudy.

Pillows floated like ice floes before taking on so much weight they sunk. Plastic knives, forks, and spoons swarmed in a pooled vortex with trembling people at the center.

They were dying.

Every last one of them would drown.

When the water reached Deena’s hips, she reached out for Tak, and their fingers laced.