Crimson Footprints (11 page)

“
But how is that
possible?”

He’d shrugged. “A
combination of things. Road trips, family vacations, just visiting
people, mostly.”

She’d been to two places in
her life, Cambridge and Miami, and neither had been
vacations.

It’d been his turn for
disbelief. Never had she crowded into a jazz joint in New Orleans
because a melody had intoxicated her. Never had she tasted Memphis
barbecue, Chicago deep dish or Philly cheese steak. Never had she
shopped on Rodeo, blew money in Vegas, or watched the ball drop in
Times Square. Her words burned him, and in that moment, he’d wanted
nothing more than to change that. He wanted those things for her,
and wanted to be there with her when she experienced them for the
first time.

Tak thought about his own
life, and the endless opportunities he’d had. Sure, it hadn’t begun
in wealth, but by the time he was in the fifth grade, even he could
see where the family fortunes were heading.

His father was catapulted to
fame quite suddenly when, at 32, he won an open competition to
design JP Morgan’s new headquarters in Manhattan. His design had
beaten a whopping seven hundred entries, including several
legendary architects, and in doing so had jammed his name into the
mouths and magazines of everyone who mattered.

Tak remembered when the call
came to their home in Miami Shores. Just the night before his
father had been pouring over the records for his fledgling firm,
fretting over whether it could get through the month. His father
was at the kitchen table frowning over drafts when the phone rang.
It was a then ten-year-old Tak who dashed to answer. The man on the
phone had an odd accent, so peculiar that he felt compelled to hang
up on him.

“
There’s no Morgan here,”
Tak said, gleaning a lone word from the garble on the other
end.

His father looked
up.

“
No JP either,” Tak
insisted. As he moved to slam the phone back in its cradle, Daichi
snatched it, rescuing his career in the process.

A $750 million dollar
contract. He would never forget the look on his father’s face in
the moment when he transformed from a man of meager means to one
that good fortune had suddenly found. In the days following that
phone call, their family was at its happiest. His mother was not
yet an alcoholic and his father still had time to toss a
football.

Then the phone calls came.
First, industry insiders like the
Architectural Digest
and
Architectural Record.
Then the rest. They called it a
coup
d’état
, an ousting of architectural
aristocracy and a supplanting of a brazen new face. It was the
beginning of the end, they’d all proclaimed.

They were right in more ways
than they knew. Within months, they’d moved from the quaint house
in Miami Shores to a posh condominium in Coral Cables. With the
move came a new school and new friends, a new life where Tak could
have whatever he wanted, so long as it didn’t include his parents.
And as the work poured in, and the Tanaka Firm grew from a single
desk in the back of a house to a monolith with twenty-seven
locations on five continents, the rift between his mother and
father, between him and his parents, slowly but surely, became an
abyss.

His younger brother Kenji
had been a surprise. Wedged between the JP Morgan account and the
revamping of Bayfront Park, no one seemed more agitated with the
news than his father. His firm was doing well, he’d hired two
architects, the first of hundreds to come, and he hadn’t the time
for fatherhood. The wince on his face told his son that he
regretted those words, but for Tak they were little more than a
Freudian slip.

He wasn’t sure about the
exact time his mother began drowning herself in alcohol. Like
Kenji, it was wedged firmly between JP Morgan and Bayfront.
Whenever Tak was in a particularly forgiving mood, he told himself
that she hadn’t drank a drop of alcohol during her nine months of
pregnancy, but when he was especially incensed with his mother, he
would say that she’d probably all but succumbed to alcohol
poisoning. The truth, he suspected was somewhere in
between.

Tak glanced at Deena as she
stirred in her seat. He couldn’t look at her and feel sorry for
himself though. Sure he had a callous father and a drunk for a
mother, but hell, he had parents. What ’s more, neither of them, at
their worst, had ever struck him in anger. He’d never known what it
felt like to be unloved, unwanted, rejected. Even his father, in
all his iciness, had never caused him to feel rejected. Forgotten,
most certainly, but never rejected.

She’d lost both her father
and brother to murder. His closest comparison was his grandfather,
George Tanaka, dead from cancer at seventy-seven. And while they’d
both experienced grief, hers of course, was
incomparable.

Deena was good for him, in
an unexpected sort of way. She forced him to reevaluate, to cherish
things he’d taken for granted. Things like life and love, money and
security. And she ignited him in a way that was as thrilling as it
was unfamiliar. Deena, with her toffee colored curls and fawn-brown
eyes, seemed to fit into his life like the perfect puzzle piece,
albeit doused with kerosene. He couldn’t wait to ignite
it.

When Deena woke, she found
herself on a bare stretch of interstate skating at close to a
hundred miles an hour. She glanced at Tak, who tapped out accosting
notes to an 80s rock song with one hand as he drove.

“
Did I wake you?” He turned
down the volume.

Deena frowned.

“
Maybe you should slow
down.”

He eased off the gas.
“Sorry. Lead foot.”

Deena’s neck creaked as she
turned to the window. “Where are we?”

“
Half an hour outside of
Gainesville.”

“
Gainesville! How long have
I been asleep?”

Tak shrugged. “A while.
About four and a half hours. Figured you were pretty
tired.”

She couldn’t remember the
last time sleep had come so easy. She brought a hand to her face
and felt the creases left there from the door.

“
You should’ve woke me.
Why’d you let me sleep so long? You don’t have to be a chauffeur,
you know.”

She had her license, a crisp
new piece of plastic in her wallet that she was dying to put to
use. But he waved her off.

“
You were tired so I let
you rest. And anyway, I don’t mind being your chauffeur,
sweetie.”

She turned away, ignoring
the customary flutters she felt at his casual endearments. He was
always dropping sweet nothings like that—a baby here, a sweetie
there, and she dared not take them for more than face value. Her
experiences with men were painfully lacking, never a lover, never
even a kiss, so she felt insecure about what constituted harmless
flirting versus a sign of sincere interest.

Deena sighed. It wasn’t that
there’d been no opportunities for her, but rather, that she’d shied
away from men; first because she feared her grandfather’s wrath and
later because she feared the men themselves—their expectations,
their experience and their laughter when they discovered she was
still a virgin. In the back of her mind, she buried Snow’s derisive
laugh when he’d stated with all certainty that she was, in fact,
still tight like a version.

As always, Deena buried her
fears with reason. She was a busy woman and had no time for men.
Driven by the need for success, she needn’t be bothered with
cumbersome relationships anyway. So she shied away from the obvious
advances, the inherent confidence of her pursuers only serving to
intimidate her more. And she shied away from the awkward innuendo
of geeks who figured she wanted an intellectual match instead of
the bare bones brawn and good looks of other pursuers. And on the
occasion when a man crossed her path with that rare combination of
looks and smarts, she of course was far too shy to do anything
about it. And so, she would stay seated, daring not to approach
such a man, and in doing so, would lose him to far more forthright
women. Still, she always found it comforting that these lost
opportunities affected her so little. Her feelings toward men had
always approached indifference. For Deena, men were like museum
paintings—ideal to admire, forbidden to touch, and always, always,
too costly to bring home.

They stopped for gas in
Gainesville, and while filling up, Tak pulled a map from his glove
compartment and spread it over the hood of his Ferrari. Despite the
GPS of his car, he insisted he liked the feel of a map his
hands.

“
How’s Atlanta sound to
you?”

Atlanta. Home of the Bank of
America Plaza, the tallest building in the country outside of New
York and Chicago. Also home of the Flatiron, a wedge shaped,
window-wide building that was the second oldest skyscraper in the
nation. In fact, some of the greatest architects in the world had
shaped Atlanta’s skyline—Richard Meier, Michael Graves,
Daichi—

“
You know your
father—”

“
Yes, yes, I know. My dad
designed Peachtree Emporium.”

Tak crumpled the map and
jammed it in his pocket. “Listen. I’m sure Atlanta has some great
architecture and I’ll make sure you see as much as you want. But
keep in mind we’re going a lot further than here and time is
finite.”

He took a breath, paused and
offered her a smile, first forced, then broadening with each second
that passed.

“
So,” Tak continued,
natural this time. “I’m thinking a show at the Fox Theatre, the
night scene in Underground Atlanta and maybe a stroll in Olympic
Park. We could tour CNN or Coca Cola if you want.” He withdrew the
nozzle from the car and placed it back at the gas pump.

“
How’s that sounding,
love?”

He glanced back at the
Ferrari, scrutinizing the exterior, before declining a car
wash.

Deena lowered her gaze. It
was there again, sweet words, warming her. And even as she uttered
the phrase “It sounds wonderful,” she couldn’t help but wonder if
she was talking about the itinerary or the sound of love on his
lips.

They arrived in Atlanta at
four thirty and at Deena’s insistence, checked into The Mansion on
Peachtree, a luxury hotel designed by renowned architect Robert
A.M. Stern. As Tak retrieved the bags from his car, she lectured
him endlessly.

“
Stern’s generally
classified as a postmodernist but he prefers the label ‘modern
traditionalist.’ You can see why though when you actually look at
his work. He’s really big on tradition. He—”

“
Hey, are you bringing this
stuff inside?” Tak held up a pair of fuzzy pink slippers, wretched
free from Deena’s partially closed duffle bag.

“
Damn it, the zipper gets
stuck and everything falls out.” Deena jammed the shoes underneath
her arm and Tak slammed the trunk and followed her towards the
hotel. He nearly collided with her when she stopped.

“
What? What is it?” he
said.

“
Look at it. It’s
wonderful. The limestone and cast stone create such a dramatic
effect.” She glanced back at him. “I’m sorry. You’re
bored.”

She did that sometimes—use
architecture as her failsafe. She could spout arbitrary facts at
awkward moments and prattle on about nuances till her nerves calmed
or a blush subsided. Though she did enjoy the work before her it
wasn’t to the exclusion of all else.

But Tak shook his head. “No,
it’s okay. I’m Daichi’s son, remember? I’m used to marveling at
concrete structures for hours on end.”

“
Limestone.”

“
What?”

“
It’s limestone and—” Deena
shook her head. “Never mind. For once, I want to forget about the
structure of a building and enjoy whatever’s inside. Maybe there’s
a hot tub. I’d love to soak in one.”

He glanced at her as if he’d
love for her to soak in one, too.

They settled on a deluxe
room, a marble and velvet delight with an enormous tub, a 37-inch
flat screen and two queen size beds. The two showered and dressed
before deciding on dinner.

“
How do waffles
sound?”

Deena glanced at her watch.
“It sounds like breakfast at 7 in the evening.”

Tak threw an arm around her,
grinning. “Come on, Dee. Waffles it is. Allow me to rock your
world.”

“
Two pecan checkerboards,
four eggs wrecked and two heart attacks on a rack. Sweep the
kitchen and give it to me scattered, smothered, covered, chunked,
topped & diced!” Deena’s waitress cupped her hands over crimson
painted lips, gave her chewing gum a few more pops, and sauntered
off in her crisp white blouse and black slacks.

Deena scrutinized the diner.
They were at the Waffle House, a place she’d never heard of until
half hour ago, despite Tak’s insistence that such a thing was
impossible. The place was a diner in every since of the word, from
its broad counter and weathered stools where patrons speculated
about

Georgia prospects for the
upcoming football season, to the single row of tables and chairs
waited on by sassy waitresses who insisted on calling you ‘hon’
even when you asked them not to.