Crimson Footprints (22 page)

There was a knock at his
door and Kenji set aside Guy Robin.

When Tak stepped into the
room, he wore only a pair of white cotton pajama pants and an
awkward expression. He cleared his throat before
speaking.

“
Hey little bro. Got a
minute?”

Kenji nodded, and reached
for the Rawlins baseball he kept near his stack of graphic novels.
“Yeah, sure, come on. I’m not going anywhere.”

Tak took a seat on the edge
of the bed, as Kenji stretched out and began a one-man game of
catch.

“
We should talk. There’s
something I need to tell you.”

Kenji glanced at him, never
slowing in his game of catch. “No need. Already know.”

Tak hesitated. “And…you’re
okay? I mean, I know you like Deena, and I know she hangs out with
us a lot already, but I don’t want you to feel like this thing is
going to come between us or anything.”

“
Nope. It’s
cool.”

“
She’ll be over here some
weekends though,” Tak said hesitantly.

“
Yeah, I figured,” Kenji
countered dryly.

Tak took a deep
breath.

“
Well, I know this is
probably a surprise but—”

“
It’s not.”

Tak grinned. “O.k. then.
It’s not a surprise and you are o.k. with it?” Kenji nodded.
“Alright then,” Tak continued. “Enough with the awkwardness. Tell
me what I missed while gone.”

Kenji shrugged mid-toss. “A
lot. I mean, it was twenty-four days.”

Tak lowered his gaze. “Yeah.
About that, I won’t do that to you again, okay.”

Kenji looked away, features
twisted with masked annoyance.

“
You’re a grown man. You
want to leave for a month, who am I to say something?”

“
Yeah, just the same. I
won’t do it again. Not for that long at least.” He paused. “So, how
was it?”

Kenji shot him a
look.

“
You know how it was. Dad
was in Asia or Africa or some other continent we’re not in and mom
was in a bottle.”

“
And you? What were you
doing?”

“
Reading, practicing music,
baseball. Made the six o’clock news one night.”

“
You what?” Tak sat up
straighter.

“
I made the six o’clock
news last. Triple play, bottom of the ninth.”

“
And you didn’t call me?”
Tak demanded incredulously.

Kenji grinned. “Figured you
were busy.”

Tak laughed. “Then you had
more faith in me then I did.”

“
Come on, Tak. You’ve never
met a girl you couldn’t have.”

Tak reached over and messed
his hair. “Spoken like a true little brother.”

He stood to exit and looked
down at the younger version of himself. Tak smiled with quiet
admiration. “Bases loaded and you’re sending ‘em home, huh? Well,
I’ll be damned.”

After an afternoon at the
game rooting Kenji on to victory, Tak stood over Deena in the place
where he’d left her four hours earlier. She was in his living room,
frowning over a legal pad that had become her constant companion.
She scribbled, scratched, and scribbled again, before lifting one
of the half dozen or so thick books from the coffee table. Next to
them were stacks of loose-leaf paper, newspaper clippings, magazine
clippings and post-it notes, many stapled together in thick,
helter-skelter wads. Tak picked up one such stack and examined it.
He lifted the glossy magazine clipping of a fuzzy-faced man to read
the Deena-created fact sheet beneath.

Aamir Mahmoud.

Electrical
Engineer

Age 52.

Native of Beirut,
Lebanon

Current Residency Los
Angeles, CA

Ph.D. Harvard
University

M.S. & B.S. from
M.I.T.

Major Projects:

Waldorf Astoria, United
Arab Emirates

Bank of Tokyo, Tokyo,
Japan

Capitol Building,
Sacramento, CA

Leaguer Fields Stadium,
Nashville, Tennessee

Pluses: Renowned for
meticulousness. Recently published a book on risks in architectural
design

Minuses: No major
residential projects to date.

Tak set aside Mahmoud’s
profile and picked up another. This one had a passport size photo
of a fat-faced Asian woman alongside a stack of notes. He turned to
the fact sheet.

Margaret Lee.

Electrical
Enginee

Age 63

Native of New York,
NY,

Current Residency West Palm
Beach, FL

Ph. D. Northwestern
University

M.S. Columbia University.
B.S. NYU

Major Projects:

Miami School of Design,
Miami, FL

West Palm Beach School of
Arts

W. Palm Beach,
FL

Bennett Regional Hospital,
Children’s Wing, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Tak frowned at Maggie Lee’s
fact sheet and he thought back to Mahmoud. He had a state capitol
and an NFL football field while Ms. Lee here had a wing in a
hospital, admirable, but certainly not equal.

“
What’s up with the drastic
departure, Dee?”

She looked up.
“What?”

“
The drastic departure
between Mahmoud and Maggie Lee. What’s up with that?”

In the kitchen, Kenji nuked
a fresh round of popcorn, snack food before he returned to his job
of clipping and sorting for Deena. He’d taken to his job of
assisting Deena in the organization of her prospects. To Tak, it
was almost as if helping her succeed would be the equivalent of
thumbing his nose at their dad.

“
Mahmoud’s a huge deal,”
she explained. “And I have to be realistic.”

She returned to her legal
pad. “Besides, I probably won’t even contact him.”

Tak sat down. “Of course you
will.”

He picked up Mahmoud’s sheet
again. “Where’s this picture from?”

“
Architectural
Digest
,” Kenji said, returning with his
popcorn. “Found it myself. There was a feature in there talking
about his new book on fault tolerance.”

Tak blinked. “On
what?”

“
Fault tolerance,” Kenji
said. He shoved a fist full of popcorn into his mouth. “It’s a
fail-safe for when part of an electrical system hits the skids.
Keeps it operating.”

Tak stared at his brother
another moment, shrugged in surprise, then turned to Deena. “Maggie
Lee seems o.k. Better than okay, even. But you shouldn’t let
Mahmoud’s credentials intimidate you. Let
him
tell you no.”

Deena shook her head, not
bothering to look up. “You don’t get it. I’m a kid to these people.
A nobody.”

“
So?” Tak sighed. “Listen
to me. You’re brilliant. Anyone who saw your design,” he reached
for a roll of paper on the table, “who saw
this
, would want to work with
you.”

Deena blinked.

“
Call Mahmoud. Please. And
don’t take no for an answer. Not at least, without letting him see
this.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

Two hundred pages bound and
color-coded. Six graphs with corresponding appendices. Three flow
charts, a budget, and one sleep-deprived architect. Deena’s moment
of reckoning was less than ninety minutes away.

In those moments of
near-neurotic fear, she flipped through her proposal in an effort
to calm herself. Her work was good. But good wasn’t necessarily
good enough.

It was an ode to organic
architecture, and as such, a contradiction. Who’d ever heard of a
skyscraper that mimicked nature? A jutting bolt of man-molded steel
claiming to be a compliment to God’s natural order?

But life was
contradiction.

Deena turned to the profiles
in the rear of her proposal. Mahmoud was still there, alongside
other prominent names like Michael Hudson, professor of landscape
architecture at Yale and a consultant for the ’96 Olympics. Steve
Marshall, a civil engineer and professor at the University of
Southern California, whose books on coastal engineering were
architectural gospel. And Claudia Oppenheimer, a designer whose
name was outside the sphere of their world, but akin to that of
Armani and Vuitton.

Of the three heavyweights
she’d invited, Oppenheimer had been added to the team in a stroke
of madness, brought on by Tak’s contagiously naïve encouragement.
Now, as Deena stared at the potential design team, a veritable rock
group in her world, her naivety and presumptuousness, her
recklessness even, stared back at her, brewing and spreading a
potent sort of horror.

She could hear Daichi as he
flipped through the proposal—Mahmoud, Hudson, Oppenheimer.
Impressive. While we’re at it, we’ll have the Beatles in the lounge
and Julia Child in the kitchen. Next on the agenda: digging up Walt
Disney, so he can sprinkle the fairy dust necessary for all this to
come true.

Deena closed her proposal
and rose from her desk. Her design was a good one. And she was a
good architect. She would succeed. She repeated the mantra
silently, as she made the trek from her office to the conference
room. And when she entered, she found Daichi already seated at the
head of the table with four junior partners in tow, two on each
side. Daichi glanced at his watch and nodded. The clock was
ticking.

With shaky hands, Deena set
up the PowerPoint presentation she’d spent a night’s sleep fussing
over, her pulse reiterating the importance of the moment. She slid
a copy of her proposal to each of the men present and waited. Deena
stared at Daichi and Daichi stared back.

“
Well?” he said
rudely.

She closed her eyes and
heaved a prayer at the heavens. When she opened them, her heart
raced. It was win or go home.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Lizzie stood at her locker,
moments after the shrill of a five-minute warning bell and tried to
remember her combination. The last time she’d opened it had been
more than a month ago. With a grunt, she punched the aluminum slab
and turned away. She didn’t even know why she was there, at that
stupid school with those stupid teachers and their stupid students.
She scowled at them as they milled by, girls in trendy tanks or
swanky skirts, boys in baggy shirts and fitted hats with the tags
stilled attached, all of them in the newest and the latest. She
glanced down at her own clothes, a white and cotton candy pink
shirt that said
Sweet and
Sour
, a pair of glittering and faded
jeans, and the perfect high top Converse. Lizzie watched the girls
as they passed, laughing and gossiping, and wondered just briefly,
if the things they wore were as hard to come by as the things she
wore.

“
Lizzie?”

She was startled by the
sound of her name. She turned to the unfamiliar face, a short and
dark boy with big black glasses, shiny, spit-filled braces, and an
odor two stop lights past wrong.

“
Go away,” Lizzie said and
turned back to her locker. She fumbled in frustration, aware of the
boy still relentless at her back.

“
I’m Harold,” he said as if
she’d been wondering. “You’re in my sixth period English
class.”

Lizzie shot him an
exasperated look. “How the hell would you know that?
I
don’t even remember
what I have for sixth period.”

Harold shifted his weight,
dark skin glistening with sweat despite the cool
corridor.

“
I saw you in it, at the
beginning of the school year. Back, you know, when you used to
come.”

Lizzie tried to concentrate
on remembering her combination. The numbers ran from 0 to 40, and
there were five numbers in the sequence—or was it six? She frowned.
If there were five, and five times 40 was 200 (was that right?),
then that meant that she would have to try 200 different
combinations before she found the right one. Lizzie sighed. She
wished she had her sister’s brain. She was always so good in Math
and Science and English…and everything.

“
I—I heard about Lucas’
party.”

Lizzie froze.

“
What the hell did you just
say?”

“
I—I just said that I heard
about the party. Everyone has, really.”

Lizzie turned and took a
single menacing step towards him. “Do I look like I give a fuck
what everyone has heard?”

She did of course, had
skipped school for two weeks just to avoid the stares and whispers
of boys who’d had her. But damned if she’d admit that
now.

“
I—I only said that
because, well—”

“
Well, what?”