Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale (2 page)

Chapter Two

Water rushed from the faucet in a burst of energy Tak couldn’t hope to replicate. Both hands in, he allowed the coolness to run into and over his hands, before bending over enough to splash his face. Maybe, sanity would find him again.

He hadn’t meant to overstep his wife’s feelings or to minimize them, even. Instead, he’d reached a junction where he felt she was making the wrong choice. And like men were hardwired to do, he snatched the wheel of the car, jumped the curb, and ran them both into a proverbial sidewalk of people.

Still, he wasn’t convinced of his wrongness—only in the hastiness of his decision. But this was the woman who raised his wife and his brother’s wife, for whatever that was worth. Their happiness was indebted to her; their lives intertwined. Even if hers did stand at an end.

So, she wanted her family together. She wanted her granddaughters back; back and in the bosom of the family they’d understandably fled. After all, he’d been the one to convince Deena that her happiness wasn’t tied to their approval, their affection, their understanding of who and what she was. And since she’d gotten that message, finally gotten it, she’d unfurled into a woman he’d only sensed, but already loved. Steely, heart beat-steady, and certain of her worth, she gave love with a fierceness that belied her upbringing. In spite of all that, was what he told himself, even as he rushed back for an encore.

Tak turned off the water and sighed.

Everything in him screamed to protect her, to protect her from another whisper or hint, another moment of ache. Yet, he couldn’t protect her from life, from family, for whatever truth waited for her.

And according to Grandma Emma, more truth was to be had.

****

Their travel agent had hell ahead of him without realizing it. A family reunion, he’d said. Wonderful. You’re footing the bill? Even better. Yes, yes. I’d be more than happy to field all the arrangements, he’d told Tak again and again.

He thought the Tanakas were so generous for the bonus they’d given him, on top of the pre-established commission. “No worries,” Tak told him. “When it’s done, you’ll have earned this money.”

So the fun began of gathering his family and hers on short notice. For Tak’s brother, Kenji, the Major League Baseball season had just ended, freeing up his ability to travel. His wife, Deena’s younger sister, Lizzie, while available, took far more cajoling and smooth talking than Tak had in his arsenal. In fact, Tak quickly discovered, he had no weapons to oppose her with. She hated her family, all of them. No location could entice her; no pretty words would persuade her.

Deena, Lizzie, and their dead brother, Anthony, had been the unwanted additions to the Hammond family. At the heart of this rejection was a bottomless sort of bigotry, made unbearable when their white mother murdered their black father. They were thrust on his family not hers, and left to the mercy of their malice. Since Hammonds, by nature, were a boisterous bunch who took pride in speaking their mind, Deena, Lizzie, and Anthony, found themselves as children, on the receiving end of unfiltered contempt, made rancid by grief. Hammonds were responsible for a whole assortment of psychological scars, healed by time, stubbornness, and perseverance. Asking Deena and asking Lizzie to spend time with their family was the equivalent of asking them to cuddle the tiger that mauled them.

But they needed to do this. Tak couldn’t say why, or for what purpose, only that he felt certain of its necessity. In the end, it was putting pressure on Lizzie’s husband, his kid brother, that did the job. He had a way with her that Tak couldn’t quite get, a way of slicing through caustic to the cream, a way of smoothing out razors into silk. “You owe me,” was Kenji’s response on convincing her, before following it with a dial tone. Something told Tak that his IOUs would mount in the coming days.

The others were easier. Hammonds came with the promise of a free trip, out the country as a bonus. With each phone call, Deena’s apprehension about the indiscriminate nature of her grandmother’s invitation sprung like a weed and grew, choking everything and everyone around them. She snapped; she snarked; she glared; she kept silent, and hoped above all that the Tanakas would, at least, reject the invitation. But they wouldn’t. Not with Christmas on the horizon and their having made a tradition of meeting in California anyway. For them, it meant a shift in destination at someone else’s expense, a chance for Aruba for the holidays.

So, in the end they were set.

Not a single rejection to their invitation. In fact, Tak’s family was thrilled at the idea of meeting the rest of Deena’s family at long last.

Deena’s family.

Who they couldn’t hope to understand.

Chapter Three

They’d decided to hold their impromptu reunion at their estate in Aruba over Christmas break. While Deena had hoped for resistance to any change of holiday tradition, somehow Aruba held more sway. With their travel agent using only a few weeks to make sense of the particulars like birth certificates, passports and expedited services, Deena used that time to try and talk her husband out of the trip.

“You don’t understand,” she reminded him for the umpteenth time. “My family’s not normal. Haven’t you noticed? We prefer a mutually agreed upon distance.”

Tak, who had taken over her home office for the planning of their trip, didn’t even bother to look up from his scribbles.

“Well maybe, Dee, it’s time for that to change.”

Time for change, said the artist, said the man who spent days mulling over life’s intangibles and losing himself in them for days at a time. Time for change, said the man who set emotions to music, stretched heart and soul on canvas for all. How raw it must be, how rewarding, to dig deep and find beauty, to find light even in the shadows. But a week of Hammonds was what he wanted. She couldn’t wait to see what he painted, what he sang, what he thought after that.

Chapter Four

On a Tuesday morning, Deena’s immediate family prepared for departure. Tony, slim, long-bodied with shoulders hunched in that perpetual state of adolescent angst, gutted out the mailbox thoroughly, before dragging his suitcases out to the car. He made two phone calls by the trunk, the first undoubtedly to his best friend, Lizard, an Irish-Jewish skateboarder who lived next door with his mother, a feminist and sex therapist of notoriety who traversed the daytime talk show circuits whenever her new drivel released. His father, an archeologist, spent most of his days in places where the people weren’t, returning for endless over-the-hedge conversations about flint tools and plant life in the Paleolithic era. Deena figured he must have been a behemoth in bed, to hold the interest of a woman who sold sexual freedom for a living. God knows it couldn’t have been the conversation she clung to.

Tony called Wendy next, his best and oldest friend, held onto from his earliest days in Miami. Unlike with Lizard, there were no eye rolls and snorts on his end this time, no guffaws of laughter rupturing the air. He did, however, turn his back to Deena. That was something new.

Mia nearly toppled her on her fly out the door, a slam of her skateboard to pavement, a jump and jerk later, had her careening for the idling taxi van at high speed, one duffle bag in hand.

Mia, with her flannel in the summer and ripped jeans, whose hair, never quite tamed or washed clean. Mia, who knew Latin, Japanese, Spanish and more poetry than her mother could ever hope for, but also knew every horror icon sprang from Nosferatu to Jigsaw. She took solitude over girls, her skate and surfboard over nail polish, and had an appetite both massive and bizarre: Iguana in Trinidad, brain curry in India, river eel in Japan. Mia lived for adventure; she was all Tak and no Deena.

Tony jammed the off button on his cell and scowled before shoving it into his pockets. While she’d heard nothing of his conversation with Wendy, Deena could imagine its gist. After all, he spent most days gnawing away his lips over what music school would undoubtedly have to reject him. After all, he reasoned, he hadn’t been introduced to the study of music until eleven—other kids saw it at three or four. He seemed to forget his sister Mia, who had begun piano lessons at three, but was much more adept at managing an epic flip on that godforsaken skateboard than she was at conjuring up a decent version of London Bridge.

Tony, on the other hand, had taken to music in desperation. He had more than an ear for music, more even than his perfect pitch. Obsession made him think in notes and dream music. His early college admission applications, long sent to five of the best programs in the country, included, Fini, a symphony he wrote himself. It also included a segment of him performing the fugue in Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 106 at a school recital the year before. It also included, by his mother’s force of hand, an essay detailing how his symphony had been inspired by his life of homelessness and the search to find his family. Deena had to stand over him to make sure he included as much in what he mailed to every school. Take embarrassment, she’d told him, take weakness, and make it your strength. Sometimes, it’s the only weapon available.

Music had started out as a parental hope to conjure discipline and expand their son’s view of the world. It succeeded tenfold. It didn’t need Tak’s bribe of any car of Tony’s choosing in exchange for the mastering of three instruments. Nonetheless, the Porsche sat in their garage, a bold bribe paid out in full. It was the Tanaka way, not the Hammonds’. Deena couldn’t imagine what they’d give him for his high school graduation, his college one, or when he married one day.

Noah burst by, bubbling, humming and pausing only to thrust in time with his own rendition of the Batman theme song, before powering onward with his luggage. It seemed not to matter that he wore a green and massively obnoxious Incredible Hulk fist on one hand and the cape of Superman on his back.

Three children and she recognized not a one as being of her own design, not even when the eldest was technically her brother’s child.

Others would travel with them to Oranjestad. Mrs. Jimenez, their maid; Antonina, their au pair; and Mario Saunders, the resident chef, who busied himself daily with threats about finding work elsewhere, never mind his incomparable salary.

Finally, they were on their way. First, to pick up Deena’s grandmother, then onward to Miami International where they would board an early evening flight, first class, to the island. No one in the car had much enthusiasm for the trip, as all of them, except Grandma Emma, had just summered there. Meanwhile, she was too busy with anticlimactic sleeping to bother with excitement.

On the flight the children busied themselves with iPads and groans of boredom, long past the enraptured face-to-window presses typical of majestic destinations. But Grandma Emma was a different story. Seated next to Tony with a blanket in her lap, she gazed out on open blue waters, eyes steady, gaze clear. Deena wondered what she thought, remembered, considered. She wondered what it must have felt like to face definitive lasts. Last vacations, last gazes of open water, last plane ride perhaps? Deena wondered if, when her time came, she would be as graceful and accommodating of death.

Aruba eventually came into view. A dot of honed in green, nestled into shimmering blue waters, it burst into calypso colors and sharp-edged countryside as they grew near.

Oh, did it stand alive, ushering Deena back to sweltering nights, sweat, and soca skin-to-skin on the dance floor. There’d been no children then. Only Tak and Deena and all the touches they could stand. She could drown with that, Deena realized. She could drown, content, so long as his fingers touched her body and her arms wrapped him in the end.

Once landed and with luggage in hand, they were driven from the airport to their chateau on Malmok Beach. They weaved away from the city along L.G. Smith, straddling the sea as delicate raindrops fell. A tiny island was all Aruba was, no bigger than D.C., though pulsing with flavor.

In a few minutes time, they arrived at their summer home.

Two floors of pretentious estate stretched to the ocean’s edge in unhurried grandeur. It was the sort of pompous residence celebrities bought to assert their wealth. Two dozen bedrooms, ten bathrooms, in addition to indoor and outdoor pools. There was more, of course, much more. And all of it was Deena’s.

It never got old for her: wealth, deference, power. She’d shattered the glass ceiling with her own two fists. Wealthiest architect under 50. No preludes, no preamble. While she was far from the iconic figure that Tak’s father was, hers was a name worth knowing and knowing well.

Deena stood in the entrance hall of her vacation home, one of three they owned. Her chef pushed past her muttering, while the au pair struggled with an armful of bags, each donned with surfer waves.

“Really, Mia,” Tak snapped as Antonina dropped a fistful of bags. “Think you could trouble yourself with more than a skateboard for once? She’s not your valet, you know.”

Mia’s gray eyes flitted up to her father, painted with what her mouth wouldn’t say, before snatching two suitcases from the floor and barging up the stairs.

Tak sighed.

“Is it time for this already?”

“She’s thirteen, so yeah,” Deena said.

“Well,” Tony said and gave his parents a one-sided smile on entering. “This should be fun. Like a rollercoaster with no brakes kind of fun.” He picked up his guitar case, balanced his horn case atop it and grabbed the handle of his rolling luggage for the journey. “Tell Mario I’ll find something in the fridge later.” He too started off.

As soon as he’d left, a shout of outrage pierced the night.

“The satellite isn’t working!” Mia cried. “No one can live like this. Call someone. Please.”

Deena and Tak exchanged a look. In 24 hours, a handful of attitudes would transform into a hurricane of the same.

“You get your grandmother settled in. I’ll take care of everyone else,” he said and disappeared just as the driver helped Grandma Emma over the threshold.