Secrets of the Apple (48 page)

The manila envelope bearing the college’s emblematic stone clock tower sat unopened on her desk for one day, then two. Each morning Ryoki peeked his head in and scanned her desk, speculating on her window of acceptance.
A week, give it a week. Probably too late to mail it back after that.
On the morning of the sixth day, he left for the office cocky and exultant, thinking that night they could feed the whole envelope to the shredder, or better yet, fling it into the fire and watch it burn while they sipped hot chocolate. But when he returned home, the outer envelope had been brutally violated, the inner documents neatly extracted, all information completed in sober black ink without a single doodle in the margins.

The next day an intern named Akihiko Sato entered Ryoki’s office, walking fast, carrying documents to be signed and returned to another executive. He was about twenty or twenty-one, wearing a dark three-piece suit, navy like Ryoki’s, six-foot-one, maybe six-two, hair cropped very short, but not short enough to disguise the curl—obviously mixed parentage. Ryoki stared until the young man grew uncomfortable. “I’m honored to be working for you, sir,” the intern said, bowing. A colleague had mentioned this Sato—college senior, sharp, hungry, comes early stays late works weekends perfect English, British father/Japanese mother—in short, a doppelganger. “Is there anything else you require, sir?”

Ryoki looked into the young man’s future, feeling the helplessness of a grandfather looking back at his own childhood.

“When’s the last time you saw your parents?” Ryoki asked, hearing the graying hairs in his voice.

Startled at such an intrusive question, the intern paused before he spoke, as though trying to divine the correct response. “New Year’s, sir.”

“Last New Year’s or the year before?”

“Well, they live in Cornwall. You know how it is,” Sato replied, rubbing his neck.

Ryoki guessed his name was actually Johnson or Smith, or possibly something unpronounceable in Japan, like Porter.

After Sato left, Ryoki leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk, a black wavy lock falling into his face. Impatiently he pushed it back. “Sato” was probably his mother’s maiden name, his father’s name a small sacrifice to fit in at the company. One sacrifice, two, three, four. Ryoki looked around his office, his lofty green office. He’d be moving back to his Tokyo apartment soon; it was closer to the office. Orange apartment, lots of orange. Hadn’t been back since Apple moved out. An orange apartment close to the green office, a pumpkin transformed to a golden coach to carry him to the moon, that big barren rock devoid of oxygen, worshipped by savages because it was hard to reach.

Ryoki rubbed his eyes and sat back. The green walls reminded him of the Fates, now damaged and sitting in storage in São Paulo. The painting would have been beautiful had the subject been less disquieting—the visceral dread of a monstrous puppet master jerking elbows and tugging heads, controlling life from a careless distance.

Though, come to think of it, his father had served as puppet master for at least a year, tweaking the threads of divinely organized coincidence, but Kate somehow still retained control of her own strings. He spun in his chair to look out the huge windows. It had begun to snow much harder.

That night Ryoki returned from work in the dark after slipping and slowing through a record-breaking blizzard. His mother appeared as he came through the door, as though she had been watching for him.

“Where’s Kate?” he asked, shrugging off his overcoat and slipping out of his shoes. His mother held her face carefully bland, a sure sign of worry. “She was on the phone with that boyfriend in Brazil. After that she went out walking until the weather got too bad. She’s been in the sunroom ever since.”

Since it had been put to rights, the sunroom had become one of Kate’s favorite haunts, and Ryoki found her there, sitting in a dim pool of light as snow blew against the glass. The coffee table was piled with notebooks and loose sheets, a pot of ink and a brush pushed off to the side.

“I hear you’ve had a busy day,” he said, putting his hand on the nape of her neck, praying she wouldn’t flinch away from such an intimate touch. She held still and he put his other hand on her arm, feeling the chill on her skin. Ryoki slid out of his suit jacket and laid it over her before building a fire in the fireplace. “Where’s that blankie of yours?”

“Still in São Paulo, in the ottoman, I guess. I keep meaning to send for it.”

“I’ll get you another one.”

“I’d rather have that one.”

“So, it
is
a blankie.”

“It was a gift from my dad.”

He sat next to her and they watched kamikaze snowflakes splatter the glass as it shuddered in the wind. To Ryoki the atmosphere felt strangely charged, as though a hundred words mutely flapped their wings and beat their chests demanding utterance, but the two of them sat silent, listening to the walls rattle as the wind prowled around the chimney, howling for admittance. Outside, a snow-laden branch cracked in the gale, the same gust sending a snake of icy air crashing through the flue. The young fire fractured and hissed. Kate turned and looked at Ryoki.

“When I was a kid in Brazil, I met a girl at a party who asked me if snow was cold. Somebody had told her it was warm and she was trying to work it out. Can you imagine not knowing what snow feels like?”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her it was frozen water, so it had to be cold. Then I tried to explain about snow’s insulating properties, but I don’t think she understood.”

“Kate.”

She looked up at him.

“Who did you talk to today?”

“You already know, don’t you,” she said, studying the folds of his jacket as it lay across her body. Ryoki felt like he was choking.

“Did he ask you to marry him, Kate?”

She looked up at him, then dropped her eyes. “Ryoki, you should know I broke up with Matt a while ago, not long after he sent the roses. I heard everything you said that day. I already knew it, in my heart.” She rubbed the wool of his jacket between her fingers.

Ryoki let out a ten-pound breath and tried to catch her eye, but she looked away. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“Ryoki, I
used
Matt. No matter how I try to spin it, that’s exactly what I did. I used him and now I’ve hurt him.”

“Did you do it maliciously or intentionally?”

“I needed to backtrack in my relationship with you, and I thought I could love him, if I tried hard enough. At least you were upfront with your girlfr—well, your harem,” she said with a sly glance, but he refused to be baited and reached out to stroke her hair.

“Did you call him to apologize, because it’s really kinder to make a clean break?”

Kate looked up, her lips wrinkled together. “He called me, for advice. He’s decided to transfer to New York anyway, and yesterday Amanda Booth took him to a special dinner to say she’d been really impressed with him, and then she asked all casually if he’d ever consider being her
daddy donor,
no strings attached, just to keep things on file until she was ready. Those were her exact words, can you believe it, ‘on file.’” Ryoki whistled. “After that he lapsed into surfer-speak and I think he mentioned ‘acid drop’ and ‘losing his baggies.’”

Ryoki bit his lip to keep from laughing, but it sneaked out in minor quakes until it erupted in a great guffaw and Kate smiled slow and crooked despite herself. She shifted under his jacket, turning her shoulders to face him, scrunching her body into an intimate C, though she couldn’t quite manage to raise her eyes. “I quit my teaching job today,” she announced shyly. “I’ve been carrying a book in my head for a long time, and when things started slowing down here, it started pouring out. I’m going to take my year.”

“Just a year?” he asked, holding very still, fearing a sudden move, a misplaced word, could scare her off. She finally looked at him.

“Ryoki, I love you and the idea of leaving has been giving me nightmares.”

Ryoki would have preferred a little more romance in her look, a shivery whisper in her voice, perhaps a slight tremor in her lips. Instead she looked like a woman flabbergasted by her own stupidity. “I need to know why you want me to stay,” she said bluntly.

Ryoki paused, a long hard pause that would have been awkward with any other woman. It wasn’t that he had no answer; on the contrary, he had a thousand, a whole rational and emotional wardrobe: We work well together (business casual), I love talking to you (shorts and T-shirt), the feel of your skin (black lace)—he could go on and on, but nothing fully clothed her question. He took in her matter-of-fact expression, the look of a teacher waiting for the final answer.

He took his time, looking into those dark green eyes that conjured a great verdant meadow scattered with golden boulders, beautiful, precious, glittering boulders, heavy enough to hurt his back or break his bones. He’d first noticed her eyes in Las Vegas, the place where she fingered his shirt, the needle flashing in and out, a needle that could sew a button or pierce his skin, spilling the rubies of his life, painting crimson hieroglyphs across the wallpaper. Every blessing harboring a curse, every curse hiding a blessing, mere mortals entrusted with the godlike power to choose.

That was it. The answer to buttons, the great
of course
snapping precisely into place as though he’d unwittingly carried it from the womb.

Ryoki looked Kate straight in the eye. “I want you to stay because, no matter what happens, you and I will dig in and stick it out, and before we die we’ll look back and recognize our happily ever after.”

It was a speech devoid of flowers and candy, and yet Kate’s expression softened as she reached out to run her fingers through his hair, thick, black and unabashedly wavy. “I want the right to touch it,” she whispered, almost unable to speak. He took her in his arms and their lips touched, asking, telling, asking, telling, until at last a true kiss, a bringer of generations that left them trembling together, passionately alive to both terror and joy.

Outside another limb cracked—this one perilously close, startling them both. Ryoki laughed at Kate’s jolt of alarm, pulling her to his chest. He dreamily surveyed the room, wondering which pane would go first and thought how poetic it would have been to tell his children he proposed to their mother under a full moon and starlit sky. Again the wind shrieked, savage rage beating at the glass, keening around the chimney, snow flailing through the air obscuring stars and garden. He moved to one knee, pausing before he spoke the words. One day he would explain that he proposed having faith that the stars were still there.

There is an old philosophical exercise that asks, if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to hear, does it really make a sound? Of course it does, any child could tell you so. But as we get older, sometimes our definition of “sound” begins to constrict, squeezing out all but those noises involving a headline or a calculator.

Secrets of the Apple
is fiction, as are all the characters, except Kate’s mother who is based on my own mother, Mary Kathryn Porter Messer. My mother really did cook the lettuce onto the tacos, and used to look at her herd of noisy children and say, “I’m going to have to take to the bottle to enjoy my blessings.” Intensely private, she even wanted an electric fence so she could just “go out every morning and pick up the bodies.” The paragraph in which Kate describes her mother’s cancer diagnosis is always very emotional for me because it’s absolutely true. In the doctor’s office, her exact words to my dad were, “I’m so glad I didn’t work. I’m so glad we didn’t chase money.” We lost her exactly three weeks later, three days after my youngest sister’s sixteenth birthday.

As the oldest child, I had a front row seat to many of my mother’s frustrations, and a woman with six children is not going to have an easy life. She was educated, yet she was never crowned doctor or lawyer. She never earned much money, and nobody ever called her Mother of the Year or submitted her name for a major award. But at her viewing I met a little foster boy she’d been tutoring, until she became too ill to get out of bed. I’d never seen him before, didn’t know he existed until that moment, but he started to cry when he passed her casket.

My mother was smart and talented, though she never did anything you could engrave on a plaque and hang on the wall. Consequently, I know there are those who would cluck their tongues at the wasted ability and claim her tree fell in a lonely forest, but her six daughters know better. The strength of a nation is not in her courts or in her cannons, but in her homes. That’s what she taught us, and in her honor I wanted to pay it forward.

Paula Hiatt

Suzhou, China

February 2012

First of all, I need to thank my husband, Seth, and my children, Abby, Chase and Porter, who put up with me as I walked around with one eye in reality and the other whirling around inside my imagination. “Aren’t you finished yet, Mom?” Uhh. Seth was the biggest trooper, even going so far as to say nice things about my first draft, which spewed out of my pen in longhand as I was waiting at swimming lessons and in the school carpool line. That’s love right there.

I am grateful to my advance readers, my step-mother Linda who has been so kind and encouraging, and my sisters, Natalie, Sue, Shara, Lani, Roni, Kamilla and Kristin who listened to me whine and told me to get over myself when I was beating my head against the wall. I’m thankful for good friends and family who gave me needed feedback, Laura Wilson, Stephanie Hancock, Tyra Armstrong, Marnie Hiatt, Tanya Adams, and Monique Goddard who asked what happened to Lucas, alerting me that I had deleted something important.

A big thank you goes to Kevin Keele who designed the beautiful cover and paid attention every time I asked him to redraw the shoes. I was lucky to find Sarah Smith who designed the layout, and the folks at Ebooks by Design who handled the electronic conversion. Thank heavens for my editor, Tim Grundmann, who corrected what I was too close to see. If you find errors, you can chalk them up either to my stupidity or my stubbornness.