Crimson Footprints

by Shewanda Pugh

  The thirteenth floor belonged to Daichi and his secretary of fifteen years, Angela. Heavy glass doors etched with the company logo glided open to meet Tak when he reached the floor. He conjured up his most charming grin and crossed the bright white lobby to Angela’s desk.

  She looked up and smiled at the sight of the boy she’d watched become a man over the years. “You must want something, Takumi. That smile is far too big.”

  Tak leaned on her desk, a hand on several of his father’s files. “You’ve done something new with your hair, Angela. Looks great. Glamorous, even.”

  Angela Martinez grinned. “Now I know you want something. Out with it, por favor.” Though she’d worked for Daichi Tanaka for so long, and knew that he and his sons were fluent in Spanish, she wouldn’t have dared use it with her boss.

  Tak shook his head. “I’m so disappointed, Angie. I came to see you. I just…needed a little sunshine in my day.” Casually, he picked up a manila folder, only to have it snatched away.

  “¿Que? You want me on the unemployment line?”

  Tak rolled his eyes. “Right, Angela. My dad would sooner get rid of me.” He watched her as she organized the files he’d skewed. “Listen, in all seriousness, I need a favor.”

  She didn’t bother to look up. “A favor?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced behind him, as if worried his father would show up.

  “Su padres en Prague.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He leaned forward. “There’s a girl who works here. I need you to clear her for vacation.”

  Angela’s mouth dropped. “I knew it!”

  Tak tried not to smile. “You knew what?”

  “You and your ‘oh I just had to see you. You just brighten my day.’” She came around the desk and folded bronzed arms, a lock of auburn hair slipping into her eyes. “Who is it?”

  Tak grinned. “Deena Hammond.”

  “Deena Hammond. You say her name like that in front of your father?”

  “You kidding me? He doesn’t even know I know her.”

  Angela’s face grew somber. She returned to her desk, hands trembling as she sorted paperwork for filing.

  Tak watched her. “What, Angela? What did I do?”

  “Go away, Takumi.”

  “Go away? Why?”

  She shook her head. “Because I said so.”

  Angela went to work filing her stacks. When she looked up, she found him still standing there. “I can’t get between you and your father. The job market isn’t good, and anyway, I’m too old to start over.”

  “I’m just asking for a few days off—days that she’s already earned. Paid.”

  “Paid!”

  “Come on. You can do it. You can do anything. Dad says so all the time.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You went too far, Takumi.”

  “Sorry.”

  Angela dashed the hair from her eyes and sighed at the hopeful expression on his young face. As a boy, he’d worn that same expression sitting outside his father’s office as he begged for pizza instead of sushi for lunch. As a teen, he wore it when he needed help getting a dent out of his new Mustang before his father was any the wiser. And now, as he needed her to bend company rules for a girl, he wore it one more time.

  Angela sighed. “How many days?”

  Tak lowered his gaze. “A month.”

  “A month!”

  “Angela, come on. She’s earned two months’ vacation. Go ahead and put it through.”

  “No one’s ever been approved for a month at a time, Takumi. No one.”

  “Please,” he clasped his hands together in desperation.

  With a groan, Angela turned to her PC, usurping the human resources department as she went to Deena’s file.

  “Well, she’s never taken a sick day. Just bereavement.”

  Tak came around her desk for a closer look and Angela jabbed the monitor’s off button. “Jesus! ¿Estás loco?”

  “Well, you’re sitting here reading it to me! What’s the difference?”

  “I’m not reading it to you, Takumi, I’m thinking out loud.”

  She scowled at him until he retreated, then turned the monitor back on.

  “I’ll give you two days.”

  “Two days! I need a month.”

  This was why he didn’t belong in corporate America. He needed to be free to roam at will.

  “Well, you’re in here at the last minute. There are people who have been waiting for months—”

  “Angela, come on. It’s me. Why are you going on about a bunch of strangers, anyway?” Tak gave her his most doleful expression. “I’ll owe you,” he promised.

  “You have nothing I want!”

  “Well, when I get something it’s yours.” Tak leaned against a desk. “Please, Angela? I’m crazy about her.”

  That was the other thing. She was a sucker for love. Married for thirty-two years, the mother of four children, and the daughter of parents who’d been happily married for sixty years were probably all to blame. She devoured romance novels and soap operas and thrived on the love affairs of celebrities. She was always, always disappointed when love didn’t work out.

  Tak smiled, knowing he’d baited his fish.

  “The first time I touched her there was this… this awareness that I’ve never felt. This sense of what she was to me, of what she was going to be to me.”

  Angela’s eyes widened. “And you met her here? At the office?”

  Tak shook his head. He knew this next part would send her over the top. He had to be careful, though, as the truth was sensational enough. Any embellishment would make it all seem implausible. “She saved my life. We were strangers and she saved my life.”

  Angela gasped. “Someone tried to kill you?”

  He nodded.

  “Get a chair out of the conference room. Pull it up and tell me everything. I’ll put in for her vacation time.”

  “WELL, I THINK you should go, Deena.” Rhonda shifted to adjust the slim black phone wedged between her shoulder and ear and waited for her niece’s protests.

  “You can’t be serious. I’d be gone a month. I don’t even know where I’m going. What if Grandma needs me? What if Lizzie needs me?”

  Rhonda thought about her niece Lizzie, the lost and promiscuous soul who would be unwilling to accept help from her sister even if she did need it.

  “They’ll just have to manage.”

  “Grandma doesn’t want me to go. She says she might need me for something.”

  Rhonda sighed. “And what about what you need?”

  She was met with a laugh. “I don’t even know what I need.”

  “No? Well, I’d start with this vacation.” Rhonda gave a tired sigh. “Sweetheart, listen to me. You’re twenty-four and you live like a nun. You work, come home and spend all your free time trying to please everyone else. There’s got to be more to your life.”

  Rhonda stood, folded her arms, and crossed the length of her spacious master bedroom. With a lean on the windowsill, she gave her lover, stretched out on the broad and accommodating platform bed, a wink. Black lace on soft curves made her irresistible.

  She turned her attention back to Deena.

  “You need a life of your own, sweetheart. An adventure. Wind in your hair and laughter in your heart. You need to feel alive, to do more than just be. And you have the right to happiness, but you have to take it and own it.”

  “And what? You think I’ll find it? On this trip with him?”

  Rhonda shook her head. “It doesn’t matter if I think you’ll find it with him. The question is, do you?”

  DEENA STARED AT the pile of clothes on her bed. She had no idea what to pack. She had a few sweaters, relics from her days at MIT, but wasn’t sure if they’d be traveling far enough north to need them. It was March, just two weeks shy of the anniversary of her brother’s death, and already the unrelenting Florida heat was upon them. He’d warned her not to pack much, that they would go where the wind took them, but she found the idea
of being unprepared frightening. So she threw in the sweaters, jammed in the jeans, and frowned at the stack of short and long sleeve shirts on her bed. Not everything would fit, and for the first time in her life, planning alone couldn’t give her comfort. For the first time in her life, she would have to trust someone else.

  A year ago, the only Tanaka Deena knew was Daichi. Back then, she was an older sister who practiced a life of piety, determined to be the shining example her siblings so desperately needed. Every decision was a conscious choice, painstakingly determined after weighing all options and ascertaining every possible outcome. From obsessing over course material to ensure that her grades remained stellar, to skipping parties and dating because they were unproductive distractions, all of it had been for Anthony and Lizzie. Anthony, who lived and died by the sword, and Lizzie, who lived and might die like a whore. For once, there was no great and noble purpose behind Deena’s actions. She was responding to a voice thought long dead, bullied and smothered by her grandparents and a file on her hard drive boldly named ‘Expectations’. It was a file whose dense itinerary bore no mention of a month-long vacation or a schoolgirl infatuation. But the junior Tanaka had done the impossible. He resurrected that voice, weak though it was, and gave it reason to shout.

  It was a damp and gray Friday morning when they left for destinations unknown. Deena ventured out with a stone gray duffle bag in hand—large, but singular. On her face was the uncertainty that plagued her. But it was coupled with something else, something wholly unfamiliar—excitement. Tak spotted her and smiled. He saw the apprehension, but he saw past it to the single bag and the simmering anticipation in her smile. He needn’t be told that she’d spent half the night packing and unpacking in an effort to meet every need, only to realize it was impossible. And he needn’t be told what this large, lone bag meant to her, or meant to them. In her own way, she was giving herself to him. She trusted him.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING about the patter of rain on a windshield, the mundane gray of an overcast sky, and the gentle hum of a car on the interstate that could lull even those with the heartiest resolve to sleep. Tak glanced at Deena, with her knees drawn to her chest, head against the door, and a few unruly wisps of hair in her face as she slept, and he smiled.

  He could recall a conversation they’d had last year, shared over two lattes in Brickell. In particular, it was the wide-eyed wonderment with which she looked at him as he confessed that he’d seen most of the country.

  “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, she said, Cambridge and Miami, and neither had been vacations.

  He’d stared at her in 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, blown 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 thirty-two, he won an open competition to design JP Morgan’s new headquarters in Manhattan. Daichi’s design had beaten a whopping seven hundred entries, including those by 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 poring over the records for his fledgling firm, fretting over whether it could stay afloat. He was at the kitchen table frowning over drafts when the phone rang, and it was a then ten-year-old Tak who dashed to answer it. He remembered the man having 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, by Daichi, of a brazen new face. It was the beginning of the end, they 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, and the one 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 Daichi’s 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 drunk 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. 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. Neglected, 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 a heart attack 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. Not to mention she ignited him in a way that was as thrilling as it was unfamiliar. Deena, with her toffee colored curls and blue-green 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 one 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?”

  T
ak 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 woken 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 good use. But he waved her off.

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

  She turned away, ignoring the customary flutters she felt at his casual endearment. He dropped sweet nothings like that—a ‘baby’ here, a ‘sweetie’ there, and she dared not take them at 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 and what constituted sincere interest.

  Deena sighed. It wasn’t that there’d been no opportunities for her, but rather that she shunned 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 a virgin.

  She buried those fears with reasoning. A busy woman had no time for men. Driven by success, she needn’t be bothered with cumbersome relationships. 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 the geeks who figured she wanted an intellectual match instead of the bare bones brawn and good looks of the 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. She would stay seated, start sweating, and 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. They were like museum paintings—ideal to admire, forbidden to touch, and always, always too costly to bring home.