For a woman supposedly so deprived, she had access to international travel, a good command of English, and perhaps, a few other surprises in store. The constant curiosity that bolstered him, tingled in desire to know. Who was this woman that drifted between border patrols without making a scene? Which of his assumptions about her were wrong?
“You can’t keep them out the storm,” Carmen said. “The best you can do is send help as quickly as possible.”
“Help?” Mike echoed dumbly. The bags in his hands grew heavy. He set them on the floor.
“I am talking of a rescue effort. You must call someone and alert them to their presence.”
“Of course,” he said. But who?
He chewed on his bottom lip. His mother and father were there. His grandmother, brother, and sister. Deena was there, he thought, and shut the door on what followed that.
Some sort of boat or plane, he supposed. One willing to take them a long distance. Or a short one, if the hospital were needed. One willing to transport 40 or 50 people in harsh conditions on short notice. What would it cost him? How would he pay it?
“Why were you in Aruba?” Mike said.
He thought she’d recoiled at the question. But as fast as he’d seen the wrinkle in her brow, it was gone, causing him to question its existence.
Carmen dropped her gaze.
“We are talking about you, Michael. You and the help your family needs.”
He stared at her. For seven hours she’d talked his mind to numbness about her mother and father and three brothers, one of which worked for an airline and lived well in the United States. She’d told him of everything from childhood scrapes to the slave-like conditions in the factory, never even flinching when showing lashes she’d received at work. A slip of fabric off a bronzed shoulder, another in the front near cleavage. None of that had been too much. But Aruba—there was where she drew the line.
“I see,” Mike said.
Michael. He didn’t know if it was by means of attrition, or what, but he didn’t mind her calling him Michael anymore. Before, the usage reminded him of his oli Daichi or his grandmother. But Carmen had made it all her own, saying it as if he were the godfather himself. Maybe it was the accent. It had an exoticism beyond belief.
“What time’s the storm to hit?” he said.
“I couldn’t say. End of the day?”
End of the day.
He wandered over to a row of seats and pulled out his cell. Like every other airport he’d been to in the world, Wi-Fi was available. Mike logged on and went to search for helicopters he could charter. He made the first phone call, eager and explained the situation to the operator.
But she was all facts and figures, estimating space and fuel necessary, without hearing the urgency in his voice. When she quoted him a cheerful $41,000, plus tax, Mike hung up. He didn’t have that kind of money. He’d never seen that kind of money.
He rooted around in his phone for Daichi’s office number, dialed and got voicemail. After hanging up on that, he called the firm’s answering service and asked to get put through to Daichi’s personal secretary—who turned out to be absolutely unavailable because it was Christmas Eve.
With a sigh, Mike dropped his face in his hands. Who did he think he was, anyway? Tak? He hadn’t the ability to save himself, else he’d be back there with them, facing death where he belonged, instead of sitting in Argentina with nowhere to go.
“Maybe a boat?” Carmen said.
A boat! It was bound to be cheaper than a plane, he thought, and immediately went searching for companies online.
Private, temporary yacht rentals were available for specific activities. They transported up to 20 to 25 people in most cases and would take them snorkeling, deep sea fishing, or to watch the setting sun.
Mike sighed.
“The Embassy,” Carmen suggested with a clap. “They are American citizens, like you, no? The Embassy will help them, for sure.”
“Of course!” He could have kissed her. He would have kissed her, if he weren’t on a forced sabbatical from women. More searching on the net turned up the American consulate in Curaçao. He put in a call and explained the situation, emphasizing that not only were they American citizens, but prominent American citizens. “My uncle, Daichi Tanaka, is quite famous,” he said for the umpteenth time. “He’s been on Time, People, Newsweek. He’s won the Pritzker Prize. The man’s like the Nelson Mandela of architecture.”
Okay, yeah, it was a road too far, but he was saving lives here and that’s what mattered.
“Whatever the cost is,” Mike said. “The family can pay tenfold. Just ensure you have someone to get them out. There is a pregnant woman and several small children. Their deaths would be a scandal of epic proportions. It would raise diplomatic concerns, I’m sure.”
He wasn’t sure, of course. He wasn’t even sure if it would conjure more than a memorial cover on Architectural Digest and a scrolling headline along the bottom of CNN, but hell, he was in this for the gold.
They assured him that they would alert local authorities and follow up to ensure that something had been done. Mike took the name of the woman on the phone and hung up, feeling a sense of accomplishment for once.
He turned to face Carmen who smiled a little too brightly.
“See there? American problems solved with American ease. Now, I must go.”
Mike stood, darting straight up stupidly, and looked down at her with concern.
“Go where?”
“To the factory. It’s where I live and work. I’ve explained this already.”
Maybe it was the cold steel of worry lodged in his throat, a thousand worries about the safety of his family. Maybe it was the sight of a young and beautiful woman with lashes on her body and hands akin to his grandmother’s. Maybe it was him, aching to prove he could be human, whole, and kind with reciprocity. Whatever it was, his mouth moved before he could stop it.
“Come with me,” he said. “Don’t go back there.”
Carmen blinked, stared, then chucked him a brittle laugh. “You don’t even know where you are going.”
“To a hotel. Somewhere close.”
She shook her head. “And do what? Be your whore till you tire of me? No, thank you.”
Mike smiled weakly. As if a guy like him could tire of a woman so beautiful.
“Actually,” he said. “I’ve sworn off women. So, if that’s your only objection…”
Carmen’s brow creased. “What does this mean? ‘Sworn off?’”
“It means I don’t want to be with them.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean that…you prefer men? Because in Argentina—”
Mike’s cheeks colored. “I am very much attracted to women. I am very much attracted to you. But poor decisions teach me that I should be alone for awhile. I am…searching for the truth in me, I guess.”
Carmen studied him as if trying to determine whether she had translated properly. Finally, her face smoothed.
“You ask for everything and offer nothing, a few days of comfort in exchange for my livelihood.”
Mike lowered his gaze. It was true. He could offer her nothing. Not without gaining employment. He thought of his job at IBM, the one where he hadn’t bothered to put in for more than vacation time. They had a location there in Buenos Aires, though and he had enough seniority to press for relocation.
“What if I hire you?” he asked. “To show me around? To be a tour guide, translator, to help me find a job?”
Carmen’s eyes sparkled. “And when all that is done?”
Mike grinned. “To teach me Spanish, of course.”
Carmen’s mouth spread into a wondrous smile.
“Estoy loco,” she groaned and slipped her hand into his.
He didn’t know if she meant that she was crazy or him, but whatever the translation, he suspected both were right.
Chapter Forty-Four
Deena rushed into the house with her father-in-law on her heels. They were late. So lat
e that whatever meager supplies existed on an island scarcely 30 miles large—an island that somehow managed to never get storms—would no doubt be beyond their grasp. Still, she sent two housekeepers into the city with order to get whatever non-perishables they could. Three others were tasked with gathering whatever flashlights, candles, matches, portable radios, and first aid kits they could find. Two more hunted down bottles of water and filled as many discarded jugs and soda bottles they could manage.
“The house,” Daichi reminded her. “The house itself…”
A silent conversation passed between, one where he reprimanded and she accepted it. On buying the house, Deena knew that it lacked the proper fixtures for adequate storm protection. Combine with that the reality that it sat wedged in the Caribbean Sea and she really had been careless. Except, it never rained in Aruba. Or so she’d thought.
“Wood,” Deena said. “We need as much as possible.”
“Musuko, you must know that—”
“Tell everyone to find an armful of wood.” She spoke directly to Ms. Jimenez then. “I don’t care if they have to tear up the furniture to do it. Board every window. Protect every space. Have all the supplies delivered to the drawing room. When the storm starts, I want everyone in there until it ends.”
Daichi looked at her.
“And if…conditions deteriorate?” he said.
“There’s an upstairs linen room. It doesn’t have windows.”
Daichi eyed her.
“I see.”
And she knew he did. He was, perhaps, the only one who did.
****
To Tak, it made no sense to wreck the furniture when they had a forest of trees in the backyard. Had his wife been the one to discover Tony and his half-naked minx, she might have remembered that. But, since she wasn’t, it was Tak who strode for the gardens with little more than a chainsaw.
“That’s a really bad idea,” Tyson called, falling in alongside him at once.
Tak doubled his speed. If Tyson took the hint, it wasn’t apparent.
“I’ll bet that you’ve never cut down a tree,” he said. “Which means you’re guaranteed to get hurt. Let me grab some supplies from the garage and help you. I don’t…want anything to happen to you.”
Tak wished he wouldn’t say things like that. He really wished he wouldn’t say things like that.
He watched him go, repressing the urge to fling himself into the task of assaulting trees ignorantly. Anything to avoid the awkwardness with Tyson.
Tyson returned with two sets of goggles, helmets, gloves, a few wedges and something Tak couldn’t even identify.
“Come on,” Tyson said. “Your furniture’s pretty expensive. Let’s chop a few trees and save you guys some money, huh?”
Tak nodded, but still, he stood, gaze sweeping the landscape for someone—anyone—to accompany them.
At least he’d said, “you guys,” an acknowledgement of Tak’s wife—an acknowledgment of his marriage. That had to be a sign of improvement in their conditions. After all, Tak wasn’t a homophobe. Once Tyson accepted the platonic nature of their relationship, there was no reason to think they couldn’t find friendliness again.
That’s what he told himself.
They made it as far as the tangle of trees and their looming darkness before Tyson selected one good for cutting.
“It’s already leaning,” he explained. “So, we’ll go with the lean, not against it. It’s small enough to come down easy.”
They set to work in silence, with Tak following his lead, moving away brush and scattered limbs from their landing site, then deciding on the direction they would move when the tree gave way. After that, Tyson sawed in a small undercut on the bark about two feet up from the root, an incision he explained would aid the tree in falling safely. He followed it with a careful cut, uniform all the way around the tree.
“I owe you an apology,” Tyson said as he worked.
Tak studied leaves on the ground.
“Uh huh.”
“I’m attracted to you. I thought you were attracted to me, too.”
Tak felt his face go hot.
“So, you’re saying I gave you some kinda gay vibe.”
Tyson shot him a look.
“I’m not gay.”
“Uh…yeah you are.”
Tyson set down his saw.
“Listen to me. What I had with Ash—that was different.”
“Yeah, okay. I gathered that much myself.”
Tyson looked him over with eyes that weren’t quite the way Tak remembered them. What he’d taken to be astuteness now looked like naked interest.
“I’m not gay,” Tyson repeated. “I only thought that we connected in some meaningful way. I only thought—”
“Look. Let’s just cut the wood, okay?”
“I’m not asking you to choose between Deena and me. She doesn’t have to know.”
“I’m leaving,” Tak announced and tossed his helmet to the ground.
Only, Tyson grabbed him by the arm the second he moved. Tak snatched free.
“Look, I don’t care that you have some kind of identity crisis. Or even that you think I’m your soulmate. Chop the damned wood, already,” Tak said. “Or I’ll forget my manners and plant that chainsaw in your skull.”
Tyson stared, stared until there was nothing but the violent rise and fall of Tak’s chest and the wild way he looked at him. He opened his mouth to say more, then closed it and returned to the tree.
“Tell Crystal,” Tak said. “Tell her today. And stop making a fool out of my wife’s cousin.”
Chapter Forty-Five
The sky smoldered a cobalt blue and streaked in fitful bouts of lightening, as they stood on the terrace boarding back windows. The wind was fierce. An old fierce, as ancient as God.
John was a menace at carpentry. He’d hold a plank and affix it with a single ill placed nail, then balk when it swung and crashed to the floor.
“The one side has to hold so I can get to the other. What kind of wood is this?”
Of course, Deena thought. The type of wood. The chemical consistency. That was the problem.
Thankfully, others worked faster, which meant that Tak found the means to help John. Which meant that two bumbled for the price of one.
“Oh really,” Deena snapped in a moment of impatience. She took the hammer and nails, stuffed both in the pocket of her skirt, and snatched the bit of wood out John’s reluctant hands. A well placed nail and a few snaps of the wrist had her protection up on one side. Quickly, she moved to the other and repeated the same. Rain sprinkled her.
“Showoff,” John muttered.
Deena turned to demand more wood and her phone rang.
She saw it then. The tense crease of her husband’s mouth. The set of his shoulders. They’d been reduced to this, she realized. Not trusting. Suspicious of even a phone call. Deena thought of her conversation with Daichi.
A slight peek into her pocket revealed that Allison called. Deena snatched it out, as thunder rocked the room.
“You’re still here?” she said.
She turned her back to John, who stood waiting with his next piece of wood. Tak, stoic as he watched, had both hands loose at his side.
“Deena,” Allison said breathlessly. “They’ve cancelled all remaining flights, including the one I was on. We’re marooned and I’m terrified.”
Deena shot a look at John, who wore his crumpled white shirt for yet another day.
“Come here,” she said.
“I can’t. After all that’s happened—”
“Come here, now, Allison.” John snapped to attention. “This is your safest possible option. Of course, John would want you here.”
Now neither John nor Tak moved. Deena, whose heart beat with the insistence that she’d been too bold, too presumptuous, pushed the thought from her mind.
“You need to get here any way you can. Bribe someone. I don’t care. It’s getting scary out there.”
“There�
�s no one to bring me.”
“No one to bring you? There must—”
“Where is she?” John demanded.
Deena paused. “I don’t know if—”
“Where is she?”
Hurriedly, she told him the hotel. John tossed the last of his wood and bolted for the door.
“John’s on the way,” Deena said and hung up the phone.
“The driver hasn’t left yet,” Tak explained. “He’s waiting as long as he possibly can, in case we need something. John will probably have to drop him off and sort it out with the chauffeur company later. He’s a lawyer, though. He’ll think of something.”
Deena retrieved John’s discarded plank.
“They better hurry,” she said. “We’ll have to bolt the doors soon.”
In simulated recreations, hurricanes were always disciplined circles of torment traveling in a neat, predictable path. Tony knew, because he’d studied every storm that had formed in the Atlantic Ocean since his moving to Miami. “Studied” seemed too mild a word though. He agonized over those storms, writhed over them. He imagined every one as the one—the one that would shred every manmade structure in its path, hack at every human limb. This storm, he told himself at every single one, would raise the floods of Noah and bring locusts to their mangled bodies.
His phone sirened every time a smidgeon of a signal fought its way through. Lizard and Wendy checking in on him again. Tony texted them when he could, but found that every word, every act in reaction to the mania outside only fueled the pump-pump of his heart and the nonstop swallowing he kept up.
The wind shrieked its hysteria. Glass doors, doubled down with planks of wood and reinforced with duct tape, might as well have been wisps of white lined paper. Every bit of glass in the house rattled like the barred cells of the innocent, rabid creatures on the other side, wild in the need to unhinge.
Dinner on Christmas Eve was to be an elaborate event, a 12-course meal dwarfed only by the 21-course one scheduled the next day. Now, family sat huddled together in the ballroom, scarfing down cold soup and lukewarm duck, all the hired help from the island now gone. Everyone that remained cast dark, expectant glances at the boarded up windows. Where endless banter and wild whoops had been the norm, plate scraping silence now dominated.
Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale Page 17
