Tak ushered the children out, then latched on to Deena, half running, half pulling, the last out the room. Upstairs and into the linen room they crowded, a vast open area with shelves stacked high on all four walls. No windows, thankfully.
“Did anyone bring the candles?” Deena said.
Tak cursed.
“I’ll get them,” John offered. Allison reached out, then withdrew her arm, cheeks hot.
Her husband opened his mouth, choked on something painful, and disappeared downstairs.
Long minutes passed. The rumbling and wild banshee of the wind felt ominous.
Too much time stretched on.
“I’ll go for him,” Tyson said. “I should have gone anyway.”
Tak stood. “I’ll go. He’s my cousin.”
Tyson stopped, brows drawn and knitted in pain.
“Just…stay with your family,” he said. “Please.”
Tyson disappeared and the minutes droned on. When he finally did return, it was with a
saturated John and a fistful of slick candles.
“Something’s wrong,” John explained. “There’s too much water down there. Too much be coming from the one window. And it rushes like a river.”
Deena and Daichi looked at each other just as Grandma Emma began to pray.
Allison inched over to a dripping John and asked if he was okay. He nodded, said something covert, and both burst into laughter.
It opened a door and a hushed conversation flowed between them. The absence of tension in either of their faces said it was a nonsensical one, light and avoidant of problems. And then it changed.
“I missed you,” John said.
Allison looked away, eyes glassy.
“Hey.” John took her by the chin and steered her so that she looked directly at him. “I missed you,” he said again.
Allison slapped him.
“Damn!” Lloyd cried from a corner.
Even Deena winced.
“You think you can just say that after—”
“Allison,” Tak said. “There are kids around.”
“Oh shut up,” she snapped. “You’re always protecting him.”
“Shutting up,” Tak said.
“Actually,” John rubbed the line of his jaw. “He’s been pretty crappy to me. You know, since you left me. He blames me, I think.”
“He should!”
“I didn’t really say—” Tak started and Allison shot him a warning look.
“Keep quiet,” Deena told Tak. “Before I lose my temper too.”
Friend or not, she had one more time to yell at Deena’s husband.
“Listen to me,” John said. “Listen good. I never cheated on you. Ever.”
“Don’t.” Allison held up a hand.
“I didn’t! I don’t know how to explain it. I just wanted you to think it. I wanted you to get you riled—to—to just get you to stop. To slow down. To realize that I’m worth something, too. That I have options.”
“Options huh?”
“You’re obsessed with divorcing people,” John pushed on. “You get this rapturous delight in—in the failing of other people’s marriages.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“You do. And then you come home and can’t decide if you’re interested in me or not.”
“Interested in you? Like I’d be interested in the six o’clock news? I love you, John. What the hell are you talking about?”
He frowned.
“Really? Because I thought—”
“I accused you of cheating with your secretary, you idiot. You never even denied it.”
John shrunk. “Well, I didn’t expect you to go straight for the divorce.”
“This is the part where they either slap each other or kiss,” Tak murmured.
“Both is my guess,” Deena said.
She looked up to see Tyson looking at her husband. Her gaze narrowed to accusatory spikes. He studied the carpet instead.
John and Allison kissed.
“You need out of those wet clothes,” she said. “Show me where your room is. I’ll…er help.”
“Of course you will,” Deena said.
Allison kicked her on the way out.
Chapter Fifty
Grandma Emma started in on another bible verse.
“Quit that, will you?” Tariq said. “It’s creepy.”
“I agree.” Aunt Rhonda clasped a hand with her wife’s.
Deena cocked her ear, training to hear beyond the fury of the storm.
“Maybe you could play something, Tak. Give us something to listen to besides this storm.”
He went for their bedroom down the hall and returned with his guitar. Tak began strumming and fell into something mournful. Moods crept in that way. He shifted again, to a mimicry of Tony’s symphony.
“It’s a good sound,” Tony said.
“A great sound,” Tak affirmed.
“I should have added a little something at—”
“You wrote that?” Lloyd said.
Tony nodded.
Aunt Caroline shot an accusing look at her grandson.
“See there? He’s got talent. Some sense. Not sitting around shooting rainbows out his ass, trying to get noticed.”
“What does that even mean?” Tony said.
“She’s talking about me losing my scholarship,” Lloyd explained. “It’s her favorite topic.”
“Fool out there trying to audition for And One. You’re in college.” Caroline said. “Play like you got some sense, dummy.”
“Really, Aunt Caroline,” Deena said. “At least he’s trying to do something. More than I can say for a lot of people in this family.”
Tony groaned. A few of the younger ones shifted uncomfortably.
“Who you talking about, Deena? Make your voice known,” Caroline said too loud.
Deena felt the feverish flash of embarrassment and shoved it back. Never mind. Some things needed to be said.
“I had no idea he was in college,” she began. “But there’s something to be said for it. At least he’s trying, instead of pursuing the poor choices we have all around. Drugs. Teen pregnancy. Prison.”
“There you go again,” Caroline spat. “After school special on the microphone.” She lit a cigarette despite constant admonishments that she wasn’t to smoke indoors or anywhere around the children. “The way you carried on all these years, you’d think we beat you. That we forgot to feed you. Judging by the size of this house, we did alright by you.”
“Oh no,” Deena said and near-choked on the flare of fury that followed. “I did alright in spite of you. Not because.”
Caroline took a leisurely drag.
“I guess you raised yourself,” she said and flicked ashes to the floor. “Worship her, for she is worthy.”
“Shut up you old tub of lard. And put that damned cigarette out.”
Deena felt Tak’s hand on her shoulder and cooled at the place he touched her. Sensibility set in like a fog, unclear and settling little by little.
“You really should shut up, Caroline,” Rhonda said.
“Oh, here we go. I’ve been waiting on you. Good thing you spoke up, too. I was starting to think you had a little too much fun last night and your tongue went numb.”
Rhonda melted into the wall, leaving her wife to gasp.
“Aunt Caroline, please. There are children,” Deena said.
“Who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”
From her wheelchair, Grandma Emma mumbled about popcorn and diapers.
“Anyway,” Lloyd said and shot Caroline an impatient look. “I’m not going back to college.”
It was as if his grandmother hadn’t even heard.
“You and this one here,” she said, gesturing to her daughter, Crystal. “Want to run, want to hide from us. From your family. Dysfunction, you say.”
“Definitely dysfunction,” Deena saidd.
“Except look where you ran to. These Tanakas got as many problems as us. An
d you, you fool,” Caroline looked her daughter over as if she were just that. “Ain’t no better. You can’t even see that your man’s just gay.”
Deena shut her eyes, fury spiking and plummeting all in the same breath. Had Aunt Caroline just done that? Whatever shot of anger she’d felt at calling Tak’s family out on their problems—her, of all people—sunk to the basement of humiliation the moment she outted Tyson.
Maybe she’d heard wrong.
Deena opened her eyes.
Nope, she hadn’t.
Eyes and mouths gaped at Tyson. Only Tak looked at the floor. Crystal had neither wide eyed shock, nor angry disbelief on her face. She had nothing. She was a blank canvas, waiting to be filled.
She’d already known.
“I’m not gay,” Tyson announced, brows furrowed into a scowl of a V.
“Sure you aren’t. Only, you been spending every minute of every day looking like you want to eat Tak’s ass with a spoon.”
“Aunt Caroline,” Tak moaned, sinking as if to go through the floor. “Come on.”
“Baby, I’m sorry. You know I say what I mean.” There was amusement in her apology.
“Well, I wish you wouldn’t,” he said.
“This is awkward,” Lauren said. “But it underscores what I’ve been talking about. Heterosexuality is a prison of fictitious design—”
“Hush!” June snapped with a wave of her hand. She leaned forward enthralled.
“You and Ash,” Crystal said to Tyson, voice low. “Not just my imagination, right?”
Tyson answered by lowering his gaze, before excusing himself from the room.
Caroline shifted, long gaze affixed on Deena.
“You know, I know what you been up to. Keeping money on Keisha’s books. Paying lawyers. Asking your momma to look out for her. Can’t see why though, the way you carry on about us.”
Neither could she.
“I’m grateful you do it,” Caroline said. “Whatever the reason.”
“Well,” Deena said, frowning as if she’d swallowed something sick. “We are family.”
Caroline snorted. “That what we are?”
Deena’s aunt looked her over.
“I don’t kid myself about what goes on around here,” she said. “About all the mistakes I’ve made, that others made. In fact,” she paused. “I’m not even sure you’d call ‘em mistakes.”
Caroline drifted toward an abyss, poised on a cloud of distant thoughts.
“I hated you,” she said. “First time I saw you, if you can believe that. I hated a child.” Deena’s aunt laughed. “But you looked like that damned Gloria, who took my brother away.”
She brought a shaking, wrinkled hand to the bridge of her nose and paused as if forgetting why it hung there. When the hand dropped away again, Deena found tightness in her jaw and her lips muscled into a knot of silence. Still, she could see the tremble there in that button of a mouth. Caroline swallowed once emphatically. Only then did Deena see the dampness of her eyes.
“When I heard that he’d died…” Caroline shook her head. “I would tell you that you don’t know what that’s like, except you ain’t so fortunate. You know exactly what that’s like.”
She took her time piecing together the next thought. Steady, somehow oblivious that even the storm hung in wait for her words.
“In my mind, you weren’t kin to me,” Caroline said. “Nothing with her blood could be kin to me. The kids…the kids just picked up on that. Picked up on my hate and made it theirs.”
Her hands rubbed together, hands that creased in ways Deena hadn’t noticed, hands that shook just so and lined from the passage of time.
“I wish I had a lot of stuff back to do over. Wish I had the last 30 years to do over. I wouldn’t let hate eat me alive, if I did. And I’d kill that goddamned Snow in his cradle.”
If she realized that this would have meant being without a grandchild that sat before her, she didn’t notice. He stared back at her blank, Snow’s son. Not speaking. He never did, really.
“All that was my fault,” Caroline said. “What he did to Lizzie, Keisha, Anthony, the kids. You say what you want, but Anthony was killed for loving his sister, for trying to protect her from what he knew was out there.” She looked directly at Tony as she spoke. “Who wouldn’t do that? You?”
Tony dropped his gaze, eyes filled with a thousand contrary emotions. He stared at his hands as if uncertain of their purpose, before inhaling what he looked unwilling to exhale.
Caroline turned from him and cast a questioning stare at each of them, daring one to contradict her. Only Deena and Kenji noticed the tears that filled Lizzie’s eyes. Kenji put an arm around her and she curved into him, earning a ghost of a smile from Deena.
“He was a child trying to protect a child,” Caroline said. “It should have been one of us, out there, putting a bullet in Snow. None of this shit should have happened. Not to Anthony, not to any of you.”
Caroline jabbed away tears with a talon-tipped thumb while Deena did her best to breathe. What was all this? Why was she stirring this vortex?
“That was Dean’s baby that dog murdered. My brother, dammit. He would have killed for anybody in this room. He would have killed for anybody that was his, and his family was his. And he didn’t give no damn about what they looked like.”
Caroline shot a withering look at Grandma Emma, who had slumped into silence. Interesting, Deena thought, the way coherence came and went. If it truly went at all.
“I used to see what I wanted to see with Snow,” Caroline said. “Make myself believe what was easy. Everybody knew what he was. Just because he smiled smiles and mouthed the right words, didn’t mean that you couldn’t see no soul stood behind it all. But that didn’t suit me, especially once Keisha had his baby. I should have had a spine. I should have spoke up. There ain’t a day I don’t think about what I could have stopped by putting my foot down, by opening my mouth and meaning it, back when she first started bringing him around.”
Tariq cleared his throat.
“I think I knew he killed Anthony.”
The room shifted, a sea of incredulous faces all in one direction.
“But saying it made it real,” Caroline’s oldest son said, eyes on the floor. “Saying it meant you had to act on it. Be ready, for what it brought. I never…” He struggled, as if defending against a barrage of insults. “I did say something. Once. About the way he treated Keisha. He put a gun to my head for it. Cocked it. Told me to let my family be my lesson. He could have meant Keisha or Lizzie. But we both knew he meant Anthony.”
Silence swelled the room.
“Well, since we’re all confessing,” Ken said brightly, his arm in a navy cast. “I’m having another child. With Karina.”
He turned a smile on his wife. Asami slapped him. It was a ringing sound that brought delight to a room full of faces. Ken gripped his cheek belatedly with a glare of incredulity, incredulity that melted into red faced rage.
“You’re brand new with all this family around you,” he spat. “You’re all sister girl and bold. We’ll see how you are in Atlanta, though, when it’s just me and you though. Something tells me, you’ll find humility.”
Daichi stood.
“Outside, Ken.”
He strode for the door.
“I’m not a Tanaka,” Ken called after him. “I don’t come when the great Daichi summons me.”
Except he did, because Tak and John were up and dragging him into the hall.
At their backs was Uncle Yoshi, on his feet and howling.
“That low down dog! Didn’t I tell you he was trash?” he shouted at his sister. “Didn’t I warn you he was nothing? You should have let me lay him low years ago! He never fooled me. I say we toss him to the hurricane.”
Grandma Yukiko hushed him so they could hear in the hall.
“I think you know that I am not a kind man,” Daichi said from just beyond their door. “That I’m known neither for my generosity nor my ability to fo
rgive.”
Despite his careful tone, not even the hurricane rivaled the chill he brought in that moment.
“You are an enemy of mine, Ken Wantanabe, and you are ignorant enough to mistake the gravity of this. I am ruthless in revenge, and you may yet learn how much. When the house you own with your whore has the entire sum called in by First National Bank. When her employers at the Children’s Trust take a surprisingly conservative view of her lifestyle, a view encouraged by their biggest backer. When you, yes you, are called before the CDC’s Management Board for indiscretions on the job; and when your mother and father lose the house they raised you in because there is no record of mortgage payments for the last three years, you will understand how far I can go. I will unhinge you, Ken Watanabe, if you cross my sister again. I care not who or what gets dragged in the undertow.”
Daichi returned to the room and sat, scowling under the weight of their stares.
Tak reappeared at Deena’s side.
“He’s always been scary,” he said. “But that—” There was a hint of awe in his voice. “That was like, look-back-and-become-a-pillar-of-salt frightening.”
“Yeah, it was,” Deena said.
She looked over to see Asami sitting in the corner, arms folded, smile smug, satisfied.
****
Lauren looked up.
“I have a problem,” she said. “I—I forgot my…vitamins.”
The things that people worried about.
“You’ll just have to go without, Lauren. In a few days you can get more,” Deena said.
“These are really important.” She pulled up to full height “I’ll go get them myself. They’re nondescript things, in there with some of the supplies.”
John stood. “I’ll get it.”
“But you nearly drowned last time,” Tak said. “Let me go. I’m a better swimmer. You know, if swimming’s necessary.”
“And you have three children. All I have are divorce papers. Let me go,” John said.
Tyson got up.
“Tell me where it is and what it’s called.”
He stared straight at Lauren, body stiff, insistent. Interestingly enough, she looked just as rigid as him.
“A small bottle. Called PharmaCare,” Lauren muttered.
Tyson disappeared without a word, leaving Deena to grin at her husband.
Crimson Footprints lll: The Finale Page 19
