Crimson Footprints II: New Beginnings

by Shewanda Pugh

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Deena eased her gloss black BMW into the parking space labeled “D. Tanaka” and frowned at the empty adjacent one belonging to Kenji. She exited the garage and rounded to the towering firm, briefcase in hand, mind already weighing and dismissing tasks. She juggled two projects at the moment, a new wing on the home of a Miami socialite and a bowling alley in a not-so-nice part of town. Both were in the tail-end phase requiring only the overseeing of construction and an occasional meeting with her engineer of preference on all projects, Greg Knight from Knight Engineering. A third potential project required her to submit a design proposal and interview with a panel of judges from the state. She expected a final decision in the days to come.

  Deena trekked up to her office on the seventh floor, same as Kenji’s. It took her eleven years to get there though on a shortened route that coworkers claimed had everything to do with her screwing the boss’s son. There were others on that floor, prized architects who’d been in the field longer than Deena had been on the earth, and a few of them were still unpacking potted plants and portraits.

  But Deena knew the score. Her father-in-law’s dream was to leave his firm to a Tanaka. When she’d married into the family, she made that a possibility; and when Kenji declared architecture his major, the marquee outside practically changed itself.

  But her transition to heir apparent hadn’t been smooth. When Kenji first came to the firm three years ago, as an intern postgraduation, Deena’s job description changed from architect to trainer, despite the accolades she’d managed to acquire. Quickly, her father-in-law made clear that he trusted the task of molding Kenji to Deena and would equate his failure to a failure on her part. She’d done everything from helping him study for the AREs to intervening on projects he’d designed. Kenji’s first week past the test he got a major contract, a fast-food restaurant that dropped into his lap, no doubt with pressure from upstairs. He slapped it together in a fit, selecting materials ill-suited to the job, overlooking obvious design flaws, and claiming tickets to the Marlins in the World Series as the cause. Later, Deena would go from patching his design to scrapping it and starting from scratch. Had she left it as it stood, it would’ve collapsed in a year, maybe less.

  He was disillusioned. As the son of the world’s most famous architect, he’d seen his father build structures that were both romantic and grand. But he lacked the discipline to learn his craft, earn his name, or take his time. The surname Tanaka bought him projects he couldn’t hope to compete for on his own—Deena knew that, as her marriage certificate had done more than even Skylife could manage. Suddenly, Tanaka meant nary a question about qualifications and only an eagerness to get started. One client of Deena’s equated it to having Ralph Lauren suddenly agree to become her personal stylist.

  Deena dropped her briefcase on her desk, powered on her PC, and went for a cup of coffee. When she returned she went through e-mails systematically, made notations where necessary, and stopped to read the congratulations cards on her desk from those welcoming her nephew to the family. She sent a few e-mails of thanks and settled in for a morning of grunt work. There were the new building codes passed by the county she needed to review, codes that she’d planned on reading at home before Tony’s arrival. As it stood now, two children in the place of one made the house way too hectic for meaningful work.

  Pausing every so often to sip coffee or take a note, Deena read over the regulations for exhaust ventilation. She was halfway through when her door cracked and someone stepped in.

  “Morning, Kenji.”

  She didn’t have to look up to know it was him. He was the only one that barged in.

  “Hey. You got here early.”

  “Mhm.”

  Deena turned the page.

  “How was Disney?”

  “Disney was interesting.” She looked up. “Have you finished the book I assigned you? International Building Code?”

  Kenji shook his head. “Thumbed through it. But I’ve got plans to read it this weekend.”

  Deena stared at him. He was in black slacks and a baby blue button-up, a gift from her if she wasn’t mistaken. His jet-black hair lay stiffened with mousse, manipulated into something new and stylish. Fatigue shadowed his face.

  “You got a haircut,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yeah, I did.”

  She turned back to her book. “You should’ve read the book already. I gave it to you before Tony showed up. There’s no excuse.”

  “It’s a dry read, Dee. I start and can’t finish.”

  Deena set her book aside and studied him carefully. She remembered him as a boy, first growing stubble on his face. He’d blurt random facts about engineering or construction as readily as he did the nuances of a Marvel comic. What happened in between was a mystery. Again, it struck her that he looked tired.

  “Ours is a slow climb, Kenji. You won’t get there if you don’t dig in and start grappling.”

  He ventured to her window. “Dad won a contest. I could win a contest.”

  Kenji pulled the blinds. Wood woven, sliding panel bamboo. Outside, a Carnival Cruise liner pulled into dock at nearby Port of Miami.

  Deena swiveled in her seat.

  “Your father put in a lot of work before he won that contest,” she said. “And the last thing you designed wasn’t even safe for habitation.”

  “Just needed a few tweaks,” he said.

  Deena’s gaze narrowed. “We don’t do ‘tweaks,’ Kenji. You do this job wrong and people die.”

  Kenji sighed. “I’ll do better, Deena. I promise.”

  She turned back to her desk, suddenly all business. “Start with the book. Read it. Today.”

  He had no projects because she’d pulled his father aside and bitched after the last fiasco. He still received his base salary, heftier than most, but would get no more until Deena gave the green light.

  “Fine,” he said.

  There was silence between them.

  “Guess I better go now,” he said.

  Sadness ate at the traces of his smile. How had she missed it before?

  Deena stood, architecture forgotten. “Kenji? You okay, sweetheart?”

  But he shrank from her. “Sure. Of course. I’ve just—I need to go. Bye.”

  Kenji whipped out the door, leaving Deena to stare and wonder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The end.

  Lizzie found it through the pain of humiliation, the humiliation of pain. She found it in withdrawal and self-loathing. It came to her not in the ferocity of violence or the peace of death, but as reconciliation, betwixt and between.

  There could be no going forward, at least not on this path. Before her was death, an Anthony sort of death, perhaps even worse. And yet, turning back made less sense. There was no one back there for her, no mother and father waiting to embrace a prodigal daughter, no praying grandmother who’d always believed. So, Lizzie stood, between two places, both of which led to nowhere.

  And yet, she couldn’t stay. There could be no more crack or heroin or mouth-foaming pain, no more men atop her thrusting, thrusting. She had but her own mistakes, multiplied and emphasized, bleeding the agony of her own demise. She had nothing and was no one.

  She could die.

  The suggestion came to her, soft as a seduction, alluring in its promise of control of determination. Finally, she would be her own, make her own way. She could die by her own hands, without pain and in peace. No one would miss her. No one would care.

  Kenji.

  She hadn’t forgotten him, even before her heart whispered his name, slicing deep and through her muck of misery.

  Kenji.

  Tears formed, confusion of another sort, interrupted only when her phone began to ring.

  ~*~

  Kenji gripped the phone at his ear, internally cursing in an effort to bully himself into hanging up. He had no reason to call her this way, angry, demanding answers to questions he couldn’t rightly ask.

&nbs
p; The ringing stopped, replaced by sniffles on the other end.

  “Lizzie?”

  He heard the fear in his voice but could hardly check it. Instinctively, a fist balled at his side.

  “Help me.”

  And he ripped at the sound of her voice, her misery laying claim to him as certainly as if it were his own.

  Kenji swallowed.

  “Do you want me to—” He shook his head. “Is this it, Lizzie? Finally?”

  He could hear nothing but crying, tears that ate through him to something soft and pitiful.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Yes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Kenji stood in the doorway of Lizzie’s apartment, gaze trailing as she zipped left and right, fingers hurriedly snatching for nothings—panties here, a sock there, a water bottle from the kitchen—all with trembling hands.

  “What are you doing?” Kenji demanded. He cast a look of blatant worry at the door.

  Lizzie tripped over a spiked heel boot. Trash piled in quaint landfills—threatening to consume.

  “I’m getting my stuff!”

  “With Snow on his way?”

  He was willing to stand there and be with her, to work on calming the thud in his heart, but he would not, he could not, put his life on the line for a sock with no apparent match.

  “He’s coming,” Lizzie said. “She called him.” And jutted a thumb at the angular white girl who’d been eyeing him sideways from the kitchen.

  Kenji had never seen such a rag of a woman. Skin sallow and hanging, hair both puffed and stringy dirty brown, pockmarks rounded her eyes and mouth. Lizzie’s roommate, Kit, stood straight up and down without a whisper of change from shoulder to thighs. The track marks on all four limbs told him of the common interest she and Lizzie shared.

  “He doesn’t love you, and he doesn’t wanna marry you!” the girl shouted, interjecting herself into an argument that wasn’t happening. “Go with this guy and you’ll be back on the corner in a month as his bitch! That plus a bounty on your head from Snow! Use your fucking brain for once!”

  Bounty?

  “Lizzie, seriously. Let’s go. Whatever it is you’re looking for, I can buy it.”

  “It’s a picture of Anthony!” she cried. “I can’t leave my brother behind!”

  And so they’d die for it, die for a picture Deena no doubt had dozens of.

  Kenji cursed and fell to his knees, rummaging wildly in heaps of trash resting on the floor, desperate in his search for a glimpse of Anthony Hammond. Outside, a door slammed and his bladder burned. Every gangster movie and graphic novel he’d ever seen told him that he had but seconds to live. So he snatched Lizzie by the wrist and whipped out the door, leaving clothes and trash in the same pile, fleeing down three flights of stairs before flinging her into the Audi. When Kenji peeled off, it was without the courage to look back.

  ~*~

  Lizzie careened for a look at the fast unraveling interstate behind her, hair whipping in the wind, relief and madness flooding her in equal measure. When she turned back to Kenji, it was with the realization that he was going far too fast, and far too fast north.

  He lived in the other direction.

  “Where are we going?” Lizzie demanded.

  Briefly, Kat’s wild admonishments came flooding back to her.

  “Palm Springs. There’s a detox center that’s expecting you,” he said, fists gripping the wheel.

  He’d had a friend at the University of Miami with a coke problem. One call to him, then to the posh unit where he’d stayed, had all been enough, done as he drove to get Lizzie. The mere hint of pro bono work from the Tanaka firm had made a six-month wait list dissolve to nothing.

  Kenji took in her sudden, frightened expression—more afraid than when Snow was on his way—and had a moment’s hesitation.

  “This is what you want, right?” He slowed. “Right?”

  Lizzie lowered her head, brown waves fluttering south like a river downstream.

  What would it be like to run hands through hair like that? To feel it whisper across his flesh?

  “It’ll never work,” she said softly. And for a moment he thought she’d read his mind. “It never does. I’m broken. Past treatment.”

  He looked away and found himself aching for her. Kenji blotted out sudden, unexpected tears with a blink of the eye.

  “One month,” he said firmly. “One month is what it should take. And when you get out, I’ll be the one at the exit, car revved and impatient for you.”

  Lizzie’s face crumpled indecisively, halfway between a smile and tears. He couldn’t bear that, so he turned to the road, far beyond an innocent bystander in her sorrow. When had it happened? How had it happened? He just couldn’t tell.

  Kenji squinted at the road, demanding discipline in the place of emotion. But she hugged him, something half clinging and searing and pushing him where he ought not go. He wrapped an arm round her, wind whipping those wild chocolate locks with the top down on the Audi. Lizzie snuggled into him, and they drove the hour and a half to Palm Springs in silence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Kenji stood at the window of his office. Up seven floors in a carving arc of view that swept the building on two sides, he looked down at the bay, stripped of its sailboats. Clouds of steel painted the sky, swelling and threatening, yet again.

  The morning after Lizzie checked into the drug treatment facility in Palm Springs, it began to rain. There was but little of it at first, liquid sunshine for a dry and thirsty landscape. But the days passed, and as they did, quiet showers fluctuated in intensity, as if mimicking the ambivalent beat of his heart. As he stared out at dark and brewing waters of the bay, a torrent rained down from the sky in an instant, as impassioned and unrelenting as the emotions awakened within him.

  Was this how it had been for his brother? Sensing the folly of his heart but unable to resist just the same? Knowing the path, its likelihood of success, yet seeing every alternative, every morsel of reasoning as impotent against the strength of his yearnings?

  It didn’t happen all at once, like a fairy tale, where one touch did him in. He could point to half-a-dozen nights and see that no one had any more sway than the other. Were he truthful, he’d admit that he’d been attracted to her in the first second of the first time they met and had been secretly pulling for her triumph ever since. But this was about more than cheerleading from the sidelines. He’d sunk seventeen thousand of his own money into her rehab treatment the first month, and now that they sought to extend her stay, he wrote a second check for more without hesitation. Yes, he was rich, and no, he wouldn’t miss it. But it was too much to spend and still call himself an innocent bystander in the tale of Lizzie Hammond.

  She called him every day. After the first two weeks moratorium on outside communication, she was allowed to make a single ten-minute phone call every day at 2 o’clock. He never missed one.

  Try as he might, Kenji couldn’t equate whatever this was to what had happened between his brother and sister-in-law. Their only concern had been the reaction others might have. Back then, a racist Hammond family couldn’t reconcile with the idea of Deena loving an Asian guy. Likewise, their father, while he loved Deena for her potential in the field, wanted to preserve their name, their culture, their history, by wedding his sons to Japanese girls. That was the long and short of their dilemma. But this wasn’t exactly an equivalent. Kenji had gone, not just for a girl with a bigoted family, but a girl just as likely to relapse, rob, and leave him on the side of the road, dead.

  Kenji smiled. He remembered his days in high school, angry about the lack of excitement in the undulating line that was a rich kid’s life. Despite living in one of the most dangerous cities in the country, he’d yet to so much as see a purse snatched by his eighteenth birthday. And while so many years later, he’d yet to witness as much, he figured escaping with a prostitute from a murderous pimp pretty much fed that need, anyway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
r />   Never in Tony’s life had he been kept to such a rigid schedule. Monday through Friday, he rose and had a heavy meal that appeared to be neither here nor there. Ham croquettes and grits alongside oversized sausages alongside fresh fruit alongside half-a-dozen other shit he could hardly be pressed to name. It was all prepared by an old Mexican who fussed at Deena when she took only coffee and toast, praised Tak for his heavy appetite, and pinched Tony’s cheeks endlessly, promising hacer que la grasa, which, according to Tak, meant something about making Tony fat.

  After breakfast, the old woman, who’d once been Tak’s childhood maid, piled the children into a black sedan and shuttled them to school, where he was expected to keep up a steady stream of classes until afternoon. Every single day after school he had homework to get done, homework that got checked by Tak or Deena faithfully. Monday evenings meant family counseling, where they crowded into a white lady’s office and told her what she wanted to hear. Tuesdays and Thursdays meant drum lessons from Tak. Wednesday he had free time for the pool or basketball court after he did his homework, which always took forever. During the week he was only allowed two hours in front of the tube a night—an obscene allowance he was certain constituted a violation of his basic civil liberties, though he had to admit the game room and pool with volcano slide made for a pretty all right substitute in any case.

  Tony ventured down the hall of Edinburgh Academy, stretched a head above other sixth graders, Jordans big and slapping like clown feet on tile. Halfway between art and literature, he kept his gaze down, never veering left or right for a glimpse of the polished, glittering, and scrubbed clean kids all around.

  A porky one with flaming red hair pulled up alongside him.

  “Hammond, isn’t it?”

  Tony shot him a hateful look. Back at the group home, it would’ve been enough to run a kid off. But this one only frowned.

  “You did say your father was in architecture, right?”

  Had he?