WHEN JOHN SLIPPED into Tak’s room, a day or so after his transfer from intensive care to the general ward, he found Deena snoozing in an armchair and Kenji by his brother’s side, flipping through an old and battered copy of Sports Illustrated.
“I hear congrats are in order,” John said, closing the door behind him.
Tak smiled. “Word travels fast.”
“Man, you should hear Allison. You’ve got her ready to elope right now. She’s all ‘they didn’t even know each other when we started dating’!” John shook his head. “You try to make me look bad.”
“Don’t have to try hard.”
He leaned against the door and gave Tak a once-over. He had more beeping machines around him than the Starship Enterprise and looked like someone had hurled a can of whoop ass at him, but hell, he was alive, and for that, nobody was more thankful than John.
“Enjoying your vacation?” John asked.
“It’s great,” Tak attempted to shift and winced. “Just the break I needed from the monotony of life.”
“You got a break all right. One for the leg, another for the ribcage.” He shook his head. “How many bones you plan on breaking this year?”
Tak’s laugh was like wisps of smoke, thin and barely there. “The plan was all, but I think I’ll tap out now.”
John looked up and spotted Kenji’s scowl. He knew the kid didn’t have the self-deprecating sense of humor that he and Tak shared, so he took Kenji’s red-eyed glare as a sign to back off the jokes. He’d never known Kenji to hit anyone, but he wanted no parts of that just the same. Something about being the test subject for a kid The Herald claimed didn’t hit balls so much as snipe them, didn’t exactly whet John’s appetite.
He glanced at Deena. “She’s been here as long as I think?”
“Longer, probably.”
“Well, they’re excited out there. You should hear them cackling about spring colors and summer weddings and caterers from L.A. or some shit.”
Deena stirred in her chair. “Are they really?” she said.
John laughed. “Go out there and talk to them. See for yourself. They’re ready to make you a Tanaka tonight if you’ll let them.”
She sat up. “Are you…sure?” She lowered her gaze. “Maybe they’re being polite. I’ll bet they’re being polite.”
John raised a brow. “Maybe you weren’t paying attention in California, but the Tanakas tend to be a blunt bunch.” He tilted a head towards the door. “Check it out. And take your new brother with you. I’d like to shoot the shit with Tak.”
Deena rose, her smile shy. When Kenji stood, he balled up the old issue of Sports Illustrated and tossed it in the garbage. John raised a brow and he shrugged.
“Babe Ruth, all-time greatest player.” Kenji rolled his eyes. “Gimme a break.”
John grinned as they disappeared into the hall, and as Kenji continued to mouth off about Ruth’s impressive stats in a league that was all white.
With the door closed behind them, John turned back to Tak. He eyed his cousin with interest.
“Now how are you?”
Tak sighed. “Tired. Sore as hell.”
“The other guy, the one that hit you, he showed up with flowers back when you were still in ICU. It took security and every orderly in the building to get our dads off him.”
Tak rolled his eyes. “Your dad, maybe. My dad was probably just trying to find an exit. I’m sure he had a flight somewhere.”
Silence filled the room. In it, John ventured over to the floral arrangements stacked on the nightstand with overflow on the floor. He lifted one and admired it. They were lilies or lilacs or something like that.
“He offered me a job,” John said.
“When?”
“When we were in California. In-house tax attorney for the firm.”
“You gonna take it?”
John shrugged. “I’m thinking about it. It’s more money than I’ve ever seen. Good even for an Ivy League grad at the top of his class. And I wasn’t at the top of my class.”
Tak sighed. “He talks with money.”
“You know, you’re right. Problem is, he can’t get you to listen.”
John gave his cousin a wink, took the remote from his hand and tossed it to the far side of the room. With a grin, he closed the door to the sound of Tak’s pained laughter.
DAICHI SAT IN his home office poring over drafts and notes for a single project he'd become obsessed with over the last few weeks. It should've been a simple enough task, a public library, but something about the designs bothered him. There was simply—something left to be desired.
Lately, concentration was something else left to be desired. Daichi’s mind insisted on wandering to the moments after his son’s accident. The feelings of helplessness, of inadequacy, of despair. Never had he felt so impotent, so desperate. But when his son regained consciousness, Daichi failed to do as most fathers would. He didn’t rush to his son’s side, embrace him, and whisper words of fondness. Instead, their encounter was brief and awkward, and when they parted, he was left feeling empty and feeble. To that day, the feeling remained.
AFTER A SERIES of strengthening exercises in the full-service weight room in his parents’ home, Tak thanked his therapist for the visit, showered and dressed, and went in search of his mother. In the hospital, he’d spoken candidly with her about her drinking and the need to quit. With the doctor’s promise that Tak would live came his mother’s commitment to detoxification. A somber bit of reality coupled with Alcoholics Anonymous meetings had given her two months of sobriety.
After a brief run-through of the house, the family maid told Tak that his mother was out walking in the garden. Their ‘garden’ was closer to arboretum than the patch of field most people toddled around in planting herbs and lilacs. He would not go in search of her. He headed for the door.
Tak didn’t know what made him stop to speak with his father. Maybe it was the way his office door was cracked instead of welded shut. Maybe it was the glimpse of him doing nothing save staring at the wall that caused Tak to pause and tap on the door.
Daichi told him to come in.
His father’s home office was pretty big. The desk he sat at was broad and made of cherry wood, the chair behind it leather and ergonomically correct. He’d pushed back his PC’s flat-screen monitor as if it had annoyed him, and piles of paper were stacked neatly in its stead. On the far end, against the wall, were a series of double wide cherry wood bookshelves, polished to gleam. In one corner was a drafting table and the various supplies his father used when he went old school—pencils, a T-square and a compass. At the back of the office was a leather couch, black and soft.
“Got a sec?” Tak said.
Daichi nodded. He pushed away from his desk and turned to face his son. Tak hesitated. His father didn’t usually stop working just because someone wanted to have a word with him.
“Mind if I sit?”
Daichi shook his head.
“Are you all right? You don’t look well,” Tak said after a brief but awkward silence.
“I’m fine. How is your rehabilitation going?”
“Good.”
More silence. The two glanced at each other, then looked away.
“She liked the ring,” Tak said suddenly.
Daichi nodded. “She should. It’s three hundred years old.”
Tak nodded.
“And the therapy? You said that it’s going well?”
“What? Oh, yeah, yeah. Pain management. Breathing techniques, strength and endurance. That’s the gist of it.”
“And is there much…pain?”
Tak shrugged. “Sometimes. The incision site bugs me. You know, where they had to stick the chest tube. And it hurts to cough. That kind of thing.”
“I see. Well…let me know if there is anything I can do to help.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Tak cleared his throat.
“You know, Mom—Mom has stopped drinking.”
Daichi turned back to his desk. “Is that right? Is that what she’s saying these days?”
Tak’s gaze narrowed. “She hasn’t had a drink since the day of the accident.”
His father unraveled a draft. “Perhaps.”
Tak stood, scowling. “There is no ‘perhaps’. She’s not drinking. She says she’s not drinking, and I believe her.”
“The woman is a drunkard, Takumi. She revels in the feel of intoxication.”
“She’s trying. Why can’t you even give her that? Why can’t you give anyone anything?”
Daichi sighed. “I don’t know what that means, Takumi.”
“It means that I’m sick of you. I’m sick of you being so damned crass and indifferent. I’m sick of you not giving a damn.”
“And what would you like me to give a damn about?” he said quietly.
“Your wife! Your kids! Me! I mean, come on, Dad. I nearly die, and for you it’s just an inconvenience in your schedule!”
Daichi swiveled to face him. “Is that what you believe? That I care for no one? For nothing?”
“I know you don’t!”
Daichi leapt to his feet. “How dare you. How dare you come into my home and speak with authority about what matters to me.”
He began to pace with the heat of his fury.
“When you lay dying in that hospital it was me who was so overcome with grief that I could neither eat, nor sleep, nor function. It was me who tortured himself with every decision, every unspoken word, every measure of affection I ever withheld from you. Me who spent the night weeping, even after hearing you were alive, as I lay there convicted by every cross word I ever spoke to you. It was me, Takumi. Your father, and no one else. And you have the audacity to tell me that I don’t care for you? That I don’t love you?”
“And Mom? Does she have to die for you to love her, too?”
Daichi turned on Tak, enraged. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve crossed the goddamned line.”
“Well, I’m so sorry! I didn’t know we had lines! Not since you habitually encroach on mine!”
“You think I didn’t love your mother? You think I didn’t ever love your mother? You wouldn’t even be here if I didn’t love your mother. Why don’t you sit down and shut up about things that you know nothing about?”
Tak crossed his arms defiantly.
“Goddamn it, Takumi, I said sit down!”
Reluctantly, Tak lowered himself onto the couch. Daichi faced him.
“I loved your mother. I loved your mother more than anything. She was beautiful, smart, compassionate—she was everything I wanted in a woman. I worshipped her.”
Tak’s eyes narrowed. “So what the hell happened?”
Daichi sighed.
“When I met your mother, she was a freshman at Harvard and I was in the last year of my graduate studies. She was curled under a tree, reading Emily Dickenson. Back then, Emily Dickenson consumed her. I walked up to her, took the book from her, and recited Lord Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty’.”
Tak blinked, trying his best to conjure an image of his father, underneath a maple, wooing his mother with poetry. The image never came.
“We dated for six months and then married. At our ceremony, she was already six weeks pregnant with you.”
Daichi slipped his hands in his pockets, leaned against the edge of his desk and sighed. “She left school to marry me and have you. She was so full of potential and so brilliant, the guilt from that plagued me. I wanted so badly to give you both a better life that I lost sight of what constituted better. I thought that ‘things’ meant better. So, I pushed for bigger contracts and worked longer hours. And by the time I accomplished what I set out to do, well, your mother and I were strangers. The distance brought the alcohol, and the alcohol, animosity.”
Tak lowered his gaze. “And what about Kenji? Most days it seems you can hardly stand to look at him.”
“I don’t know. When I look at you, there is so much of me, and of my father, that I see. But when I look at Kenji, I just see—your mother—timid conformist, crestfallen wife, adulterer.”
“She had an affair?”
Daichi waved a tired hand. “It was a long time ago. Nothing for you to be concerned about.”
“You don’t—you don’t doubt that Kenji’s yours, do you?”
Daichi smiled. “No. Of course not.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Kenji was conceived in a time when our marriage was most difficult, whereas with you, it was a time when I was full of optimism and hope, joy and love. When your brother was born, your mother and I were divorced in all but the most literal sense. Through no fault of his own, Kenji symbolizes everything that has gone wrong with my life, and you, all that has gone right.”
Tak chewed on his bottom lip. “Do you still love her?”
It was a question Daichi had been asking himself for two decades…whether he loved his wife. He and Hatsumi had shared so many years, more unhappy than happy, but he’d remained with her nonetheless. In fact, he’d never considered leaving her. Not on the countless occasions he’d found her too inebriated to care for their children and not when he found her in the arms of one of his interns eighteen years ago. But he wasn’t sure that his reluctance to abandon her was tantamount to love. Perhaps it was the guilt and self-loathing he felt whenever he saw her presented in exquisitely perfect fashion, with her makeup and hair in place, as though nothing were more important. He’d look at her and think of that beautiful freshman, hair slightly disheveled as she read Emily Dickinson. He’d think of the bright future she must’ve had before Daichi Tanaka derailed her. Perhaps the guilt kept him there.
“I don’t know if I love your mother. But I do know that I love you and I’m willing to say it until you believe it.”
When Tak returned home that evening, he exhibited signs of forgetfulness, confusion and disorientation. He put things down and forgot where they were, faltered midway through sentences and stumbled over words.
Since Tak’s accident, Deena had delved into medical journals and self-help books in an effort to monitor and assist in his recovery. His behavior was symptomatic of head trauma, and it was something that could exhibit symptoms immediately or over a period of time.
She followed him around, asking him probing questions about sensitivity to light and headaches until he turned to her quite suddenly, as if noticing her for the first time.
“Did you know that my mother was already pregnant when my parents got married?”
Deena froze, a copy of Treating Trauma in her hands. “No.”
“Oh. Okay.”
With a shrug, he took a seat on the couch and began untying his sneakers.
“He told me he loved me today.”
Deena’s eyebrows shot up. “Who did?”
Tak grinned. “My dad.”
DAICHI ENTERED THE master bedroom and cast off his plush robe and slippers. He changed into a pair of silk black pajamas and slid underneath the covers next to his wife. She lay on her side with her back to him. Daichi, taking in the slow rise and fall of her body and, in the lack of other motion, determined that she was asleep.
He put on his wire-framed reading glasses and delved into the latest issue of Architectural Digest. He fully expected to enjoy the issue, the last of the season, as it featured a retrospective look at the year’s innovations. But his mind was on Takumi and the conversation they’d had. Never had he spoken to someone with such candor, with such vulnerability. Never had his son seen him cry.
Sighing, he set the magazine back on the nightstand. There would be no Architectural Digest tonight.
“Hatsumi?”
She turned to face him. How many nights had they shared like this one? With her back to him, never speaking, never interacting, just him reading until he fell asleep and her simply listening?
“Yes, Daichi?”
He’d always thought her voice beautiful. As a foolish young man, he’d imagined that if something as sweet and pure as fruit could speak, it would have the voice of Hatsumi. How was that young man defeated? And better yet, why hadn’t he put up a fight?
“May I speak with you for a moment?”
Hatsumi drew herself up on one arm and Daichi frowned at her attire. He was certain what she wore constituted a negligee—black satin and lace cupped her breasts and hugged her mid-section, held up by only the slimmest of straps.
“Why are you wearing that?” he demanded. “It’s much too cold for that.”
He kept their home at a cool temperature to ward off bacteria.
Hatsumi lowered her gaze. “You wanted to speak with me about something?”
Daichi looked away. “Yes. I uh, wanted to ask you something. Ask your opinion, rather, on something.”
He took a deep breath.
“Do I love you, Hatsumi?”
She frowned. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.”
She shifted in her chemise, the cool air upon her breasts. Daichi's gaze faltered momentarily.
“I want to know whether or not I love you,” he said.
Hatsumi hesitated. “I don’t think so.”
He blinked a few times and nodded to himself. When he turned to her once more, she shifted again, her nipples pressing through lace of her chemise.
“You’re cold," he observed. "Allow me to get you something.”
He was out of bed and searching for a robe before she could object.
The last time he’d volunteered to do something for her was two weeks before Takumi’s accident, when he offered to pour a bottle of alcohol directly down her throat, thereby dispensing with the constant refilling of her glass.
The robe Daichi handed her was his own. Standing to take it, she revealed the full cut of her chemise—the sheerness of the material, the slight curve of her slender body, and long bare legs. He was rendered breathless and, as he stood, he recalled a time when his lips would trace the length of those legs, delighting in the sweet fragrance he found there.
“Thank you,” Hatsumi said, tying the straps of the oversized cotton robe about her waist.
“You’re welcome,” he said lamely.
He looked away in frustration.
“I, uh, spoke at great length with Takumi today,” he said.
Hatsumi blinked.
“We talked about many things, Takumi and I. This is why I asked if I loved you, as it was the question posed to me by him.”
“And what did you say?”
“The truth. That I didn’t know.”
Hatsumi walked to the large window facing the foot of their bed and gazed out at the bay, and, beyond it, the Atlantic Ocean.
“When we were younger you looked at me and you saw a beautiful woman, an intelligent woman, a woman you were honored to have by your side. But as time went by, that vision deteriorated. I became a woman who sacrificed a promising life, foolishly, according to you, to have your child and be your wife. Quite simply, I became a fool.”
She turned to face him.
“But where is it written that I can’t be all those things—beautiful and intelligent, wife and mother? When you look at me, you do so with regret. You think of what I could’ve become. You measure greatness by outward appearances and superficialities. No, there are no monuments erected to pay homage to my ego, and no, I don’t grace the covers of magazines, but I have two beautiful sons and a family that I love. Therefore, I might not meet your standards of greatness, but I am no one’s failure.”
Hatsumi turned away from her husband.
“Why do you stay, Hatsumi? Why do you stay in this empty, hopeless marriage?”
“We can find each other again.”
Daichi stared at her back, pained by the temptation her words afforded him. Suddenly, he knew why he’d never leave. Daichi, like his wife, had held out hope that love would find them again. Each in their own way longed for something, anything, to rejuvenate the passion they’d once shared.
Hatsumi took a step towards him and allowed her robe to cascade to the floor. She revealed deliciously subtle curves under dark and yielding fabric. Daichi stared, his thoughts imbued with images of long pale legs and the delectable enticements he'd once savored.
Aroused to the point of madness, his hands, his mouth, his body found hers before his mind could convince him otherwise.
THE LIBRARY STILL plagued Daichi. True, once completed it would be the largest in the state, shared by four colleges clustered in Broward, but it was just a library. He’d designed facilities for some of the largest companies in the world. His work donned the covers of magazines and the glossy pages of books in cities all over the earth. Could a library really be such a challenge?
At four o'clock, exactly six hours after entering his study, there was a knock at the door. Absentmindedly he told whomever it was to come in.
Kenji stood with a hand in the pocket of his relaxed jeans, head down, voice soft.
“Mom wants to know if you're hungry.”
“Perhaps.”
Daichi frowned at the computer-generated renderings of his flawed vision. “I just can’t…”
“You can fix it if you make your promenade wider. And put reflecting pools on both sides.”
Daichi looked up. “What?”
Kenji faltered. “I said you should make your—never mind.”
“You understand what you're looking at?” Daichi stood.
Kenji’s gaze returned to the floor. “I guess so.”
Daichi frowned. Suddenly seized by an idea, he snatched a pencil and sheet of paper from his desk and drew frantically. When finished, he held the sheet up before Kenji.
“What's this?”
He looked from the paper to his father's expectant face.
“A column.”
Daichi pursed his lips. “What kind?”
Kenji looked again. “Tuscan.”
Daichi allowed the paper to fall as he snatched another. He sketched frantically, then wielded his work.
“And this?”
Kenji looked from Daichi to the paper.
“A trefoil.”
Daichi whirled as if seized by madness, searching, rummaging wildly.
“And this? What's this, Kenji?”
He brandished a copy of Architectural Record.
“A magazine.”
“The building, son, the building.”
“Oh,” Kenji gave it a second look. He bit his lower lip and looked up uncertainly.
“You can do it, Kenji. You're my son. It's in you.”
Kenji frowned before returning to the picture.
“It's a church.”
Daichi sighed, already turning away.
“Gothic Revival?”
“What?”
Kenji hesitated.
“Look again.”
Kenji studied the picture carefully.
“Now what is it?”
He frowned. He was trembling ever so slightly, never taking his eyes off the cathedral on the cover.
“What is it, Kenji?”
He looked up. “Gothic Revival?”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Gothic Revival.”
“Louder.”
“Gothic Revival!”
Daichi tossed the magazine aside and took his seat again. “Tell your mother we'll take our lunch in here.”
Kenji raised an eyebrow. “We?”
Daichi looked up. “Yes, ‘we’. Unless you're unwilling to share a meal with your otosan.”
Kenji grinned and disappeared from the room.