____________

Noriko

 

 

 

After I hung up with Jared yesterday I alternated between pacing the room and pressing up against my window, staring at the front gates in the distance. He promised to send help. I didn’t know how he was planning on doing that. Maybe he’d send in a helicopter or storm the gates. I had to believe he would help free me. That he would help get me back to Japan.

Rushes of guilt crackled underneath my skin. I could barely ignore it. I shouldn’t have spilled my secrets with Drake to another person. I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I needed help and Jared was the only one offering it to me. The longer I waited, the greater the chance that I wouldn’t get back to my father in time.

Oh, God. What if I was too late? What if he died before I got a chance to see him again?

My fingers shook as I made the familiar folds on a square of blood-red paper. I folded a face and beak. Then his tail appeared. Finally I gave him wings so he could fly.

There. It was finished. One thousand paper cranes.

I placed my little bird in the very center of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine cranes. I closed my eyes and made my wish.

I want to go home. Let me go home.

The door opened, startling me. Loretta entered the room, a solemn look on her face, her eyes red-rimmed as if she’d been crying.

I moved towards her. “Loretta, what’s wrong?”

She held up a hand, warning me not to come too close to her. “You are to pack your bags.”

“Where am I going?”

Her eyes flashed with something I could not decipher. “Home.”

 

 

 

I could scarcely believe it. I was sitting on Drake’s private jet flying back home, in the same seat I sat in coming over here less than five months ago. Had it only been four months?

No matter, in less than fourteen hours I’d be with my papa again.

I picked at the expensive nail polish on my nails, a pale pink color like cherry blossoms. I’d never been a nail polish kind of girl. But while I’d been living in the Blackwell Manor, I’d taken to changing my nail polish color every day for something to do. That was, until Drake locked me in my room.

The memory of that day seemed faded in my mind. My rage, the way I yelled, the vase I threw at him. Shame coated me. We had both been animals that day.

The varnish on my nails was chipped, the gloss worn thin. Like my marriage to Drake. When our gloss faded, what were we left with? Lies. Pain. The fight.

I won. I was going home.

I would see my papa soon.

So why wasn’t I happy?

As I left the manor, hugging Loretta goodbye, I felt my heart pang. I would miss her, miss this house and…

Why didn’t Drake say goodbye to me? I looked for him at the airport—I thought he might have at least met me there to see me off. He didn’t even say goodbye. I didn’t get to tell him thank you.

Why, after hanging onto me so hard it had become suffocating, did he just let me go?

Was this Jared’s doing? It must be. How did Jared get Drake to release me? How did he convince him? Drake hated Jared. He never would have agreed…

Did he blackmail Drake?

In my haste to pack I forgot to bring my phone. I left it behind, sitting in my boot. I may never know.

The tension in my stomach tightened the farther away from Los Angeles—and Drake—I got. I feared…I feared that I had done something irreversible.

 

 

 

I sat at my father’s bedside in his private room at Osaka University Medical Hospital. The air was chilled, causing goose bumps on my arm, and smelled of hospital-grade disinfectant and the stale must of recycled air. The machine by his bedside beeped in time with his heart. I latched onto that precious sound. My father looked like a child in the bed, so sunken and fragile that I almost couldn’t believe it was him. Someone had stolen my father and replaced him with a shadow.

He mumbled and his lashes flickered. I sat up in my seat. “Papa?”

He blinked several times before his familiar dark brown eyes found me. “Noriko?” he croaked out. It was the sweetest sound.

I shushed him and held up a cup of water with a straw. He drank a few gulps before sagging back onto his pillow. I placed the cup down and took his soft, crinkly hand in both of mine, careful to avoid the IV drip coming out of the back of it. He felt like paper, thin and just as tearable.

His eyes were still hooded from sleep, from the drugs they had him on, things I had no hope of naming. “Nori-chan, is that really you?”

“It’s me, Papa.” Tears marked hot streaks down my cheeks, sliding over my smiling lips. My happiness tasted like salt. The same as sadness.

I embraced him around the wires and tubes coming out of him.

When I pulled back he eyed me, a smile spreading across his cracked lips. “I’m so glad you’re here to say goodbye.”

“I am not here to say goodbye.” How dare he suggest it. “You’re not going anywhere. Neither am I.” My voice vibrated with the force of my will. If only my will was enough.

“Hime, they tried to operate. But…the cancer’s grown around my spine. The surgeon couldn’t get it all out. It’s only a matter of time—”

“No!” Not listening. Not listening. “There must be something we can do.”

“You’ve already done enough.”

My jaw ached from how hard I was clenching my teeth. How dare he. He’d already given up. He couldn’t give up. I wouldn’t let him. He was the one who always told me never to give up. And now he was lying there being the world’s biggest hypocrite. There had to be another treatment. Another surgery. Some kind of drug. I’d go to the university medical library and research it my damn self if I had to.

“Can I get you anything?” I said, changing the subject, my voice betraying the violence of my inner convictions. He would not convince me that it was too late. I would find a way to save him. I cursed myself internally for all those wasted hours I spent at Blackwell Manor. I could have been researching his cancer. I could have been finding new doctors, better doctors. I handed over too much power to the health system here and clung too tightly onto threads of faith. “Food? More drugs?”

Before he could answer, I heard hard, sure footsteps coming up behind me. I spun—for a moment, thinking those footsteps belonged to Drake.

Instead it was a woman, a doctor, I presumed from her white coat, but her skin was fair and her blond hair, pulled back into a neat ponytail, was brushed with silver at the temples. A foreign doctor? An oddity in this Osaka hospital.

The doctor smiled at me and nodded to my father. “Hello, you must be Mr. Akiyama and Mrs. Blackwell,” she said in English.

“Who are you?” I asked, my hackles rising at her use of my married name.

“I’m Dr. Newton, from Johns Hopkins Hospital.”

I blinked as the name sank in. “From the States?”

She flashed me a perfectly white smile as more nurses and orderlies filled up the room. “Yes. I’ve flown in specifically to treat your father.”

“I…” I was too stunned to protest as one of the nurses gently tugged me off my father’s bed and to one side, her gentle touch and warm smile confusing me further. They swarmed around my father. I repressed the urge to yank them all away from him. “Stop. Get off him.” I turned back to the doctor, anger swirling around my body. Nobody was taking my father anywhere until I understood why. “What are you doing to him? What’s going on?”

Her voice was calm despite my outburst. “I don’t want to toot my own horn…well, okay, maybe I do,” she said with a chuckle. “I’ve pioneered a new precision surgery. It’s the first of its kind. I believe we may be able to save him.”

“But… What? How?”

“I agree. It’s completely unorthodox. I usually only operate out of Johns Hopkins. But when a man like that makes me and our hospital an offer like that… Well, I can’t refuse him.”

“A man like…?” I trailed off, my guts twisting.

Dr. Newton gave me a strange look, tilting her head. “Why, your husband, of course.”

 

 

 

A brand new hospital wing?

Drake Blackwell offered Johns Hopkins a brand new cancer research wing if this miracle doctor and her team would fly to Osaka and save my father. An entire wing. Not a room or even a corridor or a large, expensive piece of medical equipment. An entire wing. Kitted out with all the latest medical equipment.

My first reaction was one of disbelief. Why the hell would Drake do this? He had no reason to.

You were his reason, Noriko.

I shook my head. If he still cared, then why didn’t he come and say goodbye to me?

My second reaction was indignation. I was going to find a way to save my father—my love was going to find a way—but Drake had to come along with all his damn money and his “everybody do what I say” power. I bet when he died, he’d demand that God send him back to Earth, and you know what? I bet God would. If only to avoid Drake’s ego taking up most of heaven for another few years.

I watched my father’s frail body disappear between double doors. I felt sick and dizzy, the glaring lights of this ward blinding me. I felt too terrified to hope. Could this surgery actually save him?

I fell into a plastic chair in the waiting room, staring at the linoleum floor—large squares of a sickly green—while the miracle doctor and her team operated on my father. At some point a kind nurse pushed coffee in a Styrofoam cup into my hand.

Once I was able to think a little clearer, I called my sisters and aunt at home to update them on my father’s surgery. I didn’t tell them that my husband was the one to thank.

My sisters were still in Shibetzu with our auntie, still going to school and trying to have some semblance of a normal life. All the money I received from my marriage contract had gone to my father’s treatments. It was almost gone. Until Drake stepped in.

We had no money to spare for a hotel room for my sisters here in Osaka. I wasn’t even sure where I was staying. This waiting room was my home right now, I guessed. I hung up with promises to call them back after the surgery was over.

I needed to call Drake and thank him. As I stared at the keypad, I wasn’t sure I could make myself dial his home number.

What would I say? God, how badly I’d behaved. He did this for my father anyway.

“Noriko Blackwell?”

I hung up the undialed phone and looked around expectantly. The source of the kind voice was a woman wearing a tailored skirt-suit, her hair pulled back into a bun.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

She smiled at me. “You’ve been up all night. You must be very tired. Your father won’t be out of surgery for at least six hours. Would you like to rest?”

She must be one of the hospital admin staff. Whoever she was, she was a godsend.

The woman, whose name was Sakuri, escorted me in a black car to a nearby hotel. She checked me into a suite and told me, while I was staring around at this palatial space, that this suite was mine until my father was discharged. She indicated the closet which was filled with brand new clothes, stylish yet comfortable wear, linen pants and cotton blouses, all in my size.

“Mr. Blackwell thought you should be comfortable while you look after your father. The hospital knows to call you here once your father is out of surgery. There’s a car on standby to take you to the hospital or anywhere you’d like.”

She left me, standing stunned, a strange prickling in my eyes.

I must call him now.

I sank into the huge bed and punched in the number to Blackwell Manor in the phone beside it. My heart rate crept up as the calling tone rang in my ear. It crackled when someone picked up and I took in a steadying breath. Drake?

“Hello?” A female voice said.

I sagged.

“Loretta, hi, it’s Noriko.” I asked her how she was, how the manor was and about the herbs she’d planted a few days before I left. I asked about everything other than the one thing I needed to ask…

“So, um,” I rubbed the back of my neck. I couldn’t delay it any longer. “Is…Drake there?”

Loretta cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Drake isn’t home right now.”

“Oh.” I looked at the time and calculated that it was not quite dinnertime there. “When will he be home?”

Loretta paused. “I…er, I don’t know.”

“I’ll call later, then.”

“Maybe you should let me take a message.”

“Oh. Okay. Well…tell him…” thank you, a thousand times thank you for what he did, “…tell him to call me.”

I hung up. I couldn’t express my gratitude through a message, I had to say it to him. It would be better if I could tell him to his face.