Secrets of the Apple Page 36

  “How did you pull it off?” Ryoki asked, too astounded to enjoy his father’s look of triumph.

  “With Kate, you mean? Your mother’s been trying to engineer a relationship for years. Our mistake was thinking she would be the most pliable, so your mother focused on her.”

  Ryoki made an odd involuntary groan and put his finger on his lips.

  “Yes,” his father said. “Huge tactical error. We should have changed course eight years ago, the day she said a Japanese boy would want her to tie his shoes and play fetch. But we weren’t listening, and we weren’t desperate.”

  “This time you decided to send me to her,” Ryoki said.

  “Logically we should have left you in London. You were doing so well there and we had another man well qualified to take charge in South America, but we saw a long-shot opportunity. You were both single, Ka-chan had just finished her masters and she speaks fluent Portuguese. We exploited it.”

  “Lucky her job fell through,” Ryoki said, one eyebrow raised.

  “That turned out to be the easiest part. She was supposed to replace an old community college professor who gladly put off his retirement for a year if we facilitated the publication of his life’s work, so he could ride off in a blaze of glory. Some kind of history or historical fiction—I forget which. It came out three months ago, I believe. Didn’t require a very big printing.”

  “Kate was left in a lurch with no job.”

  “And an invitation to visit her beloved aunt and uncle, followed by a chance to work with Mr. Tanaka whom she would naturally assume was—”

  “You,” Ryoki finished, sitting back, amazed. “Brian Porter was in on it?”

  “Oh yes, and Grace, and her father. Very accommodating of you to offer her a job on your own. We thought we’d have to engineer it ourselves and she’d refused my job offers before. She’s been the wildcard all along.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Death should not have been a shock, but it was.

  That night Ryoki left his mother on watch and went to bed, cautiously jubilant for the morrow. Now that he had come home, his father had certainly rallied, a medical miracle, one for the books. He brushed his teeth and whistled all the way to his bed.

  Shortly after 2:00 a.m. he went to relieve his mother in the sunroom, mildly surprised to find the night nurse away from her station. He paused in the doorway, stopped by a lurid thickness in the silence, a prickly sensation that a hairy hand was about to dart out and clench his ankle, an in-law to the warning he’d felt in Kate’s cottage. For reassurance he looked out at the stars shimmering in the navy sky out beyond the glass walls, but there was something off about the view.

  Pearl gray moonlight washed through the room, unobstructed by little red and green blinking lights, no electric blue, no insistent hi-tech yellow to agitate the stillness, no hum of equipment. It was a room at peace, but missing pieces like an evacuated city.

  Knowing, not wanting to know, he let his gaze drift to the bed on which reclined a curiously lifelike figure that looked more like a waxwork, albeit a brilliant likeness. A tourist could walk past, elbowing his wife, “Almost looks like he could speak.”

  His mother touched him from behind, making him jump. “I went to get you, but you’d already come downstairs the other way,” she said, her voice weak and raspy, tear tracks dried down her face. Ryoki shivered as an unseen hand injected six ounces of arctic melt into each of his legs, slowing his feet as he moved deeper into the room, drawn toward the occupied, empty bed. The machines had already been unhooked, his father’s hands positioned neatly at his side, the scene no doubt prepared by the capable nurse who would first put her arms around his mother, then see to the body, or maybe his mother hustled the nurse away, arranging the arms herself.

  “When?” he asked, a one-word sentence he could trust himself to say.

  “An hour ago, in his sleep.” His mother broke down completely and he put his arms around her, feeling like a post with a curiously beating heart. “I couldn’t bring myself to wake you,” she said. “I just couldn’t.”

  So this was it, no last words, no expressions of love or forgiveness, no glimpse of eternity, nothing he could hold in his hand and rub for luck. There were still things to say, so many things to say.

  “He was proud of you, and he knew you loved him,” his mother said.

  “How do you know?” he asked, wanting desperately to believe, but needing proof. His mother had none to offer, except a knowing smile that reminded him so much of Kate he wanted to run to her room and hold her fierce and greedy, confessing all his sins. Instead he held his mother because she needed him.

  Numb and blank, Ryoki carried through the long wake and funeral with mechanical efficiency, stone-faced and dry-eyed. High-ranking executives came to the house to pay their respects, publicly admiring their stoic new president as one admires the cliffs of Dover and other big rocks. Privately, each walked away grieving all the more for the brilliant, gentle leader they had lost.

  At the crematorium Ryoki and his mother watched as the attendants produced a long tray, his father’s ashes still dimly clinging to human shape, like Peter Pan’s shadow captured and vanquished. The first attendant put out his hands to shake the tray. Ryoki sucked in a sharp breath, Wait Wait screaming through his head as his father’s shadow dissolved into a neat pile of bone fragments and dust. Silently, grasping their metal chopsticks, he and his mother moved to the foot of the tray and lifted the first fragment together, releasing it into the urn where it dropped with the clink of a jewel falling into a jar.

  That night his mother went to bed with a sedative and Ryoki found Kate in the music room playing Mozart’s 12 Variations, the first piece he’d ever heard her play. Quietly he stretched out on the sofa, staring at the ceiling to listen as she poured her soul over the keys. But she lost control, faltering again and again until she pulled her hands away in frustration, and yanked the black silk scarf from her neck, draping it over the end of the keyboard where it slid off and dribbled to the floor. The bruise on her neck was exposed, a mottled band of purple, yellow and brown. She took a deep breath and started again.

  He rose from the couch and touched her neck, carefully tracing a bruise. She winced, and without turning took his hand and gently pressed it flat on her neck where it wasn’t so tender. It was the first time they had touched since the attack. No romance he could detect, but the slammed door had cracked open.

  He started to talk, apologizing for the website, telling her he missed her and begging her to come back from wherever she had retreated. Moving to face him, she put a finger to her lips and pulled him down to sit beside her on the piano bench, placing his fingers on the keys, the opening position for “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Moving her hands up one octave, she slowly depressed the keys as he watched and followed, repeating the simple tune until he could do it on his own. She played around him, gradually adding notes, variations on Mozart’s variations until Ryoki couldn’t keep up and she reverted to the original piece on her own, finishing with tears sliding down her cheeks. “Your father loved that piece too. I’d just learned it the summer I worked for him. He heard me practicing once and asked me to play it almost every day for a month. I didn’t play it very well, but he always applauded. That’s why I played it for you that night at Brian’s.”

  “You played for my father?”

  “The more I know you, the more you remind me of him.”

  He put his hands back on the keys to play his five-finger tune, but none of the notes came out right, his vision blocked by a peculiar film over his eyes, his chest constricting, cutting off his air. To regain his composure he reached for the anger that had been so quick to flare whenever his father crossed him. But all he came up with was a bony pile of whys and what ifs.

  Kate took his fingers from the keys and led him to the sofa, her modest tenderness melting through the last of his control, releasing the terrible pressure, building since São Paulo, four a.m. Kate held tight and he
sobbed like a child.

  When he was finally quiet, he lay motionless in her arms, listening to her heartbeat and the ticking of the antique grandfather clock. He looked at the clock, trying to make out the time in the dim light, but as he squinted he was overcome with dizziness and vertigo, accompanied by a strange even rhythm beating softly at the edge of his consciousness. He covered his eyes with one hand taking deep breaths until the world righted itself and the dizziness cleared. But afterwards the comforting rhythm remained, more in his heart than in his mind, as though trapped in his blood, the soft, soft ticking of his own mortality.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  When the clock struck eleven Ryoki flinched at the first chime, startling Kate from a semi-doze. Ching she moved an arm, ching she scooted away, ching she planted both feet, ching ching ching until she was standing next to the sofa talking about bed and sleeping. Bed, of course, very tired. Ryoki stood too, but one of them commented on the beauty of the service, or was it the smell of the flowers, and they talked standing up for twenty minutes, shifting from foot to foot until one sat down again, and then the other, Ryoki on the sofa, Kate on the loveseat, days of pent-up words overflowing the banks and streaming over the floor, two friends, whatever else they might be, still friends with things to say, neither of them noticing when the conversation drifted off into REM state.

  His mother discovered them early the next morning, the creak of the door waking Ryoki as she entered the room. Blinking, it took him a full minute to orient himself, country, city, time, circumstance. His mother waited patiently for him to stretch out of his awkward sleeping position before silently beckoning him to follow. He arranged an afghan over Kate and met his mother outside the door.

  “Well,” she said when they had both settled in the hallway, “are you engaged?”

  Ryoki stared, senses still sluggish, trying to comprehend how she could pick that moment for such a question.

  “I suppose not,” she said wistfully. “I know I’m rushing things, but you looked so peaceful together. I hoped, well… You ought to marry sooner rather than later. Especially now—” She broke off, biting her lip. “At work people will trust you more if you’re married.”

  Ryoki had been studying her face and hardly heard her, thinking the sedative she’d taken had been a good choice, softening the haggard edges. But she still looked pale and fragile, her eyes large and hungry for happy news.

  “Come with me,” she said, slipping her arm through his and guiding him to her office where she began rapidly flipping through two of the dozen or so file boxes that had been pulled from her walk-in storage closet. “I’ve been going through some things these last few days,” she muttered. “Maybe I already got them out. I was thinking I wanted to show them to you. Things have been so—” Her voice hitched and several old letters flipped out and slid to the floor. “Will you look in the center desk drawer and see if you see two photos?” she asked, clearing her throat.

  Obediently Ryoki opened the drawer. Though he found no snapshots, he did find a recent newspaper clipping, a familiar tabloid photo of Kate, one of her loose summer dresses caught in the breeze, billowing out in front of her, with the caption WHOSE BABY IS IT? printed underneath, the source of the mysterious website picture solved. He held it up, deep furrows plowed between his eyes. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  His mother’s mouth crinkled in disgust. “Just throw that away. A friend brought me that to let me know you’ve got a talkative maid. You’re a famously eligible bachelor and the tabloids here have a nice little love triangle going, starring you as the innocent hero, Kate as the American seductress, and that boyfriend as her scheming lothari—Oh, here we go.” She set aside two photographs and began haphazardly scooping loose ends and fallen memorabilia back into the box without looking at anything. “I’ve been meaning to sort through all this, get it all into albums, and now that I have more time …” Again she cleared her throat, scraping over the emotion camped so perilously near the surface. She pushed the first photo toward him. “Do you remember this at all?”

  Ryoki recognized himself as a young boy, fast asleep, tangled around a small sleeping girl with light reddish brown pigtails askew, grass stains on her shirt, and a Band-Aid on her knee. He recognized the nursery in Brian Porter’s house, the muraled walls painted a cartoon jungle with trees, flowers, monkeys and birds in vibrant greens, yellows, reds and blues. Filled with toys, it was a paradise for children. With his fingernail he traced the rope hanging from the ceiling, thinking of all the times he and Tom had swung as high as they could, screaming Ah-eyah-eyah-eyah-eyah! and flying off into a pile of bean bags.

  “That Grace was always so talented. She painted all that herself. Decorated her whole house, in fact. Always encouraged Kate to draw, taught her everything she knew, but couldn’t interest any of her boys. She wanted a daughter so badly.”

  Something sparked in Ryoki’s head and he took another look at the little girl in the photo. Her hair was lighter, and her features less defined, but it was so unquestionably Kate that he should have recognized her at once. Looking intently, he thought he grasped the tail-end of a memory, a little gap-toothed girl with ears sticking out of her straight, wispy hair, but that could be the power of suggestion.

  “We’d gone to visit the Porters. You were about seven, so Kate must have been about three. Her mother was having a rough pregnancy, so Grace snatched up little Kate and took her to San Francisco. She followed you around like a shadow that whole trip, and one day you brought her to me because she’d fallen and skinned her knee. She couldn’t stop crying because it was nap time and she was worn out. I could see you wanted to run back outside and play, but she turned stubborn and held onto your arm until you agreed to lay by her for a while. You always were a sucker for a little kid. A little later I found you like this and tip-toed out for my camera.”

  Ryoki ran his fingers down the edges of the photo, trying to reclaim something of that day. His romantic bits wanted to believe he’d loved Kate even then, that it was all fate or kismet, whatever that was. More likely, as a child he simply loved more openly in general, before he learned to keep his affections sensibly sterile.

  “Years later I met Kate again,” his mother said. “Sixteen years old, coming in to confess to a broken window and seeing your father’s smashed computer. He tried to wave her off.” Here his mother began to fidget as a tear escaped her right eye. “You know how he was. But you know, Kate pulled herself straight up and promised to replace that computer. And she did. Never called her father or her uncle, and they never jumped in. She handed over all her savings and arranged to work for us for the rest of the summer to make up the difference. You were twenty by then and I was starting to worry that you were choosing girlfriends to match your jackets, and here was Kate, everything you wanted and everything you needed, if only you would take a good look.” His mother held out her hands, fingers splayed as though showing all her cards.

  “Except she was too young and too American,” Ryoki said.

  “Oh yes, much too young, and the nationality was inconvenient, but as Brian’s adored niece, she would naturally exert a claim on you that these other girls couldn’t quite command. So I bided my time, kept up a weekly correspondence to help her improve her Japanese and expand her kanji. Once she turned nineteen, I started encouraging her to come here to visit, and invented reasons for her to visit you at school. I thought I was fairly clever and subtle—” Ryoki coughed. “But she stymied me at every turn. I didn’t realize how deep-seated her prejudice was.”

  “Prejudice?” Ryoki looked skeptical. He’d never met anyone less prejudiced than Kate. His mother looked at him kindly.

  “Son, she’s genuinely afraid of Japanese men. I don’t think even she recognizes it. For years I didn’t notice it because I knew how much she loved your father. But she apparently had a close relationship with that graduate student who taught her Japanese, spent a lot of time with her over a period of years. As she learned Japanese sh
e was hearing all kinds of harrowing stories about her teacher’s abusive father and brother, and about the childishness of Japanese men in general. Kate was very young and her family had no idea. They’d hired the tutor to teach language, never dreaming how much influence she had. None of this came out until years and years later when she told me your father surprised her because she expected all Japanese men to have horns and pitchforks. She said it like she was kidding, but she was an adult by then and wouldn’t go anywhere near you. Early teaching is very hard to shake.”

  Ryoki leaned forward, feeling sucker-punched, knowing himself to be every bit as culpable.

  “I kept trying anyway, right up until she sent me this photo.” His mother handed him the second photograph, the one he’d seen in Salt Lake: Kate wearing his mother’s kimono, posing with the Blond Pirate. “Look at the back,” his mother said.

  “He asked me to marry him right after this was taken. Isn’t he cute!” he read, written in Kate’s familiar scrawl.

  “She got engaged in your kimono?” Ryoki turned the photo over three times before looking at his mother, who watched him with one corner of her mouth quirked in a smile.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Didn’t your mother leave Japan because of her father? I remember that story. So why did you risk marrying dad?” As the words came from his mouth, it struck him as odd that this question had never before entered his mind.

  His mother shrugged one shoulder. “My mother had a love/hate relationship with her father. Lots of bad stories to tell. But there were good things too, like the color of the cherry blossoms, and the way her father liked to play bull and gallop around with the kids on his back. And your father was such a loving and gentle man, we thought we could face anything. But then he had to work such long hours and I was left alone in a strange world with a mother-in-law who resented my every breath. I’d have to say that in the first few years of my marriage I suffered a lot, until I had you. Having you was my trump card. Your grandmother practically worshipped you and I could withhold you if I chose. You made her mind her manners.”