Secrets of the Apple (45 page)

“I’ve figured out you’ve been sick for a while. Did you want to explain about that?” Ryoki asked, more petulantly than he had intended.

His father looked at him and sighed. “Son, I was born with a heart defect. Nobody knows how it happened, except an Indian holy man who told my mother I’d been gored through the heart by an elephant in a previous life.”

“Why you didn’t tell me?” Ryoki asked, stumbling into an unexpected hole in his hope and trying desperately to fill it in before his voice got shaky.

“No man likes to admit his own mortality, especially to a child. It’s like setting Death a place at dinner.”

“But I’m your son.”

His father hesitated before answering. “When you were small we wanted to shield you, make everything seem perfectly normal. Though I don’t know how you can get more normal than death.”

“I grew up,” Ryoki reminded him.

“Yes, but by then there had been so many medical advances, so many successful new treatments that I had begun to feel immortal.”

“Nobody’s immortal,” Ryoki said, leaning forward, running his fingers along the metal bedrail.

“But everybody pretends.”

They looked at each other, two pairs of the same eyes, until his father smiled and shifted to lean more deeply into his pillows. “When I was a child, everyone was very careful with me. Not much playing with other children, no baseball, no football, mostly study and meditation. It seemed to work because I didn’t die. But I used to hide leaves in my books and keep a baseball on my desk. The fall I turned thirteen, I waited until my mother was occupied, then I pulled the bat out from under my bed and hit my baseball into the trees so hard it made the leaves come down. Then I ran hard to find the ball so I could hit it again and again, all afternoon. At my next checkup the specialist smiled and I overheard him telling my mother the excellent news that I had a good five years in me, maybe ten. I kept secretly playing baseball, and every checkup the doctor smiled and gave my mother the same happy report.”

“Which is why your family was willing to consider my mother as a possible wife.”

“Your mother is of a very old Samurai bloodline with family contacts in high circles all over Japan. My condition was well known among business families here, so it was difficult to find a bride with suitable connections who was also willing to be a young widow. My mother didn’t want an American daughter-in-law, but she went along with the meeting, thinking nothing would come of it. She’d heard too many stories about demanding American girls, you see.” His father paused, smiling to himself.

“Your mother …” His father shook his head in wonder. “She was more beautiful than I could have imagined.”

“Did she know?”

“Oh, I laid out all the risks she’d be taking in marrying me, but not until she loved me back. Always very loving and courageous, your mother. She’s watched over me all this time, kept me alive, I believe.”

“Which would be why she so often accompanied you on business trips,” Ryoki said, piecing it together. His father nodded.

“It was hard on her, leaving you so much of the time. You traveled with us when you were small, but eventually your schooling became too demanding and we had to leave you with your grandmother more and more. Your mother worried all the time, stayed with you as much as she could. I don’t know if you remember that.”

“You should have told me,” Ryoki said, looking down and staring at his feet.

“Do you think things would have been different?”

“Yes,” Ryoki said immediately.

“You would have been a nobler son, facing down death like some kind of hero, would you? You’ve lived with death since the day you were born. Are you a hero yet?”

Ryoki flinched, cut to the quick, but his father smiled kindly.

“I convinced myself I was being heroic for my son, sacrificing my life to leave you an empire. It’ll be yours soon, so how do you like it?”

There was no anger or bitterness in his father’s face, but Ryoki shrank back, wanted to yell that he didn’t want an empire, as though refusing the gift would restore his father’s health so he could go on as before, indignant and angry instead of guilt-ridden. Anything was better than guilt. He took deep breaths and tried to focus on the sparse winter garden outside, partially obscured by millions of yen worth of beeping, blinking technology.

Hiroshi Tanaka knew his son, watched the emotions warring across his face, understood the complicated pain.

“Eventually all those cutting-edge treatments ran out and my eminent specialist started talking in months rather than years. I remember coming to this room and thinking about everything I needed to review to make sure my affairs were in order, to ease the transition for my stupid son who was in London, making money with both hands and whoring his way across Europe.” His father’s voice snagged. He cleared his throat and regained his composure as a tear slid from the corner of his eye. “I realized I had offered you the wrong gift.” His voice slowed as he spoke each word distinctly. “The single most terrible moment of my life, and the only regret I will carry to my grave.”

Ryoki looked at his father, saw no trace of humor or irony, and something clicked in his mind.

“You gave me Kate,” Ryoki said.

“Your mother chose Ka-chan years ago. But that’s a story for her to tell.”

“And Kate agreed to this—” Ryoki trailed off skeptically.

His father laughed out loud then, a great big belly laugh that made him clutch his chest and played havoc with the monitors. The nurse rushed in and Ryoki leaped up, frantically scanning the machines as though they might suddenly mean something to him. But his father waved them both off, choking down his laughter. “Not possible,” he said between gasps. “We would have needed chloroform and a straitjacket.”

The nurse started to scold her patient and he snapped back that if she didn’t laugh soon, he was going to outlive her. She started to frown and he told her to bare her teeth in a feral smile. “Like this. Do it, that’s what I pay you for,” he said gruffly. Obediently she tried, but broke off with an embarrassed titter, hastily covering her mouth, but not before revealing a set of very white and very crooked teeth. “You have a beautiful smile!” his father said to her retreating back.

“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.”

D
eath 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.