She finally relented and, with one last tearful stare, turned to follow me back to the car. By then a crowd of technicians was surging in around us.
Ken's blue Toyota was still running. Without a word she buckled in, shoved the stick into gear, and turned for the exit, whereupon she barely avoided colliding with the first racing fire engine.
"Look, are you okay? I can drive if you . . ."
"Matt, don't say anything more, please." The tears had vanished. "Can I just think for a while? Just give me some quiet to think." She was gripping the wheel with raw anger. "Please."
"You've got it."
By the time we reached the highway, she was driving mechanically but with absolute precision, almost as though tragedy had somehow sharpened her reflexes, her logical processes.
It's a curious thing, but different people respond differently to disaster, and Tam was one of those rare few who become harder, not softer. I could see it in her eyes. As the minutes ticked by, and we reached the packed thoroughfare that would take us south, it even got to be a little unsettling. What in hell was going through her head?
Finally, after about an hour of bumper-to-bumper freeways, I couldn't take the silence any more. Without asking anybody's permission, I reached over and clicked on the radio. It was set for a classical station, the music Chopin. Was this Ken's regular fare? I wondered. Was he a romantic at heart or a classicist? Guess I'd never know . . . that, or much of anything else about him. Which thought brought with it a renewed sadness. Kenji Asano was a man of the East who was as much of the West as anybody I'd ever met in Japan. I'd wanted him for a friend.
When you get to be my age, you don't make too many new friends, not real ones. After forty, it's acquaintances. The roots of true friendship extend so deep that there's never really time to plant them if you start too late. Maybe it's because there's always a part missing, that shared experience of being young and crazy and broke. Those times back when you both still believed anything was possible. New friends can't begin sentences with "Remember that weekend before you were married when we got drunk and . . ." Getting old is tough, and that's one of the toughest parts. But somehow I felt, with Ken, that I'd known him forever. Could be that's absurd, but I really did. So quite apart from the tragedy of his death, I felt cruelly robbed. It sounds selfish, maybe, but it's the truth. A sad but true truth.
I was still thinking those thoughts when the four-o'clock newscast came on. For a moment neither of us noticed, but then Tam snapped alert and turned up the volume. The report was opening with a live remote from Tsukuba Science City. I couldn't really follow very well, but she realized that and began to translate as it went along.