When You Were Here (12 page)

Everything I hide, everything I bottle up, is threatening
to spill over now, and I wish I could get a handle on this vicious game of Ping-Pong being waged inside me. I am jealous one minute, pierced with guilt the next, then simply overcome.

“I love it,” I say to the table.

She shows me another one. My mother outside a temple. She’s not posing for the camera this time. She’s staring inside, and the photographer—Kana—has captured her in profile. She looks peaceful, content.

“You’re a good photographer.”

“It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t always resort to a cell phone, isn’t it? I love my real camera,” she says, then pushes the photos to me. “They are for you.”

“So what’s the story? Did you go with her everywhere? Like to the doc or something?”

Kana laughs lightly, then smiles. “Sometimes. She liked company. She liked to talk. And seeing as I am oh-so-amazingly fabulous at linguistics, I got to hang out with her.”

“You mean you were a translator? I thought my mom’s Japanese was good enough from her time working here and all.”

“Let me tell you, her Japanese is
way
better than yours. And besides, Takahashi speaks English, you silly dork. Though your mom spoke to Mrs. Mori in Japanese when she was here.” It’s a weird thought—my mom was here in this quiet, Zen-like teahouse speaking a difficult language I barely know to a woman who was honored to take care of her, who let her snap photos in this place, while I was back
home studying Faulkner or writing essays on the Habsburgs or Hohenzollerns.

And this girl in front of me wasn’t just the apartment caretaker, she wasn’t just a guide who helped my mom navigate the city, like I had assumed from her letters and from her job. She was more, much more.

“You were my mom’s friend,” I say, and it comes out as a whisper.

“Yes, I was your mom’s friend. We are both very chatty, in case you hadn’t noticed. We both like to gab, gab, gab.” Kana flaps her fingers against her thumb, imitating a talking mouth.

I smile faintly, but it’s so strange, this look into my mom’s life here, her friends here those few days each month when she was away. My mom was friends with a crazy, upbeat girl my age here in Tokyo. Then I laugh inside—maybe
that’s
why she was so happy here and back in California too. Maybe Kana rubbed off on my mom.

“I’m glad you guys were friends,” I say to the tea. I can’t bring myself to say it to her face.

“She was amazing, Danny. I loved her. And I’m so sorry for your loss. And I’m so sorry I didn’t say that sooner.”

She reaches out her hand, places it on mine, then asks me how long I’ll stay in Tokyo.

I shrug. “I don’t know. I bought a one-way ticket, so I’ll just figure it out. I guess as long as I need.”

“What is it you need?”

It’s such a simple question, but I could answer it in fifty
thousand different ways. Because there is so much I need. I am filled with so much want, so much need, and yet every day I keep reaching, and every day I keep missing the mark.

But the simplest answer is the one that feels so far away.

To be happy.

“You said she was happy. I want to know what made her so happy when she was here. Especially since she was fighting so hard to live two more months. She kept saying she was going to hang on till my graduation, and it seemed like she would. It seemed like she could fight cancer forever. And then, bam. She got worse. And it all just happened so quickly. I thought I could handle it. I thought I was ready. I had a five-year apprenticeship for this. Plus I’d done it already with my dad. This wasn’t my first time on the merry-go-round. But when he died, it was sudden and totally out of the blue, and everything I felt happened
after
. But with her, it was
five years
of hoping for the best and being afraid of the worst at the exact same time. Every single day. And then the end. It was more awful than anything I’d imagined for the past five years,” I say, sharing everything, because it’s exhausting holding up your own walls all the time. I can’t fight every second of every day to keep all the sorrow inside. “And I guess, most of all, I want to understand why nothing’s working for me. Why she was the happy one when she was dying, and I just can’t seem to manage anything when I’m living.”

Kana squeezes my hand tighter, and I’m suddenly aware that I have spoken more words to her, more personal words,
than I have to anyone lately. To anyone in months. “That was like a monologue,” I add.

“It was a good one. It was a true one too. Because it always hurts more when you have to go on. When you’re the one left behind. It just does.”

“I guess that’s what I should have said at graduation. I guess that’s what I was really feeling when I was on that stage at that stupid podium,” I say, and when she quirks up her eyebrows in question, I unburden more. I tell Kana about graduation, how it went, what I said, then how I worked out after. I flex my bicep in self-mockery. “But see. At least my arms are strong.”

She laughs. “There is always a silver lining.”

“And the other thing,” I continue, returning to her question of need. “I need to see Takahashi. She thought of him as her last great hope. That’s what she said about him. I need to talk to him, to hear about how he was treating her. I even left him a message a few days ago. But I went there today, and there was no answer.”

“He is in Tibet for three weeks. I got to know one of the ladies who works there, a receptionist, and she mentioned it to me. He treats the indigent for no charge. He will return in early July.”

“Three weeks from now?”

She nods.

“I have to wait three weeks?” I ask again, as if the second time will yield a different response, a
better
response, because I don’t want to wait. I came here to learn, to find, to know.
Besides, the answers to why she kept those particular letters in the
Personal
pile will be so much harder to figure out than the meds. That’s supposed to be the easy one. See the doctor, get the details.

Bam. Done. That mystery solved.

“Which means,” Kana says, returning to that amped-up state that seems to be her natural condition, “you will be here for three weeks!” Then she claps a few times. “Which also means you must let me teach you Japanese, okay, Danny? Let me do this for you, for your mother. Please, please, please, please, please?” She leans forward and flutters her eyelashes, long, fake purple ones. “Pretty please with sugar on top?”

She is frenzied Kana again. The girl who found me watching waterskiing squirrels.

“How much?”

Her eyes go wide, and she holds up a hand. “Oh no. I am not asking for money. I like you. And I want to not be embarrassed by your terrible, horrible, awful Japanese.”

I manage a small grin.

“Whether you are here for a week or a lifetime, you must speak better than you do now.”

“Looks like it’s at least three weeks now,” I say, half-resigned to the wait but also a bit relieved that I have a clear and definite reason to stay here so long, a reason
not
to go back just yet. It’s the strangest thing, but even in spite of my monologue, I feel like I’ve been almost human for the afternoon.
It’s not a bad feeling at all. “Kana, you said my mom always told stories about her family when she was here. Can you tell me them? The stories she told you? I’d like to hear them.”

Because that’s what I really
need
most right now.

Kana leans forward, gesturing theatrically as she tells me about the district-championship game I won with a shutout in my sophomore year, about how I aced my advanced-placement history test last year, about how Sandy Koufax always slept on my bed, even from the first night we got her, even when my mom would try to get her to sleep on her bed. She tells me about how the four of us loved roller coasters and practiced lifting our arms in unison on the downhill, all so my mom could have a family photo snapped at just that moment. She talks about how my father taught me how to save spiders I found in the house by returning them to the outdoors rather than stepping on them, how that was one of his sweetest legacies that my mom saw in me even when he was gone.

I can hear my mom saying these words. These are my mother’s words; these are my mother’s stories. I know these stories. I lived these stories. But I like them more when they’re being told to me, knowing my mom told them to others, knowing my mom wanted to share me with her friends here. She feels alive here, like she left a living, breathing part of herself here in Tokyo. The thought crosses my mind for a second: Did my mom leave these stories here for me? I’m sure that sounds terribly selfish, but did she plant the seeds of these stories, like she planted gardens and flowers and bulbs, so they could find their way back to me? Was that some kind of gift, maybe a legacy, she left for me? Maybe she knew I’d come looking. And maybe she wanted me to have them, a gesture from beyond the grave, a guide for me to keep moving, keep living, keep asking.

“Those are some good stories. Assuming they’re all true,” I tease, and it feels good to be playful again.

“Maybe someday you will tell me a story.”

“Maybe. But stories aren’t really my thing.”

“Oh, but they
are
my thing. And wait! There’s one more,” she says, that smile lighting up her face as she bounces once or twice on her cushion.

“She talked about how you were in love with her best friend’s daughter.”

I grip my hand around my teacup and look down.

“She said,
Danny has been in love with my best friend’s daughter since he was in third grade. He had a crush on her when she wore this cute black-and-white gingham dress to
school, and he talked about how pretty she looked. And then in junior high he was always going over to her house to show her some funny cat or dog video, or she was always coming over to do the same. As if I didn’t know they liked each other.
” Kana laughs, kind of a snorting laugh, and she sounds just like my mom. “And she said Holland was crazy about you.”

Against my better judgment, against all my ramparts and defenses, I look Kana in the eyes, because I still want the reminder that Holland was into me too.

“She said she used to say to Kate,
They are so in love. So maybe we’ll be in-laws as well as best friends
.”

We were both crazy in love, crazy for each other. That is true. That is a story that doesn’t change. But the story has been told. I know the ending.

“So are you back together with this epic woman? Will she be joining you in Tokyo? Maybe flying in across the sky wearing her cape and Superwoman costume?”

I shake my head. “Nope.”

“Then we will find you a fabulous Japanese girl to mend your broken heart.”

“I didn’t say it was broken.”

“You didn’t have to,” Kana says.

I look at the candles flickering on the shelves. They remind me of the night I almost burned Holland’s pictures after she dumped me. I had saved all of them, ordered prints of the best ones of her, including her beating me in a winner-take-all round of Whac-A-Mole at the Santa Monica Pier.

“Ha! Take that!” Holland held her arms in the air, victorious. I snapped a picture of her. And many more—her walking ahead of me to skee ball, her ordering cotton candy, her offering me a piece of the sugar cloud.

“How is it possible that you’re hot in every picture?” I asked as I looked at her images on my phone.

She rolled her eyes. “Because you’re in love with me. Same reason you’re hot on my phone.”

“Let’s get a shot of you on the Ferris wheel.”

Her eyes widened; then soon we went sailing into the night sky. She gripped my hand as we rose higher while the cars filled with people. I could feel her nails digging into me at one point.

“You okay?”

She nodded. “Yep.”

We reached the top, the highest point on the Ferris wheel. “Take a look at that.”

She kept looking down, though. She stared at her feet. I tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “Are you afraid of heights?”

“No!”

But she wouldn’t look up. The Ferris wheel stopped moving. “Take out your phone,” I said to her.

I started texting her so she wouldn’t have to see how high up we were.
You can see the Hollywood sign from here.

She wrote back,
No, you can’t!

Then it was my turn.
Fine, but I can see that guy who walks on stilts down on Venice Beach.

Is he wearing that red-and-white top hat?

Yep. There’s a bird glued to the top, though. So weird.

I pretended to take his picture, and she laughed, but we kept on like that for the rest of the ride. By the time we got off she hadn’t looked up once from her phone.

“Thank you,” she said, when her feet touched the ground.

“Why didn’t you just tell me? We didn’t have to go on it.”

“I didn’t want you to know I was afraid of heights. It’s so lame, my stupid fear of heights.”

“Holland, you never have to go on a Ferris wheel for me ever.”

She took her phone out one more time and wrote back to me.
Good, because I frigging hate those things.

I laughed when I read the text and then took her hand. We walked down the path along Ocean Avenue. “Tell me what else you’re afraid of.”

“So you can use it against me?” She squeezed my hand when she said it, and I knew she was joking.

“Seriously. So I know. So I don’t have to take you up in a Ferris wheel again to find out.”

“Spiders, for sure.”

“You picked the wrong state to live in.”

“I know,” she said as we leaned to the right so a late-night cyclist on the concrete path could cruise by. “There are spiders all over this city. All over my house.”

“Know what I do with spiders?”

“Don’t tell me you keep them in a cage as pets.”

“Uh, no. You’ve been to my room. No spider cages there.”

“What do you do with spiders then?”

“My dad taught me how to rescue them. Whenever there was a spider in the house, we’d shout, “Spider Alert!” And he’d arrive on the scene with a salute and a glass, and I’d go find a sheet of paper. And then he’d put the glass over the spider and slide the paper underneath. He’d carry the spider to the yard or the door, or whatever, and free it. He didn’t like killing things. So that’s what I do too.”