When You Were Here (13 page)

“Look at you. Such an animal lover. Even for spiders.”

I shrugged. “He loved animals. All animals. I mean, he wasn’t one of those people who had a house full of lizards or snakes, but he wasn’t the guy who stepped on spiders and killed them to get them out of his house either. Obviously. My sister was a total freak, though. She was terrified of bugs, and even though I was only nine or ten it was my job to capture and free the spiders Laini found when my dad was out of town. When my dad would come home from whatever trip he was on, the first thing I did was give him the spider count. It was this running thing we did. Then he’d high-five me and take me out for doughnuts as a reward or something.”

“Do you miss him?” Holland asked as we neared a bench. She gestured to it, and we sat down.

“Sometimes. Like when I’d pitch and win and he wasn’t there, or when I’d pitch and lose and he wasn’t there. Or sometimes when I jump in the pool and I come up, and
there’s no one else there but me. But then there are days when I don’t think about him. Which sucks and doesn’t suck at the same time.”

“If he were here, right now, what would you tell him? And not just some epic thing, but what ordinary, everyday thing would you tell him?”

I ran my fingers through her hair, letting her blond waves fall against my hands. “I’d tell him you beat me at Whac-A-Mole tonight. And I’d ask him where to take you tomorrow night and the next day, because one of the things that sucked the most when I started going out with you was that I couldn’t tell him, and I wanted to, because he always liked you.”

She smiled and moved closer. “I always liked him too, and I’m totally afraid of spiders, so I’m glad he taught you well. I’m also afraid of getting locked in bathrooms,” Holland offered.

I mimed checking an item off a list. “Do not lock Holland in bathroom. Duly noted.”

She leaned into me. “No, silly. Like gas-station bathrooms.”

“Oh, well. I can totally see that. I don’t want to get locked in gas-station bathrooms either.”

“And cold. I’m terrified of cold. I hate snow and windchill and temperatures below seventy degrees.”

I wrapped an arm around her. “I know that was just a cheap trick to get me closer to you.”

“It was.” She rested her head against my shoulder. We
stayed like that, quietly, as the joggers and cyclists and other late-night warriors pounded through their cardio. It was Los Angeles after all. Fitness is a round-the-clock endeavor.

“And being far away from you,” she said, then looked up at me. No more teasing, no more punching, just the purest of looks in her blue eyes. “When I go to college in a month. I’m three hours away.”

It was the first time either one of us had acknowledged
the thing
. The inevitable end of the summer. The inevitable end of us.

I waited for her to say more. I didn’t want to admit that I’d drive three hours there and back every day to see her.

“It’s not that far, though,” she said softly, offering up an idea, a possibility. “I mean I could come back on weekends, right? Or you would come down maybe….”

She held it out there, and she was so vulnerable in that moment.

“I’ll come see you anytime you want, Holland.”

“You will?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

“I don’t want this to end when I go to school, Danny. I want to be with you. I don’t want to be one of those couples that fades away when one goes away.”

I kissed her forehead. “We won’t. I promise.” It was the easiest promise I ever made in my life.

“You mean it? You’ll come see me?”

“Yes. Will you come back here? To see your
high school
boyfriend
?” I said it with a touch of sarcasm, but it was a mask for my own fears. That she’d be embarrassed by having a boyfriend still in high school.

“Are you kidding? All the girls will be jealous that I snagged myself a hot younger guy,” she said, then pushed me down on the bench and climbed on top of me, sliding her hands under my T-shirt and kissing me so hard and with so much fire that I nearly forgot we were in a very public place.

But when I came up for air, I managed to get words out. “Being ridiculously turned on in a public place.”

“What?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” I stood up and pulled her up with me, then made her walk right in front of me to my car, so it wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else how much I wanted her. We drove home to my house. My mom was sound asleep, and even if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have cared that Holland spent the night, twisted in my sheets, intertwined in my arms, my dog’s chin on my girlfriend’s leg all night long.

But we didn’t stay together when she went to UCSD. She had no problem doing the thing she said she was most afraid of, after all.

After she dumped me, I found a lighter my mom used for candles. I brought the pictures taken at the pier to the kitchen sink and started to burn the first one. But then I stopped. I blew out the embers and jammed the pictures into an envelope that I stuffed in the back of my closet. I
couldn’t turn her photos, or my memories of her, to ash. She has always been fire; she has always been a flame.

And so the candles here in the Tatsuma Teahouse remind me of her. Then again, I am always reminded of her, so I find a way to shift gears.

“Your mom said you had to practice yesterday,” I say to Kana. “What do you practice?”

Her big brown eyes light up. “I play the saxophone. I’m in a band, and we’re playing at a jazz club in a couple weeks. You have to come! Will you please please please come see me perform? I play a mean sax solo!”

“So you play the sax, you have a panda purse, you’re a crazy-good photographer, you like to talk, and you hiss at women on the streets. Did I get that right?”

Kana smiles knowingly, like I’ve caught her in something. “You noticed the hiss.”

“Well, it’s kind of unusual. Why did you hiss at her?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “Someday I’ll tell you. But for now tell me more about your sister. Laini was so reserved when I met her.”

My sister. All roads keep leading back to her, and I’ve got a feeling that Laini and my mom weren’t just talking about tuxedo cats when my sister came to Tokyo.

When Laini was eight days old, her birth parents clothed her in blue footie pajamas, wrapped her in a thick green blanket, and left her outside a police station in the city of Wuhan. They were likely a poor couple, with few options, but they wanted Laini to be warm, and they wanted her to be found quickly and safely. She was sent to a foster family, who took care of her for the first eleven months of her life, until she was matched with an American couple—Garry and Elizabeth Kellerman from Santa Monica, California. They’d been waiting for a match for nearly two years. I don’t really know the details, but I assume they tried to have a biological baby with no luck. And I’m pretty sure they didn’t have much luck for many years
after
Laini’s adoption either. Which means I’m pretty sure I’m an Oops
Baby. My mom would never admit this, but it’s hard to dispute the evidence. I was born six years later.
Abroad.
Clearly, they weren’t planning for me.

Anyway, my mom joked that Laini was so ultra-American, it was as if all the Chinese had been vacuumed out of her. Laini loved pink and Barbie and pizza and mac and cheese. But something changed when Laini turned twelve. She started hanging out with other Chinese girls more. A bunch of them knew Mandarin and had been taking classes at a school in Los Angeles. Laini asked to take classes too, and in a few years she was speaking fluently, bantering back and forth with her friends and with our dad. It was their bond, their thing. Even as she pulled away from our mom, she stayed close to him, and they often researched China together, looking up websites about Chinese culture, Chinese studies, the Chinese language.

Then she wanted to reconnect with her roots, so we went on one of those return-to-the-
homeland
trips when she was in high school.

I thought China would be like Japan, but that was shortsighted of me. You couldn’t drink the water in China. Sidewalks were cratered in sections, traffic lights were ignored by both pedestrians and cars, and pollution from nearby factories choked the air in the afternoons. On my second day there, I saw a white-coated man pulling out some other guy’s tooth in a dental office that was more like
that food stall
, open-air and exposed to all. So I stayed in the hotel room reading books and watching movies on my iPod. My
mom stayed with me. She wasn’t crazy about China either. But Laini was the opposite. She was energized by the country. “I want to do everything I can to help China. To eradicate pollution. To save the environment. To help the poor families so they don’t have to abandon their baby girls,” she said.

She kept going back, summer after summer. My dad would take her to China, and my mom and I would stay in Tokyo. Then they’d rejoin us back at the apartment. That’s where we all stayed on the last family vacation, a few days after Laini graduated from high school. Midway through the trip, my dad had to take off to Kyoto for the day for work. He was heading up the Los Angeles office of his company then, but it was still based in Kyoto, as it had been when I was born.

“I swear, this’ll be the one day I have to work on this trip. Then I’m all yours,” he said to the three of us when he left us that morning at Hachik
’s mosaic and headed into the Shibuya Station to catch the bullet train to Kyoto for the day.

His last words.

That evening my mom received the type of phone call that sends you to your knees. He’d been hit by a truck that came barreling down a street just as he was crossing it. His death was instant.

It’s safe to say we were all devastated, but Laini showcased her sadness with constant barbs before she left for
college. She was pissed my mom was working again right after my dad’s death. Laini seemed to think mourning should have been my mom’s job.

“How can you do that?”

“Do what, Laini?”

“Work. Just sit there and work as if everything is normal,” Laini said, but that’s exactly what Laini was doing too. She was headed off to college, getting on with her life.

“Nothing is normal, Laini. And you’re not the only one who misses him. We all do.”

“You have a funny way of showing it,” Laini fired back. My mom returned to whatever she was working on, but my sister kept at her, trying to get her to take the bait. “I bet if he’d been married to my real mom, she’d miss him.”

My mom looked up, exhaustion and frustration written all over her face. “Don’t. Don’t do that again, Laini.”

“Maybe
she
misses me,” Laini countered. “Have you ever thought of that?”

“I’m sure she does, Laini. I’m sure she never forgets you.”

“Maybe I should help her remember me. Maybe I should find her.” Laini pressed her palms on the table and stared at our mom, willing her to fight, waiting for her to fight.

“Perhaps you should. If that’s what you want to do.”

“Perhaps I will. Because you know what? I wish she were my mom,” Laini said, then stormed out of the room.

I grabbed her arm. “You’re being such a hypocrite. Just leave her alone.”

She shook her head at me. “Don’t even go there with me, mama’s boy.” She held up a palm toward me, like a running back holding off a lineman, and walked away.

Laini left for college two months later, and we barely saw her again, even after my mom got sick a year later. That’s why it’s so strange to me that Laini would have visited my mom in Tokyo. So I keep calling Laini until she breaks her Monday-Thursday rule and picks up.

“Why didn’t you tell me you came to see Mom?”

“Why would I have?”

“Because you never once came home after you left for school. But you came
here
.”

“Because there were things I wanted to tell her.”

“Like what?”

“Jesus, Danny. Does it ever occur to you to just say hello? To start a conversation like a normal, pleasant person?”

“Oh, sorry. Right. I’m the one who vacated the family, so yeah, I’m the one you should be berating.”

She stops, and the silence startles me. We are so good at this, at the cruel back-and-forth. Laini and I have done sarcasm and bitterness, cordiality and fakery, extraordinarily well for years. What we don’t do is
real
. “I thought I had reasons,” she says softly.

“For distancing yourself?”

“Yes. I thought I had reasons,” she repeats. “I was wrong.”

“About what?” I ask carefully. I’m thrown off by her change in tone, by the thawing of the polar ice caps.

“This is a conversation we should have in person.”

“Laini, I’m not flying to China to meet you.”

“You don’t have to. I’m in Kyoto for the weekend with my boyfriend. He’s here for research for his dissertation. Can you come meet me here?”