When You Were Here (14 page)

I catch the first train to Kyoto in the morning. It’s Saturday now, and the train is filled with families, with fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, and all I can think is this might have been the very train my father took on his last trip.

The same train, the same car, maybe even the same seat.

I switch to an empty seat across the aisle, just in case. I push my earbuds into my ears and zone out to music, letting the songs drown me for a while. I swipe my finger across my phone to switch to a new band, and like someone just jumped out of the closet to shout “Surprise!” there’s a text from Holland staring up at me. The first time I’ve heard from her since I kicked her out of my house nearly a week ago.

How is Tokyo? We miss you here.

Even as I think about my family, about the way we all splintered, Holland is still the real shard in my hand, and I can’t bring myself to take it out. I want to shut her out. I want to find the strength to ignore her forever and just let go of the piece of my wasted, ragged, worn-out heart that she irretrievably owns. But my instinct to reach out to her,
to talk to her, to hold her tight, is too strong. It overpowers any ability I have to save myself.

As we wind south through Japan to the city where my sister waits for me, I give in.
I’m on a train now to Kyoto.

Seconds later she writes:
I love trains. They are so…

I know what she wants to say. They are so
romantic
. Trains make you think of movies and novels and rain. Trains are the last few hours before you’re ripped from the one you love. Trains are all the ways you miss each other—wrong train, wrong tracks, wrong time.

I know what you mean.
I send before I think about it, before I contemplate the sheer stupidity of letting her back in with a bit of banter, because her words on my screen are a purr, sexy and inviting.

The towns speeding past the windows…

Why am I doing this? Because it feels so good to talk like we used to, even though I know this is just a shadow of what we had. But I chase it anyway.
The rattling of the cars on the tracks…

I close my eyes and imagine everyone on this train has disappeared and it’s just Holland and me. We ride the train as far as it goes, into the night, an endless night with her.

Another text comes in from her.
Can I call you later? I want to talk to you.

My phone is a pill, it’s a sweet, seductive pill that’ll trick me into thinking she’s what I need, when she can’t possibly be what I need. I stuff the phone into the bottom of my backpack.

A red sign flashes above the train doors. First, Japanese writing I can’t read. Then in English:
WE WILL SOON MAKE A BRIEF STOP AT KYOTO
. The train lets me out at Kyoto Station, and it’s a sleek, metal, modern spaceship. Soon I’m escaping the crowds and the streets jam-packed with tourists who snap photos. I haven’t been to Kyoto in several years, but I studied the map last night, and now I find my way through the quieter alleys, the small shops and the narrow lanes that lead in and out of gardens and temples and that bring me to a walking path that runs along a stream. Off to the side looms a narrow set of steps. After five minutes of going vertical, the stairs end at a stone bench that looks out over the gurgling water below. Laini sits on the bench. She stands, and for a second I think she is going to hug me.

Then we both remember—we don’t like each other.

We sit on opposite ends of the bench. Laini has packed a lunch, and for me she brings takeout sushi in a plastic container; for herself she has picked up pigeon lungs from a traditional Chinese restaurant.

“Shen and I go there every time we come to Kyoto,” she says, as if we regularly meet and chitchat about her travels and her life.

“Shen’s your boyfriend, I’m guessing?”

She nods and spears a piece of pigeon. “He’s writing about Eastern art, comparing Japanese to Chinese. So we come here every now and then. He’s spending the afternoon at the galleries and museums.”

“And this comparison, let me guess. I’m betting he
thinks Chinese art is better.” I pop another piece of
hamachi
in my mouth.

She gives me a stern look. She really should have been a schoolteacher in the 1800s out on the Great Plains. She’d have done well, behind her glasses and with her hair pinned up. She chews the pigeon meat, and just the thought of eating a street rat makes me sick.

“Do you really like pigeon lungs?”

“Pigeons are delicious.” She offers me a chopstickful. I shake my head vehemently. “Have you ever had one?”

“No. I have never eaten pigeon, and I don’t ever plan on eating pigeon.”

“Then how do you know you don’t like it?”

“It’s a
pigeon
, Laini! You’re not supposed to eat it.”

“Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean the rest of the world doesn’t like it. You can be so narrow-minded.”

“Yes. I’m narrow-minded. I’m closed off. That’s why I’m spending the summer five thousand miles away from my hometown.”

“Why are you spending the summer here, Danny?”

“ ’Cause the Tokyo Giants scouted me. They don’t mind that my shoulder is shot. They’ll let me pitch,” I say, and for some reason my joke elicits a laugh. Laini laughs with her whole mouth wide open. She has Kohler white teeth, perfectly straight, courtesy of two and a half years of Santa Monica’s best orthodontia. I take some strange solace in this; she is more American than she will let on. Then I
answer her. I don’t tell her I came to Tokyo to figure out what to do with the apartment she doesn’t want or to learn all our mom’s secrets. But I don’t lie to her either. “I came to Tokyo because I like it. But I’ve always liked Tokyo, and you never did. That’s what I don’t understand. Because you hardly came home when Mom was sick, Laini, but you went there, and I just don’t get it. So what was it you said you had to tell Mom?”

She takes off her glasses and rubs the bridge of her nose. “Do you remember how I was to Mom before I left for college?”

“Remember? How could I forget? You were a complete bitch.”

She winces but takes it on the chin. “It wasn’t my finest moment. Or moments. But I didn’t realize it at the time.”

Laini has always been stubborn, has always dug in her heels. For her to admit she was wrong about something is nothing short of momentous. I let up on her a bit. “What do you mean, Laini?”

She reaches into her bag, a forest-green, woven, hippie-chick thing. She takes out a Moleskine notebook, unsnaps the elastic band that keeps it in place, and opens the notebook. Pressed between two sheets of paper is the ripped-off corner from a page in a spiral notebook. The jagged edge that completes the note my mom kept from my dad.

The missing piece.

Laini shows me the ripped paper, holding it gently in place with her index finger. “Do you see the date?”

I look down at the blue ink that matches the page that’s in my wallet now. One of my mom’s secrets; one of the clues. The note my dad wrote to her:
L—I already miss you. I will be back soon. Love always.

“Of course. It’s the date Dad died,” I say, and, like invisible ink appearing, it clicks. That’s why my mom kept
this
note.

“He wrote her this note
that
day. She was reading it over and over again after he died. And when I saw the note, I just snapped.”

“Why?”

“Because it was the last thing he’d said. The last thing he would ever say. And he said it to her.”

“Why would that make you snap, though?”

“Because it was to her. Not to me. And I was jealous. And I was mad. So I started to rip the note, but I stopped and instead I kept this part.” She holds up the small section of the paper. “So I’d have something for me. Because this note brought up all these things I’d felt but never said.”

“What sort of things?”

“See, you probably don’t think about this because you’re
them
. You’re parts of them. But I never felt like I was enough for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She had you after me, Danny.”

“Yeah, that’s how it usually goes with second children. They come after the first. Besides, I don’t think they were trying all that hard to have another kid. I’m pretty sure
they weren’t planning to have me,” I say, to make light of things, to put us on even footing.

She sighs, the sad, defeated kind of sigh, as she leans back on the stone bench. “But I’m adopted, and you’re their real child.”

“Laini, don’t say that word. You know Mom and Dad never said that,” I say, because they never did. I was never the
real
child, the
natural
child. I was simply referred to as the biological child and Laini the adopted one, but we were both their kids.

“I know. But I felt that way. Mom never wanted to learn Chinese. She never wanted to go to China. Dad was the one who did. He was always the one who did that stuff with me. And she was never interested, so I felt like she wasn’t interested in me. Just you. Just her
real
child.”

“Stop saying that word.”

“But I’d always been closer to him. You know that. I was a daddy’s girl. He and I were just in synch always, know what I mean?”

I nod, picturing all the times she ran to him first, hugged him first, held his hand first.

“And when he was gone, I felt so disconnected from her. Like this rope that had connected me to the Kellerman family was gone. He was that rope. He was what connected me. He was the one who wanted to be part of where I came from. She never did. So it was like there was nothing for me back in the States. There was nothing for me with her. So I lashed out at her. Because I was so broken by what happened
to him. And I had to make sense of it somehow. So I made sense of it by leaving. By believing that I had nothing to do with her. That she didn’t care about me. That he was the only one who cared, and he was gone. Besides, I was going to college anyway. Mom wasn’t even sick then, so
what did it matter?
I figured. I was moving on. To my new life. To the life I was supposed to have.”

“You know that’s not even remotely close to the truth, though, right? Because
she
loved both of us.
He
loved both of us. She didn’t
not
learn Chinese to spite you, Laini. She just didn’t learn Chinese because she didn’t learn Chinese. There wasn’t a reason for it. There wasn’t some dark and terrible reason. And she didn’t go with you on the other trips to China because
he
went with you. Because they had two kids. It wasn’t a competition. That was just how it worked out.”

“I know that now. I just had so much resentment at the time,” she admits, and I don’t know how to respond, because I don’t understand how you can nurture something so dark, so twisted, for so long. We sit in silence for a minute. The only other sounds are birds chirping in a nearby tree. “And then once Mom got sick, I was already so far away anyway. And whenever we e-mailed she was always telling me to just keep focusing on college, that Kate was there and that she’d be fine. I was so disconnected from her already at that point that it was easy—and I’m not saying that’s a good thing—but it was easy to just keep doing what I was doing. It wasn’t till I met Shen and told him all this
that he encouraged me to talk to her. To let her know I was wrong.”

“Shen told you to do that?”

She nods. “Yes. He’s the one who urged me to visit her and talk to her. To say I was sorry. To see her and tell her I’d been wrong all those years.”

“How did you know you were wrong?”

“Time.”

“Time?”

“Yes. After a while I just stopped hurting so much. And when I didn’t hurt anymore, I realized I was wrong to lash out at her. And wrong to take off. And I told her.”

“How did she take it?”

“How do you think she took it?”

I picture my mom hearing Laini’s apology. Listening to her absent daughter say she messed up. Without having been there, without having heard it, I know what my mom would have said. That it was all good, and all fine, and there was nothing to worry about.

“I’m sure she hugged you and said she missed you and that she loved you,” I say quietly.

“Of course that’s what she said.”

I flash back to the card from Laini. It’s also in my wallet.

I feel a momentary sense of peace thinking about how Laini was finally able to say the important stuff to our mom before she died—
I am glad you are my mom
. That’s a gift,
in a way, to be able to have the last thing you say to someone be the last thing you want them to have heard from you.

Now I have two answers for the price of one. Laini’s card and my dad’s note. But not just
any
card and not just
any
note. My mom kept those particular ones because of what they meant to her and for her. That card and that note mattered enough to travel around the world—good-luck charms maybe, talismans even—because they were the last things people she loved said to her. A promise—
I will be back soon
. Then starting over—
I am glad you are my mom
. Words of love. Words of happiness. No wonder my mom was happy. She knew how to hold on to what mattered, how to keep it close to her, how to let it heal her.

There’s a lull in the conversation, and Laini returns to her pigeon, taking a few more bites. “Do you know why I stay in China?”

“Because you’re Chinese?”

“Yes. And no. I came to China because I want it to be beautiful and healthy. Because I want to help the people. I’m glad now that my birth mom gave me up, but I want the families there to have a choice. This is how I make good for what I did to Mom. For how I left you both.”

I want to tell Laini it’s okay that she left, that she abandoned our mom when she needed her most. But I can’t exonerate her for that. I can’t absolve her for not being there. This forgiveness is not mine to give. It’s my mom’s, and she’s already given it. But we
can
move on. “Are you happy?
In China? With Shen?” I ask, and place a hand on her back. This may be the first tender moment we’ve shared in years. The first real question I’ve asked her in ages.