When You Were Here (15 page)

She nods and wipes away a tear. “Yes. I am. I came to China because I wanted to feel connected to something again. And I stayed in China because it feels like home to me. It’s where I live now. It’s where I belong.”

I don’t think Laini and I are going to be best of friends. I doubt we’ll be the brother and sister who hang out and catch up each week over long, friendly phone calls. I suspect we’ll always be merely an item on the other’s to-do list. But I no longer want to smash her guitars.

At the very least I understand her now. Sometimes that’s enough.

When I return to my apartment, I head to my mom’s room. I flick on the light and walk to her bookshelves. There are envelopes on the lower shelf with photos, and framed pictures too. I pick up a framed photo of my mom and dad. She’s wearing a summer dress, and he’s in khakis and a blue button-down—standard-order over-forty male uniform, he called it, saying,
I have no choice but to wear this, and someday, son, you’ll have to dress like this too
. They’re standing by the pool at sunset. His arm is around her waist, and you can see that her hand is curled over his hand, their fingers interlaced. She’s smiling or laughing, maybe at something he said.

He always wanted to make us laugh. He used to take me out to the Santa Monica Pier for ice cream on Friday nights.
We walked past the trapeze girls and the Ferris wheel and the skee ball to the ice-cream stand at the end of the pier. We’d stand there licking cones, watching the water, him joking about something or other, teasing me about school or making fun of himself.

“I turn forty-five soon. I think I’m going to have a midlife crisis,” he said over malted chocolate ice cream one night. “Should I get a sports car? Or a new stereo system?”

“A Ferrari. Get a Ferrari. Those are cool.”

“Sure. No problem. I hear the dealership is having a sale. Only two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“They cost that much?”

“They don’t call it a midlife crisis for nothing, son,” he said.

But he wasn’t having a midlife crisis in the traditional way, because he was crazy about my mom. He liked to sneak kisses with her when he thought no one was watching.

“You are the hottest mom in all of Southern California,” he’d say to her in the hallway.

“Oh, shut up,” she said.

“I mean it. I totally mean it. How could anyone be hotter than you?”

I chimed in from my room. “Can you please stop referring to Mom as
hot
? It’s freaking me out.”

“Let’s freak Danny out. Kiss me now, Liz. C’mon, kiss me now, right in front of him.” He planted a kiss on her and pulled her tight, and at that point I closed my eyes and covered my ears.

He was the first one I told that I had a crush on Holland, though he’d already figured it out.

I was in third grade, and she was in fourth grade, and she wore some black-and-white-checked dress to school. It was the first time I noticed what a girl wore. Over the next few days I dog-eared all the pages in our elementary school yearbook with Holland’s picture on them. My dad saw me stretched out on my bed flipping through the pages. I slammed the little yearbook closed. He patted me on the back and whispered, “Don’t tell your mom, and don’t tell Kate, but I think you’ve got good taste.”

“Dad!”

“What? You think I didn’t do the same thing when I was your age?”

“You did?”

He sat down on the bed with me. “Of course. Girls are great. Just remember this: manners and a sense of humor. Those are the keys to winning their hearts. Oh, and there’s another thing. You have got to learn to save them from spiders. Girls just hate spiders. Like that one right there on your floor,” he said, and pointed.

Then he showed me how to
not
kill a spider.

There are so many things I had to learn without him. I learned how to deal with getting sidelined from baseball without him around. I figured out how to graduate at the top of my class without his input. I taught myself how to shave. There was no dad to ask, so I learned how to do it myself.

He didn’t teach me how to get over a girl who breaks your heart either.

Because last summer Holland and I talked about going to Tokyo together. She was lolling around in my pool, floating on a raft, a plastic cup of Diet Coke with a silly straw in her drink holder, her foot a rudder in the water, and she glided on over to me. I was hanging by the side of the pool, sunglasses on because it was high noon and it was bright and hot. The kind of heat that made your skin feel like it had been baking from the inside out. Plants were wilting, flowers were drooping, and the whole of Los Angeles was languishing in a heat wave. Sandy Koufax had flopped over on her side in the shade of a tree. Holland pushed my sunglasses on top of my head and said, “Let’s go to Fiji.”

“Let’s go to Tahiti.”

“Bali.”

“How about the Cook Islands? It’s practically off the map.”

“The Maldives.”

“Seychelles.”

Then she splashed water on me. “Now you’re just showing off.”

“The Maldives? I think you might be showing off too.”

“I was just trying to impress you with my geographical knowledge. Geography was my best subject. I can totally name all fifty states. Just try me.”

I pulled her off the raft and brought her hot, wet body against mine. “It’ll just make me want you even more,” I joked, even though I wasn’t sure it was possible to want her more.

She turned serious then. “Do you know how long I’ve liked you, Daniel Kellerman?”

I shook my head. “No. How long?”

She spread her hands as wide as they could go. “This long.”

“That’s a long time to harbor a crush, Holland St. James.”

“Not just a crush, Danny. I’ve been in love with you.”

The girl I loved loved me. My greatest dream, my most intense fantasy—Holland and me—was coming true. “Me too,” I whispered as I placed a hand on the back of her neck and kissed her gently. “I’ve been in love with you for so long.”

When we pulled apart, she had her hands on my chest, and she said, “I want to go all those places with you.”

“I would take you there. I would take you wherever you want to go.”

“But you know where I want to go most of all?”

“Where?”

“I want to see Tokyo with you.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “Yes. Because you love it. Because it’s like a part of you. The way you talk about it, the things you’ve done there with your family—your eyes light up.”

It was like someone was seeing into me, knowing me, and I was a little bit scared but mostly happy out of my mind. “I would show you Shibuya, and I would take you to the fish market, and I would take you to the coolest shopping
areas where you could find all kinds of cute rings and necklaces and all the things you like.”

“Take me there, Danny.”

“You know we’d be freaks, though, Holland. I’d be the six-foot-two American, and you’d be the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl next to me.”

“We’d be out of place, and it wouldn’t bother me one bit. I would be a freak with you anytime, anywhere.”

I shook my head, not because I didn’t believe her but because I was in utter disbelief. She was the opposite of what my life had been like for years. Losing my dad, then my sister leaving with so much ugliness in her wake, then my mom’s illness. She, this, us, was a gift from the universe, the thing that made it all survivable. She was the other side of pain.

“You know where else we should go?”

“Where?” I asked.

“Camping,” she said, and made sure to look right at me, to connect with my eyes before she said the next part. “Because it would be my first time.”

“First time camping?” I asked, trying to sound cool.

“I’ve
been
camping,” she said, and let her voice trail off along with my thoughts. “So maybe in a few weeks we should go.”

We went to this state park thirty miles north of Santa Monica, right off the Pacific Coast Highway. We walked on the beach and watched the sunset and kissed more times
than I could ever hope to count. As the sky darkened, she gave me this knowing look and touched the bottom edge of my T-shirt. She had these restless hands,
exploring
hands, and she was always touching my arms, my lower back, my waist. I twined my hands in her hair, pulling her blond waves away from her face. She tilted her head just a bit, my cue to kiss her neck. Then the hollow of her throat, then behind her ear in a way that made her gasp. She said my name in this low and husky voice that made me feel as if no one had ever kissed her like this, that no one ever would or could.

A hush fell over the beach. We made our way back to the tent. We had set it up in the most secluded spot we could find, and we zipped ourselves up in it.

As soon as we were inside she pulled me against her on top of all the sleeping bags, still fully clothed, then gave me this goofy, little grin. “Here we are.”

“Here we are,” I repeated.

She shifted her body against mine, answering all the questions I’d never had to ask, sighing into my mouth, moving under my touch. We pulled apart for a second, and Holland grabbed the edge of her shirt, then yanked it over her head. It fell somewhere. My shirt came off next; then Holland traced her fingers across the lines of my stomach, the way she had before, the way she knew I liked. I closed my eyes and breathed in hard. Then opened them to see her unclasping her bra. She reached for my shorts, and we
fumbled through unbuttoning them. I unzipped her shorts and slid them off her, and I could have stared at her all night, at the spot where her bikini underwear hit her hip bone, if I didn’t want them off so badly.

I reached a hand under the waistband and stopped for a sliver of a second. She was the only girl I had ever loved, and I wanted her to like everything we did.

I wanted her to
love
everything we did.

We stripped off the final layers, and though we’d been naked together before, now there was
this
.

Holland whispered in my ear, “I’m glad I waited for you, Danny.”

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t respond. The power of language had been drained from me, and I was one giant electrical power line, humming, buzzing.

I reached for a condom. I asked if it hurt. She shook her head and pressed her hands against my back, and I was sure that nothing would ever be better than this, because this was better than everything. It was the real world times a thousand. It was thunder and lightning and stars.

The next day, after another time, she said, “Someday we’ll do that in the Maldives. Or the Seychelles. Or Tokyo.”

“Next summer,” I said. “Next summer in Tokyo.”

“Yes.”

But we’re not camping now, and we’re not on a train now, and we’re not here now. We’re not together. She’s in the past, and I have to leave her there.

I think I finally know how to do that. I think I know the way, thanks to my sister and thanks to my mom.

When she rings me as she said she would, my hand hovers over the Talk button as I look at the face on the screen: Holland beating me at Whac-A-Mole, the picture that flashes when she calls. I flick back to the words I said to her at my house when I called her a disease, when I called her a cancer. I don’t want that to be the last thing I’ve said to her. I don’t want to carry a knot of anger, a kernel of resentment, that I feed for years until it leaves me scarred.

But I don’t answer her call, because I’m not strong enough yet to resist the sound of her voice.

Instead I open an e-mail to her, and I take the shard out of my hand. It doesn’t bleed. It barely even hurts as I say good-bye.

Hey, Holland. Great chatting with you on the train earlier. Listen, I feel bad about the way I left things. I was a jerk to you at my house that day. I’m really sorry about what I said to you. If you make it to that Statham flick, let me know what you think. Just don’t tell me the ending.

I’m tempted to add a smiley face, but I don’t do emoticons, so I let the words do the work for me. She’ll know what I mean. She’ll know that I’m sorry and that we’re all good from here on out.

Then I hit Send.

I look around the apartment one more time, at all the memories this place holds. I came to Tokyo in part for a practical reason, to decide if I should keep this place or sell it. But there isn’t a single bit of me that’s been evaluating that choice, that’s been weighing the financial or logistical implications of owning an apartment halfway around the world. And honestly I haven’t thought much about the house back in LA either, but maybe that’s the one I should sell, with its empty rooms and gardens I don’t know how to take care of. I could find another place near UCLA, a place just for Sandy Koufax and me.

But I’ll deal with that soon enough. For now I leave and head into the Shibuya night, walking down a crowded street, passing laughing guys and gals jabbering in a language I want to understand. I do a double take when I spot an ice-cream stand staffed only by a robot. Like a vending machine, but a little more elaborate. I press the buttons on the touch screen next to the blue-and-white life-size robot, and when my order has been entered, the robot shifts clunkily to a soft-serve machine, pulling levers to fill a cone with chocolate-and-vanilla swirl. As I watch and wait, I text Kana.