When You Were Here (19 page)

I turn the apartment upside down. I empty every drawer, every cabinet, every cupboard. I do it again. And again. By the end of the day, I have found nothing else. Nothing else my mom hid from me, nothing else my family didn’t tell me. But I’m sure something’s there, lurking.

Something to make sense of this mess. Because this does not compute. My mom didn’t keep secrets like this. She wouldn’t. She was honest and open and up front. When I was in third grade, the other kids were starting to talk about the birds and the bees, but no one quite got it, especially the details on how we’d all managed to escape out of our moms as babies. I asked at dinner one night.

“Mom, how did I get out of your belly?”

She laughed hard. My dad chuckled, looking away. Laini guffawed. “Oh, this is going to be good,” she said.

My mom looked at me, trying to wipe the smile off her face. “Do you really want to know? Are you really ready for the answer?”

“Yes.”

Then she told me. Not in graphic detail or anything. But enough to dispel my previous notion that I’d somehow emerged
Alien
-style. “That is the most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.

The three of them laughed throughout the rest of the meal. But even that truth didn’t stop me from asking more questions over the years. I asked; she answered. That was the deal. Even when she was first diagnosed, I asked her, tears streaking down my thirteen-year-old cheeks, if she was going to die.

“It’s possible, but I am going to do everything I can to fight it. I promise.”

If she was so honest about all that, why then would she hide
this
?

I leave her room and slam the door. I like the sound of it, so I slam it again and again, the sound echoing through the apartment, the noise splintering in my ears.

I return to the living room, to the lilac seeds on the coffee table where I tossed them my first day here. Lilac seeds from Holland. Then the note Holland sent my mom on lavender paper that I’ve been keeping in my wallet. Three clues in the
Personal
pile, and this last one is now abundantly clear. I read the note again, looking at it in a new way. I
never
would have guessed what it really meant—a makeshift memorial for my mom’s only grandchild.

How could they have this little secret and keep it from me? A coldness settles into my chest, a deep black coldness, like the dark of space. I am floating out there, on the edge of it all, about to be sucked into the black hole. The only thing keeping me
here
is this anger that I am encased in, all icy and frozen, as I spend another vacant night in a lonely home, far away from everyone.

When daylight mercifully comes, I ask Kana to go to the movies with me, and we spend the afternoon in a darkened theater, eating popcorn and gummy bears, and the only thing not lost in translation is the food and the comfort.

But it’s still not enough to right this capsized life of mine. We leave, and as we near the Hachik
mosaic, as we stand under the baking afternoon heat, I ask her if my mom ever mentioned Sarah to her.

“Yes,” Kana says with a nod.

“What did she say?”

“She said Holland had a baby. And Holland lost a baby.”

“You knew.”

“Yes. I knew.”

“Did you ever want to tell me?”

She doesn’t answer right away, just tilts her head to consider. Then she speaks. “I didn’t really think about telling you, Danny. I didn’t know, one way or the other, if you’d ever known. And it never came up in all our conversations, and to be honest, Holland hasn’t come up much either.” She looks straight at me when she says that, and I nod, because it’s true. Kana and I haven’t talked much about Holland, and the omission hasn’t been deliberate, it’s just happened naturally. “So I never felt as if Sarah was something to be told, do you know what I mean?”

“I guess. But I just don’t understand how everyone knew, but no one told me. My mom, Holland, Kate. They all knew, and my mom told
you
instead. And don’t get me wrong, Kana. I think you’re awesome, but you’re not the father of the—”

I can’t even finish the sentence.

“Sometimes it is easier for us to tell hard things to people who are far away. That’s how we test out saying things.”

“But my mom never told me. I can
almost
understand Holland not saying anything. She was eighteen and pregnant. But my mom? What’s her excuse?”

“She didn’t want to hurt you. That’s what she told me.”

“Did she show you the picture?”

“Yes. Sarah was a beautiful baby.” I don’t know what to
say to that. I don’t think babies are beautiful. I don’t think babies are anything. “She showed it to me at the teahouse one day after your sister came to visit.”

I close my eyes and reach for the dog mosaic, holding on to Hachik
’s white ears for a second. Kana reaches out and places a hand on my arm. I open my eyes. “What is wrong with my life? Why is everything so fucked up?”

“What is so messed up?” Kana asks as she shifts her words from my curses to her softer ones.

I don’t tell her that my grasp on truth, on words, on people, has slipped. I was getting close, so close to normal again, and that’s been snatched away. I’m not even back where I started. I’m somewhere else entirely, so far off the map I don’t know where to turn next. I look away, at the jumbo screen on the building across the street. A Chihuahua walks across a tightrope. “How could my mom know and not say anything? She was supposed to be on my side. She was
my
mom. Why was she on Holland’s side?”

“Is this a war between you and Holland? It wasn’t a battlefield. It wasn’t a fight. There are no sides. All sides of it are sad, okay?”

“You know what I mean.”

She shakes her head. “No, I don’t.”

“How could my mom know Holland had our baby and not tell me?” I grab Kana by the shoulder, and she tenses for a second. I let go. I can’t hurt her. She is the one person I can’t hurt. I can’t shake the answer out of her.

“Danny. Why do you think your mom didn’t tell you?”

I hold up my hands. “No clue.”

“Because she was dying. Because she didn’t want you to have any more loss in your life. You’d lost your father, your sister was gone, your girlfriend had broken up with you, and you were losing the person you loved most—her. Your mom. She didn’t want you to have one more thing to deal with. She wasn’t keeping a secret from you. She was protecting you from a secret.”

I shake my head many times. “No. No. No. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works,” I repeat.

“You have to understand she did it because she loved you. But you also have to understand that she wanted a picture of the only grandchild she would ever see. Even if that baby was already gone.”

Kana puts her arms around me, and I resist at first, resist the closeness, the connection, until finally I let myself fold into her. She wraps her skinny arms around me, and maybe this, maybe her, is why I came to Tokyo. She is the only thing that makes sense to me.

She holds on to me, or I hold on to her, I can’t tell, because I don’t want to separate myself from her.

Soon the sun is too much; the heat is too much. No one can last outside this long in the heat of the day.

“This is going to sound crazy, but do you want to go to karaoke?”

I laugh. “Really?”

I pull back, untangling my arms from her and my face from her shoulder.

“Sometimes I think when we are sad, we need to do the opposite of sad. Sometimes we need to sing.”

She takes my hand, loops her fingers through mine, leads me to the nearest karaoke place just a few blocks away, and orders up a karaoke room. She starts with the karaoke standards, Bon Jovi and the Beatles, then we hit newer tunes, Katy Perry and Arcade Fire, and we laugh and toast and hold our soda glasses high and say
kampai
, a Japanese
cheers
, and then sing more songs. We sing duets, including a ridiculously cheesy Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers song about islands, and she teases me mercilessly because my voice is so bad, and I cannot carry a tune at all. When we flip through the Guns N’ Roses section, she skips over “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and picks “Welcome to the Jungle,” and for this I want to buy her jelly crepes for the rest of her life. When the sadness is pumped out for the moment, we leave and head into the neon Tokyo night. I walk Kana to the subway station, and say good-bye as she cruises through the turnstiles on her way home.

I make my way through the evening crowds, the sidewalks teeming with people, and turn onto my street.

I stop in my tracks, because I must be imagining this. Imagining the outline of someone I’d recognize anywhere—the hair, the legs, the curves of the body. There’s a piece of paper in her hand, and she’s looking for numbers on buildings,
and she’s just a few feet from my building, trying to find the address that matches the one in her hand.

When she turns around, I’m looking into the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever known.

And she smells like lemon sugar.

“How did you get here?” I ask. It’s a dumb question, but still it comes out, because here she is and she called me on my bluff.

“I took a plane.”

“Right. Those things that fly over the ocean.”

“I got a cheap flight.”

“Oh good. I wouldn’t have wanted you to spend any real money to come here.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean I would only come because the flights were cheap.”

“Then why don’t you say what you mean for once? Or is that just too hard to do? To tell the truth?”

She shifts her bag higher on her shoulder. “Can we talk?”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes. To talk. To see you.” She gestures to the door of my building. “I came here because you wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. You wouldn’t answer my e-mails.”

“Note to self: As long as you fly across the ocean, the girl finally appears.”

She nods slightly, absorbing the blow. “Is there someplace we can go?”

“Oh, like my place? Do you want to come upstairs and have tea and we can talk there? Maybe we can even put Sarah’s photo on the table while we chat. I’ll get out the lilac seeds you sent my mom.”

Holland looks away, swallows.

“Sorry,” I mutter. “That was shitty.”

She shakes her head. Her blond waves are flatter than usual. Ten hours on a plane will do that. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. But we can’t go to my place.” The apartment is not my house in Los Angeles. It’s not a place she gets to float in and out of when she appears with food or with luggage. This place is mine. “Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” she says, and flashes me the tiniest smile. I look away.

“I know a twenty-four-hour sushi place.” I guide her down a quiet side street. There are no street barkers hawking TVs or cell phones here. I tip my forehead to a half-wood, half-screen door that I slide open. We enter a sardine-size sushi shop. The gentleman who runs the place holds out his arms and grins.