When You Were Here (20 page)

“
Hisashiburi
,” he says.
Long time no see.

“Chigau? Senyoru ni kittan darou.” Are you kidding? I was here the other night!

He shrugs playfully, then asks me what I want to eat.

I gesture to Holland.
“Kanojo no hoshii mono.” Whatever the lady wants.

He laughs, a deep hearty belly laugh and looks at Holland, then spreads his arms in front of the sushi bar, stocked with tuna, octopus, yellowtail, salmon, shrimp, and more. “Anything for you,” he says in a thick Japanese accent.

“Thank you,” Holland says, and we sit down. She leans into me. “You speak Japanese.”

“Just a tiny bit.”

“That was a whole conversation, Danny,” she says, and there’s pride on her face. It makes me sort of want to flex my muscles and let her watch. Then I lose the thought, because We. Had. A. Kid. And. The. Kid. Is. Dead.

“You should order,” I say, pointing to the food.

“Are you going to eat?”

“Sure.” I ask for some salmon, tuna, and octopus, and she chooses eel, miso soup, and edamame.

“So…” I say.

“I saw Sandy Koufax,” Holland begins. “I ran into her and Jeremy at the beach a few days ago. She raced up to me to say hello. She wagged her tail and put her paws on my chest and licked my face.”

My dog. My loyal, faithful dog.

Holland continues. “I think she wanted me to say hi to
you too. So from Sandy Koufax,
hi
. She misses you.” Holland stops talking and pauses. She looks straight at me. “She’s not the only one.”

I shake my head. “Don’t.”

If I let her talk like this, I will sink. My whole body will go underwater and never come back up.

“But I do. I do miss you, Danny. I’ve always missed you. I’ve missed you every day since…” Her voice trails off for a few seconds. “And that’s why I wanted to talk to you. That’s why I’ve been e-mailing and calling. Even if it took me flying five thousand miles, I’d fly five thousand more to tell you.”

“What are you going to tell me?”

“I want you to know why I never told you the truth about Sarah.”

“Okay. Tell me the truth,” I say as our guy hands over a plate of sashimi and some miso soup. It seems strange to be eating and talking about
this
.

“You know how I love kids,” Holland begins. “I love taking care of them. I love working at the camp. And I’ve always wanted kids. Just not as a teenage mom, not as a freshman in college, obviously. So when I found out I was pregnant, it was all so wrong.” She doesn’t touch her soup, just rests her hands on the counter as she talks to me. “But it was all so right in this weird way too. I think that’s what surprised me the most. I mean, as a girl you always think at some point,
What would I do if I got pregnant before I was ready?
But then it happened. And I was shocked. Because
we were careful even when I started on the Pill. So I took, like, ten pregnancy tests. And every time, it didn’t feel totally wrong. It felt like something I’d want. And with you. But just not then. So I was totally confused, and then that just turned into being totally paralyzed. Because all I knew was that I wasn’t going to end the pregnancy. But I couldn’t think beyond that.”

“So naturally you dumped me.”

“Yes.”

I hold out my hands, waiting for an answer. But it doesn’t come yet.

“I couldn’t think beyond each moment. I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t tell my mom or my roommate. I wore these baggy clothes, and I carried my backpack in front of me to class. And I was this zombie of a person. Just going through the motions of each day until I could figure out what to do and how to say it.”

I soften my voice. “I would have helped you figure it out. You know that, don’t you? I’m not some idiot who can’t handle complicated stuff.”

“I know.” She fiddles with a rubber band, a black ponytail holder around her wrist.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I could barely deal with it myself.” There is a fierceness in her blue eyes, an intensity to them. “Because I knew if I saw you, I would have wanted to keep her. I would have been this stupid hormonal girl who was getting fat, and I’d be like,
Danny, let’s have a baby. Let’s play house.
Let’s get married and be teenage parents.
I would have done that. I would have begged you, and we’d have been this joke. I had to cut you out because I didn’t want to put you in that position. I needed time to be okay with the idea that I was going to have to give her up before I told you. I planned to tell you. I mean, I knew I should tell you. I knew that, Danny.” Now her eyes plead with me. “And I talked to adoption agencies even though it broke me apart to think about giving her up. But I knew I had to. I just wanted to get my act together and a plan together and tell you when it was all sorted out. I wanted to be able to tell you without it messing up your life. Besides, I figured I’d have
time
to sort it out. I thought I could tell you when I had an adoption agency picked and when I was certain what I was doing. But then I went into labor. And everything happened so quickly. I had to get a cab to a hospital in San Diego and then call my mom and ask her to come down.”

When she says that, a memory flickers. Kate being gone for a few days six months ago. My mom not even knowing where Kate went. Just that she had to take care of business out of town.

“And my mom raced down to San Diego, and she arrived a few minutes after Sarah was born. It all just happened so quickly.”

“Jesus. You were alone when you had her?”

Holland nods. “I’d never imagined I’d give birth that early. That had just never even occurred to me. I never thought I would run out of time to tell you. I truly never
thought she’d be born before I could say something. But then they handed her to me, and I was overwhelmed with love for her. I was like this fierce lion, and I just wanted to protect her,” she says, her voice strong, the look in her eyes telling me she is both
here
and
there
right now. “She was small, so small, she could fit in my hands. Her face was reddish and a little bit blue at the same time. Her eyes were barely open, and her feet were tiny, and she let out this little sound, not like one of those full-bodied baby screams but more like a kitten’s meow.”

She puts her hand against her mouth for a second, her voice catching. “And I knew I had to protect her, and I had to fight for her. My only thought was I had to save my baby. But I couldn’t. She got an infection, and I wasn’t enough for her. What I had to give her wasn’t enough. I couldn’t do a thing. I failed her completely. She lived for exactly fifty-two hours. Her heart had been beating, and I had held her, and she was this
real
person. And when she died, all I felt was black and empty. We didn’t have a funeral or memorial service or anything. She was just cremated. That was it. And it was absolutely horrible—this tiny little person turned to ash.”

I try to picture a baby, a two-pound baby, being cremated. But it’s too awful a thought.

“And I thought her dying was all my fault. A punishment for not having figured out what to do beforehand.”

“Holland, it’s not a punishment. The world doesn’t work that way. Bad things just happen.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. That’s how I felt at
the time. And my body. It was just this mess. My body didn’t know she was dead. My body was trying to be a mom. And how could I tell you then? How could I tell you at that point? Just call you up and say,
Oh, hi. I didn’t have the guts to tell you I was pregnant, but now I’m not, and now she’s dead, and I feel dead too, and can you please come save me from all this?
”

I reach for her. I don’t care if she
should have, could have, would have
told me. I can’t let her, I can’t let
anyone
, go through this alone again, whether it was her choice or not. She presses her wet cheeks against my T-shirt, and I let her cry into my chest. “I would have saved you, Holland,” I say into her hair. She nods roughly against my chest.

I touch her hair for a second, then pull away.

“I know. I know, but I was scared. Besides, you were with Trina then. Even if you weren’t, what was the point? It wasn’t bringing her back. Then your mom got worse, Danny. That was when we all knew she wasn’t going to make it. How could I just add to that?”

I remember that clearly too. The blunt conversations the doctors had with my mom. Telling her it was time to get her affairs in order.

“How did my mom know about Sarah, though?”

“My mom told your mom after Sarah died. You know how they are. They tell each other everything. And the picture—my mom had taken the photo just a couple hours after I had her, and then after Sarah died she said she wanted to give your mom a picture because it would be
the”—Holland stops, looks away for a moment to swallow, then manages the next part—“the only way your mom would ever see one of her grandkids.”

All the things my mom will never see and never know flash before me. She will never know what I’ll study in college, who I’ll marry, how many kids I’ll have, what I’ll do for a living. She will never learn golf or qualify for a senior discount at the movies. She will never grow old.

Holland keeps talking.

“That’s why I hated college. I hated every single thing. I hated that she died. I hated that I hadn’t made a decision soon enough. I hated myself for being so weak, for not being able to tell you, for not being able to save Sarah. And then I came back for the summer, and I couldn’t stay away from you.”

Despite myself, I manage the smallest of smiles.

“I couldn’t. I mean, you know what happened! I kept coming over and bringing you food and trimming the flowers and inviting you to lunch. And just showing up. And every time I’d think,
This will be the time I tell him
. But you were just so broken, understandably, and I just didn’t want to pile on. It felt unfair then to tell you. Like I’d just be getting it off my chest and making a new problem for you. And I didn’t want to do that. It’s not that you couldn’t handle it, Danny. I didn’t want you to
have
to handle it.”

“I could have handled it.”

She places her soft hand on my arm. I tense but then give in to how good it feels to be touched by her. “I know,” she says.
“And the reason I know that is because nothing has changed for me. I’m still totally in love with you. I’ve never stopped.”

She’s doing it again. She’s saying things that make it impossible for me to be mad, impossible for me to resist. I want to wrap my arms around her, pull her next to me, and stroke her hair. I want to plant kisses on her forehead, her cheek, her glorious neck. I want to tell her I miss her so much too that the missing is like its own life force, like a living, breathing organ of fire inside me, and that I would do almost anything to take the pain away from her. But some other force, fueled by the memory of all the hurt she’s caused, is pulling me the other way.

I am not ready to open myself to the fire again, to the burning of Holland.

“I’m not ready,” I say to her.

She nods, taking the punch. “I have more pictures of Sarah if you ever want to see them. They’re not scary or sad. They’re pictures of her all wrapped up and sweet-looking in a little baby blanket or sleeping in my arms when the doctors would let me hold her for five minutes at a time before she went back into her Isolette. Maybe that sounds too weird or depressing. But I’m trying to be open about it now and tell you all the things I never told you before.”

Baby pictures. This is the real foreign language.

I look at her next to me here in Tokyo. I’ve always wanted her
here
with me. But this isn’t exactly how I pictured it. Even so, I need to say the next words to her. “Holland, I don’t agree with you not telling me. But I do understand
what you’re saying. I do understand why you thought you had to do it that way.”

Then I move on and ask her where she’s staying.

“You know my mom has that client in Tokyo?”

I nod.

“She’s going to let me stay with her.”

“How long are you here?”

She hesitates before she answers. “A week. I’m done with the camp job for now.”

I want to invite her back to my place, but I just can’t stand the thought of losing someone else again.

“You should eat,” I say instead.

I return to the temple my mom used to visit. It is dusk. The midday heat rays have been washed away by the cooler evening air. I wave my hand through the sickly-sweet-smelling incense, spreading it through the temple. No one is here, just like the last time. But I can feel my mom in this place. I can feel that she was here just a few months ago.

I was close to my mom. I told her stuff; I leaned on her; I asked her for advice on almost everything—friends, school, girls, sports, college. I stand in the darkened temple, lit only by flickering candles, staring at a stone statue of Buddha with his hands clasped together, and I wonder if I would have asked my mom what to do about a pregnant girlfriend.

Hi, Mom. I got a girl pregnant. What should I do?

Does she want to keep the baby or give it up?

She doesn’t know.

Well, son, you should—

That’s as far as I can get. Because she’s not here to fill in the blanks, and because she didn’t tell me about it anyway. I try to imagine what I would have done if I were Holland. Who would I have told? If Sarah had lived, would Holland have kept her? Would she have quit school to raise a kid? If she had given her up, would it have been an open adoption where you stay in touch? Maybe in ten years Holland would have become buddy-buddy with the ten-year-old Sarah and then have ice-cream dates and shopping trips and prom consultations with the teenage Sarah. Maybe teenage Sarah would have wanted to know her dad. Maybe teenage Sarah would have been like Kana, wanting to fly away, wanting to escape.

But that didn’t happen. Because Sarah went the way of so many people in my life.

I close my eyes and try to picture the NICU, the doctors telling a scared college freshman who’d given birth to a baby too soon that the child was dying. Did Sarah fight to live like my mom? Did the doctors do everything they could? Did they say,
Sorry, we can’t save your daughter
? And then wrap the baby in a blanket and hand her to Holland to hold till Sarah took her last breath?