When You Were Here (21 page)

I know what it’s like to watch someone you love die. I was there the night my mom died. It was at our house in Santa Monica, in her bedroom. I held one hand, and Kate
held the other. My mom’s breaths grew farther apart and fainter. Then they were rattling almost, like she was sucking in air, gulping, but only once every minute. Her eyes were closed—she was hardly there; she’d said her good-byes—and now we were just watching, just witnessing the closing down of her body. A final inhale, a final exhale. Then the barely visible rising and falling of her chest stopped once and for all.

All that was left was me and my dog, and my goal in life became singular—to strike out anything inside me that resembled a feeling.

I leave the temple and walk around the back of the building with its peeling, faded paint. I stop short when I see a cemetery. It’s not a regular cemetery. The graves are different. The headstones are small. They have teddy bears next to them and bonnets on top of them. I am in a baby cemetery. I take another heavy, leaden step and read the dates, just to be sure, just to hold my finger in the flame a few more seconds.

I have to
feel
this pain. I have to
let
myself feel it.

I force myself to stare at the headstones, to read the names on them and the dates. This baby lived for three days. This baby for a year. This baby for five months. I feel as if someone has reached a hand through my chest, a fist, and it’s gripping my heart, squeezing it, wringing it, and suddenly I’m coughing, I’m choking, I’m down on my knees.

Something like tears is building up deep inside me, and I
cough some more, like I’m hacking up a lung. I have lost something I didn’t know I had and something—to be honest—I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be a father. I didn’t want to have a baby. But I didn’t want my firstborn child to die either. For the briefest of seconds, I picture my mom and Sarah. Somewhere else, someplace else, someplace heavenly, where it smells like lilacs and my mom has all her straight brown hair, curly at the ends, and she is laughing and holding hands with a little girl.

Sarah is with my mom. My mom is with Sarah. My dad is even there too. Together, all of them.

My mom wanted to know Sarah, the only grandchild she would ever know. My mom took her picture to Tokyo, looked at it, maybe even touched it, maybe even remembered the girl who would never live.

And I know—no, I
believe
—that this is all necessary, that this is all deliberate, that my mom in some greater cosmic, karmic, Buddhist sense somehow left these clues for me. Kana, Laini, Sarah. Soon, Takahashi. That if I can figure them out, I can heal.

But if my mom were here now, I’d tell her that she has given me the best of her, but that she messed up on this one count. I’d tell her I could have managed. I would have wanted to know. I’d tell her that this is the part of her I don’t want to be like. She may have had her reasons, and I think—now,
here
, after these weeks in Tokyo—I can respect that. But as for me, I will not be someone who harbors secrets, because secrets eat away at love.

Maybe this is what she wanted me to figure out. My own path.

I leave the cemetery because I have to be somewhere right now. Tonight is Kana’s show. She’s performing with her band. I texted her earlier to tell her.
Guess what? Holland showed up last night. And I also need the address of your show.

I grab my phone to see if she sent me the address.

I WANT ALL THE DETAILS! Can’t wait to see you at the Pink Zebra tonight!

There’s an address and a time. Her show starts soon. I shift into high gear and hop onto a train. I must tease her about the name Pink Zebra. It sounds like a gay bar or a strip club. Once I’m in Roppongi, I find the Pink Zebra at the bottom of a hill, the far end of a slim alley, down a set of stairs, underground. There is no flashing sign to guide you, just a faded dark pink one with the name in curvy letters. I walk inside, and there she is onstage, blowing air into the sax, her cheeks like chipmunk cheeks, like Dizzy Gillespie on his trumpet. She is playing some jazz number I don’t know. She wears a green sequined T-shirt, a jean miniskirt covered in ironed-on patches of brand names like Coca-Cola and Crest, and then rainbow knee-high socks inside a pair of pink Converse sneakers. Her sax is covered with stickers of pandas.

She plays with her eyes wide open, with her body moving, like she’s giving life to the instrument, or maybe its notes are what give her so much life, so much zeal. She notices me at the end of her solo, and her eyes light up like
sparklers set off on the Fourth of July. She is a beacon of light, a magnet; she is Tokyo itself, vibrant, twenty-four-seven, nonstop, and neon.

The song finishes, and she points to me and then bangs out a few notes from “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” I laugh and point back at her as I sit down. I drink a Diet Coke the waitress brings me as I listen to the rest of their set, and when it’s over, Kana jumps off the stage, sits down in my lap, wraps her arms around my neck, and stares at me with her big brown eyes.
“What did you think?”

“You were amazing.”

“I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Me too.”

“So.” She says it like a command as she gives me a pointed look.

“So?” I repeat back to her.

“So how did it go with Epic Superwoman last night?”

I give her the details. Her eyes grow wider and wider.

“And have you seen her today?”

I shake my head. Kana swats me, then scoots off my lap and into a chair next to me.

“Hey! That hurt!”

“Good. It should. You are madly in love with this girl, she flies to Tokyo to tell you everything, and you are here with me? You are an idiot who deserves to be swatted many, many times!”

I hold up my palms.

She puts her hands on her hips. “Go see her now.”

I shake my head again. She peers at me, staring hard, and leans closer and closer as if she is burning a hole in me with her eyes.

“Kana. It’s not that simple!”

“It
is
that simple.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You win. Why is it that simple?”

“You love her, right?”

I shrug.

She waves a hand. “Allow me to answer this question.
Yes, Kana, I love her.
So move forward.”

“How? She kind of kept a big secret from me. And she kind of broke my heart in the process.”

Kana places her index finger next to her lips and looks at the ceiling. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking. Wait. Was she pregnant and didn’t know if she was going to keep the baby when all this happened? And was your father gone and your mother getting sicker at this time?”

I roll my eyes.

“It’s not easy being a teenage mom. Just ask my mom. The point is, my pigheaded, wonderful, amazing American friend, she had a lot going on too. Both of you did.”

“Okay. So what of it?”

“Danny, you have every right to be hurt. And every right to shut her out and say good-bye to her forever. So I’m not saying what she did didn’t hurt. But I
am
saying you can get over it. And more important, you
can
forgive.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

She reaches out a hand to ruffle my hair. “That is just all your walls talking. That is not your heart.”

“And what does my heart say? Since you seem to think you know it so well.”

She presses an ear against my chest. “Wait. I think I can hear it now.” She pretends to listen again. “Oh yes, I totally agree.” She jams her ear against me once more. “Definitely. That’s what I think too!”

She pulls away.

“What did my heart say?”

“When you’re ready, you’ll listen to it, and you’ll know.”

I laugh. “You know what it’s like hanging out with you?”

“It’s like having someone call you on your BS all the time?” she asks with a kooky smile.

“Something like that.”

“Go see her tomorrow.”

“No. Tomorrow Takahashi is back. Kana, will you come with me tomorrow?”

“To Takahashi?” She looks bewildered by the request.

“Yes. I mean, not the meeting itself. But will you go with me to his office? Like how you took my mom to some of her appointments?”

“I would be honored,” she says, and I’m glad I will have her company tomorrow. I’m glad I won’t have to go alone.

Then she finishes my soda and plunks the glass down hard. “Now I have something to ask you.”

“Anything.”

“I want you to walk me home, and I want you to narrate.”

“Narrate?”

She nods. “Yes. I want to see Tokyo through your eyes. I want you to tell me why you love it here.”

It is the least I can do for her. To help her fall for the city where she’s always lived. The city I’ve
always
loved.

We leave, and when we walk by a girl in the crosswalk whose heels fall out of her sky-high shoes with each step she takes, I say to Kana, “Welcome to the land of three sizes for shoes. Barely fits, hardly fits, and doesn’t fit at all.”

Then a nightclub with red flashing signs three stories high and techno music seeping through the doors. “Tokyo, the
real
city that never sleeps.”

Next a pack of girls our age suddenly picks up the pace and runs toward a pink wooden stand on the corner selling bubble tea. “ ‘This just in. There is a bubble-tea shortage in Tokyo tonight. Sue, teenagers in Roppongi are reportedly hoarding bubble tea.’ ‘Bob, when was the last time this happened?’ ‘Well, Sue, it reminds me of the great bubble-tea shortage of 1989…’ ”

Kana laughs deeply, then we sidestep a too-cool-for-school guy, wearing a striped vest and variations-on-a-hipster jeans, so I slide into another riff, pretending I’m the hipster guy. “ ‘That girl in the rainbow socks totally wants me. She can’t resist me in my skintight jeans even if I. Can’t. Breathe. In. Them.’ ”

I walk Kana the rest of the way home, and when we’re outside her building, I give her a hug, and she squeezes me tight. She holds on, and our bodies are close; we are connected in some way, and I feel something for her I haven’t felt in a long time. But it’s not a desire to touch her, to run my hands over her and press her against the wall, like I want to do with Holland. This may sound crazy or silly, but I feel like Kana is my sister too. Maybe she is the sister I was meant to have now. Maybe she is my second sister, for this fully orphaned phase of my life. Maybe a piece of Laini, the piece that shut me out long ago, has been reincarnated in Kana. Or maybe it’s the piece of Laini that still cares that is now carried on in Kana.

And what I’m about to say to Kana has nothing to do with Jeremy or even Sandy Koufax. It is not meant to disrespect either of them or to knock them down. What I am about to say is this moment, this month, this summer. “This is going to sound totally crazy, but I kind of feel like you’re my best friend, Kana.”

“I totally think of you as my BFF too.”

I believe
she
is why I was drawn to Tokyo. I believe somehow that my mom, wherever she is, brought me here
so I could meet Kana Miyoshi. Because I know Kana is what I need and what I want.

For a second I feel something like joy.

I try to hold on to that feeling as I say good-bye and return to the Shibuya night.

Kana waits for me on the corner, sitting outside at a café, aimlessly kicking a ruby-red-slipper-clad foot back and forth as she nurses a slushy-looking drink. She peers at me over her big, round black sunglasses that I swear are half the size of her face. “Ready, Freddy?”

“Guess I’d better be.”

We descend into the subway again. I know this station so well by now—passing through the turnstiles and hopping onto the train is like rote, like muscle memory. We board, and as the train slaloms through the tunnels of underground Tokyo, I know I have reached the last mile. Takahashi is the last stop, and whatever I learn from him will be the last thing there
is
to learn about my mom. Something
about the visit feels ritualistic, like a rite of passage, maybe the way graduation should have felt.

“What do you think I should be ready for?”

“Whatever you might learn.”

“Cryptic today, Kana?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I just know you’ve put a lot of stock in this visit with Takahashi.”

“What do you think he’ll say, O Wise One?”

“I think you already know.”

“Do I?”

She nods, and her brown eyes remind me of my dog’s. I stare into them for a few seconds. Her glasses are pushed up on her head; her black hair is like a waterfall of silk around her face. Her hair is down today, no ribbons, barrettes, or headbands.

Do I already know what he’ll say? Do I already know what my mom wanted from the doctor who was her last great hope?

She would have asked him to help her live a few more months, of course.
Of course
that’s what she would have said to him.

But then why would all those pill bottles still be full?

A dark fear rises up, but I push it back down. I shove it aside. Instead I remember something Kana said the first day we met at the teahouse, about how stories were her thing, about the way she seemed to sparkle when I told her the story of my neighbor’s lilacs when we visited the temple.
“Do you want to hear a story?” I ask Kana, because maybe it’s in the stories that the people we love are still alive.

She lights up and nods a big yes. I can give her this one, as she has given me so many.

“I used to play baseball in high school. Not like I was some major-league prospect or anything,” I say as the train weaves around a corner and we lean with it. “But I was good, and I helped our team win a district championship in tenth grade. But at the end of my junior year, I blew out my shoulder.”

Kana quirks up her eyebrows, waiting for me to explain.

“It wasn’t bad. I mean, it
was
bad, because I’d torn my rotator cuff, and I couldn’t play my senior year. I was bummed because you want to go out on top. I knew high school would be the last time I played ball, and I was going to miss all of my senior year. Which meant that baseball as I knew it was over. And my mom was awesome about it. She said all the right things and took me to this great ortho surgeon at UCLA to go over surgical options. But there was no point in going under the knife, since I wasn’t going to try to play again. My shoulder healed on its own with time. So when the season started in February, and I wasn’t on the field or with the team, my mom said we needed to honor the end of my baseball career and also celebrate my
new
life, without baseball. It was like paying homage to the sport, to what it had meant to me, she said. It would be a way to give thanks to baseball.”