When You Were Here (22 page)

“Like baseball was a friend to you,” Kana says.

“Yes, exactly.” The train pulls into our stop, and we exit. I continue the story as we walk up the subway steps and into the Asakusa district, one of Tokyo’s more traditional neighborhoods, with shrines and shops and less flash than the other places we go. “So we took Sandy Koufax to the baseball diamond where I played my first-ever game in this little neighborhood park in Venice Beach. I was nine then. I had pitched, and we’d won. And since my mom kept every little memento under the sun, she brought photos of me pitching and of the team celebrating after we’d won. And she even had my uniform and my hat from back then.”

I shake my head at the memory, amazed at my mom’s pack-rat tendencies when it came to this stuff.

“Did you put it on? The hat?” Kana asks, eager for more. Stories like this are Gatorade to her; they replenish her.

“It didn’t fit, but I put on the hat just to be silly, I guess. I said,
I’m going to look incredibly stupid putting this on, but this one’s for you, Mom
.”

Kana playfully punches me in the arm. “I bet she loved that.”

“She did,” I say as we walk past a store selling cookware and long steel knives. “She handed me a tennis ball and said we would honor that first game by pitching to Sandy Koufax. She told the dog to sit at home plate while I walked to the pitcher’s mound. I went into my windup and threw to Sandy Koufax. She leaped up and caught it in her mouth. She was the true natural. Then she ran out to the pitcher’s mound and dropped it in front of me and stared at it. That was her
way of saying,
More
. I lobbed a few more balls to her, and my mom and I just laughed. Then my mom said,
One thing passes into another. Now your arm serves that dog.
”

Kana beams, a bright, shining smile. “I like that. I like the idea of saying good-bye to one thing but welcoming another.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly what my mom was doing. She’d also gotten some bakery cake, and she brought plates and forks and a knife. So she sliced up pieces, and we sat down by home plate, and we ate cake and looked at pictures. And she let the dog have a piece of cake too. She joked that she’d make me a cake too for graduation,” I say, adding the air quotes that my mom used at the time, making light of her baking—or nonbaking—abilities. I turn to Kana. “But that didn’t happen. She always said she was holding on for graduation, Kana. She always said that. But she didn’t make it.” I choke up. That dark fear resurfaces, and I can’t help but think that I already know the reason why she didn’t hang on. Why she wanted to have that cake on the baseball diamond then. Why that day was the ceremony. Because I don’t think her business advice from long ago was just business advice. Because one thing
does
pass into another.

“No. She didn’t. But we are here now,” she says, and gestures to a door, the same one I banged on more than three weeks ago. Takahashi’s name is on it. “Call me later.”

“I will.”

Kana waves good-bye, then I ring the bell and wait for the doctor to let me in.

Takahashi is tall. Surprisingly tall. He is my height, six-two. I’m not used to Japanese people being the same height. I’m not used to most people being the same height. He wears a suit. A gray business suit. I guess, after the temple and the teahouse, I expected a short Zen master in some traditional Asian garb, maybe in a feng shui-ed, Zen-i-fied garden office.

Instead his office is like a European library, with oak furniture, an ornate navy-blue couch, and tall bookshelves lined with leather-bound editions of Japanese and English texts. Takahashi doesn’t offer me tea, like I expect. Instead he opens a cupboard on his shelves and places a bowl of candy on the table between us. Bags of candy are inside the
cupboard. He gestures to the crystal bowl in front of me. It is filled with lemon and orange sucking candy.

“Please. Take one,” he says, and reaches for one, popping a lemon candy into his mouth. “I am a candy connoisseur,” he says as he sits down across from me. I’m on the blue couch, and he sits in a deep, rich red chair. I feel like I’m at a shrink’s. I’ve never been to a shrink’s office, but I suspect it feels like this. Like feeling displaced. Like someone trying to make you feel comfortable. But the truth is, everything about being here is a Tilt-A-Whirl. Everything is off, different from what I pictured. My hands feel clammy, and I try to rub my palms against my shorts, but the clamminess is inside me. It’s stuck in me, jammed in there like a too-stuffed drawer that won’t close, squeezed along with everything else—with hope, with fear, with wanting, and most of all with
knowing
this is the end of the line. I want so much for him to tell me something I don’t know, something that will make sense of my life, like my mom has been in his office all this time, the first case of an experimental procedure to cure cancer, and look: Here she is, all better now.

“Though truth be told, it’s really an addiction. I can’t stop myself when it comes to candy.”

Is he really talking to me about candy? I take an orange one to be polite and put it in my pocket for later. My leg is shaking. I press my hand down on my thigh to quiet it. I think I’m supposed to speak first. “How was Tibet?”

“Uplifting,” he says. “I treat the poor and indigent there who are suffering. They are grateful for the help.”

“I imagine they are.”

He sucks on the lemon candy, his cheek pouching out as he does. Should I ask him next if he’s climbed Mount Everest? Because that’s about all I know of Tibet—that the big peak is nearby. But I don’t ask that. He doesn’t go to Tibet to climb Mount Everest. I bet he goes there because it is part of his way of life, part of his beliefs.

“What do you do there? In Tibet?” I ask, because it is so much easier to say that than,
Did my mom stop taking her medicine?

He tells me about his work there. I hear maybe every three words, and though I tell myself to focus, to listen, inside I’m scrambling to figure out how to ask what I most want to know.

“But I suspect that is not why you are here,” he says gently, and I want to thank him profusely for putting me out of my small-talk misery.

“No. That’s not why I’m here, Dr. Takahashi. You treated my mom,” I say, stating the obvious, as if I can just ease into the difficult conversation.

He nods and begins to explain his credentials, his approach. But I know what he’s written, I know the research he’s done, the awards he’s received.

“She thought of you as a medicine man, some kind of healer. Like a spiritual healer,” I continue, starting smaller, circling the big question.

He nods. “I am flattered.”

But I’m not here to flatter him. “Are you?”

“A spiritual healer?”

“Yes. You sent her to drink that tea. She thought it would heal her.”

“She was looking for all sorts of healing,” he says, and I’m tossed back to the afternoon at the teahouse, to Kana’s words to me as well.

Sometimes healing isn’t about our bodies.

“Do
you
believe in that legend, then? The one about the tea, about the emperor and his wife?”

“I believe that sometimes if you believe you are healthy, you are healthy.”

“Mind over matter?”

“There is something to it, Danny. There is something to the energy in the universe, the energy you put out, the energy you take in.”

“And does that work for cancer treatment? Or is that more for, say, nerves or headaches?” I ask, and I’m instantly embarrassed because I sound so sarcastic, so snippy. I didn’t come here to accuse or to interrogate, but my old habits die hard.

But before I can apologize, he speaks again. Calm and gentle. Every word chosen with care, it seems.

“I am saying that if you have someone who wants to heal, sometimes they will respond to the unconventional. Their minds are more open to healing, so their bodies become more willing too. I believe that medication, while a wonderful thing, has its limits. That there are answers to be found in the unconventional. And she wanted that. She
asked for that. I treated her with traditional cancer meds, and also with Chinese herbs and acupuncture, to minimize the effects of the chemo. I was in touch with her doctors in LA. As I’m sure you know, they were following this protocol too. And yes, I encouraged her to go to the teahouse and to see the temples and to keep her mind and her heart open to new ways of healing.”

“She
was
open to healing. She was willing. And it still didn’t work.” I hold out my hands, waiting for an answer. “So why did she keep coming over here every month? When the cancer came back, why did
she
come back? What did she think was going to happen? She talked about you as a miracle doctor. She thought you were going to save her,” I say, working hard to keep my voice measured now, to hold back all my darkest fears. My jaw is tight, I’m clenching my fists, and all my muscles are tense, but this time it’s not because I’m angry. It’s because I’m terrified of what he’s going to say. I’m petrified of falling apart again. “And when my mom first saw you, she was great,” I say slowly, doling out each word so I can keep it together. “She was doing better than in years. She was so sure she was going to be in the clear.” I try to speak again, but the sounds in my mouth are a chasm, and I am at the edge. Somehow I manage to say, in the barest of whispers, “
I
was so sure you would save her.
I
wanted you to save her.”

I wanted it more than anything. More than Holland, even.

I look at him, but it’s not him anymore; he’s twenty,
thirty, forty feet away, and everything is shrinking and expanding, and I don’t think I can even see the walls in the room anymore. I’m cycling back over everything I hoped for. Everything I wished for in the last five years. My mom had been to Mexico, to the Mayo Clinic, to every doctor in Southern California, to Stanford, to Greece for some whacked-out treatment that didn’t work. She was in and out of remission all the time. She wanted to live; she wanted to make it; she fought for so long. And then she found
him
.

The possibility of a miracle.

But he wasn’t just my mom’s last great hope. He was mine as well.

“If I could have saved her, I would have. I do everything I can to help my patients. That is not just my job. That is my calling.” Takahashi presses his hands together and leans forward in his chair. “And your mother was one of the bravest, toughest, most resilient people I have ever known. She lived longer than anyone thought she would with her diagnosis. On paper, she should have died years ago.”

The lump rises in my throat.

“But she was as strong as the cancer. She was stronger most of the time,” he says.

“She could have lasted two more months then. Couldn’t she have?” I ask as desperation gets the better of me, and my voice rises. “She wanted to. Don’t you know how much she wanted to?” I push the question onto him, throwing it in his hands, and as I do I can hear the words echo—but
not just the words, the
idea
of the words, of what it means to want to hold on.

“She wanted to live, more than anyone I have ever treated. She had the strongest will to live. And that is why she lived so long. That is why she was as healthy as she was for someone who had cancer. I am sure you can recall that she was more well than she was not the last five years?”

I think of breakfasts at the fish market, of walks with Sandy Koufax, of crosswords she filled out, of songs she played on the piano, of the boat orchids she planted. She
was
more well than not. She was ridiculously healthy a lot of the time for someone who was so sick.

“Yes.”

“But when she worsened, she knew her time was running out. And so, Danny, she wanted to heal in her own way, in the only way that she
could
heal at that point.”

And so now I am here. The last thing. “So she stopped taking her meds?”

“Most of them, yes.”

“Was she trying to break a habit or something?”

He shakes his head. “No. Not at all. She hadn’t been dependent on pills or medications. She didn’t feel beholden to them, but even so, she made a deliberate choice when her treatments ended to stop all medical assistance. She made a choice then to finish out her days as free as she could be. She wanted to experience life and death on her own terms.”

“When you sent her to the teahouse, it wasn’t because of
the legend then, right?” I ask, even though the question hurts as it forms in my throat.

He nods. “You are correct. I did not send her there for the legend of the tea. I did not send her there for the mystical powers of the Tatsuma tea.”

I press my lips together, then speak. “You sent her there for some kind of peace, right? Peace of mind. That’s the healing she was looking for?”

“Yes. Yes, I did. And yes, that’s what she was looking for.”

I know I have to ask the final question. I know
this
path is leading to
this
question. And I think I know the answer. It’s come in and out of focus these last three weeks, and it’s the thing I’ve been dreading. The answer I’ve always pushed aside. I can’t push it aside anymore.

“She always told me she was holding on to see me graduate. That that’s what she was fighting for and living for. She told me the reason she held off cancer for five years was to get to my graduation,” I say, but as the words come out, I can feel, finally, how small they are, how hollow they are in light of everything my mom embraced, everything she was. Still, I need to come out on the other side. “But I don’t think she was holding on anymore, was she?” I ask, but I know the answer.
I
was the one holding on then.
She
was the one ready to go. “She stopped holding on, didn’t she?”

There is a pause, so quiet it’s like his office is now the temple, so still I can smell incense drifting through.

“She told me she was ready,” the doctor says. “She said
she was ready to die. That she did not want to hold on any longer.”

For a second, I want to ask if it was suicide. If he’s just another version of Dr. Kevorkian. But I don’t. Because it wasn’t, he’s not, and she never would do that. Instead I say what I had feared to be true. What I now
know
to be true. Something I’ve denied and hid from but finally figured out before I walked in the door. Something I was terrified of moments ago. But something that I also know I can finally handle. “She came to you first for treatment, then for release.”