When You Were Here (3 page)

Holland walks to the living room and sits down next to my dog. She pets Sandy Koufax’s ears and talks to my dog in a high-pitched voice, telling her she is the cutest dog in the whole wide world. Sandy Koufax rolls over and lets Holland pet her belly. Seeing the two of them like that, the girl who likes the dog, and the dog who likes the girl, makes me want to blurt out the invitation:
Let’s shack up here all summer and not leave until August.
Maybe she’d feel sorry enough for me to say yes, to stay, to say leaving me last fall was the dumbest thing she ever did and
will you please take me back?

Why yes, Holland, I think I would take you back. Even though I don’t have a single clue as to the secret of why you left me in the first place.

Holland points to my cap on the coffee table. “This cap thing. Pretty sure it’s supposed to go on your head.”

“That’s what all the graduation how-to books say.”

She grabs the cap and walks back to me. She hands me the mortarboard and I put it on, far back on my head.

“That’s all wrong.” Holland laughs, shakes her head, as if this is normal, as if she can just slide into the way we used to be good buds before last summer, before everything else. “It’s supposed to sit on your forehead.” She mimics pulling a mortarboard down on her forehead, pointing to this spot right above her eyes where the cap is supposed to rest.

“Fix it,” I say, and it comes out raspy, like a croak. I know I should say
please fix it
or
can you fix it?
but this is
all I can manage, this two-word admission, as I do everything not to sound hungry for her.

“See! You did need me to get ready,” she says, then looks at me, half-nervous, like she’s waiting for an answer, waiting for me to admit I needed her.

I just point to the cap. She nods, then wiggles the cap farther down my forehead. Her fingers brush against my face. My heart pounds a tick louder at her touch, but I look away, because the ache is too much. She pulls my cap down for a final tug, then stops to consider a strand of my brown hair. “I can’t believe my mom didn’t make you get a haircut for your graduation.”

“Yeah, oddly enough she doesn’t really control my hair.”

“She thinks she controls everything,” Holland says, and rolls her eyes like she’s trying to invite me back into the teasing, to the way we make light of Kate and her tendencies. I say nothing, and Holland absently taps the silver chain on her neck that she wears every day. There’s a small circle hanging from it and the name
SARAH
is engraved on it. Sarah was Holland’s friend from college who died a few months into their freshman year. Then Holland says softly, “You always look so nice when you get your hair cut.”

“Do you want me to get a haircut?” I want to kick myself the second the words come out.

“Your hair looks great. So does the rest of your
ensemble
,” she says, gesturing to my cap and
robe
. “Mom will approve too.” She catches herself. “Sorry. I meant my mom.”

“It’s okay. I know what you mean.”

“Do you miss her today?”

“I miss her every day,” I say instantly, relieved that someone has asked, that someone wants to know.

“Of course. That was stupid to ask.”

“You can ask. You’re the only one who does,” I say, because after two months, the condolences are running out, and it’s as if my mom is being erased from the world again as the memory of her fades and we all start to forget. But Holland’s asking, Holland’s remembering, and I want to grab her and tell her,
Everything hurts, and I can’t stand the hurting
. Instead my hand lifts a few inches, like it has a mind of its own and wants to touch her, to connect with her through words and skin. But I don’t go that far. I can’t stand the hurting.

“I miss her too. I miss planting flowers with her, and I miss going to the farmers’ market with her, and I miss looking at all those bulb catalogs with her,” Holland says, and my heart rises in my throat because
Holland hasn’t forgotten either. She hasn’t forgotten a thing.
“And now the cymbidium, the boat orchids in front of your house? The ones I planted with her last summer? They need to be trimmed.”

“Yeah?”

“She would have done that. She would have trimmed them around now.”

I can see it so clearly. I can picture my mom outside the house, wearing jeans and a T-shirt because she was a jeans-and-a-T-shirt kind of mom, planting the orchids last summer,
hoping she’d be here a year later to take care of them. Determined to be here a year later.

“Right. She would have,” I say quietly, then I steer away from all this, from these cracks in my chest that feel too much like feelings. “I don’t see why I have to go to graduation, though. My mom was the one who liked all these ceremonies and crap.”

Holland tilts her head to the side. “Do you want to skip it?”

I scoff. “What? Are you serious?”

“I am serious, Danny. If you want to skip graduation, I’ll cover for you.”

The idea entices me. “What would you say?”

“I don’t know. I’ll come up with something. I’ll pretend I’m you!”

I laugh.

“I mean it, though. If you need to escape or whatever, I’ll go out there right now and I’ll tell my mom you’re on your way, that you want to drive yourself. And we’ll go without you. And when they say your name, I’ll act like I have no idea where you are. Or I’ll get up and say you took the dog for a walk. Do you want me to?”

“You would do that?”

“Yes.”

“You would really do that?”

“I would really do that. I would do that for you.”

She is serious. She will do this for me. I hate her for breaking me so many months ago, and I love her for wanting to cover for me today.

But this isn’t about Holland, and this isn’t about me. “I should go. For my mom.”

Holland nods. She knows this is what my mom was holding on for. Kate does too. Kate said it all the other day when I told her I didn’t want to go.
Elizabeth loved ceremonies. Elizabeth loved events. This was the thing she was trying to live for. For the last five years, all she wanted was to make it to your graduation before she died. So get up there and give your valedictory speech so your mother, wherever she is, can hear you.

Kate doesn’t believe in heaven or the afterlife. My mom didn’t either. We’re Jews, and Jews don’t subscribe to the typical heaven or hell ideas. Kate does believe my mom is somewhere, maybe in limbo, maybe in spirit, waiting for this moment. Why, then, didn’t she hang on? I wish there were an answer, because I just don’t get why my mom could survive five years of remission and recurrence and come up eight weeks shy of the thing she held on for. But there’s no one here to ask. When my dad died, my mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault line in our life—and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I’m 0 for 2 and I don’t get any more pitches to swing at.

And so it must be time for my friend Vicodin.

I slip into the kitchen to take a pill, and when I return to the hall, Holland gestures to the front door. “My mom and dad are waiting outside,” she says. “We’d better go.”

Then I’m piling into the car with them, driving to the
place I’ll never have to step foot in after today, and I’m marching with the rest of the class, I’m sitting down listening to the principal, then he’s calling me to the stage for the final time. My last assignment; then high school will be behind me and college in front. Just one summer in between.

“Daniel Jon Kellerman, our valedictorian.”

I walk to the podium, take out my index cards, and look at my classmates in the first several rows. We all look like otters, just a fat sea of otters, with blond hair or brown hair or red hair, with tanned skin or black skin or white skin. They’re not the ones I want to see. There’s only one person I want to see in the audience. I even begged my mom at one point to hold on. Begged her like a little kid would do. A couple months ago when it was clear she was nearing the end, I pleaded, “June’s not that far away. You can do it, Mom.”

What a shit thing to do. What a shit thing to ask.

I worked my ass off through high school. I had my nose in all the books; I was not going to let valedictorian slip from my grasp. She knew I had a good shot, knew I was in contention.
My son, the valedictorian.
I pictured her saying it today, bursting with pride, with joy. It was like this thing I could give her, a last gift to her. But she doesn’t even know I pulled it off because I got the news I was top of the class three days after she became ash. And I’m flesh, and I don’t want to be here on this stage. I want to lie down on a raft, close my eyes, and let the little white pill take me away, float me off into the happy land where I feel no pain. It’s kicking in, and so the words I’m saying, sounds and syllables about
this moment, about the future, don’t matter to me, and they don’t matter to all these people out here in the audience. My words don’t change how they see me.

The orphan.

The dad was killed in an accident six years ago.

Then the mom died in April.

Remember the sister? She’s gone now; she took off for China years ago. Does anyone even hear from her?

They all think they know me. Because that’s all I am to them—that guy with the shitty luck.

I glance down at my index cards and do the thing they most want me to do. Because I can be that guy now. I can be mercurial. I can be fickle. I can be the guy who gets away with anything, and for the first time in months—years—I am grateful I have carte blanche to say whatever I want.

I stop reading. I rip the index cards in half and fling the severed blue remains up in the air.

“Fuck high school. Fuck everyone. I’m outta here.”

Let me tell you: You’ve never seen a standing ovation like that before.

My mom would have flipped out if she knew what I did. She would have gone ballistic and slapped me upside the head.

Not literally. She never hit me, obviously. But she would have given me all kinds of stern looks and disappointed glares.
I did not raise you to tell your peers to fuck off, Daniel Kellerman.

She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even legible.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked her.

“It’s not good enough yet. You have to try harder,” she said, her voice gentle. “You have to try hard at everything you do. That’s all I ask.”

I rolled my eyes and revised it, and over time her approach wore off on me and I became like her too—wanting to do my best, expecting my best.

That’s why I can’t face Kate. She knew my mom better than anyone, and Kate probably wants to wallop me right now. Because I did the absolute opposite of what my mom would have expected or wanted. I leave Terra Linda before Kate can find me. I walk home, since it’s only a couple miles away, chucking my cap and robe into a trash can on a street corner, then I change into gym shorts when I get home and head to the garage, my dog following close behind as I park myself on the gym bench out here. Yeah, this is my life. Working out on graduation. What could be better than this?

But I don’t want to go to a party, and I don’t want to have some fancy meal at some fancy restaurant with people who are pissed at me, or people who feel sorry for me, or people who feel both, not to mention my own disgust at what the guy on the stage wearing my cap and
gown
just did.

Besides, I have to figure out what to do with all our
stuff
. Kate may be the executor of my mom’s will, but Laini and I are the ones she’s executing for, and there’s so much
stuff
to figure out, money to be moved around, accounts to be administered, possessions to be dispersed.

Like wigs. Like, what do I do with all those wigs?

I manage a dry laugh, because it was so much easier—
easy
being an incredibly relative term—when my dad died. My mom handled it all. She managed all the phone calls
and decisions while Holland made brownies and showed me stupid cat videos on the Web to try to make me laugh again. Because that’s what my dad and I had always done together—
fun
. We did
fun
incredibly well. We’d spend entire Saturdays in the pool, inventing games and racing each other. We’d go out for doughnuts or ice cream and talk about random things. We’d read every book in the Get Fuzzy collection together. When he was gone, that fun rudder was out of whack, and Holland was determined to fill the role of humor producer in my life. She did it ably, all while my mom kept us going as a family.

But now my parental insurance policy has run all the way out, and so it’s up to my sister and me to figure out things like wigs and college funds and the apartment in Tokyo.

I start chest presses and let my thoughts turn to Tokyo, where I was born, since my parents both worked for Japanese companies at the time. We moved back to California when I was three, but we kept returning to Tokyo for vacations. Now we have a place there, an apartment in the Shibuya district, the center of young Tokyo, with neon and lights and billboards the size of Mars, with shops and stores open at all hours and über-trendy girls who
click-clack
down the sidewalks in gold high heels and playing-card earrings, and dudes who wear plaid pants and black lace-up boots.

Back when we were a foursome, we’d spend summer breaks and winter breaks in Tokyo. My dad, my mom, Laini,
and me. Eating noodles and fish, buying manga I couldn’t read, asking whoever walked past to take our picture.

I haven’t been to Tokyo in a year because I was too busy as a senior—too many tests, assignments, college apps, and so on. But my mom traveled there to see Dr. Takahashi, who runs a clinic for cancer patients that’s part Eastern medicine, part Western medicine. For her first trip to see him, I drove her to the airport and walked her to security. She was practically bouncing the whole way. “If there is a miracle cure, this is it.
He
is it,” she said. She believed in him, and so I did too, especially when she felt better than she had in years. It was working, his mix of traditional medicine and alternative treatment. Takahashi was my mom’s last great hope, so she saw him at least once a month in the last year. Filled with hope each time. I was filled with hope each time. For a while there, all that hoping brought its rewards.