When You Were Here (4 page)

Now all I have is an apartment in Tokyo to show for so much wishing, so much wanting.

Because Laini told Kate last week—
e-mailed
Kate, I should say—that it was entirely up to me to decide what to do with the apartment in Shibuya.

Do I keep it or sell it? Rent it? Or say to hell with California and set up a new home far, far away from here?

I risk a grin at the thought. Because there’s a part of me that likes that idea. Get out of town and never look back.

I switch to the dumbbells, working on triceps, then biceps, thinking of the empty apartment, picturing dust
gathering on the wooden slats of the futon in the room I slept in. I’ve never had a bad time in Tokyo. Never had a bad time at all.

Maybe it’s time for me to go back.

I put the weights away and turn to Sandy Koufax. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

She wags her tail. She likes the word
walk
.

I go back into the house, ignoring the texts from Kate and Jeremy and Ethan and everyone else. I close the piano, duct-tape it shut in several places, and then slap a sign on it that says
DON’T TOUCH. REALLY. DON’T TOUCH.

I leave the door unlocked so Jeremy and Ethan can come by whenever they want and do whatever they want. It’s an arrangement that works; I barely have to say a word, but there are people around now and then, making the house a little less empty. Then I leash up Sandy Koufax to take her for a hike in the Hollywood Hills. As we cover the hard-packed trails, I tell her about my last trip to Tokyo a year ago. I tell her about visiting the fish market while my mom wore her pink wig, about eating some strange octopus pancake from a street cart near the University of Tokyo, and I tell her about the time I wound up having lunch with a group of Japanese college students who invited me to join them at their table while they were playing a party game with chopsticks that made no sense to me, but everyone was laughing, and soon I was too. Maybe I could find them again. Go back to the same restaurant, learn how to play that chopsticks game.

I tell her all this and more, and soon we’ve traversed miles, and the sun is so low in the sky that the paths are all shadow now. I find my way back to the rental car Kate got for me and open the front door for Sandy Koufax. She hops up on the passenger seat and curls into a ball, panting. I blast the AC for her as I drive.

I park several houses away because there are cars everywhere, jammed up against every square inch of sidewalk, and the noise and the music and the madness is spilling out from my house and my yard and my pool. I’m surprised the neighbors aren’t complaining, but I guess I still have that free pass, so no one is saying anything as all of Terra Linda celebrates in my house.

Have pool. Have fridge. Have at it.

I steal inside, a quiet thief, and no one notices the host, the man of the hour—and that’s fine because I like noise much more than I like quiet.

Besides, there’s a part of me that’s already out of the country anyway.

I clean up the next morning, dragging a garbage bag around my yard, tossing away the remnants of the party that became the background to another night in this house. Everyone is gone now, but I haven’t told anyone that I’m thinking of getting away. That I’m thinking a quick trip might be just what the doctor ordered. Besides, I’ve got to treat the Tokyo apartment like an investment, and to do that I should evaluate it closely, inspect it, consider it.

Right?

It would take my mind off this looming summer that stands like a cavern between today and the start of college, when I can bury myself in classes and get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don’t enter anymore. Or maybe I should just spend the summer
volunteering. Go to the library, shelve books, listen to that old, grizzled surfer dude who spends his days checking books in and out, chatting with patrons. I could smile and nod as he tells me about the waves he used to catch in the Pacific. I wouldn’t have to say a word. I’d just be his audience, and it’d be air-conditioned.

It’s not as if I can play baseball like I used to in the summers. My baseball-throwing arm, which for years lobbed hardball after hardball, is shot, courtesy of a shoulder injury junior year. And it’s not as if I’m going to be taking care of my mom or going to the movies with Holland. It’s not as if I have any plans at all for the next three months.

I grab the last bit of party debris and head back inside. As I toss the bag, my phone rings. Holland’s picture appears, and some vestige of self-preservation tells me to bury the phone in the couch cushions. But my desire for her is stronger, and it wins.

“Hey,” she says, speaking first.

“Hey.”

“Remember that guy who used to paint himself in silver and do all those robot moves on the Promenade?”

“Sure.”

“And how he never talks? Even if you talk to him, he stays in full robot mode?”

“Right.”

“Well, he just got in a fight with some other robot. A gold robot!”

I laugh. “Like, did they hit each other?”

“They were about to, then some cop broke it up. Apparently the gold one was horning in on the silver one’s turf.”

“Crazy,” I say, picturing painted-robot-people fisticuffs. That would have been a good way to kill an afternoon.

“So,” Holland starts, and then stops, as if the words she was about to say have vaporized. She finds them somehow. “So I was going to get lunch. Do you want to join me?”

“Yes,” I say, and within seconds I’m in the car and on my way to her.

I find her at an outdoor café. She’s wearing big brown sunglasses pushed up on her head. The sun is bright, but she’s not shielding her eyes. She’s looking right at me as I walk toward her and sit down next to her. She’s got on a short skirt, this green corduroy skirt that she wore when we went to the movies one time last summer and sat in the back row and barely watched a scene on the screen.

I can smell lemon-sugar lotion on her too. Her lotion, her scent.

“I love this weather,” she says, and tilts her face to the sun. She closes her eyes and soaks in the rays, and I have free rein to look at her. At her neck, her throat, her shoulders, since she’s only wearing a tank top. Forget the library volunteering. Maybe Holland will take me to lunch every day this summer. Maybe she’ll sunbathe, and I’ll pass the days watching her.

She opens her eyes, sees me looking at her. But she doesn’t look away, nor do I.

“Because, you know, I’m allergic to cold.”

“And fog,” I add, because I know this riff, I know how she feels about hot and cold, and it is so easy to slide back into our banter, our back-and-forth.

“And any temperature below seventy degrees.”

“And windchill.”

“
Windchill.
The worst thing ever invented.”

“And snow. And ice.”

“Of course. Let’s not forget ice,” she says, and mock shudders. Then the waiter comes by and asks what we want.

She orders a sandwich, and I do the same. Same orders, same choices, same food we used to pick when we came here before. A group of friends about our age sits down at the table next to us. Two girls, two guys. One of the girls has short blond hair, the other a blue streak in her hair, and they’re laughing about no more boarding school and talking about the start of Juilliard, it sounds like.

“So about graduation,” Holland begins.

I hold up a hand, reflexes kicking in. “Is that why you asked me to lunch? Because I really don’t want to talk about it. I’m sure your mom already reamed me out on my voice mail.”

“You think that’s what I’m going to do?”

Like I have
any
idea what she’s going to do anymore. Like I had any clue she was going to excise me from her life after all her promises, all her words, all the ways she told me we weren’t like any other high school couple, that we were different, that we could last. She repeated all those promises, and so did I, the day she drove off to San Diego. I
believed all of them. Every single last one. And then, poof. She pulled her disappearing act.

And yet, here she is, inches from me, her bare legs close enough I could run a hand over her knee, watch her shiver and smile, and then she’d ask me to do it again. My body is filled with complete emptiness and complete longing at the same time, only there’s not enough space in me for both, so they fight and argue and run masking tape down my middle to divide me.

“I thought it was awesome. Like, the kind of epic thing people will be talking about for years.
Remember the time Danny Kellerman told us all to eff off?
”

“I believe the words were
fuck everyone
, Holland.” I cannot resist teasing her on this front. She has never sworn. She has never lobbed the F-bomb.

“Bleep,” she says. “Besides, you didn’t miss much. I mean, you were at my graduation dinner. It’s just a chance for people to tell embarrassing stories about you.”

“Like the time you threw your copy of William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
into the pool, calling it
As I Lay Failing
?” I say, recounting the stories that were shared one year ago when Holland finished high school and my mom and I joined her family for dinner.

“That is the cruelest novel ever assigned to high school seniors.”

“Or how you’d announce every few months that you had a new plan for what you wanted to study in college. Some days it was environmental science; some days it was French
history,” I say, prompting another trip back in time, and I don’t know why I’m doing this, why I’m acting as if we’re still those same people who went to dinner together with our families a year ago. Except that it feels good to remember when I was happy.

Holland and I were together the summer before my senior year at Terra Linda and her freshman year at UCSD. It all started after I gave her that star ring. I was crazy nervous to give it to her because even though I
knew
something had been brewing between us, with every innuendo and flirtation, I didn’t entirely
want
to let myself believe it. I fooled myself into thinking I was just giving her this silly ring, a cheap little decoder ring, like the kind of thing you’d find in a gum-ball machine. I went over to her house, and both her parents were out, and it was the middle of the day, so Holland was doing what any self-respecting California girl who’d just graduated from high school would be doing. Hanging out with all of her friends by the pool. Caitlin and Anaka, Elle and Lila. I was outnumbered, and clearly there were too many bikinis and too much flesh for me to be able to see straight, or be able to give a girl a gift and not feel supremely stupid.

But Holland didn’t care that her friends were over. Her face lit up when she answered the door. “Come join us, Danny,” she said, and waved toward the pool.

“I have to be someplace,” I said, and thrust the box with the ring at her.

“Come on. Stay. Please stay.”

“I have to go.”

Later that night, she found me on the beach as I walked Sandy Koufax on the edge of the waves. She marched up to me and held up her hand. The ring was on her right index finger. “I
love
this ring, Danny. I love this ring so much.”

My heart ricocheted around my chest. “You do?”

“I do.”

A step closer. It was like a slow dance, and you know what’s coming next, you know you’re coming together, and it’s all a delirious build.

“Do you remember that time you helped me with calculus earlier this year?” she began.

“Yes.”

“And how you didn’t make fun of me for not getting integers or derivatives or whatever it was?”

“Why would I have made fun of you for that?”

“Because you’re smarter than me.”

“That’s not true,” I said. I was just good at school.

“But the point is, I wasn’t embarrassed to ask you and I knew you’d help and you did help. Or how about all the times you drove me to school and you always came to the door to get me? You never honked.”

“My dad always told me to never honk when you pull up to someone’s house. Turn off the car and walk to the door to get them.”

“Or how about the time my mom and dad were out of town and I found a possum in the house?”

“He was pretty creepy.” I laughed, remembering the possum under the couch.

“And the first thing I did was call you. And you came over right away.”

“Well, you
did
shriek a bit on the phone. But yeah, you had a possum under the couch. Of course I would come over,” I said, and I felt like every breath was magic in the night air, because I knew every breath would bring me closer to her. “But it wasn’t me who saved you from the possum.” I tipped my forehead toward my dog. I had brought Sandy Koufax over, and she ferried that possum right out of the house and into the backyard. Holland slammed the doors shut, then insisted on cooking a steak for my dog, who stood at the sliding-glass doors looking out all night and watching for the possum she’d almost had for dinner.

“The point of all this is—you’re awesome. So it’s about time we just admitted it.”

I inched closer to her. This was happening. This was real. “Admitted what?” I asked, teasing her.

“This.” Then her arms were around my neck, and my lips were on hers, soft and warm and better than in all the times I’d imagined kissing her. Her perfect body was pressed against mine, and my mind was soaring, and my whole body was humming.

At the end of the summer Holland went off to college, but we had plans. We were going to see each other twice a month. I’d drive down there, or she’d drive up here every other weekend. But the first time I was supposed to visit,
my mom needed a blood transfusion, and even though Kate kept saying she’d take care of her that weekend, I wasn’t going to leave my mom alone. I canceled, and we made plans for two weeks later. But then Holland called and told me she had a massive project due in her women’s studies elective that Monday morning and if I came down she wouldn’t touch the thing, she’d only touch me, and so she had to resist me, a sentiment that was ridiculously endearing at the time.

The next time we talked, she was a different person entirely. It was as if a machine inhabited her and moved her mouth with its robot hands and turned her voice into a cold talking computer. “Danny, I’m in college now. I need to get my head on straight. I need to focus.”