When You Were Here (7 page)

Then we’re both off, but I don’t return in thirty minutes, and I don’t water the yard. I buy a one-way plane ticket, since I don’t know how long I’ll be there. I call Dr. Takahashi’s office, and I don’t understand a word on his voice mail, but I leave a message asking to see him. Then I e-mail Kana Miyoshi, thanking her for her letter and letting her know I’ll be arriving at the end of the week, and I would be so very grateful if she could meet me at the apartment to let me in, since I don’t have a key.

Two hours later, Holland’s at my door. She’s holding cartons of Chinese food and her black canvas purse on her shoulder. “I don’t think the rice is sizzling anymore, but the pepper steak will taste good if you heat it up.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“Can I come in?”

I nod, and she walks straight to my kitchen and takes out a ceramic bowl, pours the soup in, and pops it into the microwave. She knows my house as well as I know hers. It’s scary sometimes, how much we know about each other. She knows what foods I like, what books I read, what movies I’ll watch all the way through and which ones I’ve walked out on.

I sit down at the counter and let her wait on me because
she seems to want to. She places the soup bowl in front of me, then roots around in the utensil drawer for a spoon. She hands one to me. Next she warms up the pepper steak, then divides it onto two plates. She finds forks and napkins and parks herself across from me, sliding a plate of Chinese food to me and keeping the other for herself.

“I know how much you like Captain Wong’s,” she says, with a smile that reminds me of all the times we ordered from there.

“I do. But that name kills me every time.
Wong
,” I say with a drawl. Then a sci-fi voice. “Hello. I am Captain Wong.”

“I have come to take over your planet,” she adds. I laugh, and she does too, and then her laughter fades. We eat in silence for a minute, then Holland breaks it. “So you’re going to Tokyo?”

“Your mom told you?”

“Yes.”

“Did your mom send you to get info out of me or something?”

“No. She mentioned it, and now I’m mentioning it. Why? Is there info to get? Are you going with a girl?”

I scoff. “Yeah, right. I was supposed to go with someone, but it didn’t work out,” I say, my eyes locked on her the whole time.

“Well, I wanted to go, okay?”

“So did I,” I say, so low it’s a whisper. But she hears me, and she inches her hand across the counter, just a little bit closer, and that hand, I want to grab it and hold on.

“Me too,” she says, barely there, barely painting the space between us with all that has been broken.

I glance at our hands, so close all it would take is one of us giving an inch.

“I bought my ticket an hour ago.”

“When do you leave?”

“A couple days from now. I found a good deal.”

She nods a few times, taps her fingers. I can feel the warmth from her hands. “Cool,” she says, and we stay like that. One stretch is all it would take to be back, so I wait. Wait for her to tell me she’ll miss me, to ask me to stay, to put her hands on my face and press her lips against mine and kiss me like it’s the thing that’s been killing her not to do for all these months. That it’s
not
cool for me to go. That if I go,
she’ll
be the one who’s sad.

But she doesn’t. We just finish our food, and she washes the plates, and the other ones that were in the sink too, and she tosses out the cartons from Captain Wong’s and bags up the garbage, and she’s like a nurse. She’s here as a nurse. To take care of me. To make sure I eat enough food and clean the house and take my vitamins.

I watch her take my vitals and check my temperature and adjust the tubes, and when she suggests we watch a movie, here on the couch, I just nod because my heart isn’t beating fast enough anymore, blood isn’t pumping smoothly enough anymore for me to find the will to say
no
like I did last night. Evidently I can buy tickets to fly out of the country,
no problem, but I can’t even tell Holland to stop being so near to me all the time but not near enough.

Because she is
supposed
to want to go to Tokyo with me now. She is supposed to invite herself, to ask me in that sweet and sexy, that bold and confident voice, to say that I should take her along, that we promised we’d go together, that we even talked about it last summer.

As if I needed reminding. As if I were the one who’d forgotten.

Instead she turns on the TV and finds a film where the hero survives a bridge being blown up. We stay like that through fire and bombs, through fists and blows, through a knife fight in an alley, a foot away from each other, not touching, not moving, not talking, not curled up together, just staring mutely at the screen.

But faking it becomes too much for me, so when the hero clutches the crumbling concrete from the bridge, scrambling for purchase, I stand up and leave the living room, mumbling, “Be right back.”

I walk to the bathroom at the end of the hall. I shut the door. I head straight for the window. I slide it open and pop out the screen. I stand on the toilet seat, then climb the rest of the way out of the window and hop into my front yard. I close the window, and I walk and I walk and I walk.

When I return an hour later, my greatest hope is she’ll be gone. My most fervent wish is that I will have made my great escape from her, from her hold on me. But instead I
find her sound asleep on my couch, Sandy Koufax tucked tightly into a ball at Holland’s bare feet.

I kneel down on the tiles where the book she was reading has slipped out of her tired hands. It’s a paperback,
The Big Sleep
. I run a thumb across the cover, wondering when Holland developed a penchant for Raymond Chandler. There was a time when she would have told me her favorite parts. When she would have tried to tell me the ending because she just
loved
it so much, she had to share, and I’d have held up a hand and told her to stop. Laughing all the time. Then I’d have read it too, and we’d have walked on the beach and talked about the best parts. We’d have done that tonight with the movie too. Imitated the actors’ inflections at their most over-the-top moments, then marveled at the blown-up buildings.

I shut the book we’re not sharing. The ending we’re not talking about. I place it on the coffee table and walk upstairs, because if I stay near her, I will wake her up, rustle a shoulder, and ask her. Ask her why she left. Ask her why she’s here. Ask her what changed for her.

When I get into my bed, I am keenly aware of her in my house, as if the rising and falling of her breathing, the fluttering of her sleeping eyelids, can somehow be seen and heard from a floor above. I imagine her waking up, walking up the stairs, heading down the hall, standing in my doorway, a sliver of moonlight through the window sketching her in the dark. I would speak first, telling her the truth—that
I’m still totally in love with her. That nothing has changed for me when it comes to her.

Everything else is so muted, so fuzzy, so frayed around the edges. This—how I feel for Holland—is the only thing in my life that has remained the same. Everyone I have loved is gone. Except her. Holland is the before and the after, and the way I feel for her is both lethal and beautiful. It is like breathing, like a heartbeat.

She would say the same words back to me, that she feels the same. Then she would say my name, like she’s been searching for something, like she’s found the thing she’s been looking for.

Come find me, come find me, come find me.

In the morning, I find her in my kitchen making toast.

“I am the world’s deepest sleeper,” she announces by way of a greeting. “I did not wake up once all night.”

I say nothing, just sit down at the counter on one of the stools.

“I don’t think I even realized I fell asleep. I just woke up this morning all disoriented and then I was like,
Oh, I fell asleep on Danny’s couch
.”

The toast pops up, and she begins to spread butter on it.

“But thank you. For letting me fall asleep here.”

“Right.”

She hands me a plate. I look at the toast like it’s a foreign substance. I don’t eat it.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

I push the plate back to her.

“Sorry,” she says, and looks down at the plate, staring hard at the toast like it holds secrets. Then she fiddles with her star ring, twisting it one way, then the other.

“Why do you wear that still?”

She looks up, surprised that I’ve had the guts to ask her a real question for once.

“No, really. What’s the point, Holland? Just take off the ring.”

She shakes her head.

“Seriously. Take it off. You don’t need it anymore. Take the star off and throw it out.”

She swallows hard and presses her lips together, as if she is holding back both words and tears. But I
can’t
care about her anymore. I can’t keep pretending that I’ve forgotten what we had. Because I haven’t, but I can’t have her the way I want her. And seeing her here and acting like we’re all fine hurts too much. I’ve got to make the hurting stop.

“I don’t want to throw it out,” she says. “Okay? I just don’t. And if you’d just—”

“Why are you here then? You could have left this morning. You didn’t need to make me breakfast. I’ve been making
toast since I was eight. I didn’t have to start making toast when my mom died, okay?”

“Danny,” she says, and the look on her face is soft, and it’s sad, and it
has
to be a harbinger of more pity from her.

“Why did you leave me, Holland? After everything, how could you do it? How could you do it and then just keep showing up like nothing ever happened between us? Because I don’t want to
just
go to the movies with you and eat takeout in my kitchen, and I don’t want to find you on my couch in the morning. Don’t you get it? I can’t
just
pretend with you.”

She looks hard at me, her blue eyes steely around the edges. “I
do
get it. But there are things that you don’t get, and if you’d let me—”

But I feel stronger for the first time in weeks, and lashing out at her feels so good, it feels like survival. “I don’t want to go back to being best friends with you. But you’re like a disease. You’re always around, and you’re always showing up, and you act like nothing’s changed, but everything’s changed, and you—you’re like a cancer.”

The words come out without warning, too quickly for me to stop them, too fast for me to abort.

I watch as her shoulders drop, her eyes lower, the
thing
I just called her fully registering. She speaks in the lowest possible voice, so low it’s a barrier to protect herself from me. “I can’t believe you really just said that.”

Neither can I. But I know if I open my mouth again, any ounce of self-preservation left in me will wither.

I stare at my plate of uneaten, cold toast as she grabs her book and her black shoulder bag and gives Sandy Koufax a quick pat on the way out before pulling the door closed behind her.

There is nothing, nothing but smoke and dust and debris, here for me in California. The only choice I have, the only
chance
I have, is to leave.

We adopted Sandy Koufax two years ago, and she’s named after the greatest pitcher ever, a lefty like me, and a Jew.

“We should name her Sandy Koufax,” my mom said as I drove us home from the shelter while she petted the little border collie–lab puppy sitting in her lap.

I shook my head. “Sandy Koufax is a guy. This dog is a girl.”

She narrowed her eyebrows at me and hugged the dog tightly. “Sandy Koufax is not a sexist pig. She doesn’t mind being named after a man.”

“Dad would have liked this dog,” I said.

She nodded. “He always loved animals.”

“He would have been glad we got her from the shelter too.”

“He liked shelter dogs best of all,” she said.

Sandy Koufax was a fitting name for the dog for other reasons too. He wasn’t just the greatest pitcher ever, in my view. He also played through pain, pitching with a damaged elbow, throwing heat with injured fingers. He didn’t let the pain stop him. The name would be a fitting tribute not just to my baseball idol but to my mom. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew the dog would outlive my mom by many, many years. But I wanted to believe that my mom—who was kickass at everything she did—would kick cancer’s ass too.

Now Sandy Koufax is all mine. She always was mine, truth be told. The first night home she slept in my bed.

I’m going to miss this dog like crazy.

I drive her to Jeremy’s house. His mom and dad love dogs. Like crazy love. They have two Chihuahua–minipinscher mixes, and Sandy Koufax races to the yard and starts rounding up the diminutive dogs.

“You’re the only one I trust to take care of my dog,” I remind Jeremy.

“Dude. That dog is in good hands.”

“That dog catches Frisbees on the beach. Dogs that catch Frisbees on the beach are hard to come by.”

Jeremy points to the tiny beasts in his yard. “
Those dogs
are not chick magnets. I bring those dogs to the beach, and the girls want to take me shopping and ask which shoes to buy.”