When You Were Here (18 page)

My eyes are drawn to the pile of photos I saw the other night on the lower shelf, next to the framed photo I’d been looking at of my mom and dad. I reach for them just to see what’s there, to see what photos never made it to frames. I flip through them. Mostly they’re doubles of ones that are already framed or they’re the bad shots—the ones with red
eyes or the blurry ones or where the subject is out of focus. I’m about to toss them back onto the shelf when an image catches my eye. I’d recognize that hair anywhere. A lock of light blond hair, the slightest wave to it. It’s Holland; she’s barely in the frame at all, just the edge of her hair. She’s holding a white blanket wrapped around something. A throwaway photo, a mis-shot. But where’s the real one? Where’s the one that matches this, the one that tells the story this photo isn’t sharing?

I check out my mom’s shelves. I don’t see it. There are no framed photos of Holland. I look behind books. Still nothing.

What the hell? Why does my mom have a picture of her like that? Not a pose or a headshot or a vacation pic but a moment in time instead. I scan my mom’s desk. There’s not much on it, just some Post-it notes and pencils for her crosswords, some worn down, some sharpened. There’s a crossword-puzzle book off to the side of her desk. Something white, like a piece of white cardboard, is poking out the side. I grab the book and reach for the cardboard. It’s a stiff photo frame, not metal but the cardboard kind that stands open, with two photos in it. My hands tremble as I open the frame.

Two pictures. In one Holland is looking at the camera and smiling. There are machines nearby, and she’s holding something in her arms, wrapped in that white blanket, and a few tufts of brown hair poke out from the blanket. In the next photo, she’s turned the bundle around, and inside the
bundle is a tiny baby. The baby’s eyes are open, and Holland is kissing the baby’s head. Holland looks tired but happy.

My heart ricochets out of my chest and collapses on the floor when I read the name my mom has written.

Sarah St. James.

Sarah’s not a friend from college.

Sarah has Holland’s last name.

And a date of birth.

Six months ago.

I stumble out of my mom’s room.

Six months ago Holland had a baby.

Sarah is six months old.

I fumble around for a Percocet. I find them on the coffee table. I take one. Then another. I leave. I pace through the streets of Shibuya, past arcades, past shops selling socks with hearts and rainbow stripes, past pachinko parlors where people are winning cat erasers and manga figurines. How can people want cat erasers and manga figurines at a time like this? I march past cell-phone stores and crepe dealers and a nail salon advertising decals of suns and moons and flowers, and I don’t understand how a nail salon can advertise suns and moons and flowers when there are too many things that don’t make sense.

Beads of sweat drip from my forehead. I wipe a hand across my face. My hand is slick. I reach for the bottom of my gray T-shirt and wipe my face with the fabric. But the sweat starts again, and when I look up at the time and the temperature outside the Bank of Tokyo, the red flashing sign blares ninety-seven degrees at one in the afternoon. That means it’s nine at night yesterday in Los Angeles.

I’m in front of a towering department store, eight floors high. A skinny Japanese woman in heels and a suit leaves, and a jet of cool air follows her. It’s an igloo inside. I need the igloo effect right now, so I take the escalator to the basement, a massive expanse of gourmet food shops and stalls selling European chocolates and
bento
boxes and fresh fruit for sky-high prices. The cool air sucks the heat off of me, and by the time I pass the pickled radishes and eggplants being sold by Japanese women in beige dresses with white caps like nurses wear, I’m able to take my phone from my pocket.

She answers on the second ring, and I hate that the sound of her voice takes my breath away. I am fighting a losing battle with her, drowning on dry land at the sound of her saying my name.

“Danny.”

I don’t bother with small talk. “Who is Sarah really?”

She stumbles on her words. “What do you mean?”

“I mean: Who. Is. Sarah? Why do you wear her name around your neck? Who is she? Where is she? Because I don’t think she was your friend at school. And I don’t think
she died,” I say as I walk past a young guy trying to sell me a sake set. I hold up a hand, my palm a stop sign to his peddling.

“Who do you think she is, then?”

I pass gift boxes of cherries and Asian mushrooms while her voice weakens across the phone line, across the distance from Los Angeles to Tokyo. “Your daughter.” A pause. What do I say next? “What the hell, Holland?”

Holland doesn’t say anything. I try to picture her. Where is she? At her house? At the day camp where she works?

“Did you give her up for adoption?”

“No.”

I stop walking. I place a hand on a counter to steady myself. There are red-bean pastry balls under the glass. No one asks me if I want to buy some. Everyone who works here can tell I’m not here to buy red-bean pastry balls. “You didn’t? You didn’t give her up for adoption?”

“No. I didn’t give her up.”

“Did she die?”

“Yes. She died.” I shift my stance, move away from the food, and lean back against a section of the brick wall. I look down at the gray concrete floor. “Shit, Holland. Why didn’t you tell me?”

No answer.

“What happened?” I ask softly.

“I went into labor when I was five and a half months pregnant. I was twenty-six weeks along. The baby was born
premature. She was two pounds and one ounce and she was perfect in every way, except she was so small and she wasn’t supposed to be born yet. She was in the NICU for two days and she got an infection and she wasn’t strong enough to fight it off and she died.”

The words are heavy, rehearsed, like she’s said them before. I wonder if she has, and who she’s said them to, or if she’s just rehearsed them in her head, so she can get them out without choking on every single awful word, because they are awful, all of them, strung together like little grenades.

“God,” I say, but when I try to think of the next word, the next thing, I come up short. “Were you going to keep her?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe. I hadn’t decided.”

“Does your mom know?”

“Yes. Everything. I told her when I was, I don’t know, four months along. My dad never knew.”

“But my mom knew. She has a picture, Holland. Do you know that?”

No answer.

“Why does my mom have a picture of your baby, Holland? Why does my mom have a picture of Sarah?” I know the answer. There is only one answer. But the answer is so surreal, so foreign, so completely messed up. “Was she… Was Sarah…” I trail off. I can’t get
mine
to come out of my mouth. My tongue is tied.

Holland unties it with her answer. “Yes. She was yours.”

Forget the grenade. It’s like a dirty bomb exploding in my chest, shrapnel everywhere. I have so many more questions now that I know
that
answer, but I’m picking metal and glass out of my skin. And my voice is gone, it’s shot, my throat is dry and my lungs are closed and the food stalls fade, the counter is gone, the ladies in their beige dresses disappear, and I have been blasted back to some primordial state where I don’t have speech, I don’t have arms and legs and voice. I sink down to the floor of the department store basement, as people, so many people, an endless stream of people, walk past me.

“Danny.”

Holland is saying my name. She may have been saying it for seconds, minutes, years, eons. I focus again. The floor is concrete again, and the counters are full of food again, and the workers have shape again.

“I’m here.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers into the phone. “I’m so sorry.”

Sorry? Is that what this is about? Sorry? There are so many more things to be said than
sorry.
They all start with
Why. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say anything? Why am I finding out now that I was a father? Why am I finding out now the kid died?

That blasted feeling returns, like the bomb Holland lobbed has ripped out my organs. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to take this, receive this, accept this, deal with
this. I don’t have a clue. You would think I’d be an expert, a professional griever at this point. That this would be second nature. That this would be my best subject, the class I excel at.

But the only thing I feel for sure is a sick form of relief. I’m eighteen years old. I’m about to start college. I don’t have a family. I’m the last person in the world who should have a child. The girl I love has been broken to pieces by this for the better part of a year, and I never knew it. But me? All I can think is,
Thank God I don’t have a kid
. I have dodged a bullet, one that was heading straight for my head.

I can’t say this to her. I can’t say this to anyone. A family walks past me. The mom glances over. She knows. She looks at me, and she can tell. I am a boy who had a kid he didn’t want, and the kid died, and there’s a part of him that’s glad.

How did I become this person? I do not like this person. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. I can’t believe you didn’t ask me what to do. I can’t believe you didn’t say a word. Then or ever.”

“I have been wanting to tell you for the last few weeks. Why do you think I e-mail you all the time? Why do you think I called you?”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to have a clue?”

“I have been trying to explain everything.”

“You want to explain things? You want to explain things now? That sounds great. Why don’t we meet for coffee
tomorrow, and you can tell me everything you’ve been trying to explain?” Then I hang up on her.

I drop my head between my knees, but I don’t think it’s Holland I’m mad at for not telling me. I’m mad at someone else. Someone I’ve never really been mad at before.

My mom.

Holland worked at a camp every summer during high school, but it never seemed like work for her. She had a natural connection with kids. One day last year, I picked her up from camp, and she was sitting at the picnic table in front of the school where the camp was held. There was a little girl with her. Her parents must have been late picking her up or something, so I joined them at the bench, and Holland and the girl played tic-tac-toe for probably twenty minutes. The girl beat Holland in a round and did a little jig, then Holland beat the girl and held her toned arms up in the air victoriously. It went on like that—sometimes Holland let her win, sometimes Holland won purposely, and sometimes it was a draw.

I liked that Holland didn’t just let the kids win all the time. I liked that she was playfully competitive with them.

“You know tic-tac-toe originated in Egypt?” Holland said to the girl.

The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Maybe it was Madagascar then?”

Another head shake.

“Okay, I’m thinking Romania.”

The girl started laughing. “No! Not Romania.”

“Well, where then? Where do you think tic-tac-toe originated?”

The girl shrugged her skinny shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“We should find out. We should research it. Can you look it up tonight?”

“I don’t know how to do that!”

“Just Google it and get back to me. Maybe write a report. Can you do that for me?”

The girl laughed more and shook her head. “I don’t know how to do a report, Holland!”

“Well, maybe you can just make me some chocolate chip cookies tonight. No, wait. How about cupcakes? Can you make German Forest Tree Frog cupcakes?”

“I don’t think you want to eat tree frogs.”

“No? I heard they taste great with chocolate icing. Doesn’t everything taste better with icing?”

“I love icing. What if cupcakes were just made of icing?”

“What about icing and Skittles?”

“That would be messy.”

“But good. Don’t you think?”

The girl nodded. “How much does my mommy owe you?”

Holland looked at me. “Late pickup fee,” she explained.

When the mom showed up, she was frazzled, harried, and her hair was unkempt. She dug through her purse for a checkbook but didn’t have one.

“I’m so, so sorry,” the mom said.

“It’s nothing,” Holland said, and waved a hand in the air. “We had fun.”

“I’ll pay you tomorrow, I promise.”

“Seriously. Don’t think twice about it. It’s on the house.”

The mom left, and we invented scenarios as to why she was late as we drove away.

“She was stuck in traffic,” Holland suggested.

“No. She was getting her nails done.”

“Botox, baby. She was getting Botoxed.”

“Tummy tucked.”

“Dolphin tattoo on her butt.”

“Nipple pierced.”

“Ewww!” Holland said, and wrinkled her nose.

“Belly button pierced?” I offered.

“Much better. But I think she was having an affair with her boss.”

“Ah, a little afternoon delight.”

“And they just came from the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

I nodded. “Yeah, she’s totally having an affair. But it’s not her boss. She’s seducing a much younger guy.”

“Younger guys are the best,” Holland said, and placed
her hand on my leg. We reached a traffic light, and she leaned in to whisper, “Let’s pull over somewhere soon.”

I found the emptiest floor at the next closest parking garage, and we climbed into the backseat of my car.

We both had clean bills of health, so Holland had gone on the Pill by then. For all I know that might have been the time the birth control didn’t do its job.