When You Were Here (23 page)

He nods, the kind of sage nod of the wise man. “Yes. She was ready to move on. She came here to find peace, to be weaned off her meds in a way that was safe, so that she could die on her own terms. So that she could seek solace in the world around us.” He gestures to the windows of his office, a gesture I understand to indicate the temples beyond. “To come to peace with the moving on. It is a gift, in a way. We spend so much of our time fighting death, as we should. But sometimes the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and in turn the ones we love, is to know when to let go. To know when it is time—and to be at peace with that.”

Maybe he is a faith healer after all. Because it seems what my mom found in Tokyo, more than anything, was a new faith. Faith in the Buddhist ways; faith in the belief that everything happens as it should, in its own time, that we move on from one phase of life to the next, whether we celebrate it with a ceremony or not.

For her there was no more resistance, just readiness, just the letting go.

It hurts knowing that. But it also
doesn’t
hurt like I thought it would. Because I finally understand. It was never really about the pills. It was never really about tea or treatments. It was about moving on.

I stand up and hold out my hand to shake Takahashi’s. He was my mom’s last great hope, and that’s all I ever saw him as too. But now I understand who he is and what he was. Because now I finally have all the things I came to Tokyo for, all the things I didn’t know about her:

That Takahashi was not only her last hope for life but her great hope for a peaceful death too.

I am outside, back on the street I walked down only an hour ago. It is just me now, me and this city, this adopted home that I have always loved, that I still love. Asakusa is not Shibuya. It is not neon and lights and flash. It is subtler: It is bamboo and temples; it is kimonos and sandals. It is a long shopping alley with open-fronted stores and carts and people weaving in and out as they hunt for seaweed and fish, for rice crackers and biscuit sticks dipped in chocolate. I find myself walking down this shopping arcade, part of the flow of people—the shopkeepers and the workers, the families walking through and the tourists scooping up folded fans and miniature red cat statues.

An older Japanese woman with graying hair and lines around her eyes nods at me as I walk past the display of
mochi
cakes she is selling. I stop, reach into my pocket for some yen, and buy a packet of
mochi
filled with strawberries. I eat one as I continue on, passing a small store peddling embroidered jackets, then souvenir shops selling tiny replicas of a nearby temple, Tokyo’s oldest temple, built for the goddess of mercy. I’ve been to the temple itself, many times, on family trips.

But it’s not the temple or the visits I remember now as I walk past men on bicycles with shopping bags in the metal baskets, past women pushing strollers, past all this regular, everyday life.

All this beautiful, wonderful, amazing everyday life.

I remember some of the last words my mom said to me. She was lying down on the living room couch, under a blanket, petting Sandy Koufax. “Obviously,” she said, “I’m going to miss your graduation.” Then she became serious but also content. “But in some ways it’ll be like I’m there. I’ve already pictured it, imagined it, constructed it in my mind. And I’ve watched it. I’ve clapped, and I’ve cheered, and I’ve cried. And I am proud of you. Life is short, and life is beautiful, and everything is lovely. Love it, embrace it, smell the lilacs, play with the dog, and love endlessly and fiercely with everything you’ve got. Live without regret.”

My mom’s life was all it could be. She made sure of it. She made sure of it in the way she lived—and the way she loved.

Because there was no magic cure. There was no secret remedy, no ancient tincture to save her, to save anyone. But
then there
was
. There
is
and always will be. The magic cure is in how she lived her life, and even more so in how she chose to die when given the choice. My mom, even in her death, has shown me yet again how to live and how to love.

That’s the secret. That’s the cure.

I am no longer the left behind. I am the living. And I want everything this life has to offer.

I stop for a second and look around at all the shops and stores and stalls. At all the people, going about their days, at all the moments they’re living.

This
is what I want.

I want to live every moment. I want to feel everything. I want to love one girl.

I want to walk down this street with Holland. I want to show her the stores, I want to take her to the fish market, I want to buy her rings and bracelets and all the silly things she loves, I want to share these
mochi
cakes with her, I want to introduce her to my new best friend, and I want to hang out with both of them. I want to be with Holland here, like we planned. So many nights ago, back in my house, in my bed, I wanted her to come find me. She didn’t find me then, but she found me now, and we aren’t the same people we were the first time or even a few weeks ago. We’re different, but we can be different together. Because this is what
I
believe—that second chances are stronger than secrets. You can let secrets go. But a second chance? You don’t let that pass you by.

I dial a familiar string of numbers and hit Send. She
answers on the second ring. She sounds nervous when she says my name. “Danny.”

“Do you remember how my mom was always saying how she wanted to look back on her life and know she’d done everything she could?”

“Of course I remember that about her.”

“How when she once took me out of school early to go surfing when I was in ninth grade, she said,
This will be one of the things we look back on at the end and are glad we did
. Even though neither one of us was very good at surfing. But it was eighty-two degrees and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and she felt good that day, so we went and we caught a couple waves. And how she always ordered her lattes with low-fat milk rather than skim, saying,
I’m pretty sure I won’t wish I’d had more nonfat lattes when it’s all said and done
. And how much she traveled. She always said that when she got to the end of her life, she wouldn’t regret a trip to Italy or Barcelona or Tokyo.”

“That sounds exactly like your mom.”

I look up at the sky. It’s cloudless, like that day my mom and I played hooky at the ocean.

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m at the Imperial Palace. Well, outside. Walking around the gardens.”

Of course. Holland. Gardens. They go together.

“Will you wait there for me? It’ll take me twenty minutes to get there. I have to catch the subway.”

“Of course I’ll wait for you.”

The most interminable minutes I’ve ever spent sludge by as I wait for the next train. I pace, like a caged animal, on the platform and peer down the tunnels. When the light from the next train appears, I want to reach out, stretch my arms all the way down, and yank the train closer. Finally it stops and the doors slide open. The train charges by a few stops, and minutes later I’m racing up the steps, taking them two by two, and then I run across the street seconds before the traffic light turns red, the cars and cabs just a few feet away from me.

The Imperial Palace looms in the distance. I speed through the late-morning crowds in the park that flanks the palace. Or, really, the park that flanks the moat that flanks the palace. I
get
why the emperor needs a moat; I’m totally down with keeping people out. But I don’t need a moat anymore; I don’t want one. I cross the park and find the path to the gardens. I run along the edge of the pond, avoiding the tourists snapping photos of the mossy trees and lush green bushes and languid water. On the far side of the pond are the cherry blossom trees, their bare branches reflected back in the pond.

I see her. She stands next to the water, lily pads floating nearby. She’s talking to an older, heavyset couple, obvious tourists in matching Hawaiian shirts and white sneakers. She holds a camera and shows them a picture on the back of it. She gives the camera back to them, and they smile and thank her. They walk away, and she sees me and her face lights up. She wears a V-neck white T-shirt, jean shorts,
flip-flops, a ton of silver bracelets, and her star ring. Her hair is summer blond, wavy again.

I walk closer, and she does the same, and I’m sure my heart is beating outside my body. I want to hold her tight, but there are things that need to be said first.

“I’m sorry I was such a dick the other night.”

She shakes her head. “You weren’t.”

“Yes. I was.”

“It’s not like any of this is remotely normal. It’s not like there aren’t a million ways I could have done this better. Or told you better.”

“Yeah, but you flew all the way over here, and I couldn’t even talk to you.”

“So talk to me now,” she says in a shy, nervous voice. “If you want.”

“I do. I do want that.”

We walk to a bench under a shady tree a few feet away. Neither one of us says anything for a minute, and maybe that’s because
us
—whatever we were, whatever we might be—is so fragile, or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s because we both know there’s something that needs to be done and said.

“Do you have her pictures with you? Sarah’s pictures?”

“Yes. Do you want to see them?”

“Yes.” I am ready.

She unzips her shoulder bag, a black canvas thing, and takes out a manila envelope. The sky is crystal blue, and
the sun beats down. But the air is cool under the tree; we’re not baking in the midday heat here on this bench.

“Is this weird?” she asks. She looks so vulnerable here with me, far away from all her bearings, her internal clock still off by many hours.

“No,” I reassure her. But it is weird. I brace myself as I watch her hands unfold the clasp. I don’t know what to expect. Part of me expects the macabre, the morbid, even though she said the pictures are of Sarah alive. But I never knew her alive, so all I can think of is a dead baby. Holland opens a slim brown leather photo album. It’s a small album, the kind that holds just a few photos.

She holds it open on her lap and points to the first picture. It’s black-and-white, an ultrasound picture. I read the type on the white border—twenty-two weeks.

She turns the page. It’s a close-up of her belly, round but not huge. “I was twenty-four weeks. I took it myself,” she says with a shrug, like she’s apologizing for the angle.

The next picture is Holland in a hospital chair holding a tiny little creature wrapped in a white baby blanket. Just the top of the baby’s head is showing, a smattering of dark hair on her head. When I see her hair, I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me again. The picture is just like the one I found in my mom’s room, but I’m looking at it in a new light now, looking at it and knowing exactly what it is. My kid. And my kid had my hair. “She has my hair.” The words don’t sound like they come from me.

“Yes, she did,” Holland says, and touches the back of my hair lightly with her hand, like she’s reminding herself, like the touch of my hair is reconnecting her. She returns her hand to the photo album and turns the page again. In the next photo, Holland is smiling. She looks exhausted, her hair a wild mess, but she’s holding Sarah in her arms and the photographer has captured both faces—mother and daughter. Sarah is tiny, her eyes are closed, but she’s all there, all the parts—lips and cheeks and ears and nose.

“She slept most of the time, but in this picture of her in the Isolette you can see her eyes,” Holland says as she shows me one of the last photos. Sarah is surrounded by wires and tubes, but she’s wide awake, with a crinkly forehead and bright gray eyes that stare into the camera. There are specks of blue around the edges of the gray.

“She was going to have blue eyes, wasn’t she?”

Holland nods. “I think so.”

“Like you.”

“Yes. Like me. And brown hair like you.”

Holland closes the photo album. I expect her to be crying, but she’s not. She seems peaceful. She seems okay with all of this, with showing me the pictures, with talking about Sarah.

“So my brown-hair gene beat your recessive blond. But your recessive blue eyes beat my brown.”

“Sounds like we’d call that a draw.”

Then in a quieter voice, I say, “She was cute. She was beautiful.”

“She was ours.”

“I wonder what she would have been like,” I say.

“I’m sure she would have been very sweet. And very funny, like you. Lots of jokes about Captain Wong’s.”

“And she would have been easy to talk to, like you.”

“And kind and thoughtful. She would have been thoughtful,” Holland continues, though I’m not so sure I’ve been anywhere close to thoughtful lately.

“And caring. The kind of person who remembered to trim the boat orchids.”

“And she would have made all the boys crazy,” Holland says playfully.

“And I’d have hated each and every one of those boys, and I wouldn’t have let any of them near her.”

“Of course. But you wouldn’t have needed to worry. Because she’d only have eyes for the boy she’d loved since she was in grade school.”

“Would she?” I take the photo album away from Holland and set it gently down on the bench. It’s just us now.

“Yes. Just like her mom did.”

“Is that what her mom did?” I trace a finger across her palm.

“Yes. She was a goner for this one boy. No one else ever stood a chance, because she fell for the boy next door a long, long time ago. Well, a few blocks away. But, still, it felt like next door.”

“And what about the boy?”

“I hope,” she begins, nerves creeping into her voice, and
what she says next becomes a question, “he would have been in love with her his whole life too?”

“Totally. Like a disease. One that gnawed away at his heart and turned him into ice.”

“Oddly enough she still loves him, even though he keeps calling her a disease.”

I touch her bracelets next, then run my fingers up her arm, savoring the feel of her warm skin. I reach a hand into her hair. She leans into my palm and closes her eyes. I trace her cheek with my thumb, her face, her beautiful, gorgeous, perfect face that I could touch and kiss my whole life.