When You Were Here (5 page)

A clean break.

I didn’t see her again until my mom’s memorial service. She even read at the service, a line from
The Little Prince
, something about living in the stars, or laughing in the stars, or something that basically is supposed to comfort you and shred your heart at the same time. I near about lost it when she got up and read, and she pretty much did too.

Now we’re having lunch.

“Well, college sucks,” Holland says after the waiter brings her an iced tea. “I hated literally everything about my freshman year.”

“You did?” This is news to me. Then again, everything about her life for the last several months is news to me.

“Every. Single. Thing.”

She reaches a hand to her throat, feeling for her necklace, touching the tab with the word
SARAH
on it. I watch her fidget with it before she lets it go to take a drink. Then I realize why she’d say college sucks. Her friend died.

Soon we’re eating our sandwiches, and she’s paying the bill, even though I try many times, but she keeps insisting. I thank her as we walk away from the café. She stops, takes a deep breath, and turns to me. “Do you want to go to the movies?”

“The movies?”

“Yeah, that thing where they project two hours of famous actors in impossible situations on the screen?”

“I’m familiar with the concept.”

But
movies
? That was what we did
before
. We watched big shoot-’em-up action flicks. “The more stuff that blows up, the better,” was Holland’s mantra. She had no interest in Oscar contenders, or quiet dramas, or period romances with English accents. “I want fires, and I want chase scenes, and I want dudes jumping out of tenth-story windows and then running through the streets like it didn’t even hurt.”

I wanted the same. Life was full of enough family drama. I didn’t need it on the screen.

“There’s a new Jason Statham flick at the theater down the block, I hear,” she says, throwing out the name of our favorite action star. “We could get popcorn and gummy bears.”

That was where we saw movies last summer, when we were together.

“What do you mean?” I ask as my heart pounds against my skin, trying to make a mutinous escape to land in her hands. Does she mean go to the movies like we did when we were friends, or when we were
more
? Because she alone could give me my reason to stay in California, if she wanted
more
.

“Want to go? You know, for old times’ sake.”

Right. For old times’ sake. Because we should be buds again, not more.

“I’m not really up for a movie.” Movies, lunch, graduation-morning pop-ins—I don’t need her pity. I don’t need her trying to resurrect our friendship because she feels sorry for me.

“Do you want to take Sandy Koufax for a walk then? We could walk and talk.”

“Talk?” That four-letter word sounds so alien, like she’s speaking another tongue now.

“Sure.
Talk
,” she repeats, all tentative, like she’s not even sure how she’s forming words either.

“I’ve got plans with Trina,” I say as I walk away so she can’t see my face as I lie to her.

“Danny.”

I turn around, and she looks like a snapshot, like she’s been caught taking one step toward me.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says quickly. “It’s just… I trimmed the boat orchids earlier today. They look better now.”

The next day I check the mail for the first time in a week. There are no more sympathy cards. They have all come and gone. The
sorry
s, the prayers, the
my thoughts are with you
s are over. Everyone has said what they need to say to the bereaved, and everyone has moved on to their happy, joyful, noisy, everyday lives.

The mail brings only memories. Catalogs from gardening-tool makers. Order forms from bulb suppliers for tulips, calla lilies, dahlias. There is even some flyer from this environmentally friendly tree company offering my mom a lilac bush. She loved lilacs. They were her favorite. Wild lilacs on trees. She stopped and smelled every lilac bush she ever saw, I’m sure. Every now and then she’d cut off a branch and put it in a vase, but lilacs were best enjoyed
in the wild, she said. Then she’d wink and add,
The wilds of Los Angeles
.

For Mother’s Day when I was ten, I woke up early and left the house with a pair of garden clippers. We had a neighbor a few blocks down who had a huge lilac bush on the side of his house. He was one of those dudes who didn’t like kids, though, one of those
get out of my yard, you whippersnapper
types. But my mom coveted his lilacs. So I sneaked into his yard, snipped off a few branches, and ran back down the street to our house. I placed the lilacs in a glass and handed them to my mom when she woke up.

“You little scofflaw,” she said when I told her the story.

“Do you like them?”

“Love them. They’re perfect.”

The next few days she sniffed them every chance she had.

I drop the catalogs and everything else from the mailbox into the green recycling bin at the end of the driveway. As the papers fall, I see Mrs. Callahan from across the street. She’s in her porch swing, drinking a glass of iced tea. She holds a book in her hand and waves to me. “Good afternoon, Daniel,” she shouts.

I wave back and turn around to head inside. I glance once more at the green bin, and just by chance—by sheer, dumb, accidental luck—I see something that doesn’t look like a catalog. It’s a letter, a handwritten one, practically an ancient artifact these days.

I reach for the envelope. It’s addressed to me, my name written like it’s calligraphy in some sort of felt-tip pen. The
postmark is Japanese and the name in the return address—
Kana Miyoshi
—is so familiar. My brain is feeling pinpricks, like someone is tapping needles against my head, trying to drum up a memory.
Kana Miyoshi.
I say the name silently, then whisper it. “Kana.”

My mom mentioned Kana a few times. Kana is the teenage daughter of the woman who took care of the apartment when my mom wasn’t there. Kana lives in Tokyo. Kana knew my mom.

Kana knew my mom.

Everyone else is forgetting my mom. But maybe this girl remembers her.

I peer quickly at Mrs. Callahan. She is watching me without watching me, her eyes alternating between her book and me. I know she doesn’t have bionic eyes. I know she can’t read the letter from across the street.

Still, this is not a letter I will open in front of anyone.

I walk back into my eerily quiet house and sit down at the kitchen counter. I slide a thumb under the envelope flap, but before I rip it open I realize my hand is shaking. My heart is beating quickly too, like I expect this letter to unleash secrets. I know it’s not from my mom; I know that. But right now it’s the closest I’m going to come to a connection to her. To anyone.

I turn to my dog.

“It’s a letter from Kana,” I say to Sandy Koufax, who’s stretched out on the nearby couch. Her legs poke up in the
air. The back ones look like drumsticks with those meaty thighs she has. She tilts her head toward me. “What do you think it says, Sandy Koufax?”

Sandy Koufax listens to my question and waits for an answer.

I pull out the letter and I feel like I’m not in Los Angeles anymore. I’m thousands of miles away, in Japan, in Tokyo, in the Shibuya district. I try to shake it off, but as I unfold the letter, I can see and smell and hear and taste Tokyo. Even the paper looks Asian.

She lists the medicines and notes whether each bottle had been opened. Most are marked as unopened. Odd.

Then she lists things like clothes and photos and other items, but what catches my attention are the next few lines.

Then there’s a phone number and an e-mail address under her name. But I don’t dial and I don’t type because I’m already up the stairs, turning the corner, opening the door to my mom’s room for the first time in two months, a room I’ve avoided purposefully because the emptiness might kill me. I don’t look around; I head straight for her bathroom.

I yank open the medicine cabinet, hunting for pill bottles. But there are none in here. Just toothpaste, lipstick, nail polish, lotion, and a nail file. Did Kate clean them out? Dump out the unused meds? She’s the only other person who’s been in the house. I close the mirrored door quickly and open the drawers below the sink to find towels, tissues, and a hair dryer that was hardly used in the last few years.

I leave, putting blinders on as I pass the bed that’s been made for two months, and head back downstairs.

I read the letter again, keying in on the temple and the teahouse this time. My mom e-mailed me every day when she was there for her treatments and talked to me about how good she felt when she came back, but she never mentioned a temple, and she definitely never said a word about Tatsuma anything, certainly not whether the good doctor had sent her to a teahouse, of all places.

Each time she returned from a visit, she’d tell me about the treatments, about how the combo of herbs and diet, drugs and medicine, seemed to be working better than anything had before. One time, as we walked the dog to our favorite coffee shop—green tea for her, coffee for me—she said she could
tell
, really tell, as she tapped her heart, as her eyes sparked with hope, that Takahashi’s approach was doing the trick.

She was getting well for real, for good.

But then the cancer came roaring back, and when I’d ask her about her visits, about the miracle cure that didn’t last, she’d turn the conversation to school, or the dog, or my college plans.

Maybe there was something she wanted to tell me about her time in Tokyo, about her treatments there, about her last great hope, but she couldn’t figure out how to say it?

I’m not religious, I’m not spiritual, I don’t even know if I believe in anything, yet here is this letter arriving just days after I’ve started thinking about a trip to Tokyo, and it feels like a message from
out there
.

Because if there are stories about her life that have yet to be told, pieces of her that I
could
still get to know, it’s almost as if my mom’s not completely gone. Maybe she even meant for me to know them
now
, to find these pieces when I need them most? Because, if there’s a little bit of my mom still left in this world, then maybe I won’t feel so unmoored all the time. Maybe I can feel that thing called happiness again.

Yes.

This
is what I’m supposed to be doing this summer.
This
is how I’m supposed to be passing my days. Figuring out the secret to how she was
the most joyful person
when she was dying. Because I’m living, and I sure as hell don’t have a clue how to feel anything but empty.

I flip open my laptop and plug
Tatsuma Teahouse
into the browser, but I can’t find a website for it, only a location in Shibuya on a few city guides. There’s a short review on one of the sites, so I copy the Japanese words into an online translator, and read the results.

Tatsuma Tea is very healing cure.

The last word tastes like déjà vu.

My mom never talked about this teahouse, but she sure as hell used words like
cure
. I want to smack myself for not having gone to Tokyo with her on her last quest for a cure, for not getting to know the final doctor who took care of her. Because I
get
that green tea is supposed to be good for you and all, but
doctor’s orders
? What’s that all about?

I could call or e-mail Kana, but I don’t want to say the wrong thing to her, to this girl who may hold the key to all the things I don’t know about my mom, all the things that would bring a bit of her alive again. Instead I want to take a crazy leap of faith. To go out on the creakiest of limbs and tell the only other person who’s not forgetting my mom about this note.

I want to tell Holland. I want to show her the note and study the note and talk about the note and come up with a
plan together, a map of what’s next. My decision to go to Tokyo is the first thing that’s felt like a spark, like a flash of light and color, in months. Because it’s
something
; it’s movement; it’s not just the vast expanse of endless, hollow days.

I grab my phone, keys, and wallet. But when I shut the door, I remember the whiplash of yesterday’s lunch. The way we talk to each other like we used to, then the way we don’t know how to talk to each other at all. I can’t share this letter with someone who knows all of me but doesn’t want all of me.