When You Were Here (8 page)

“My dog is a total chick magnet,” I say, and pat Jeremy
on the back. “You will score endlessly with her by your side.”

“I’m totally taking her to the pier every day. This is going to be like my most epic summer ever.”

“Take good care of her.”

“I will. But I’m
not
sending you photos of her.”

“But e-mail me, okay? Let me know how Sandy Koufax is doing?”

He laughs and shakes his head. “You’re embarrassing. You’re like a girl when it comes to this dog.”

I call Sandy Koufax over, rub her head, pet her ears, and tell her to be good. She tilts her head to the side, like she’s listening. Her tongue hangs out of her mouth. I tell her I love her in a voice so low that Jeremy can’t hear me say it. Then we leave, and Jeremy drives me to the plane that’ll take me 5,400 miles away.

I’m not tired when I file off the plane, pass through customs, and purchase a ticket for the train from Narita Airport into the center of Tokyo. I’m not tired either when I sit down on a red upholstered seat for the quick train ride to the city center. All I feel is relief that I’m far away from California.

I look around at the other passengers, mostly Japanese businessmen and-women returning from their meetings with film execs or record execs or rug-dealing execs or
whatever on my same flight from Los Angeles. There are smatterings of families too: moms with toddlers, dads telling those same toddlers to sit down. I don’t have to know much Japanese to know what the dads are saying. I see some college students a few rows up—they look European, and they have backpacks slung on their knees for the train ride. They must have rolled off a plane from Germany or maybe Sweden, I guess.

I gaze out the window at the lush, green fields we’re passing out in the suburbs that soon turn into the squat apartment buildings at the edge of the city that then become the skyscrapers and sleek, steel structures in the middle of Tokyo. The train arrives gently in Shibuya Station, and I exit, tossing my lone backpack on my shoulder. I packed lightly, not wanting to bother with checked baggage. I stuffed everything I might need—laptop, shorts, T-shirts, some books, and a pair of flip-flops—into an oversize camping backpack. The sneakers are on my feet.

The doors open, not with a screech but with a
whoosh
, and the crowds of people do not push or shove. They politely shuffle off. I’m first, though, hitting the ground of Shibuya Station, taking the stairs out of there two at a time, passing through hordes of Tokyoites who are coming and going from work, from early dinners, from anywhere. It is five thirty in the evening on a Thursday night in June, and the station is bustling. I read somewhere that more than two million passengers travel through this station each day.

I push through the final turnstile at the Hachik
exit.
I’m at one of the busiest, craziest intersections in the world, because Shibuya Station sits at the convergence of six streets that all seem to collide at once, to my American eyes. But somehow the Japanese car drivers and bus drivers and cab drivers all know when to stop, when to merge, and when to let the other lanes go. I walk over to something that has become a favorite thing of mine from all my past trips here. Carved into the street-side wall of the subway station is a bright, chunky mosaic of stars, rainbows, and a white husky dog with a perfectly coiled tail. There’s a statue of the dog here too, but I like the mosaic best. Everyone in Tokyo knows the story of the dog named Hachik
. He followed his owner, a university professor, to work every morning and waited for his return in the evenings. One day in 1925, his master failed to show. He had died while teaching. But Hachik
was loyal to the end. The dog walked to the subway stop every day, waiting for the same train for the next several years until his own death. A statue was erected, a ceremony is held every year in April, and the dog’s taxidermied body resides in Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science.

I tap the dog’s head once, for good luck.

I head for the intersection and join the sea of people fanning out in all directions. I don’t know any of them, I don’t understand any words they say, but there’s this flicker, a flash of something familiar inside me, the feeling that I’m no longer so alone.

I open the familiar glass-paneled door to the lobby of our apartment building. I expect to see Kana, since she had told me she’d meet me here at 6:00 pm to let me in and give me my keys. Instead Mai greets me with a small bow, and I bow slightly in return.

“Hello, Mrs. Miyoshi.”

“Hello, Daniel. Please call me Mai.” She extends her hand, and I shake. She is much younger than I thought she would be. Maybe in her mid-thirties. Her long black hair is fastened in a braid. She wears jeans and a short-sleeve blouse. “How was flight?”

“Good. Easy.”

“That is good.”

“Yes.”

“We are glad. Let me show you.” She presses the elevator button, and we shoot up six floors. The last time I was here, my mom was feeling good. She wore an electric-blue wig because her hair hadn’t all grown back yet. We went to the fish market every morning for breakfast. “We are so Japanese, aren’t we?” she said to me, as we sat at the counter of the food stall we both loved, eating raw fish in bowls.

“Totally, Mom,” I said, and then gobbled up more of what had become my favorite breakfast food ever.

The elevator door opens, and Mai gestures for me to exit first. But I sweep out a hand for her. My father would roll over in his grave if I went in anywhere—store, building, car—before a lady. He held doors open for everyone all the time.

Mai walks down the hall, turns the key in the door of our—
my
, I need to get used to saying
my
, especially since I’m the one who has to decide what to do with it—apartment. I follow her in and inhale. My lungs feel like they’re filling with the equivalent of water from a fresh mountain stream. This place is small; it
is
Tokyo real estate after all, but it
feels
big compared to my house in Los Angeles somehow. I drop my backpack by the door and turn into the kitchen, running my hand across the outside of the fridge, over the bright white sliver of a countertop, then along the panes of the window that look out over the street below. There are potted plants along the window, some with flowers blooming. They are my mother’s plants, the
gardens
she made here in Tokyo so she’d have her flowers here too. I touch the
soil in a pot with blue irises. The soil is damp. Mai and Kana must water the plants. I like knowing that they take care of my mom’s plants. I lean in to smell the flowers, something my mom did every day. They smell like flowers, like they should, but they also smell like her, if that makes sense.

I return to the living room, breathing in the familiar surroundings—the blond hardwood floors, the bookshelves wedged in that hold framed photos of Laini, Sandy Koufax, my dad from years ago, my mom and me, and then the light-green couch that you just sink into and the metal coffee table where I’d put my feet only to get yelled at for putting my feet on the coffee table.

I can tell the table has been polished and cleaned and shined, but I swear I can see it a year ago, the very last time I was here, with newspapers spread open, ceramic mugs half-drained, crossword puzzles completed. A lazy summer afternoon in Tokyo, my mom wearing a purple wig, a pink wig, one time even a yellow one, drinking tea and doing crosswords. “Ah, I should have retired a long time ago. It suits me so,” she said.

I head into the second bedroom—my bedroom. It’s just the same. A low futon with a white mattress on hardwood slats, a nightstand, and a slim three-drawer bureau are all that fits in here. I brace myself before I enter my mom’s room next, unsure whether the ghosts of the bits of her life here will swallow me whole. But for some reason, seeing her Tokyo bed, her Tokyo nightstand, her Tokyo life doesn’t
hurt. It feels strangely comforting, maybe even calming. Because this place is breathing, living, pulsing in a way my home in California hasn’t in months.

Waiting to share all its secrets with me. All its wisdom. All the things I want to know.

I return to the living room where Mai waits for me.

“You said something about medications, Mrs. Miyoshi? I mean, Kana did. Your daughter did.”

“Kana is at practice. She help with that,” Mai says in her staccato way of speaking. I wish I spoke better Japanese. I wish I could say more than the basics like
arigato
—thank you—because I’d rather not be the Ugly American who expects everyone to speak his language. But I am. Years of visits, dozens of trips, and I am left bereft of useful language.

“Arigato. Domo arigato.”

“Do you need anything?”

I shake my head. “I am good. The apartment looks good. Thank you for taking care of it,” I say, then press my hands together and bow once more.

“Kana sees you tomorrow. After school, she says. She will find you at three thirty. I leave now.”

I walk to the door and hold it open for Mai, thanking her again and again, as my dad taught me. It’s funny to see pieces of him, now and then, in me. But it stings too, because that’s all there is now—pieces of memories, and they’re becoming more hazy every year. The thought hits me hard that sometime soon, maybe not too far from now, my mom will be faded around the edges as well.

I close the door and am about to head to the bathroom to inspect the medicine cabinet, to get to the bottom of the unused pills. But then I notice the entryway table tucked in the corner. There’s the packet of lilac seeds Kana mentioned in her note. Then there are letters stacked neatly in two piles, as promised. One pile has been opened—water bills and stuff like that—and marked
Paid
with an orange Post-it note.

In my mother’s handwriting.

Such a pedestrian word, such a functional word—
paid
—but it jolts me because it’s her handwriting.
Her
handwriting. It’s everywhere at our Los Angeles house if I look around, if I root through drawers and desks and inside boxes. But to see it
here
feels like a trail of bread crumbs, a little bit of hope that if I look hard enough I can find all the pieces of her life left behind, even just the way she sorted through bills and papers while she was here in Tokyo.