When You Were Here (9 page)

The other pile is much smaller, marked with someone else’s handwriting, and a pink Post-it that says
Personal
. The stack Kana made when she sorted through this place.

I reach for that pile.

There’s an open white envelope, no stamp on it or anything, and inside it is a card, a picture of a black-and-white cat on it. I know instantly it’s from Laini. She always loved cats. She had a thing for black-and-white ones especially. Tuxedo cats, she liked to say.

“They always look like they have little white gloves on,” she’d say, and then hold her arms out in front of her, as if
she were admiring white gloves on her hands. She had a cat growing up. His name was CatCat, and I’m not really sure who named him, but my parents got CatCat for her right after they brought Laini home from China. He was a loyal cat. When she was in seventh grade, he followed her to school one day. She called my parents to come get CatCat and even waited with him in the principal’s office until my mom showed up. At dinner that night, everyone sang, “Laini had a little cat, little cat, little cat, Laini had a little cat who followed her to school.” He went to “kitty heaven” when Laini was fourteen or fifteen, and she cried for days. My dad even had a little cat memorial service in the backyard that we all attended.

I open the card.

It reminds me of the kind of card a grade-schooler sends her parents when she’s just learning to write. Then I remember—my mom has a card just like this framed back at the house. It doesn’t have a cat on it. But it’s on a piece of blue construction paper and written in that blocky, big lettering kids use when they learn to write. The words—
I am glad you are my mom
—are exactly the same. Somehow,
Laini is hearkening back to a card she wrote my mom when she was five.

Is this her way of making good for how she treated our mom? For running halfway around the world and then barely coming back after our mom got sick?

I tuck the card inside the open white envelope when I notice it’s not alone. There’s a sheet of lined paper folded in quarters inside the envelope, the edges serrated roughly as if ripped from a spiral notebook. My dad kept a stash of standard school-size notebooks on his nightstand. He was always tracking ideas for new businesses he wanted to start. When I was eleven, I noticed him sitting by the pool on a Sunday afternoon writing in a green spiral notebook.

“What are you writing, Dad?”

“Ideas.”

“For what?”

“For the day when I won’t have to work for the man anymore. Because then I’ll invent the sky.”

“Sky’s already been invented, Dad,” I said.

He snapped his fingers in an
aw shucks
gesture. “What about the sea?”

“Sea too.”

“And trees?”

“Yes.”

“Birds?”

“Definitely,” I said, and was cracking up. He liked making me laugh, so we went on like that for several more rounds.

“Seriously, Dad. What are you writing?”

“Just some thoughts on a business I may want to start someday.”

“What’s the business?”

He looked down at his notes. “Eh, it’s not really coming together.” He tossed the notebook on the lawn chair and cannonballed into the pool. I jumped in next, and the notebook was forgotten.

Here’s a page from one of those notebooks with the top corner ripped off. Only, it’s not an idea for a business. It’s personal, and it’s to my mom. I can barely remember
his
handwriting six years later, but I know he called my mom Liz. He was the only one who called her Liz, and sometimes when he whispered to her in the kitchen or the hall as he pulled her in for a kiss, he shortened her name even more. She was L to him then.

I run a finger over the blue ink, as if I can activate a secret message, a hidden explanation, a translation that will give me a date and an answer to the question that trips through my head: Why is
this
sheet of paper with the corner ripped off in
this
small stack of papers? Why is this tuxedo-cat card here? I know why they’re marked
Personal
—they’re
personal notes, obviously. But why were they important enough to be singled out?

I reach for the last thing in the stack. A sheet of crisp lavender stationery folded in half.

Even five thousand miles away, she is here, inside this apartment, with a note and some sort of parting gift for my mom. I can never get away from her. Only now I am tired of it. I am weary. I am worn down and worn out and worn through. I don’t have a clue how to solve the puzzle of Holland. And I don’t know if I want to right now, not in this threadbare state of mine. I return to the entryway table and grab the seed package. It’s unopened, and I take some small measure of victory that Holland’s dreams of lilacs blooming
in Tokyo as some sort of memorial to my mom never materialized.

I toss the envelope with the lilac seeds onto the coffee table.

But still,
why
did my mom keep these three notes here? Far away from me. Far away from the house in Los Angeles. Because some are old—my dad’s note. And some are clearly new—Holland’s letter. Were they all sent to the address of this apartment? Or did my mom bring them on her last few trips to have them with her when she was here? I wish these notes came with a code to decipher them.

But that’s it for the
Personal
pile. A note from the daughter who deserted the family, a note from the dad who’s long gone, and a note from the ex-girlfriend. All these people who didn’t live with her for the last several years. All these people who weren’t there every day.

But nothing
from
me. Nothing
for
me.

I could tell myself this is a mere Post-it note from Kana, that it’s no big deal to be excluded from this pile. But it’s not
just
a Post-it note. It’s a collection of things that mattered to my mom. That she must have assembled over the years, gathered together near the end.

I head to the bathroom, yawning as I fumble for the light. Jet lag is kicking in quickly, threatening to smother me into sleep. I slide open the medicine cabinet, and it’s filled with prescription bottles. Bleary-eyed, I reach for one. It’s a cancer drug, and it’s barely been touched. Then
another kind. This one was marked “open” on Kana’s list, but it looks like nearly all are still in the bottle, like my mom hardly took any. I know these drugs by heart, know their side effects and their benefits.

What I don’t know is why they’re full.

I remind myself that Takahashi can explain this. Takahashi, the last great hope, the supposed miracle doctor—
brilliant and compassionate
, my mom used to say—will tell me. Rules or no rules. He hasn’t called back yet, but I’ll go to his office tomorrow.

I grab another bottle. It’s Percocet, and it was filled by a pharmacy here several months ago. But even in my barely awake state, I can tell that none were taken either.

Ah, but perhaps
this
is what my mom left for me. Perhaps this is the
Personal
for the son. Yes, a gift from beyond, a beautiful parting gift indeed, because these work wonders on the living. It’s such a shame to waste a perfectly good numbing agent. I open the cap and free one of these beauties. I put the pill on my tongue and it feels like blasphemy—taking my mom’s painkillers when she was in real pain. But then I do it anyway, swallowing it dry.

I return to the living room, picking up the note from my dad, the card from my sister, the letter from Holland. I fold them all up and put them in my wallet to keep with me at all times.

They are foreign words to me now, but soon,
soon
, I’ll know how to translate them. I have to. Really, I have to.

Jet lag wins.

The sun has barely risen, but I’m wide awake, ready for this city to unlock secrets. I shower, pull on shorts, a T-shirt, flip-flops, and sunglasses, and jam my wallet and phone into my pocket. It’s too early to meet Kana, too early to find the doctor, so I take the subway to the Tsukiji Fish Market, the largest fish market in the world, stretching along several blocks and all the way out to the Tokyo Bay.

I walk along the edge, where I can hear the merchants inside, sloshing around in their knee-high boots in the fishy water that puddles on the concrete floor as they peddle everything from mackerel to eel to shrimp to salmon to octopus to tuna that was just sold at auction a couple hours ago. I reach the block of food stalls on the outskirts of the
market, each one no more than a few feet wide. A red awning with Japanese characters falls over a stall selling fish crackers and dried oysters. Another with bamboo walls is flush against the sidewalk and offers up tempura and soba noodles heated in metal pots.

I find that food stall easily. My first stop. My first order of business. Not just breakfast but maybe a bit of information.

I grab a stool, order, and am quickly distracted from my mission by the taste of raw tuna. It feels like ages since I’ve enjoyed food, since I’ve tasted something that made me want food for more than just hunger.

My chopsticks dive into the bowl again, scooping up another heaping spoonful of rice and soy sauce and raw fish. A businessman next to me hungrily spears his breakfast fish too. I look behind the counter, hoping to see Mike. He’s this young dude, maybe twenty, who worked here last summer when I visited. He was into music, always playing some cool Japanese tunes on low on his little stereo while he served up fish. We’d sometimes trade song recommendations. If he’s here, I’m going to ask him about my mom, what she was like in those final days over here. I’ll take an anecdote, a sliver of a tale, something, anything, that’ll bring her back in some small way.

Mike’s not here, though. Instead there is a hunched-over Japanese woman behind the counter, stirring a huge vat of miso soup, and I ask for a bowl of that too. She nods, then ladles out some soup for me.

I don’t even know if this place where I’m eating has a
name. My mom would say,
Let’s go to that food stall
, and we’d swipe our subway tickets through the turnstiles and catch an early morning train to the fish market for breakfast. “If sushi cured cancer, I’d be in the clear,” she joked last summer over a bowl of tuna.

“Don’t say that, Mom. Besides, you will be in the clear soon.” She’d held cancer at bay for four years by then. She’d withstood countless rounds of chemo and surgeries. She was going to lick it, I was sure. No one was tougher than my mom. She’d managed the disease with laughter, and some tears, but mostly laughter.

“And then I will be at your graduation, and I will be wearing a neon wig then, not because I need it, but to embarrass you,” she teased.

“It would be totally embarrassing,” I said, but it also wouldn’t be. Everyone at school knew about my mom and her colorful wigs. The girls loved them. They would come up to me, tears in their eyes, and tell me how tough my mom was and how cool she was with her electric-blue wig, her candy-pink hair, her emerald-green curls, and so on.

“You should know I plan on hollering your name from the audience and throwing the most elaborate party in the world. Mark my words, as this bowl of tuna is my witness, I will be standing up and cheering at my son, Daniel’s, graduation. I may even bake a cake.”

“You don’t bake, Mom,” I said.

“I know. But I will for graduation. Or maybe I’ll just get one of those really awesome store cakes.”

I push the bowl away. I fix my eyes on the merchants down the street, who are adjusting their displays, to distract myself from the memory, from the failure of it to become reality. I stare so long that the things in front of me become blurry, as if I’m watching all the shopkeepers and food sellers from behind an antique camera while their lives pass by in sepia tone. Whatever pettiness I felt last night at being left out of the
Personal
pile has dissipated here at the fish market. Because now I’m just back to missing her. It feels embarrassing to admit that. I’m a guy; we’re supposed to be tough, strong. We’re not supposed to miss our mommies. But damn if I don’t miss her. Damn if I don’t miss having dinner with her, talking about the little things, like what app I just downloaded on my phone and whether I thought she’d like it too, or the bigger things, like what if I didn’t make it into UCLA, or even just talking about Sandy Koufax. My mom loved that dog like she was a third child. Whenever we’d come back from dinner out, since we ate out a lot, or a school event, or one of my mom’s treatments, Sandy Koufax would jump off the couch, stretch, then wag her tail and offer herself for petting.

“Oh, you are the cutest, sweetest, most adorable dog in the entire universe,” my mom would say.

The dog made her happy. As for me, just having someone to talk to made me happy. Now my voice barely gets used. And so I miss her, and the silence in my life reminds me of how much.

I’m jerked back by the buzzing of my phone. I glance at the screen. There’s a note from Kate. I e-mailed her yesterday, letting her know I landed safely.
Are you at the fish market? Say hi to the tuna for me! Every time I look at the clock now I convert the hours to Tokyo time too.

I send a quick reply, letting her know the tuna says hello, and it feels vaguely comforting that Kate’s checking up on me. When I look up, the hunched-over old woman is whispering to someone in the cramped quarters at the back of the food stall. I lean to the side to get a better look. It’s Mike. He wears a white T-shirt, black chef pants, and an apron around his waist. An unlit cigarette rests behind his ear. I hold up a hand to wave. He tips his forehead in response, then walks over.