When You Were Here

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 aplan 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.
    I hop into the rental car and head to the hospital to meet Trina. She’s got a break in a few minutes.
    In the cafeteria Trina shakes three sugar packets crisply between her thumb and forefinger. She never uses artificial sweetener. “Too many chemicals. That stuff will mess you up,” she likes to say. “At least with sugar, we know what it does to you.” Then she’ll pause and blow air into her cheeks. “Makes you fat!”
    She rips open her sugar trifecta and dumps it into her coffee. “Fuel,” she says, tapping the paper cup. She wears blue scrubs, a white lab coat, and has her long black hair looped back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. “So what’s the story, morning glory?”
    “This chick from Tokyo wrote to me,” I say, and tell Trina about the letter as clinically as I possibly can, like an unbiased reporter, because I want her unbiased report in return. Then I tell her about the absence of meds at my house.
    “You’re going to go, right?”
    I don’t answer right away, because I expected more back-and-forth. I expected I’d have to convince her. But Trina is decisive, and she has issued a ruling. She leans forward and has this strangely serious look in her hazel eyes, like she’s telling the nurse to get the patient into the operating room, stat. “You’re going to go over there and meet this girl and read the cards and see this temple and go to this teahouse?”
    She chugs half her coffee. I wonder if it burns her throat.
    “You really think I should go there?” I figured I was crazy. I figured I was casting about for something, anything, and Trina would be the one to knock sense into me. But logical, rational, sensible Trina thinks Tokyo is a good idea.
    She nods several times. “Next flight. Go.”
    “Why?”
    “First off, because of the meds. That’s a little weird if she wasn’t taking them when she was in Tokyo.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Unless she just had them filled. Which could be the case. But yeah, cancer patients usually take their meds. Because, you know, meds make you feel better.”
    “So I should go to Tokyo, find Takahashi, and ask if my mom was taking her medicine or not?” I ask, sounding like the parent checking up on the sick kid.
    “I would, but maybe it’s just the doctor in me that’s curious about the meds.”
    “Would he tell me? Can he tell me?”
    “Sure, I have to imagine he’d talk to you.”
    “What about the whole doctor-patient confidentiality thing? I thought it was against the rules or something.”
    She shrugs. “Technically. But that’s all about getting sued, and this isn’t a TV crime drama. There isn’t a trial going on where someone’s being compelled to testify.” Then she raises an eyebrow and gives me a conspiratorial look. “Look, I’d talk to you if I were him, but then again, it’s not like I’m an advocate of following all the rules.” Trina, of course, has already been a rule breaker. “It’s different in Japan too. Doctors there, they’re used to talking to the family. Sometimes the family learns stuff before the patient does.” She reaches a hand out and places it on mine. “Besides, Danny, what else are you going to do this summer?”
    Trina says it so gently, so sweetly, and it’s so clear that being with her was never an option for summer entertainment for either one of us. I picture a trip. I could do more than just figure out whether to keep the apartment. I could see the Tatsuma Teahouse for myself, not just read some cryptic online review that hints at a wing-and-prayer kind of hope. I could visit my mom’s favorite temple too. I could find the people who knew her, the guy who served her breakfast at the fish market when