When You Were Here

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.
Dear Mom:
    I am glad you are my mom.
    Love, Laini
    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.
L—
    I ALREADY MISS YOU. I WILL BE BACK SOON. LOVE ALWAYS.
    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’repersonal 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.
I ordered these online for you, but they are from the Japanese lilac tree. As you know, they take a few years to bloom, but they will produce the most fragrant and aromatic flowers. It’s nice, in a way, to think about flowers to be remembered by, isn’t it? And that in a few years, these lilacs will delight people with their scent. Maybe you can find a place to plant them in Tokyo?
    xoxo
    Holland
    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 bloomingin 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