When You Were Here

of kin of his former patient know where to find the Great Dr. Takahashi.
    C’mon, Doc. You were like the messiah to my mom. You were the man. You were God. Where are you?
    I even called him before I flew over the Pacific Ocean. I left a message. I asked for an appointment three days ago. How long does it take to return a phone call to the kid of one of your dead patients? I knock harder, over and over, as if the answers will come when it hurts enough, when I amraw enough. My knuckles are red now, worn now. And still no one answers. No one opens the door.
    I’m pissed at myself that I never went with my mom to an appointment here, but she was the mom; I was the kid. It wasn’t like I was supposed to go to her doctors’ visits, especially the ones halfway around the world. Besides, she told me everything about Takahashi.
    At least that’s what I thought at the time.
    I turn to leave, wishing I had a translator, wishing someone could decode all these clues. But I don’t, so I walk to Kana, to our meeting later. I plan to ask her about the teahouse and the temple, to ask her to tell me all she knows. I’m halfway across the city when my phone buzzes. I pull it out and there’s an e-mail from Jeremy.
    I click it open. Dude. This is Sydney. I met her at the beach last night. Guess what? She loves dogs! Who woulda thunk it.
    There’s a photo of a gorgeous brunette wearing a gray V-neck T-shirt and board shorts and waving into the camera with one hand. Her other hand rests on top of a dog’s head. My dog is looking the other way, but I see half her face. I laugh as I read the rest of the note.
    For the record, I am not, technically, sending you a photo of your dog. I am sending you a photo of a chick.
    I bang out a reply. For the record, I am not thanking you for the photo that happens to include a head of a dog. I am thanking you for where that chick’s hand was when you took that picture.
    Since I’m in my e-mail anyway, I fire off a note to Laini.How’s Beijing? Great, I’m sure. I’m in Tokyo now, and I heard you visited Mom back in the winter. That’s awesome, though I gotta admit a little weird that you never mentioned it in all our e-mails. What’s the story?
    It’ll take her days to respond. She’s probably holed up in the library, translating ancient Chinese texts into modern-day Mandarin or something. She’s getting a master’s or a PhD at Peking University in Beijing. Honestly, I don’t know which degree she’s pursuing because she’s been gone for so long—first college on the East Coast, then study abroad, now living abroad—and even if she graduated from one level to the next she wouldn’t invite me, wouldn’t tell me. She sends e-mails with supreme regularity—almost always on Mondays and Thursdays, which leads me to believe I am on her Monday and Thursday to-do lists. The rest of the time she is busy being Chinese, studying Chinese history, learning Chinese ways, doing everything to renounce the years she was raised wholly American.
    I close the phone and continue my trek across town.

    My mom was a blogger, but she was more of an entrepreneur. An engineer by training, she developed cell phones for years, first for a Japanese company, then for one in California. When she burned out on engineering, she started a blog about cell phones, and very quickly it was read by everyone in the business. She scooped national newspapersand beat out online outlets for years because she had contacts on the inside everywhere. She crushed the blogging competition so effectively that a big publishing company offered her many millions for her blog.
    “You’ve got to know when it’s time to hold and know when it’s time to sell,” she told me when we went out to dinner to celebrate the sale. “That’s the biggest mistake people make in business. They get greedy, and they hold on too long. They think they can get more. That the stock’ll go up more. But the price won’t always keep rising. So grab that chance.”
    A few months later, she was diagnosed, and fighting cancer became her new job.
    As I reach Shibuya, I find myself wondering if her business advice might come in handy for me as I consider what to do with the apartment here. If I should hold it or sell it. I’ll have to go research Tokyo real estate to figure out how to apply her business wisdom.
    I stop outside an electronics store, where a salesman is hawking a TV set. Across the screen walks a cat, a silver-and-black-streaked