When You Were Here

wasn’t my first time on the merry-go-round. But when he died, it was sudden and totally out of the blue, and everything I felt happened after . But with her, it was five years of hoping for the best and being afraid of the worst at the exact same time. Every single day. And then the end. It was more awful than anything I’d imagined for the past five years,” I say, sharing everything, because it’s exhausting holding up your own walls all the time. I can’t fight every second of every day to keep all the sorrow inside. “And I guess, most of all, I want to understand why nothing’s working for me. Why she was the happy one when she was dying, and I just can’t seem to manage anything when I’m living.”
    Kana squeezes my hand tighter, and I’m suddenly aware that I have spoken more words to her, more personal words,than I have to anyone lately. To anyone in months. “That was like a monologue,” I add.
    “It was a good one. It was a true one too. Because it always hurts more when you have to go on. When you’re the one left behind. It just does.”
    “I guess that’s what I should have said at graduation. I guess that’s what I was really feeling when I was on that stage at that stupid podium,” I say, and when she quirks up her eyebrows in question, I unburden more. I tell Kana about graduation, how it went, what I said, then how I worked out after. I flex my bicep in self-mockery. “But see. At least my arms are strong.”
    She laughs. “There is always a silver lining.”
    “And the other thing,” I continue, returning to her question of need. “I need to see Takahashi. She thought of him as her last great hope. That’s what she said about him. I need to talk to him, to hear about how he was treating her. I even left him a message a few days ago. But I went there today, and there was no answer.”
    “He is in Tibet for three weeks. I got to know one of the ladies who works there, a receptionist, and she mentioned it to me. He treats the indigent for no charge. He will return in early July.”
    “Three weeks from now?”
    She nods.
    “I have to wait three weeks?” I ask again, as if the second time will yield a different response, a better response, because I don’t want to wait. I came here to learn, to find, to know.Besides, the answers to why she kept those particular letters in the Personal pile will be so much harder to figure out than the meds. That’s supposed to be the easy one. See the doctor, get the details.
    Bam. Done. That mystery solved.
    “Which means,” Kana says, returning to that amped-up state that seems to be her natural condition, “you will be here for three weeks!” Then she claps a few times. “Which also means you must let me teach you Japanese, okay, Danny? Let me do this for you, for your mother. Please, please, please, please, please?” She leans forward and flutters her eyelashes, long, fake purple ones. “Pretty please with sugar on top?”
    She is frenzied Kana again. The girl who found me watching waterskiing squirrels.
    “How much?”
    Her eyes go wide, and she holds up a hand. “Oh no. I am not asking for money. I like you. And I want to not be embarrassed by your terrible, horrible, awful Japanese.”
    I manage a small grin.
    “Whether you are here for a week or a lifetime, you must speak better than you do now.”
    “Looks like it’s at least three weeks now,” I say, half-resigned to the wait but also a bit relieved that I have a clear and definite reason to stay here so long, a reason not to go back just yet. It’s the strangest thing, but even in spite of my monologue, I feel like I’ve been almost human for the afternoon.It’s not a bad feeling at all. “Kana, you said my mom always told stories about her family when she was here. Can you tell me them? The stories she told you? I’d like to hear them.”
    Because that’s what I really need most right now.

Chapter Fourteen
    Kana leans forward, gesturing theatrically as she tells me about the district-championship game I won with a shutout in my sophomore year, about how I aced my advanced-placement history test last year, about how Sandy Koufax always slept on my bed, even from the first night we got her, even when my mom would try to get her to sleep on her bed. She tells me about how the four of us loved roller coasters and practiced lifting our arms in unison on the downhill, all so my mom could have a family photo snapped at just that moment. She talks about how my