When You Were Here

teasing, no more punching, just the purest of looks in her blue eyes. “When I go to college in a month. I’m three hours away.”
    It was the first time either one of us had acknowledged the thing . The inevitable end of the summer. The inevitable end of us.
    I waited for her to say more. I didn’t want to admit that I’d drive three hours there and back every day to see her.
    “It’s not that far, though,” she said softly, offering up an idea, a possibility. “I mean I could come back on weekends, right? Or you would come down maybe….”
    She held it out there, and she was so vulnerable in that moment.
    “I’ll come see you anytime you want, Holland.”
    “You will?”
    “Yes. God, yes.”
    “I don’t want this to end when I go to school, Danny. I want to be with you. I don’t want to be one of those couples that fades away when one goes away.”
    I kissed her forehead. “We won’t. I promise.” It was the easiest promise I ever made in my life.
    “You mean it? You’ll come see me?”
    “Yes. Will you come back here? To see your high school boyfriend ?” I said it with a touch of sarcasm, but it was a mask for my own fears. That she’d be embarrassed by having a boyfriend still in high school.
    “Are you kidding? All the girls will be jealous that I snagged myself a hot younger guy,” she said, then pushed me down on the bench and climbed on top of me, sliding her hands under my T-shirt and kissing me so hard and with so much fire that I nearly forgot we were in a very public place.
    But when I came up for air, I managed to get words out. “Being ridiculously turned on in a public place.”
    “What?”
    “That’s what I’m afraid of.” I stood up and pulled her up with me, then made her walk right in front of me to my car, so it wouldn’t be obvious to anyone else how much I wanted her. We drove home to my house. My mom was sound asleep, and even if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have cared that Holland spent the night, twisted in my sheets, intertwined in my arms, my dog’s chin on my girlfriend’s leg all night long.
    But we didn’t stay together when she went to UCSD. She had no problem doing the thing she said she was most afraid of, after all.
    After she dumped me, I found a lighter my mom used for candles. I brought the pictures taken at the pier to the kitchen sink and started to burn the first one. But then I stopped. I blew out the embers and jammed the pictures into an envelope that I stuffed in the back of my closet. Icouldn’t turn her photos, or my memories of her, to ash. She has always been fire; she has always been a flame.
    And so the candles here in the Tatsuma Teahouse remind me of her. Then again, I am always reminded of her, so I find a way to shift gears.
    “Your mom said you had to practice yesterday,” I say to Kana. “What do you practice?”
    Her big brown eyes light up. “I play the saxophone. I’m in a band, and we’re playing at a jazz club in a couple weeks. You have to come! Will you please please please come see me perform? I play a mean sax solo!”
    “So you play the sax, you have a panda purse, you’re a crazy-good photographer, you like to talk, and you hiss at women on the streets. Did I get that right?”
    Kana smiles knowingly, like I’ve caught her in something. “You noticed the hiss.”
    “Well, it’s kind of unusual. Why did you hiss at her?”
    She shrugs her shoulders. “Someday I’ll tell you. But for now tell me more about your sister. Laini was so reserved when I met her.”
    My sister. All roads keep leading back to her, and I’ve got a feeling that Laini and my mom weren’t just talking about tuxedo cats when my sister came to Tokyo.

Chapter Fifteen
    When Laini was eight days old, her birth parents clothed her in blue footie pajamas, wrapped her in a thick green blanket, and left her outside a police station in the city of Wuhan. They were likely a poor couple, with few options, but they wanted Laini to be warm, and they wanted her to be found quickly and safely. She was sent to a foster family, who took care of her for the first eleven months of her life, until she was matched with an American couple—Garry and Elizabeth Kellerman from Santa Monica, California. They’d been waiting for a match for nearly two years. I don’t really know the details, but I assume they tried to have a biological baby with no luck. And I’m pretty sure they didn’t have much luck for many years after Laini’s adoption either.