When You Were Here

Which means I’m pretty sure I’m an OopsBaby. My mom would never admit this, but it’s hard to dispute the evidence. I was born six years later. Abroad. Clearly, they weren’t planning for me.
    Anyway, my mom joked that Laini was so ultra-American, it was as if all the Chinese had been vacuumed out of her. Laini loved pink and Barbie and pizza and mac and cheese. But something changed when Laini turned twelve. She started hanging out with other Chinese girls more. A bunch of them knew Mandarin and had been taking classes at a school in Los Angeles. Laini asked to take classes too, and in a few years she was speaking fluently, bantering back and forth with her friends and with our dad. It was their bond, their thing. Even as she pulled away from our mom, she stayed close to him, and they often researched China together, looking up websites about Chinese culture, Chinese studies, the Chinese language.
    Then she wanted to reconnect with her roots, so we went on one of those return-to-the- homeland trips when she was in high school.
    I thought China would be like Japan, but that was shortsighted of me. You couldn’t drink the water in China. Sidewalks were cratered in sections, traffic lights were ignored by both pedestrians and cars, and pollution from nearby factories choked the air in the afternoons. On my second day there, I saw a white-coated man pulling out some other guy’s tooth in a dental office that was more like that food stall , open-air and exposed to all. So I stayed in the hotel room reading books and watching movies on my iPod. Mymom stayed with me. She wasn’t crazy about China either. But Laini was the opposite. She was energized by the country. “I want to do everything I can to help China. To eradicate pollution. To save the environment. To help the poor families so they don’t have to abandon their baby girls,” she said.
    She kept going back, summer after summer. My dad would take her to China, and my mom and I would stay in Tokyo. Then they’d rejoin us back at the apartment. That’s where we all stayed on the last family vacation, a few days after Laini graduated from high school. Midway through the trip, my dad had to take off to Kyoto for the day for work. He was heading up the Los Angeles office of his company then, but it was still based in Kyoto, as it had been when I was born.
    “I swear, this’ll be the one day I have to work on this trip. Then I’m all yours,” he said to the three of us when he left us that morning at Hachik’s mosaic and headed into the Shibuya Station to catch the bullet train to Kyoto for the day.
    His last words.
    That evening my mom received the type of phone call that sends you to your knees. He’d been hit by a truck that came barreling down a street just as he was crossing it. His death was instant.
    It’s safe to say we were all devastated, but Laini showcased her sadness with constant barbs before she left forcollege. She was pissed my mom was working again right after my dad’s death. Laini seemed to think mourning should have been my mom’s job.
    “How can you do that?”
    “Do what, Laini?”
    “Work. Just sit there and work as if everything is normal,” Laini said, but that’s exactly what Laini was doing too. She was headed off to college, getting on with her life.
    “Nothing is normal, Laini. And you’re not the only one who misses him. We all do.”
    “You have a funny way of showing it,” Laini fired back. My mom returned to whatever she was working on, but my sister kept at her, trying to get her to take the bait. “I bet if he’d been married to my real mom, she’d miss him.”
    My mom looked up, exhaustion and frustration written all over her face. “Don’t. Don’t do that again, Laini.”
    “Maybe she misses me,” Laini countered. “Have you ever thought of that?”
    “I’m sure she does, Laini. I’m sure she never forgets you.”
    “Maybe I should help her remember me. Maybe I should find her.” Laini pressed her palms on the table and stared at our mom, willing her to fight, waiting for her to fight.
    “Perhaps you should. If that’s what you want to do.”
    “Perhaps I will. Because you know what? I wish she were my mom,” Laini said, then stormed out of the room.
    I grabbed her arm. “You’re being such a hypocrite. Just leave her alone.”
    She shook her head at me. “Don’t even go there with me, mama’s boy.” She held up a palm toward me, like a running back holding off a lineman, and