When You Were Here

was the last thing he’d said. The last thing he would ever say. And he said it to her.”
    “Why would that make you snap, though?”
    “Because it was to her. Not to me. And I was jealous. And I was mad. So I started to rip the note, but I stopped and instead I kept this part.” She holds up the small section of the paper. “So I’d have something for me. Because this note brought up all these things I’d felt but never said.”
    “What sort of things?”
    “See, you probably don’t think about this because you’re them . You’re parts of them. But I never felt like I was enough for her.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She had you after me, Danny.”
    “Yeah, that’s how it usually goes with second children. They come after the first. Besides, I don’t think they were trying all that hard to have another kid. I’m pretty surethey weren’t planning to have me,” I say, to make light of things, to put us on even footing.
    She sighs, the sad, defeated kind of sigh, as she leans back on the stone bench. “But I’m adopted, and you’re their real child.”
    “Laini, don’t say that word. You know Mom and Dad never said that,” I say, because they never did. I was never the real child, the natural child. I was simply referred to as the biological child and Laini the adopted one, but we were both their kids.
    “I know. But I felt that way. Mom never wanted to learn Chinese. She never wanted to go to China. Dad was the one who did. He was always the one who did that stuff with me. And she was never interested, so I felt like she wasn’t interested in me. Just you. Just her real child.”
    “Stop saying that word.”
    “But I’d always been closer to him. You know that. I was a daddy’s girl. He and I were just in synch always, know what I mean?”
    I nod, picturing all the times she ran to him first, hugged him first, held his hand first.
    “And when he was gone, I felt so disconnected from her. Like this rope that had connected me to the Kellerman family was gone. He was that rope. He was what connected me. He was the one who wanted to be part of where I came from. She never did. So it was like there was nothing for me back in the States. There was nothing for me with her. So I lashed out at her. Because I was so broken by what happenedto him. And I had to make sense of it somehow. So I made sense of it by leaving. By believing that I had nothing to do with her. That she didn’t care about me. That he was the only one who cared, and he was gone. Besides, I was going to college anyway. Mom wasn’t even sick then, so what did it matter? I figured. I was moving on. To my new life. To the life I was supposed to have.”
    “You know that’s not even remotely close to the truth, though, right? Because she loved both of us. He loved both of us. She didn’t not learn Chinese to spite you, Laini. She just didn’t learn Chinese because she didn’t learn Chinese. There wasn’t a reason for it. There wasn’t some dark and terrible reason. And she didn’t go with you on the other trips to China because he went with you. Because they had two kids. It wasn’t a competition. That was just how it worked out.”
    “I know that now. I just had so much resentment at the time,” she admits, and I don’t know how to respond, because I don’t understand how you can nurture something so dark, so twisted, for so long. We sit in silence for a minute. The only other sounds are birds chirping in a nearby tree. “And then once Mom got sick, I was already so far away anyway. And whenever we e-mailed she was always telling me to just keep focusing on college, that Kate was there and that she’d be fine. I was so disconnected from her already at that point that it was easy—and I’m not saying that’s a good thing—but it was easy to just keep doing what I was doing. It wasn’t till I met Shen and told him all thisthat he encouraged me to talk to her. To let her know I was wrong.”
    “Shen told you to do that?”
    She nods. “Yes. He’s the one who urged me to visit her and talk to her. To say I was sorry. To see her and tell her I’d been wrong all those years.”
    “How did you know you were wrong?”
    “Time.”
    “Time?”
    “Yes. After a while I just stopped hurting so much. And when I didn’t hurt anymore, I realized I was wrong to lash out at her. And wrong to take off. And I told her.”
    “How did she take it?”
    “How do you think she took it?”
    I picture my mom hearing