When You Were Here

sometimes Holland won purposely, and sometimes it was a draw.
    I liked that Holland didn’t just let the kids win all the time. I liked that she was playfully competitive with them.
    “You know tic-tac-toe originated in Egypt?” Holland said to the girl.
    The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
    “Maybe it was Madagascar then?”
    Another head shake.
    “Okay, I’m thinking Romania.”
    The girl started laughing. “No! Not Romania.”
    “Well, where then? Where do you think tic-tac-toe originated?”
    The girl shrugged her skinny shoulders. “I don’t know.”
    “We should find out. We should research it. Can you look it up tonight?”
    “I don’t know how to do that!”
    “Just Google it and get back to me. Maybe write a report. Can you do that for me?”
    The girl laughed more and shook her head. “I don’t know how to do a report, Holland!”
    “Well, maybe you can just make me some chocolate chip cookies tonight. No, wait. How about cupcakes? Can you make German Forest Tree Frog cupcakes?”
    “I don’t think you want to eat tree frogs.”
    “No? I heard they taste great with chocolate icing. Doesn’t everything taste better with icing?”
    “I love icing. What if cupcakes were just made of icing?”
    “What about icing and Skittles?”
    “That would be messy.”
    “But good. Don’t you think?”
    The girl nodded. “How much does my mommy owe you?”
    Holland looked at me. “Late pickup fee,” she explained.
    When the mom showed up, she was frazzled, harried, and her hair was unkempt. She dug through her purse for a checkbook but didn’t have one.
    “I’m so, so sorry,” the mom said.
    “It’s nothing,” Holland said, and waved a hand in the air. “We had fun.”
    “I’ll pay you tomorrow, I promise.”
    “Seriously. Don’t think twice about it. It’s on the house.”
    The mom left, and we invented scenarios as to why she was late as we drove away.
    “She was stuck in traffic,” Holland suggested.
    “No. She was getting her nails done.”
    “Botox, baby. She was getting Botoxed.”
    “Tummy tucked.”
    “Dolphin tattoo on her butt.”
    “Nipple pierced.”
    “Ewww!” Holland said, and wrinkled her nose.
    “Belly button pierced?” I offered.
    “Much better. But I think she was having an affair with her boss.”
    “Ah, a little afternoon delight.”
    “And they just came from the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
    I nodded. “Yeah, she’s totally having an affair. But it’s not her boss. She’s seducing a much younger guy.”
    “Younger guys are the best,” Holland said, and placedher hand on my leg. We reached a traffic light, and she leaned in to whisper, “Let’s pull over somewhere soon.”
    I found the emptiest floor at the next closest parking garage, and we climbed into the backseat of my car.
    We both had clean bills of health, so Holland had gone on the Pill by then. For all I know that might have been the time the birth control didn’t do its job.

    I turn the apartment upside down. I empty every drawer, every cabinet, every cupboard. I do it again. And again. By the end of the day, I have found nothing else. Nothing else my mom hid from me, nothing else my family didn’t tell me. But I’m sure something’s there, lurking.
    Something to make sense of this mess. Because this does not compute. My mom didn’t keep secrets like this. She wouldn’t. She was honest and open and up front. When I was in third grade, the other kids were starting to talk about the birds and the bees, but no one quite got it, especially the details on how we’d all managed to escape out of our moms as babies. I asked at dinner one night.
    “Mom, how did I get out of your belly?”
    She laughed hard. My dad chuckled, looking away. Laini guffawed. “Oh, this is going to be good,” she said.
    My mom looked at me, trying to wipe the smile off her face. “Do you really want to know? Are you really ready for the answer?”
    “Yes.”
    Then she told me. Not in graphic detail or anything. But enough to dispel my previous notion that I’d somehow emerged Alien -style. “That is the most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
    The three of them laughed throughout the rest of the meal. But even that truth didn’t stop me from asking more questions over the years. I asked; she answered. That was the deal. Even when she was first diagnosed, I asked her, tears streaking down my thirteen-year-old cheeks, if she was going to die.
    “It’s possible, but I am