When You Were Here

between you and Holland? It wasn’t a battlefield. It wasn’t a fight. There are no sides. All sides of it are sad, okay?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    She shakes her head. “No, I don’t.”
    “How could my mom know Holland had our baby and not tell me?” I grab Kana by the shoulder, and she tenses for a second. I let go. I can’t hurt her. She is the one person I can’t hurt. I can’t shake the answer out of her.
    “Danny. Why do you think your mom didn’t tell you?”
    I hold up my hands. “No clue.”
    “Because she was dying. Because she didn’t want you to have any more loss in your life. You’d lost your father, your sister was gone, your girlfriend had broken up with you, and you were losing the person you loved most—her. Your mom. She didn’t want you to have one more thing to deal with. She wasn’t keeping a secret from you. She was protecting you from a secret.”
    I shake my head many times. “No. No. No. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works,” I repeat.
    “You have to understand she did it because she loved you. But you also have to understand that she wanted a picture of the only grandchild she would ever see. Even if that baby was already gone.”
    Kana puts her arms around me, and I resist at first, resist the closeness, the connection, until finally I let myself fold into her. She wraps her skinny arms around me, and maybe this, maybe her, is why I came to Tokyo. She is the only thing that makes sense to me.
    She holds on to me, or I hold on to her, I can’t tell, because I don’t want to separate myself from her.
    Soon the sun is too much; the heat is too much. No one can last outside this long in the heat of the day.
    “This is going to sound crazy, but do you want to go to karaoke?”
    I laugh. “Really?”
    I pull back, untangling my arms from her and my face from her shoulder.
    “Sometimes I think when we are sad, we need to do the opposite of sad. Sometimes we need to sing.”
    She takes my hand, loops her fingers through mine, leads me to the nearest karaoke place just a few blocks away, and orders up a karaoke room. She starts with the karaoke standards, Bon Jovi and the Beatles, then we hit newer tunes, Katy Perry and Arcade Fire, and we laugh and toast and hold our soda glasses high and say kampai , a Japanese cheers , and then sing more songs. We sing duets, including a ridiculously cheesy Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers song about islands, and she teases me mercilessly because my voice is so bad, and I cannot carry a tune at all. When we flip through the Guns N’ Roses section, she skips over “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and picks “Welcome to the Jungle,” and for this I want to buy her jelly crepes for the rest of her life. When the sadness is pumped out for the moment, we leave and head into the neon Tokyo night. I walk Kana to the subway station, and say good-bye as she cruises through the turnstiles on her way home.
    I make my way through the evening crowds, the sidewalks teeming with people, and turn onto my street.
    I stop in my tracks, because I must be imagining this. Imagining the outline of someone I’d recognize anywhere—the hair, the legs, the curves of the body. There’s a piece of paper in her hand, and she’s looking for numbers on buildings,and she’s just a few feet from my building, trying to find the address that matches the one in her hand.
    When she turns around, I’m looking into the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever known.
    And she smells like lemon sugar.

Chapter Twenty-Two
    “How did you get here?” I ask. It’s a dumb question, but still it comes out, because here she is and she called me on my bluff.
    “I took a plane.”
    “Right. Those things that fly over the ocean.”
    “I got a cheap flight.”
    “Oh good. I wouldn’t have wanted you to spend any real money to come here.”
    “I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean I would only come because the flights were cheap.”
    “Then why don’t you say what you mean for once? Or is that just too hard to do? To tell the truth?”
    She shifts her bag higher on her shoulder. “Can we talk?”
    “Is that why you’re here?”
    “Yes. To talk. To see you.” She gestures to the door of my building. “I came here because you wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. You wouldn’t answer my e-mails.”
    “Note to self: As long as you fly across the ocean, the girl finally appears.”
    She nods slightly, absorbing the blow. “Is there someplace we