When You Were Here

thought of losing someone else again.
    “You should eat,” I say instead.

Chapter Twenty-Three
    I return to the temple my mom used to visit. It is dusk. The midday heat rays have been washed away by the cooler evening air. I wave my hand through the sickly-sweet-smelling incense, spreading it through the temple. No one is here, just like the last time. But I can feel my mom in this place. I can feel that she was here just a few months ago.
    I was close to my mom. I told her stuff; I leaned on her; I asked her for advice on almost everything—friends, school, girls, sports, college. I stand in the darkened temple, lit only by flickering candles, staring at a stone statue of Buddha with his hands clasped together, and I wonder if I would have asked my mom what to do about a pregnant girlfriend.
    Hi, Mom. I got a girl pregnant. What should I do?
    Does she want to keep the baby or give it up?
    She doesn’t know.
    Well, son, you should—
    That’s as far as I can get. Because she’s not here to fill in the blanks, and because she didn’t tell me about it anyway. I try to imagine what I would have done if I were Holland. Who would I have told? If Sarah had lived, would Holland have kept her? Would she have quit school to raise a kid? If she had given her up, would it have been an open adoption where you stay in touch? Maybe in ten years Holland would have become buddy-buddy with the ten-year-old Sarah and then have ice-cream dates and shopping trips and prom consultations with the teenage Sarah. Maybe teenage Sarah would have wanted to know her dad. Maybe teenage Sarah would have been like Kana, wanting to fly away, wanting to escape.
    But that didn’t happen. Because Sarah went the way of so many people in my life.
    I close my eyes and try to picture the NICU, the doctors telling a scared college freshman who’d given birth to a baby too soon that the child was dying. Did Sarah fight to live like my mom? Did the doctors do everything they could? Did they say, Sorry, we can’t save your daughter ? And then wrap the baby in a blanket and hand her to Holland to hold till Sarah took her last breath?
    I know what it’s like to watch someone you love die. I was there the night my mom died. It was at our house in Santa Monica, in her bedroom. I held one hand, and Kateheld the other. My mom’s breaths grew farther apart and fainter. Then they were rattling almost, like she was sucking in air, gulping, but only once every minute. Her eyes were closed—she was hardly there; she’d said her good-byes—and now we were just watching, just witnessing the closing down of her body. A final inhale, a final exhale. Then the barely visible rising and falling of her chest stopped once and for all.
    All that was left was me and my dog, and my goal in life became singular—to strike out anything inside me that resembled a feeling.
    I leave the temple and walk around the back of the building with its peeling, faded paint. I stop short when I see a cemetery. It’s not a regular cemetery. The graves are different. The headstones are small. They have teddy bears next to them and bonnets on top of them. I am in a baby cemetery. I take another heavy, leaden step and read the dates, just to be sure, just to hold my finger in the flame a few more seconds.
    I have to feel this pain. I have to let myself feel it.
    I force myself to stare at the headstones, to read the names on them and the dates. This baby lived for three days. This baby for a year. This baby for five months. I feel as if someone has reached a hand through my chest, a fist, and it’s gripping my heart, squeezing it, wringing it, and suddenly I’m coughing, I’m choking, I’m down on my knees.
    Something like tears is building up deep inside me, and Icough some more, like I’m hacking up a lung. I have lost something I didn’t know I had and something—to be honest—I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be a father. I didn’t want to have a baby. But I didn’t want my firstborn child to die either. For the briefest of seconds, I picture my mom and Sarah. Somewhere else, someplace else, someplace heavenly, where it smells like lilacs and my mom has all her straight brown hair, curly at the ends, and she is laughing and holding hands with a little girl.
    Sarah is with my mom. My mom is with Sarah. My dad is even there too. Together, all of them.
    My mom wanted to know Sarah, the only grandchild she would ever know. My mom took her picture to Tokyo, looked at it,