When You Were Here

me on the corner, sitting outside at a café, aimlessly kicking a ruby-red-slipper-clad foot back and forth as she nurses a slushy-looking drink. She peers at me over her big, round black sunglasses that I swear are half the size of her face. “Ready, Freddy?”
    “Guess I’d better be.”
    We descend into the subway again. I know this station so well by now—passing through the turnstiles and hopping onto the train is like rote, like muscle memory. We board, and as the train slaloms through the tunnels of underground Tokyo, I know I have reached the last mile. Takahashi is the last stop, and whatever I learn from him will be the last thing there is to learn about my mom. Somethingabout the visit feels ritualistic, like a rite of passage, maybe the way graduation should have felt.
    “What do you think I should be ready for?”
    “Whatever you might learn.”
    “Cryptic today, Kana?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. I just know you’ve put a lot of stock in this visit with Takahashi.”
    “What do you think he’ll say, O Wise One?”
    “I think you already know.”
    “Do I?”
    She nods, and her brown eyes remind me of my dog’s. I stare into them for a few seconds. Her glasses are pushed up on her head; her black hair is like a waterfall of silk around her face. Her hair is down today, no ribbons, barrettes, or headbands.
    Do I already know what he’ll say? Do I already know what my mom wanted from the doctor who was her last great hope?
    She would have asked him to help her live a few more months, of course. Of course that’s what she would have said to him.
    But then why would all those pill bottles still be full?
    A dark fear rises up, but I push it back down. I shove it aside. Instead I remember something Kana said the first day we met at the teahouse, about how stories were her thing, about the way she seemed to sparkle when I told her the story of my neighbor’s lilacs when we visited the temple.“Do you want to hear a story?” I ask Kana, because maybe it’s in the stories that the people we love are still alive.
    She lights up and nods a big yes. I can give her this one, as she has given me so many.
    “I used to play baseball in high school. Not like I was some major-league prospect or anything,” I say as the train weaves around a corner and we lean with it. “But I was good, and I helped our team win a district championship in tenth grade. But at the end of my junior year, I blew out my shoulder.”
    Kana quirks up her eyebrows, waiting for me to explain.
    “It wasn’t bad. I mean, it was bad, because I’d torn my rotator cuff, and I couldn’t play my senior year. I was bummed because you want to go out on top. I knew high school would be the last time I played ball, and I was going to miss all of my senior year. Which meant that baseball as I knew it was over. And my mom was awesome about it. She said all the right things and took me to this great ortho surgeon at UCLA to go over surgical options. But there was no point in going under the knife, since I wasn’t going to try to play again. My shoulder healed on its own with time. So when the season started in February, and I wasn’t on the field or with the team, my mom said we needed to honor the end of my baseball career and also celebrate my new life, without baseball. It was like paying homage to the sport, to what it had meant to me, she said. It would be a way to give thanks to baseball.”
    “Like baseball was a friend to you,” Kana says.
    “Yes, exactly.” The train pulls into our stop, and we exit. I continue the story as we walk up the subway steps and into the Asakusa district, one of Tokyo’s more traditional neighborhoods, with shrines and shops and less flash than the other places we go. “So we took Sandy Koufax to the baseball diamond where I played my first-ever game in this little neighborhood park in Venice Beach. I was nine then. I had pitched, and we’d won. And since my mom kept every little memento under the sun, she brought photos of me pitching and of the team celebrating after we’d won. And she even had my uniform and my hat from back then.”
    I shake my head at the memory, amazed at my mom’s pack-rat tendencies when it came to this stuff.
    “Did you put it on? The hat?” Kana asks, eager for more. Stories like this are Gatorade to her; they replenish her.
    “It didn’t fit, but I put on the hat just to be silly, I guess. I said, I’m going to look incredibly stupid putting this on, but