When You Were Here

this one’s for you, Mom .”
    Kana playfully punches me in the arm. “I bet she loved that.”
    “She did,” I say as we walk past a store selling cookware and long steel knives. “She handed me a tennis ball and said we would honor that first game by pitching to Sandy Koufax. She told the dog to sit at home plate while I walked to the pitcher’s mound. I went into my windup and threw to Sandy Koufax. She leaped up and caught it in her mouth. She was the true natural. Then she ran out to the pitcher’s mound and dropped it in front of me and stared at it. That was herway of saying, More . I lobbed a few more balls to her, and my mom and I just laughed. Then my mom said, One thing passes into another. Now your arm serves that dog. ”
    Kana beams, a bright, shining smile. “I like that. I like the idea of saying good-bye to one thing but welcoming another.”
    “Exactly. That’s exactly what my mom was doing. She’d also gotten some bakery cake, and she brought plates and forks and a knife. So she sliced up pieces, and we sat down by home plate, and we ate cake and looked at pictures. And she let the dog have a piece of cake too. She joked that she’d make me a cake too for graduation,” I say, adding the air quotes that my mom used at the time, making light of her baking—or nonbaking—abilities. I turn to Kana. “But that didn’t happen. She always said she was holding on for graduation, Kana. She always said that. But she didn’t make it.” I choke up. That dark fear resurfaces, and I can’t help but think that I already know the reason why she didn’t hang on. Why she wanted to have that cake on the baseball diamond then. Why that day was the ceremony. Because I don’t think her business advice from long ago was just business advice. Because one thing does pass into another.
    “No. She didn’t. But we are here now,” she says, and gestures to a door, the same one I banged on more than three weeks ago. Takahashi’s name is on it. “Call me later.”
    “I will.”
    Kana waves good-bye, then I ring the bell and wait for the doctor to let me in.

Chapter Twenty-Five
    Takahashi is tall. Surprisingly tall. He is my height, six-two. I’m not used to Japanese people being the same height. I’m not used to most people being the same height. He wears a suit. A gray business suit. I guess, after the temple and the teahouse, I expected a short Zen master in some traditional Asian garb, maybe in a feng shui-ed, Zen-i-fied garden office.
    Instead his office is like a European library, with oak furniture, an ornate navy-blue couch, and tall bookshelves lined with leather-bound editions of Japanese and English texts. Takahashi doesn’t offer me tea, like I expect. Instead he opens a cupboard on his shelves and places a bowl of candy on the table between us. Bags of candy are inside thecupboard. He gestures to the crystal bowl in front of me. It is filled with lemon and orange sucking candy.
    “Please. Take one,” he says, and reaches for one, popping a lemon candy into his mouth. “I am a candy connoisseur,” he says as he sits down across from me. I’m on the blue couch, and he sits in a deep, rich red chair. I feel like I’m at a shrink’s. I’ve never been to a shrink’s office, but I suspect it feels like this. Like feeling displaced. Like someone trying to make you feel comfortable. But the truth is, everything about being here is a Tilt-A-Whirl. Everything is off, different from what I pictured. My hands feel clammy, and I try to rub my palms against my shorts, but the clamminess is inside me. It’s stuck in me, jammed in there like a too-stuffed drawer that won’t close, squeezed along with everything else—with hope, with fear, with wanting, and most of all with knowing this is the end of the line. I want so much for him to tell me something I don’t know, something that will make sense of my life, like my mom has been in his office all this time, the first case of an experimental procedure to cure cancer, and look: Here she is, all better now.
    “Though truth be told, it’s really an addiction. I can’t stop myself when it comes to candy.”
    Is he really talking to me about candy? I take an orange one to be polite and put it in my pocket for later. My leg is shaking. I press my hand down on my thigh to quiet it. I think I’m supposed to speak first. “How was Tibet?”
    “Uplifting,” he says. “I treat the poor and indigent there who are suffering. They are grateful