Free When You Were Here by Daisy Whitney Page A

drinking tea and doing crosswords. “Ah, I should have retired a long time ago. It suits me so,” she said.
    I head into the second bedroom—my bedroom. It’s just the same. A low futon with a white mattress on hardwood slats, a nightstand, and a slim three-drawer bureau are all that fits in here. I brace myself before I enter my mom’s room next, unsure whether the ghosts of the bits of her life here will swallow me whole. But for some reason, seeing her Tokyo bed, her Tokyo nightstand, her Tokyo life doesn’thurt. It feels strangely comforting, maybe even calming. Because this place is breathing, living, pulsing in a way my home in California hasn’t in months.
    Waiting to share all its secrets with me. All its wisdom. All the things I want to know.
    I return to the living room where Mai waits for me.
    “You said something about medications, Mrs. Miyoshi? I mean, Kana did. Your daughter did.”
    “Kana is at practice. She help with that,” Mai says in her staccato way of speaking. I wish I spoke better Japanese. I wish I could say more than the basics like
arigato
—thank you—because I’d rather not be the Ugly American who expects everyone to speak his language. But I am. Years of visits, dozens of trips, and I am left bereft of useful language.
    “Arigato. Domo arigato.”
    “Do you need anything?”
    I shake my head. “I am good. The apartment looks good. Thank you for taking care of it,” I say, then press my hands together and bow once more.
    “Kana sees you tomorrow. After school, she says. She will find you at three thirty. I leave now.”
    I walk to the door and hold it open for Mai, thanking her again and again, as my dad taught me. It’s funny to see pieces of him, now and then, in me. But it stings too, because that’s all there is now—pieces of memories, and they’re becoming more hazy every year. The thought hits me hard that sometime soon, maybe not too far from now, my mom will be faded around the edges as well.
    I close the door and am about to head to the bathroom to inspect the medicine cabinet, to get to the bottom of the unused pills. But then I notice the entryway table tucked in the corner. There’s the packet of lilac seeds Kana mentioned in her note. Then there are letters stacked neatly in two piles, as promised. One pile has been opened—water bills and stuff like that—and marked
Paid
with an orange Post-it note.
    In my mother’s handwriting.
    Such a pedestrian word, such a functional word—
paid
—but it jolts me because it’s her handwriting.
Her
handwriting. It’s everywhere at our Los Angeles house if I look around, if I root through drawers and desks and inside boxes. But to see it
here
feels like a trail of bread crumbs, a little bit of hope that if I look hard enough I can find all the pieces of her life left behind, even just the way she sorted through bills and papers while she was here in Tokyo.
    The other pile is much smaller, marked with someone else’s handwriting, and a pink Post-it that says
Personal
. The stack Kana made when she sorted through this place.
    I reach for that pile.
    There’s an open white envelope, no stamp on it or anything, and inside it is a card, a picture of a black-and-white cat on it. I know instantly it’s from Laini. She always loved cats. She had a thing for black-and-white ones especially. Tuxedo cats, she liked to say.
    “They always look like they have little white gloves on,” she’d say, and then hold her arms out in front of her, as ifshe were admiring white gloves on her hands. She had a cat growing up. His name was CatCat, and I’m not really sure who named him, but my parents got CatCat for her right after they brought Laini home from China. He was a loyal cat. When she was in seventh grade, he followed her to school one day. She called my parents to come get CatCat and even waited with him in the principal’s office until my mom showed up. At dinner that night, everyone sang, “Laini had a little cat, little