Unbreak My Heart(13)

Best,

Kana





There’s a phone number and an email address.

I jam the heel of my hand against my eye and swallow roughly, viciously, trying to edge past the aggressive lump in my throat. I stare at the dog until my vision clears again.

I set down the letter and step away from the counter. Breathing out hard, I pace through the living room to the sliding glass door. I shove it open and inhale the thick June air. I cut a path across the yard, around the pool, vaguely aware the dog is trotting behind me.

I turn to her.

“Why didn’t I go with him?” I huff in frustration. “I should have gone with him on one of his trips in the last year.”

Sandy stares, head tilted, wagging her tail.

But there was no reason for me to go to Tokyo. He was in remission, and he was busy with Kana there. I was buried in coursework, an internship, and studying for the Bar. The final year of law school leaves no breathing room for any extracurricular activities.

I want to smack myself for not going with him at least once, for not getting to know the one doctor he briefly saw there.

He told me to stay behind—to focus on school and the Bar. “That’s all that matters to me. Finish your JD, don’t take care of your big brother.”

I drag a hand through my hair and curse. “I fucking wanted to take care of you, asshole.”

But now I wonder what those trips meant to him, and the role the doctor he saw—Takahashi or something—played in his life.

I scratch my head, trying to make sense of the teahouse and the temple. Ian emailed me when he traveled to Tokyo, told me he was doing well, singing karaoke with Kana and eating fish at the market with her too, but he never mentioned a temple. He definitely never said a word about Tatsuma anything, and certainly not whether a good doctor had sent him to a teahouse, of all places.

I’m not religious, and I’m not spiritual. I don’t know if I believe in anything, yet here is this letter arriving just days after I’ve started thinking about the apartment in Tokyo, and it feels like a message from out there.

This is what I’m supposed to be doing before I buckle down and focus on work. Figuring out how Ian was the most joyful when he was dying. Because I’m living, and I sure as hell don’t feel anything but empty.

I flip open my laptop and plug Tatsuma Teahouse into the browser, but I can’t find a website for it, only a location in Shibuya on a few city guides. There’s a short review on one of the sites, so I copy the Japanese words into an online translator and read the results.

“Tatsuma Tea is a very healing cure.”

Is this a result of a bad translation? Or did he turn to some other kind of cure, and that’s why some of his meds were left unopened? Did he go overseas searching for a brass ring that didn’t exist?

I grab my phone and call Holland. I skip the hello and launch into questions. “Did Ian stop taking his meds when he was in Tokyo?”

She makes a startled noise. “What?”

“Do you know if he stopped taking his meds when he was there? You saw him.”

“I didn’t see him that much,” she says gently. “And I don’t think so, but he was in remission most of the time.”

“He still had meds for remission,” I say, since Ian was on those meds for a while, well before he first noticed signs in January that the cancer might be recurring. The disease roared all the way back in March, two months before it KO’d him.

“I’m aware of that.”

“Did he stop taking them here?”

“There were things your cousin Kate and I cleaned out after . . .” She lets her voice go. Finds it again. “But I didn’t inventory his meds. I didn’t count pills. Besides, there weren’t many left when . . .” Another abandoned sentence. Another side effect of death. Words go AWOL. “So we just got rid of what was left.” She clears her throat. “What’s going on?”

I swallow hard. “There are things I need to understand.”

“What? What do you need to understand?” Her voice wavers, and something in it—maybe the threat of her tears—stabs at me.

I want to tell Holland. I want to show her the note so we can devise a plan together, a map of what’s next. My decision to go to Tokyo is the first thing that’s felt like a spark, like a flash of light and color, in months. Because it’s something, it’s movement, it’s not just the vast expanse of endless, hollow days.

But I remember the whiplash of lunch the other day.

Of every day with us.

The you’re beautiful.

The it’s okay.

The let’s see a movie.

The I have an appointment.

We are both attracting and repelling each other, and right now I need facts, not endless feelings for the girl I want to fuck and kiss and bury my sorrows in as I fuck her some more.

But I’m not fucking her or kissing her. Because she’s not mine, and I can’t get caught up in her again.

“I’ll call you back later,” I say.

“Promise,” she says, a flash of urgency in her tone.

“I promise.”

“We can get Chinese,” she adds.

“Yeah.”

Hanging up, I grab my phone, keys, and wallet.