Unbreak My Heart(35)

Kana bites her lip, and I watch her throat move, as if she’s swallowing roughly, holding in tears.

“Shit. I’m sorry,” I say, my head hanging low. “I know you loved him too.”

“I did.”

“I know it’s hard for you,” I say. Her eyes are wet, but she’s holding strong. Like I should be doing. I breathe in deeply then ask the question others ask of me. “How are you holding up?”

Once I say it, I sit straighter. Asking someone else does something meaningful to me. It changes the score. Makes me feel not so alone at all. This woman I hardly know has more in common with me than I ever expected.

“It is hard,” she says, but she manages to smile. “But I try to remember the good times and let them fuel me. Fortunately, Ian and I truly only had good times.”

That’s why he didn’t want her to see him dying. Maybe that was his parting gift to her. The gift of only good memories.

It seems to have worked too.

Her smile is infectious. I can’t help but grin, because part of me is thinking of the conversation with Holland from the other day. Endorphins, natural painkillers—those are made during good times. I don’t really want to be thinking of my brother getting it on, and I’m not—but I also understand. Sometimes, you just need a good woman.

In the worst of times.

In the best of times.

In all the times.

“Tell me about some of your good times with him.” I shake my head and hold up a hand. “Wait. Nothing inappropriate.”

She laughs and winks. “Don’t worry. I keep those for myself.” She dives into story time. “We loved music. We loved a lot of the same music.”

I smack my forehead. “Wait. Don’t tell me. He won you over with the piano?”

She laughs and shrugs happily. “What can I say? When a man plays John Legend for me, I go all swoony. A man like Ian? I had no choice.” She looks away for a second, maybe more, as if she’s remembering. “Our first date was at a piano bar. And he did take me to a John Legend concert.”

The ticket stub. He went to see the show with her. He must have saved it as a memento.

I learn that my brother was a total romantic. He pulled out all the stops for Kana. He went full repertoire at the piano bar—John Legend, Ed Sheeran, and Matt Nathanson.

“Did he tell you he met Matt Nathanson?” I ask, leaning forward.

“Oh God, he did?” she asks, her pitch rising in excitement.

“That’s one of the perks of living in Los Angeles. We run into celebrities sometimes. Once, when we were eating at a café in Santa Monica, he saw the singer and walked right up to him.” Kana’s eyes widen as I tell the story. “Ian held out a hand and said, ‘Thank you. Your music has done so much for me. Well, for my love life, that is.’”

“He said that? That devil,” she says, but her smile is radiant.

“Matt Nathanson clapped him on the back and said, ‘Happy to help a brother out.’”

“I’ll never listen to ‘Still’ and not think that.” The spark in her eyes says the song is another good time. Another good memory.

And I gave her a new piece of it. A new twist on a story. For one of the first times since my brother died, I didn’t take from someone—I gave. It feels . . . cathartic, and it feels amazing.

As if another patch in the hole in my heart is filling in.

I lift the cup of tea, and a new piece of understanding slides into place. “Sometimes healing isn’t about our bodies,” I say, and it feels that way for me right now.

“I believe that’s true.”

I take another drink. It’s not mystical tea. It doesn’t bring eyesight to the blind. It doesn’t even taste that good. But sipping again makes me turn over a new possibility: maybe what my brother was searching for wasn’t healing from the disease, but healing from the way it could hollow your heart.

Maybe Kana was part of that healing. I still don’t know what she meant to him entirely. But this much is clear: she was so much more than I thought.

Maybe she was everything to him.

Now that—that I understand.



*

As I walk home to the apartment that evening, my phone pings with an email.

It’s from my sister.





21





Andrew



Laini is going to be in Kyoto in four days. She has business there, meeting with a design studio her film company contracts with. We make lunch plans, and I plan to spend the next few days with Holland. Three days of unstructured time, with hours spilling before us. It feels like the summer we were together, but it also feels entirely new because we go places neither one of us have ever been.

We visit a tranquil fish pond where we give nicknames to many of the fish.

“That orange one? He’s Fred,” I say.

“The yellow one is Carl.”

I point to a blue fish. “She’s definitely a Jen.”

“Fish should always have standard human names,” she agrees.

“But telling them apart remains the challenge.”

“Do you think the fish can tell each other apart though?”

I consider this, furrowing my brow as I study the creatures zipping through the placid water. “Probably. I bet Jen says to herself, ‘Oh I have a lunch appointment with Carl at noon. We’re going to eat some . . .’” I trail off, trying to remember if fish eat plants, algae, or something else.