Unbreak My Heart(36)

Her eyes glint playfully. “Smaller fish. They’re cannibals.”

“I believe that makes them carnivores.”

“Tomorrow, let’s be herbivores. I have an idea for a lunch place.”

The next day we try to find a ramen shop that’s been lauded on food blogs, but we wind up so twisted and turned around we figure it was never meant to be. Especially since we stumble across a lunch spot that serves ice-cream-stuffed bread.

I point to my empty plate. “Now this was meant to be.”

“This is last meal–worthy.”

As I settle the check, my phone rings. I grab it to hit ignore, since I don’t want to be rude and answer it in a quiet restaurant, but it’s the doctor’s office.

I mouth Dr. Takahashi to Holland, and she shoos me out.

“Hello?” My voice doesn’t sound like my own.

I expect the receptionist, but it’s the man himself. “Good afternoon. This is Dr. Takahashi.”

I straighten my spine when I hear the deep timbre of his voice. “Good afternoon, sir.” He’s definitely a sir.

My pulse is rocketing, and I’m all raw nerves as he says things like doctor-patient confidentiality and I don’t typically do this.

Then the next words come, and they’re beautiful. “But I understand this is important, and for you I can step outside the bounds. I return at the end of next week. Can you meet me the next Monday at one? The first Monday in July.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Thank you so much,” I say, and I’m overjoyed that he’s bending for me. “I’ll see you then.”

The why—the very thing I came for. He’s the star witness in the case I’m trying to crack, and I hope he can finally tell me the answer to clue number three.

When Holland leaves the restaurant, she looks at me expectantly.

I hold my arms out wide, smiling. “I’ve been granted an audience a week from Monday with the good doctor.”

She squeals and claps then throws her arms around me.

I don’t know that this is hug-worthy, but for the chance to get a little closer, I’ll deem it so.



*

At night, we go our separate ways.

That’s always hard. Watching her fade into the crowd. I want to reach out and yank her back to me.

But I’m starting to understand she’s not leaving each night—she’s waiting for me.

Maybe she’s waiting for me to see my sister. The doctor. Or maybe to find all the answers.

It’s possible she’s waiting for something of her own.

Perhaps these days together—from the first day at the market, to the next along the canal, to the fishpond and ramen adventures—are part of what she needs too.

Whatever it is she’s waiting for, I love her more for it.

Don’t get me wrong—if she invited me up to her place, I’d be there in a nanosecond or less.

But she doesn’t invite me to stay the night.

I don’t invite her either. I also don’t take any more painkillers. I find I’m not craving them as much.

Maybe that’s because I know I’ll see her in the morning.



*

The next day we visit a clone factory that makes life-size dolls of yourself. “For only seventeen hundred and fifty dollars, you too can make a three-D version of your head perched atop a veritable android body,” I say, as we try not to crack up or freak out while surveying the replicas.

“I feel like that’s a little, how shall we say, self-indulgent?”

That afternoon, we take the subway to Ginza to check out the capsule apartments.

“Could you do it? Live in one of those?” Holland points to one of the hundred or so box-like rooms protruding from a tower, like Tetris blocks haphazardly arranged.

“You mean if we were in a post-apocalyptic society and that was the only option?”

She laughs. “Sure. Or if you were relocated to the moon, like in that sci-fi book, and you had to live in a prison-cell-sized room.”

“I suppose if I had to, I would. But generally, I try to avoid situations where I need to live in a capsule,” I say, as we turn away from the odd building. “I kind of like space, and sun, and beaches.”

I like, too, that we’ve fallen into this rhythm—checking out the city together as if we’re on a vacation. It sure seems like one. Her new job hasn’t started yet, and I’m taking time off. I called Don Jansen yesterday. He was kind, but quick—“All is well,” he’d told me. Of course all is well.

She scoffs. “If you like space, you’re in the wrong city.”

Am I? In the wrong city? Maybe I’m merely playing pretend with her, experiencing a slice of life for a few days, or weeks, before we have to say goodbye again.

I know there’s an end date. But now I feel it, even more powerfully than I did a few days ago. I want to ask what happens when I return to California, but I don’t want to crush whatever this tender new thing is between us. Nor do I want to ignore what seems to be building.

I choose an easier way into the topic of us. “It’s been fun—these last few days,” I say as we pass a shoe store selling high-top Converse shoes decorated with superheroes.

“It has been. It’s funny because I thought it would feel all mission, mission, mission. But it doesn’t.”