The muscles on either side of her jaw twitched. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this. I was just trying to find out if you’re okay.”
I wasn’t okay—of course I wasn’t okay. The tears had broken down the doors. I was really crying now. I was, as a matter of fact, falling apart. At the seams.
“Why did you even bring me here?” I asked. “Are you trying to make me upset about Dad, too? Are you trying to remind me how worthless and alone I am?”
“Don’t be selfish,” Alison said, more annoyed than frustrated now. “I’m here, too. Worthless, check. Alone, check.”
“No.” I wiped tears from my mouth, and my hand came back smudged red. “I’m not like you.”
“What do you want me to say to that?” Alison said.
I stood up and pushed my tray across the table. “Nothing, okay? I just—I don’t want you to say anything.”
I went into the bathroom, found an empty stall, and sat on top of the toilet seat. There was a speaker mounted on the wall to my right—an Otohime—and I waved my hand in front of it until the polite sound of running water began. I cried so hard, holding my Musée d’Orsay tote against my chest, curled over it. I cried until my throat was scratchy and my head throbbed. Until I was sure Alison wasn’t coming to get me.
Until I was sure I was alone.
CHAPTER 15
WEDNESDAY
MY PHONE STARTED RINGING.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. It was probably Alison, calling to tell me to grow up or pull myself together or some hypocritical bullshit like that. I dug around in my tote and gripped the phone in my hand, waiting to see if the muffled ringing would stop.
It did. Thank God. I’d already had my daily quota of my sister’s judgmental self-righteousness. She’d been like that practically my whole life, ever since Dad left. Although, in fairness, it was better when we were little kids. She was more protective of me then. We’d walk hand in hand through Charles de Gaulle airport every January, Alison shooting death glares at anyone who tutted at me for crying. But as we got older, things got worse.
She said she was sick of how I put up with Dad. She said he was a Russian nesting doll of disappointment, each disappointment leading to another even when you thought it wasn’t physically possible. The phone calls that never happened, the sporadic e-mails, the summers he said we could come stay with him until he decided to visit friends in Vienna instead. The angry whispered phone calls we’d overhear Mom having with him late at night. The way she punctuated every word when she said he was letting. Us. Down. Again.
Things changed after he got remarried. He moved into a house outside the city center, in an area full of small brick houses and kids who’d bike around the quartier all day long. He never backed out of having us to visit. He called us once a week. At least.
And then, four years ago, when Mom said we were moving back to Tokyo, my parents gave me a choice: I could go to Tokyo with Mom, or I could live in Paris instead. Dad and Sylvie had a decent-sized house, and there was an American school I could go to, and that way I could stay in one place until I graduated.
I’d chosen Paris. Because it was the only thing that hadn’t changed since my parents got divorced. And I had this theory that maybe—possibly—it could also be home. Until the babies. Until Mom had to sit me down and explain it wasn’t going to work out. Not then, anyway.
And even though I wished it wouldn’t get to me, it totally got to me. I’d wanted a life in France. I’d wanted to slice out the times I’d spent with Dad—watching Hitchcock movies, eating falafel in the Marais, hanging outside cathedrals in the evenings waiting for the bells to ring—and make those times last beyond four weeks a year.
And that, Alison couldn’t understand. She couldn’t understand why I’d pick Dad, why I’d even imagine picking him.
“You realize he’s not our actual parent,” she’d say for the hundredth time. “Just because he acts like this Cool Guy, that doesn’t mean he is. That doesn’t change the fact that he ditched us in the first place.”
“He didn’t,” I’d reply. “He left Mom. They left each other.”
Someone else came into the bathroom, yanking me from my thoughts. I took a deep breath and walked out. Thankfully, Alison wasn’t in the café anymore, or on the observation deck. I stood by a window and closed my eyes, imagining the gray buildings and the traffic and the rain outside, all of it utterly silent behind glass.
A part of me wanted to go find Jamie, even though I knew that was crazy. But I could feel the strings connecting me to my life snapping one by one. I was floating in the air, untethered, and I needed something to grab onto.
My phone started to ring again. This time, I scrambled to pull it out of my bag, Jamie’s name thrumming in my thoughts. But it wasn’t him or Alison or Mika or even my mom.
It was David.
By the time I got to Shibuya, it was after six. The real reason you’re here, I told myself, is you don’t want to be alone, you pathetic, needy loser.
When I’d answered David’s phone call back at Tokyo Tower, the plan had been to hang up on him in twenty seconds. But then he told me that Caroline had dumped him. Then he told me, in an even sadder voice—one that was shaky and nearly transparent—that he wanted to see me. That he missed me.
And that had broken down my last defense.
David was at Smiley’s, an America-themed restaurant that served a plethora of huge drinks and many-layered hamburgers and had black-and-white photos of old Hollywood stars covering the walls. It was in a knot of narrow streets too small for cars to drive down and crowded with konbinis, karaoke places, cafés, and boutiques.
David was on the second floor of the restaurant, at a table with his back to the window. A glass of something pink and frothy sat in front of him—and Jamie sat across from him.