by Angie Kim
Young narrowed her eyes, as if trying to decide something. Finally, she said, “Abe found the person who took the insurance call.”
Pak felt burning in his eyes, and he fought his need to blink, to look away.
“The caller spoke perfect English, no accent. It couldn’t have been you.”
Thoughts whirred in panicky speed, but he forced himself to stay calm. Denial. He had to stick to that. “Obviously, this person’s wrong. You can’t expect someone on hundreds of calls a day to remember all the voices a year later.”
Young put something on the table. “I went to see the Realtor, from the Seoul listings. She remembered them very well. She said it’s unusual for people to move back to Korea, and even more unusual for a young girl to be calling.”
Pak forced himself to keep his eyes on Young, to intensify the indignation in his voice. “That’s why you think I’m lying? A few strangers misremembering voices from a year ago?”
Young didn’t answer, didn’t raise her voice to match his. In that same gratingly calm tone, she said, “Last night, when I showed you the listings, you looked so surprised. I thought you were surprised I’d found your hiding place, but that wasn’t it. You’d never seen those listings before.” Pak shook his head, but she kept talking. “And the tin case, too.”
“Now, you know that was mine. You handed it to me yourself in Baltimore, and I—”
“And you put it with the rest of the pile for the Kangs and gave it to Mary to deliver.” Pak felt fear in his bowels, crawling and gnawing. He’d never told her that. How did she know?
As if in answer, she said, “I called them today. Mr. Kang remembered Mary dropping everything off and said how fortunate we are to have such a helpful daughter.” Young glanced at Mary. “Of course, they didn’t know she kept the tin case with the cigarettes for herself. No one did. Until last night, you thought that case was in Baltimore.”
Bitter saliva slithered up his throat, and he swallowed. “I did give Mary the pile for the Kangs, that’s true. But I took out the case first. I’m the one who put it in the shed.”
“That’s not true,” Young said with an absolute certainty that churned his stomach. If she was bluffing, she was giving the performance of her life. But how could she know, with no doubts? He said, “You don’t know that. You’re guessing, and you’re wrong.”
Young turned to Mary. “Teresa heard you talking on the phone in the shed.” Mary kept staring at the tea, gripping the mug so tightly he thought it might break. “I know you sent the listings to a friend’s house. I know you used your father’s ATM card. I know you hid everything in the bottom box in the shed.” Young shifted her gaze to Pak. “I know,” she said.
He wanted to keep denying, but too many specifics were piling up. He had to admit some things, maintain credibility. “All right, the listings were hers. She wanted to move back to Seoul, and she got them to show me. So now she’s feeling guilty, like that caused everything, when I’m the one who came up with the arson plan. So I wanted to take the blame for everything, try to remove her from this completely. Can you understand that?”
“I understand wanting to take all the blame, but you can’t. I know you. You’d never start a fire around your patients, no matter how small or contained. You’re too careful.”
He had to keep talking to keep her from saying the words he was terrified she’d say. “I wish you were right, but I did do it. You have to accept that. I don’t know what you think really happened, but you seem to think Mary was involved somehow. But you heard me confessing to her this morning, how shocked she was. We didn’t know you were there. We weren’t staging our conversation.”
“No, I don’t think you were. I believe you were telling her the truth.”
“So you know I did everything. The cigarette, matches, I mean, what more—”
“I thought about it. A lot,” Young said. “Everything you said you did, over and over. Picking the spot, gathering sticks, building the mound, putting the matches in, the cigarette on top—so much detail about every aspect of setting the fire. Except one thing.”
He didn’t say anything, couldn’t. Couldn’t breathe.
“The most important thing. And I kept thinking, why would he leave that out?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about actually starting the fire.”
“Of course I did. I lit the cigarette,” he said, but the familiar memory rushed to him. His panic that night when the protesters called, taunting him that they’d be back and they wouldn’t stop. Seeing their flyer and getting the idea to make it look like they tried to burn down his business. Remembering that hollow tree stump in the woods he’d come across, the used cigarettes and matches he’d seen there. Running to it, retrieving the fullest matchbook and longest cigarette among the discarded bunch. Building the mound. Lighting the cigarette, letting it burn for a minute. Then putting his gloved finger on the tip, putting it out.
As if she could see into his mind, Young said, “You lit it but you put it out. You wanted the police to find it just like that—make it look like the protesters tried to start a fire but the cigarette went out too early and it failed. You didn’t start the fire. You never intended to.”
He felt fear—so hot it felt cold—unfurl across his body in strands, overtaking it. “That makes no sense. Why would I confess to doing something I didn’t do?”
“As a decoy,” she said. “To keep my focus away from where you’re afraid it might go if I keep digging.”
He breathed. Swallowed.
“I know the truth,” she said. So quietly he strained to hear. “Have the decency to be honest with me. Don’t make me say it.”
“What do you know?” he said. “What do you think you know?”
Young blinked and turned toward Mary. Her composure broke then, her face grimaced in pain. He hadn’t been sure until that moment. But the way she looked at their daughter—so tenderly, with all the sadness of the world—he knew. She’d figured everything out.
Before he could do anything, before he could tell her to stop, don’t say anything, don’t say those devastating words and make them real, Young reached out to Mary’s face and brushed away her tears. Gently, delicately, like she was ironing silk.
“I know it was you,” his wife said to their daughter. “I know you set the fire.”
MARY
AT 8:07 P.M. ON AUGUST 26, 2008, eighteen minutes before the explosion, Mary was leaning against a weeping willow after having run for a minute straight through the woods. After Janine threw cigarettes, matches, and a crumpled note at her, Mary had said in the calmest tone she could manage, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” pivoted away from her, and walked in the opposite direction. One foot, then the other, focusing on keeping her pace steady, fighting her instinct to run and scream—forcing her nails into her palms and pressing her tongue between her teeth, applying more and more pressure until just to that point of breaking through and drawing blood. After fifty steps (she’d counted), she could no longer stand it and started running, the fastest she could—muscles burning in her calves, tears blurring her vision—until she felt dizzy and her legs went rubbery, and she crumpled against the tree and cried.
Whore, Janine had called her. Stalking slut. “You can bat your eyes and twirl your hair and act like some innocent girl, but let’s be honest, we both know what you were doing,” she’d said. Sitting here, away from Janine—the role model her father had invoked as who she should aspire to be, why he’d wanted her educated in America—it was so easy to think of everything she could, should, have said. It was Matt who brought cigarettes and got them smoking. Matt who started writing notes to meet up. And yes, she’d been lonely here and grateful for his company, but seduce? Steal? This man who’d pretended to be a caring friend before exposing his true motives, who held her down and pushed his tongue into her mouth as she tried to scream out, who got on top of her and forced her hand ins
ide his pants, wrapping it around himself so hard it hurt, using it like an object to pump up and down, up and down?
But she didn’t say anything. Just stood there, listening to Janine’s ugly words, letting them penetrate her skin and burrow into her brain, spreading their tendrils and taking root. And now, even as she told herself that Janine was wrong, that Matt was the one at fault here and she the victim, a voice inside her whispered, hadn’t she liked the attention? Hadn’t she noticed him staring from time to time and felt the satisfaction of knowing she was desirable, perhaps even more so than Janine? And on her birthday, hadn’t she worn a sexy outfit, asked him to drink with her, and when he started kissing her—softly, romantically, exactly how she’d imagined her first real kiss should be—hadn’t she kissed him back, and for a moment, before the night’s dark turn, hadn’t she imagined a fairy-tale ending with flashes of I love you, peering into eyes, and other cringe-inducing clichés she couldn’t bear to think about now?
She’d thought the humiliation of her birthday night had killed that pathetically naïve hope, but Matt’s weeklong campaign of writing multiple daily notes and following her to SAT class had somehow revived it. She’d agreed to meet him, and after sneaking in chugs of her father’s rice grain alcohol for courage and walking to the creek, there had been a microsecond when a part of her—the tiniest speck in a nauseatingly Disney-fied subsection of her brain—had pictured Matt standing by the creek, waiting to declare love, to confess his desperate inability to live without her, to explain his behavior on her birthday night as a never-to-be-repeated moment of insanity driven by inebriation mixed with passion. Right then, with the soju sloshing in her stomach, her heart thumping in anticipation—that’s when she’d seen Janine. The shock of that moment, the mortifying realization that everything had been a setup for his wife to tell her off for him! Thinking about it now, pressing her forehead against the willow tree bark to stop the pain behind her eyes from spreading, shame frothed through her, filling and threatening to burst every organ, and she wished she could disappear, just run away and never face Matt or Janine again.
She heard a noise then. A distant knocking noise from the direction of her house. Janine. It had to be Janine knocking for her parents, to complain about their slutty daughter seducing and stalking her virtuous husband. She imagined them at the door, horror overtaking their faces as Janine showed them her notes and the cigarettes, depicting her as a pathetic girl sexually obsessed with her husband. Shame and fear flashed through her again at this thought, but something else, too. Anger. Anger at Matt, the man who’d taken her loneliness and twisted it into something sick, then lied to his wife about it. Anger at Janine, the woman who’d been so quick to assume her husband’s innocence without even stopping for Mary’s side of the story. Anger at her parents, who’d ripped her away from her home, her friends, and put her in this situation. Most of all, anger at herself that she’d let all this happen without fighting back. No. No more. She stood and marched toward her house. She would not let them judge her without hearing everything Matt had done.
It was then—walking to her house, her anger at her own past impotence mixing with her shame, the combination of that and her headache overpowering her—that she saw it: a small white stick by the back of the barn. A cigarette. Positioned perfectly to start a fire that would burn down the barn and destroy Miracle Submarine. A fire like the one she’d dreamed of just a week ago.
* * *
THE IDEA HAD COME on her seventeenth birthday. Right after Matt ran off after their night of drinking ended with The Thing (she couldn’t bear to label it), she’d retreated to her safe place amid the weeping willows, half sitting, half lying against a rock, chain-smoking cigarettes, trying to keep from crying or throwing up.
After she finished her third or fourth cigarette, she dropped it and reached for another. She was focusing on lighting the next one as quickly as possible—she needed the smoke to neutralize the smell lingering in her nostrils, a combination of the sickly sweetness of peach schnapps and the pungent fishiness of semen—while simultaneously keeping her head and torso absolutely still to keep the world from spinning and the alcoholic sludge in her stomach from lurching. But her fingers were still shaking and it was hard to see without moving her head, and as she lit the match, she dropped it.
The fire didn’t catch—it landed close to the water and fizzed out right away—but moving her eyes down to the ground, Mary noticed flames a few feet away; apparently, a cigarette she’d dropped earlier had landed on a pile of leaves. She knew she should stomp it out right away, but something stopped her. She crouched before the fire and watched it—orange, blue, and black waves whirling and growing—and remembered Matt’s teeth shoving against her lips, and his tongue, jabbing her lips open, forcing her No down her throat. She remembered him crushing her fingers onto his penis, using her hand like an object to pump and squeeze, up and down, each pump accompanied by a grunt that stank of fermented peach and made her cough into his tongue, and the lukewarm, viscous spurt of semen that clung even after she scrubbed her hand in the creek until it turned bright red, the scratch mark from his zipper a white line across her hand. She remembered how stupid she’d been with her SAT classmates earlier. After they all said they couldn’t make her birthday dinner, she said it was no problem, and actually, she was meeting up with a guy later anyway, a doctor, and when they teased her, said he sounded like an old perv who was just after sex, she said he was a gentleman, a friend who cared and listened to her problems and was going through a hard time himself. They’d laughed, called her naïve, and they’d been right.
She poured the rest of the schnapps onto the fire. Right when it hit, the flames whooshed, and she felt wild happiness that the flames would reach her, consume her, and destroy everything. Matt, her friends, her parents, her life. Gone.
The fire died out almost immediately, its pre-death expansion lasting a second, and she made sure it was completely out before leaving. But later that night, sleeping in the chamber, she’d dreamed of the fire, the flames from the willow grove spreading and engulfing the barn to destroy the business that kept them tied to this town she hated, to the man she wished would disappear. She didn’t think about it again after she woke up—she’d tried to wipe her mind clear of that night, had tried to keep busy with SAT studies and research into college and housing options in Seoul—but now, almost a week later, here it was, right next to the barn: a cigarette sticking out of a pyre of twigs and dried leaves, positioned precisely in the middle of an open book of matches. It felt like a gift to her, an offering. As if fate were calling to her, inviting her to light the cigarette, telling her to come on, go ahead, this was exactly what she needed right now, mere minutes after the humiliation of Matt’s wife screaming that she was a stalker and a whore, as shame and anger were searing her insides. Just burn it down and destroy it.
She walked toward it. Slowly, cautiously, as if toward a mirage that might disappear. She crouched in front of the mound and reached her shaking hand to pick up the cigarette. Somewhere in the back of her mind, it occurred to her that it was charred, as if someone had lit it but it had gone out before the pyre caught on fire, but the question of who and why wouldn’t come until later. After waking up in the hospital and for the next year of her life, she’d be consumed with it. But for now, she didn’t care. It didn’t matter. It only mattered that this cigarette was meant to be lit and the pyre meant to be in flames. She thought of the swoosh of the flames by the creek when the schnapps hit it, the warm comfort of the fire, and she wanted it again. Needed it.
She picked up the matchbook, tore a matchstick, and struck it. It lit, and she quickly placed the matchbook and cigarette in the middle of the mound. The matchbook caught fire in its entirety, and the cigarette burned, its tip a bright red. She felt a warmth deep in her chest, that same comfort, and she blew on the fire, gently, feeding the flames, encouraging the mound to catch, sending bits of ash from dried leaves floating lazily up the smoke. Her face grew h
ot, and she stayed until the entire mound was on fire, then she stood and backed away, step by step, watching the flames, willing them to get bigger, higher, hotter, to destroy this decrepit building and everything inside.
When she turned away to walk to her house, the magic of the moment, the surreal feeling of this not quite being real, zapped away. It was past 8:15, so the patients were all gone—and yes, the patient parking lot was empty, she checked, and besides, Janine had said the dive ended earlier—but what if her father was still in the barn, cleaning up? No, the barn was obviously empty as well; he always turned off the AC after cleaning, and the AC was off now, its loud fan silent, and the lights were off. Still, her heart thumped as she thought of what she’d done—arson, a crime, the police, jail, her parents—and she stopped, thought about going back and stomping out the fire before it got out of control.
“Meh-hee-yah. Meh-hee-yah!” Her mother’s yell came from inside the house, obviously annoyed she couldn’t find her. It felt like rocks hitting her in her chest, those caustic six syllables wrapped tight around a core of her mother’s disapproval, and just like that, Mary was furious again, the calm that came from lighting the fire and walking away gone. She turned and ran.
She was almost to the shed—she desperately needed a smoke, right now—when she saw her father outside, dialing his phone. He looked up and said, “Oh, good, I was about to call you. I need your help.” He put the phone to his ear and motioned for her to come. After a few seconds, he said into the phone, “You always think the worst of her, but she’s here, helping me. And the batteries are under the house kitchen sink, but don’t leave the patients. I’ll send Mary to grab them.” He turned and said to her, “Mary, go, right now. Take four D batteries to the barn,” then said back into the phone, “I’ll come in one minute and let the patients out. Remember not to say … Yuh-bo? Hello? Are you there? Yuh-bo!”
