by Angie Kim
When Abe stood, Young had a moment of residual hope, of expecting him to ask Matt how dare he lie, how dare he implicate an innocent man. But Abe spoke in a defeated voice, asking perfunctory questions about who else uses the H-Mart paper and how Matt couldn’t be sure of his explosion-to-hatch-opening estimate, and Young felt her body deflate, air rushing out of her like a punctured ball.
Young wanted to stand up and scream. Scream at the jurors that Pak was honorable, a man who literally threw himself into fire for his patients. Scream at Elizabeth’s lawyer that he wouldn’t risk killing himself and his daughter for money. Scream at Abe to fix this, that she’d believed him that every scrap of evidence pointed to Elizabeth.
The judge announced lunch recess, and the courtroom doors creaked open. Young heard it then. The sound of hammering in the distance. Thunk-clang, thunk-clang, matching the tha-dunk of her heartbeat pulsating in her temples, sending blood whooshing through her eardrums—resonant and magnified, as if underwater. Probably workers in vineyards. She’d seen them earlier, piling wooden posts by the hill. Stakes for new vines. There must’ve been loud bangs all morning. She just hadn’t heard them.
* * *
THEY WALKED FROM COURT to Abe’s office in single file—Abe in front, then Young pushing Pak’s wheelchair, Mary in back. The line they formed, led by a hulking man, and the crowds unzipping as they approached, as if repelled—Young felt like a criminal being paraded by an executioner through town, its people gawking and judging.
Abe marched them into a yellow building, down a dark hall, and into a conference room, and said to wait while he met with his staff. When the door closed, Young stepped closer to Pak. For twenty years, he’d towered above her, and it felt strange being above him now, seeing the hair whorl on top of his head. She felt braver. As if the act of tilting her face down opened some dam that usually blocked her words. “I knew this would happen,” she said. “We should’ve told the truth from the beginning. I told you we shouldn’t lie.”
Pak frowned and gestured with his chin toward Mary, who was looking out the window.
Young ignored him. What did it matter what Mary heard? She already knew they’d lied. They’d had to tell her—she’d been part of the story he concocted. “Mr. Spinum saw you,” Young said. “Everyone knows we were lying.”
“No one knows anything,” Pak said in a whisper, even though no one nearby could understand their rapid Korean. “It’s our word against his. You, me, and Mary against an old, racist man with thick glasses.”
Young wanted to grab his shoulders, to yell and shake him so hard that her words would penetrate his skull and rattle around his brain like a pinball. Instead, she dug her nails into her palms and forced her words to be quiet, having learned long ago that calm words penetrated her husband’s attention better than loud ones. “We can’t keep lying,” she said. “We didn’t do anything wrong. You just went out to check on the protesters, to protect us, and you left me in charge. Abe will understand that.”
“And what about the part where no one was there, leaving everyone sealed up in a burning chamber, unattended. You think he’ll understand that?”
Young slumped into the chair next to Pak. How many times had she wished she could go back and redo that moment? “That’s my fault, not yours, and I can’t live with you taking the blame to protect me. I feel like a criminal, lying to everyone. I can’t do this anymore.”
Pak put his hand on top of hers. Green veins meandered through the back of his hand and seemed to continue on hers. “We’re not the guilty ones here. We didn’t set the fire. It doesn’t matter where we were—we couldn’t have done anything to stop the explosion. Henry and Kitt would’ve died even if we were both there.”
“But if I’d turned off the oxygen in time—”
Pak shook his head. “I keep telling you, there’s residual oxygen in the tubes.”
“But the flames wouldn’t have been as intense, so if you’d opened the door right away, maybe we could have saved them.”
“You don’t know that,” Pak said, his voice gentle and calm. He reached under her chin and raised her face to meet his gaze. “The fact is, if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have turned off the oxygen at 8:20, either. You have to remember—TJ took off his helmet. Whenever he did that, I added extra time, to make up for the lost oxygen—”
“But—”
“—which means,” Pak continued, “that the oxygen would have been on, and the fire and explosion exactly the same, if I’d been there.”
Young closed her eyes and sighed. How many times had they gone around this same issue? How many hypotheticals and justifications could they throw at each other? “If we did nothing wrong, why not tell the truth?”
Pak clutched her hand, hard. It hurt. “We need to stick to our story. I left the barn. You’re not licensed. The policy is clear—breaking regulations like that is automatically considered negligence. And negligence means no payout.”
“Insurance!” Young said, forgetting to keep her voice down. “Who cares about that?”
“We need that money. Without it, we have nothing. Everything we’ve sacrificed, Mary’s future—all gone.”
“Listen.” Young knelt in front of him. Perhaps the act of looking down would help him take in her words. “They think you lied to cover up murder. That lawyer’s trying to send you to prison in Elizabeth’s place. Don’t you see how much worse this is? You could be executed!”
Mary gasped. Young had thought Mary was off in her own world, as she often was, but she was facing them. Pak glared at Young. “You’ve got to stop being melodramatic. Now you’ve got her scared for no reason.”
Young reached to squeeze her arms around Mary. She waited for Mary to shake her off, but Mary stayed still. “We’re worried about you,” Young said to Pak. “I’m being realistic, and you’re not taking this seriously enough.”
“I’m taking it seriously. I’m just being calm. You getting hysterical, gasping in the courtroom—did you see how everyone turned to look? That’s the kind of thing that makes me look guilty. Changing our story now is the worst thing we could do.”
The door opened. Pak glanced at Abe and continued in Korean, saying, “No one say anything. I’ll do the talking,” but in a relaxed tone, like he was talking about the weather.
Abe looked feverish. His face, normally the color of oiled mahogany, was a blotched russet, and a film of half-dried sweat matted his skin. When his eyes met Young’s, instead of his usual toothy smile, he looked away quickly as if in embarrassment. “Young and Mary, I need to talk to Pak alone. You can wait down the hall. There’s lunch there.”
“I want to stay. With my husband,” Young said, and put her hand on Pak’s shoulder, expecting a hint of gratitude for her support—a smile or nod, or maybe his hand on hers, like the night before. Instead, Pak frowned and said in Korean, “Just do what you’re told.” His words were quiet, almost whispers, but they had the sound of a command.
Young dropped her hand. She’d been foolish to think that just because of one moment of tenderness last night, Pak was no longer what he’d always been: a traditional Korean man who expected nothing but meek obedience from his wife in public. She left with Mary.
They were halfway down the hall when the door shut behind them. Mary stopped, looked around, and tiptoed back to the conference room.
“What are you doing?” Young said in a whispered yell.
Mary put her finger to her lips in a silent shhhhh and put her ear to the door.
Young looked down the hallway. No one else was around. She ran on tiptoes to join Mary and listen in.
There was no sound, which surprised Young. Abe was one of those people who didn’t like silence. She couldn’t remember a meeting that didn’t overflow with Abe’s words strung into one continuous sound with no pauses. So what did this mean, this silence? Was Abe being guarded and slow, carefully considering every word, because Pak was now a murder suspect?
Abe finally said, “Many things ca
me out today. Troubling things.” His words had the heft and forced evenness of a requiem.
Pak spoke immediately, as if he’d been waiting to speak. “I am suspect now?”
Young expected Abe to protest, No! Of course not! But there was nothing. Just the soft crunch-crunch of Mary gnawing on a thick strand of her hair, a bad habit that started their first year in America.
After a moment, Abe said, “You’re no more a suspect than anyone else.”
What did that mean? Abe said things like this a lot, things that were meant to be reassuring but, really, when you thought about it, left wiggle room the size of a cathedral. Like after the police investigated Pak for negligence and Abe said, “You’re as good as cleared.” You were either cleared or not—how could anything other than actually cleared be as good as cleared?
Abe continued. “There are some … inconsistencies. The insurance call, for one. Did you make it?”
“No,” Pak said. Young wanted to shout at Pak to elaborate, to say he had no reason to call because he already knew the answer. Before signing, she’d helped him translate the policy, and they’d laughed over the idiocy of American contracts taking multiple paragraphs to say obvious things even children know. She’d specifically pointed out the arson section. (“Two pages saying they won’t pay if you burn down your own property or get someone else to!”)
“You should know,” Abe said, “the company’s retrieving the recording of the call.”
“Good. That will prove I am not caller.” Pak sounded indignant.
Abe said, “Did anyone else have access to Matt’s phone during the morning dive?”
“No. Mary left house at 8:30 for SAT class. Young cleaned up breakfast. I was always alone for first dive, every day. But…” Pak’s voice trailed off.
“But what?”
“One day, Matt said he had Janine’s telephone, and Janine had his telephone. They exchanged, by mistake.” Young remembered. Matt had been upset; he’d almost skipped the dive to get his phone back right away.
“Was this the day of the call? The week before the explosion?”
“I am not sure.”
There was a long silence, then Abe said, “Did Janine know who your policy was with?”
“Yes,” Pak said. “She recommended the company. Same one her office use.”
“Interesting.” Something about this last exchange seemed to break Abe’s caution; his normal fast, up-and-down cadence—the vocal equivalent of merry-go-round horses—returned. “Now, this other business of your neighbor. Did you leave the barn that last dive?”
“No,” Pak said. His unequivocal denial made Young flinch, wonder who she’d married, this man who could lie so effectively, absolutely, with no hesitation.
“Your neighbor says he saw you outside for ten minutes before the explosion.”
“He is lying or his memory is wrong. I check electric lines that day, many times, check if power company is there to fix. But always during breaks. Never during dives.” Pak sounded confident, almost arrogant.
Abe, his stiffness fully broken, said, “Listen, Pak. If there’s anything you’re not telling me, now’s the time. You suffered a major trauma. It’s enough to make anyone fuzzy. It’s natural to get a few things wrong. You wouldn’t believe how many witnesses swear they remember perfectly and tell me X, then I tell them something somebody else said, and bam, they remember something they’d completely forgotten. The important thing is to come clean now, before you’ve testified. You just tell the jury everything the first time, it’ll be fine. You wait until later, though, that won’t fly. Suddenly, the jury wonders, What’s he hiding? Why’d he change his story? Then bam, Shannon screams there’s their reasonable doubt, and everything falls apart.”
“That will not happen. I am telling the truth.” Pak’s voice rose, got louder.
“You have to realize,” Abe said, “your neighbor’s very convincing. He was on the phone, telling his son about you fooling with the balloons in the power lines and whatnot. The son verified it. The phone records match up. Your story and theirs can’t both be true.”
“They are wrong,” Pak said.
“Now, what I can’t figure out,” Abe continued as if Pak hadn’t spoken, “is why you’d fight this. That’s a golden alibi right there, a neutral party verifying you were nowhere near where the fire started. Shannon can yell and scream all day long about you not opening the hatch, but none of that changes the fact that Elizabeth set the fire. So for my purposes, getting that woman in prison, I’m fine with what Spinum says. What I’m not fine with is you lying about it. Because you lying about anything makes me wonder what you’re covering up, you know?”
Mary started chewing her hair again, the sound of her teeth gnawing on her hair growing louder in the silence, more insistent, matching the rhythm of Young’s crescendoing heartbeat in her ears.
“I was in the barn,” Pak said.
Mary shook her head. Her face was one big frown, scrunched in agitation, and the scar across her cheek popped out, puffy and white. “We need to do something. He needs help,” Mary said in English.
“Your father told us to do nothing. We must do what he says,” Young said in Korean.
Mary looked at her, her mouth open as if to say something but unable to produce a sound. Young recognized the look. Right after Pak came to America, when he told them he’d decided to move them to Miracle Creek, Mary had fought with him, cried and yelled that she didn’t want to move to the middle of nowhere where she knew no one. When Pak scolded her for disrespecting her parents’ authority, she’d turned to Young. “Tell him,” she’d said. “I know you agree with me. You have a voice. Why can’t you use it?”
Young had wanted to. She’d wanted to shout that they were in America now, where she’d spent four years parenting, running a store, and handling finances all on her own, and Pak barely knew them anymore and certainly didn’t know America half as well as she did, so who was he to order her what to do? But the way he’d looked—bewildered anxiety blooming on his face, like a boy at a new school, wondering where he fit in—she’d seen how much the years of separation had stripped from him, his desperation to reestablish his role as head of the family. She’d ached for him. “I trust you to decide what’s best for our family,” she’d told Pak and seen on Mary’s face the same look as now: a mix of disappointment, contempt, and, worst of all, pity for her powerlessness. She’d felt small, as if she were the child and Mary the adult.
Young wanted to explain all this to her daughter now. She reached out for Mary’s hand, to guide her away, where they could talk. But before she could do anything, say anything, Mary turned, opened the door, and said in a loud, clear voice, “It was me.”
* * *
THE ANGER THAT Mary had acted like a child—without thinking first, with no regard for consequences—would come later. In the moment, though, what bubbled to the surface was envy. Envy that her daughter, a teenager, had the courage to act.
“What was you?” Abe said.
“Who Mr. Spinum saw, that was me,” Mary said. “I was out there before the explosion. My hair was up in a baseball cap like my dad wears, and I guess, from a distance, he thought I was my dad.”
“But you were in the barn,” Abe said, his frown deepening. “That’s what you’ve said all along, that you stayed with your dad until right before the explosion.”
Mary’s face blanched. Clearly, she hadn’t thought through how to reconcile their story with her new one. Mary looked to Young and Pak, her eyes darting in a panicked plea for help.
Pak came to her rescue and said in English, “Mary, the doctors say your memory will return slowly. Do you remember new something? You went outside to help Mom find batteries, maybe something else happened?”
Mary bit her lip, like she was trying not to cry, and slowly nodded. When she finally spoke, her words were halting and unsure. “I had a fight with my mom earlier—helping out more, cooking, cleaning … I figured … if we were alone, she’d just yel
l at me more, so I … didn’t go in the house. I remembered…” Mary’s brow furrowed in focused concentration, as if trying to recall a fuzzy memory. “I knew about the power lines, so … I went there instead. I thought maybe … I could free the balloons, but … I couldn’t reach the strings. So I came back.” She looked at Abe. “That’s when I saw smoke. So I went there, behind the barn, and then…” Mary’s voice broke off and she closed her eyes. A tear glided down her cheek, as if on command, accentuating the bumps and crevices of her scar.
Young knew that she should act the part of the mother aching for her daughter who, until now, had never talked about that night. That she should hug her, smooth her hair, do all the things mothers do to comfort their children. But she could only stand still, nauseated, worry coursing through her, sure that Abe must see right through Mary’s story.
But he didn’t. He bought it all—acted like it, anyway—and said this explained a lot, and of course it was understandable for memories to slowly rise to the surface, in dribs and drabs, like the doctors said. He seemed intensely relieved at hearing a plausible explanation for Mr. Spinum’s story, and if Abe had doubts about Mary’s story—how someone could, even from a distance, mistake a girl for a middle-aged man, or how to reconcile Mary’s few-minutes-by-the-power-lines timing with Mr. Spinum’s ten-plus minutes—he glossed over them with mutterings about failing eyesight, old white men thinking all Asians look the same, and teenagers losing track of time.
Abe said to Pak, “I don’t know why Shannon’s decided to pick on you. There’s no motive. Even if you wanted insurance money, why wouldn’t you wait until the chamber was empty? Why risk killing kids? It makes no sense. If it weren’t for this mix-up about you being outside, she’d have nothing on you.”
Mary let out a half chortle, half sob. “It’s my fault. If only I’d remembered before…” She looked at Abe, her face crinkled in pain. “I’m so sorry. This won’t hurt my dad, right? He didn’t do anything wrong. He can’t go to jail.”
