by Angie Kim
* * *
WHEN MARY (then Meh-hee) was a year old, after Young told him of their baby’s glee at seeing balloons for the first time, Pak brought some home from a work event, carrying them on the crowded subway and bus. This made him late getting home—he said he’d had to wait more than thirty minutes for the trains to clear so they wouldn’t pop—but when he got home, Meh-hee squealed with delight, toddled on her fat legs across the room, and wrapped her tiny arms around the balloons, as if to hug them. Pak guffawed and acted like a clown, bopping the balloons against his head while making goofy noises, as Young stood by, wondering who this man was, not at all who she’d assumed him to be until that moment (and who he continued to be except around their daughter): a practical, serious man who tried to exude an air of quiet dignity, who rarely told jokes or lost himself in laughter.
It was the same feeling she had now, looking at Pak and telling herself that this man—glaring at Shannon with veins popping in his forehead and sweat dampening his hair into a droopy flop—was the same man who’d brought home balloons bigger than their baby’s head. Except back then, the he’s-a-different-man-than-I-thought realization had been figurative—the welcome discovery of a previously unseen side of her husband—whereas now it was literal: Pak had not, in fact, been what she thought he was, the wellness-center manager and HBOT expert he pretended to be.
As Pak wheeled down from the stand for recess, Young tried to catch his eyes, but he avoided her. He looked almost relieved when Abe stepped in, saying they needed to prepare for his redirect, and wheeled him away without a glance her way.
Redirect. More questions to Pak, more lies explaining away the lies he’d already told. Young felt her stomach churn, acid lurching up her esophagus to the back of her throat. She bent forward, trying to hold down the contents of her stomach, and swallowed hard. She needed to get out of here; she couldn’t breathe.
Young grabbed her purse and told Mary she didn’t feel well. Must be something she ate, she said, and hurried out, trying not to stumble. She knew she should tell Mary where she was going, but she didn’t know herself. She only knew she needed to get away. Right now.
* * *
SHE WAS DRIVING too fast. The road out of Pineburg was an unpaved country road that, on rainy days like today, turned muddy and slippery. But it felt calming to take the hairpin curves at top speed, having to turn the steering wheel with both hands while pumping the brake, the out-of-control exhilaration of her body sliding into the door. If Pak were here, he’d yell at her to slow down, drive like a proper mother, but he was far away and Young was alone. Alone to focus on the feel of the tires crunching the gravel beneath, the rain pattering on the car’s rooftop, the thick trees forming a tunnel high overhead. Her nausea abated and she could breathe again.
When the creek alongside the road was bloated, like today, it reminded her of Pak’s home village outside Busan. She’d said this once, but Pak said not to be ridiculous, it was nothing like his village, and he accused her of being a city person to whom anything remotely rural all looks the same. And it was true that there were vineyards here instead of rice paddies; deer, not goats. But the water covering the rice paddies—that was the exact shade Miracle Creek turned during storms: the light brown of old chocolate gone crumbly. That was the thing about being nowhere like this; there was nothing to orient you to place and time, and you could be transported to the other side of the globe, to a time long past.
It had been in Pak’s village where they’d had their first fight. They’d gone right after their engagement, to pay respects to his parents. Pak was nervous; he was convinced that she, who’d always lived in high-rises with indoor plumbing and central heating, would hate his home. What Pak didn’t understand was that she actually liked his village, the tranquility of escaping the chemical-scented smog and construction noises from every corner of Seoul as it remade itself for the Olympics. Stepping outside the car in the village, she smelled the sweet stench of compost—like kimchi when you first opened the sealed jar after days of fermentation. She scanned the hills, the kids running around the creek beds where their moms were washing clothes on wooden boards, and said, “It’s hard to believe you come from a place like this.” Pak took it as belittling, as confirmation of his long-simmering belief that Young’s family (and, by extension, Young herself) regarded him as “beneath” her, when in fact Young meant it as a compliment, a tribute to his raising himself from squalor to the university. The fight had ended with Pak saying he was going to refuse her father’s offer of a dowry as well as the sales job at her uncle’s electronics company. “I don’t need charity,” he’d said.
Remembering this now, Young gripped the steering wheel. Something ran across the road—a raccoon?—and she veered, sending a tire thumping off the road and the car skidding toward a giant oak. She braked hard and turned, but the car kept sliding, slipping, slowing too slowly. She pulled on the parking brake. The car lurched to a stop, and her head jerked back.
The tree trunk was directly in front of the car, centimeters away from the bumper, and—yes, she knew it was inappropriate, but she couldn’t help it—she guffawed. It must have been the panic and relief, mixing into a bizarre sense of triumph. Invincibility. She breathed to calm herself down, watching the rainwater meander around the tree’s knots and gnarls, and she thought of Pak, her proud husband, fired less than a year after his family left for another country. They’d talked infrequently in those four years of separation—international calls were expensive and their work schedules incompatible—and she herself had avoided bad news in those calls. Was she surprised that he hadn’t wanted to expose his shame over the phone or in an e-mail? Sitting here, away from the immediacy of her shock at his deceit, Young’s anger began to crumble away at the edges, displaced by sympathy. Yes, she could see how easy it would have been to justify keeping silent about something happening literally a world away, something she could have done nothing about. Maybe she could even forgive it.
But beyond all that, there was still the matter of the balloons. The thing was, Pak knew Mylar balloons could short power circuits. Probably every Korean parent did. Household items causing electrical accidents were popular science-fair entries in Korea—a boy had won Mary’s fifth-grade competition with an exhibit featuring Mylar balloons, hair dryers falling in tubs, and worn power cords starting fires—and she’d been surprised that most Americans seemed to have no idea. (Then again, America was low on international science-education rankings.) And Pak had been at a balloon store within hours of the outage. But did that mean he caused it? It made no sense. And what of Pak’s smoking? A few times last summer, she thought she smelled smoking, but it had been so faint, she’d thought it must be from neighbors walking their dogs and smoking nearby. And if he really had lost his job in Korea, how had he managed to save up so much money before coming to America?
She shut her eyes and shook her head hard, hoping to clear these thoughts, but the questions seemed to bounce off her skull into one another, multiplying with each impact and tearing into her brain, leaving her dizzy. A squirrel jumped onto her car hood and peered through the windshield, its head tilted sideways like a child examining fish in a bowl and asking, What in the world are you doing?
She needed answers. She released the brakes, backed away from the tree, and faced the road. If she turned left, she could get back to the courthouse before recess was over, back to her husband’s side. But there would be no answers there. Only more lies, leading to more questions. And now, when Mary and Pak were both away, was the perfect opportunity, the only opportunity, to do what she needed. No more waiting to be fed someone else’s vague, nonsensical answers. No more watching and trusting.
She turned right. She needed to search for the answers. On her own.
* * *
THE STORAGE SHED was on the edge of their property, within spitting distance of the utility pole where the balloons got stuck that day. When Young stepped inside, smells she couldn’t begin to identify assaulted
her, pungent, dank, and sour. The rain pelted the aluminum roof in fast micro-beats like snare drumming, and water dripped through cracks onto the rotting floorboards in bass-drum beats. Tools and dead leaves littered the ground, camouflaged by a shroud of dust, rust, and mold, which had congealed into green-black slime in the corners.
She wondered how long she’d have to stand still before spiders started crawling on her. One year of neglect—a drizzly autumn followed by one hurricane, four snowstorms, and a summer of record-shattering humidity levels. That was all it had taken to transform their years in Seoul and Baltimore into this pile of forgotten items in varying states of decay. There was no attic or closet in their shack. If Pak was hiding anything, it had to be here.
She walked to the corner pile of three moving boxes and pulled off the trash bag on top, its former transparency veiled by dried cobwebs. Chalky dust rose like mist before the air’s dampness weighed it down into a free fall, and Young smelled something dank, like earth buried deep getting dug up and hitting air for the first time.
It was in the third box—the bottom one, the least accessible—that she found it. The top two boxes were nearly empty, but the third was full of old philosophy textbooks she’d forgotten she’d kept. If she’d just riffled through, she’d have missed the item, wrapped neatly inside a paper bag and nestled between similarly sized books: the tin case from the grocery store where they stored loose cigarettes from damaged packs, which she’d had the idea to sell for fifty cents apiece. After she informed the welfare customers that food stamps couldn’t buy cigarettes but that she couldn’t prevent their using change from food-stamp purchases to buy singles, sales went way up and she started having to open perfectly fine packs to keep up with demand.
The last time she’d seen this case was during their move here. It had been on top of sweaters waiting to be packed, and she’d opened it to see it full of loose cigarettes. She asked Pak why he was bringing it—hadn’t he said he was quitting?—and he said he didn’t want to throw away perfectly good cigarettes, there must be a hundred in there. “What, you’re saving cigarettes to pass down to our grandkids?” She laughed. He smiled, his eyes not meeting hers, and she told him that actually, it was part of the store inventory, which belonged to the owners. She asked him to put it with the things they needed to return. That was the last time she’d seen the case—in Baltimore, in Pak’s hands, as he took it to deliver to the Kangs. And now here it was, in another state, deliberately hidden from view.
Young took the tin case out of the paper bag and yanked open the lid. Like the last time she saw it, slim rolls of cigarettes neatly lined the box like soldiers, but on top were two packs of Doublemint gum (Pak’s favorite) and a travel-size can of Febreze (“ELIMINATES ODORS”).
Young slapped the lid shut and looked at the moving box. What else was hiding in there?
She picked up the whole box. It was heavy, its bottom grimy with mold, but she gripped tighter, lifted, and turned it upside down. Everything fell out, sending a plume of dust up and dried cobwebs scattering all around. She hurled the empty box at the wall—it felt good, hearing it smack, though not as satisfying as the deep thuds of the heavy books pummeling the ground, one after the other—and scanned the items looking for … what? Receipts for balloons? Matches from 7-Eleven? H-Mart notes? Something. But there was nothing. Just Korean books, all around her, some torn from the impact of the fall, and one trio of books that had somehow fallen together, as if glued, and ended up in a neat stack.
Young stepped over to the three books. Once closer, she could see: the middle book wasn’t lying flat. Something was inside it, making it bulge. She touched the top book with her sandal’s tip—cautiously, as if the books were poisonous snakes that looked dead but might simply be sleeping—and kicked with just enough force to knock it off the tower. She bent down and reached for the second book, now on top. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, her favorite book in college. Which meant the thing making it bulge must be—yes, opening the book, she could see the familiar paper folded inside—her notes for her master’s thesis comparing Rawls, Kant, and Locke as applied to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. She’d never finished it; she’d stopped at her mother’s insistence (“No husband wants a wife more educated than him; it would humiliate him!”), and she’d forgotten she’d kept it. She flung it to the side and flipped through the bottom book. Nothing.
It wasn’t until Young checked all the books that she realized she’d been holding her breath. She closed her eyes and breathed out, relieved by the expulsion of stale air from her lungs, the tingling of her fingers that meant oxygen was resaturating her body. She’d expected to find something else, been sure of it to the point of dread. But really, what had she found? Evidence that Pak hadn’t quit smoking and had pilfered (if you could call it that) fifty dollars’ worth of cigarettes? So what? Yes, he kept secrets from time to time. What husband didn’t? He smoked, and after the explosion, he decided to hide his smoking out of fear of being unfairly judged. Was that so wrong?
She checked her watch. 2:19. Time to return to court. She’d take the tin case and find a quiet time to confront Pak about it. No, not confront—that was too harsh a word. Ask. Discuss. Yes, she’d show it to him and see what he’d say.
Reaching for the tin case, her hands shook slightly, and she had to chuckle at herself, the level of panic she’d worked herself up to, so sure she’d uncover incontrovertible evidence of her husband as a liar. No, it was more than that. Now that the moment was over, she could admit it; she’d actually expected to find proof that her husband, the gentle man who loved her and their daughter, the man who jumped into fire for his patients, was a murderer. “Sahr-een. Bang-hwa,” Young said, out loud. Murder. Arson. She felt small for having thought it, having allowed it to enter even her unconscious. A bad wife.
She grabbed the case and picked up the paper bag it came in. She opened the bag to put the case back inside it when she noticed something. She reached in. It was a pamphlet in Korean, Requirements for Reentry to South Korea, paper-clipped to the business card of a Realtor in Annandale and a handwritten note in Korean: How exciting that you’re moving back. I hope the pamphlet is helpful. Enclosed are some listings meeting your requirements. Please call anytime.
A stapled document was behind the pamphlet. Listings of apartments in Seoul, all for units with immediate availability. She turned back to the first page. Next to Search date was 08/08/19. The Korean date format for August 19, 2008.
Exactly a week before the explosion, Pak had been planning to move them back to Korea.
TERESA
TWO DAYS AFTER THE EXPLOSION, she overheard people discussing “The Tragedy,” as they called it in those initial days. She’d been in the hospital cafeteria, drinking coffee—or rather, stirring and pretending to drink it.
“It’s a miracle two of those kids survived,” said a woman’s voice—low-pitched and raspy, which Teresa was sure was deliberate, a woman trying to sound either sexy or like a man.
“Yup, sure is,” a man’s voice responded.
“Makes you think, though—God sure has a strange sense of humor.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the kid who’s pretty much normal is the one who ends up dead, while the autistic kid’s injured but lives, and the kid with severe brain damage is totally fine. It’s ironic.”
Teresa focused on her stirring, circling the spoon faster and faster, the white bits of congealed cream swept up in its torrents. She could almost hear the liquid rush down the spiral; a buzzing whirl filled her ears, overtaking the cafeteria noise. She stirred faster, harder, ignoring the coffee splashing over the rim and wetting her hands, willing the coffee cyclone to reach the bottom of the mug.
Something knocked the spoon out of her grip. She blinked and, somehow, the mug was on its side, the coffee everywhere. The buzzing ended, and in the silence she heard an echo of a clang, like an auditory afterimage. She looked up. Everyone was looking at her, no one and nothing m
oving except for the spilled coffee creeping outward toward the table’s edge.
“Here, ma’am. You okay?” the low-pitched woman said, slapping down napkins to form a dam between the coffee and the edge. The woman handed her one, and Teresa said, “Sorry. I mean, thanks.” The woman said, “It’s nothing.” She put her hand on Teresa’s and said again, “It was nothing, really,” her eyes sliding downward and a flush blooming on her cheeks, and Teresa knew she recognized her as the mom of the ironically fine girl.
The low-pitched woman turned out to be Detective Morgan Heights, and Teresa saw her now, walking to court after lunch. For some reason she couldn’t understand, Teresa felt a hot flush of shame every time she remembered the detective’s words in the cafeteria, what everyone probably thought: that Rosa, by virtue of being the most disabled, should’ve been the one who died. How fair that would’ve been. How logical. Clean. Get rid of the defective kid with the ravaged brain, the one who can’t talk or walk, the one who might as well be dead anyway.
Teresa positioned her umbrella to hide herself from Detective Heights. Standing in line to enter the courthouse, she heard someone say, “They might institutionalize him. He says the fecal smearing’s gotten worse. And the school’s having to use a straitjacket, his head banging’s gotten so bad.” Another voice said, “Poor thing. He’s lost his mother. No wonder he’s acting out, but—” Three teenagers got in line, drowning out the voices with their loud chatter.
