by Angie Kim
“Honey, you up?” Janine’s voice called, waking him. He clutched the blanket and turned over, pretending to still be asleep as she told him she was leaving early for the voice sample. He stayed still until she left. After he heard her car drive away, he went into the bathroom. He turned on the water and tried to scrub his underwear clean.
YOUNG
THE FIRST THING SHE NOTICED upon waking up was the sunlight. The crooked cutout that served as their window was too small to let in much light. But when the sun was in just the right position, like now—morning, when the sun climbed above the trees into the middle of their makeshift window, perfectly framed by the square hole—it surged in, the square beam of light so strong it looked almost solid for the first meter before diffusing into an ethereal brightness that flooded the whole shack and gave it a fairy-tale quality. Floating motes of dust glittered in the veil of sunlight. Birds chirped.
The thing about the backwoods was how dark it became on moonless nights like last night—the dark not just a lack of light, but its own presence with mass and shape. An inky blackness so absolute, it made no difference whether she opened or closed her eyes. For much of the night, she’d lain awake, listening to rain drumming the roof and breathing in dank air, and resisted the urge to shake Pak awake. She was a big believer in sleeping on problems before taking action. It was funny how American articles spouted the wisdom of resolving arguments at day’s end (“Never Go to Bed Mad!”), which was the opposite of common sense. Night was the worst time for fights—its gloom intensifying insecurities and heightening suspicions—whereas if you waited, you always woke up feeling better, more reasonable and charitable, the passing time and brightness of the new day cooling emotions and deflating their power.
Well, not always. For here it was, a new day—rain stopped, clouds gone, air lightened—but instead of last night’s worries seeming inconsequential, it was the opposite, as if the passage of time had cemented the reality of this changed world in which her husband was a liar and maybe even a murderer. In the surreal fuzziness of the night, there was the possibility of the new reality not being real; the morning’s clarity snatched that away.
Young got up. A note on Pak’s pillow read: I went outside for fresh air. I’ll be back by 8:30. She looked at her watch. 8:04. Too early for any of her plans to investigate Pak’s story—visit Mr. Spinum, their neighbor; call the Realtor who sent the Seoul listings; use the library computer to search for e-mails to/from Pak’s brother—except one: ask Mary exactly what she did with Pak the night of the explosion, minute by minute.
Young stomped twice outside Mary’s shower-curtained corner—their faux knock—and said, “Mary, wake up,” in Korean. It was a toss-up which would annoy Mary more, her speaking English (“No one can even understand what you’re saying!”) or Korean (“No wonder your English is so bad—you’ve got to practice more!”), but she didn’t want the handicap of using a foreign language for this talk. Switching from English to Korean doubled her IQ, gave her eloquence and control, and she’d need that to root out all the details. “Wake up,” she said louder, stomping again. Nothing.
Suddenly, she remembered: today was Mary’s birthday. In Korea, they’d made a fuss over her birthdays, decorating overnight to surprise her with signs and streamers when she awoke. Young hadn’t continued this in America—her store hours left no time for anything beyond basic necessities—but still, Mary might expect something special for her eighteenth birthday, a milestone year. “Happy birthday,” Young said. “I’m excited to see my eighteen-year-old daughter. Can I come in?”
There was nothing. No sheets rustling, no snores, no deep breaths of sleep. “Mary?” Young opened the curtain.
Mary wasn’t there. Her sleep mat was rolled up in the corner, same as last night, and her pillow and blanket were missing. Mary hadn’t slept here. But she’d returned last night. Headlights had streamed in the window about midnight, and the front door had rattled open. Had she left again, and Young hadn’t heard?
She ran out. The car was there, but Mary wasn’t inside. She ran to the shed. Empty. But there was nowhere else dry enough to spend the night, no place within walking distance …
An image came to her then. Her daughter, lying flat on her back in a dark metal tube.
She knew exactly where Mary had slept last night.
* * *
YOUNG DIDN’T GO IN at first. She stood at the barn’s edge and opened her mouth to call for Mary, but she smelled something stale and chalky and thought of burned flesh, singed hair. She told herself it couldn’t be—a year had passed since the fire—and walked in, her eyes down to avoid the indicia of fire, but that was impossible. Half the walls were gone, and mud puddles from the storm covered what remained of the floor. A swath of sunlight from a caved-in hole in the roof shone down, spotlighting the chamber like a museum display. Its thick steel frame had survived the fire intact, but its aquamarine paint was blistered and the glass portholes shattered.
Mary had slept here most of last summer. At first, they’d all slept in the shack, but Mary complained nonstop—the too-early lights-out, too-early morning alarm, Pak’s snoring, and so on. When Young pointed out this was temporary, and besides, they’d all slept in one room back in Korea, per tradition, Mary said (in English), “Yeah, back when we were actually a family. Besides, if you want Korean tradition so much, why don’t we just move back? I mean, how is this”—Mary swept her arms across the shack—“better than what we had?”
Young wanted to say she understood how hard it was to have no space of her own, to confess how hard it was for Pak and Young herself to have no privacy to even bicker, let alone other marital necessities. But the way Mary sneered and rolled her eyes—openly, defiantly, as if Young were so unworthy of respect that Mary didn’t even need to pretend to hide her contempt—sent Young into a toxic fury, and she found herself wishing she’d never had Mary and yelling maternal clichés she’d promised herself never to say: that some children had no food or shelter, and did she realize how ungrateful and selfish she was being? (This was the quintessential skill of teenage daughters: making you think and say things you regretted even as you were thinking and saying them.)
The next day, Mary acted the way she always did during their fights: saccharine to Pak, acidic to Young. Young ignored it, but Pak (clueless as ever to filial manipulations) relished the onslaught of Mary’s affection. Young had to marvel at the expert way Mary mentioned—carefully casual, with a diffident, almost apologetic tone—how badly she’d been sleeping, the way she led him to think her proposed solution, sleeping in the chamber, was actually his idea. Mary slept there every night until the explosion.
The night Mary came home from the hospital, she went to sleep in her corner inside their house. But when Young woke up, Mary was gone. She looked for her everywhere except the barn; it didn’t even occur to her that Mary might cross the yellow tape encircling it, that she could stand to go near, much less inside, the metal tube where people were burned alive. But passing by a charred hole in the barn wall, Young glimpsed a flashlight by the chamber. She opened the hatch and found Mary inside, lying on her back. No pillow, no mat, no blanket. Her only child, motionless, eyes closed, arms straight by her side. Young thought of corpses in coffins. Crematorium ovens. She screamed.
They never talked about it afterward. Mary never explained, and Young never asked. Mary returned to her corner where she slept every night, and that was the end of it.
Until now. And here she was again, opening the hatch. The rusted hinges creaked, and pinpoint beams of sunlight pierced in. Mary wasn’t there. But she had been. Her pillow and blanket were inside, and two strands of black hair—long, like Mary’s—crisscrossed the pillow, forming an X. On the blanket sat a brown bag. Last night, Pak had put the bag from the shed by the door, to throw it away today. Had Mary found it when she returned home?
Young crawled in for the bag. Just as she tilted it to look in, she heard a noise. The crunch of gravel, the snapping of dead bra
nches on the ground. Steps. Fast, like someone running toward the barn. A shout. Pak’s voice. “Meh-hee-yah, stop, let me explain.” More steps, a thunk—Mary falling?—then sobs close by, right outside.
Young knew she should get out and see what was happening, but something about the situation—Mary running from Pak, obviously upset, Pak following her—stopped her. Young could see inside the bag now. Tin case. Papers. She was right; Mary had found the cigarettes and Seoul listings. Had Mary confronted him, like she had?
The click-clack of Pak’s wheelchair got closer. Young closed the hatch so she’d be hidden but could see out the slit opening. Maneuvering her body in the darkness, her hands touched Mary’s pillow. It was damp.
The wheelchair noise stopped. “Meh-hee-yah,” Pak said in Korean, his voice closer now, right outside the barn, “I can’t tell you how much I regret it.”
Mary’s voice, shaking, her words in English separated by choked sobs: “I don’t believe … you had anything … to do with it. It doesn’t … make any … sense.”
A pause, then Pak’s voice: “I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. The cigarette, the matches. It was my doing.” He was talking about the tin case, had to be. Except it had no matches.
Mary’s voice, in English: “But how did it end up here? I mean, out of our whole property, how did it wind up in exactly the most dangerous spot?” It occurred to Young then, where their voices were coming from: behind the barn, where the oxygen tanks used to be.
A sigh. Not long, but heavy—infused with dread, a desperate longing to keep silent—and Young wished the sigh could last forever, that he would not open his mouth for the next words.
“I put it here,” Pak said. “I picked the spot, right under the oxygen tube. I gathered twigs and dried leaves. I put the matches in, and the cigarette.”
“No,” Mary said.
“Yes, it was all me,” Pak said. “I did it.”
* * *
I DID IT.
At those words, Young put her head on Mary’s pillow, her cheeks against the wetness of Mary’s tears. She closed her eyes and felt her body spin. Or maybe it was the chamber spinning, faster and faster, getting smaller and collapsing into a pinpoint, squashing her.
I did it. It was all me.
Incomprehensible words that meant the world was ending, so how could he say them so matter-of-factly? How could he so coldly admit to setting the fire that killed two people and remain breathing, talking?
The sound of Mary’s sobs, hysterical now, broke through, and it came to Young, what she’d overlooked in her fog: Mary just discovered that her father had committed murder. Mary was suffering shock, the same shock she herself was reeling from. Young’s eyes snapped open, and she ached to run out, to take Mary into her arms and cry together over the grief of learning something so horrifying about their beloved. Young heard shh-shh, the sound of a parent comforting a child in pain, and she wanted to yell at Pak to get away from Mary, to leave them both alone and stop tainting them with his sins, when Mary said, “But why that spot? If you’d picked anywhere else—”
“The protesters,” Pak said. “Elizabeth showed me their flyer, and she kept saying they might set a fire to sabotage us, and it gave me the idea—if the police found a cigarette in the same spot as the flyer, they’d get in trouble.” Of course. How convenient: set the fire, blame the protesters, collect the insurance. A classic frame-up job against the people who’d enraged him.
“But the police took them away for the balloons,” Mary said. “Why did you need to do anything else?”
“The protesters called me. They said the police just gave them a warning, and there was nothing to stop them from coming back every day, until they drove all the patients away. I had to do something more drastic, to get them in real trouble and keep them away for good. I never imagined you’d go anywhere near there, let alone…” His voice faltered, and the image flooded her mind: Mary running to the barn and turning, then blink, her face bathed in the orange glow of the fire and her body thrown in the air, caught in the blast.
Mary also seemed haunted by that moment; she said, “I keep thinking, there was no fan sound from the HBOT. It was so quiet.” Young remembered that, too—hearing the distant croaking of frogs without the usual AC fan noise masking it. The smothering purity of the silence before the boom.
“That was all my doing,” Pak said. “I caused the power outage to frame the protesters. That set everything in motion—the delays, everything that went wrong that night. I never dreamed so many things could go wrong. I never dreamed anyone would get hurt.”
Young wanted to scream, demand to know how he could possibly think that, setting a fire under a stream of oxygen. And yet she believed him, knew he had some plan to get everyone out in time. That was why he used a cigarette, to let it burn down slowly before the fire caught, and why he wanted to stay outside while she turned off the oxygen, to make sure that the flames didn’t get too big before 8:20, while the oxygen was still on. He’d come up with the perfect plan to set a slow-burning fire that would scare but not hurt anyone. Problem was, the plan didn’t go like it was supposed to. Plans never did.
After a long silence, in a quivering voice so quiet she strained to hear, Mary said in English, “I keep thinking of Henry and Kitt.”
“It was an accident,” Pak said. “You have to remember that.”
“But it’s my fault, all because I was selfish and I wanted to go back to Korea. You told me things would get better, but I kept being stubborn and complaining, and finally…” Mary broke into sobs, but Young knew: finally, Pak decided to give their daughter what she wanted and did the only thing he could think of to make that happen.
Young felt something collapse, as if someone had punched her lungs. The thing grating at her, telling her none of this made sense, was the question of why. Yes, Pak hated the protesters. Yes, he wanted them gone. But why a fire? Their business had been thriving, and there was no reason to destroy it. Except there was. Mary had come to him, begging him to move back to Korea. Arson wasn’t a spontaneous idea, born out of his anger at the protesters. He’d planned it. Everything made sense now, fit into place. The arson call, the Seoul listings—all in furtherance of his plot. And when the protesters came along, he seized on the perfect decoys.
Young felt pain in her chest, like tiny birds pecking at her heart, imagining Mary confiding in Pak last summer, crying to him about her desperation to return to their homeland. Why hadn’t Mary come to her, her mother? In Korea, every afternoon, they’d played Korean jacks while she told her about the boys who teased her and the books she secretly read during class. Where had that closeness gone? Had it evaporated, no longer retrievable, or had it simply burrowed deep to hibernate through the teenage years? She knew Mary didn’t like America and wanted to return, but only through snips and snide asides, not the soul-baring confidence Mary apparently reserved for Pak. And Pak, not coming to her, but carrying out a dangerous plan to give Mary what she wanted—making this decision by himself, with no input from her, his wife of twenty years. It felt like betrayal. Betrayal by her daughter and husband. Betrayal by the two people she loved and trusted most.
“We should tell Abe,” Mary said. “Now. We need to stop torturing Elizabeth.”
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Pak said. “But the trial is nearly over. Chances are good she won’t be convicted. Once the trial ends, we can move, start fresh.”
“But what if she’s found guilty? She could be executed.”
“If that happens, I’ll confess. I’ll wait for the insurance money to come through, and once you and your mother get away, somewhere safe, I’ll go to Abe. I won’t let her go to jail for something she didn’t do. I couldn’t do that.” He swallowed. “I did many things wrong, but no one, no one, intended to hurt anyone. Remember that.”
Mary said, “But she’s already suffering. She’s on trial for killing her son. She must be in so much pain, I can’t bear to—”
“Listen to me,�
� Pak said. “I feel horrible about what’s happened. I’d give anything to change it. But I don’t think Elizabeth feels the same way. She may not have set the fire, but I think she wanted Henry dead, and she’s glad it happened.”
“How can you say that?” Mary said. “I know they’re saying she hurt him, but to say she actually wanted him dead—”
“I heard her, with my own ears, through the intercom when she thought it wasn’t on,” Pak said.
“Heard what?”
“She told Teresa she wanted Henry to die, that she actually fantasized about him dying.”
“What? When? And why haven’t you said anything? You didn’t even testify about it.”
“Abe said not to. He’s going to ask Teresa about it on the stand, but he wants to surprise her, to get the full truth.” Was that why Young had never heard about this, because Teresa was her friend and Abe was afraid she’d say something? Was there anyone who hadn’t lied to her?
“The point is,” Pak said, “Elizabeth wanted Henry dead. She abused him. They were going to prosecute her for that anyway, and she’s already on trial. Will being on trial one more week make that much of a difference to her? And remember, if the verdict is guilty, I’ll come forward. I promise you that.”
Was that really true? Or was he just saying that to convince Mary to remain silent, and if the verdict was guilty, he’d come up with some other excuse and let Elizabeth die?
“Now, before we go in,” Pak said, “I need you to promise me. You will do as I say. Not one word to anyone, including your mother. Understand?”
