“I didn’t say I’d be alone, I just said I wouldn’t be with a man!”
She scoffed. “Your so-called friends won’t have any interest in you at all after they have their own families, believe me! Henry is the one you should be trying to impress, not them, because he’s the one you’ve…” Something occurred to her. “…he’s the one you’ve been…” The words died on her lips as she finally heard the implication of what I’d said.
She never finished the sentence, because she took a step back from me, finally taking a really good look at my room. The two pillows, the cherry-print bra with cups that were way too big for my small breasts hanging on the back of my chair, the framed photo on the bedside table with Bree smooching my cheek...
She picked it up, her jaw open. She was completely silent for a second. “My God,” she said eventually, looking down at the photo.
This was it. This was the moment I hoped would never come.
I closed my eyes for a second. “Bree,” I told her. “Her name’s Bree.”
She took a ragged breath, dropping the photo back on the table and shaking her head stiffly. “No. No, I don’t believe it! This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening, you’re about to marry Henry!”
I swallowed. “I didn’t know how to tell you, Mum.”
She looked up at me, horror and disbelief evident on her face. “So you lied to me? You lied to your own mother?” She turned sharply away from me for a moment, putting her face in her hands and making a series of agonised sounds, before turning back and taking a step towards me. “’Henry can’t talk to you because he’s busy on a project’? Really?” She grabbed my lapels. “Tell me this isn’t what happened,” she said through tight lips. “Tell me you didn’t leave Henry, lovely Henry, the HR Manager for a Fortune 500 company, the man who wanted to marry you, for that,” she gave me the once-over, “and for this?”
There was no point in answering her. She knew the answer. Shaking, she shrank away from me like everything in my room was encroaching on her, staring at me with a mixture of horror and confusion. “Where did this come from?” she asked in a tiny voice. “Who are you and what have you done with my daughter? The daughter who loved Henry and wanted to marry him?”
“I never loved him like that. I wanted to, believe me, and I tried. I tried for three years. But I couldn’t.”
She didn’t reply. Instead, she looked at me with new eyes. The anger was gone, and in its place was something far, far worse: disgust.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, desperately shaking her head at me. “Who couldn’t love Henry? He’s everything any woman could want in a husband, and he wouldn’t have left you, Min! He wouldn’t have left you to raise your children on your own, he would have stayed with you! God, when you told me you’d left him, I knew you weren’t in your right mind, and I knew it had something to do with your mental illness, but I never thought…” She took another hoarse breath. “God, I never thought it could be this bad. Look at you! You need psychiatric treatment. Your mental illness is completely out of—”
My illness? “—Anxiety doesn’t cause this, Mum, it’s—”
“Then you were obviously misdiagnosed!” she interrupted me, backing away. “It’s something much, much worse. You are sick. You are sick, Min, there is something wrong with your brain! Look at the disgusting, depraved, and perverted things you are doing!” Her mouth twisted on the words, her face contorted with disgust. She was pressed back against the door as if she thought I might be contagious. “Why are you doing all this? Are you trying to make people think you are a real—”
“—because it feels right, Mum!” I answered. “It’s the only way I feel—”
“This is crazy!” she was repeating, hardly listening to me. “This is sick and crazy. You do realise you’re not actually a man, don’t you? You’re not a man, no amount of wearing men’s clothes is going to turn you into one! Underneath them all you’re still the little girl I gave birth to, and when you stand before God in Heaven—God willing, you actually get there!—it will be as that same girl. You have a girl’s body and a girl’s—”
I felt ill. “—I know, Mum, okay? Believe me, I know I—”
“Then why are you doing this?” she asked. “Why are you putting me through this if you know? Why are you depriving me of my daughter and a wedding and a family if you know?”
A lump formed in my throat. “I’m not trying to take anything away from you, Mum, it’s—”
“There’s nothing you haven’t taken from me! I spent twenty years giving every part of me so you were fed, wore the beautiful clothes I never had as a little girl, and received a good education... I gave up my career for you, my country, my home, everything I knew! Everything I knew, Min! I came ten thousand kilometres to make a home and a future for you, and this is how you repay me?”
“I can’t repay you, Mum,” I managed through my tight jaw. “I’m never going to be able to repay you. You act like the debt’s settled when I do everything you want me to, but the second that stops, suddenly I owe you again, and I can’t live like that! I can’t live the life you gave up and be happy!” I presented myself. “This is me! This is me, living the life that’s right for me, this is how I am!” I let my hands fall to my side. “But I’m still your child. I’m still the person you raised all by yourself. You can see that, can’t you?”
“No, I can’t,” she told me firmly through quivering lips. “I don’t know this crazy, delusional person in front of me. I don’t want to know her. I want my daughter back.”
Like she’d punched me in the stomach, I reeled, breathless. I shouldn’t have said it, I shouldn’t have, but I was aching from that blow and before I knew it, I’d spat at her, “Well you can’t have her. She’s gone. You’re never getting her back.”
I saw immediately how much that hurt her, and she took a step away from me, her hand rising up to the pearls at her throat again. For a moment she just stared at me like she couldn’t believe I’d said it, and then she shook her head, defeated. I expected her to insult me, or yell at me, or belittle me, anything. But she didn’t, she just spun on her heels and marched out through the bedroom door.
She was out into the living room well before I could follow her there, an anxious hand on her chest and half-walking, half-jogging towards the door. Rob was hovering nervously by the table, but I didn’t have time to address him, because Mum was already at the door. She grabbed the handle and went to pull it, but the door just rattled and stayed put. It was locked.
“Let me out!” she said in English, her voice shooting up high as she shook the door. “Let me out! I need to get out of here!”
I felt for the keys in my pocket as I went over to her. “It’s locked, Mum, just let me—”
She darted away from me as I got there, her hands in the air as if she thought I was going to try and physically stop her. “Don’t! Don’t!” she told me—it wasn’t clear what she thought I was going to do—but she’d already lost it. “Oh God! Oh God! I can’t breathe! Look what you’ve done to me, you monster—!”
She was reaching for her throat, pulling at her blouse and her pearls, gasping each breath and clutching at her chest—
—and that’s when I looked past her and saw Rob, white as a sheet. His eyes were glazed; I don’t know if I’d seen him like that before. He was somewhere else. “She’s having a heart attack,” he realised aloud. “Min, she’s having a heart attack!” He sprung immediately to action, rushing towards her. “Here, sit down, Mrs Lee,” he said in his broad accent, carrying one of the heavy kitchen chairs in a single hand like it was nothing but kindling and placing it neatly behind her. “Sit down, it’s going to be okay.” To me, he said, “It’s okay, I learnt what to do. You just call triple-0, yeah?”
I pulled him back. “Rob, it’s not a heart attack,” I told him. “It’s just a panic attack, I get these all the—”
“It’s a heart attack!” he insisted, pushing Mum down into the chair. He put a hand o
n my shoulder briefly and squeezed it. “I know it’s difficult to watch, but I need you to call…” He trailed off, considering me. “Actually, you know what? I’ll call triple-0. You look like you could use a bit of a sit-down, yourself.”
His phone was already out of his pocket and in his hands as he finished speaking. He thumbed out the number and then put the phone against his ear. “Ambulance, please.” He’d put a warm hand on Mum’s shoulder, just like Henry used to.
She didn’t stop him from calling. She didn’t do any of the things she would have done if it was me telling her to sit still. She was meek and sweet with Rob like she was with Henry, and now Rob probably thought I was this giant asshole who hated their mother. At least Rob would see I was right when the paramedics arrived and gave her a clean bill of health.
I was busy pacing, listening to him talking to the operator and watching him fuss over Mum, absently reaching around to rub an uncomfortable spot on the small of my— Oh, Bree’s tablet was still tucked in my belt and poking directly into me. I’d completely forgotten about it; I took both it and Bree's mobile out and put them on the table. They did serve to remind me how fucking awful my day had been from the very beginning, though, and how this medical circus over a panic attack was not what I needed at the end of it.
It wasn’t even five minutes before the unmistakable wail of a siren came up our road and pulled into the driveway. There was a firm knock on the door—“Ambulance!”—as I opened it for them. Three serious people in uniforms marched single-file into the house carrying big, heavy medical kits and the two female paramedics got straight to work on Mum.
“You’re Mrs Lee, aren’t you?” one of them asked a bit too slowly and clearly. “Can you tell me how you’re feeling right now?” Mum didn’t respond straight away; her lips were pressed too tightly together. “Mrs Lee? Can you understand me?”
“She’s having a panic attack,” I told them when she didn’t answer. I may have sounded a bit unsympathetic.
Everyone looked at me. “You’re her son?” the paramedic at Mum’s side asked innocently.
That made Mum finally look up at me, and when she saw me and saw all the people looking at me, a pained sound escaped her lips. “Oh! I can’t look at her, I can’t even look at her for a moment,” she told them, and then started dramatically clutching at her chest again. “My daughter…”
The ambos glanced at each other, not sure what to make of that, but started to prop her up and clip things on her anyway.
Every time they took a reading from her, I expected them to smile and say, ‘You’re fine, Mrs Lee!’, but they didn’t. No one told her she was fine. They kept piling more and more equipment onto her, and when they started attaching adhesive leads by her collarbones and under her ribs, their mobile unit flashed at them. I didn’t know what that meant, because they weren’t rushing like it was a critical emergency, but they weren’t patting her on the back and leaving, either.
While they were lifting her onto a stretcher, one of the paramedics took me aside and quietly asked, “Sorry, but can I ask about this ‘daughter’ she keeps mentioning? Was there a recent death in the family, maybe?”
Shit. I grimaced at him. “Not exactly,” I told him carefully. “Technically I’m her daughter. That’s the problem.”
He frowned at first like I’d said something cryptic, but after a few moments his eyebrows lifted and his mouth formed a perfect ‘o’. “Oh, right,” he said, putting two and two together. “And it’s distressing her to see you like that now, I understand.” Thankfully, he didn’t linger on the topic. “Would you mind if I asked some questions about her history?”
I can’t even remember what he asked, because while I was answering, they wheeled Mum right past me to load her into the ambulance. With all these cords and clips and machines connected to her, it suddenly hit me they were loading my mother into an ambulance. They hadn’t given her a clean bill of health. They hadn’t waved goodbye and left. Instead, my mother was on that stretcher, with an oxygen mask over her face and her eyes closed. She looked so small, lying down like that. Small and pale.
And no matter how much I told myself I was stupid and I needed to snap out of it, I couldn’t get rid of the crushing realisation that I’d done that to her.
While I was mutely watching the ambulance back out of the driveway, pausing for a second in the centre of the road before it lit up and the siren started whooping, the door to the house shut behind me. “Come on,” Rob said as he jogged past me towards the car. “Let’s go. They’re taking her to the Royal Prince Alfred.”
No sooner had I got in the passenger seat, Rob was reversing out of the driveway at the speed of light and screeching up the road in the same direction the ambulance had gone.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told me as I belatedly did up my seatbelt, even though I hadn’t said anything. “They probably caught it in time. She’ll be okay.” Aside from saying that, he stared forward at the road, eyes still glazed. I watched him for a moment, wondering if I should ask him if he was alright, but I didn’t want to intrude.
Rob probably got about ten speeding fines along the M1, but he hardly slowed down at all until he pulled in beside the entrance to a beautiful big old building with a sign above us that said, ‘Welcome to RPA—AMBULANCE ONLY’.
Rob looked unfazed by it. “Bugger ‘em,” he said, and then turned to me. “Get out, go see your mum, I’ll find us a park.”
I thanked him and did as he instructed, walking through the main doors into the ER waiting room.
There was a queue at triage. Of course, I thought, standing at the back of it and fidgeting with my phone, wondering if I should text Sarah to let her know what was going on. I probably would have, except there was a sign with big red letters right in front of me that said, ‘Mobile phones to be switched off at all times in the ER’, so I left my phone in my pocket.
The line moved at a gruellingly slow pace—and I learnt things about the people in front of me that I never wanted to know—until finally I was face to face with the triage nurse. Despite having bags the size of small sauces under her eyes, she smiled at me. “What’s the problem?”
Where do I start, I thought ironically, but said, “My mum came in here by ambulance just a little while ago, is this the right place to ask about her?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said, and rolled sideways to her computer. “What’s her name?”
“Yeong-suk Lee,” I told her, and then at her blank expression I continued, “Y-E-O-N—”
“Oh, it’s okay, I found her,” she said, and then her eyes scanned the screen. “And you are—” Her eyebrows went up, and she glanced up at me before squinting at the screen for another couple of seconds. Her expression sobered. “Min, right?” I nodded, and she rolled sideways to a phone, lifting the handset. “Hang on a moment, I need to grab a social worker.”
A social worker? “But she’s okay, right?” I asked while the nurse was waiting for someone to answer. “You’d say if she wasn’t?”
The nurse gave me a polite smile. “If you just go and wait by that door, Lisa will see you very shortly.” She was gesturing to the side of the window so I stepped aside, and immediately she turned her attention to the next person in line.
I stood there for a moment, frowning, and then obediently went and stood by the door she’d pointed to. That was a bad sign, wasn’t it? That a social worker had to be the one to tell me something?
I was standing there waiting for ‘Lisa’ when Rob came bursting into the ER, a phone pressed against his ear.
“Fuck!” he said loudly and then noticed all the children around us. “Um, sorry,” he said sheepishly to the families around me and then pulled the phone away from his ear, looking at it. “Sare’s phone is off,” he told me, looking worried. “I tried her like five times, no dice. Did she say anything to you? Have you heard from her?” I shook my head, and he pursed his lips. “Well, maybe the battery’s flat. Anyway, did they tell you about your mum? She’s fine,
right?”
I opened my mouth to answer him when a woman’s voice called, “Min Lee?”
I closed my jaw again. “I’ll let you know in a sec,” I told him, and then followed ‘Lisa’ through the door.
The woman who’d called me had a similar stature to Bree’s mum—even with the curly hair, except this woman’s hair was dark brown—but where Bree’s mum had been cool and distant, Lisa was warm and receptive. “Sorry about the awful wait,” she told me, leading me through the double-doors and into a small office down the end of the corridor. She closed the door behind her.
I sat down in one of the chairs facing her desk. There were little plastic figurines all over the edge of her table and a toy box in the corner; I guessed she saw a lot of children.
She spent what felt like eternity pouring me a glass of water and sitting back down at her chair. When she was finally done, she leant forward on the desk. “This might be a very difficult conversation,” she began. “So if you need to go to the toilet, or you need anything—”
My blood ran cold. “Thank you, I’m fine,” I said shortly. Why was it going to be difficult?
She nodded once, and then sat back. “Are you close to your mother?”
What kind of question was that? “Why, is she not okay?” I asked, getting to the point. “She’s okay, right?”
Lisa grimaced. “I’m very sorry, but I can’t actually tell you that.”
Why not? “Is she in theatre or something?”
Lisa took a slow breath. “Well, Mrs Lee requested that details of her medical condition are withheld from you for now.”
I didn’t—wow. I just—she didn’t want her own kid to know how she was? I immediately knew why, and my worry about her hardened into something else. “Fine,” I said bitterly. “But can you at least tell me if she’s going to be okay?”
Lisa looked genuinely sympathetic. “I’m sorry, I’m not able to give you that information. You’re welcome to wait to see if she changes her mind, but unfortunately she was very specific about what she wanted.” She paused. “And what that is will be difficult for you to hear.”
Flesh & Blood Page 47
