Skin Deep

by Sung J. Woo

“Thank you. My quiet space is on the second floor,” she said. “There’s nobody above me right now, so that’s where I go for my morning meditation.”

  She scampered up the ladder. I thought of my time at the Korean camp back in Minnesota, the creak of the metal as it gave and took our daily abuse. I’d always preferred being on top because where I slept, there were skylights that showcased the moon and the stars on clear nights. This high ceiling had no such openings, but it was painted in a soothing sky blue and cloudy white that made it feel even higher.

  Dido took the head of the bed so I took the foot. From this height, the top of the lake was visible from the window, the late morning sun bedazzling an oval sheen of water. She straightened her legs, drew her right foot into her left thigh, then grasped her right knee with her left hand and turned the top of her body completely away from me. Downstairs on one of the posters, I’d seen this yoga pose. I’d throw out my back if I’d tried it.

  “So you knew Penny,” I said.

  “I have no idea who that is,” Dido said.

  I know this place was supposed to instill patience and virtue and acceptance and love, but what I really wanted to do right now was to shove Dido off the top bunk.

  “Then why did you bring me up here?”

  When she smiled, her whole face softened, almost became someone else’s. I saw how pretty she was, despite the blue hair and the lip ring and the tattoo of a spiderweb on the side of her neck.

  Dido reversed the pose, left foot to her right thigh.

  “Because you needed to be here.”

  “Said my pink aura.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I thought the pink aura meant I was a liar.”

  “Should an aura’s hue be limited to a single meaning?”

  “I hope that’s a rhetorical question.”

  Dido returned to sitting position and put her hands together, her fingers splayed. She placed her thumbs over her heart, breathed in, then exhaled with a quiet om.

  “Complication is the blood of life,” she said. “It lets us know we’re alive.”

  I slid over to the edge of the bed to climb back down before I hurt this silly girl, but then I had a thought. Dido was most likely not her name. Maybe Penny wouldn’t be using hers, either. I took out my phone.

  “That unnatural device is not allowed in this sacred space,” Dido said.

  “Both the unnatural device and my unnatural self will be leaving this sacred space soon enough. Just look, okay?”

  After giving me a lingering look of disapproval, she looked. “Hae Jun.”

  “That’s her Korean name. You do know Penny.”

  “By way of Prasad.”

  Prasad was Christopher. Hae Jun was Penny. Whoever thought up this thing here where people chose their own names never took into consideration that this would make a detective’s work rather trying.

  “And where may I find Hae Jun?”

  “She tried to kill herself,” Dido said. “Last week.”

  Shit.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know the details, and I don’t care to know.”

  “Is she still here?” I asked.

  “The next day, she was gone.”

  “And…has anyone been informed? Or does nobody care?”

  “People who come here to be volunteers…they come for many reasons, but one of the more common ones is that they’re running away from something.”

  Dido told me she had been at veggie prep and was transitioning to the bakery, so she was tasked to train Penny to work in the basement kitchen, chopping, coring, and dicing enough vegetables to feed six hundred people three meals a day. It was not an easy job, but not a difficult one, either. There is a meditative quality to doing the same thing over and over again, a rhythm you find as you dump one container after another of potatoes into the industrial combo food processor to make a hundred gallons of sweet potato fries.

  “We play music real loud, we dance, we sing. It’s like a working party, and there’s also a great sense of accomplishment because things come in and go out and disappear. Bins of prepared vegetables are filled with our work and our love, and off they go upstairs to the hot kitchen, for all to feast on. When the day ends, we power wash and squeegee our floors, literally wipe the slate clean.”

  “Penny danced and sang?”

  “Just because she tried to kill herself doesn’t mean she’s moping around all day. Depressed people probably laugh more than regular people.”

  “Why was she depressed?”

  “None of my business. Everyone has a right to suffer in their own way, and I respect that. I did notice, though, that the day Prasad arrived was the day she disappeared.”

  Dido scrunched her shoulders tight, then scrunched them even tighter. With an explosive exhalation that sounded like “Huh” she slacked her body to a slouch, her head lolling like a doll’s. And then slowly, inch by inch, she woke herself back to an alert, straight-backed sitting position.

  “I’m due for my shift, and I can see the red rising off of you like steam. This is as good a time as any for us to retreat inside ourselves and do our own work. Let’s talk again when our spirits are better aligned.”

  She hung her legs over the side of the bed and jumped, landing on the hardwood floor without a sound. A few other volunteers were now milling about the room, making a cup of tea by the kitchenette, one older lady doing tai chi.

  “You can stay for as long as you like.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, and took the longer but safer route down the ladder.

  56

  Dido made her way towards the doors and I followed.

  “Do you know the concept of mindfulness?” she asked.

  “No, but I saw a poster with that word on the way over here.”

  “See,” Dido said, and slipped her shoes back on. I did the same. “This is karma. This is the magic of Krishna. It’s no coincidence that of all the posters on the board, you saw and remembered Dharma’s. Go and talk to him. He might even let you sit in his program, because he’s one of the old-school guys.”

  “I’ll see. I’m here until tomorrow and I still need to talk to Prasad and…”

  Dido smiled. “Karma once again, Siobhan. Prasad’s gone.”

  “I just saw him in the dining hall. With you.”

  “Yes. And right after his meal, he left.”

  I was beginning to get the feeling that Penny and Christopher were not just difficult to find but actively trying to avoid me.

  “Can you tell me where he went?”

  “You want to follow him?”

  “At most he’s got an hour’s head start.”

  “Even if I knew where he was headed, I’m not sure I would tell you.”

  I’m no fan of violence, but Dido was getting me very close to that edge.

  “Is it still because of my pink aura? Or fuchsia? Or whatever the fuck it is?”

  She laughed. “No. It’s because you’re fighting it.”

  “Fighting what?”

  “The flow.”

  I sighed, for what felt like the hundredth time since I started talking to this girl.

  “Go with the flow. Uh-huh,” I said.

  I considered my options. If I could get the license plate number of Christopher’s car (which Krishna must have somewhere in their system), then I could contact Keeler, who then could look up the toll tag in the car. Most had these nowadays, and they doubled as a homing beacon, because there were a couple of tolls along I-81 north-south, a bunch of them on I-90 running east-west…

  Dido cupped my face in her hands, breaking me out of my thoughts.

  “What is happening now is what should be happening, because it is exactly what is happening.”

  “Dido,” I said, “please get your hands off me.”

  “There are no accidents. Prasad leaving was what was meant to happen. Do you know why? Because that’s what happened. Siobhan, let it
go. Let it happen. Because that’s how things work around here. It’s actually how they work everywhere, but here especially, it becomes self-evident.”

  An investigation is a living, breathing thing. Go with what happens, because what happens then is what was always supposed to happen.

  Ed, if you’re speaking to me beyond the grave through this girl, please stop.

  “I’ll consider it.”

  Dido held open the door back to the main building for me.

  “Namaste.”

  I put my hands together and wished her the same. She took the stairs up while I took them down.

  Was it time for a little breaking and entering? That would probably be the fastest way to get what I needed, though there were no guarantees. Dido’s words kept repeating in my ear. There are no accidents. Prasad leaving was what was meant to happen. The problem with this fatalistic line of thinking was that you could end up doing nothing of consequence, ever. If everything happened for a reason, then there was never any reason to do anything, since whether you did something or not, it was all meant to be.

  I had to try, didn’t I? If I didn’t try, how would this case move forward?

  But what if not trying was trying in itself? Let the universe do the heavy lifting?

  Jesus Christ, my brain was tying itself into a pretzel. Christopher was just here, and if I’d kept a closer eye on him, if I hadn’t let that woman in the kitchen dissuade me…

  Reality: The likelihood of me catching up to Christopher within a reasonable timeframe was basically zero.

  Where would a kid like him go? Probably back home, which, as I recalled from my background check, was Ronkonkoma, New York. Or back to Lenrock. I could find him if I tried a little harder. But if I did find him, what good would it do if he screamed and yelled and went boo-hoo nutzos on me again?

  Maybe the best thing would be to give him some distance, a little time.

  Or was pressure what he needed to fess up to whatever it was that he needed fessing up?

  I didn’t know what to do. I had to do something, or else I was gonna drive myself insane.

  57

  I didn’t start running until I was thirty. It wasn’t a milestone-birthday thing. It was a fat thing, or perhaps more accurately, a fear of fat thing. Right around this time was when my pants and skirts started to groan under the pressure of having to contain my burgeoning waistline.

  As luck would have it, that autumn, a group of co-workers at the Athena Times decided to form a running group. We even had a name: The Paper Route. Leave it to a bunch of writers to come up with something like that. It was three women and four guys, none of us remotely athletic, and it took us twelve huffing minutes to run one mile. A week later we were down to six runners, but we managed to shave off a full minute. This attrition of people and time occurred steadily until two months later, when tiny snowflakes caught in my eyelashes, I was a group of one who ran an eight-minute mile.

  For the last twelve years, I’ve run the same loop twice a week: Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings, along the red-bricked church and past the dog park and through the apartment parking lot, the path so ingrained that I imagine the calluses on my feet have molded to the medley of cracks and potholes on the asphalt. No matter how hot or cold or rainy or snowy, I’m out there, my body cutting through the wind, a smile plastered to my face.

  Running helps me think, and right now, I had some thinking to do. The pocket map in my Krishna welcome packet laid out a route that took me to the center of Hawthorne, along the shoulder of East Street, a three-mile round trip. In my running uniform of a black pullover and black tights, I jogged lightly down the long driveway and headed for the town.

  The temperature couldn’t have been more perfect, in the mid-fifties, where my run starts off chilly but never gets hot. It was Saturday afternoon and the cars were few and far in between. On both sides of the road, tall, thick evergreens held me in their natural grace. For a while, all I knew was now, my feet stomping on the pavement, the scent of pine needles, the breeze running through my hair. I was hitting that magical equilibrium where it felt like every step on the ground generated the same amount of energy on the rise.

  At the one mile mark, my GPS watch beeped, and I ran by the sign:

  HAWTHORNE

  Settled 1750

  Incorporated 1767

  In the center of the white metallic sign with black letters was the image of a red square building with a steeple, which was exactly what I was running towards. It was the town hall, fancy and impressive, fitting for the well-to-do Hawthorne. I ran past an antique store located in a classic Victorian, its beige clapboard shingles painted so exactly that they looked like vinyl siding. A hair salon aptly named “The Cutting Edge” was also located in a historic-looking building, but seen through the windows, the inside was almost futuristic, all chrome and white ceramic—yet not in a clashing or displeasing way. There was an inn/spa for pets, a musical instruments store, a yoga studio—every restaurant was a non-chain, not a single Starbucks or McDonald’s to be seen.

  Three athletic men wearing white turtlenecks and black slacks, all with crewcuts, exited a café; one of them held the door open. Sashaying through was none other than Cleo Park, just a flash of her as she made a beeline for another open door, a black Cadillac Escalade. Wearing enormous sunglasses and a skin-tight slate-gray yoga outfit, she looked like a Hollywood actress escaping the paparazzi. So, in addition to Professor Collins and President Wheeler of Llewellyn being here, Cleo Park herself was in attendance. And there was one more. I’d only seen her once, at the basketball game, but that was most definitely Grace. I might have lost Christopher, but this was an excellent development.

  At the intersection of three roads was a traffic circle, and in its center was a bronze statue of a guy on a marble pedestal, the namesake of this tony town, Henry Hawthorne, according to the plaque. REVOLUTIONARY, SCHOLAR, FATHER, it read. The circle was a natural place to turn around, so I started on my return to Krishna, with my mind in a relaxed state, ready to process the bits of information I’ve gathered so far.

  Mid-July, Josie drops Penny off at Llewellyn for their six-week incoming freshman program. Penny is painfully shy, but she meets Christopher and they begin a relationship. By the beginning of the semester, late August, she’s fully adjusted.

  Penny is assigned a roommate, but she doesn’t live with her. Instead, she lives with Grace Park, the daughter of a Korean billionaire, who also has a connection to Christopher, according to Beaker.

  Penny writes a controversial horror story in a fiction writing workshop and has a physical altercation with another student over what she wrote. After this incident, Penny moves out of Grace Park’s dorm and enters Tender Llewellyn Care, a safe house for students run by Faith, who is the daughter of the president of Llewellyn, Vera Wheeler.

  By the end of September, Penny asks Josie, her mother, not to call anymore. Josie goes to see her and is turned away by Faith.

  Two weeks ago, Josie receives a call from the dean, who informs her that Penny took a leave of absence. Christopher’s roommate Beaker says she’s at Krishna, but she isn’t anymore after she tried to commit suicide. And Christopher was here because he wanted…what?

  That was the million dollar question, wasn’t it? And I’d let him get away.

  Was what was happening in Llewellyn, especially at Travers Hall with the wigs and the fake eyelashes, related to any of this? Or was it just a distraction? Wheeler was definitely turning the college into something it was not, and even though the fight between her and Faith was perhaps a mother-daughter fight as much as an ideological one, there was definitely a rottenness there. Town cops acting as security, special personal security for Grace Park….

  Christopher, Penny, and Grace. A triangle. Thinking over my bullet points, that was the glaring hole, between two and three. Finding out what happened between these three kids had to lead to Penny’s whereabouts. Grace would no doubt be surrounde
d by her guards, but I had to find a way to talk to her.

  I was so deep in thought that I hadn’t noticed.

  Someone had joined me on my run.

  58

  “I hear you’re writing a story about our beloved Krishna.”

  The man who jogged next to me was none other than Dharma Benjamin Roth. Clad in a white bandanna, a white training suit, and white sneakers, his craggy face led me to think he was probably in his sixties, possibly even his seventies, but the way he moved suggested someone far younger. His stride was light and relaxed, the mark of a veteran runner.

  “You heard correctly,” I said.

  “And I believe you are a seeker of truth and justice,” he said.

  I guess I should’ve expected it. This was just the way people talked around here, and the more I accepted it instead of resisting it, the easier it would go down.

  “If you say so.”

  “Do you not believe in the freedom of the press?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You can call me Dharma,” he said.

  “I know your name. I’ve seen your poster.”

  “It’s a nice poster, isn’t it? One of my better ones.”

  Now that we ran up the final hill on this path, the peak of Krishna’s Meadowlark building rose beyond us.

  “Do you desire to hear the real story of Krishna, about what truly matters?” Dharma asked.

  “Absolutely. I’m getting a bit out of breath here, so how about if we meet up at the downstairs café at, say, 4 p.m.?”

  “That café,” Dharma said, “is an utter abomination.”

  “Well, okay, we certainly don’t have to meet there.”

  “I know you are fatigued, but if you will allow me, I’ll lead you on a different path, a road not as often taken. Which is always the road more fulfilling. It’ll bring us to the western side of Lake Ondaga, a quarter of a mile from the Meadowlark.”

  “I didn’t know there was another lake besides Lake Hawthorne here.”