Officer Choi cleared his throat and leaned forward, bracing his arms on the desk. “I’m sorry about your mom. I know this...must be a lot right now...”
Tiny drops of sweat formed on her face. She rubbed between her brows, pressing the pain that throbbed inside her head. She spotted the death certificate on his desk and remembered the black box ticked beside the word Accidental.
Margot closed her eyes, inhaling through her mouth as if to protect herself from the memory of the scent of her mother’s body. The putrid smell of the rotten fruit—sweet, foul, and gaseous. Acid soured her mouth. She could feel his gaze lingering on her face. When she glanced up at him, his eyes dropped, scanning his notes.
“Died last Saturday or Sunday. Hematoma,” he said, scrunching his brow. “Found on Wednesday. All her possessions seemed to be intact, her keys, her Corolla. Cash in her purse. No forced entry. Shoes, slippers by the door.”
The outstretched arm. The feet in the nude socks. How tiny she appeared to be on the ground.
A trip. A fall. A horrible way to die. To have survived all those traumas, those hardships—a war, an orphanage, immigration, being a single mother in a foreign country—only to die by something as mundane as a slipper or a shoe. It was terrible. It was all so very terrible.
“Are you sure you don’t want any water?” he asked, sitting up in his chair.
“No. No, that’s okay.”
“I know that this is a lot. It’s a lot to process.” His eyes softened. “It never makes sense to lose people—especially like this.”
There would be no goodbye, no farewell. Her mother’s body was in a mortuary, awaiting cremation. There were no plans for a funeral. There was no will. They never discussed her mother’s wishes after death. They rarely discussed her mother’s desires at all. Margot only knew that her mother wanted Margot to be closer to her. I wish you would live near me.
There would only be ash—silent and heavy in a box. What would she do with her mother now?
“Even though this is a closed case... I wanted to make sure that you don’t suspect anything? That nothing suspicious was going on, or that there isn’t something you want to tell me about.”
Finding her mother’s body was one nightmare, but sitting in this room with a police officer was another. What good could the police do for her and her mother now? What good had they ever done? There were so many instances growing up when she and her mother needed help—when they had been robbed at gunpoint once, or when a thief had broken into their apartment—but no one ever thought of calling the police. No one ever knew what they would do or whose side they were on, if they could get her mother deported somehow. What did he care? Who cared if he was Korean, too, or went to her high school?
“She went to work. She had a simple life. She worked hard. She was...boring.”
Margot believed all these statements to be true. But could she convince herself that she knew her mother? Because she didn’t. Her world was designed to erase her mother. Her mother was just another nobody, another casualty of this city, of this country that lured you with a scintillating lie.
She had been an inconvenience. A casualty of more important things. Of more important people.
“When had you spoken to her last?”
“A few weeks ago? Something like that.” Business was slow again today. Even all the Korean businesses downtown are closing. “She...she mentioned that she was struggling at work. She was struggling financially, but none of that is new.” Had she been asking for help? Had she needed money?
“And you said her business was in a swap meet down south. Near Bell.”
“Huntington Park.”
She imagined her mother coming home that night, exhausted, taking off her leather ankle boots. But why was the light switched off? Was it earlier in the day? Was there still light outside streaming in through the window? In Margot’s mind, her mother removed her shoes and tripped on the slippers she always kept by the door. There were always two pairs. One for Margot. Or maybe her mother was going somewhere. Maybe she was heading out the door and realizing that she forgot something, turned around and tripped in the dark. How terrible. How infuriating. She wanted to scream, Why didn’t you take better care of yourself? But there was no one to hear her now.
“Did she have any employees?”
“No, just her.”
“Was she friends with any of the neighboring store owners?”
“Yes. Well, there’s this woman... She has a children’s clothing store across the aisle from my mom.”
His pen scratched on the pad. “Did they get along? Did your mom get along with everyone?”
“I think so. When I was growing up, she had some trouble with being one of the few Korean store owners there. She thought the customers and the other store owners might not like her since her Spanish was bad.”
Margot remembered how her mother would yell, Amiga, amiga, to potential customers as they walked away on the green-painted pathways between the stores. Sometimes they would stop and wave goodbye. Other times they would simply ignore her. Occasionally they would pinch their noses around the Korean food that she brought from home. Her mother had the profound capacity to brush the insults off, but Margot could not. They would haunt her for her life. She had loved her mother more than anyone but was also deeply ashamed of her—her poverty, her foreignness, her language, the lack of agency in her life. She did not know how to love anyone, including herself, without shame.
Tears leaked out of her eyes. She grabbed a tissue from a box on his desk.
“I wanted you to know that you can call me if you need anything,” Officer Choi said kindly. “You have my card?”
“I just wish I knew what to do with her now. With her ashes.”
“Did she go to church?”
“Yes.” The clay Spanish tile roof. The tall creamy white building. The bell tower.
“Could they help you? Could they help you figure out what she would’ve liked?”
“Yes, of course. I don’t think I’m quite ready yet for that.”
“Your dad?” He furrowed his brow. “Is he still around? Can he help you somehow?”
The words your dad bit at her quick, like an eel hiding in seagrass.
“I don’t... I didn’t know him.” She had often been judged by people at church, at school, who didn’t understand how she could survive without a father. Don’t you wonder who he is? Do you think he’d ever come back? She had been pitied, too. But most of all, she had been excluded, unable to relate to the structure of family, both in America and in what she knew of Korean life. The message had always been that women without men lacked shape, women without men were always waiting for them to appear like images in a darkroom bath.
WHAT WOULD MARGOT do with all the mundane objects that made up her mother’s life? A tangle of rosaries in a dusty ceramic dish. Faded school portraits of Margot with her gapped teeth and the horrible bangs that her mother cut straight across. An old single-CD boom box covered in a fur of dust. A dingy white teddy bear, glossy crooked nose, gripping a stuffed red satin heart. A framed photo of her and her mother on the day of Margot’s high school graduation. A box of albums that had gotten so old, most of the images slipped out, no longer held by the ancient adhesives. Closets and drawers full of clothes. She didn’t understand why her mother needed so many sweaters and pajama pants and blankets. It was Southern California after all.
It had been about a week since her mother had died and a few days since discovering her mother’s body. A part of her wanted to leave everything and go back to Seattle, let the landlord deal with it.
But then her own childhood possessions—her old clothes, schoolwork, photos, immunization records, notebooks—which she didn’t even have the courage, the energy to confront in the other bedroom, would be abandoned as well.
Eventually she’d have to go through her old room, whic
h her mother had used mostly for storage, keeping the twin-size bed for Margot’s visits around the holidays. As a teenager, Margot would retreat there after dinner, disappear with a notebook and pen, crank up her moody music—PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Portishead—to drown out the sound of her mother watching the Korean channel in the living room. Sometimes she’d exit her room and catch a glimpse of her mother nodding her head as if in conversation with the screen. It must’ve been a relief after a long day in a foreign country to be immersed in images where you belonged just by sound and gesture and face. How much language itself was a home, a shelter, as well as a way of navigating the larger world. And perhaps that was why Margot never put much effort into learning Korean. She hadn’t been able to stand being under the same roof as her mom.
But now Margot could see that, despite moving to Seattle, she was everywhere inside of this apartment. It wasn’t just her mother’s objects covered in dust, but her own—the photographs of Margot as a gap-toothed little girl, the certificates of Margot’s grade-school accomplishments framed and hung on the walls, which meant nothing to Margot but clearly were a source of pride for her mother.
It was obvious now how much they depended on each other—for food, shelter, a sense of identity in this world—and how much Margot had resented that. She didn’t want to need or be needed by her. Her mother was too heavy with history, with sadness, unspoken and unexplained. She rarely mentioned her childhood and had only sometimes vaguely referenced the variety of jobs—a cook, a textile cutter, a seamstress—that she had been forced to work as a teenager to survive.
Margot knew that at some point her mother had moved from the orphanage into a boardinghouse where she had shared a room with three other young women, either orphans or exiles, without families for shelter—a particularly thrilling time when Mina had finally been free to live her own life, free from the scrutiny of adults.
Margot never felt strong or sturdy enough for the details of her mother’s truth. She could barely handle her own. Growing up American was all about erasing the past—lightly acknowledging it but then forgetting and moving on.
But history always rose to the surface. Among the wreckage, the dead floated to the top.
And here now—the rosaries, the dingy white teddy bear, the photo albums.
How could she even begin to separate her belongings from her mother’s? Why had she always counted on her mother to be here so that Margot wouldn’t have to make any decisions, place any value on the items that were the evidence of their lives—not just of their daily activities, but of what they simply couldn’t bear to get rid of, what they simply couldn’t bear to lose?
How much had her mother been carrying? How much had she been carrying for them both?
And now Margot would have to bear it all by herself.
* * *
Down in the garage—cool and dim and soundless except for the gentle knocking of pipes—Margot backed out of the spot behind her mother’s car. A tall figure appeared in her rearview mirror. She gasped and slammed on the brakes, the man scurrying out of the way. As she pulled up beside him, she lowered the window on her side.
“Sorry,” she said. “You came out of nowhere.”
“That’s okay.” He stood holding a broom and dustpan in hand. She recognized him as the landlord or maybe the janitor—she couldn’t tell which one—who had been there the day she found her mother’s body. He was wearing the same gray pullover sweater, pilling and rubbed thin on the elbows. Wrinkled and tanned, he had both the ease and the awkwardness of someone who had immigrated decades ago—a fluent English speaker who had probably grown up on American pop culture but for whatever reason never left Koreatown. He seemed a bit lost, out of place. Margot could certainly relate.
“Hey, I’m so sorry about your mom,” he said with a slight New York accent. “She was a good tenant. Always paid rent on time.” He coughed and turned to spit on the ground.
“Thank you,” Margot said. It struck her that he might have known her mother, seen her more than Margot had this past year. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she asked, “Do you remember the last time you saw her? What she seemed like?”
“Hmm.” He paused. “It’s hard to say. She dropped off her rent check a couple days early. Last Friday, I think?”
“Was there—I don’t know—anything odd going on? Anything around the apartment or...?”
Scrunching his brows, he ran his fingers through wavy hair, bright white at the temples. “Well, last weekend, I might’ve heard your mom yelling,” he said, biting his lower lip. “At night. But a lot of people fight. A lot of families fight, you know.”
“Yelling?” she asked, shocked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was someone else in the building. A Korean woman.”
Heart pounding, Margot asked, “Do you remember which day that was?”
“Not really. Saturday or Sunday.” He scratched his head, avoiding her eyes. “It’s probably a mistake. Who knows? My apartment isn’t directly below hers. But my window was open, and I thought I could hear a woman yelling.” He shrugged. “I went back to sleep.”
“Was it just my mother yelling? Was there anyone else with her?”
He shook his head. “I’m probably mixed up, you know? I heard Korean and there’s not a lot of us left in the building, so—I figured it was your mother. But I don’t know.”
“Did you tell anyone? The police?”
“No, no, I didn’t. Honestly, I didn’t even remember this until now. Not a big deal. It could’ve been anyone. I mean, no need to get them involved with that. People fight. People get mad.”
“Was my mother usually noisy?”
“No, no. Very nice lady. This has always been a safe building. Very safe. No problems.” He dug in his back pocket and produced a Marlboro Lights packet half-wrapped in plastic. Slipping a cigarette behind his ear, he said, “It could happen to anyone, you know?”
Was he being cagey or was it just her imagination? Margot asked, “Are you new?”
“Excuse me?”
“I used to live here,” she said. “I don’t recognize you.”
“My wife owned this building. She died a few years ago and I’ve been trying to keep it together since then. You have no idea how expensive it is to own a building these days. We used to be the bad guys, you know? Now it’s like we can’t even make a decent buck, you know, with all the big companies buying everything. The electric bill is so expensive these days. Then you have tenants complaining all the time about the noise. There’s crime. Is it my fault? I try my best. I fix the security door. The next step is to buy a camera, but how much more can I put into this building? How much? It’s never good enough. Everyone hates the landlord.”
“Well, you own something, right?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“At least now that my mom’s dead you can raise the rent.” Her voice cracked. “Would that help pay for your camera?”
“What are you trying to say? I wasn’t complaining about your mom. Your mom was good. She was quiet. She had some visitors sometimes... A man used to come around here. A boyfriend, I guess. Rich guy. Who knows? She had friends. She was fine.”
“A boyfriend?” Margot’s mother had never mentioned or expressed romantic interest in anyone, even the occasional shopkeeper at the swap meet who courted her.
“Yeah, some guy, I don’t know. I don’t get in anyone’s business except when they’re parked too close to the driveway or whatnot. Some man. Nice car. Mercedes. I always wanted a car like that.”
“Fuck,” she said to herself. “Was it the person she was yelling at that night?”
“I only heard one voice that night. The boyfriend, he hasn’t been around for a while. Months maybe. Who knows? It was in the summer. I don’t like to get involved. It’s a safe building. No problems here. I don’t like to get involved, okay?”
“You could’ve told the police,” Margot said. “About the yelling.”
“What for? I was tired and it could’ve been anyone. I don’t need them snooping around here. Do you? Do you think the neighbors like that? What do you think the police are going to do for you? Do you think they care about your mother? Do you know how many die, get robbed, get killed in this city? I don’t need any more problems around here. Young ladies like you should focus on getting married, meeting a nice guy, having a family.”
She almost told him to go to hell but instead rolled her window up. Yes, he was right; her mother, and women like her, were an inconvenience.
But if she allowed that story to continue to be told, over and over again—that her mother was a nobody, anonymous, an immigrant who couldn’t speak the language, another immigrant who worked a job that no one else wanted, another casualty of more important things, a casualty of more important people—she would be letting them win, wouldn’t she? She would be allowing them to sweep her mother away like dirt and dust.
She and her mother deserved better than this. But how would she figure out what exactly happened to her mom?
If only she had left Seattle earlier, bought a plane ticket, she could have prevented her mother’s death, or at least found her soon after dying, rather than allowing her body to remain alone in that apartment. Why didn’t she try to get there earlier? Why did she brush off the fact that something was weird when her mother was not answering the phone?
As soon as she got back home, she’d leave Officer Choi a message about the landlord and the yelling from her mother’s apartment, the possible fight last weekend. She’d scour through her mother’s belongings. There might be some clue of who her mother might’ve been with last weekend. Who visited her? And who was this boyfriend in the summer? A boyfriend. That couldn’t be right. Her mother had a single-minded focus—work and their survival.
But could the boyfriend have returned? Could they have gotten into a fight? She’d have to find him now.
The Last Story of Mina Lee Page 4