The Last Story of Mina Lee

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

  The last time they had gotten into an argument about church, Margot had been fifteen or sixteen years old, mutinous and loud enough to scare her mother. That was about the same age when she had fully given up on learning Korean, too, the same age when her defiance was the only thing she had to feel alive. And anything about her mother—her foreignness, her poverty, her powerlessness—became only a mirror for what Margot did not want to be or become.

  “I don’t believe in God,” Margot had said in English, washing dishes after dinner. “I don’t want to go to church tomorrow.”

  “You don’t believe in God?” her mother replied in Korean, wiping the table. “Do you know what happens to people who don’t believe in God?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Her mother approached, cornering Margot. “Do you want to go to hell?”

  Despite her fatigue after a long day of work, twelve hours or so of running around downtown for inventory, courting customers who mostly ignored her, who sometimes called her “china,” laughing at her face, her mother, in an argument, drew words from her deepest well, her deepest fears.

  “I don’t believe in hell.” Already exhausted, Margot rinsed the pot under the hottest water, steam rising, tickling her face.

  Her mother’s hand slapped the counter. “Do you want to go to hell?”

  “If there was a God, He wouldn’t let us suffer,” Margot shouted, turning off the tap. “He wouldn’t let so many of us be poor.” Her voice had risen in English, and she couldn’t tell how much her mother would understand, but it didn’t matter. She needed to say this out loud. “He wouldn’t make life so hard for us. There wouldn’t be war. He wouldn’t make life hard for so many people.” Tears gushed out of her eyes. She couldn’t stop herself now.

  “What about when you die? Uh?” Her mother gestured to the ground as if they would all be buried right on the spot under the beige linoleum of their floors.

  “When I die, I’ll be dirt. It doesn’t matter.”

  “What about when you die?” Her index finger, shaking, pointed toward Margot’s chest. “How will people find you? Uh? How will you find the people you lost?” Her mother, who rarely cried, sobbed. “How will you find the people you lost?”

  At the sight of her mother’s face cracked open, Margot rushed past her into the bathroom where she perched on the toilet, weeping about the impossibility of living with her mother, tyrannous but every now and then, unexpectedly transparent, leaking light from the disasters of her life—her single motherhood, her childhood as an orphan, the war, the hours and hours without a proper day off, without a vacation, that she put into the store.

  Margot never knew what to do with the bright flashes of who her mother was that would threaten to burn them all to the ground.

  She could hear the squeak of the carpeted floor as her mother stood outside the bathroom, listening to Margot cry. Margot imagined her now—her fingers pressed against the closed door, her head leaning forward, her hand curled in a fist to knock, but then she retreated.

  How afraid they were of each other. How impossible they seemed together. But if only her mother would’ve knocked, and Margot’s response wouldn’t have been, Go away. If only they had a way to embrace each other and say, I don’t understand you, but I’m trying my best. I am trying my very best.

  And now being in her mother’s world was like stepping into a wildfire, the edges of which she might not ever contain or even know. An immolation that might clear dead brush, bring seed trapped in perfect pine cones down to the soil.

  At the end of the prayer, the crowd stood, flipping through the onionskin pages of black vinyl-covered books, clearing throats to sing. The gentleness of their song above organ music elevated the room, as if their spirits could skim the vaulted ceiling, filling the rib cage of the church. She didn’t understand the words, but her body hummed with the sound, a sound of kindness and belonging, maybe even forgiveness, too. Tears filled her eyes and she wiped the corners with the sleeve of her sweater before they could fall.

  When she looked up, she saw the side of a familiar face about twenty feet in front of them.

  The red mouth.

  Margot nudged Miguel urgently.

  “What?” he whispered. The sermon had begun. The priest in his robes spoke with gentle but firm words, stirring the church like a fire. Margot could only catch in the net of her mind the Korean words for giving, love, and God.

  “Mrs. Baek,” she said. “Over there.”

  “Where?”

  “Gray scarf.” A man standing beside Margot shot her a dirty look.

  When communion commenced and her row had been called, Mrs. Baek, who wore a deep navy blouse, rose from the pew. Her long blue skirt, closer to indigo, swayed with her body. She bowed when receiving the wafer in her mouth. Margot imagined the taste and texture, the dryness before it dissolved on the tongue, down the throat. She leaned against the wall, looking at the gilded altar above which Jesus hung, pale and lanky, arms spread on the cross.

  Returning to her row, Mrs. Baek glanced up and, for a second, Margot thought that she had seen her and Miguel. Of course, they stood out. But then she picked up her songbook and seated herself as if nothing unusual had happened.

  At the end of the service, Margot watched as Mrs. Baek gathered her belongings in a black canvas bag from which she pulled out her cell phone. Reading her screen, she stumbled out of the nave, oblivious to her surroundings.

  Margot signaled to Miguel, and they followed, maintaining their distance. Before exiting the building, Mrs. Baek turned and descended a flight of stairs into the church’s basement. Stepping as quietly as possible, Margot and Miguel went down into a dusty storage area and waited behind several tall columns of cardboard boxes. They could hear Mrs. Baek speaking with someone, a man in Korean whose voice sounded familiar.

  “You look so nice tonight,” he said. “Let me take you out for dinner. It’s Christmas Eve.”

  Margot and Miguel glanced at each other as they crouched down lower to the ground.

  “How did you get my number?” Mrs. Baek asked.

  The man laughed. “What’s wrong with you? Come here.”

  “Stay away from me. Don’t ever call me or come here again.”

  “I thought maybe you might be looking for a job,” he said. “I could help you find a new one.”

  “I don’t need anything from you. Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “Shhh, lower your voice. You’re like an animal,” he said. “Ha, that’s what women are like when they don’t have men around. They’re like animals.”

  Mrs. Baek said something, which Margot couldn’t understand, through her teeth.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Lee.” Her voice cracked.

  “Ha, which one?”

  “Lee Mina.”

  “I don’t even know who that is,” he said. “Come here.”

  Swiftly, she grunted. He yelped in pain.

  “Don’t touch me,” she spat. “I’ll kill you.”

  Margot peeked around the boxes to see Mrs. Baek rushing out and Mr. Park following her, cradling his shin.

  “Shit,” Margot said, looking at Miguel. “Let’s go.”

  They ran up the stairs and out of the building into the cold night, which had rapidly blackened into a street almost empty of people. At the other end of the church’s parking lot, Mrs. Baek slammed the door of her battered gray Toyota Camry and drove off. Mr. Park had disappeared.

  “She’s probably going home,” Margot said, catching her breath. “We should make sure she’s okay?”

  Why did she say her mother’s name? Did he kill her?

  Driving toward Mrs. Baek’s apartment, Margot remembered the stacks of books and magazines in the living room, the layers of paper and text, tenuous skyscrapers, and Mrs. Baek’s face without makeup, t
he wash of pale skin, and the eyes—intense, defiant, a little terrified. A steady and slow state of shock. She had imagined her in that apartment, poring over books, completely alone.

  But Margot had been wrong about both her and her mother: their loneliness was not special, or any worse than anyone else’s. In fact, they each had their own universes, small but constructed in their own way. Who was to say that in their devices, in their plots, they were different from other people?

  Margot, who could only see her mother as the impossible foreigner with her rapid-fire Korean and embarrassing, halting English, who could only see her as an oppressive prop in Margot’s own story, realized more and more that, in actuality, her mother was the heroine. She was the one who had been making and breaking and remaking her own life. And in the end, she might’ve paid for it.

  Mina

  Fall 2014

  ON THE SATURDAY prior to Thanksgiving, almost one month after Mr. Kim’s death, Mina entered her daughter’s musty bedroom, folded newspaper in hand. She had attempted to snag a copy of the paper every day on her way to work while stopping for inventory at one of the wholesale businesses downtown. Sometimes there would be an unread newspaper on a counter that she would slip into her purse, or she would ask if she could take a look inside for an obituary. A friend had just died. Finally, one of the business owners offered her a stack of newspaper that he had kept from the past few months—saved for the bottom of his birdcage at home. Inside of her parked car, she scavenged through the pile until she found the one from October, the one with Mr. Kim inside.

  Now on top of Margot’s desk, where Mina mostly stored her own records and bills, she grabbed a pair of scissors from a wide plastic purple cup jammed with all the pens they had collected over the years. She imagined peering over the shoulder of her daughter, sitting at this desk hunched over a sketchbook with pencil in hand.

  Mina lay the newspaper on that desk and flipped carefully through the pages until she found again the black-and-white photo of Mr. Kim, Kim Chang-hee—a slightly younger but much more vibrant manifestation of the man with whom she had traveled to the Grand Canyon two months ago in September.

  Hand in hand, they had stared at the largest chasm they could find.

  Dark shadows pressed against red-and sand-colored rock striped over billions of years by wind and water. The purest golden light saturated large swathes of the green brush and trees clinging to walls of hard mineral against a soft and hazy azure sky. The warm breeze smelled of pine. The earth was rich.

  This was what she had always wanted—a return to feeling minuscule, tiny yet safe somehow again. Here she was so small that she could elude the cruelties that she had endured. Here she could go undetected. Nature in its most extreme forms taught us that there was a design greater than us, and we could unburden ourselves briefly from our individuality in this world, our self-importance. Wasn’t that the relief?

  The closest proximity to which she could attain this feeling in her everyday life must have been under God’s roof in a cathedral, where the vaulted ceiling, that arch, was a refuge in which the entire universe, in the form of prayer and song, hummed. Beauty was safety. Beauty kept us from harm.

  Cumulus clouds above projected shadows, dark silhouettes, deepening the drama of the peaks. The ornate striations of color and light made the spectacle of yesterday’s overnight stop in Las Vegas—which they had finally experienced together again after all these years—laughable. Standing in front of this chasm was like looking up at heaven and into the deepest part of the earth—its soul, the violence and agony of its billions of years, and the resulting splendor—at once.

  And then three weeks later in early October, he had delivered in a clean manila envelope the information on the whereabouts of her parents, papers that she now stowed in a safety-deposit box along with what she had left of her past—a few photographs from her time at the orphanage, her old identification documents in Korea, the only image she had left of her husband and daughter on that day they had gone hiking together.

  Here now in front of this black-and-white photo of Mr. Kim—his face still glowing, eyes warm and soft, the gentle curve of his crooked smile—she experienced an unburdening, a rush of relief as this obituary confirmed what she had known when he had stopped answering his phone weeks ago: that he was gone forever. Now, she could reassemble her life, placing Margot’s items—any photographs or mementos of hers that Mina had hidden from Mr. Kim these past few months—where they belonged before Margot’s next visit.

  Margot would never know he had been there, or who he was. And vice versa.

  Carefully, Mina cut around the edges of the obituary’s text, the straight lines.

  In their few months together, despite his weakened condition, despite the fact that their bodies had changed, hers rounding and softening, and his revealing more bone and angles, they loved each other. He kissed her on the mouth in her bed. They felt young again as if they had just moved to America, as if they had always been in love. They could somehow erase the past. She had forgiven him. She did. She was so relieved to forgive someone.

  But nothing could prepare her for the hole that Mr. Kim’s death could leave in her life.

  She found an empty envelope, folded the obituary, and slipped the paper inside for safekeeping. She opened the drawer and slid the envelope underneath the tray of her daughter’s art supplies. To her knowledge, Margot never went inside that desk anymore. Mina had actually not seen her daughter sketch anything in a very long time.

  She closed the drawer, sat on her daughter’s chair, and wept on top of the newspaper that remained spread on the desk. She lowered her face onto the empty rectangle from which she had removed Mr. Kim’s life, soaking the print, gently stamping the side of her face with smears of ink.

  “MINA?” MRS. BAEK said on the phone, relieved and angry. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Haven’t you been listening to your messages?”

  For the past week since she had cut the obituary from the newspaper, Mina had been ignoring the phone, the sound of which made her heart pound in her chest. She had been overcome by the most profound exhaustion, recalling all those days of relentless grief, years and years ago when her husband and daughter died, like so many waves, pounding against her.

  Mr. Kim was gone. This truth had knocked her down into the icy water, tossed her body around, and she found herself gasping for breath on the shore. She needed sleep. She needed rest and warmth.

  “You haven’t been at work in what—a week?” Mrs. Baek asked.

  Until today, the weather had been balmy. In the seventies and eighties during the day. Outside now, the sky was black, and the ground shimmered, wet with rain. The season was turning again.

  “I’m fine,” Mina said, rubbing the space between her brows.

  “Are you sure? I thought maybe you might be with Margot or something for Thanksgiving but...it’s been too long. I’ve been worried about you these past few months. What’s wrong? Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  “You’ve done enough for me, unnie.” Mina’s voice cracked as she remembered, all those years ago, Mrs. Baek rushing through her bedroom door, helping her to the bathroom, the toilet. How many times had Mrs. Baek held her hand? “Please do not worry about me. I just need some rest. I’m very tired these days. I’ll be back at work tomorrow. I promise. We can talk about it then.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “Hello?” Mina asked.

  “No. No. I’ll come over, okay? Have you eaten anything?” Mrs. Baek’s voice softened. “You sound weak.”

  “No, I don’t need—”

  “I’ll bring you some food. I’ll be over in an hour, okay? Wait for me. I’ll be there soon.”

  * * *

  As they sat on Mina’s couch, the broken figure of the Virgin Mary watched and Mina, finally, after twenty-six years, shared why Mr. Kim had fled. She t
old Mrs. Baek about what had happened to Lupe that day—how the supermarket owner had assaulted her and Mr. Kim intervened, causing him to disappear for fear of deportation. Mina confessed about Mr. Kim’s reappearance in her life, their affair over the summer, their trip to the Grand Canyon, the information he had gathered about her parents by using a private investigator, his death.

  “Does Margot know?” Mrs. Baek asked, picking up a framed photo of Margot as a child, six or seven years old, her bangs straight across, on the couch’s side table.

  “No, she does not,” Mina said with a heaviness in her chest.

  “I don’t remember this photo.” Mrs. Baek scanned the room. “There’s another one there, too. I remember thinking that you didn’t have any photos of Margot—the first time I came here. In the summer.”

  “I hid all of them. I didn’t want Mr. Kim to know.”

  “You never told him?” Mrs. Baek appeared confused.

  “No.”

  “All those years,” Mrs. Baek said, eyes lingering on the photo in her hand. “But Margot. Look at that face. Don’t you think she would want to know? Don’t you think—”

  “It’s better this way.” Mina mustered all the strength she could to say those words. Did she believe them? She had but now she wasn’t so sure.

  Mrs. Baek nodded, setting the frame down on the table. Scrunching her brows, she appeared lost in her own thoughts, her own memories. A deafening silence bloomed.

  What would Margot gain from knowing that her father had reappeared and died, only months later? Margot had already given up on him long ago. She had moved to Seattle and apparently was doing just fine without him, without Mina, too. But what if Mina was wrong about her daughter? What if—

  Abruptly, Mrs. Baek stood, paced back and forth. She stopped, turned toward Mina, and asked, “The owner of the supermarket, the one who attacked Lupe—whatever happened to him?”