Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  Wren told his side of the story, above the other boy’s denials, and then the colonel sent them off to class instead of the principal’s office. After that, Wren never doubted he could stand up for himself, and the next year, when Alvin Harrison called him a Japanese motherfucker as they were headed out for the layup line, Wren cornered him against a wall and put a hand to his throat, and it was the look in Wren’s eyes more than anything else that forced an apology.

  On the interstate, headed home, Wren thinks about his mother’s confrontations in Fordyce, her own slights, and how it has always been a bigoted place. He’s not lived there in more than ten years, but when he thinks about being growing up there, he finds it harder and harder to remember what was good and easy for them in that place.

  “One of these days you could really get hurt,” his mother says.

  “Maybe,” Wren says, thinking about Hannah’s call. Her crying. “He knows everything,” she said. Over the phone, he heard French police sirens wailing.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “At a pay phone down the street,” she said. “He got the phone bill yesterday and saw all my calls to you, and then he hacked my email account and found our messages.”

  Wren was sitting up in bed by then, his heart beating fast. “You weren’t paying for the phone bill? He hacked your account?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You wanted to get caught,” he said. “Look at how you’ve handled this. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “What about our plans for you to come home this fall?”

  “I don’t know about that either.”

  “We can make this work,” he said. “I know you’re scared, but if you get back here and we see each other again, it will be all right.”

  “You’re always so sure about that,” she said.

  “You’re the one who said you wanted to come back home to me,” he told her.

  She was breathing heavily into the phone. “My phone card is running out of time. I need to go to the store and get a new one. I can call you back.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he wants to talk tonight when he gets home from work.”

  Wren knew her boyfriend was going to ask her to work it out, and when he did, she would stay. “Call me tomorrow,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, barely audible.

  “I want you to come home,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  “I do know it.”

  He closed the phone and stood up in the dark of his apartment. He went to the window and looked out over the barren street below him. He tapped a fingernail to the glass and listened to the hollow clink, thinking that in eight hours they were going to have a conversation that would decide his future. He went to his desk and opened his laptop, and there was an email from Henri to Hannah, blind copied to Wren. Do you love me? Henri asked her. He wrote in English for Wren’s benefit. Or do you think about Wren when you are fucking me? Wren closed his laptop and leaned back in his desk chair. They’d both been so caught up, and once they had started down this path, they couldn’t stop themselves, even though they saw the danger ahead. Now his and Hannah’s long exchanges, their secrets and desires, had been pored over by someone else.

  “What’s wrong?” his mother asks. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” he says. The hills of Kentucky roll past at seventy miles per hour. Hills that are imprinted on him along with each bend and curve of I-75.

  “You’ve barely said anything. Aren’t you happy to see your mother?” she teases.

  “I’m okay. Tired, is all.”

  “You can’t lie to me, son. Are you depressed? Did something happen? You haven’t called us as much as you usually do.”

  He relents, wanting to tell somebody what’s happened, how he feels. “Things went bad with this girl I was seeing.”

  “I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone.”

  “Well, I’m not really. I met her over the summer at my internship. She lives in Paris.”

  Her head snaps back. “Kentucky?”

  “No, Mom. The real Paris. It didn’t work out.” He doesn’t tell her more, though. She worries about him too much already.

  “Why?”

  “Because she lives across the ocean for one.”

  “It worked for your dad and me,” she says.

  He never asked his parents how they met or fell in love. He knows his father asked her to wait for him when he went to Germany to finish out his army service. Six months they spent apart, held together only by his letters to her.

  “I guess that’s right,” he says, and he smiles at her, feeling the pain in his cheek.

  ON WREN AND Hannah’s last night together they left the hotel room and went back to the bar where they met. It was late, and the kitchen was going to close in ten minutes. Their bodies were spent, and they sat across from each other with weak legs and glossy eyes.

  “Would it matter if I told you I don’t want you to get on that plane?”

  “No,” she said, “but it’s nice to hear.”

  “I want you to stay,” he said, and knowing it wouldn’t come true made it easier to say.

  “And what would we do if I stayed?”

  “We’d figure this out,” he said.

  “And what would we find?”

  “That you’re trouble,” he said.

  “And you’re not?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He ran the backs of his fingers over her hand. “We needed more time,” he said. “But that wouldn’t change anything would it?”

  “It might have,” she said.

  They made small talk then, avoiding what they were feeling and, Wren believed, trying to convince themselves the entire summer hadn’t been some big mistake and that when he got on the train tomorrow they would leave each other and not think about what could have been. And later, back in the room, with daylight drawing close, tangled in the sheets, he said to her, “Do you love him?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then why are you here?”

  They had almost had this conversation once before, but they had both been drunk and she started to cry, saying he must never ask about him, that he could never question her about her relationship.

  “I wanted to be,” she said.

  He was holding her from behind, and he kissed her shoulder, then her neck. “If you love him then I want you to go over there and give it your best shot,” he said. Fear rose in him and dried his mouth, and it was hard for him to keep speaking, but he went on anyway. “If you really love him, you owe him that much. Don’t tell him about us. Go over there and give your heart to him.”

  She pushed herself up from the bed, out of his embrace, almost frantic, he thought later, and said, “How can you say that?”

  He turned from her, onto his back, and looked at the ceiling. His stomach was completely hollow. He licked his lips and tried to measure his words, steady his voice. Her visa expired in May, and either way she was coming back to the States. “What else can I say? I want you to go over there, and when spring comes and you’re back home, I’ll still be here. I’ll be waiting without waiting.”

  He knew she was angry with him. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked down on him.

  “You know how I feel about you,” he said. “Don’t act like you don’t.”

  “You really want me to go back to him?”

  “No, but there’s nothing I can say that’s going to change your mind about leaving. You’ve said as much. If there is something, tell me.”

  “No,” she said quietly, retreating.

  “Then don’t get angry with me for telling you that.”

  They lay apart for a long time, and when she was finally asleep, he listened to her breathing and the soft talking noises of her dreams and remembered that within their first week together he had woken up one morning to find their foreheads were pressed right
next to each other, their breath passing back and forth like two slow-moving trains. He wasn’t sure how long they had slept like that, but he closed his eyes and soon he was asleep with her again. That was the moment when it stopped being a fling for him, and he began to feel closer to her than he ever had to anyone else. The room was ripening with sunlight, and he finally understood what it meant to fall for someone. His feelings for Hannah, for what was going to happen to them, were the same as if he had stepped off a cliff and, tumbling through the air, grasped at the firm ground above him that grew more distant with increasing speed. Beside him Hannah let out a sigh and he rolled to her, running a finger along the curve of her hip, and then he put his arm around her and she took his hand and clutched it, bringing it near her heart.

  “YOUR DAD’S MAD at me.”

  “Why?” Wren asks. They’ve just pulled into Fordyce. New fast-food joints along the roadside stand out against the sheared gray mountainsides.

  “One of his cousins died a few weeks ago and was so poor his wife didn’t have enough money to pay for a funeral. So Dad called your Aunt Janice and said we wanted to help pay for it, but she told him that his cousin didn’t want anybody’s money.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your dad thinks she didn’t want to feel like she owed anybody.”

  “So what’d they do?”

  “The funeral was last week, and Janice and Tom went out there and helped her dig the grave at the cemetery.”

  “They dug the grave themselves?”

  “I reckon,” she says. Wren smiles at this, marveling at just how long she’s lived in Fordyce, how she talks like a country woman. “That’s what Janice said. She called to see if we wanted to go help, but your dad said to let them do it by themselves.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century and they dug a grave using shovels?”

  “I think so,” she says.

  “The county didn’t take a Bobcat out there or anything?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “That’s what your aunt told me.”

  “Damn,” he says. “So why is Dad mad at you?” They make the turn by the post office, where the high school football field is—the centerpiece of town—and cut through the underpass and make their way to Main Street.

  “Well, he said we needed to start thinking about where we were going to be buried and what kind of funeral we wanted, and I told him I didn’t care. I said, ‘I don’t have a country anymore. You can just spread my ashes in the ocean.’ And he got real mad at me. He started cussing and saying, ‘This is your country. What makes you say things like that?’ I tell you, he gets sensitive about those kinds of things. He doesn’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t guess he does.”

  They pass the ball fields where he used to practice Little League football, and for a moment he imagines the figures and shapes of his past, the coaches that were so young then standing in shorts with baseball caps on backward, getting down in three-point stances and yelling instructions. He sees the ill-fitting shoulder pads and the helmets on him and his friends and remembers the sting of the first blow he ever took, the sensation of it running from the top of his neck, through his spine, and into his toes. Not all his memories of home are bad, he thinks. “Where do you want to be buried?” he says. “In Masan?”

  “I want to be cremated,” she says. “Masan isn’t my home anymore, but neither is here.”

  He aches with sadness for her. She gave up everything for his father, for this place where they raised him.

  “Are you going to see this girl again?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I doubt it. I wasn’t very smart about things.”

  She’s not one to pry, but they’ve always talked. They’re friends as much as they’re mother and son. As he’s grown older, he’s become aware how important his happiness is to her. He tries to shield her from his disappointments and pains.

  “It’d be nice for you to have somebody,” she says.

  He thinks about the early years of his parents’ marriage, of how much trouble his mother had adjusting to Kentucky. Wren doesn’t understand how she dealt with her misery, but his parents made a life together—a life for him—and the only explanation is that they loved each other.

  “Sometimes I think you like being lonely,” she says, pulling into the driveway.

  “Why is that?”

  “The things you get yourself into,” she says. Then, feeling bad, she corrects herself. “I shouldn’t say that. You’ll find someone.”

  “I’m not worried about it, Mom. You shouldn’t be either.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No.”

  He gets out of the car and grabs his bag and walks his mother around the house to the back deck. Cold air rocks through the trees, and the wind chimes hanging from the eaves go sideways and clang.

  “Are you coming in?” his mother asks.

  “In a minute,” he tells her.

  But she comes beside him. He feels her looking up at his eye. “You should put some ice on that,” she says.

  “I will,” he says, still staring ahead.

  “You know,” she says, and he turns toward her, but then she shakes her head. “Never mind.”

  “What? What was it?” he asks. He feels guilty for not telling her more about Hannah. All she’s ever done or wanted to do is help him. She wants to take his pain and make it her own.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “I’ll go make you a cold pack.” And she turns to go in before Wren can stop her.

  One night, after he and Hannah made love, he rested his cheek on her stomach, and she asked to tell him a story in French. It was so dark in the room he barely saw her face, and when she began speaking he didn’t hear her but felt the vibrations of her talk through her skin. He had no idea what the story was about, but it was filled with feeling, with pauses and contemplation. He listened to the emotion of her voice, and at times she was so moved she had a hard time continuing, but she’d gather herself, and when she was finished, when the beautiful rhythm of the language and sentences was complete, they lay in the dark for a long time, not wanting to ruin the silence.

  “I don’t know why I did that,” she said, at last.

  “It was nice.” He pushed himself up so that his face was beside hers.

  “Did you understand any of it?”

  “No, but that wasn’t important,” he said, sure, somehow, that might be the most of herself she would ever give him, the most she would ever let him in.

  He puts his hands in his pockets, bracing himself against the weather. He looks up at the thin poplar trees swaying in the stiff breeze and the autumn leaves swirling and twisting as they fall. The mountains surround them, and he wonders if he’ll one day look at any other place the same way again, with the same feelings of comfort rising in his chest, when his parents are gone and there is no reason for him to return here.

  LARGER THAN THE SEA

  I WANTED TO FIGHT. I told Seo-Yun that the Japanese were only men, but she didn’t want to hear that. She wanted me to run away, like so many others, into the mountains and wait until the soldiers passed through our village.

  The Japanese needed men for the war. They were traveling from village to village, kicking in doors and marching men out at gunpoint. Since Sook-Cha was born, I had lived in greater fear that they would come for me. We heard they were only three days from Masan and I was afraid, but I didn’t tell Seo-Yun that. I only said when they came I would be right beside her and our daughter.

  It was evening and the child was already asleep in her corner of the house, as near to the fire as we dared put her. “Look,” Seo-Yun said, and went to the girl. “This is why you must run.” She squatted beside the child’s pallet and pushed back a small curl of hair on the girl’s forehead.

  I went below the house to stoke the fire of the ondol that warmed the floor where we slept. I crawled on my stomach, feeling the earth’s coolness against my body. I heard Seo-Yun’s feet padding above me in the
tiny kitchen. Then she stopped and there was a tapping, and I knew she was waiting by the door for my return. I took my time lighting the fire, stacking small limbs on top of the burning coal and blowing on them to fan the flames. The fire bloomed brighter, and I shut the stove door and rolled to my back, looking at the dark underside of the floor. They are all I have, I thought, and they are all I want. And in the next moment I said aloud, “And yet.”

  “And yet what?” Seo-Yun said when I stepped up to the small ledge of our porch.

  “Nothing,” I said, and I dusted myself off and stepped past her, onto the warming floor. A small set of bowls and cooking utensils sat in the corner and a strip of moonlight landed on the crock of water, sending silvery dances of light onto the soot-covered clay wall. Seo-Yun had not moved.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  I knew where it would go. I saw every angle of her argument laid out like stones in a path—neat and in line. “I’m tired,” I said.

  “Promise me you’ll go,” she said. “Promise you won’t stay and fight.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  “Even for her?”

  “If I stay it will be because of her. That’s why I must fight. They can’t have everything. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “Why can’t you see that I need you?”

  We both had our eyes on the child, unable to look at each other. I saw her side, but it didn’t stop me from feeling my own arguments, of remembering when my father was taken from me at ten and always wondering what had happened to him and how he had died.