Shelter

by Jung Yun

  Kyung and Gillian gather around the window, craning to see what she does. Their backyard is empty except for the swing set and clothesline. The neighbors’ yards too—all empty. He looks out toward the overgrown field of weeds and wildflowers where their property line ends and the conservation land begins. Kyung’s eyesight isn’t what it used to be, but when he squints, he thinks he can see someone wading through the tall grass.

  “Is she actually naked?” he asks.

  Gillian leans in closer, fogging the glass with her breath. “Jesus, Kyung. I think that’s Mae.”

  He narrows his eyes, trying to sharpen the blur of lines and colors coming at them. The woman’s hair is black like his, but with the sun parked behind a cloud, he can’t make out her face. It’s not her, he thinks. She’s limping. Mae doesn’t have a limp.

  “You two know this person?” Gertie asks.

  “I think it might be Kyung’s mother.”

  He continues staring as the woman approaches, holding one hand over her breasts, and the other over her privates. Neither hand can obscure what Kyung realizes is not an optical illusion, not some crude misunderstanding of distance and light. His mother is completely naked.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t understand.…” Half of him wants to tear out of the house, but the other half wants to salvage the meeting by making up excuses. “She hasn’t been well lately. She’s … forgetful, I guess you’d call it.”

  “My mother had Alzheimer’s too,” Gertie says. “It’s a sad way of losing someone. Why don’t I leave you two alone now?” She collects her papers and puts them back in the folder. “When I hear from my clients, I’ll give you a call.”

  Kyung restrains himself, clutching the back of his chair as Gillian tries to show her out, but Gertie stops just before she reaches the door.

  “I know you probably hate the idea of renters in here. Most people in your situation do, but it might not be the worst thing in the world to spend more time with your parents right now. I wish I had.”

  Mae is fifty-six years old. She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t have anything. But Kyung doesn’t bother to correct her because dementia is the only reasonable explanation for what she’s done. As soon as Gertie leaves, he runs out the back door toward the field, the same way he did when he saw Ethan turning blue at a neighbor’s birthday party. He was choking on a piece of candy, a thumb-sized chocolate that he wasn’t supposed to eat. Kyung was terrified at first, and angry later. Now he feels the full force of both. He rips a beach towel from the clothesline, and a plastic pin snaps off and hits him in the face, missing his eye by almost nothing.

  The grassy field comes up to his knees, littered with things that he never noticed from a distance. Everywhere he steps, there’s broken glass and pieces of metal and thick patches of thistle that sting and scrape his legs. Even if the ground were free of obstacles, he wouldn’t look up. He can’t. His mother is so conservative, so timid about her body. She’s never even worn a bathing suit. He doesn’t understand how that woman became this one. As they meet near the middle of the field, Kyung turns his head and hugs her with the towel, covering the parts of her that he doesn’t want to see.

  “What?” he shouts. But his thoughts are too scattered to finish the question. “Why?”

  Mae’s face is filthy. Her skin is covered with dark brown streaks. He worries that it’s excrement, a possibility no stranger than wandering naked from her house to his.

  “Where are your clothes?”

  Mae’s expression doesn’t change, not even when he shouts the question just inches from her ear.

  “Help,” she says, followed by something in Korean—so low, he can barely make out the words.

  “English. Speak English. I can’t understand you.”

  “Help,” she repeats.

  “I’m trying to.” He pulls the towel around her tighter, embarrassed by the sight of Mae so diminished, wrapped in hot pink sea horses and neon green stripes. “Where’s Dad? Can we call him to come get you? Can he bring you some clothes?”

  “Aboji ga dachi shuh suh.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “Aboji ga dachi shuh suh.”

  Korean is no longer the language he speaks with his parents. They retired it from use years ago, when Kyung was just a child. Like a dog, he sometimes recognizes the sounds of certain words, but doesn’t always grasp their meaning. Aboji ga … your father? Dachi shuh suh … hurt me? Your father hurt me? The air catches in his lungs as the question forms a statement, and suddenly everything forgotten is familiar again. He turns Mae’s face toward his, gently lifting her chin until he notices the bruises. Two in the center of her throat. Eight more fanning out on the sides of her neck. Fingerprints. When he backs away, the towel slides off her shoulders and falls to the ground, but Mae doesn’t reach for it or even cover herself with her hands. She just stands there, trembling as he takes in everything that he missed before. The scratches on her arms and breasts. The bloody patches where her pubic hair has been ripped out. Bruises everywhere. Bruises again.

  Behind him, the kitchen door squeaks open and bangs shut.

  “Is she all right, Kyung? What’s going on?”

  As Gillian approaches, his mother buries herself in his arms and starts to cry, but it’s like no cry he’s ever heard before. She wails, long and low, like a wounded animal that any decent man would have the sense to kill.

  * * *

  One of the paramedics asks if Mae speaks English. Kyung insists that she does—she’s fluent, he tells them—but she keeps screaming at all of them in Korean. Twice, she lurches up to a sitting position on the gurney and rips the oxygen mask off her face. When the paramedics try to strap her down, she fights them both, throwing punches as if she’s gone wild. Kyung has never seen his mother act like this before. She’s not the type to resist. He rests his hand on her shoulder, startled by the temperature of her skin, which is burning hot.

  The female paramedic covers Mae with a thin, crackly sheet that looks like tinfoil. “Don’t touch her,” she warns. “She has frostbite.”

  “But it’s June. And it was warm this morning.”

  “But it was raining last night,” she snaps. “Those blisters forming around her ankles? That’s trench foot. She was probably out in the woods since yesterday.”

  The woman doesn’t try to hide that she blames Kyung for what happened. He bristles at this, the idea that he’s somehow responsible, or irresponsible.

  “My father did this. She told me, right before I called you. She said, ‘Your father hurt me.’”

  The woman glances at her partner as he prepares an IV line. When he finishes inserting the needle into Mae’s arm, he knocks on the sliding glass door that separates them from the driver.

  “Ten-sixteen,” he says. “Call it in.”

  The driver nods and picks up his radio.

  Mae tries to say something, but it’s muffled by the seal of her oxygen mask. Kyung leans down beside her ear. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He’s told this lie so many times in the past, but something about it feels different now. He’s no longer a small child or a sullen teenager, lifting himself up to play a part. He’s a thirty-six-year-old man with a promise to keep. Kyung was a freshman in college when he threatened to kill his father if he ever raised a hand to Mae again. Even though his voice cracked as he said the words out loud, even though he fully expected to become the object of the beating instead of the observer, the threat was surprisingly effective. Jin started going to counseling once a week. He became a regular at prayer group and Bible study. For eighteen years, he lived like a changed man—not a loving or caring man, but the absence of rage was change enough. Still, Kyung couldn’t rule out the possibility that a day like this would come, and now, of course, it has. Why it started again, why it happened with such a different, demented kind of violence—he can’t even begin to understand. His father was always a hitter. Open hand or closed fist. An occasional kic
k to the ribs or back. But the patches of pubic hair ripped out by their roots—this is something new. He shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the image. He can’t imagine what his mother did to deserve such a beating, but that was always the point. She didn’t deserve any of them.

  Mae falls asleep during their last few minutes in the ambulance, despite a stretch of potholed road that jolts Kyung’s spine. As he sees the hospital approaching in the window, he’s tempted to ask the driver to circle the block. That’s what he used to do with Ethan, who had colic as a baby. The car was one of the few places where he could sleep, so Kyung often drove around the neighborhood, over and over again, to soothe Ethan’s frayed nerves and his. It always felt like a shame to wake him at the end of the ride. Despite everything that’s happened, Mae appears peaceful for the first time since he saw her in the field, a peace that ends as soon as the ambulance stops and the paramedics fling open the doors.

  Suddenly, people are coming at them like locusts. Everyone is talking over each other—the doctors, the nurses, the paramedics. Mae is screaming again, banging her head against the gurney with such force, a nurse has to hold her down. Kyung assumes he’ll be allowed to go into the exam room with her, but a doctor waves him off.

  “Check in over there,” he says.

  Kyung watches as they wheel Mae away, struggling against her restraints like a psych patient. He should be with her, he thinks. He feels terrible for being so impatient in the field, barking questions in her ear while she was asking for help.

  At the front desk, a dough-faced woman hands him some forms to fill out and asks for Mae’s insurance card.

  “Insurance?”

  “Yes, does she have any?”

  He isn’t sure what bothers him more—the fact that she’s asking now, or the fact that he doesn’t know.

  “I think so.”

  “Any idea who she’s covered by?”

  “No.”

  “Fine,” she sighs. “Just do the best you can.”

  Kyung fills out the top section of the cover sheet—Mae’s name, address, telephone number, and birth date. He’s not sure about the answers to anything else, so he slides the clipboard across the counter.

  The woman scans the form and tries to slide it back. “You missed a bunch.”

  “I can’t fill out the rest.”

  “You don’t know if your mother has any preexisting conditions?”

  “No … we’re not really that close.”

  The woman lifts and lowers her eyebrows. “Okay, then. The police are waiting to talk to you. I think they’re around the corner.”

  “They’re here already?”

  “The paramedics called ahead.”

  Of the three men standing beside the soda machine, Kyung recognizes two of them: Connie, Gillian’s father. And Tim, her brother. Both appear to be off duty, dressed in T-shirts and jeans as if they were interrupted mid-barbecue. Their faces are angled toward a small television set hanging from the ceiling that’s tuned to a Red Sox game. Kyung approaches slowly, then slower still until he comes to a stop and takes a deep breath. He didn’t ask Gillian to call her family. He wishes she hadn’t.

  “Connie,” he finally says.

  His father-in-law turns around. “What’s going on? Is she all right?”

  Kyung nods, but he’s not convinced.

  “This is Officer Lentz. He’s here to take your statement.”

  He looks at the third man’s face, alarmed by the roundness of it, the absence of stubble or wear. “How old are you?” he asks. He blurts out the question before he realizes what an insult it levies.

  “Twenty-nine.”

  Lentz emphasizes the word “nine,” which Kyung assumes people mistake for “five.”

  “Matt’s a good guy. He knows what he’s doing.” Tim rests a protective hand on Lentz’s shoulder.

  “So what happened?” Connie asks. “Gilly called in a fit about your mom getting beaten up.”

  Kyung nods again, staring at the checkered tile floor. This is too much to say in front of his in-laws, too much history that he’s guarded from people like them.

  Connie seems to sense this because he steps toward him, lowering his head to look Kyung in the eye. “She said you mentioned something about your father before the ambulance arrived? He’s done this kind of thing before?”

  Connie’s eyes are blue, blue like Gillian’s. For the first time, Kyung sees something resembling kindness in them. Not suspicion, like the day she brought him home to meet the family. Or apathy, like every other Christmas and Thanksgiving since. Being married to his daughter wasn’t enough to earn this man’s affection, but being a victim somehow is.

  “It used to be pretty regular. A long time ago.” Kyung pauses. “My mother told me he did this to her—when she came to the house today, she said so.”

  Lentz is taking notes with a small blue pencil, the stubby kind used by golfers. Kyung watches the lead leave a neat trail across the page. Every letter is perfectly slanted and looped; it looks like a woman’s handwriting, or a young girl’s. He wonders if Lentz has ever been assigned to anything more serious than a bike theft.

  “That seems like enough to go talk to him, don’t you think?” Connie asks. “Mind if we come along?”

  Although he phrased it in the form of a question, it’s obvious that Connie expects the younger man to defer to him, which he does.

  “I want to go too.”

  The three men look at Kyung, then at each other.

  “That’s probably not such a good idea,” Tim says. “Maybe you should wait—”

  Connie swings his arm in front of Tim’s chest like a barricade. “It’s okay if he wants to come. Someone does this to a guy’s mother, he has the right.” He doesn’t bother to consult Lentz about this. He simply starts walking toward the exit. “Just promise me you’ll stay out of the way.”

  What he promises to do and what he thinks he’ll do are two different things. Kyung is convinced that when he sees Jin, he’ll go straight for the old man’s throat, pressing his thumbs into the hollow until someone pries him off. Connie and Tim might respect him more for the effort, although the McFaddens are the kind of men who always seem ready to fight, which ensures that they never have to. Kyung doesn’t feel comfortable around them, making their presence today even odder. He reminds himself that Gillian couldn’t have known any of this was going to happen when she called. It’s not her fault that he’s sitting in the back of Connie’s Suburban, following Lentz’s squad car up the hill toward Marlboro Heights.

  “I keep forgetting,” Tim says. “What’s your dad teach again?”

  “Engineering. Mechanical engineering.”

  “College professor ought to know better than to hit a woman, don’t you think?”

  Tim turns around in the passenger seat, his expression a cross between menacing and sly. He’s a hulk of a man, even taller and thicker than Connie. The question was probably his dumb idea of a trick. Kyung is a college professor too. Tim wants to hear him say the right thing.

  “Everyone,” he answers.

  “Everyone what?”

  “I think everyone should know better.”

  The main road into Marlboro Heights is a wide, neatly landscaped street. The houses along this stretch are the cheapest in the neighborhood because of their proximity to traffic. Still, Tim whistles at the sprawling Victorians with their chemical-green lawns and tall, leafy shade trees. It occurs to Kyung that his in-laws have never visited his parents’ house before. They were invited once, shortly after he and Gillian eloped, but they declined the invitation, which was never extended again. Under different circumstances, he would have been proud to bring them here. Mae and Jin live near the top of the hill in a stunning Queen Anne, built in the 1860s and restored to ornate, expensive perfection.

  When they pull into the horseshoe driveway, Tim leans out his open window, taking it all in. “This doesn’t look like a college professor’s house.”

  “My fathe
r still earns money from his patents.”

  “His what?”

  “He invents things.”

  “Never mind all that.” Connie turns around in his seat. “Remember what you promised. You’re going to keep your head in there, right?”

  Kyung feels like a bullet sitting in a chamber. Compressed and powerful, ready to inflict damage. Sending his father to jail isn’t the same thing as killing him, but it’s close. Close enough.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Lentz is waiting for them on the doorstep. As they walk up the flagstone path, Kyung notices that all the drapes have been pulled shut. Lentz picks up the brass knocker and raps the handle against the door. When no one answers, Connie pounds on it with his fist.

  “I guess he took off,” Lentz says. “No cars in the driveway.”

  Kyung lifts a flowerpot filled with marigolds and removes a spare key from the draining dish. His father is smart, smart enough to park the Lincoln a few blocks away to give the appearance that no one is home. That would explain the drapes. He tries to offer the key to Lentz, who steps away as if it’s a grenade.

  “We can’t use that. We’ll have to come back later.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Connie says. “You ever let yourself in with that key before?”

  “A couple of times. Why?”

  “And your parents didn’t mind, did they? Didn’t complain?”

  “No. They told me where to find it.”

  Connie turns to Lentz. “It’s not illegal entry if he had prior consent. I say we go in.”

  “Come on, Connie. That’s a stretch. You know how much trouble we’d get into—how much trouble I’d get into if I had to explain this to someone?”

  Their conversation is beginning to frustrate him. Kyung doesn’t care about illegal entry or prior consent. All he knows is that his father is hiding somewhere inside, and he wants to see Jin’s face when he realizes the police have come for him, that his own son brought them here for him. This is reason enough to go in. He turns the knob clockwise, surprised to find no resistance. Before Lentz can tell him not to, he pushes the door open, and the conversation behind him stops midsentence. In the entryway, the antique console that usually holds flowers and mail has been tipped over onto its side. One of its legs is broken, lying a few feet away like a junky dowel. There’s paper everywhere, loose sheets that look like bills, and pages from books that have been torn out of their bindings.