Shelter

by Jung Yun

  “Yes, but why did it stop?”

  “I was a kid, Gillian. I didn’t bother to ask. What matters is that my mother had a miserable life back then. I understand why she took her frustrations out on me, but it didn’t happen often, and you know how small she is—it’s not like she could ever really hurt me.”

  Gillian doesn’t look like she believes him. He hardly believes himself. Half of him still feels sorry for Mae. The other half only feels rage—not because she hit him, but because she stayed. Every time Jin beat her into a corner because of a lukewarm dinner or an innocent comment, Kyung wondered why she wasn’t brave enough to run away, to take him with her and simply get out. She settled for a life of meaningless terror, dragging him alongside her when she should have wanted more for them both.

  “My mother isn’t that person anymore. You’ve seen her with Ethan, my father too. They’re careful with him, happy with him in a way they weren’t with me. I know you know this.”

  “But the sleepover invites, and all the offers to babysit—you always said no. It was like you were worried about them being alone with him.”

  “It wasn’t like that. It was more about sending them a message … about punishing them.” Kyung pauses, aware that he’s a very small man, using his child to communicate all of the things he never could.

  Gillian leans down on the countertop, stretching her arms out in front of her. She seems more relaxed now. Sad, but relaxed. From her posture, the way her elbow gently touches his, he knows the argument is almost over.

  “You’ve been a good son,” she says. “You figured out how to keep them in your life, even though you really didn’t have to. It’s not like you owed them anything.”

  “They’re my parents, Gillian. What was I supposed to do?”

  “What lots of people do—move to another city, get an unlisted number, avoid them. You had every right to cut them out of your life. Even a therapist would say so.”

  “That’s an American idea. Koreans are different.”

  “But you grew up here. You’re American too.”

  “It’s not the same.” He switches cheeks again, turning his face away from her. “Why are we talking about this anyway? A minute ago, you were giving me grief about being responsible and taking care of people. Did you change your mind already?”

  “No, no. It’s not that. I just want to make sure that if things get out of hand here, if it’s not safe or healthy for us to be around them, you’re going to take care of us, right? You’re going to put me and Ethan first?”

  What she’s asking for is completely reasonable. His wife and child should come before everyone else. But this is an American idea too. On the other side of the world, the world he never fully left, it’s parents first, children second, wife last. This is how Mae and Jin raised him, although he resents their claim as much as he struggles with Gillian’s. Still, he’s not about to explain something so incomprehensible to her, not when they’re this close to the end.

  “Of course you and Ethan come first.”

  Gillian brushes her thumb over his. He closes his eyes, trying not to think about the doubt implied in her questions. He could easily fall asleep folded over the countertop if she’d just let him.

  “Kyung,” she says quietly. “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “But now it’s your turn not to yell.”

  “Why would I?”

  She stands up and removes a piece of paper from a drawer. The font is so small—it takes a few blinks for his eyes to focus, to comprehend that what she’s given him is an e-mail confirmation of a wire transfer. Three thousand dollars from Jin’s bank account to theirs.

  “He asked for our routing number so he could give me some money. He said I should buy all new clothes for Mae before she’s released from the hospital. I tried to call you.… He was so insistent, but honestly, I thought he was talking about a couple hundred dollars or something. I had no idea he was planning to transfer this much.”

  Kyung scans the digits from left to right, counting and recounting the number of spaces they extend. “What else did he say this was for?”

  “I don’t know. I’m guessing it’s for food, maybe.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “This is important, Gillian. I need to know exactly what he said.”

  “Nothing, I swear. I told him it was too much and he said he wanted us to have it for our trouble. That’s it. That was the whole conversation.”

  For our trouble. It’s not worth it to explain that the money is Jin’s penance for his outburst earlier, that three thousand dollars is now the going rate of an apology in his family. Kyung knows how desperate Gillian is to keep the money—he can see it on her face, the way it looks so old and lined with worry. She understands, just as he does, that pride won’t fill their refrigerator next week. Pride won’t get his license renewed or pay the water bill or keep the collection agencies at bay. It’s a useless form of currency they can’t afford to trade in anymore. Kyung folds the paper in half and returns it to her, reminded of the gifts that always appeared like clockwork after a beating, the art and jewelry and clothing with their price tags still attached. One of his clearest memories of Mae dates back to grade school, when she stood in the hallway outside his room for over an hour, staring at herself in a full-length mirror. She was wearing a new mink coat, a plush gray one streaked with black and white—the kind that actresses on television wore when their characters were supposed to be rich. Mae kept turning from side to side, swinging the coat to make the fur brush against her legs, which were purple with bruises. He hated her then—he hates her still—for teaching him that everyone had a price.

  PART TWO

  DUSK

  FOUR

  The man on the doorstep is dressed like a college student, with a T-shirt and jeans and a Red Sox cap pulled low over his eyes. Kyung doesn’t recognize him; he doesn’t recognize the car in his driveway either.

  “No soliciting,” he says, pointing at the sticker on the storm door that announces the same.

  The man removes his cap and runs his fingers through his matted hair. “Oh, sorry, Mr. Cho. It’s just me.”

  Kyung is startled to see Lentz again. He wonders if he came to tell him that Nat Perry is in custody, or maybe even dead like his brother, but the longer he examines him, the clearer it is. There’s no good news on Lentz’s dimpled face. It’s a courtesy call, nothing more. He invites him in and leads him back to the kitchen, where Gillian is making lunch and Jin and Ethan are sitting on the floor, assembling his tricycle. The area around them is littered with parts, like a hardware store exploded and showered them in metal.

  “That’s a nice bike,” Lentz says to Ethan. “You’re going to have a lot of fun with that, aren’t you?”

  “It’s from my grandma and grandpa. I named him Boomer.”

  Kyung dragged the tricycle upstairs earlier that morning, desperate for an activity that didn’t involve sitting in front of the TV. Ethan shrieked when he saw the box, skipping around in circles and singing “bicycle” to the theme song of his favorite cartoon. Jin didn’t seem to mind that his gift had sat in the basement for several months. The impromptu song and dance even made him smile. Kyung assumed the three of them would work on the bike together, but Jin was quick to deputize Ethan, assigning him to sort and organize the parts. Despite the occasional pang of guilt he felt for not helping, Kyung was actually relieved to sit on the sidelines. He’d always been terrible at following instructions; he could barely put a bookshelf together, much less a bike. From his seat at the kitchen table, he tried to read a book that Gillian had given him, but his attention kept drifting away from the pages. Assembling a bike required patience, especially with an excited child underfoot. He worried that Jin might lose his temper at any moment, but the moment never came.

  “Do you have some news for us?” Gillian asks.

  Lentz leans against the wall, glancing at the stacks of sandwiches t
hat she’s arranging on a platter. “We finished collecting evidence at Mr. and Mrs. Cho’s house, so they’re free to go back now.”

  Jin continues reading his instruction manual. He doesn’t even bother to look up.

  “Whenever you’re ready, I mean. You’re free to go back whenever you’re ready. Also, we found your car in Newport.”

  Gillian frowns. “Newport, Rhode Island?”

  “No, Vermont. Up near Canada.” Lentz pauses, looking aimlessly around the kitchen until he lands on Kyung. “How’s your mother doing? The hospital released her, I hear.”

  The shower in the guest bathroom was running a few minutes ago. Now it’s stopped. Beyond this, Kyung has no idea what she’s doing up there, much less how. It’s been three days since Mae returned from the hospital, and she hasn’t left her room since. Every attempt to check on her has been met with silence and a locked door. Aside from the occasional flush of the toilet and the sound of her footsteps overhead, no one would even know that she’s living among them again. She’s the ghost in the house whose presence they all feel, but never see—not even Jin, who she exiled from the guest room within minutes of her arrival.

  “My mother’s resting. Is there anything else we should know?”

  “About the house? Not really. You’ve got good insurance, I hope?”

  The question was clearly directed at Jin, who makes no effort to respond. He just sits there with his chin tucked to his chest, staring at the manual, which appears to be upside down. Kyung isn’t used to seeing him this way, so desperate to be ignored. At work, his father is always the center of attention, a position he says he earned over time. Back in the ’70s, when Jin first started teaching, his research on renewable energy was easy to ignore, almost even laughable. Now he generates more grant money than anyone else on the faculty, and his patent revenues, a small fraction of which goes to the university, keeps the campus well fed. His success makes him popular in a way that his personality doesn’t, and he abuses his colleagues freely, always talking more than he listens.

  “Sorry,” Lentz says. “I wasn’t trying to pry. I just thought you might want to hire a cleaning crew before you go back.”

  There was no need to share this information in person. All of it could have been done on the phone. Kyung wonders if there’s something else he came to say, but can’t in front of a woman or a child.

  “So that’s it?” he asks. “Nothing else?”

  “Well, there’s a detective assigned to your case now. His name’s John Smalley. He was the one who asked me to stop by today.”

  “Why didn’t he come here himself?”

  “His wife’s been in and out of surgery this week. Blood clots or something. But don’t worry. John’s good—he’s been around a long time. He already got a positive match on that guy I was telling you about. Fingerprints, hair…” He glances at Ethan. “You know, that kind of thing. He also sent a statewide bulletin out, so now we’re just waiting for Perry to turn up somewhere.”

  Over a week has passed and this is all the progress he has to report. It hardly seems like enough. Kyung hasn’t thought twice about the police—he’s been too preoccupied with his parents to think of anyone else—but now it occurs to him that they aren’t doing everything they should.

  “Are you telling me you’re just waiting around for this guy to make a mistake?”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “But that’s what you said: Now we’re waiting for him—”

  “I didn’t say we’re not looking. We’re actively looking.”

  “But how do you know he’s not in Canada? What good is a statewide bulletin if he’s not in the States?”

  “Hey,” Gillian says, pulling on his sleeve. “Calm down. He’s just telling us what they’ve done so far.”

  She pulls again, harder this time, but Kyung doesn’t care. He can’t imagine a world in which Nat Perry is allowed to enjoy his freedom after taking so much of theirs. He wants this man in a prison or a grave. He expects the police to put him there.

  “So what does ‘actively looking’ mean? Where are you actually looking? And how many of you are there?”

  Lentz tosses his baseball cap back and forth from one hand to the other, looking nervous or confused—possibly both. He’s just the messenger; Kyung understands that. But he has a message of his own that he wants Lentz to carry back.

  “That day in the waiting room, when half the department turned up … I thought all of you were invested in this, but you’re not really doing anything, are you?”

  “Cut it out,” Gillian says. “Now you’re just being unfair.”

  “How is that unfair? You were standing right there—you heard him.”

  “There’s a process, Kyung. I should know. I grew up with this. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.”

  His father is watching Gillian, studying her as she speaks. Her behavior is probably distasteful to him—a wife sharing an opinion that differs from her husband’s, contradicting him in front of others. Mae would never dare, having learned long ago that dissent was the fastest route to grief. Neither of his parents really knows Gillian—how stubborn she is, how she doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind. Over time, he’s come to accept and sometimes even love this about her, but suddenly she’s making him nervous. After a week of living together under the same roof, she’s abandoned his careful list of dos and don’ts. With no advance warning, no discussion at all, she’s letting his father see who she is, who they are as a couple. Kyung doesn’t know how to interpret the expression on Jin’s face, a queer mix of curiosity and embarrassment, maybe even anger.

  “I’m sorry,” Gillian says. “My husband’s anxious—we all are.”

  “Why are you apologizing for me?”

  “Everyone’s a little on edge right now.”

  “But we’re not the ones who should be apologizing. We’re the victims.” He stops and tries to glide over his mistake. “My parents are the victims. They shouldn’t have to live like this, knowing he’s still out there somewhere.”

  Lentz’s cheeks flush pink, and he looks at the platter of sandwiches again. Something about this reminds Kyung of the kids he grew up with, the ones whose parents were too poor or neglectful to feed them properly. He was always grateful to Mae for offering them food, for encouraging them so kindly to take it. Kyung, however, regarded them differently afterward, saddened by the glimpse of something shameful about their lives. He realized how little it took to reveal a secret, and what a burden it was on people once they knew.

  “If you want a sandwich, then just take one already.”

  He slides the platter across the island, pushing the slick plastic much harder than he means to. The platter veers off toward the edge of the countertop like a bowling ball headed for the gutter. Kyung sees it all happen in slow motion—the skid, the drop, the crash of the platter against the tile and the startled jump that Lentz takes to avoid the bread and cold cuts strewn at his feet.

  “What is the matter with you?” Gillian shouts.

  Kyung locks eyes with Ethan, whose face registers an early, confused stage of alarm. He can stop it, he thinks. He can stop it if everyone else plays along. He walks to the other side of the island and gets down on his knees, using his hand as a makeshift broom.

  “Sorry about that,” he says, not looking up.

  Lentz gently kicks his foot to the side, discarding a piece of lettuce on his boot. “It’s all right. Like your wife said, you’re all on edge these days. You have every right to be.”

  This wasn’t what Kyung intended, not at all. He wanted to be assertive in front of his father; he wanted to prove that it was possible to disagree with his wife without feeling the need to beat her into submission. Instead, he’s crouching at another man’s feet.

  “I should probably get going now,” Lentz says. “If you folks need anything, if you have any more questions…”

  Kyung continues scooping handfuls of meat and cheese onto t
he platter until he realizes that no one is talking; no one is moving at all. He turns and finds Mae standing behind him with a towel draped over her shoulders and a head of dripping wet hair. She’s dressed in the powder blue bathrobe that Gillian bought her, a cheap polyester one that zips all the way to the neck.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  Her face is even paler than usual. The skin hangs loosely from her chin. Mae has always been a petite woman—a hundred pounds wet, at best—but even the billowy, oversized robe can’t disguise the fact that she looks thinner than before, almost skeletal.

  “What happened?” she repeats.

  “Nothing,” Gillian says. “I knocked a plate off the countertop.… I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

  Kyung can feel Lentz staring at him, but he doesn’t contradict what she said. No one does, not even his father. Everyone defaults to the illusion that everything is fine, everything is normal.

  “I got out of the shower and heard voices—I thought that was you. Hasn’t anyone offered you coffee yet?” She leads Lentz to the table, frowning over her shoulder at Gillian. “Can you get him a cup?”

  Coffee was always his mother’s way of making people feel welcome. Regardless of who the visitors were or how long they planned to stay, she tried to turn it into something special, breaking out her nice china and cloth napkins and tins of cookies that she stockpiled just for guests. Being a good hostess mattered to her—she said it was a skill that girls didn’t learn anymore. Perhaps that’s why she looks so upset when Gillian puts a manure-colored mug on the table, a gag gift from an old roommate with the words HOT AND STEAMY written on it.

  “You know what, Mrs. Cho? I think I’ve had enough coffee for the day.”

  “So how do you take it? Milk or sugar? Or both?”

  “Actually, ma’am, I was just leaving.”

  “No, you sit. Sit.”

  Lentz is one of them now—confused and bewildered by Mae’s sudden appearance, her forceful hospitality. He lowers himself into a chair and nods.