Shelter

by Jung Yun

  He picks up a small crystal bowl that’s much heavier than it appears and carefully sets it back down. “But don’t they just need a list of everything that has to be replaced?”

  “I can’t tell them what’s missing until I figure out what I still have.”

  “Oh.”

  Mae’s tastes are expensive; they always have been. Perhaps the only good thing about being married to Jin all these years was that he could afford her. Their settlement is sure to be considerable. Between the art and everything else, Kyung would venture to guess a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand at least. It’s strange to think that the money his parents will recoup from their losses alone would change his life for the better—not fix it entirely, but enough.

  “What about the photos and broken stuff? What should I do with all of it?”

  “Put the valuables somewhere out of the way so I can look at them,” she says. “The photos I don’t need anymore.”

  He didn’t expect her to dismiss the pictures so quickly. Many of them are sixty or seventy years old—vintage sepia-toned originals of relatives who passed away long before he was born. It’s sensible of her to let them go. Sensible, but still surprising.

  “I’m done with the living room now. Do you want me to start on the second floor?”

  “No.” She pauses. “That can wait until later.”

  He’s grateful for this response. He isn’t ready to see the master bedroom yet; he’d prefer never to set foot in that room again. He waits for Mae to give him another task. When she doesn’t, he makes up his own, sweeping some broken glass beside the china cabinet.

  “Can you not do that here?” she asks.

  “What would you like me to do instead?”

  “I don’t care. Just do it somewhere else.”

  Kyung clenches the broom handle and walks away, digging his fingernails into his palm. When he returns to the living room, he stops in front of the window, startled by the sound of footsteps and a man’s hushed whisper outside. He pushes back a corner of the curtain and sees two shadows cast long and diagonal against the porch. He runs to the entryway and lifts the broom like a bat, lowering his voice to a menacing baritone.

  “Who is it?” he shouts. “What do you want?”

  The person on the other side of the door knocks timidly—three quick raps followed by a meek “Hello?” He puts the broom down, embarrassed to realize that the landscapers have arrived, but when he opens the door to greet them, he finds his parents’ elderly neighbors standing on the porch instead. Mrs. Steiner is holding a large glass tray covered with tinfoil.

  “Lasagna,” she says abruptly, thrusting the tray at Kyung’s chest. “It needs an hour at 425.”

  “Oh … well, thank you.” He doesn’t know what to do next—leave it at that and send them away, or invite them in.

  “How are your parents?” Mr. Steiner asks, peering inside.

  Kyung remembers them from the news, shaking their heads and mumbling about what a good neighborhood they lived in, how people were supposed to be safe in the Heights. He wishes they hadn’t spoken to a reporter, but he can’t blame them for what they said. It was exactly what everyone else in town was already thinking. The Steiners own the biggest house on the street, a massive Victorian painted in various shades of purple, which would be hideous if not for the fact that it was done very well. He’s not sure if Mr. Steiner is retired now or still runs his chain of sporting goods stores, but judging from the giant canary-colored diamond on his wife’s finger, it hardly matters.

  “My parents are doing better, thank you. They’re staying with me for a while. My mother and I just dropped by to do a little cleaning.…”

  The Steiners are no longer listening to him. Their attention has drifted over his shoulder to Mae, who’s fixing her hair as she joins them in the entryway.

  “Carol, Mort, hello. Why don’t you come in?”

  She sounds remarkably, unnaturally cheerful again, the same way she did with Lentz. He doesn’t know why she feels the need to do this now. She can’t possibly think anyone expects it of her.

  The Steiners take a few steps inside, but both of them are tentative, as if the air just beyond the threshold is toxic. Carol’s milky blue eyes wander over the broken pieces of furniture and trash bags propped up in the corner. She looks frightened. Kyung thinks it’s lucky she didn’t arrive a few hours earlier.

  “We noticed a car in the driveway, so we thought we’d stop by,” Mort says.

  “And I made you a lasagna.”

  Mae takes Carol by the arm and leads her into the living room. “Thank you so much. Do you want to sit down and have some coffee? It’s—it’s messy in here. I’m sorry about that.”

  The difference in her tone is noticeable, so much kinder than the way she spoke to Kyung only minutes before.

  “Here.” She flips over a badly stained sofa cushion. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “No, no. Don’t go to any trouble, Mae. Carol and I just wanted to drop off some food. We’ll let you get back to your work now.”

  “Oh, wait. Don’t go just yet. I actually have something for you.”

  Mae disappears into the kitchen again, leaving the three of them looking at each other awkwardly. Kyung has no idea what to say. His parents and the Steiners have lived next door to each other for years, but he’s never spoken to them before. What little he’s seen or heard about them seems quaint and old-fashioned, as if they’re stuck in a different era. Unlike his neighbors, who wave in passing and quickly move on, the Steiners drop by with flowers and vegetables from their garden. They stop to have long, extended conversations over the fence.

  “So you and your family live down the hill?” Mort asks.

  Kyung nods.

  “There’s some nice real estate down there these days.”

  He nods again. Normally, Mort’s comment would bother him. People in the Heights never hesitate to point out the difference between living on the hill and below it. But he’s too distracted by Carol to reply. She’s wringing a pot holder, twisting the fabric tighter and tighter until her knuckles begin to turn white. She strikes him as a fragile sort of woman—rail thin and small, as pale as the double strand of pearls around her neck. He can’t imagine what kind of bubble she lived in next door, or how it feels now that she’s out.

  “Here you go.” Mae returns with an oversized silver fork. She hands it to Carol, who stares at it wide eyed, running her thin fingers over the elaborately forged handle.

  “Where in the world did you find this?”

  “I called about twenty different antique stores. I got this from a dealer in Springfield. It’s the right pattern, isn’t it? The Durgin Regent?”

  “It is, it is. You remember this, Mortie? This is part of the serving set we got from your mother for our wedding. It’s the fork we lost when we moved.”

  Mort puts on his glasses and studies the handle, which has an oval crest surrounded by an ornate floral trim. “That’s it, best as I can tell.” He seems vaguely interested, but uncomfortable focusing so much attention on a piece of silverware. “Thank you for finding it for us, Mae. That was very thoughtful of you.” He rests his hand on his wife’s shoulder, aware that she’s starting to cry. “It’s okay, Carol. Jesus, what are you doing that for? It’s just a fork.”

  Carol hangs her head. Her shoulders begin to shake, small tremors that quickly turn into seismic ones. There’s nothing worse than seeing a woman her age cry, Kyung thinks. He puts down the lasagna so he can get her a tissue, but she starts blotting her face with a pot holder instead.

  “I’m sorry. You’re just so nice. I can’t stop thinking about what happened to you. Those men, they were monsters.… We keep hearing about them on TV.”

  She’s crying too hard to notice Kyung clearing his throat, desperate to send her a signal to stop. The news never referred to his parents by name, but anyone who recognized the house filmed in the background knew what happened to the people who lived inside. Every time Kyung t
urns on the news or opens the paper, it’s the same story, the same onslaught of reminders that he doesn’t want his parents to hear or see. How mortified they’d be to realize their shame was so public.

  “Our sons are always telling us not to keep so much cash in the house, but we just assumed we were safe here. Shows you what we know.” Carol continues to weep. “Nobody’s safe anywhere these days.”

  Mort flinches. “Okay, sweetheart. Time to go. We’ve bothered these folks long enough.” He steers his wife toward the door. “I’m sorry about this,” he says to Mae. “I’m so sorry about everything.”

  She smiles at him but says nothing as the Steiners walk down the steps and cut across the lawn toward their house. When they slip out of view, she shuts the door and sighs.

  “Are you all right?” Kyung asks.

  “I really thought Carol would be happier about that serving piece. It took me such a long time to find it.”

  “That’s what you’re upset about? A fork?”

  She looks at him curiously. “I worked really hard to get that for her.”

  “But it’s just a fork.”

  The expression on Mae’s face could be the beginning of anything—anger, sadness, frustration. It has no shape yet, no hard edges or creased lines, as if she’s still trying to decide what to be.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it that way. But you don’t need to keep pretending like everything’s the same as it was before. We all know it’s going to be difficult for a while.”

  She continues staring at him, almost the same way she stared at Jin in the kitchen. Kyung understands now why his father was the first to blink. It’s her eyes—the emptiness of them, like no light will ever break their surface again. As he turns away, Kyung feels the pain before he sees the source of it—Mae’s hand, slapping him hard and fast across the cheek. The shock sends him back decades to his childhood home, to a room much like this one, with this miserable woman who was supposed to love him but barely even seemed to like him. He takes a step backward, supporting himself on the banister, waiting for the next hit to come. But Mae just stands there, her expression dissolving into something he doesn’t understand.

  “What do you know?” she shouts. “When have you ever wanted to know anything?”

  She picks up the lasagna and walks away, kicking the kitchen door open. As soon as it swings shut, he hears a crash against the wall—not the accidental kind that would send him running to help—but something more intentional, something thrust or thrown with force. He imagines the lasagna pooling on the floor, covered with shards of broken glass, but he doesn’t dare take a step in Mae’s direction. His hands, he realizes, are balled into fists.

  * * *

  The car is silent during the ride home. Kyung replays the slap over and over again, his blood pressure spiking each time Mae’s hand makes contact with his cheek. At first, his impulse is to shout at her, to make her regret what she did, but when he looks at Mae, the anger slowly begins to spiral down his throat. She’s sitting in the passenger seat—forehead in her hands, elbows on her knees—gently rocking herself back and forth. She seems wounded, as if she feels more pain than she just inflicted.

  “That can’t happen again,” he says, his voice quiet but firm.

  Not once have they talked about the way she used to treat him. Avoidance was always the price of their détente. But now he worries that he dismissed Gillian’s concerns too quickly, and whatever faith or confidence he had in Mae, she’s just lost.

  “If you ever put a hand on Ethan, if you ever scare him or hurt him in any way, I can’t—I won’t let you do that.”

  She rocks herself harder.

  They drive through several lights without speaking, although Kyung keeps thinking that they should. If there was ever a time to have this conversation, to revisit the source of their resentments, now seems right. Now seems like their last best chance. He can’t, however, bring himself to start. He knows why she stopped hitting him so many years ago, even though the subject has never been discussed. When he entered his teens, he was big enough to hit back. The thought of this makes his chest tighten, hardening the air in his lungs. He would never. But he allowed her to think so because the threat of violence was the only thing that protected him from harm.

  As he turns onto his street, he swerves to avoid a car parked too close to the corner. Mae sits up, startled by the screech of his tires. Dozens of cars are parked along the curb, end to end down the length of the block. Kyung’s neighborhood is full of families, young ones not much bigger than his own. Aside from the occasional garage sale or birthday party, crowds like this are rare. He wonders if a neighbor is hosting a barbecue that he and Gillian weren’t invited to, but the slower he drives, the more he notices the bumper stickers with the telltale logo, and then there’s the familiar red Buick in front of his house.

  “No,” Mae says, tapping her window. “No, no.” She grabs her door handle as if she wants to jump out. “I knew they’d do something like this.”

  “Why are they all here?”

  “I think they came to see me.”

  He doesn’t need to ask who she means by “they.” It’s Sunday, a day they own. When he woke up that morning, he assumed his father would ask for a ride to church, but the hours kept ticking away, and Jin never mentioned it.

  “Should I keep going?”

  “No,” she sighs. “Just park.”

  Kyung pulls in behind the Buick, which has a shiny Jesus fish attached to its bumper. Beside it, there’s a sticker that reads PEACE, scrawled in childlike cursive letters. He turns to Mae, who’s examining herself in the mirror, pinching her cheeks to bring out their color. Her face is smooth but tense—the upper jaw locked tightly against the lower.

  “Do you even want to see these people right now?”

  “What does it matter? I’ll have to see them eventually.”

  “But if you’re not ready—”

  Mae snaps the visor back into place. “Please,” she says quietly. “Please don’t make this any worse.”

  Reverend Sung is the first to greet them when they open the front door. A kiss on both cheeks for Mae and a stiff handshake for Kyung, followed by something he can’t hear above the crowd.

  “What did you say?” Kyung asks.

  “Your parents couldn’t join us at church today,” he repeats. “So we brought church here.”

  The reverend makes it sound like he’s doing them a favor, and Mae responds with a grateful nod of her head, but Kyung can’t stand the sight of so many strangers milling through his house. It feels like they’ve been invaded.

  “Where’s my wife?”

  The reverend cups his hand to his ear. “What?”

  “My wife?”

  “In the kitchen, I think.”

  He leaves Mae with the reverend and squeezes through the hallway, occasionally throwing his elbows to separate the bodies pressing in around him. He finds Gillian in the dining room, standing in a corner with her arms crossed over her chest. The room is overrun by women, all jabbering away at each other as they organize the meal. The table is covered with huge trays of Korean food, surrounded by neat little containers of paper plates and plastic utensils, bottles of soda, and stacks of napkins embossed with the church’s logo. The women take no notice of Gillian as they go about their work, setting up a buffet line that would rival any restaurant’s.

  Kyung leans down to whisper in her ear. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did. I’ve been calling for over an hour.”

  Kyung pats down his empty pockets. The last time he saw his phone, his mother was using it. “How long have they been here?”

  “Since four, I guess. Did you know this was happening?”

  “No, of course not.” He looks around and lowers his voice. “I would have told them not to come.”

  “Actually, they’ve all been very nice. Did you see how much food they brought?”

  “Who cares about the food? The point is, that man�
�—he’s too frustrated to say the reverend’s name out loud—“that man didn’t even tell me they were planning this. He should have asked first.”

  Gillian just shrugs. She doesn’t understand the way these people are—all smiles and politeness one minute, then vicious and judgmental the next. He’s known this about them ever since they entered his parents’ lives, felt it in their stares and questions and awkward attempts at conversation. They think he’s a lesser person because he refuses to believe as they do. And Gillian—lapsed Catholic that she is—she matters even less, but she can’t see through their act.

  “Where’s Ethan?”

  “He’s with your father in the living room.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I think he’s just playing—”

  He leaves her midsentence, sidestepping past the women to rescue Ethan, certain that he’s trapped by a gaggle of old ladies who keep asking if he accepts Christ as his savior. Kyung’s first memory of them is exactly this. A crowd of pinched faces and perfumed hands, all pestering him about things he didn’t understand, words he didn’t even know. He’s not about to let a stranger click her tongue at Ethan and tell him that hell is for bad children who don’t believe.

  The living room has been repurposed into a makeshift receiving area, with a long line that extends deep into the hallway. Jin is sitting in an armchair with Ethan on his knee, while Mae is sitting in the chair beside him. The small sofa and love seat are occupied by the very elderly, so the rest have taken to the floor, sitting compactly on their heels or with their legs tucked off to the side. His parents look like a king and queen, surrounded by their court, while a line of visitors slowly moves past to pay their respects. Jin greets them all with the same handshake and hello, but Mae does her best to make conversation, accepting their hugs and kisses with gratitude. Kyung wishes he could hear what people are saying to her and what she’s saying so pleasantly in response, but it’s too hard to make out anything above the din. Occasionally, someone passes through the line and pats Ethan on the head, but no one seems the least bit interested in him, and he only seems interested in his puzzle.