by Jung Yun
“A maid,” she sneers. “Who in the world would take in a maid?” Mae is standing in her living room, placing figurines on the bookshelves as Kyung looks on. “And you didn’t even ask if I’d mind.”
By now, their argument is so familiar, Kyung knows his lines by heart. “Where do you expect her to go?”
“It’s not like she’s homeless. She has an apartment of her own.”
“In a building with no elevator and six flights of stairs. Imagine Marina trying to live there without any family around to help her.”
“But why is that your problem? You barely even know her.”
“It’s not my problem—it’s Dad’s. Remember? Marina listed him on her college forms as her emergency contact.”
“So tell your father to give her some money so she can go to a hotel.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
Mae runs her fingertip across the length of a shelf, inspecting it for dust—something she’s already done twice. She ignores his suggestion, just as he ignored hers. Kyung would like nothing more than to get Marina out of his house, but he’s never talked to Jin about money. He’s not about to raise the subject now.
“Marina needs people,” he says. “People who can check on her, make sure she’s okay.”
“Your father can buy people too.”
She makes a point of turning to look at him as she says this. Kyung isn’t sure what he sees in her eyes. Not judgment. Complicity, maybe. She goes back to her work, exchanging a small glass vase on one shelf with a set of candleholders from another.
“I don’t like coming downstairs and seeing her on the couch … the way she’s always sitting there, just staring at me.”
Earlier that morning, Kyung heard voices drifting up from the living room while he was getting dressed. He cracked his door an inch and heard his mother and Marina speaking in angry, muted whispers, the kind that people reserve for arguments they don’t want others to hear.
“What were you two talking about today? Before I came downstairs?”
Mae moves the vase an inch to the left, and then a fraction of that to the right. She crosses her arms and steps back, cocking her head as she examines her work. “I don’t know.”
“It sounded like an argument.”
“I’d remember if we had an argument.”
She didn’t answer his question, but he can tell that she doesn’t intend to. Mae walks to the center of the room and turns around in a slow circle, taking it all in. Aside from a few pale stains on the upholstery and some empty spaces on the walls and shelves, the house now resembles its former self, tidy and grand. She hasn’t thanked him for helping her all week, carting out the garbage and hefting the things she couldn’t carry. But it’s thanks enough to see things as they were, to pretend—if only for a moment—that the attack never happened because there’s no evidence that it did. Now that they’re finished with their work, he’s tempted to ask if Mae plans to move back in soon, a thought that prompts both relief and worry. It’s obvious that things still aren’t right with his parents, who continue to keep a noticeable distance from each other. He’s certain they haven’t exchanged more than a handful of sentences in days, and Jin is still sleeping on a cot in Ethan’s room every night.
“I think it’s ready,” she says.
“Ready for what?”
Mae collects her notepad from the end table, tucking her careful inventory into her bag as she sets off toward the door. She does this more often now—drift in and out of conversations, as if she’s having others that only she can hear. Kyung follows her outside and joins her in the car. The clock on the dashboard reads half past noon.
“So”—he hesitates—“should we go home now?”
She purses her lips at him, as if to hold something back. They both know what the problem is—Marina, sacked out in his living room, staring at the walls as they try to maneuver around her.
“Or maybe you’re hungry. Should I take you out to lunch?”
Mae shakes her head. Lately, she’s been eating. Not full meals yet, but small bites of things, which is better than nothing at all. For this, he has Molly and the ladies to thank. Ever since the impromptu Sunday potluck, they’ve been dropping by his house with deliveries. They’re surprisingly unobtrusive about it; they don’t even knock on the door to say hello. A cooler just appears on his steps every day. He’s not sure what to be more grateful for, the Korean food that his parents clearly prefer over Gillian’s cooking, or the lack of conversation as it’s handed off. He glances at the clock again. Only a minute has passed since he and Mae got in the car. They have hours to kill before Marina takes her midafternoon nap, when she pulls the blanket over her face and drifts off to sleep.
“Maybe you can teach me how to drive now,” Mae says.
Kyung has been waiting for this for years, but had given up hope that she’d ever want to learn. “Are you serious?”
“It’s something to do.”
“Okay, then. Let’s go.” He throws the car into reverse and backs out too fast, scraping the undercarriage against the pavement.
There’s too much traffic in the Heights to let Mae take the wheel, so he heads to the university’s athletic stadium, where the parking lot is bigger than the field. As he follows the main road around campus, ringed by classroom buildings covered in unkempt ivy, he drives past his office. The lot in front of the weathered brick building is almost half-full. His heart skips as he recognizes his colleagues’ cars. Technically, none of them are required to report to work in the summer. The break is paid time off to do their research, although Kyung hasn’t given his a moment’s thought. It’s now mid-June, nearly a month since classes ended, and it’s his first time back on campus. In another field, maybe something in the humanities, an absence like this might go unnoticed, but scientists are different. He should be here, he thinks, working in his office a few days a week, making sure everyone sees his face. Two years from now, he’s scheduled to go up for tenure, something he tries not to think about because he knows what to expect. The personnel committee will tell him that his teaching scores are just average. He hasn’t published or presented enough of his own research. And his success rate with grants is abysmal—he neither submits many proposals nor wins the few that he does. In an entirely fair world, where the process worked as it should, Kyung would be denied tenure. He hasn’t earned it, and two years is hardly enough time to catch up with his colleagues, who seem to do everything right and on schedule. The only advantage he has is his connection to Jin, who funnels millions into the campus through his grants and patent revenues. Despite the state of his finances, Kyung doesn’t worry about losing his job; he worries about what it would mean to keep it.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mae asks.
“Nothing, why?”
“You’re driving so slow.”
He looks at the speedometer. He’s going twelve miles an hour.
“If you don’t want to teach me—”
“No, no,” he says, stepping on the gas. “I just got distracted.”
Kyung drives to the center of an empty lot and turns off the engine. The stadium casts a long shadow over the asphalt, hiding the sun somewhere behind its walls. He switches places with Mae and shows her how to adjust her seat.
“Accelerator and brake,” he says, leaning over and tapping each pedal with his hand.
“Accelerator and brake,” she repeats, moving her seat so close to the steering wheel, only a few inches of space separate her forehead from the windshield.
He wants to tell her to back up; there’s no need to sit that close, but Mae gets easily discouraged. One wrong word from him could cut their lesson short. He tries to channel the instructor who taught him how to drive when he was sixteen, going so far as to emulate the man’s calm, even tone. Seat belts first, hands at ten and two, foot on the brake when shifting out of park, mirror check before pulling out.
Mae drives much like Kyung did when he first learned, accelerating with unnecess
ary bursts of speed and braking as if to avoid wildlife. After her first few attempts, she begins to smooth out, driving in huge loops around the parking lot at a steady, consistent speed. Kyung rolls down his window to let some air in. When he looks over at Mae, she’s smiling as the wind blows her hair back; her eyes are clear and bright. He should be relieved to see her this way, but instead, it feels like someone has taken a lead pipe to his knees. Such a simple thing they’re doing, and she’s never looked happier, as if she never had reason to be happy before.
Mae reaches over and turns on the radio, which is tuned to an oldies station that Gillian likes. Kyung doesn’t care much for music, but even he recognizes the song that’s playing a few seconds into the chorus.
“… watching the tide roll away…,” Mae sings quietly.
“You’ve heard this before?”
“Just sittin’ on the dock of the bay…”
“I didn’t think you liked this kind of music.”
“I like music.”
“No, I meant—I thought you mostly listened to church music.”
“That’s your father. Not me.” She turns to him, taking her eyes off the road in a way that makes him nervous. “You know I have a record collection now? I’ve been buying a lot of old records—”
“That’s nice,” he says, grabbing hold of the wheel to correct the car’s drifting path. “Hey, maybe”—he pauses, trying to choose his words carefully—“maybe it’d be a good idea if you watched the road instead of me.”
She looks straight ahead and starts singing again. “Two thousand miles I roamed … just to make this dock my home…”
At the edge of the parking lot, Mae loops around a light post, her arms and shoulders more relaxed than when she began, and it all seems like some strange, wishful dream, listening to Otis Redding with his mother while she learns to drive. He should sit back and just let the moment be what it is—he knows that—but he can’t help himself. He has to ask.
“So you and dad—what’s going on with you two?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.… You’re not really talking to each other. Eventually, you’re going to have to, right? When you move back into your house?”
“Why? Do you want us out already?”
“No. That’s not what I said. I just, I just want to know what your plan is, when you’re going to start seeing a therapist, maybe work some things out.”
“I’m not doing that again.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to sit there while some stranger tells me I should change things about my life. That was insulting the last time.”
“I don’t think the doctor was trying to insult you.”
“Why should I pay someone to tell me things I already know? I know. I’m not as dumb as you think I am.”
Kyung never thought of his mother as dumb, not in the way she means it. Her disinterest in books, her lack of a college degree—he doesn’t judge her for these things. What matters is that she wasn’t brave enough to leave, and neither was he. He understands this more clearly now, sees it as the weight and counterweight that he balances across his shoulders. He made a choice to live his life in careful proximity to hers, and not once did she ever acknowledge what he lost, what they both lost because they were afraid to go. Where he would have ended up, what kind of person he’d be right now—he tries not to wonder. All he knows is that his life could have been different; it could have been better in ways that he can’t even imagine anymore.
Mae continues driving, but the expression on her face—he’s ruined it. Gone are the lines on her cheeks, bookending her smile like apostrophes. Everything has smoothed out, the skin perfect and creaseless, but cold. Kyung sits back and counts the light posts as she drives around in silent loops. After half a dozen passes, he tells her to switch directions. Mae looks anxious. She hits the brake too hard and the car lurches to a stop before she takes an agonizingly slow and wide turn in the other direction.
“Your father wants to sell the house,” she says.
He turns down the acid twang of a Jimi Hendrix song, not certain if he heard her correctly. “Sell your house?”
“He told me yesterday.”
She hardly seems bothered by this, but Kyung is quick to feel the outrage she doesn’t. “You can’t just let him decide things like that. You love that house; you’ve spent years—”
“I don’t care what he does with it.”
“But all the work you’ve done—”
“I can’t live in that place again.”
It never occurred to Kyung that his parents wouldn’t eventually return to their home, and he still hasn’t forgotten the proposition that Gertie mentioned not long ago, when his greatest fear was renting out his house and moving into theirs. What are they supposed to do now? Where will they all go?
“You might regret it, though—later, I mean.”
“No, I won’t.”
“But the market—it’s not a good time to sell right now.” He hears himself saying these words out loud, which hardly matter. Mae doesn’t want to live in the place where she was attacked. It makes perfect sense, but he’s not prepared for the ways in which it throws his own life out of balance.
“Well, I guess you can put it up for sale and see what happens.” He inhales slowly, bracing himself for what he has to offer next. “You and Dad are obviously welcome to stay with us as long as you need to.”
Mae doesn’t acknowledge his invitation. The importance of it seems to sail right over her head. “He wants you to call a realtor for him. Get the house listed as soon as you can. He said he doesn’t care how much he loses.”
It’s a terrible idea—the kind so reckless, it can only be the product of someone who knows how to spend other people’s money, but has never earned her own. “Dad didn’t really agree to this, did he?”
“Ask him if you don’t believe me. Also, we want to move to the beach house for the rest of the summer.”
“The two of you—together?”
“No. All of us. There’s more space there. And he said to invite your father-in-law this weekend, to thank him for being so helpful lately.”
The ground beneath him feels like quicksand, sinking each time Mae opens her mouth. There are too many things he doesn’t understand, too many scenarios he can’t begin to imagine. When did the word “we” suddenly reenter her vocabulary? And when did his parents even have this conversation? It would take weeks, maybe even months for him and Gillian to make these kinds of decisions.
“I don’t know,” he says, referring to nothing in particular and everything at once.
“It’d be good for us.”
“But I thought you didn’t like the Cape.”
“I like it enough.”
This is news to Kyung. His father bought the house in Orleans years ago. He seemed to enjoy telling people that he owned a second home, but after Mae finished updating every square inch with her decorator, she quickly lost interest. It was too far away, she said. Too isolated from everything. At best, she and Jin spent only a few days a year there, sometimes skipping years altogether.
“The Cape is hours from here.” He struggles to think of another reason not to go. “And my work—I have to go back soon. Maybe Dad does too.”
“It’s summer. You don’t have to be on campus every day. You can drive back once or twice a week if you need to. We have six bedrooms at the beach house. Everyone can have their own.”
Kyung mentally assigns the rooms. One for him and Gillian. Another for Mae, Jin, Ethan, and Connie. There’s still space for one more. “What about Marina?”
“What about her?”
“Would she come with us?”
“No, of course not,” she snaps. “She’ll just stay at your house while we’re gone. Then she can sit around all day and no one has to see her do it.”
“But how’s she supposed to eat? Or get to her doctor’s appointments?”
“Let her figure it
out. Maybe she’ll finally realize she’s not welcome and just leave.”
The hostility in Mae’s voice is impossible to miss, but Kyung doesn’t understand its source. What was Mae doing during her first few days back from the hospital, if not staring at the walls? Where’s her sense of empathy for this girl who suffered as much as she did? Although he’d never dare say this out loud, he thinks his parents are partly to blame for what happened to Marina. None of this would have happened to her if she didn’t clean their house.
“Listen, I don’t like having her around any more than you do, but what you’re suggesting—it’s not right. Marina needs some time to get over this, so if that means we let her sit around for a while and—”
“No!” Mae stabs her finger at the steering wheel, thrusting it with such force that she accidentally honks the horn. “You have to get up. You have to keep going. If you just think about it and think about it, it won’t ever go away. You have to have a plan.”
The “it” she’s referring to requires no explanation. It’s the thing they haven’t been able to talk about, the absence and the everything all at once. For the first time, Kyung sees how much pain she’s holding on to, the way it affects everything she’s doing, whether he understands it or not. He reaches out and gently lowers her finger, pressing it against the steering wheel until she grips it safely again.
“All right,” he says, not quite agreeing with her, but knowing he’ll have to. “All right. Why don’t we practice parking now?”
Mae turns around a light post and overcorrects as she straightens out. “I don’t need to know that.”
“Well … eventually, you’ll have to park somewhere, right?”
“Later,” she says. “I’ll learn that later. This is all I want to do right now.”
She turns up the radio again, as if to drown out the sound of anything else he might say, and Kyung is content to let her, to give her this moment in which the road ahead is all that’s on her mind.