by Jung Yun
* * *
The neighbor’s new dog is at it again. MILO is the name freshly painted on his house, but Kyung usually refers to him as “the werewolf” because of his appearance—a hairy mottled brown that reminds him of a German Shepherd, with legs as long as a Great Dane’s. Until recently, the werewolf used to bark at all hours of the night and howl at the moon when it was full. Then Gillian went next door and complained. Kyung doesn’t know what she said or how she said it; all he knows is that it worked, sort of. The werewolf doesn’t bark or howl anymore, but something in between, tortured by the expensive new collar around his neck that shocks him when he tries to do either. The result is a low, painful whimper that sounds neither animal nor human. Usually, Kyung is tired enough to sleep through the noise, but the day’s events have drugged him awake, leaving him staring at the ceiling tiles above his bed. Not only did Jin support Mae’s desire to sell their house and go to the Cape, but Gillian thought it was a good idea too. “A vacation,” she called it, and nothing he said afterwards could dissuade her. Even Connie seemed uncharacteristically open to the offer, going so far as to ask—if it wasn’t any trouble, if it wasn’t too impolite—would there be enough room for his new lady friend to come too?
He turns and looks at Gillian, who’s asleep with a pillow clutched to her chest. She was visibly excited when he mentioned the beach house, cutting him off before he had a chance to tell her they shouldn’t go. Vacations always appealed to her sense of being a grown-up, of being cosmopolitan enough to own a passport and actually use it. Her first trip outside the United States was their honeymoon, a seven-day cruise to Bermuda that he paid for with student loans. They’ve been returning to a different island in the Caribbean every year since, charging one trip after another but never paying any of them off. It was a luxury they allowed themselves despite knowing they shouldn’t. The indulgence of living outside the hole they’d created, if only for a week at a time, somehow made the rest of the year more bearable. Kyung understands why Gillian was so excited about the beach house, even if she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. The Cape is their only chance to pretend like they can afford to get away. Still, the thought of the upcoming weekend, surrounded by their parents in an unfamiliar place, sends all the acid in his stomach straight to his throat.
Kyung sits up and rubs his chest in circles when he hears the noise clearly for the first time. Not the dog outside, but something much closer. What he previously dismissed as the house settling isn’t that at all. It sounds like cans rattling around in a container. The rattling starts, then stops, then starts again, not following any pattern. Had he been more tired or less alert, he might have missed it entirely. Kyung slides out of bed and goes downstairs, pausing every few seconds to confirm that the noise is getting louder. As he inches toward the kitchen, he tries to translate what he hears, to turn it into something ordinary and reasonable instead of frightening. His mother is making herself a cup of tea. Or his father came down for a glass of water. But as he approaches the door, the more he can identify the sound behind it and the less it makes sense. It’s not tin cans after all, but the metal clank of pots and pans, as if a family of raccoons is ransacking the house. The blood pulses in his ears as he opens the door a crack, gently pushing it wider and wider until he sees Marina kneeling on the floor, surrounded by Gillian’s cookware.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, Mr. Kyung.” Marina stands up, using the countertop for balance. Her dark brown hair hangs in her face, unwashed and unkempt. She’s wearing a nightgown that belongs to Gillian, an ugly oversized T-shirt with a picture of Bugs Bunny on the front.
“I’m sorry I wake you.” Marina hooks a piece of hair over her ear. “I get up early to clean.”
“Clean? Right now?” He rests his hand on a chair to steady himself as he glances at the clock. “But it’s two in the morning.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Why are you doing this, anyway? You don’t have to clean my house.”
Marina goes to the sink and returns with a plastic hand broom and dustpan. Inside the pan are furry clumps of lint and stray pieces of rice, cereal, and hair. “But your cabinets need good clean, see? Once a year, I wash inside of all cabinets for your parents. I do for you too.”
No one has seen Marina leave the sofa since she returned from the hospital. She still has bruises and cuts that haven’t healed, a slight limp in her step when she walks. Kyung wonders if her process is similar to Mae’s. Nothing for days, and then a sudden, uncontrolled burst of housekeeping.
“Marina, you’re a guest here. You don’t have to clean anything. Now, why don’t you go back to sleep?”
“But I make myself useful, Mr. Kyung. I help you and Miss Gillian.”
He’s always found Marina’s accent charming, but now her sweet trill and broken, insistent English are starting to grate his nerves. He scans the floor, which is covered with pots and pans, a bucket of water and sponges, and rolls of paper towels. He takes the dust broom away and leads her to the table. When he turns around, Marina is standing perfectly straight, staring at his thumb resting over her wrist. He quickly releases it and pulls out a chair, offering her a chance to sit. Marina remains where she is.
“I clean more quiet,” she says. “You don’t notice me anymore.”
“It’s nice that you want to help—it really is—but you don’t have to. You’re a guest. Do you understand that?”
Marina stares at the floor, nodding as if she does, but clearly, it makes her uncomfortable. He wonders if the idea of being in someone else’s home and not having a job to do is simply too strange for her to comprehend. When she looks up at him again, her huge brown eyes are filled with tears.
“What’s the matter? What did I say?”
The tears stream down her cheeks as she shakes her head. “I cannot go home again, Mr. Kyung. I cannot see my family, not like this.”
“Who said anything about you going home?” He asks even though he already knows the answer. He just wants to hear it from her. He pulls out the chair a few inches more. “Come sit,” he says, not offering so much as ordering.
Marina does as she’s told and knits her fingers together on the table. Up close, her hands don’t look like they belong to a twenty-four-year-old girl. The nails have been bitten down to the quick, and her skin is dry and cracked, aged by a lifetime of work. On her right pinky, just below the knuckle, there’s a tattoo of a faded black cross, which he’s never noticed before. The proportions are uneven; the placement, slightly crooked. It looks like she did it herself. He wonders how long it took to carve the lines into her flesh until they could never go away.
“When did you get that?” he asks.
She looks at the tattoo as if she’d forgotten it was there. “I was teenager. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. Why?”
“It’s a cross?”
“Yes?”
“A crucifix?”
“Yes.”
“But—you’re from Bosnia. I thought Bosnians were Muslim.” Instantly, he can tell by the look on her face that they’re not. “Sorry. I don’t know a lot about that part of the world.”
“Orthodox Christian,” she says quietly. And then, in a noticeably sharper tone, she adds: “Not Muslim.”
The tears on her face have dried, but she still seems upset, and Kyung recognizes the same distant expression he sees in his mother, as if her body is here but her mind is somewhere else.
“Does it help you?” he asks. “To believe in something?”
“You mean God?”
He nods.
She reaches for the saltshaker, moving it from one side of the pepper mill to the other and then back again. “The men in my country—they did bad things to people because they believe in something. The Muslims too. They all think God give them the right.”
He was hoping she’d just say yes, hoping for her sake that she still had faith, if nothing else. But it’s obvious that Marina is no more of a believer
than he is. She’s completely on her own.
“So why do you think we’re going to send you home?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
Marina circles the room with her eyes, trying not to look at him. Then she takes a napkin from the stack on the table and blows her nose.
“It was my mother, wasn’t it? She said we didn’t want you here anymore?”
“Mrs. Cho,” she says slowly, “she tell me you all go to the Cape on Friday and I leave here before you return. She offer me ticket home, and money, but I cannot see my family like this, Mr. Kyung. My father…” Her eyes well up again and spill over, but she doesn’t look sad so much as terrified.
“What about him?”
“He tell me not to come here. He think something bad happen. My father is—coward, afraid of everything since the war. He always talk about girls who go to America, to Europe, how men trick them into being prostitute. But I said no, I go to work, to study. Maybe I come back as lawyer or doctor one day, but he warn me over and over. Something bad happen if I leave.” She blows her nose again, crumpling the wet napkin in her fist. “I have sisters, Mr. Kyung. Four sisters, all younger than me. If I come home like this, my father will never let them leave, not even to study. He will say he was right.”
Kyung can’t remember the number of times he’s passed Marina on the couch and wished her gone, blinked somewhere far away. But sitting across from her now, he sees how young she is, how permanent the damage of her life back home and her life here. There’s a point, he thinks, when no amount of psychiatry or pharmacology can help a person lead a normal life. He passed his long ago. There’s no helping her either, but he still feels the need to try, to extend the hand that was never offered to him.
“I won’t let anyone send you away.” Before he has a chance to second-guess himself, he adds: “This is my house, and you can stay here as long as you need to.”
Marina brightens immediately. She doesn’t understand the dynamics of his family or the hell he’ll take to defend this decision, and for the time being, he doesn’t want to think about it either.
“Thank you, Mr. Kyung. I be helpful here, I promise. I make things easy for you and Miss Gillian.”
She gets up from her seat and tiptoes through the maze of cookware, resuming her place beside an empty cabinet. He’s about to tell her no—just leave it—but she’s already kneeling on the floor and leaning into the cabinet, scrubbing the far reaches with a sponge. In this position, the back of Marina’s petite figure resembles a violin. Wide at the shoulders and hips, cinched narrow in the middle. The further she reaches, the higher her nightgown climbs, revealing faded pink underwear with blue and yellow stripes. Nothing about what he sees—the Bugs Bunny shirt, the thick woolen socks, the baggy, stretched-out underwear—should appeal to him, but the longer he stands there, the more turned on he feels. It’s disgusting, he thinks. He’s disgusting. He backs out of the room, his face lit with shame, and walks stiffly up the stairs. For a moment, he considers waking Gillian, but he knows better than that by now, and just the thought of her irritated, exhausted rejection begins to deaden what Marina awoke.
Upstairs, he opens Ethan’s door to check on him and finds the boy asleep next to Jin. The two of them are curled up together on the cot. Ethan’s little bed is empty; the race car–patterned covers are still made up, as if he didn’t spend a minute there before crawling in beside his grandfather. Kyung wonders how many nights they’ve been sleeping like this, and who suggested it first. It’s jarring, such an outward display of tenderness from someone who never seemed the least bit tender. Kyung tiptoes to Ethan’s side of the bed and tries to lift him up. He whines and turns toward Jin, stretching himself out long. The boy is taller now, even taller than when the summer began. It’s hard to believe that anything could grow so fast. Kyung was terrified when Gillian gave birth, watching the doctor raise their tiny baby into the air, so slick and fragile and noisy from his first breath. He didn’t feel any of the joy he expected at the sight of his son, only worry. He worried when Ethan cried and cried for no apparent reason; he worried when he wouldn’t walk like other babies his age and then worried he’d crack his skull open when he did. He worried that Ethan was slow to learn his letters and numbers. He worried that television would make him sullen and rude like the neighborhood kids. Parenthood felt like nothing but a lifetime of worry, which made Kyung worry even more.
He tries to pick him up again, but Jin startles awake, clutching Ethan with one hand and the bedsheets with the other.
“It’s me,” Kyung whispers. “It’s just me.”
Jin adjusts his glasses, which are still perched on his nose. He keeps blinking at Kyung, as if he doesn’t trust that he’s awake. “What are you doing?” he whispers back.
“Nothing. I just came to check on him.” He motions toward Ethan, who’s still asleep, his mouth open and whistling.
Jin adjusts himself, pulling the sheets higher and the boy closer.
“You should let him sleep in his own bed.”
“He’s fine here.” Jin looks down and brushes a sweaty wisp of hair from Ethan’s forehead. “Just let him be.”
His father and son look like they belong together, like they’ve always been this close. But it bothers Kyung to see them this way. It feels like Jin is slowly taking over everything that matters.
“We have a system now, and you’re ruining it. It took us months to train him to sleep alone.”
“He can sleep in his own bed tomorrow. He’ll wake up if you move him now.”
Jin is right, but Kyung doesn’t know how he can stand it. When Ethan was younger and prone to nightmares, he often crawled into the space between him and Gillian, who continued to sleep through the night. But Kyung could never get comfortable. He’d feel his arm tingling under the weight of Ethan’s head, and then a deadness as his blood began to slow. It usually took him hours to drift off again, and even then, he slept lightly, frightened that he’d crush the boy simply by turning the wrong way.
“How’s your mother?” Jin asks.
The question irritates him, not because it’s meant to change the subject, but because his father shouldn’t have to ask.
“Why don’t you”—he lowers his voice again as Ethan stirs in his sleep—“why don’t you try talking to her?”
“I have.”
Kyung is about to tell him to try harder, but he remembers the cruel flick of Mae’s wrist as she let go of his hand during the prayer. It’s not Jin’s fault that she’s mad at him.
“She’s all right, I guess.” No sooner has he said it than Kyung quickly reconsiders. “I mean, not really. Now that she’s done with the house—I’m not sure. I don’t know what she’ll do next.”
“Whatever she wants.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let her do whatever she wants, whatever she needs to do.”
This has never been the dynamic of his parents’ marriage. Everything was always about making Jin happy, or at the very least, not making him unhappy. Sleep, food, silence, absence—whatever he wanted, Mae tried to give it to him. And she always managed to get it wrong. Years ago, she had to throw a dinner party together with less than an hour’s notice. A visiting professor had come to campus for a lecture and Jin invited him and his colleagues to the house afterward. Kyung had never seen his mother run so much or so fast in his entire life, cooking and cleaning and making herself presentable, sometimes all at once. When the guests finally arrived, he still remembers the expression on her face when one of them asked for a glass of white wine. She didn’t have any—only red. The woman didn’t seem to mind, but from then on, his mother looked different to him. Uneasy. It didn’t matter how many compliments she received about the house or the dinner or her hospitality. The wine was the only thing she could think about. The irony of it was, when the guests left and Jin flew into his usual rage, he said he was hitting her because she’d looked so unhappy all night.
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br /> “Don’t,” Jin says.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t raise your voice.”
Kyung doesn’t understand at first, but he realizes he’s been frowning. He softens a bit, aware that his son’s presence provides a barrier of safety he’s never felt around his father. Jin doesn’t want to scare the boy again.
“Why did you two even get married in the first place?”
“What kind of question is that? You shouldn’t ask—”
“But I’m asking.”
The mirror of his father’s face startles him. Kyung feels like he’s seeing himself aged by thirty years. The eyes are droopier, the skin redder and more wrinkled, but the outline is still the same.
“We weren’t even supposed to. I wanted to marry her cousin.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because she was poor.”
“But your family was poor too.”
“My parents thought I could do better. I was almost finished with my degree—that was a big deal back then.” Jin scowls, but now that he’s started, he can’t seem to stop. “If I couldn’t marry a rich girl, they said, I should at least marry someone middle class. Your mother’s parents—they owned a store. Not a big one, but respectable. They offered mine a dowry.”
“You mean like money?”
“Yes, money.”
Somehow, it seems only fitting that what brought his parents together, what’s kept them together all these years is the same thing that Kyung worries about every waking minute of his life. It’s like a disease they passed on through their bloodlines, mutated into a new form for his generation.
“I still don’t understand why you’re selling the house.”
“Because she likes to decorate. If we start somewhere new, it’ll keep her busy.”
“But busy isn’t the same thing as happy.”
“People your age,” Jin says, not making any effort to hide his disdain. “All you do is think about happiness. You think I was happy when I first came to this country? When I was trying to get tenure and no one said I could?”
“There’s nothing wrong with—”