Shelter

by Jung Yun

  Connie offers his hand to Kyung, getting him on his feet. He tries to avoid looking at the wet spot on his pants, or the puddle of piss he left on the road.

  “Nothing,” Connie says. “You just have to be prepared, is all.”

  Jin marches in front of him, pushing his face directly beneath his. “What are you saying? What did they tell you?”

  “They’ll come over and explain in a second.”

  “No. I want you to explain it to me now.”

  Connie takes a step backward. “I’m sorry, Jin.” He hesitates, scanning the crowd for the officers, both of whom are guiding the tow truck as it backs out into traffic. “They don’t think it was an accident.”

  “Of course it was an accident. She didn’t know how to drive.”

  “But the road”—Connie points at the asphalt, drawing a straight line from where they’re standing to the tree in front of the house—“there aren’t any skid marks. That means she didn’t hit the brakes.”

  “Maybe she got confused about the pedals.”

  “Some of the neighbors said she sped up on purpose. Right before the tree, they heard her gun it.”

  Jin doesn’t blink as he examines the unmarked stretch of asphalt, slowly tracing the car’s path from the road to the lawn to the tree. “She was confused, that’s all. She thought the gas was the brake.” He studies it again, as if to convince himself that what he said was true. Then he turns to Connie, stabbing his finger at him. “We’re Christian—do you understand what that means? She wouldn’t have done this to herself on purpose; she can’t. It’s not allowed.”

  Connie looks pained, as if he regrets opening his mouth, but now he has to finish what he started. “She left a note, Jin. It was on the floor, next to her seat. I’m sorry, I should have let them tell you.”

  The tow truck drives off, dragging the carcass of the Jeep behind it. Kyung follows the swirling lights until they disappear into the distance. The lanes open up from one to two and traffic begins to move again, filling the air with a dense cloud of exhaust. Behind him, Jin is still arguing with Connie, but their voices fade out, replaced by a memory of something his mother said not long ago. It never made sense to him as completely as it does now. You have to have a plan. Kyung repeats these words to himself as he looks at his shadow stretched diagonally across the pavement. The longer he studies the rough black surface, the more clearly he sees it, the moment of impact. Marina’s face has sunk into itself—eyes closed, mouth open, screaming. But his mother is staring right at it, at the death she knows is coming, and for once, she’s not afraid.

  * * *

  The note she left behind isn’t a note at all. It’s an inventory, the same one she was compiling for the insurance company. The handwritten list is twenty-eight pages long, documenting every item she ever bought for the houses in Marlboro and Orleans. Kyung spends the first two days after the accident sitting on the beach, studying the list through a haze of Valium. On the far right, Mae had added a column indicating who should receive what upon her death. Molly’s name is there, beside a bowl described as Regency, glass, 8 inches wide, living room. He also recognizes the names of her decorator and several women from church. Gillian is nothing more than a footnote at the end, one that makes it entirely clear how Mae felt about her. Anything my friends don’t want can go to my daughter-in-law.

  The inventory seems like proof of the obvious. Mae was planning to end her life long before they arrived in Orleans. That’s why she wanted to learn how to drive, why she was willing to go to the Cape, why she chose to bring Marina with them. She had a plan all along. Knowing this should provide some thin sliver of comfort, but Kyung is crippled with doubt, unsure if the things he said hastened the plan’s timeline or confirmed the need for it to exist. As the haze begins to lift and he sees the signs he missed, Kyung considers walking into the ocean, walking and walking until the water’s pressure crushes the guilt building up inside him. He doesn’t know how else to make it go away.

  Gillian and his father refuse to speak to him. Not on the ride home to Marlboro, not in the days after they return. Kyung is relegated to the guest room of his own house, sleeping in the same bed his mother occupied only a few nights before. Vivi comes by daily to help with the funeral arrangements, having recently planned services for her father. He listens in on their conversations, sitting at the top of the staircase as they select flowers and music and menu items for the reception. Not once does anyone mention Kyung or ask for his opinion. His only notice of the funeral date is the sudden appearance of his suit on the bathroom door, wrapped in dry-cleaning plastic with a note skewered through the hanger: Be dressed at ten.

  With one car gone and only Gillian’s battered hatchback as a spare, Connie has to pick them up for the service. Kyung would rather walk across town than spend time with his father-in-law again, but he accepts the favor for what it is. When Connie and Vivi arrive, he climbs into the far backseat of the Suburban, where he sits by himself like the family dog, hot and sticky and ignored as he stares at the backs of everyone’s heads. No one says a word during the drive except for Ethan, who complains bitterly about his itchy new suit, which looks like a miniature version of Kyung’s. He wonders if Gillian explained to him what a funeral is, and whether four is too young to attend one. The fact that she didn’t consult him before letting Ethan come says everything about the state of their marriage now. She’s no longer interested in being partners in their child’s upbringing, or any of the things she used to aspire to before Ethan was born. Their relationship is beyond aspiration, and if he allows himself to see things from her point of view, he understands why she would think so.

  First Presbyterian is on the outskirts of town, on a fading commercial strip lined with stores that are either vacant or closed. Although the neighborhood looks different now—poorer and a little dirtier—the building itself has hardly changed since he last attended services there as a teenager. The tall brick church sits on a corner lot, elevated from street level and flanked by beds of bright orange daylilies that provide the neighborhood’s only color. The matching brick sign in front offers a Bible quote to random passersby. PRECIOUS IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD IS THE DEATH OF HIS SAINTS, PSALMS 116:15. Kyung doesn’t know if the quote is a coincidence, or if it was changed for their benefit, but it makes him uncomfortable to think of his mother as a saint. It doesn’t seem right to embellish her memory, to turn her into the person she thought she had to be for everyone else. He wants to remember Mae as she really was, flawed and fragile and the product of a life that never gave her a chance to do or be anything more.

  Connie pulls into the fire lane in front of the church and turns around. The starched collar of his shirt appears to cut off the circulation to his neck. “I’ll let you out here and find a place to park.”

  “I’ll stay with Connie,” Vivi adds. “You all should go in.”

  People are streaming into the building, so many that Kyung keeps losing count. He’d rather use a side door and slip in unnoticed, but he knows what’s expected of him today. He gets out of the car, trailing behind his father and Gillian, each of whom is holding on to one of Ethan’s hands. As they make their way up the path to the front steps, people he doesn’t recognize stop to pay their respects. All of them, even the children, are dressed in black and gray—colors that seem at odds with the fierce blue sky and the heat of summer, which is stifling even though it’s barely midday. As he listens in on their conversations, he hears the word “accident” over and over again: “What a terrible accident.” “Such a tragic accident.” “I’m so sorry about the accident.” His father doesn’t correct this interpretation of events; he simply thanks everyone for coming and moves on.

  As they step into the sanctuary, Kyung is immediately overwhelmed by the smell of flowers. Bright white gardenias, displayed to excess everywhere—not a cheap carnation in sight. They were Mae’s favorite flower, but it almost seems grotesque, spending so lavishly on decorations for a funeral. The gardenias are arrange
d in gilded planters, ascending along the steps to the altar. They’re bunched together in clusters, tied with white ribbon and clipped to the pews. The most elaborate display is the twin wreaths—huge, tire-sized wreaths, one on each side of a black-and-white photograph of Mae. Kyung doesn’t recognize where or when the photo was taken, but he thinks it captures her well. Straight spined and imperial, with the slightest lift of the corners of her mouth instead of a smile. Tucked behind the photo is a silver urn on a pedestal, a detail he hadn’t considered before. He’s grateful for the absence of a coffin, open or closed, but he worries where the ashes will go after the funeral. He doesn’t understand the idea of keeping the dead.

  Kyung follows Jin and Gillian to the first pew, struggling with the heat and perfume of flowers as he scans the crowd of people already seated. He notices Tim immediately, sitting a full head and shoulders taller than everyone else. He also notices the Steiners, Craig, and some familiar faces from campus. Strangely, the faces he’s least prepared to see are the ones he should have expected the most. When Reverend Sung and Molly appear, hands outstretched, he feels a spike of panic. His body goes rigid, ready to be hit, but he quickly finds himself wrapped in the reverend’s arms, bear-hugged in a way that seems wrong among men.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he says.

  Kyung blinks as the reverend sweeps down the pew in his shiny black vestments, greeting everyone with the same octopus embrace, even Connie and Vivi, who managed to slide into the seats next to Jin unnoticed. Molly follows close behind, bowing and shaking hands. He expects her face to reflect some memory of the last time they were together, but she keeps her eyes fixed to the floor. It’s obvious she didn’t tell her husband what happened, which is both a relief and a disappointment. Even the devout have their secrets.

  “We have a nice gathering of people here today,” the reverend says, staring out into the pews.

  The sanctuary is almost two-thirds full. Most of the mourners are members of the church—Koreans with lined faces and dark clothes, blotting their sweaty foreheads with handkerchiefs. Over a hundred, maybe even 150 have turned out, which is more than he would have expected. He wonders who, if anyone, will show up for Marina’s services, if she had any friends to remember her at all.

  “When is Marina’s funeral?” he whispers to Gillian.

  “Why are you asking that now?” she snaps, barely attempting to conceal her irritation at being spoken to.

  “Because I want to be there.”

  “We’re sending her body back to Bosnia. Now stop talking.”

  The reverend climbs the steps to the altar and asks everyone to be seated. The low murmur of conversation comes to a halt as he thanks people for coming to celebrate Mae’s life. Kyung thinks of Marina’s parents, standing on an airstrip in some wretched little town, waiting for men to unload their daughter’s coffin. He’s certain there won’t be any gardenias at her funeral. No gardenias or carnations, probably no flowers of any kind. Just a modest grave that people will visit for a while until they eventually don’t. The memory of his first and last real conversation with Marina still haunts him, the way she kept insisting she couldn’t go home. Death made it easier, strangely. Everything she didn’t want her family to know will remain secret now. He assumes that Mae understood this, and the bond he couldn’t see was actually there all along. She thought she was doing right by Marina, ending their suffering together, the same way it began.

  “Our sister, Mae, is no longer with us…,” the reverend says. “I know that her loss may seem like too much to bear, and you’re tempted to ask yourselves, Why? Why did the Lord have to take her?”

  In the corner of his eye, Kyung sees several people nodding, but it’s not the right question, he thinks. God didn’t take her. She took herself. And the guilt he feels is multiplied by the fact that he prayed for this as a child, back when he thought his prayers might still be answered. He wanted his mother to run. He wanted her to be brave. But he knows it wasn’t bravery that made her get in that car. It was him.

  “Some of you may even find yourselves blaming the Lord for her absence.” The reverend lowers his head, shuffling through pages and pages of notes that everyone can hear through the microphone. When he looks up again, he pauses much longer than he should, flustered in a way that Kyung has never seen before.

  “We’ll now have a reading from Sister Han.”

  A small Korean woman stands up across the aisle. She watches the reverend for a signal, confused perhaps by the brevity of his remarks. When he doesn’t give one, she approaches the altar, nervously folding and unfolding a slip of paper. Kyung thinks he recognizes her. She and her husband used to run a copy shop somewhere. Her round face is more withered now, and her hair has turned gray, but her footsteps sound the same, the way they clunk in thick black orthopedic shoes that correct the uneven lengths of her legs. Despite the shoes, Mrs. Han’s face barely clears the podium.

  “From Thessalonians…” She adjusts the microphone, cranking it down near her mouth with a screech that rings through the sanctuary. “‘For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.…’”

  Kyung turns to look down the pew at his family. Everyone is listening intently to Mrs. Han as she struggles through the reading, her accent too thick to fully enunciate the words. No one is crying except for Vivi, who dabs at her face with a handkerchief, consumed by a fit of grief that seems out of place beside the others. Gillian squeezes his leg—not affectionately, but forcefully, as if to snap him back to attention. He scans through his program, a long list of readings and remembrances by people he barely knows. When he looks through the names more closely, he notices that Jin isn’t scheduled to speak on Mae’s behalf, and of course, no one trusted Kyung enough to ask. He’s never attended a funeral in which a family member didn’t say at least a few words about the deceased, but their omission seems entirely appropriate. He and his father lost their rights to Mae long before the Perrys entered their lives. It’s better that people who treated her kindly have a chance to say their good-byes.

  “‘… And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.’”

  The reverend thanks Mrs. Han for her reading and assumes his place behind the podium again. Kyung expects him to begin his eulogy in earnest, but he introduces the chorus and retreats to a corner as an army of people take to the stage. They arrange themselves in two long rows, dressed in royal blue robes with their hands clasped in front of their chests, the same way Kyung was taught to sing in public as a child. Behind them, a man begins to play the pipe organ, which lights up the sanctuary with noise—too much noise, almost. It drowns out the solo of the woman in the center, whose reedlike voice drifts aimlessly toward the ceiling. The rest of the choir eventually joins in, singing something about Jesus being a redeemer, but what the actual lyrics are, Kyung can’t hazard a guess. There’s a muddy quality to their performance. The song feels unpracticed or unplanned. He looks at his program again, confirming that what they meant to sing was “Amazing Grace,” which this certainly isn’t.

  After the music concludes, an older woman approaches the podium with a stack of index cards. She raises the mike, filling the sanctuary with the same unfortunate screech as Mrs. Han. The woman’s face glows white and oily under the spotlights as she introduces herself as Elinor Hamel, Mae’s decorator. Kyung has never seen her before. For years, Elinor was nothing more than a voice on the phone or a name in a story. She was the person Mae spent the most time with, and probably spent the most money on as well. At first, Elinor doesn’t seem like much of a speaker. She clears her throat too much and fumbles through her prepared remarks until she eventually puts he
r note cards down.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should bring this up today, but it’s difficult to talk about Mae’s life without at least referencing the things that happened to her recently.”

  All the ambient noise in the room—the coughing, the fanning, the shifting in pews—suddenly stops and the sanctuary is quiet. Kyung sits up straight, wondering if he’ll finally hear something uncomfortable and true.

  “I’m sure there are people out there, people who didn’t know Mae like we did, who thought of her as nothing more than a victim. But Mae was just the opposite. She was strong and smart. She survived something terrible, something that would have broken an ordinary soul. And I have to believe that God had his reasons for testing her as he did and then taking her away so soon afterwards. Maybe he had a special place for her.…”

  Several people raise their Bibles. A ripple of amens makes its way to the back of the room. Kyung feels like he’s sitting on the bottom of a swimming pool, looking up at a distorted view of a world in which no one understands what really happened. And his father and Gillian, people who should understand, refuse to believe.

  Elinor concludes with a passage from John 14. “‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me so that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.’” She pauses and puts her note cards down again. “Mae is with our Father now, making his home more beautiful for him and for us, which was always her way. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to be her friend in this lifetime, and I know we’ll meet again in the next.”

  There are other remembrances and readings after Elinor’s, brief ones that are hard to listen to nonetheless. Everyone talks about Mae in generalities, confirming his fear that she never let anyone truly see her, not once in fifty-six years. Kyung tips his head back and stares at the huge stained-glass panels in the ceiling—bright red, blue, and gold crosses surrounded by bursts of color as if he’s viewing them through a kaleidoscope.