by Steph Cha
Her mother was shot, and what did Grace do? She spurned her, she railed at her, she wished she’d been born to a different family. For twenty-seven years, she’d thought the world of her mother; for two weeks, as Yvonne lay dying, Grace abandoned her in her heart, and they both knew it.
Never had she been so completely alone. She hated her sister. For being blithe Miriam, the one things worked out for, who took the good in stride, like it was her due. Yes, she had lost her mother, too, but she’d lost her on her own terms somehow. Tragically. Beautifully.
A crack had torn open the earth, and Miriam was on the other side of the chasm. The only side with a path back to safety.
Grace started to pray—she’d fallen into the habit since the shooting, of asking for things, for comfort and peace, for her pain to be taken away. But what good had it done? Her mother was dead. Wherever she was now, she was there forever.
She felt hollow and nauseated, her stomach dropping inside her, the sensation before a long fall. It brought her no comfort to imagine Yvonne drifting into the afterlife. She hoped, in earnest, there was nothing there. Heaven required a hell, and heaven was for the repentant.
She opened her eyes, dizzy and despairing. She would never have a mother again.
Twenty-Four
Friday, September 6, 2019
Shawn never thought he’d be sorry that Jung-Ja Han was dead. But when the news came—a phone call from Nisha, who’d heard from Ray’s lawyer—it brought him physical pain, a twist in his stomach so tight it was momentarily incapacitating. The blows kept on coming, and this was the hardest one yet. Just like that, his nephew’s crime had turned to homicide. Darryl was a killer, and Ray would now face murder charges. If he was found guilty, he might never see another day outside.
Just yesterday, they had all been so hopeful. Ray’s lawyer had told Nisha that Grace Park was ready to testify to Ray’s innocence. Nisha had said nothing about Duncan’s photo, the girl in her husband’s lap; all she wanted, at least for now, was to bring Ray home. Shawn feared what would happen if charges were dropped against Ray, but the way Nisha told it, it sounded like the prosecutors were convinced of Ray’s guilt, and it was just a matter of whether they thought the charges would stick. Shawn let himself fantasize about having all his loved ones back home. It wasn’t so crazy, was it? It was only what he’d had ten days ago.
Shawn woke up to the news. Nisha called him at five in the morning, and he drove over, still in his sleeping clothes. The whole house was alive, the air of it hot and thrumming. Aunt Sheila and Nisha had been crying, their eyes wet, red, and bulging. He knew if the kids weren’t in the house, they’d be in full mourning. They’d lost Ray—that’s what it felt like. Like they’d gathered up his ransom, just to have it raised at the last minute to a price they could never pay.
Dasha sat with her mother and grandmother, the three of them a somber command center, mobilizing every resource they had. Nisha and Aunt Sheila made phone calls—the lawyer, Brother Vincent, Jules Searcey—while Dasha typed furiously on her phone. This little girl had an online audience now, a legion of strangers following the fate of her father.
Only Darryl stayed hidden, cloistered in his room.
Shawn hadn’t told anyone—not Nisha, not Jazz—and it made him dizzy that he’d even thought about it, how close he’d come to involving more people. He left the women and let himself into Darryl’s room and locked the door.
The boy was in bed, lying with his back to Shawn, his body rolled toward the wall. His posture was rigid, and Shawn could tell he was awake and alert, and that he hoped to hang on to the pretense of sleep.
Shawn sat down on his nephew’s bed. “You heard, then,” he said.
Darryl was silent, but his body contracted, a spasm jerking through him that Shawn felt through the mattress. The covers were bunched up under where Shawn was sitting, and Darryl yanked them as hard as he could, to gather them over his arms.
“You asked me what you should do,” Shawn said, his mouth dry. “I didn’t know what to tell you, but I do now.”
Darryl stayed still, and Shawn knew he was listening. Shawn laid a hand on the boy’s trembling shoulder.
“You do nothing, you hear me? And just as important, you say nothing. You stay away from Quant Fox and your other wannabe banger friends. They got nothing on you unless you give it to them, and if you give it to them, you better know they gonna use it. They’ll get busted one day, and they’ll squirm and rack their brains for a trade.” He paused and took a breath, unsure how far he should push the boy. But this was too important for the soft touch. “You killed someone, Darryl. And not just anyone. Someone who got the media whipped up, which means the police got whipped up, too. None of these fools gonna keep their mouth shut knowing they have that trump card. Not out of love for you.”
Darryl sat up suddenly, flinging Shawn’s hand away. He flipped away from the wall and faced his uncle. His eyes were bleary, his skin without luster. While he slept, everything had changed, and now he looked like he might never sleep again.
“I know that,” he said, his voice a fierce whisper. “But Dad—”
“He knows, and he’s made his own decisions. He’s taking his chances, and he could beat the charge.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Then he’ll go to prison. It’s better him than you.”
“But he didn’t do anything.” He pounded his chest, hard. “I did.”
There was a rich irony in this that tickled Shawn in a wicked place. No matter the sentence, that judge had said, Jung-Ja Han would suffer. She would carry the weight of Ava’s death for the rest of her life—wasn’t that punishment enough? Shawn had known guilt, and he had known prison. Darryl would live with his guilt, and that would have to do for everybody else.
“What’s done is done,” said Shawn, catching Darryl’s fist before the boy hurt himself. “Your debt to society—as far as I’m concerned, that’s been paid. You owe your family now.”
Men’s Central was a hateful place. It was one of the ten worst jails in America, and God knew there was tough competition. Shawn had spent sixty days here, more than a decade ago. He still remembered them—dangerous, soul-grinding days, difficult for even a young man. He didn’t want to think about Ray in there, a middle-aged man fresh from freedom and family, back to sharing a stinking toilet and a rusted-out bunk bed in an overcrowded cell.
He hadn’t scheduled a visit, and it took him an hour and a half to get through the hurdles of the walk-in, just before the six o’clock cutoff. It depressed him, the insult and hassle just to see his cousin, the questions and the searches; he’d hoped he’d never have to submit to them again. Last time he saw Ray, they were at Shawn’s home, sharing booze and memories, fearing exactly this: that one of them would lose his freedom, end up back in a place like this, vulnerable and alone.
Now they were at arm’s length, a grimy window between them, flanked by other visitors, other inmates, in two rows of hard stools and metal partitions; guards, alert and grim-faced, ready to step forward and keep them in line.
Ray’s months of freedom had been good to him—the open air, his mother’s cooking. Shawn saw that now that it was stripped back away. Already, his cousin looked like the man who’d stumbled out of Lompoc, thin and ashen, on the verge of old age.
He picked up the phone. “About time,” he said.
Shawn blinked. With all that had happened, with the craziness of the shooting, Ray’s arrest, Darryl’s disappearance; with a toddler at home and a full-time job; it hadn’t occurred to him that he was taking too long to visit. But a week and a half felt a lot longer in here, misery thickened by monotony. He wasn’t going to argue with Ray. “How’re they treating you?”
Ray shrugged. “You know how it is. They don’t have to treat me any way for it to be hell. And they treating me all kinds of ways.”
Shawn nodded.
“How’s everything at home?”
“How do you think? It’s a mess,” sai
d Shawn. “Everyone misses you.”
“At least it’s nothing new. Y’all should be used to having me gone by now.”
He studied Ray, his upbeat bravado, knowing it for what it was. “You seem calm for a man who just became a murderer.”
Ray rolled his eyes and sighed, screwing his mouth up into a wry smile. “Don’t tell me. Nisha sent you,” he said. “Are you here to tell me I didn’t do it?”
Shawn spoke quietly into the receiver. “I know you didn’t do it.”
Ray laughed. A dry, husky, exhausted laugh. “You don’t know shit. I did it. I shot that bitch and now she’s dead. Ding. Dong.”
“When you confessed, you didn’t know it was murder.”
He shrugged. “I’m not sorry about it. What, you gonna tell me to renege? Nisha been trying that.”
“I know it wasn’t you, Ray. I talked to him.”
“Who?”
Shawn shook his head and pointed at his phone. He didn’t know if anyone would bother recording this conversation, but he wasn’t about to take any chances. He held Ray’s stare until the understanding came.
Ray’s whole body seemed to deflate. Slumping, relieved. He lowered his phone to his chest and leaned in closer, resting his head on the dirty glass. He looked like a penitent, worn out from confession. When he came back up, he was smiling, a light dancing in his eyes.
“It was me,” he said again. But this time, his face told the truth.
Shawn sat back. Now they were talking.
“I was already fucked when they found the gun,” said Ray. “Even if they don’t get me for the shooting, I go back to prison just for having it. And if they match the gun to the shooting—well, you know.”
The gun would match, and someone would have to own it. Ray knew that as well as Shawn did.
“What possessed you to get a gun?” Shawn couldn’t quite keep the accusation out of his tone. If Darryl hadn’t found a gun just lying around, he might never have gone through with this reckless, ruinous plan.
“Every motherfucker has a gun in this country. What’re they afraid of? Anyone got a grudge against me got a gun. I gotta protect myself and my family.”
Shawn thought of Darryl, his weak gangster posturing. “No one was trying to get at you. And I love you, Ray, but you know getting that gun didn’t protect your family.”
Ray’s nostrils flared, and Shawn knew he’d touched the raw guilt just under the surface of his cousin’s new story about himself. There was no sense digging in further. He switched the subject. “You know there’s a whole bunch of people saying you’re innocent? You’d love it, Ray. You’re all over the internet. Dasha’s been showing me. You got fans.”
Ray brightened. “Yeah? What do they say about me?”
“A lot of them say you couldn’t have done it. You know Reddit?”
Ray shook his head.
“It’s like a big message board. There’s pages and pages on there about you and about Jung-Ja Han. It’s nuts. I don’t know where these people find the time. Anyway, lot of folks think you’re innocent, and they have all kinds of theories about why you confessed.”
“Like what?”
“Most of them think you were forced. A few people think you’re covering for someone. My name’s come up a couple of times.” He smiled at Ray. Darryl was safe, at least from the internet sleuths. A sixteen-year-old with a clean record wouldn’t be easy to find.
“They think you killed her?”
“I don’t think they really care who killed her. They just think it’s wrong you’re going down for it. Far as they’re concerned, it could’ve been anyone pulling the trigger. Me. The Crips. The angel of death. Even if you did shoot her, a lot of these people think you were justified. ‘No jury would convict.’”
Ray nodded solemnly. “That’s what my lawyer’s hoping, too, but we’ll see.”
“Any word on Jung-Ja Han’s daughter?”
“I’m the one in jail. I should be asking you.”
No one could reach Grace Park. She’d avoided calls from the prosecutor, from Ray’s lawyer. Aunt Sheila sent her an email, a long, heartfelt letter that offered condolences for the death of the woman who’d murdered her child. Grace ignored this, too. What a surprise—she couldn’t even deliver the thin amends she had promised.
She was in mourning, Shawn knew, and it had only been hours. Jung-Ja Han was her mother, even if she was something different to everyone else. Still, Shawn didn’t owe it to anyone to be generous on her account. Jung-Ja Han dying, now, twenty-eight years after she killed Ava—it felt like a sick joke, a final fuck you.
“Anyway, I’m not counting on her or any kind of miracle.” Ray bit down on his lip and sighed. “I was out for what, two months? Wish I’d have known. I would’ve done things different. Spent more time with the kids.”
Shawn didn’t say anything.
“Or maybe not. It was hard for me, Shawn. I missed so much being away so long. I love those kids, but they barely know me. And seeing them after all that time, every day, and every day them not knowing me—it was too much for me to handle.”
“You needed time. Everyone understood that.”
“I didn’t have time. I made damn sure of that, too.”
Shawn kept quiet. In more ways than one, all this was Ray’s fault. If he’d been smarter when he got out, instead of running wild and leaving a gun out for his kid to find. If he’d just been there when Darryl was growing up, a boring dad his kids could get sick of. Then maybe Darryl wouldn’t have tried so hard to plug in and share the family traumas, the family mistakes. But those mistakes were old and irreversible, and Shawn had made his share of them.
“You were there, though.” Ray’s voice quivered between sarcasm and gratitude. “Don’t think I don’t know that.”
Shawn rested the side of his fist on the window. He wanted to hug his cousin, to let him know how much he loved those kids and that he’d be there for them, but that he’d never replace Ray or dishonor his sacrifice. “And now you’re here,” he said instead, and bumped his fist against the glass.
Ray bumped his own fist on his side, matching it up with Shawn’s. He laughed, and tears spilled out of his eyes.
IV
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Yesterday, they buried her mother. In an unfamiliar chapel on the side of a Burbank graveyard, Grace sat in the first pew, mouthing hymns, letting the sermon run her by. Pastor Kwon officiated the funeral, and Miriam spoke for the family—a brief, formal eulogy delivered in her tentative Korean. Grace had declined to give her own speech. She couldn’t begin to think what she was supposed to say.
The chapel was crowded, nearly every pew full of mourners. She stood beside her father and sister at the open casket, her mother’s eerie, waxy, refurbished body visible from the corner of her eye, and she greeted each of them as they filed by. Aunts and uncles and cousins flown in from Las Vegas and Chicago. People from church, from the market; countless others Grace had never seen before. They came at her with kind words and gazes, grasping at her with hugs and handshakes.
They watched her, and they would remember, Grace thought, that she didn’t cry at her own mother’s funeral. Maybe she was unnatural, but she seemed to be fresh out of tears. It felt like she’d been hollowed, and that drop by drop, cup by cup, she was filling back up with bile.
What was this sham? Practical strangers, paying their two-penny respects, murmuring about God and peace. Her mother had been murdered. Didn’t they know that? This was no time for shallow sympathies and useless platitudes. That boy—that killer. He would have to answer.
Grace felt a hand on her wrist and snapped her head back to glare at her sister. Miriam was watching her, open worry on her face. “Hey,” she said. “Don’t wander off, okay?”
They were in a sea of people, clumping on an enormous lawn in front of Los Angeles City Hall, a hot, howling wind making them sticky and restless. Grace remembered the last time she was downtown, at the memorial in front of the feder
al courthouse, which glinted across the street, behind LAPD Headquarters. It was only a few months ago, but it felt like a different lifetime, a different incarnation of Grace.
“Look at this turnout,” said Miriam.
There were clusters of people in matching T-shirts, like old Koreans on bus tours. Signs floated across the crowd, homemade, crude, exuberant. JUSTICE 4 ALFONSO. FREE RAY HOLLOWAY. HANDS UP DON’T SHOOT. AMERIKKKA ALWAYS WAS AMERIKKKA TO ME. Children held their own signs as they rode on fathers’ shoulders, clung to mothers’ thighs. It felt almost festive. Drumbeats and chanting, car horns honking as drivers rolled by. Grace caught the unmistakable smell of bacon-wrapped hot dogs, grease and grilled onion and blistering meat.
“I guess people really hated Mom,” she said.
“There’s more to it than that,” said Miriam, without much conviction. “People think Ray Holloway is innocent, and to see him indicted right after Trevor Warren got off—it just looks like justice gone haywire.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I understand why people are angry. Trevor Warren is a murderer.” Miriam’s face twisted, and Grace could tell there was more that she feared to say.
“But?”
“Someone killed Umma.” Her eyes misted in an instant. She glanced around and lowered her voice, leaning closer to Grace. “And I don’t know why people are so eager to get Ray Holloway off. Why are they so sure he’s innocent? He’s a convicted felon. He had a motive and a gun that matched. This isn’t the fucking Central Park Five.”
Grace must have been staring at her, because Miriam turned red and looked away. “You’re the one who wanted to come here,” Miriam mumbled.
The indictment had been announced just as Yvonne went into the ground. Grace saw the news on her phone in the bathroom of the restaurant in Glendale, where she’d escaped the Korean barbecue lunch with her mother’s mourners. It stunned her, the text from MacManus popping up on her lock screen like all the others she’d ignored. She’d meant to contact him, but the days had fallen away from her, her will to act sluggish, unmotivated by any real feeling.