My father grunted back in that low way of his, the vibrato from his neck tickling my thighs, his voice all raw meat and stones, and my mother just answered him, Come up right now and eat some lunch. He marched around the side of the house with me hanging from his back by my ankles and then bounded up the front stairs, inside, and up to the kitchen table, where she had set out bowls of noodles in broth with half-moon slices of pink and white fish cake and minced scallions. And as we sat down, my mother cracked two eggs into my father’s bowl, one into mine, and then took her seat between us at the table before her spartan plate of last night’s rice and kimchee and cold mackerel (she only ate leftovers at lunch), and then we shut our eyes and clasped our hands, my mother always holding mine extra tight, and I could taste on my face the rich steam of soup and the call of my hungry father offering up his most patient prayers to his God.
None of us even dreamed that she would be dead six years later from a cancer in her liver. She never even drank or smoked. I have trouble remembering the details of her illness because she and my father kept it from me until they couldn’t hide it any longer. She was buried in a Korean ceremony two days afterward, and for me it was more a disappearance than a death. During her illness they said her regular outings on Saturday mornings were to go to “meetings” with her old school friends who were living down in the city. They said her constant weariness and tears were from her concern over my mediocre studies. They said, so calmly, that the rotten pumpkin color of her face and neck and the patchiness of her once rich hair were due to a skin condition that would get worse before it became better. They finally said, with hard pride, that she was afflicted with a “Korean fever” that no doctor in America was able to cure.
A few months after her death I would come home from school and smell the fishy salty broth of those same noodles. There was the woman, Ahjuhma, stirring a beaten egg into the pot with long chopsticks; she was wearing the yellow-piped white apron that my mother had once sewn and prettily embroidered with daisies. I ran straight up the stairs to my room on the second floor of the new house, and Ahjuhma called after me in her dialect, “Come, there is enough for you.” I slammed the door as hard as I could. After a half hour there was a knock and I yelled back in English, “Leave me alone!” I opened the door hours later when I heard my father come in, and the bowl of soup was at my feet, sitting cold and misplaced.
After that we didn’t bother much with each other.
I still remember certain things about the woman: she wore white rubber Korean slippers that were shaped exactly like miniature canoes. She had bad teeth that plagued her. My father sent her to the dentist, who fitted her with gold crowns. Afterward, she seemed to yawn for people, as if to show them off. She balled up her hair and held it with a wooden chopstick. She prepared fish and soup every night; meat or pork every other; at least four kinds of namool, prepared vegetables, and then always something fried.
She carefully dusted the photographs of my mother the first thing every morning, and then vacuumed the entire house.
For years I had no idea what she did on her day off; she’d go walking somewhere, maybe the two miles into town though I couldn’t imagine what she did there because she never learned three words of English. Finally, one dull summer before I left for college, a friend and I secretly followed her. We trailed her on the road into the center of the town, into the village of Ardsley. She went into Rocky’s Corner news-stand and bought a glossy teen magazine and a red Popsicle. She flipped through the pages, obviously looking only at the pictures. She ate the Popsicle like it was a hot dog, in three large bites.
“She’s a total alien,” my friend said. “She’s completely bizarre.”
She got up and peered into some store windows, talked to no one, and then she started on the long walk back to our house.
She didn’t drive. I don’t know if she didn’t wish to or whether my father prohibited it. He would take her shopping once a week, first to the grocery and then maybe to the drugstore, if she needed something for herself. Once in a while he would take her to the mall and buy her some clothes or shoes. I think out of respect and ignorance she let him pick them out. Normally around the house she simply wore sweatpants and old blouses. I saw her dressed up only once, the day I graduated from high school. She put on an iridescent dress with nubbly flecks in the material, which somehow matched her silvery heels. She looked like a huge trout. My father had horrible taste.
Once, when I was back from college over spring break, I heard steps in the night on the back stairwell, up and then down. The next night I heard them coming up again and I stepped out into the hall. I caught the woman about to turn the knob of my father’s door. She had a cup of tea in her hands. Her hair was down and she wore a white cotton shift and in the weak glow of the hallway night-light her skin looked almost smooth. I was surprised by the pretty shape of her face.
“Your papa is thirsty,” she whispered in Korean, “go back to sleep.”
The next day I went out to the garage, up to the nook behind the closet, to read some old novels. I had a bunch of them there from high school. I picked one to read over again and then crawled out through the closet to turn on the stereo; when I got back in I stood up for a moment and I saw them outside through the tiny oval window.
They were working together in the garden, loosening and turning over the packed soil of the beds. They must have thought I was off with friends, not because they did anything, or even spoke to one another, but because they were simply together and seemed to want it that way. In the house nothing between them had been any different. I watched them as they moved in tandem on their knees up and down the rows, passing a small hand shovel and a three-fingered claw between them. When they were finished my father stood up and stretched his back in his familiar way and then motioned to her to do the same.
She got up from her knees and turned her torso after him in slow circles, her hands on her hips. Like that, I thought she suddenly looked like someone else, like someone standing for real before her own life. They laughed lightly at something. For a few weeks I feared that my father might marry her, but nothing happened between them that way, then or ever.
The woman died sometime before my father did, of complications from pneumonia. It took all of us by surprise. He wasn’t too well himself after his first mild stroke, and Lelia and I, despite our discord, were mutually grateful that the woman had been taking good care of him. At the time, this was something we could talk about without getting ourselves deeper into our troubles of what we were for one another, who we were, and we even took turns going up there on weekends to drive the woman to the grocery store and to the mall. We talked best when either she or I called from the big house, from the kitchen phone, my father and his housekeeper sitting quietly together somewhere in the house.
After his rehabilitation, my father didn’t need us shuttling back and forth anymore. That’s when she died. Apparently, she didn’t bother telling him that she was feeling sick. One night she was carrying a tray of food to his bed when she collapsed on the back stairwell. Against her wishes my father took her to the hospital but somehow it was too late and she died four days later. When he called me up he sounded weary and spent. I told him I would go up there; he said no, no, everything was fine.
I drove up anyway and when I opened the door to the house he was sitting alone in the kitchen, the kettle on the stove madly whistling away. He was fast asleep; after the stroke he sometimes nodded off in the middle of things. I woke him, and when he saw me he patted my cheek.
“Good boy,” he muttered.
I made him change his clothes and then fixed us a dinner of fried rice from some leftovers. Maybe the kind of food she would make. As I was cleaning up after we ate, I asked whether he had buried her, and if he did, where.
“No, no,” he said, waving his hands. “Not that.”
The woman had begged him not to. She didn’t want to be buried here in America. Her last wish, he said, was to be burned. He did th
at for her. I imagined him there in the hospital room, leaning stiffly over her face, above her wracked lips, to listen to her speak. I wondered if she could ever say what he had meant to her. Or say his true name. Or request that he speak hers. Perhaps he did then, with sorrow and love.
I didn’t ask him of these things. I knew already that he was there when she died. I knew he had suffered in his own unspeakable and shadowy way. I knew, by his custom, that he had her body moved to a local mortuary to be washed and then cremated, and that he had mailed the ashes back to Korea in a solid gold coffer finely etched with classical Chinese characters.
Our gift to her grieving blood.
VOIR DIRE
Don Lee
On Sunday afternoon, when Hank Low Kwon returned to his house in Rosarita Bay, he found a note tacked to his front door. “You don’t think I read?” it said. The note was unsigned, but he knew it was from Molly Beddle. No doubt she had seen the newspaper article, small as it was, summarizing the first day of the trial, and was miffed that he had mentioned it only tangentially to her. It was clearly his biggest case in four years as a public defender.
He had been working at his San Vicente office all day and didn’t know where Molly would be. He tried her at her loft, at the sports center and gym, and then, on a hunch, dialed the marine forecast—northwest at twenty-three knots, gusting to thirty—and was certain he would find her at Rummy Creek, her favorite windsurfing spot.
From Highway 1, he turned onto a dirt fire road that cut through a barbed-wire fence with no trespassing signs, bumped down half a mile of scrub grass, wound past the Air Force radar station, and then arrived at the headlands bordering the ocean. Molly’s truck was there, parkedDON LEE, a third-generation Korean American, was born in Tokyo in 1959. He is the author of the short-story collection Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Winners of a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award, his stories have been published in GQ, Manoa, Bamboo Ridge, the Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, New England Review, and elsewhere. He has been the recipient of fiction fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Saint Botolph Club Foundation. Currently he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares.
among a handful of cars, and Hank stepped to the edge of the cliff to look for her.
It didn’t take long. She was flying across the water, feet in the board’s straps, hooked to the boom in her harness, raking the sail back so far, she was almost lying flat—a human catamaran. She carved the board into a sweeping turn, executing a smooth laydown jibe, and raced back to shore. She jibed again, accelerated toward a small wave, and launched off its lip, swooping fifteen feet into the air, and then touched down without missing a beat.
Hank sat on a tree stump and watched her. Molly had once described the feeling she got out there, sometimes flailing, struggling just to keep her balance and hang on to the boom, and then getting into a slot where everything fell into place, hydroplaning on the tail of the board, lightly skimming over the chop. At that moment, going as fast as she could, it was effortless. She could take one hand off the rig, let her fingers drag in the water. She could look around, catch a little scenery—the cypress and pine atop the bluffs, the kelp waving underneath the surface. It was glorious, she had said, and as Molly, finished for the day, waded to the sand, as Hank climbed down the cliff to meet her, he could see the quiet elation in her face, the contentment of a woman who knew what she loved in this world.
But then she spotted Hank. She dropped her board and sail and marched toward him, sleek and divine in her sleeveless wetsuit. Without a word, she punched her fist into his arm, stinging him so hard with surprise, he fell to the ground. He looked up at her, half laughing. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said.
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes, it hurt. Like a son of a bitch.”
“Good. I feel better now,” she said, and helped him to his feet.
The indictment was on two counts: Penal Code Section 187, second-degree murder, punishable by fifteen years to life, and Section 273a, Subdivision (1), felony child abuse, punishable by one to ten. The previous summer, Chee Seng Lam, a cocaine addict, had beaten his girlfriend’s three-year-old son, Simon Liu, to death with an electrical cord, whipping the boy, according to the medical examiner, more than four hundred times.
On Friday at San Vicente Superior Court, before the weekend recess, Hank had given his opening statement. He had told the jury that Lam was not a child abuser; he had never intended to harm Simon Liu that night. Indeed, he hadn’t even known it was Simon he was hitting. High on cocaine, hallucinating wildly, he had believed he was lashing at—trying to protect himself from—a nest of snakes, thousands of them.
Drugs alone could not eliminate culpability. To win an acquittal, Hank would have to prove that the coke had made Lam delusional and paranoid, even when he wasn’t under the influence—in other words, that he had developed a latent mental defect—and because of it, he was incapable of knowing or understanding the nature and quality of his act, or of distinguishing right from wrong—the legal definition of insanity in California.
“You believe him?” Molly asked as she hosed the salt off her gear in his driveway.
“I don’t know,” Hank said. “I’m not sure he’s smart enough to have made it up.”
“Does he have a history of violence?”
“Not against the kid, but yeah, he was your basic piece of shit.” Chee Seng Lam had twenty-two prior arrests, mostly as a juvenile, when he had been a member of the Flying Dragons gang: aggravated assault, extortion, burglary, receiving stolen property, gun and drug possession, a couple of other assorted goodies, none of which would ever be revealed in court, since Hank had gotten his record suppressed.
“I guess you won’t have too many character witnesses,” Molly said.
“His dealer liked him.”
Molly restrapped her shortboards on the rack of her truck. She had been a ten-meter platform diver in college, but she was in better shape now, at thirty-five, than she had been at her competitive peak, although most people never suspected it. Largely, this had to do with how little she cared about her looks. She had a sweet, guileless face—eyes set wide apart, a plump mouth, long, wispy blond hair—yet she never wore makeup, and her skin was always sunburned in patches, bruised, scratched, her lips chapped. In the rumpled sweaters and khakis she preferred, she was deceptively ordinary. Solid and thick-boned, one would think; maybe even a little overweight.
But of course, underneath the baggy attire, it was all muscle and power. Besides windsurfing, Molly skied, kayaked, rock climbed, and occasionally entered a triathlon for fun. She had degrees in biome chanics and sports science, and she was now the head diving coach at San Vicente University, where she had put together a championship program.
Her energy and fitness both attracted and overwhelmed Hank, who’d become, in his late thirties, a bit paunchy and prone to bronchitis. Yet, for all their differences, they got on remarkably well. They had met at the grand opening of Banzai Pipeline, the Japanese restaurant on Main Street. Hank had grown up in Hawaii with the owner, Dun-can Roh, a surfer Molly knew from Rummy Creek.
They had been seeing each other for a year and a half now, and recently they had agreed that they would move in together at the end of the summer, when their current leases expired. Both divorced, they were careful not to attach undue significance to the decision. They knew enough not to ask the other for compromise, not to be too preoccupied about defining a future, which had become difficult of late, since Molly was now ten weeks pregnant.
She adjusted the nozzle on the garden hose and took a sip of water. “Would you mind if I came to the trial?” she asked.
“Why would you want to?”
“I want to see you at work. I’ve never been to a trial.”
“You might make me more nervous than I already am,” he told her. This was partially true. Out of the
two-hundred-fifty-some cases he had handled, only twenty had gone to a jury—a routine track record in the public defenders’ office, where the motto was plead ’em and speed ’em.
“Your ex-wife never went to court?”
“Didn’t care for the clientele.”
Molly pulled her T-shirt over her head.
“What are you doing?” Hank said. He rented a mildewy two-bedroom cottage near Rummy Creek, and his neighbors were out and about.
Molly bent over and sprayed water on her hair, then squeezed it into a ponytail.
Hank noticed a cut on her bicep. “You’re bleeding,” he told her. He didn’t think she should have been windsurfing at all, but pregnancy hadn’t slowed her down a bit—no morning sickness, no fatigue.
Molly examined the gash on her arm, then licked the blood and kissed him. “Have you been smoking today?” she asked. “You taste like smoke.”
“That’s what I like about you. You don’t nag. Why don’t you put your shirt back on before someone gets a cheap thrill.”
She looked down at her breasts. “Amazing. I actually have tits now,” she said. “They’re so swollen. Feel them.”
“Are they tender?”
“A little. You don’t want to feel them?”
He handed back her T-shirt. “You really want to come to the trial?”
“Would it disturb you that much?”
“I guess not,” he told her. “But it’ll be embarrassing to watch.”
“Why? Is your case that weak?”
“No, you don’t get it,” he said. “I think I’m going to win.”
Last summer, on June 23, Ruby Liu drove down from Oakland to San Vicente with her son. She had been looking forward to spending the weekend with Chee Seng Lam, but right away they argued. Lam was irritated she’d brought Simon. “He say Simon noisy,” she testified. “He say Simon need discipline.”
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