Love Love

by Sung J. Woo

  Now, as Judy stared at the vase sitting on the middle shelf of her wall unit, the afternoon sun catching the faint blue glaze, she thought of all the misery this contiguous piece of ceramic had witnessed in its lifetime, all the sadness and hardship and death of her family over two centuries on two continents, the wails and whimpers sliding down its narrow throat and settling down its wide, hungry base. Her eyes moved from the vase to a single index card on the coffee table. On it were three sentences:

  I miss you.

  I’ll always miss you.

  Where are you now?

  It was in blue ink and it was her handwriting, though Judy didn’t remember writing it. She’d found it during her mass cleanup, the note stuck between the pages of an abandoned mystery novel. The piece of paper may have initially acted as a bookmark, but at some point during her reading, its purpose shifted from being a keeper of pages to a beholder of her psyche.

  She picked it up and looked at it inches away from her eyes, reading the letters one at a time until they became words. She could have written them for her mother. They could’ve been for Brian. But Judy knew who these were for.

  When the little oval on the pregnancy test stick had shown a pair of pink lines, she immediately opened another one and did it again. As she washed her hands in the bathroom sink, she looked at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror and accepted the inevitability that she’d be alone in whatever decision she would make. She and Brian had been together for just three months, and she couldn’t fathom a scenario where this could go well. From the outside, he looked like a solid guy, standing six feet tall with a friendly paunch, but he was fragile inside, both mentally and physically. In his youth he’d spent a summer at a sanitarium for an attempted suicide, and under stress his stomach ulcers bled. Father material he was not, and she was no mother, either, which was why she’d been on the pill for her entire adult life. And yet somehow a statistical miracle occurred, and now she had to deal with it.

  He was at work when she rang him, his sales job at Best Buy. Thursdays were his off days, but she’d forgotten he’d swapped with a coworker that week. She didn’t want to tell him then, but he knew something was up, and the concern in his voice was unmistakable.

  “I’m pregnant,” Judy said.

  She imagined him at that moment, his slouchy posture frozen in front of the grid of widescreen televisions, all broadcasting the same vivid animated feature, the screens dancing in perfect unison as Brian clutched his tiny phone in his hand. She listened to the background noise of the electronics megastore, beeps and dings interspersing a steady drone of a pop tune with its incessant beats.

  “Really?” he said, so quietly that she almost didn’t catch it.

  “Yes,” Judy said. He’d said only one word and said it so mysteriously that all she could do was repeat it. “Really.”

  “Wait for me,” he said, and he hung up.

  He rushed over, the underarms of his cobalt-blue polo shirt darkened with sweat. He hugged her. He cried. To Judy’s utter astonishment, he got down on one knee and proposed to her, right then and there. He produced a gold ring, passed down from his grandmother, tiny diamonds encrusted in the shape of a heart.

  “You know this wasn’t supposed to happen, right?” Judy said. “It was an accident.”

  He closed his eyes and lowered his head, as if in prayer. He was balding early, the crown of his curly brown hair thinned to a delicate fuzz.

  “I know,” he said. “But an accident can also be a blessing, don’t you think?”

  She didn’t know what to think, and even worse, what to feel. A bead of sweat rolled down from one armpit, chilling her. That was a bad sign, wasn’t it? But then here he was, her Brian, staring up at her with such unguarded earnestness. That was a good sign. Right?

  She got down on the floor and kissed him.

  Judy knew she could count on her mother’s and brother’s support, and she steeled herself for her father’s disapproval, but even here, the worst of it was a backhanded compliment.

  “Good,” he said. “Baby make you grow up.”

  For the first time, Judy felt as if there was a plan to her life, and the plan was a new place, a husband, and a child, in that order. She and Brian moved out of their studio apartments into a two-bedroom in Asbury Park. Judy stopped drinking and smoking, and instead of feeling restricted, she felt clarified. Brian’s gourd-shaped bong disappeared and out came a pair of running shoes from the closet, and when a managerial position opened up at the store, he wore his freshly dry-cleaned business suit and took the interview. He’d never shown such initiative, such energy, and even more impressive was his positivity when he didn’t get the promotion.

  “There’ll be others,” he told her, and maybe the most amazing thing of all was that she believed him. Brian wasn’t the only one changing. As the child grew inside her, Judy, too, became a sunnier person, someone she’d always hoped to be.

  She took care of herself in a way she never had before, loved herself as she never had before. When she awoke in the morning, her hands traveled down to her belly and felt a warmth emanating from this beautiful secret of a person. Next to her was Brian, mouth ajar and snoring away, her husband-to-be, her mate in this great adventure they were about to undertake. This was her own family, nestled together right here in this bed.

  At her twelfth-week checkup, her obstetrician told her in her kindest voice that Judy had suffered a delayed miscarriage.

  “I don’t understand,” Judy said.

  The baby was no longer registering a heartbeat. It was dead, and it was still inside her.

  There was a scene, one that Judy would not be proud of later, calling the doctor a liar, screaming it, a nurse hurrying in to calm her down. Brian was there fifteen minutes later. Tests showed the baby had been dead for a week, possibly longer. The doctor assured her that death almost always occurred without the mother’s knowledge, but Judy knew she’d failed. Any mother worth her salt would’ve sensed that she was carrying a corpse.

  The doctor offered two choices, a surgical procedure called dilation and curettage, or a pill. Swallowing a pill felt too simple, too easy, but Brian convinced her to take the misoprostol to dilate the cervix and force-evacuate the embryo. It was a white tablet like any other, oblong in shape, innocent in the palm of her hand. The doctor drew a glass of water then left the room, and now it was just Judy and Brian.

  She lay down on the table sideways, and her tears flowed from her eyes down to the stiff white paper beneath. On the wall was a poster flowcharting the stages of pregnancy, and she ping-ponged between fury and longing as she stared at the final illustration of the mother cradling her baby.

  “We’ll just try again,” Brian said, holding her hands. Then he put on his best fake smile, and she loved him for it. “And again and again and again.”

  A month later they were married, in a small ceremony by the Jersey shore with a few friends and immediate family. Everyone seemed happy, or at least pretended to be, so Judy did likewise.

  She and Brian kept trying, but as her period appeared with clock-like regularity, Judy couldn’t shake the feeling that the reason they were attempting to get pregnant again wasn’t so much to have a child but to recapture the romantic whirlwind of promises and possibilities. But they kept at it, and after half a year of striking out, they consulted with a doctor who deemed Brian’s sperm plentiful and active and put her on Clomid because, three years shy of forty, Judy was past her peak. She didn’t feel like an old woman, but apparently in the world of fertility, she was past her prime.

  Their final attempt at pregnancy involved a round of injectable hormone therapy that maxed out their credit cards, which they had to stop when Brian got fired from his job.

  “We’ll just take a break while we get back on our feet, right?” Judy said, secretly relieved.

  “No, we can’t give up now,” Brian said, more determined than ever, but it turned out to be an empty threat. Three times a week became once a week, and th
en a month passed where they didn’t have sex at all. And then it didn’t take long for Brian’s running shoes to retreat to the closet and the bong to take their place.

  Just when Judy thought their lives were stabilizing, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Through days and nights of heartache and misery, Brian stood by her side; if he showed any signs of distress, she missed them. They buried her mother in April. When Brian decided to fly out to Seattle to visit his brother in May, Judy thought it was a good thing for him to reconnect with his sibling and recharge his batteries.

  He called the next evening to tell her he wasn’t coming back.

  “It’s the coffee, right? Once you go black, you never go back,” she joked.

  But he wasn’t joking.

  “I didn’t plan this,” he said. “But here, away from you, I remember I can be happy. Please, Judy, can you just let me go?”

  Let him go? What, had she kept him chained in a dungeon? Once the shock of his words wore off, Judy found herself getting furious. She shouted into the phone for him to act like an adult, to make some goddamn fucking sense, but she stopped when all she heard coming out of the telephone speaker was his crying. It was a terrible, primal noise, an animal with a mortal wound, and she saw him for who he really was, someone more broken than herself. The razor scars on his wrists had almost faded away, but they’d always be there.

  “I just can’t,” he said. “Don’t make me, Judy. Please. I just can’t, not anymore.”

  “You asked me to marry you. You could’ve walked away when . . .”

  And now it was her turn to cry. Judy sank into the couch and balled herself and held the phone so tight that she thought she might crush it.

  “I waited as long as I could,” he said. “It wasn’t good for me, but I stayed.”

  “Until my mother died.”

  “It was the best I could do.”

  Judy listened to the hum on the line, the faint mechanical buzz of the vast distance between them.

  “Why did we try so hard?” Judy asked.

  Brian’s answer was heartbreakingly simple. “I think we just wanted to be happy.”

  He’d begged her to let him go, so she finally did. She hung up the phone.

  A week later, his brother came and packed up Brian’s clothes and CDs. The hall closet still contained a mountain of his stuff, things she should give away or throw away, but that would require her to open the door and sift through the most painful part of her life. In moments like these, while in remembrance and reflection, Judy could feel the heat of those objects in there as if they were alive—Brian’s snowshoes, a his-and-hers set of beach towels, a mixer they received as a wedding gift but never opened—pulsing like a heartbeat, waiting to be freed.

  Their marriage had been formed on the foundation of an accident. Was it any wonder that it had failed so spectacularly?

  Judy grabbed a pen and wrote the following sentence below the last one.

  I don’t know where you are, but I am here.

  What had come out after she took the abortion pill was a bloody golf ball–sized clump of tissue that plunked into the toilet bowl. She’d suffered through eight hours of cramps before the embryo was expelled. There was so much blood, and floating inside that unfathomable crimson pool was their child who never was and would never be. They hadn’t talked about names, but she had picked out one for each gender: Mason and Abigail. She’d save the other name for the next child, because she wanted a boy and a girl—that’s what she dreamed in those brighter days.

  Judy heaved herself up from the couch, marched herself to the bathroom, and stripped. She stepped into the shower and turned it on, the sudden coldness of the water at first excruciating, then liberating. As the water warmed up, she closed her eyes and lifted her face to the familiar rain. She had two hours to get ready for her date with Roger, two hours to sequester her shadows into a corner and look askance toward the light.

  6

  There was something wrong with his parents’ mailbox, and it wasn’t just the white paint that had faded to reveal the underlying gray of the sheet metal. The whole structure was standing askew like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Later Kevin would need to fix this permanently, but for now, he was able to straighten the post by jamming a few stones into the crevice at its base.

  Frankly, he was impressed it had lasted this long, considering the circumstances of the day he and his father had put it in. That morning, they drove to the houses of four of Judy’s girlfriends where she could’ve possibly spent the night, and when she was still nowhere to be found, his dad asked Kevin where he thought she might be. Community Park South came to mind, where she’d watched him take tennis lessons with his first coach, but that was years ago. The fact was, he hadn’t a clue of his sister’s whereabouts; they lived in the same house, but as a senior and a sophomore at Princeton High, they lead entirely separate lives.

  Still, they had no better ideas, so his dad gunned the car down Van Horne entirely too fast, almost twice the speed limit. They parked and walked over to the swimming pool, but it wasn’t open yet and the tennis courts were deserted. His father leaned against the chain-link fence, his forehead grinding against the metal.

  “Mi-chin-nyun,” he whispered. Korean curse words, Kevin knew well. His dad had just called his sister a crazy bitch, but those harsh sounds carried more worry than malice.

  They left the park and drove down Nassau, passing by the university’s gates, a pair of eagles with dispassionate stares perched on stone pillars. They slowed down at Thomas Sweet, the ice cream shop, hoping to see Judy sleeping on the bench or sitting under the outdoor seating under the umbrellas.

  His father made a sudden, violent turn onto Harrison and slammed the car to a stop at Ace Hardware.

  “Why are we here?” Kevin asked.

  “New mailbox,” his father said. He commandeered a nearby shopping cart and almost rammed it into another customer exiting the store.

  The night before, his father and his sister had argued about the length of her skirt (Kevin also thought it was a little too short), but it was different than their fights before. Having turned sixteen a week ago, there was a new boldness to Judy that had surprised everyone, their father, too. That’s why their father was so flustered, because his daughter was no longer someone he could even pretend to control. Still, this was crazy, filling up their cart with a bag of Quikrete, a prefabbed post, and a shiny white mailbox. It was the sort of thing that Judy would do. Couldn’t his father see how alike they were?

  “We should be out looking for her,” Kevin said.

  His dad thrust his credit card to the cashier. “We look, can’t find. Where we look, Kevin? Where?”

  “I don’t know, the bus stops?”

  Laughing without mirth, his father signed the receipt hard enough to run a gash through the paper. “Your sister, riding bus? Funny. Even she don’t hate me that much.”

  There was no arguing with his father when he was like this, and besides, Kevin was tired of being in the middle. Twenty-seven days was what was left of his time here at home, the end of his adolescent prison sentence. Penn State would be his reward for putting up with his family’s inanity for all these years, though maybe he wasn’t taking Judy’s running away seriously enough. Kevin was certain she hadn’t done anything too stupid. But a little stupid?

  When they returned home, his mother took him aside.

  “Just help him put it up, okay? It’ll calm him down. I just got a call from Elise’s mom.”

  “We were just there.”

  “Apparently Elise was hiding Judy in her closet. Her mother is mortified. I’ll be back.”

  By the curb, his father swung the sledgehammer with all his fury, almost knocking out the rotting post with a single swing.

  “She was at Elise’s,” Kevin said.

  His father took another mighty chop, and this time, the L-shaped structure flew away and landed on the other side of their driveway with a thud.

  “I don’t care,�
�� he said.

  Kevin could see his father was ashamed of what he’d uttered, so Kevin did what he could to make everything go faster. He poured the concrete into the mixing tub and added water, first not enough and then too much, but his father didn’t mind. As his mother thought, the physical act of running the shovel with two hands back and forth through the mixture calmed his father. Watching his father’s patient strokes, Kevin thought of the ferryman Charon on the River Styx in those myths he’d craved as a child (and still loved in a nostalgic sort of way), guiding the lost souls to their intended destinations.

  In retrospect, it’d been a terrible idea to build something so permanent at such an awful time, as if they were raising a monument to commemorate the difficulties between his father and Judy. Almost a quarter of a century had passed since that day, but now, as Kevin stared at the line of rusted screws on the bottom of the mailbox, a row of teeth bleeding red, he wondered if the reason why his father so often got angry at Judy, why he always gave her such a tough time, was because she’d been his blood-born child while Kevin was not. He hated himself for even thinking along such juvenile lines, but he couldn’t help what he was feeling.

  “Hello!” Soo said at the door, drying her hands on her apron. The smell of tofu soup with red miso and scallion-oyster pancakes swirled around her. Kevin hoped she hadn’t gone too far with her cooking endeavors. Even though he enjoyed some Korean cuisine, he found most of it too spicy, but he’d never had the heart to tell Soo.