The Queen of Tears

by Chris Mckinney

  But she’d learned to hate hospitals years before that. When Soong arrived in Las Vegas, she hated the hospital before she even saw it. She did not even want to be in the country. Things had been good in Korea. She ran a restaurant that practically ran itself; she appeared in several movies in supporting roles; her star power, which she told herself she never liked anyway, was long gone because of the fickleness of audiences and the army of younger actresses that rose after her time. Chung Han was supportive, never oppressive. And she kept up her responsibilities. She sent money to Henry bimonthly. It was enough to keep the farm aboveground and support Darian. Why would she come back? Her two eldest children were adults, at least she’d been an adult at their age, and her American daughter was being taken care of by her American husband. What could she contribute to the life of that child but money? Darian had the adoring and ever-present love of one parent and the financial support of the other. Soong supposed that this would be enough for her. It was more than she’d ever had. It was more than her two eldest children ever had. Soong had begun telling herself that she did not need to return. They were all better off with her in a place where she could make money.

  But with one phone call, she’d been boarding a plane in Seoul. Now, two days later, she was in Las Vegas, dodging the merciless sun rays, attempting to find a shaded path to the entrance of the hospital, where her daughter needed her. And when she located the room, which she would later realize was in the psychiatric ward, and saw her skinny son with huge hair, making a ridiculous and futile attempt to grow sideburns, leaning against the bed where her broken daughter lay, she knew that she would probably not get back to Seoul ever again.

  Donny stood up, “I think she was mugged,” he said. Then he shrugged, not looking at his mother. “I don’t know why she’s like this. She has only spoken once since I found her. She asked for her purse, and that’s when she called you.”

  Nobody had told Donny what had happened. Soong took a chair and dragged it next to the bed. “They only let me visit an hour a day,” Donny said.

  She sat down. “Leave,” she said.

  Donny quickly responded. “You have your nerve. You leave us and go back home. Now you come back and think you can tell me what to do. I’m surprised Won Ju even called you. You have been dead to us. We were doing just fine without you. You should leave. We do not need you.”

  It sounded rehearsed. Soong wondered how much time her son had spent thinking about what he was going to say to her. He’d probably also spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not he was going to say it at all. She was glad that he’d said it. It demonstrated strength to her. She turned to him. “Please, son. Just wait outside. I need to talk to your sister alone.”

  Donny was about to say something else, but seemed to change his mind. As he walked out, he said, “Hurry up. The nurse will kick us out soon. This is a crazy ward. We cannot stay here too long.”

  Soong turned to her daughter. She was curled in a fetal position with her back facing her mother. Her hair was sprawled out on the pillow. The strands looked so stiff, like fossils on the white pillowcase. She had an IV tube running from her arm. Soong knew that she probably wasn’t eating, and she was overcome by one feeling: rage. She stood up and walked to the other side of the bed. Won Ju was staring vacantly at the wall. “Who?” Soong asked.

  Soong was surprised that her daughter responded immediately. Still keeping her eyes focused on an empty portion of the white wall, she said, “Andy Martinez. He works with me at the California. I don’t know how I am going to go back to work. I have to go pretty soon, though, or they will fire me.”

  “I will call the police.”

  Won Ju’s eyes rolled up at Soong. “Please, don’t. Please, don’t. Just take me home, please.”

  “I will kill him.”

  Won Ju didn’t say anything. She closed her eyes. Then she said, “If you call the police, he will kill us. He said so. He knows some important people.”

  She was like a child. Soong was shaking. She fought with herself to maintain control. She wanted to rip the entire world apart, even her curled-up daughter. She closed her eyes. Then she realized that she’d been holding her breath since she last spoke. She let out a powerful breath. “You and your brother will go back to California. I will take care of things here, and meet you there.”

  Won Ju’s eyes remained closed. “Why can’t we go and live someplace nice. I want to live someplace nice. Like maybe Hawaii.”

  “Wherever you want to go. We will all pack our things, me, you, Chung Yun, your stepfather and Darian. And we will go wherever you want to go.”

  “Hawaii.”

  Soong bit her lip. She remembered something. It wasn’t a thing that could have possibly prevented this, but it suddenly became very important to her. “Now you have to listen to me carefully. Years ago, I gave you something. It was a silver knife. Do you remember? I left it at your stepfather’s house for you.”

  “I remember.”

  “Where is it?”

  “You have to promise me you won’t get mad.”

  “I promise.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I promise.”

  “Chung Yun brought it here with us. Then he sold it. We needed the money…”

  Soong was heading out the door. She pushed it open and saw her son sitting on the floor. She began to kick him as hard as she could. He curled up, yelling, “What did I do?”

  One of her heels broke on his head. She continued to kick violently. She was screaming, “You did this! You did this!”

  The nurses came running, attempting to restrain her. Despite the fact that these nurses were experts in restraining, and twice her size, it took three of them to get her off her son. She heard her daughter screaming from behind the door, “You promised! You promised!”

  The voice was hoarse and a lot softer than Soong’s. It took a couple of seconds for Soong to soak in her daughter’s words. Suddenly, they sent a chill through her. She had promised. She had promised years ago that she would not let this happen to her daughter. She had lied. A feeling of crushing self-hatred filled her. She felt faint, but managed to remain standing, with the help of the nurses. Donny stood up. He glared at his mother. “I didn’t do this, you did. And you know it. You know it.”

  Soong looked at the nurses who held her against the wall. They were obviously disoriented because they couldn’t understand a word the three of them were saying. For all they knew, Soong, Donny, and Won Ju could have been threatening to kill each other. Donny shook his head. Blood was trickling down his forehead. One of the nurses approached him. “I hate you,” he said.

  “Where did you sell it? Where?”

  Donny smiled. “You are mad because I sold some of your jewelry and old trinkets. You greedy bitch. Always money.” He reached into his back pocket. The nurse approaching him paused. He pulled out his wallet. He threw a slip of paper at Soong. Despite the fact that he seemed to throw it as hard as he could, the slip only traveled a foot from his hand, then floated downward like a feather. “Take it. Your daughter is sick in there and all you care about is your stuff. I hate you.”

  Soong broke loose from the nurses, limped toward the slip on her one broken heel, and picked it up. She walked back into her daughter’s room, while the nurses gently tried to restrain her. She picked up her purse, looked at her daughter who was now sitting up and staring at her. Soong walked out. “I’ll be back for you,” she said.

  Donny was holding gauze on his forehead. She shook her head. She wanted to say something, but couldn’t. She began to walk out of the hospital, with the nurses following her. She ignored them and made it to the exit. She marched out into the sun, calling the first taxi she saw. She gave the cab driver the slip of paper. “Right away, ma’am,” he said.

  By the time she’d gotten the silver knife back, and returned to the hospital, Soong had cooled down. She was glad that she only had to pay two hundred dollars for it. It didn’t really surprise her, though. Ho
w could he know that he had sold a priceless Korean antique older than this country for two hundred dollars? It wasn’t a neoclassical painting, nor was it a doubloon from a sunken pirate ship, it was a slightly tarnished, unassuming silver knife, worn down by time.

  After regaining most of her composure, she was also amazed at the need she’d felt to get the knife back. Why? she asked herself. She felt like a child awakened in the middle of the night, looking frantically for that doll or blanket that had been with her all of her life. Soong considered it very pathetic. An old woman feeling the need to have a symbol of security in her hands when security had already been decimated by a rude awakening, a nightmare that did not disappear with the arrival of consciousness. But despite the fact that she knew she was being irrational, she could not help but be comforted by the knife in her purse as she sat in the hospital lobby.

  Cold rage was a funny feeling to her. It seemed like a contradiction. She was sitting there knowing that her mind was not clouded. It was sharp. In fact, she felt as if it were sharper than usual. The heat on the rims of her ears was gone, and she could calculate. What now? She would get her daughter out of this place. Police? No, her daughter would never forgive her. How could she make it up? She never could. But something had to be done; her rage demanded it. Kill him. It was the only option Soong had been thinking about since she’d received the phone call from her daughter. But her energy had to go elsewhere. It had to be spent putting her daughter back together.

  There were at least a hundred and fifty Martinezes in the phone book. More than twenty started with some form of the letter “A.” “A.” “A.” “A.” “A D.” “A E.” “A R.” “Abraham.” “Al.” “Albert.” “Alfred.” “Alex.” “Alma.” “Andrew.” “Ann” “Anthony.” “Arlo…” She looked back up at “Andrew.” There was an address. Soong took out her address book and wrote it down. She closed the book and walked back to the chairs in the lobby. She curled up, hugging her purse. She suddenly felt very tired, and was soon learning that there were two places she could never fall asleep: hospitals and planes. She’d been up for two days, and was sure that her daughter had been awake longer than she had.

  -5-

  The doctors wouldn’t release her. Soong was the only person that Won Ju would talk to, which the doctors decided was insane. Soong moved out of the hospital and got a room at the California Hotel and Casino. And though she wasn’t a big drinker, she found herself at the bar every evening, sipping a scotch on the rocks, her husband’s drink, peering at the thick-necked bartender whom Soong found intolerably loud, obnoxious, and unrepentant.

  She committed his schedule to memory. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 11 PM to 5 AM. She wondered whether this is what her husband had done as an American military intelligence officer in Korea. Spy. Spy with detachment, caution, and thoroughness. She still hadn’t called her husband since she’d been back in the States; in fact she talked to no one except Won Ju. She didn’t even talk to her son, whom she also saw at the hospital every day. She was proud of him. He loved his sister. But she didn’t know what to say to him. He hated her, but right now, she could not be concerned with that. She could not be concerned with any of her children except the first now. Soong realized then that she had only so much room in her heart, as if it could only concentrate on one thing at a time. How can one actively love more than one person at a time? She did not feel that it was possible.

  At that moment, she was loving her daughter, and watching very closely the man that might have destroyed her. Immediately, she knew why he’d won his daughter’s confidence. He was friendly, outgoing, in fact, charming. He genuinely cared about those around him. It took Soong a half an hour of surveillance to discover his true talent: he was an actor. He was one of the millions walking the world with the talent, but not the luck. Besides, he was not handsome enough. He was dark, thick, and brutish. To Soong, he was disgusting. He lacked class. He looked to her like one of the lazy Mexican field hands that worked on her husband’s grape farm, disguised in a coatless tuxedo. She was aware of her racism, but it didn’t shame her. It was funny to her that she had to come and live in the United States to become a racist. Looking at the man who had nearly killed her daughter, Soong decided that all of Mexico could be wiped out in nuclear holocaust, and she would not care one bit.

  She never spoke to him, except to order her drink. He’d tried to start up a conversation a couple of times, but she just looked at him blankly, communicating to him that she spoke no English. On this night, like every other night, Soong finished her drink, thought about it, reached for her wallet instead of her knife, and looked at him one last time before walking through the dullards that populated the casino who were hoping for luck, trying to force luck, which to Soong was as pointless as trying to force gravity to allow you to fly. She looked at him for the last time that night and smiled. She looked around the casino, listening to the promises made by the sirens and the sound of coins falling on stainless steel. Does he know how close to death he is? Does he know, as the Americans love to say, that his luck is about to run out?

  Andy Martinez’ luck ran out the next day, the moment Soong found out that Won Ju was pregnant, and that she’d already decided to have an abortion. It amazed Soong that the same doctors who were proclaiming her daughter insane consented to the abortion immediately. When Won Ju told her, still curled up in the fetal position, Soong sat in the chair, shocked. Was anybody more unlucky than her daughter? A grandchild. Or as Won Ju called it, “An abomination.”

  She saw hate for the first time in her daughter. It made Soong glad. She knew that her daughter would find strength enough in her hatred to leave the hospital. But the child had to go. Soong understood it. She understood that in order for her daughter to live, the child must die. An abomination. Soong herself was an abomination. She was an unwanted child of rape. Perhaps that was why the mother she’d never known died. In a situation like this, one often had to go. If Won Ju had decided to choose as Soong’s own mother might have done, Soong would’ve begged her daughter to reconsider. Yes, the child had to go. There would be other grandchildren. Soong and Won Ju would feed these future grandchildren with love as great as the rage they felt now. They would make up for it. But this one had to go. Soong looked at her daughter. They were thinking the same thing. Without saying goodbye, Soong walked away knowing that one would not be enough. Two had to pay the price for this. Because, though Soong was sure it would sound irrational to others, it made perfect sense to her. The one who created her grandchild also destroyed it. The destruction came before the conception. Time, for Soong at that moment, became a very complex, but very clear thing. Why not destruction before birth? The lack of the linear made perfect sense to her.

  She had been sitting on the porch for hours. After the hospital visit, after the unceremonious death of her first grandchild, after she’d watched her daughter sit up and eat solid food for the first time since she’d been in Las Vegas, after she’d gone back to her hotel room and stared at the address of the near, undearly departed, after she’d showered and dressed as she would on any day, after she’d gone to the bar marching past the slot machines that were in soldier formation and watched Andy Martinez enjoy his final day of work, after she took a taxi to the latest address scribbled in her address book, she’d been sitting on the second step of the porch of the small, unassuming white house, staring at the neatly cut, dying light-brown grass on the tiny lawn divided in perfect halves by a flat, cement walkway, waiting for that time of day when it was not quite day, but not quite night either, when she knew Andy Martinez would walk up, shoes clicking on the hard, gray path, past the dead grass, the shoes clicking like a crisp heartbeat, stopping when they reached her. She imagined it without passion, glee, or fear. In fact, to her, it was not imagination, really, it was the clairvoyance she’d felt when she realized that time was not only linear, that it did have more than one dimension. This was going to happen as if it had happened already.

  At five-thirty
five, the grass had no residue. It was the first thing Soong noticed as Andy pulled up to the curb in front of his house. It was odd to her, the lack of morning dew. It was like the beer bottles she’d noticed in the casino. They didn’t sweat. The entire city seemed to lack condensation. She, herself, was not sweating one bit.

  The second thing she’d noticed was the color of the sky. The sun was not visible, but present. The blue-black of night was being bleached by the approach of the star. Soong saw purple. It was a brilliant, cloudless, windless, starless purple that was all around her. These are the times when things happen, she thought. Sometimes you see it, and sometimes you don’t, but these are the times, the times of transition, the times when two giant forces such as day and night, heat and cold grate together, when things happen below.

  Andy approached her frowning and without apprehension. “Who the hell are you? Oh, you’re a guest at the hotel? But what the hell are you doing here?” He was obviously both irritated and shocked, though he tried to hide it with shoddy acting.

  Soong stood up and gave him her most radiant smile. One hand was in her coat pocket while the other waved him in closer, like she wanted to whisper a secret into his ear. Andy shrugged, leaned over, and moved in closer. He wasn’t that tall, but he was a lot taller than her. He casually moved the left side of his head to her mouth. His neck bulged like ripe fruit.

  Soong was a little surprised by the fragility of human flesh. She’d cut open rotten oranges that had given more resistance to the blade.

  -6-

  In high school, in English, Donny had to read The Great Gatsby. It was not as difficult for him as it was with other books in English. He couldn’t even get through one page of Shakespeare. But he finished The Great Gatsby. It was the first book he read in English in its entirety.