by Jimin Han
I pulled the blanket over my head to drown out his words.
The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. I recognized Willa’s voice. “How bad is it?” I said.
“Oh—” she said, and I heard her let out a breath. When she spoke again, she spoke more slowly. “It’s not what you think. She has pneumonia, Yoona. It was a cold that just turned into pneumonia somehow. Her fever was 104, so we took her to the emergency room.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said.
“Don’t come now. Just stay by a phone, and I’ll let you know if it gets any worse. The doctor is supposed to talk to us soon.”
“Are you sure that’s all it was? No fights?” I said.
“I’ve been in every night. Albert’s been busy. I promise you it’s not Dad’s fault this time.”
Hearing her acknowledge it, even though it was reassuring news, made my throat close with grief. “I’m coming anyway,” I said.
“Yoona, by the time you get here, they might have let her go home.”
“Okay.” I sat back down, deflated. Maybe she was right. She hung up, and I held the receiver dumbly in my hands.
There was a clatter of knocks on the door. I opened the door to find Lloyd leaning against the frame on the other side. “I heard the phone. Everything all right?”
“No,” I replied and closed it. He knocked harder. I opened the door again. Lloyd was sitting on the floor, bracing his hand against the doorframe.
“Then it’s your mom, isn’t it? I’ll drive you. It’s four hours, right? We’ll be at your house by ten thirty.”
“Willa says to wait.”
“I’m still your friend. Let me help you.”
“Just go home, Lloyd. Go back to your parents. Go back to Queens.”
“You don’t mean it.”
“Go home. Please.”
“You’re upset. Please, don’t shut me out. You promised Jaesung you wouldn’t do that anymore.”
“How do you know that?”
“He told me. Who do you think talked to him after you wrecked his heart each time?” He looked up at me as if I were the most unreasonable person in the world. “I’ll be waiting in my car downstairs for you, and I’ll drive you to the hospital. It’s the least I can do for you. We’re in this together.”
He said more, and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t lash out at him again. It was all I could do to stand there with my hand gripping the doorknob. Heather must have had an early class, because her door opened, and she walked out and saw us. Lloyd saw her too, and her smile turned into concern. “No need to call the RA,” I said to her, loud enough for a person walking down the hall to turn his head in our direction.
“I’ll be waiting downstairs,” Lloyd said, standing up, his backpack in his hands. I closed the door when he had cleared the threshold. The bus station ticket office opened at seven, so I waited and then called for the next bus going in the direction of Lakeburg.
76
The phone rings. ANSWER IT, Lloyd barks, still looking out the window. The helicopter engines have grown more distant. A constant drone now.
I pick it up and hear Sax’s voice. “Sorry about that, someone tipped off the Scranton news crews. I’ve got Dick Thornburgh’s office willing to talk.”
“Hurry,” I say.
“Who’s this? Where’s Lloyd?”
Lloyd grabs the phone from me and shoves me toward the bed. I GAVE YOU THE GIRL, AND YOU CALL IN MORE POLICE? IS THAT HOW YOU WANT TO PLAY THIS GAME? I’VE GOT THREE MORE IN HERE, REMEMBER? IF YOU THINK YOU CAN— He drops the phone and grabs Heather, his arm around her neck, and shrieks, TELL HIM I’M NOT AFRAID TO ADD HEATHER TO THE LIST.
Heather sputters, pulling at his arm, which he jerks tight and releases, jerks again.
I pick up the phone and offer it to him. “You tell him. You’re the one he’s negotiating with. You’re the one who holds all the cards. Tell him to make the helicopters back off. Lloyd, for Jaesung. Diplomacy. Keep calm.” I nod and continue to hold out the phone.
He releases Heather and shoves her to the floor before grabbing the phone from me. I SWEAR I’M—
That’s when Heather, even with her hands still taped together, springs up and scrambles for the door. Faye backs away, and Lloyd launches toward Heather. I reach for him and find his leg, and then he kicks me, and I land on the floor and try to get to my feet, but my legs don’t cooperate. Did she make it? “What’s happening, what’s going on, Lloyd?” Sax’s tinny voice is the only one I hear, coming from the receiver on the floor beside me.
77
The Greyhound bus stopped at half a dozen places along the way. I took a taxi from the bus station to the hospital and walked into the lobby at two thirty in the afternoon. The receptionist looked up with a smile and asked me who I was visiting, and I couldn’t remember my mother’s name. The white-haired woman at the desk looked at me tenderly. “Are you all right, dear?” she said.
And a voice at my side said, “Soojin Lee,” and I saw that it was Lloyd. I didn’t have the strength to be angry at him. The bus ride had been long, and I’d waited another hour at the station for a taxi to take me to the hospital. I scowled at him and headed for the third floor, as the receptionist directed. He followed.
Willa and my father were sitting by the window in the waiting area, looking out. And I was struck by how devastated my father looked. I’d never seen him at a loss. Even after his episodes in the house, he’d take his seat in his La-Z-Boy chair in front of the television and act like nothing had happened. No apology. As if he were perfectly justified in what he’d done to my mother. But now in the hospital, he looked like a child, and his small stature added to that impression. He loomed large in my mind, but only because of his bellowing voice and his quick hands, which seemed to push and punch and be everywhere at once, attacking my mother. Now, as I neared, he and Willa stood up, and he held out his arm awkwardly, but I didn’t go any closer to him. Willa gave me a weak smile, so I knew she was relieved I had come. I saw her look beyond me to where Lloyd was standing near the entrance to the waiting area. I turned back to my sister and father. “Can I see her?”
“They made us leave because they had put her on a ventilator.” His voice was small.
“They’ll come back out and let us know when we can go back in,” Willa explained. “How’d you get here?”
I sat down at her words. I hoped I wasn’t too late. I looked over at Lloyd, who had taken a seat now as far from us as possible despite the empty chairs in between. “A friend from school,” I explained.
That seemed to be an acceptable answer. My father said he would go to thank him, but I told him it wasn’t necessary. He winced at my words, but I didn’t care. He had no right to pretend to be the gracious father now. Exasperated, I walked over to Lloyd. “Come meet my father.”
“You hate him,” he said.
Willa was talking earnestly with my dad, so I didn’t think they heard, but I saw others closer to us in the waiting room freeze. “What’s the matter with you?” I barked and stomped away from him to sit near my father and sister.
We waited for another half hour before the nurse said we could go in. “Two at a time,” she warned and looked at Lloyd, who had moved to a chair closer to us by now.
I was irritated by him. “He’s not family,” I told her.
My father said Willa and I should go in first. We didn’t disagree. “She’d want to see you two,” he said.
78
Here is where I tell you I told Lloyd things about my family that I didn’t tell you in Korea. He knows about my father’s rages. One night after he returned to Weston, after Tongsu Cho said he didn’t remember you or Lloyd or me, when we despaired, my mother called on the phone. After I hung up, Lloyd asked me what was wrong, and I said I felt as if I was failing her and you. And Lloyd’s reaction that night and now in the hospital was the one I didn’t want you to have. Where you looked at my family with prejudice and disdain. And me too—where you looked at me
that way too, as a coward who had failed to protect my mother. I wanted you to see me always the way you had in Korea, as someone who stood up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves.
79
My mother used to tell me and Willa when we were little girls how my father suffered. “Forgive him,” she said. “He loves you, and he wants the best for you, but it’s too much. This world is too much for us.” Those were the nights the television flashed lights on the walls of the living room, and we had to be quiet, but we had to be in the room too, to keep our father company after his long day at work. Our mother peeled oranges, taking off the thin skin of each section for pure pulp.
80
Nothing prepared me for seeing my mother in the intensive care room full of curtains and machines. She was on a ventilator, and seeing her with her eyes closed and her facial muscles slack, I realized I’d never seen her asleep in my entire life. How could that be?
“She looks like that because she’s not asleep,” the nurse explained as if reading my mind, adjusting buttons and dials on the machines around us.
“Can she hear us?” Willa said.
“They sedate patients before putting in the ventilator,” she answered and then left us. I held my mother’s hand, trying not to stare at the two intravenous lines taped down to the top. The skin around the tape gleamed as if my mother had applied her daily moisturizing cream minutes earlier. Her tender, smooth skin was her particular beauty. An irony that my father had damaged it routinely. I turned away. The doctor came in and said we would have to wait and see now. They’d done all they could.
When we returned to the waiting room to send our father in, Albert was talking with him. Albert recognized me and gave me a hug when I walked over. “I’m sorry,” he said. I’d had a fantasy when I was a child that Albert would marry Willa, and they’d make me their child and move me away from our father’s fits. She and Albert were four years older than I was. Albert was the perfect peacemaker. He’d stood up for me in school once when some kids my age made fun of what I had brought for lunch. With his Clark Kent glasses, Albert had been my idea of a superhero. Willa didn’t consider him dating material, though they were in the same grade and it was obvious he had eyes only for her. I was glad for his sake that she was spending more time with him. Albert was a good friend.
I saw my sister squeeze his hand and drop it in a hurry. Willa took charge. She figured out a schedule where she and Dad would go home for a few hours and return at dinnertime for us. And then I’d go get some rest and sleep at the house and come back for her and our dad in the morning. “You’ll need your sleep if you have to drive back,” she said, and she nodded toward Lloyd, who was still sitting by the door. I regretted my earlier harsh dismissal of him. “What are you going to do with him?” she said.
“He convinced me to come and drove me here. He’s trying to be respectful,” I explained, because I knew Willa was judging him the way I had.
“Good friend,” Albert summed up. His opinion meant a lot to me, and I was glad when he walked over with me. Lloyd stood up and extended his hand to Albert.
“I’ve heard about you,” Lloyd said, which made me blush. Albert’s amused eyes flicked in my direction for a second.
“Thanks for helping out,” Albert returned. Lloyd relaxed. “So I hear you kids have the first shift? Want me to bring you anything from the real world? Real coffee?” He lifted his eyebrows. I told him that would be perfect.
Later, when Willa, my dad, and Albert returned to the hospital, Lloyd and I went to the house. Every hour or so I’d gone in to check on my mother, who remained unconscious. It rattled me to see her that way.
We had enough money to go out for watery soup, crackers, and coffee at a corner café. Lloyd and I split a piece of chocolate cake that was so dry it crumbled into tiny pieces—but it bought us a place to sit and try not to panic about my mother’s condition for a few hours.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in fact in an alternate universe. Somewhere out there, I was someplace else, and my mother wasn’t in the hospital for pneumonia. The waiter, Mike, yelled that it was good to see me again, and I thought how different I was from a few months ago before I’d gone to Korea, before I’d met you and Lloyd. Now my mother was on the line, and dread hit me like a sledgehammer as it had at the clinic.
“He knows you?” Lloyd said. “Jaesung would be surprised.”
“Why?” I said.
“You’re not listening,” Lloyd said and peered at me as if I’d fainted, and I wondered if I’d lost consciousness of this moment. Time was folding in on itself.
“What are you talking about, Lloyd?” I tried to make my voice brisk and authoritative.
He got up, slid over to my side of the booth, and gave me a hug, but I pulled away. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, but he seemed to be talking to himself more than me. “Listen, I think we lost them when we drove here. Maybe that’s the thing to do, keep moving. I hadn’t thought of that. Only way to be safe.” I let him mumble, but I wasn’t listening.
At the house there was an awkward moment concerning where we’d sleep. Even though my father and Willa weren’t home, I couldn’t sleep with Lloyd near me, not even in my room. I didn’t think he’d assume he would, but he followed me to my room and folded back the covers. “I’m exhausted,” he announced. “We need to talk.” He lay down on my bed and put his hands behind his head like a pillow.
Fury curled my hands. I twisted the doorknob. “Get out, Lloyd. Can’t you see I need a break?”
“A break? Do you think those men are taking a break from tracking us? Is this some game to you?”
“It’s my house, Lloyd. My sister and father could walk in at any time.”
“I know you’re mad at me, but let’s get past it. For now, while you’re in this crisis with your mother, I think we should calm down. I won’t abandon you, no matter how hard you push me away. Friends don’t do that to other friends. I know you’re quick to cut ties. Jaesung said you had a problem with that, so I’ll pretend you didn’t say those fucked-up things to me back at Weston. I’ll give you another chance.”
“Stop talking about him.”
“Why? Because you’d rather he were dead?”
“How dare you say that?”
“Something’s different about you,” he said. “It’s like you’re a robot. I don’t think Jaesung would understand.”
“You don’t know what he would understand. Get out,” I said.
Fatigue threatened to knock me over. He was shouting again. “You never believed me. That’s the only way you can talk to me like this. The only way, because you don’t think it’s real. You don’t care about him. You’re cutting him off like you did all those times in Korea. You’re breaking your promise to him.”
“Get out, Lloyd,” I said. It seemed to be the only statement I could make in any form. I repeated it over and over again. I held open the door and stood there.
The air in the room swirled as he bounded up from the bed, stomped to the doorway, stormed through it, and slammed it shut behind him. That was fine. I was used to doors slamming in my house. Without changing my clothes, I crawled into bed and closed my eyes. I felt my shoulders heave and realized I was crying myself to sleep. I gave in to sheer fatigue. The smell of the laundry detergent my mother used, the one I remembered throughout my childhood, lavender and something they called “spring wind” on the label, filled my senses and carried me to sleep.
I woke to the smell of bacon and eggs. Lloyd held a tray in front of him. My first thought was that my mother was in the kitchen. “Should she be cooking?” I said.
“Should who be cooking?” he replied.
“Why are you here?”
He shrugged. “Willa called from the hospital. Your mom is awake,” he said.
It all came back to me. The hospital. I hurried to the bathroom to wash my face and then returned to look for clean clothes to wear.
“You’ve got to eat something,” Lloy
d said from the bedroom door.
“I should go,” I mumbled and dug into my dresser for folded shirts. I had no time to deal with Lloyd. Something in here must be dark and plain, but my high school self seemed to have had a fascination with bright colors in frilly ruffled material. Such silly mall-store clothes in peppy candy colors. I was forced to wear a tank top with daisies and jeans.
“I remember you wore this the day I met you. I like it better than the stuff you wear now,” he said. “College girls think it’s intellectual to wear plain things. You look better in patterns, Yoona.”
I ignored him and went back to poking around for a sweater. I felt his hand on my shoulder and whirled around. “Stop touching me,” I said.
“You have a thread—wait,” he said and plucked something from my shirt, but I didn’t see anything between his thumb and forefinger, and I wondered if he was lying. He followed me to my parents’ room, where I found a sweater in my mother’s closet. It was a rough shawl-necked cardigan with strands of gray- and mustard-colored thread woven through thick maroon wool, one of the few things my mother had brought from Korea when she’d immigrated. I’d thought it ugly, but she wore it late at night over her nightgown. I decided to wear it now over my shirt.
“What’s with all the guns?” Lloyd said. I kept forgetting he was in my house.
I turned to him now and let out a sigh. “What are you talking about?” I said, and I knew I sounded annoyed.
“These,” he said, pointing to parts of a handgun on my father’s dresser.
“He collects them. Goes to garage sales and things like that. He’s obsessed with guns,” I said.
“It’s in pieces,” he said.
“He’s got ones that work someplace,” I said just to shut him up.
“He’s an asshole who glorifies guns,” Lloyd said. “I hate that he hurt your mom, that he did that to you.”
“You can go now. I’m fine.” I was standing at the front door, ready to lock up the house, and he was standing in the middle of the room, judging my family.