He turns and looks at Gillian, who’s asleep with a pillow clutched to her chest. She was visibly excited when he mentioned the beach house, cutting him off before he had a chance to tell her they shouldn’t go. Vacations always appealed to her sense of being a grown-up, of being cosmopolitan enough to own a passport and actually use it. Her first trip outside the United States was their honeymoon, a seven-day cruise to Bermuda that he paid for with student loans. They’ve been returning to a different island in the Caribbean every year since, charging one trip after another but never paying any of them off. It was a luxury they allowed themselves despite knowing they shouldn’t. The indulgence of living outside the hole they’d created, if only for a week at a time, somehow made the rest of the year more bearable. Kyung understands why Gillian was so excited about the beach house, even if she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. The Cape is their only chance to pretend like they can afford to get away. Still, the thought of the upcoming weekend, surrounded by their parents in an unfamiliar place, sends all the acid in his stomach straight to his throat.
Kyung sits up and rubs his chest in circles when he hears the noise clearly for the first time. Not the dog outside, but something much closer. What he previously dismissed as the house settling isn’t that at all. It sounds like cans rattling around in a container. The rattling starts, then stops, then starts again, not following any pattern. Had he been more tired or less alert, he might have missed it entirely. Kyung slides out of bed and goes downstairs, pausing every few seconds to confirm that the noise is getting louder. As he inches toward the kitchen, he tries to translate what he hears, to turn it into something ordinary and reasonable instead of frightening. His mother is making herself a cup of tea. Or his father came down for a glass of water. But as he approaches the door, the more he can identify the sound behind it and the less it makes sense. It’s not tin cans after all, but the metal clank of pots and pans, as if a family of raccoons is ransacking the house. The blood pulses in his ears as he opens the door a crack, gently pushing it wider and wider until he sees Marina kneeling on the floor, surrounded by Gillian’s cookware.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, Mr. Kyung.” Marina stands up, using the countertop for balance. Her dark brown hair hangs in her face, unwashed and unkempt. She’s wearing a nightgown that belongs to Gillian, an ugly oversized T-shirt with a picture of Bugs Bunny on the front.
“I’m sorry I wake you.” Marina hooks a piece of hair over her ear. “I get up early to clean.”
“Clean? Right now?” He rests his hand on a chair to steady himself as he glances at the clock. “But it’s two in the morning.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Why are you doing this, anyway? You don’t have to clean my house.”
Marina goes to the sink and returns with a plastic hand broom and dustpan. Inside the pan are furry clumps of lint and stray pieces of rice, cereal, and hair. “But your cabinets need good clean, see? Once a year, I wash inside of all cabinets for your parents. I do for you too.”
No one has seen Marina leave the sofa since she returned from the hospital. She still has bruises and cuts that haven’t healed, a slight limp in her step when she walks. Kyung wonders if her process is similar to Mae’s. Nothing for days, and then a sudden, uncontrolled burst of housekeeping.
“Marina, you’re a guest here. You don’t have to clean anything. Now, why don’t you go back to sleep?”
“But I make myself useful, Mr. Kyung. I help you and Miss Gillian.”
He’s always found Marina’s accent charming, but now her sweet trill and broken, insistent English are starting to grate his nerves. He scans the floor, which is covered with pots and pans, a bucket of water and sponges, and rolls of paper towels. He takes the dust broom away and leads her to the table. When he turns around, Marina is standing perfectly straight, staring at his thumb resting over her wrist. He quickly releases it and pulls out a chair, offering her a chance to sit. Marina remains where she is.
“I clean more quiet,” she says. “You don’t notice me anymore.”
“It’s nice that you want to help — it really is — but you don’t have to. You’re a guest. Do you understand that?”
Marina stares at the floor, nodding as if she does, but clearly, it makes her uncomfortable. He wonders if the idea of being in someone else’s home and not having a job to do is simply too strange for her to comprehend. When she looks up at him again, her huge brown eyes are filled with tears.
“What’s the matter? What did I say?”
The tears stream down her cheeks as she shakes her head. “I cannot go home again, Mr. Kyung. I cannot see my family, not like this.”
“Who said anything about you going home?” He asks even though he already knows the answer. He just wants to hear it from her. He pulls out the chair a few inches more. “Come sit,” he says, not offering so much as ordering.
Marina does as she’s told and knits her fingers together on the table. Up close, her hands don’t look like they belong to a twenty-four-year-old girl. The nails have been bitten down to the quick, and her skin is dry and cracked, aged by a lifetime of work. On her right pinky, just below the knuckle, there’s a tattoo of a faded black cross, which he’s never noticed before. The proportions are uneven; the placement, slightly crooked. It looks like she did it herself. He wonders how long it took to carve the lines into her flesh until they could never go away.
“When did you get that?” he asks.
She looks at the tattoo as if she’d forgotten it was there. “I was teenager. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. Why?”
“It’s a cross?”
“Yes?”
“A crucifix?”
“Yes.”
“But — you’re from Bosnia. I thought Bosnians were Muslim.” Instantly, he can tell by the look on her face that they’re not. “Sorry. I don’t know a lot about that part of the world.”
“Orthodox Christian,” she says quietly. And then, in a noticeably sharper tone, she adds: “Not Muslim.”
The tears on her face have dried, but she still seems upset, and Kyung recognizes the same distant expression he sees in his mother, as if her body is here but her mind is somewhere else.
“Does it help you?” he asks. “To believe in something?”
“You mean God?”
He nods.
She reaches for the saltshaker, moving it from one side of the pepper mill to the other and then back again. “The men in my country — they did bad things to people because they believe in something. The Muslims too. They all think God give them the right.”