He was hoping she’d just say yes, hoping for her sake that she still had faith, if nothing else. But it’s obvious that Marina is no more of a believer than he is. She’s completely on her own.
“So why do you think we’re going to send you home?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
Marina circles the room with her eyes, trying not to look at him. Then she takes a napkin from the stack on the table and blows her nose.
“It was my mother, wasn’t it? She said we didn’t want you here anymore?”
“Mrs. Cho,” she says slowly, “she tell me you all go to the Cape on Friday and I leave here before you return. She offer me ticket home, and money, but I cannot see my family like this, Mr. Kyung. My father…” Her eyes well up again and spill over, but she doesn’t look sad so much as terrified.
“What about him?”
“He tell me not to come here. He think something bad happen. My father is — coward, afraid of everything since the war. He always talk about girls who go to America, to Europe, how men trick them into being prostitute. But I said no, I go to work, to study. Maybe I come back as lawyer or doctor one day, but he warn me over and over. Something bad happen if I leave.” She blows her nose again, crumpling the wet napkin in her fist. “I have sisters, Mr. Kyung. Four sisters, all younger than me. If I come home like this, my father will never let them leave, not even to study. He will say he was right.”
Kyung can’t remember the number of times he’s passed Marina on the couch and wished her gone, blinked somewhere far away. But sitting across from her now, he sees how young she is, how permanent the damage of her life back home and her life here. There’s a point, he thinks, when no amount of psychiatry or pharmacology can help a person lead a normal life. He passed his long ago. There’s no helping her either, but he still feels the need to try, to extend the hand that was never offered to him.
“I won’t let anyone send you away.” Before he has a chance to second-guess himself, he adds: “This is my house, and you can stay here as long as you need to.”
Marina brightens immediately. She doesn’t understand the dynamics of his family or the hell he’ll take to defend this decision, and for the time being, he doesn’t want to think about it either.
“Thank you, Mr. Kyung. I be helpful here, I promise. I make things easy for you and Miss Gillian.”
She gets up from her seat and tiptoes through the maze of cookware, resuming her place beside an empty cabinet. He’s about to tell her no — just leave it — but she’s already kneeling on the floor and leaning into the cabinet, scrubbing the far reaches with a sponge. In this position, the back of Marina’s petite figure resembles a violin. Wide at the shoulders and hips, cinched narrow in the middle. The further she reaches, the higher her nightgown climbs, revealing faded pink underwear with blue and yellow stripes. Nothing about what he sees — the Bugs Bunny shirt, the thick woolen socks, the baggy, stretched-out underwear — should appeal to him, but the longer he stands there, the more turned on he feels. It’s disgusting, he thinks. He’s disgusting. He backs out of the room, his face lit with shame, and walks stiffly up the stairs. For a moment, he considers waking Gillian, but he knows better than that by now, and just the thought of her irritated, exhausted rejection begins to deaden what Marina awoke.
Upstairs, he opens Ethan’s door to check on him and finds the boy asleep next to Jin. The two of them are curled up together on the cot. Ethan’s little bed is empty; the race car — patterned covers are still made up, as if he didn’t spend a minute there before crawling in beside his grandfather. Kyung wonders how many nights they’ve been sleeping like this, and who suggested it first. It’s jarring, such an outward display of tenderness from someone who never seemed the least bit tender. Kyung tiptoes to Ethan’s side of the bed and tries to lift him up. He whines and turns toward Jin, stretching himself out long. The boy is taller now, even taller than when the summer began. It’s hard to believe that anything could grow so fast. Kyung was terrified when Gillian gave birth, watching the doctor raise their tiny baby into the air, so slick and fragile and noisy from his first breath. He didn’t feel any of the joy he expected at the sight of his son, only worry. He worried when Ethan cried and cried for no apparent reason; he worried when he wouldn’t walk like other babies his age and then worried he’d crack his skull open when he did. He worried that Ethan was slow to learn his letters and numbers. He worried that television would make him sullen and rude like the neighborhood kids. Parenthood felt like nothing but a lifetime of worry, which made Kyung worry even more.
He tries to pick him up again, but Jin startles awake, clutching Ethan with one hand and the bedsheets with the other.
“It’s me,” Kyung whispers. “It’s just me.”
Jin adjusts his glasses, which are still perched on his nose. He keeps blinking at Kyung, as if he doesn’t trust that he’s awake. “What are you doing?” he whispers back.
“Nothing. I just came to check on him.” He motions toward Ethan, who’s still asleep, his mouth open and whistling.
Jin adjusts himself, pulling the sheets higher and the boy closer.
“You should let him sleep in his own bed.”
“He’s fine here.” Jin looks down and brushes a sweaty wisp of hair from Ethan’s forehead. “Just let him be.”
His father and son look like they belong together, like they’ve always been this close. But it bothers Kyung to see them this way. It feels like Jin is slowly taking over everything that matters.
“We have a system now, and you’re ruining it. It took us months to train him to sleep alone.”
“He can sleep in his own bed tomorrow. He’ll wake up if you move him now.”
Jin is right, but Kyung doesn’t know how he can stand it. When Ethan was younger and prone to nightmares, he often crawled into the space between him and Gillian, who continued to sleep through the night. But Kyung could never get comfortable. He’d feel his arm tingling under the weight of Ethan’s head, and then a deadness as his blood began to slow. It usually took him hours to drift off again, and even then, he slept lightly, frightened that he’d crush the boy simply by turning the wrong way.
“How’s your mother?” Jin asks.
The question irritates him, not because it’s meant to change the subject, but because his father shouldn’t have to ask.
“Why don’t you”—he lowers his voice again as Ethan stirs in his sleep—“why don’t you try talking to her?”
“I have.”
Kyung is about to tell him to try harder, but he remembers the cruel flick of Mae’s wrist as she let go of his hand during the prayer. It’s not Jin’s fault that she’s mad at him.
“She’s all right, I guess.” No sooner has he said it than Kyung quickly reconsiders. “I mean, not really. Now that she’s done with the house — I’m not sure. I don’t know what she’ll do next.”
“Whatever she wants.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let her do whatever she wants, whatever she needs to do.”
This has never been the dynamic of his parents’ marriage. Everything was always about making Jin happy, or at the very least, not making him unhappy. Sleep, food, silence, absence — whatever he wanted, Mae tried to give it to him. And she always managed to get it wrong. Years ago, she had to throw a dinner party together with less than an hour’s notice. A visiting professor had come to campus for a lecture and Jin invited him and his colleagues to the house afterward. Kyung had never seen his mother run so much or so fast in his entire life, cooking and cleaning and making herself presentable, sometimes all at once. When the guests finally arrived, he still remembers the expression on her face when one of them asked for a glass of white wine. She didn’t have any — only red. The woman didn’t seem to mind, but from then on, his mother looked different to him. Uneasy. It didn’t matter how many compliments she received about the house or the dinner or her hospitality. The wine was the only thing she could think about. The irony of it was, when the guests left and Jin flew into his usual rage, he said he was hitting her because she’d looked so unhappy all night.