“Let’s go,” Gertie pleads. “Let’s go now.”
She helps him up and leads him to the kitchen, where he collapses in a chair, too stunned to speak or move. Kyung has never hit anything before — not an object, not a person — and he’s horrified for acting this way, for giving in to the impulse and liking the result. He wishes that Gertie would leave now, but it’s obvious she doesn’t intend to just yet. Although his back is to her, he can tell what she’s doing. Running the faucet, opening the cabinets, cracking ice from a tray into the sink.
She returns with a plastic bag wrapped in a towel. “Here. This might help.”
Two of Kyung’s knuckles are dark red. The one in the middle has already started to swell, rising high above the skin like a knot in a tree. The ice pack stings when she lays it over his hand, but he leaves it there, the pulsing blood fighting the numbing cold.
“Thank you,” he says hoarsely.
He looks up at her, and she does her best to smile, but her face is the color of chalk.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, and suddenly he’s crying again.
“Why? What do you have to be sorry about?”
“For scaring you.”
He’s never cared much for Gertie, but he realizes he should be grateful for her presence now. If not for her, he’d still be sitting on the floor, punching the bed frame until his bones turned to dust.
“Oh, you can’t scare me,” she says unconvincingly. “I was just worried. Now, why don’t we have some tea? That always helps me relax.”
Gertie puts a kettle of water on the stove. She comes back with two cups and saucers and a sampler basket still wrapped in cellophane and Christmas-colored ribbon. She slices through the packaging with her nails and rifles through the contents.
“Calming Chamomile,” she reads aloud. “Revitalizing Ginger…” She lists off the names on every envelope, as if she doesn’t know what else to say. “Maybe we need something stronger. How about Earl Grey?”
He doesn’t like tea, but he nods anyway, wiping his face on his sleeve.
“So that day when I met you and Gillian at your house, when your mother was walking around without any clothes on — that was the day, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” She scratches at a small chip on the edge of her saucer. “I was so booked up with appointments that week. I heard about what happened on the radio, but I didn’t really pay attention, I guess.”
“Why would you? Who wants to think about something like that?”
“I know, but a woman walking around naked in broad daylight … I should have made the connection.”
“It’s better you didn’t.”
The teakettle sings its alarm, and Gertie gets up to retrieve it. When she returns to the table, she opens two envelopes and dunks the bags with her fingertips until the water turns almost black. As he reaches for his cup, she waves him off.
“Not yet.” She digs through her purse and removes a silver flask, shaking it gently to confirm that there’s something left inside.
Gertie didn’t strike him as the type of person who carried alcohol in her bag, but upon closer inspection, it starts to make sense. No one who looks so pulled together ever really is. She empties the flask into their tea, turning it upside down to shake out the last few drops.
“Times like these…,” she says, then looks away, embarrassed. “I actually don’t know what I was going to say there.”
The bourbon and Earl Grey don’t mix well together, but he drinks the acrid concoction anyway. Gertie adds two sugar cubes to her cup, dissolving them slowly with her spoon.
“So … how are they now?” she asks. “Your parents?”
Something about his expression must answer the question for him because she doesn’t bother to wait for a response.
“It was good that your mother came to you that day. That must give you some relief, at least.”
“Why would it?”
“Well, she trusts you. She came to you for help.”
He doubts that Mae trusts anyone. Not him, not his father, not even the people from her church. It was proximity that led her stumbling into his backyard that day, nothing more.
“I’ll give you the listing,” he says. “How soon can you get it on the market?”
Gertie hesitates. “I don’t think I can sell this house, Kyung. I’m sorry.… I really wish I could, but no one’s going to be able to sell it, not for a while.”
“Because of what happened here?”
She nods. “Maybe if you waited a year. People might start to forget, and the market could be in recovery by then,” she adds optimistically. “For now, though, there’s no way. Someone just died here. Your mother was … assaulted here. Even if you slashed the price, I can’t see buyers getting past that kind of history. Not yet, at least. It’d be easier to get rid of this place by burning it down.”
Kyung would like nothing more than to take a match to the drapes and watch the flames engulf them, erecting violent walls of amber where real ones once stood. Everything in the house is so old; every piece of its ancient frame is wood. It wouldn’t take long for a fire to reduce it all to an expensive pile of ashes.
“So my father and I are the same, I guess.”
“I don’t follow.”
“We both own houses that you can’t sell.”
At first, Gertie appears hurt by his comment, ready to object. But she takes a long sip of tea instead.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to criticize. I understand that my family’s situation is — complicated.”
“Well, at least you have each other, right? You’re all in this together.”
“Yes,” he says, having resolved not to cry in front of Gertie again. “We all have each other.”
SIX
Kyung unlocks the door to his office and turns on the lights, bracing himself for the noise and flicker of the fluorescent tubes hanging overhead. One by one, they buzz to life, rendering the walls an unpleasant, tobacco-stained shade of yellow. He assumed things would look different when he returned to work, but his books and papers are exactly where he left them, scattered in their usual disarray across the length of his desk. The only thing that’s changed in his absence is the smell — a musty shut-in odor that reminds him of a warm attic. Kyung opens his window, which overlooks a tree-lined quad of office buildings. The campus below is barely awake. A handful of maintenance men and early-bird secretaries travel the sidewalks, their pace leisurely, not yet hurried by the start of the day.
He deposits his mail on the ledge and turns on his computer, knocking over a row of picture frames like dominoes. The cluttered display of family photographs is Gillian’s doing. When he was first hired at the university, she decided they should decorate his office, insisting in a way that she’d rarely done before. She said she wanted him to feel at home there, and he understood the source of her excitement even though he didn’t feel it himself. None of the men in her family were the office type. He wasn’t about to take that from her, so he let her do what she wanted, organizing the bookshelves and hanging his diplomas with care.
The computer takes longer than usual to boot up, but Kyung doesn’t mind the wait. He’s afraid to see how much got away from him during his absence, the missed meetings and deadlines and requests for recommendation letters from anxious students. Classes ended in mid-May. He’d intended to take a week or two off after commencement, but over a month has passed, and he forgot to set up an auto-reply while he was gone. Now every e-mail will demand an apology or explanation, depending on how serious the delay. Despite not looking forward to this, Kyung dreads the thought of something else even more. He sits down at his desk and rolls his chair toward the aquarium in the corner. The lights in the tank are off, the water black and still. He stares inside, searching for the school of zebra fish. The fish are purely decorative — they have nothing to do with his research — but they’re living, breathing creatures nonetheless. At least they used to be. He expects to find them floating at the top, cocooned in several weeks’ worth of mold, but all twelve are alive and well, zipping from left to right and back again. He gives them a liberal pinch of food, surprised that they managed to survive for so long without it.