Drifting House (3 page)

“You’re angry.” Her entire body was prepared. She leaned toward him. “You’ll feel better, after.”

Instead he punched the wall, wincing even as he did it.

“Mr. Rhee!”

He wiggled the hand in the air, still shaking. “Don’t ever, ever speak like that again, please.”

“You were so angry.” She stood, slowly. “I only asked for what I deserved.”

After they iced and wrapped the modest spectacle of his swelling hand, and he washed off what must have been the day’s humiliations, he opened a bottle of rice wine. They sank into the sofa by a stack of jigsaw puzzles and a checkered
baduk
board—hobbies of a solitary person.

The thimble-size
soju
glass clattered as Mr. Rhee set it down.
The paper lampshade above them swung, then rocked to a stop. She did not remove his hand when he laid it on hers.

After Mr. Rhee’s visit, the detective made regular reports to Mrs. Shin. He told her of his own difficulties immigrating eight years ago when he had abruptly decided to leave accountancy and leave Seoul. “I opened a store and before the first year was over, I had a bullet in me.” His left hand became a gun that jabbed at his right shoulder. “And my—boy, he almost dropped out in his first semester at university.” He looked excited, almost wistful, as he recalled those years of hardship, and she thought it must be possible for the past to someday be rendered harmless. It ended happily, he assured her, as it will for you. The detective’s overtures of friendliness surprised her almost as much as the Ping-Pong lessons Mr. Rhee insisted on, and she could only wonder at how unknowable man was. As for her Ping-Pong game, it improved rapidly. Mr. Rhee trained her to use a pimple-surfaced rubber paddle, then a sponge-covered one for topspin, and even monitored her practice hours. They went on a picnic where they were surrounded by geese the size of her daughter; they held hands and rode a creaking roller coaster on the Santa Monica promenade, facing the setting sun while holding hands and laughing, as if they were a young couple with a long, hopeful future ahead of them. Sometimes she woke up under the Ping-Pong table with her hair in the thicket of his pubic hair, though she insisted they still shower separately, like civilized people. Her own attempt at updating Mr. Rhee’s wardrobe was a quiet failure.

Each pleasant, uneventful night passed much like the next. It
was as if another her was married again with an actual future ahead, as if there was the possibility of love. Except that none of it felt real until she stepped outside of the house for a walk and saw the tidy suburban landscape sprawled out in front of her, and heard a nation of people of all colors speaking a language that wasn’t hers.

In November, Detective Pak called.

“I’ve located your daughter,” he said.

She couldn’t speak. She had to remind herself to breathe, one, two, as she imagined her daughter’s sleeping face. The memory was frozen, a photograph that had replaced her actual daughter’s face as unpredictable as the flight pattern of a moth; and though she willed the image to move and become alive for her again, the image dominated and the sleeping face remained slightly puzzled, with eyebrows raised as if the face had never experienced another expression. That was the last time Mrs. Shin had seen her daughter.

After a swallow of coffee, in the same unhurried voice, Detective Pak told her Yuri’s home address in Beverly Hills, three blocks from the school she attended.

She traced the scribbled address with her index finger, not quite believing it to be real. More than four years had passed since she had touched her daughter, four years that had taken away her child, and her husband, from her. Those four years—they were not real to her, either. She began wondering what to wear—the navy skirt suit or the forest green wraparound dress?—already anxious. She had faith in appearances.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re only getting what you deserve.”

She drew back from the phone. “You’re quite right, yes.”

Softer this time, he said, “I also lost my children…It was a terrible choice to have to make, a necessary loss.”

Startled, she waited for him to continue. But he wished her the best, then there was the click of the receiver.

Children dressed in clothes as colorful as marbles spilled out across the yard. Through the aluminum fence built so high she could not touch its top, she watched her daughter’s life: the queue of American children waiting to play (Queuing! Children!), the jungle gym made for larger bodies, these harsh, glottal syllables, the few Asian faces, boys and girls, that belonged to bodies moving with an ease that she had thought belonged only to men.

She had dressed up for her daughter as if for an interview. But despite her navy pin-striped suit and her supple leather shoes and purse, the horizontal lines of the fence now imprinted on her face made her look unhinged. Its hot metal pricked her skin. The crowds thinned as parents picked up their children. She continued looking.

Then there was Yuri. Mrs. Shin held herself; she began rocking back and forth, the pressure of feeling in her heart, her feet, her stomach, so strong her body would explode if she did not contain it. Yuri was clustered with other second grade girls, two formidable fists on the hips of designer jeans that Mrs. Shin recognized by the detailing on the pockets. Her face was still round, pumpkin-shaped like Mrs. Shin’s, and her darkly alert eyes were her father’s, but her hair had lightened to a nutty brown. She was so adult, not the same girl who had promenaded each of her toys for guests. When her friends began a round of hopscotch, Yuri sighed as she joined in, as if surrendering to their nonsense.

Her daughter’s deportment was a reprimand. Yuri had not stopped for time. The girl that Mrs. Shin had expected was changed, anchored by confidence, by friends, by a gaze that took in the playground as if she owned it—her father’s gaze. Somehow she had stopped being the girl who looked for her mother everywhere, and somehow, while some other woman had taken care of her, she had grown. Mrs. Shin’s explanations—the years it took to cobble a life together and hoard the money to return to Yuri—all of it became excuses that might no longer be relevant.

Still, she called out her daughter’s name; Yuri only continued to look periodically from the hopscotch to the parking lot. Only when Mrs. Shin tossed a pebble her way did her daughter look up and look around. She saw her mother.

Yuri had been three when her parents separated; she shyly regarded her mother as if she were a distant relation.

“Yuri,” she said.

“My American name is Grace,” said Yuri. She rocked on her heels, excited and afraid, then Mrs. Shin saw that she was still a child.

“You were Yuri first,” she said, her voice weighted, despite herself, with reproach.

“I know who I am,” Yuri said. “I’m called Grace most of the time.”

Her face was ugly with a stubbornness Mrs. Shin knew as her own, and she felt great pity and love for her daughter; the years ahead would work to undo her girlish certainty.

“Come to your mother,” Mrs. Shin said. “I won’t hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” Yuri looked as if she had not considered this a possibility.

Mrs. Shin had enough of talking. She saw her daughter moving farther and farther from her, so far that soon enough she would be untouchable, moored to this foreign land of perennial drought and swimming pools.

She jogged to the corner of the fence, then turned, her arms out to her daughter, but Yuri ran, ran away—toward the parking lot. Mrs. Shin followed, first trotting in her heels, then running. What lies had they told her daughter?

Yuri rapped on a black sedan’s tinted window with her fists. The door clicked open and Yuri’s terrified face disappeared behind it, but Mrs. Shin caught the door. One acrylic nail ripped off, her wrist bent backward, but the door swung open, and forestalled her exile.

In the rearview mirror, her ex–husband’s gaze stabbed into her. She sank into the leather seat and crossed her legs, ready to negotiate.

His nose flared. “What are you doing? Where did you find her?”

“It’s not my fault,” Yuri said. She recoiled from her mother, demonstrating where her loyalties lay.

Mrs. Shin’s eyes shifted from him to her daughter, her world suddenly unclear. It was too much for her—her husband, her daughter, the car a reliquary of their failings. She reached into her purse, snapped a bamboo fan open, and cooled herself.

“Still living on your family’s money, are you?” she said. “You never could take care of yourself.”

“Why don’t you wait outside, mushroom,” Yuri’s father said. “Go play with your friends. We’ll pick up Mother from the doctor’s soon enough.”

Yuri opened the door and retreated. She sat primly within a
few feet of the car. She leaned over as if practicing for an earthquake drill, her eyes riveted to the spokes of the tires. She seemed too afraid to blink.

“Sheebal.”
He cursed, spraying spit onto the mirror. “Yuri finally gets used to her new mother and here you come with your desires and disturb everything.”

“After four years a mother finds her kidnapped daughter.” Her hands gripped the handle of the door as she watched her daughter outside. “How disturbed is that?”

“Still acting up, acting out.” But there was a lubricant heat to his voice, as if some latch had loosened. “Kidnapped? All we did was move.”

Mrs. Shin’s eyes dragged from Yuri back to the mirror.

“Do you beat her?”

“You know I wouldn’t touch Yuri.”

She twisted the silk fan until the wooden frame snapped in two. She shuddered at herself in the mirror, a woman with eyes aflame. She had come to see her daughter; she had. She had not left Korea to be this other woman again.

“I mean, do you beat
her
?”

He studied Mrs. Shin. “That’s not for you to know.”

“You must help me.” She couldn’t stop herself. “You made me the way I am.”

“No one made you but God.”

“When we first met, you said—”

“We were an earthquake for each other.”

She touched his shoulder. Her palm tingled; he jerked away.

“I was thirty and you gave me—what? Fire, and nothing will ever wake me up again.”

He slumped against the steering wheel. She waited.

“What do you want from me, woman?”

“Hit me. No one can see us.”

“Find yourself a gentle lamb.” His voice had brittled up, was careful again. “Someone quiet you can share your old age with.”

“I’ve tried.” Her nails scraped into her scalp. “Oh, I’m trying.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Like I got used to you.”

His large right hand made a perfect fist before he composed himself.

He finally faced her.

“If you don’t leave now, Yuri will finally learn what kind of mother she has.” His voice was in control, as smooth as a luxury car engine. “She’s only a child—what will that knowledge do to her?”

The clock had mercifully stopped its ticking. Dust motes spun, zigzagged across the cloth-covered sewing machine, the love seat, the militant rows of perfume bottles on the armoire, settled, then lifted. Mrs. Shin stayed hidden under the tweed comforter as she had for the past few hours or days. It was night, it was day; it was America, it was Korea; it was nowhere, and she was no one. She would not be able to manage Mr. Rhee’s sympathetic gaze.

When she roused herself, she stared out at dusty beams of white light, wondering what they were, until she realized, of course, they were coming from streetlights. Sweet rice and spicy cabbage stew smells saturated the room. Mr. Rhee must be making dinner; he must be tidying up the kitchen, thinking of clearing off
a bookshelf for her, maybe hoping for a genteel poke before bed. She pulled her useless clothes off their hangers and carpeted the floor with silk and cashmere. In the mirror, she stared spitefully at her hand-stitched jacket, the garnet brooch adorning her chest. She stripped, cupped her forty-six-year-old breasts. These lumps had nourished a baby but were still ugly, sick breasts, an aging body still betraying her with its monstrous desires. It was better that Yuri had not wanted her.

She removed scissors from her sewing basket and held it to a swatch of her hair. She cut deliberately, evenly, then flung hair at her image. “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you,” she said louder, then even louder until she was screaming.

By the time Mr. Rhee pounded on the door, she had stabbed the cushions of the love seat, swept the perfume bottles to the floor. She took her sewing scissors and ran the edge along the back of her thigh. The pain erased all grief, stripped her of camouflage. A wound so bright it looked pasted on blossomed on her leg. There was no symmetry yet, so she ran the scissors down the other thigh.

“Mrs. Shin!” A distant voice tried to reach her, but she was beyond reaching. There was only the world narrowing to predictable pinpoints of pain. She took off her thin belt and tried it against her back. She was becoming herself again, loving herself, as the door crashed down like a bomb and Mr. Rhee crawled through, his hands blindly pushed out in front of him. But even as he reached for Mrs. Shin, my darling, my love, her wounded body continued its ancient song.

H
IS NAME WAS
Myeongseok Lee at home and Mark Lee at school, he was nine years old, and he knew everything. He knew that in Peru one bush housed more ant species than all of the United Kingdom, and that rain forests above three thousand feet were called cloud forests. That dogs had nose prints the way humans had fingerprints, that a violin contained more than seventy pieces of wood, and that ­ninety-nine percent of what people bought they didn’t use after six months. He knew that his sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Whitney, tried to make him skip another grade because he corrected her grammar mistakes out loud and napped during sharing time, and that his parents were melancholy when they ordered him pizza for dinner instead of making rice, or spoke quietly about their hometown and family that might be dead or alive, they would never know, or about America passing the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2004, but so far had let only ­two hundred of their ­people—only ­two hundred, including their family!—into the country. He knew that Roberto the
bully was ­right—that Mark’s father couldn’t
really
love him because he wasn’t his real father. He knew you were supposed to have friends but he didn’t care. He knew that President Lincoln was so depressed he was afraid of carrying a penknife in case he might kill himself, and that William Taft was the world’s heaviest president ever. Today was May 17, 2009. He knew everything.