Miracle Creek(12)

“What happened next?” Abe said.

“I asked Kitt what happened, if she was okay.”

“And?”

“She looked really upset, like she was about to cry, and she said no, she wasn’t okay, that Elizabeth was really mad at her. Then she said she had done something and she needed to figure out how to fix it before Elizabeth found out, because if she found out…” Matt looked to Elizabeth.

“Yes?”

“She said, ‘If Elizabeth finds out what I did, she’s gonna kill me.’”





PAK YOO





THE JUDGE CALLED FOR RECESS AT NOON. Lunch, which Pak dreaded, knowing that Dr. Cho—not Janine, but her father, who went by “Dr. Cho” even though he was an acupuncturist, not a doctor—would insist on treating them. Forced charity. Not that he wasn’t tempted—they’d eaten nothing but ramen, rice, and kimchi since the hospital bills started arriving—but Dr. Cho had already given them too much: monthly loans for necessities, assumption of Pak’s mortgage, a generous sum in exchange for Mary’s car, power bill payments. Pak had no choice but to accept it all, even Dr. Cho’s latest brainstorm, a fund-raising website in English and Korean. An international proclamation of Pak Yoo as a destitute invalid begging for handouts. No. No more. Pak told Dr. Cho they had other plans and hoped he wouldn’t see them eating in their car.

On their way to the car, he saw a dozen geese waddling around, directly in their path. Pak expected Young or Mary to shoo them away, but they kept walking, rolling Pak closer and closer, like a bowling ball toward the pins. And the geese—they were equally oblivious, or maybe just lazy. It wasn’t until his wheelchair was centimeters from knocking one over and he was about to yell that one honked and the whole gaggle took off for flight. Young and Mary kept walking, paces steady as if nothing had happened, and he wanted to scream at their insensitivity.

Pak closed his eyes and breathed. In, out. He told himself he was being ridiculous—he was actually angry at his wife and daughter for not noticing geese! It would be comical if it weren’t so pathetic, this oversensitivity to geese from his four years alone.

Ghee-ruh-ghee ap-bah. Wild-goose father. What Koreans called a man who remained in Korea to work while his wife and children moved abroad for better education, and flew (or “migrated”) annually to see them. (Last year, when alcoholism and suicide reached alarming levels among Seoul’s 100,000 goose fathers, people started calling men like Pak—men who couldn’t afford any visits, so never flew—penguin fathers, but by then, his identification with geese was fixed, and penguins never bothered him the way geese did.) Pak hadn’t set out to become a goose father; they’d planned to move to America together. But while waiting for a family visa, Pak heard about a host family in Baltimore willing to sponsor a child and one parent to live with them for free, arranging for the child to attend a nearby school, in exchange for the parent working at their grocery store. Pak sent Young and Mary off to Baltimore, promising he’d join them soon.

In the end, it had taken four more years for the family visa. Four years of being a father without a family. Four years of living alone in a closet-studio in a sad, disheveled “villa” full of sad, disheveled goose fathers. Four years of working two jobs, seven days a week, of skimping and saving. All that sacrifice for Mary’s education, for her future, and now, here she was, scarred and unanchored, no college on the horizon, attending murder trials and therapies instead of seminars and parties.

“Mary,” Young was saying in Korean, “you have to eat.” Mary shook her head and looked out the car window, but Young put the bowl of rice on Mary’s lap. “A few bites.”

Mary bit her lip and picked up the chopsticks—tentatively, as if scared to try some exotic food. She picked up one grain of rice and put it just inside her lips. Pak remembered Young showing Mary this way of eating back in Korea. “When I was your age,” Young had said, “your grandmother made me practice eating rice grain by grain. She said, ‘This way, food is always in your mouth, so you are not expected to talk, but without appearing to be a pig. No man wants a wife who eats or talks too much.’” Mary, laughing, had said to Pak, “Ap-bah, did Um-ma eat like that when you were dating?” Pak had said, “Definitely not. Good thing I like pigs,” and they’d all laughed and eaten the rest of the dinner as sloppily and noisily as possible, taking turns making pig grunts. Had that really been so long ago?

Pak looked at his daughter, chewing one grain of rice after another, and his wife, studying their child, worry lines framing her eyes. He picked up kimchi to force himself to eat, but the stink of fermented garlic swirling in the sweltering heat formed a mask over his face, overpowering him. He cranked the window open and stuck his head out. In the sky, the geese were flying away, the majestic symmetry of their V-formation visible in the distance, and he thought how unfair it was, calling men like him “goose fathers.” Real male geese mated for life; real goose families stayed together, foraged, nested, and migrated together.

Suddenly, a vision: a cartoon of male geese in a courtroom, suing Korean newspapers for defamation and demanding retractions of all goose-father references. Pak chuckled, and Young and Mary looked at him with confusion and concern. He thought about explaining, but what could he say? So these geese file a class-action lawsuit … “I thought of something funny,” he said. They didn’t ask what. Mary went back to eating rice, Young back to looking at Mary, and Pak back to looking out the window, watching the wedge of geese fly farther and farther away.