Miracle Creek(21)

Late afternoon, two girls walked in, the younger around five and the older Mary’s age. Her mother immediately unlocked the door. “Anisha, Tosha. You both look so pretty today,” she said, and hugged them. “Meet my daughter, Mary.”

Mary. It sounded foreign in her mother’s familiar, lilting tone, like a word she’d never heard before. Unnatural. Wrong. She stood there, silent, as the five-year-old smiled and said, “I like your mommy. She gives me Tootsie Rolls.” Her mother laughed, handed the girl a Tootsie Roll, and kissed her forehead. “So that’s why you come in every day.”

The older girl told her mother, “Guess what? I got an A on my math test!” As her mother said, “Wow! I told you, you can do it,” the girl said to Mary, “Your mom’s been helping me with long division this whole week.”

After they left, her mother said, “Aren’t they sweet girls? I feel so bad for them; their father died last year.”

Mary tried to feel sad for them. She tried to feel proud that this beloved, generous woman was her mother. But all she could think was that these girls would see her, hug her every day, and she would not. “It’s dangerous opening the door like that,” Mary said. “Why have the bulletproof door if you’re just going to open it and let people inside?”

Her mother gazed at her for a long moment. She said, “Meh-hee-yah,” and tried to put her arms around her. Mary stepped back to avoid her touch. “My name is Mary now,” she said.



* * *



THAT WAS THE DAY Mary started calling her “Mom” instead of “Um-ma.” Um-ma was the mother who knitted her soft sweaters, who greeted her every day after school with barley tea and played jacks with her while listening to stories about what happened that day. And those lunches—who at school hadn’t envied Um-ma’s special lunches? The standard lunchbox fare in Korea was rice and kimchi in a stainless-steel container. But Um-ma always put in extras—fluffy bits of fish with the bones plucked out, a fried egg nested perfectly in the rice mound like a snowy volcano erupting yellow yolk, ghim-bop seaweed rolls with daikon radish and carrots, and yoo-boo-bop, sweet sticky rice tucked inside doll-sized pillowcases of fried tofu.

But that Um-ma was gone, replaced by Mom, a woman who left her alone in someone else’s house, who didn’t know about the boys who called her “stupid chink” and the girls who giggled about her in front of her, who didn’t know that her daughter was struggling to know who Mary was and where Meh-hee had gone.

So as she left the store that day, Mary said “Farewell” in Korean—she deliberately chose the formal phrase that implied distance, meant for strangers—then, looking straight into her eyes, said “Mom” instead of “Um-ma.” Seeing the jolt of hurt on her mother’s face—her cheeks blanching and mouth opening, as if to protest, but closing after a second, in resignation—Mary expected to feel better, but she didn’t. The room seemed to tilt. She wanted to cry.

The next day, her mother started managing the store by herself and sleeping there more often than not. Mary had understood, at least intellectually: the drive home was thirty minutes, time better spent on sleep instead, especially since Mary wouldn’t be awake. But that first night, lying in bed, Mary thought how she hadn’t seen or talked to her mother all day for the first time in her life, and she hated her. For being her mother. For bringing her to a place that made her hate her own mother.

That was her summer of silence. The Kangs went on a two-month trip to California to visit their son’s family, leaving Mary alone, with no school, no camp, no friends, no family. Mary tried to relish the freedom, told herself she was living a twelve-year-old girl’s fantasy—never bothered by parents or siblings, left alone all day to do, eat, and watch whatever she wanted. Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d seen much of the Kangs even before the trip—they were quiet and unobtrusive, doing their own activities and never bothering her. So she didn’t see how being on her own would be too different.

There’s something, though, about the sounds that other people make. Not talking, necessarily. Just their sounds of living—creaking upstairs, humming a tune, watching TV, clanging dishes—that blot away your loneliness. You miss them when they’re gone. Their absence—the total silence—becomes palpable.

And so it was with her. Mary went days without seeing another human being. Her mother made sure to come home every night, but not until one a.m., and she was gone before dawn. She never saw her.

She did hear her, though. Her mother always came into her room when she returned home, stepping over Mary’s piles of dirty clothes to pull the blanket up, kiss her good night, and, some nights, just to sit on her bed, combing Mary’s hair with her fingers over and over, the way she used to in Korea. Mary was usually still awake, consumed by images of her mother caught in gunfire stepping out of the bulletproof vault in the middle of the night—a real possibility, the main reason for her mother’s refusal to bring Mary to the store. When she heard her mother tiptoeing in the hallway, a mix of relief and anger coursed through her. She thought it best not to speak, so she pretended to be asleep. Kept her eyes shut and her body still, willing her heartbeat to slow and calm, wanting the moment to continue, wanting to relish the reliving of her mother as Um-ma and savor the old affection.

That was five years ago, before the Kangs returned and her mother started sleeping at the store again, before Mary became fluent in English and the bullies moved on, before her father came to America and moved them to a place where, once again, she felt like a foreigner, where people asked where she was from, and when she said Baltimore, said, “No, I mean, where are you really from?” Before cigarettes and Matt. Before the explosion.