Miracle Creek(57)
It was the same feeling she had now, looking at Pak and telling herself that this man—glaring at Shannon with veins popping in his forehead and sweat dampening his hair into a droopy flop—was the same man who’d brought home balloons bigger than their baby’s head. Except back then, the he’s-a-different-man-than-I-thought realization had been figurative—the welcome discovery of a previously unseen side of her husband—whereas now it was literal: Pak had not, in fact, been what she thought he was, the wellness-center manager and HBOT expert he pretended to be.
As Pak wheeled down from the stand for recess, Young tried to catch his eyes, but he avoided her. He looked almost relieved when Abe stepped in, saying they needed to prepare for his redirect, and wheeled him away without a glance her way.
Redirect. More questions to Pak, more lies explaining away the lies he’d already told. Young felt her stomach churn, acid lurching up her esophagus to the back of her throat. She bent forward, trying to hold down the contents of her stomach, and swallowed hard. She needed to get out of here; she couldn’t breathe.
Young grabbed her purse and told Mary she didn’t feel well. Must be something she ate, she said, and hurried out, trying not to stumble. She knew she should tell Mary where she was going, but she didn’t know herself. She only knew she needed to get away. Right now.
* * *
SHE WAS DRIVING too fast. The road out of Pineburg was an unpaved country road that, on rainy days like today, turned muddy and slippery. But it felt calming to take the hairpin curves at top speed, having to turn the steering wheel with both hands while pumping the brake, the out-of-control exhilaration of her body sliding into the door. If Pak were here, he’d yell at her to slow down, drive like a proper mother, but he was far away and Young was alone. Alone to focus on the feel of the tires crunching the gravel beneath, the rain pattering on the car’s rooftop, the thick trees forming a tunnel high overhead. Her nausea abated and she could breathe again.
When the creek alongside the road was bloated, like today, it reminded her of Pak’s home village outside Busan. She’d said this once, but Pak said not to be ridiculous, it was nothing like his village, and he accused her of being a city person to whom anything remotely rural all looks the same. And it was true that there were vineyards here instead of rice paddies; deer, not goats. But the water covering the rice paddies—that was the exact shade Miracle Creek turned during storms: the light brown of old chocolate gone crumbly. That was the thing about being nowhere like this; there was nothing to orient you to place and time, and you could be transported to the other side of the globe, to a time long past.
It had been in Pak’s village where they’d had their first fight. They’d gone right after their engagement, to pay respects to his parents. Pak was nervous; he was convinced that she, who’d always lived in high-rises with indoor plumbing and central heating, would hate his home. What Pak didn’t understand was that she actually liked his village, the tranquility of escaping the chemical-scented smog and construction noises from every corner of Seoul as it remade itself for the Olympics. Stepping outside the car in the village, she smelled the sweet stench of compost—like kimchi when you first opened the sealed jar after days of fermentation. She scanned the hills, the kids running around the creek beds where their moms were washing clothes on wooden boards, and said, “It’s hard to believe you come from a place like this.” Pak took it as belittling, as confirmation of his long-simmering belief that Young’s family (and, by extension, Young herself) regarded him as “beneath” her, when in fact Young meant it as a compliment, a tribute to his raising himself from squalor to the university. The fight had ended with Pak saying he was going to refuse her father’s offer of a dowry as well as the sales job at her uncle’s electronics company. “I don’t need charity,” he’d said.
Remembering this now, Young gripped the steering wheel. Something ran across the road—a raccoon?—and she veered, sending a tire thumping off the road and the car skidding toward a giant oak. She braked hard and turned, but the car kept sliding, slipping, slowing too slowly. She pulled on the parking brake. The car lurched to a stop, and her head jerked back.
The tree trunk was directly in front of the car, centimeters away from the bumper, and—yes, she knew it was inappropriate, but she couldn’t help it—she guffawed. It must have been the panic and relief, mixing into a bizarre sense of triumph. Invincibility. She breathed to calm herself down, watching the rainwater meander around the tree’s knots and gnarls, and she thought of Pak, her proud husband, fired less than a year after his family left for another country. They’d talked infrequently in those four years of separation—international calls were expensive and their work schedules incompatible—and she herself had avoided bad news in those calls. Was she surprised that he hadn’t wanted to expose his shame over the phone or in an e-mail? Sitting here, away from the immediacy of her shock at his deceit, Young’s anger began to crumble away at the edges, displaced by sympathy. Yes, she could see how easy it would have been to justify keeping silent about something happening literally a world away, something she could have done nothing about. Maybe she could even forgive it.
But beyond all that, there was still the matter of the balloons. The thing was, Pak knew Mylar balloons could short power circuits. Probably every Korean parent did. Household items causing electrical accidents were popular science-fair entries in Korea—a boy had won Mary’s fifth-grade competition with an exhibit featuring Mylar balloons, hair dryers falling in tubs, and worn power cords starting fires—and she’d been surprised that most Americans seemed to have no idea. (Then again, America was low on international science-education rankings.) And Pak had been at a balloon store within hours of the outage. But did that mean he caused it? It made no sense. And what of Pak’s smoking? A few times last summer, she thought she smelled smoking, but it had been so faint, she’d thought it must be from neighbors walking their dogs and smoking nearby. And if he really had lost his job in Korea, how had he managed to save up so much money before coming to America?