Miracle Creek(58)
She shut her eyes and shook her head hard, hoping to clear these thoughts, but the questions seemed to bounce off her skull into one another, multiplying with each impact and tearing into her brain, leaving her dizzy. A squirrel jumped onto her car hood and peered through the windshield, its head tilted sideways like a child examining fish in a bowl and asking, What in the world are you doing?
She needed answers. She released the brakes, backed away from the tree, and faced the road. If she turned left, she could get back to the courthouse before recess was over, back to her husband’s side. But there would be no answers there. Only more lies, leading to more questions. And now, when Mary and Pak were both away, was the perfect opportunity, the only opportunity, to do what she needed. No more waiting to be fed someone else’s vague, nonsensical answers. No more watching and trusting.
She turned right. She needed to search for the answers. On her own.
* * *
THE STORAGE SHED was on the edge of their property, within spitting distance of the utility pole where the balloons got stuck that day. When Young stepped inside, smells she couldn’t begin to identify assaulted her, pungent, dank, and sour. The rain pelted the aluminum roof in fast micro-beats like snare drumming, and water dripped through cracks onto the rotting floorboards in bass-drum beats. Tools and dead leaves littered the ground, camouflaged by a shroud of dust, rust, and mold, which had congealed into green-black slime in the corners.
She wondered how long she’d have to stand still before spiders started crawling on her. One year of neglect—a drizzly autumn followed by one hurricane, four snowstorms, and a summer of record-shattering humidity levels. That was all it had taken to transform their years in Seoul and Baltimore into this pile of forgotten items in varying states of decay. There was no attic or closet in their shack. If Pak was hiding anything, it had to be here.
She walked to the corner pile of three moving boxes and pulled off the trash bag on top, its former transparency veiled by dried cobwebs. Chalky dust rose like mist before the air’s dampness weighed it down into a free fall, and Young smelled something dank, like earth buried deep getting dug up and hitting air for the first time.
It was in the third box—the bottom one, the least accessible—that she found it. The top two boxes were nearly empty, but the third was full of old philosophy textbooks she’d forgotten she’d kept. If she’d just riffled through, she’d have missed the item, wrapped neatly inside a paper bag and nestled between similarly sized books: the tin case from the grocery store where they stored loose cigarettes from damaged packs, which she’d had the idea to sell for fifty cents apiece. After she informed the welfare customers that food stamps couldn’t buy cigarettes but that she couldn’t prevent their using change from food-stamp purchases to buy singles, sales went way up and she started having to open perfectly fine packs to keep up with demand.
The last time she’d seen this case was during their move here. It had been on top of sweaters waiting to be packed, and she’d opened it to see it full of loose cigarettes. She asked Pak why he was bringing it—hadn’t he said he was quitting?—and he said he didn’t want to throw away perfectly good cigarettes, there must be a hundred in there. “What, you’re saving cigarettes to pass down to our grandkids?” She laughed. He smiled, his eyes not meeting hers, and she told him that actually, it was part of the store inventory, which belonged to the owners. She asked him to put it with the things they needed to return. That was the last time she’d seen the case—in Baltimore, in Pak’s hands, as he took it to deliver to the Kangs. And now here it was, in another state, deliberately hidden from view.
Young took the tin case out of the paper bag and yanked open the lid. Like the last time she saw it, slim rolls of cigarettes neatly lined the box like soldiers, but on top were two packs of Doublemint gum (Pak’s favorite) and a travel-size can of Febreze (“ELIMINATES ODORS”).
Young slapped the lid shut and looked at the moving box. What else was hiding in there?
She picked up the whole box. It was heavy, its bottom grimy with mold, but she gripped tighter, lifted, and turned it upside down. Everything fell out, sending a plume of dust up and dried cobwebs scattering all around. She hurled the empty box at the wall—it felt good, hearing it smack, though not as satisfying as the deep thuds of the heavy books pummeling the ground, one after the other—and scanned the items looking for … what? Receipts for balloons? Matches from 7-Eleven? H-Mart notes? Something. But there was nothing. Just Korean books, all around her, some torn from the impact of the fall, and one trio of books that had somehow fallen together, as if glued, and ended up in a neat stack.
Young stepped over to the three books. Once closer, she could see: the middle book wasn’t lying flat. Something was inside it, making it bulge. She touched the top book with her sandal’s tip—cautiously, as if the books were poisonous snakes that looked dead but might simply be sleeping—and kicked with just enough force to knock it off the tower. She bent down and reached for the second book, now on top. John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, her favorite book in college. Which meant the thing making it bulge must be—yes, opening the book, she could see the familiar paper folded inside—her notes for her master’s thesis comparing Rawls, Kant, and Locke as applied to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. She’d never finished it; she’d stopped at her mother’s insistence (“No husband wants a wife more educated than him; it would humiliate him!”), and she’d forgotten she’d kept it. She flung it to the side and flipped through the bottom book. Nothing.