Miracle Creek(77)

There was nothing. No sheets rustling, no snores, no deep breaths of sleep. “Mary?” Young opened the curtain.

Mary wasn’t there. Her sleep mat was rolled up in the corner, same as last night, and her pillow and blanket were missing. Mary hadn’t slept here. But she’d returned last night. Headlights had streamed in the window about midnight, and the front door had rattled open. Had she left again, and Young hadn’t heard?

She ran out. The car was there, but Mary wasn’t inside. She ran to the shed. Empty. But there was nowhere else dry enough to spend the night, no place within walking distance …

An image came to her then. Her daughter, lying flat on her back in a dark metal tube.

She knew exactly where Mary had slept last night.



* * *



YOUNG DIDN’T GO IN at first. She stood at the barn’s edge and opened her mouth to call for Mary, but she smelled something stale and chalky and thought of burned flesh, singed hair. She told herself it couldn’t be—a year had passed since the fire—and walked in, her eyes down to avoid the indicia of fire, but that was impossible. Half the walls were gone, and mud puddles from the storm covered what remained of the floor. A swath of sunlight from a caved-in hole in the roof shone down, spotlighting the chamber like a museum display. Its thick steel frame had survived the fire intact, but its aquamarine paint was blistered and the glass portholes shattered.

Mary had slept here most of last summer. At first, they’d all slept in the shack, but Mary complained nonstop—the too-early lights-out, too-early morning alarm, Pak’s snoring, and so on. When Young pointed out this was temporary, and besides, they’d all slept in one room back in Korea, per tradition, Mary said (in English), “Yeah, back when we were actually a family. Besides, if you want Korean tradition so much, why don’t we just move back? I mean, how is this”—Mary swept her arms across the shack—“better than what we had?”

Young wanted to say she understood how hard it was to have no space of her own, to confess how hard it was for Pak and Young herself to have no privacy to even bicker, let alone other marital necessities. But the way Mary sneered and rolled her eyes—openly, defiantly, as if Young were so unworthy of respect that Mary didn’t even need to pretend to hide her contempt—sent Young into a toxic fury, and she found herself wishing she’d never had Mary and yelling maternal clichés she’d promised herself never to say: that some children had no food or shelter, and did she realize how ungrateful and selfish she was being? (This was the quintessential skill of teenage daughters: making you think and say things you regretted even as you were thinking and saying them.)

The next day, Mary acted the way she always did during their fights: saccharine to Pak, acidic to Young. Young ignored it, but Pak (clueless as ever to filial manipulations) relished the onslaught of Mary’s affection. Young had to marvel at the expert way Mary mentioned—carefully casual, with a diffident, almost apologetic tone—how badly she’d been sleeping, the way she led him to think her proposed solution, sleeping in the chamber, was actually his idea. Mary slept there every night until the explosion.

The night Mary came home from the hospital, she went to sleep in her corner inside their house. But when Young woke up, Mary was gone. She looked for her everywhere except the barn; it didn’t even occur to her that Mary might cross the yellow tape encircling it, that she could stand to go near, much less inside, the metal tube where people were burned alive. But passing by a charred hole in the barn wall, Young glimpsed a flashlight by the chamber. She opened the hatch and found Mary inside, lying on her back. No pillow, no mat, no blanket. Her only child, motionless, eyes closed, arms straight by her side. Young thought of corpses in coffins. Crematorium ovens. She screamed.

They never talked about it afterward. Mary never explained, and Young never asked. Mary returned to her corner where she slept every night, and that was the end of it.

Until now. And here she was again, opening the hatch. The rusted hinges creaked, and pinpoint beams of sunlight pierced in. Mary wasn’t there. But she had been. Her pillow and blanket were inside, and two strands of black hair—long, like Mary’s—crisscrossed the pillow, forming an X. On the blanket sat a brown bag. Last night, Pak had put the bag from the shed by the door, to throw it away today. Had Mary found it when she returned home?

Young crawled in for the bag. Just as she tilted it to look in, she heard a noise. The crunch of gravel, the snapping of dead branches on the ground. Steps. Fast, like someone running toward the barn. A shout. Pak’s voice. “Meh-hee-yah, stop, let me explain.” More steps, a thunk—Mary falling?—then sobs close by, right outside.

Young knew she should get out and see what was happening, but something about the situation—Mary running from Pak, obviously upset, Pak following her—stopped her. Young could see inside the bag now. Tin case. Papers. She was right; Mary had found the cigarettes and Seoul listings. Had Mary confronted him, like she had?

The click-clack of Pak’s wheelchair got closer. Young closed the hatch so she’d be hidden but could see out the slit opening. Maneuvering her body in the darkness, her hands touched Mary’s pillow. It was damp.

The wheelchair noise stopped. “Meh-hee-yah,” Pak said in Korean, his voice closer now, right outside the barn, “I can’t tell you how much I regret it.”

Mary’s voice, shaking, her words in English separated by choked sobs: “I don’t believe … you had anything … to do with it. It doesn’t … make any … sense.”