Shelter(30)

Kyung feels genuinely sorry for Marina, but she’s a stranger to him, a girl who cleans his parents’ house twice a week. The list of people who need him is long enough already, and he hardly knows what to do about the names that are already there. Marina’s immediate problem—the fact that she has no one to care for her—seems like the easiest to solve. If she doesn’t want to go back to her family in Bosnia, then why not let Jin hire a nurse to help her? Or put her up in one of those assisted-living facilities downtown? To suggest these things out loud would probably seem cruel, and of course, he has no money of his own to make this problem go away. If he did, he’s certain that none of them would ever see Marina again.

“Well?”

Kyung leans forward and stretches his upper half over the countertop, resting his cheek on the cold Formica. He’s exhausted—he wants to sleep. He wants his parents back in their house and Marina back in hers. He wants to rewind all of their lives to the point just before everything started to go wrong.

“Are you thinking or taking a nap over there?”

“Okay,” he says. “She can stay with us. Are we done now?”

Although his eyes are closed, he doesn’t have to see her reaction to realize he made a mistake. Suggesting they should be done already will only prolong the conversation.

“I’m going to ask you something, and I need you to be completely honest with me when you answer.”

He opens his eyes, trying not to glare at Gillian, who doesn’t seem to understand when enough is enough. She won the argument; she got what she wanted—now what?

“Will Ethan be safe here?”

“How should I know? You’re the one who wants to invite a stranger to come live with us.”

“No, it’s not Marina I’m worried about. It’s your mother. You said in the hospital that Jin never hit you when you were little, so I’ll take your word for it, but you never said anything about Mae.”

“What about her?”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m asking.”

Kyung switches cheeks. “Ethan will be fine.”

“But that’s not an answer. I need you to say it one way or the other. She either hit you or she didn’t.”

He’s in no condition to explain that his childhood wasn’t simple like this, with the fault lines so straight or clearly drawn. Mae was a teenager when she married Jin and barely in her twenties when they moved to the States. She had no friends, no job, no control over anything in her life except for Kyung. If Gillian took the time to think about it, she’d know the answer to her question already. His father hit Mae. Mae hit him. That was the order of succession in their family. He just can’t bring himself to say so out loud.

“You’re not talking anymore. Does that mean what I think it means?”

“My mother’s not going to do anything to Ethan.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“I just am.”

Gillian raises her empty palms to him as if to say, That’s all?

He doesn’t know how to convince her without steering the conversation to a bad place, but he owes her this much. She has the right to feel that Ethan is safe in their own home. “It stopped a long time ago, okay? I’m talking decades now.”

“Yes, but why did it stop?”

“I was a kid, Gillian. I didn’t bother to ask. What matters is that my mother had a miserable life back then. I understand why she took her frustrations out on me, but it didn’t happen often, and you know how small she is—it’s not like she could ever really hurt me.”

Gillian doesn’t look like she believes him. He hardly believes himself. Half of him still feels sorry for Mae. The other half only feels rage—not because she hit him, but because she stayed. Every time Jin beat her into a corner because of a lukewarm dinner or an innocent comment, Kyung wondered why she wasn’t brave enough to run away, to take him with her and simply get out. She settled for a life of meaningless terror, dragging him alongside her when she should have wanted more for them both.

“My mother isn’t that person anymore. You’ve seen her with Ethan, my father too. They’re careful with him, happy with him in a way they weren’t with me. I know you know this.”

“But the sleepover invites, and all the offers to babysit—you always said no. It was like you were worried about them being alone with him.”

“It wasn’t like that. It was more about sending them a message … about punishing them.” Kyung pauses, aware that he’s a very small man, using his child to communicate all of the things he never could.

Gillian leans down on the countertop, stretching her arms out in front of her. She seems more relaxed now. Sad, but relaxed. From her posture, the way her elbow gently touches his, he knows the argument is almost over.

“You’ve been a good son,” she says. “You figured out how to keep them in your life, even though you really didn’t have to. It’s not like you owed them anything.”

“They’re my parents, Gillian. What was I supposed to do?”

“What lots of people do—move to another city, get an unlisted number, avoid them. You had every right to cut them out of your life. Even a therapist would say so.”

“That’s an American idea. Koreans are different.”