Shelter(47)

“All right,” he says, not quite agreeing with her, but knowing he’ll have to. “All right. Why don’t we practice parking now?”

Mae turns around a light post and overcorrects as she straightens out. “I don’t need to know that.”

“Well … eventually, you’ll have to park somewhere, right?”

“Later,” she says. “I’ll learn that later. This is all I want to do right now.”

She turns up the radio again, as if to drown out the sound of anything else he might say, and Kyung is content to let her, to give her this moment in which the road ahead is all that’s on her mind.

*

The neighbor’s new dog is at it again. MILO is the name freshly painted on his house, but Kyung usually refers to him as “the werewolf” because of his appearance—a hairy mottled brown that reminds him of a German Shepherd, with legs as long as a Great Dane’s. Until recently, the werewolf used to bark at all hours of the night and howl at the moon when it was full. Then Gillian went next door and complained. Kyung doesn’t know what she said or how she said it; all he knows is that it worked, sort of. The werewolf doesn’t bark or howl anymore, but something in between, tortured by the expensive new collar around his neck that shocks him when he tries to do either. The result is a low, painful whimper that sounds neither animal nor human. Usually, Kyung is tired enough to sleep through the noise, but the day’s events have drugged him awake, leaving him staring at the ceiling tiles above his bed. Not only did Jin support Mae’s desire to sell their house and go to the Cape, but Gillian thought it was a good idea too. “A vacation,” she called it, and nothing he said afterwards could dissuade her. Even Connie seemed uncharacteristically open to the offer, going so far as to ask—if it wasn’t any trouble, if it wasn’t too impolite—would there be enough room for his new lady friend to come too?

He turns and looks at Gillian, who’s asleep with a pillow clutched to her chest. She was visibly excited when he mentioned the beach house, cutting him off before he had a chance to tell her they shouldn’t go. Vacations always appealed to her sense of being a grown-up, of being cosmopolitan enough to own a passport and actually use it. Her first trip outside the United States was their honeymoon, a seven-day cruise to Bermuda that he paid for with student loans. They’ve been returning to a different island in the Caribbean every year since, charging one trip after another but never paying any of them off. It was a luxury they allowed themselves despite knowing they shouldn’t. The indulgence of living outside the hole they’d created, if only for a week at a time, somehow made the rest of the year more bearable. Kyung understands why Gillian was so excited about the beach house, even if she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. The Cape is their only chance to pretend like they can afford to get away. Still, the thought of the upcoming weekend, surrounded by their parents in an unfamiliar place, sends all the acid in his stomach straight to his throat.

Kyung sits up and rubs his chest in circles when he hears the noise clearly for the first time. Not the dog outside, but something much closer. What he previously dismissed as the house settling isn’t that at all. It sounds like cans rattling around in a container. The rattling starts, then stops, then starts again, not following any pattern. Had he been more tired or less alert, he might have missed it entirely. Kyung slides out of bed and goes downstairs, pausing every few seconds to confirm that the noise is getting louder. As he inches toward the kitchen, he tries to translate what he hears, to turn it into something ordinary and reasonable instead of frightening. His mother is making herself a cup of tea. Or his father came down for a glass of water. But as he approaches the door, the more he can identify the sound behind it and the less it makes sense. It’s not tin cans after all, but the metal clank of pots and pans, as if a family of raccoons is ransacking the house. The blood pulses in his ears as he opens the door a crack, gently pushing it wider and wider until he sees Marina kneeling on the floor, surrounded by Gillian’s cookware.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh, Mr. Kyung.” Marina stands up, using the countertop for balance. Her dark brown hair hangs in her face, unwashed and unkempt. She’s wearing a nightgown that belongs to Gillian, an ugly oversized T-shirt with a picture of Bugs Bunny on the front.

“I’m sorry I wake you.” Marina hooks a piece of hair over her ear. “I get up early to clean.”

“Clean? Right now?” He rests his hand on a chair to steady himself as he glances at the clock. “But it’s two in the morning.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Why are you doing this, anyway? You don’t have to clean my house.”

Marina goes to the sink and returns with a plastic hand broom and dustpan. Inside the pan are furry clumps of lint and stray pieces of rice, cereal, and hair. “But your cabinets need good clean, see? Once a year, I wash inside of all cabinets for your parents. I do for you too.”

No one has seen Marina leave the sofa since she returned from the hospital. She still has bruises and cuts that haven’t healed, a slight limp in her step when she walks. Kyung wonders if her process is similar to Mae’s. Nothing for days, and then a sudden, uncontrolled burst of housekeeping.

“Marina, you’re a guest here. You don’t have to clean anything. Now, why don’t you go back to sleep?”