Shelter(5)

Behind him, the kitchen door squeaks open and bangs shut.

“Is she all right, Kyung? What’s going on?”

As Gillian approaches, his mother buries herself in his arms and starts to cry, but it’s like no cry he’s ever heard before. She wails, long and low, like a wounded animal that any decent man would have the sense to kill.

*

One of the paramedics asks if Mae speaks English. Kyung insists that she does—she’s fluent, he tells them—but she keeps screaming at all of them in Korean. Twice, she lurches up to a sitting position on the gurney and rips the oxygen mask off her face. When the paramedics try to strap her down, she fights them both, throwing punches as if she’s gone wild. Kyung has never seen his mother act like this before. She’s not the type to resist. He rests his hand on her shoulder, startled by the temperature of her skin, which is burning hot.

The female paramedic covers Mae with a thin, crackly sheet that looks like tinfoil. “Don’t touch her,” she warns. “She has frostbite.”

“But it’s June. And it was warm this morning.”

“But it was raining last night,” she snaps. “Those blisters forming around her ankles? That’s trench foot. She was probably out in the woods since yesterday.”

The woman doesn’t try to hide that she blames Kyung for what happened. He bristles at this, the idea that he’s somehow responsible, or irresponsible.

“My father did this. She told me, right before I called you. She said, ‘Your father hurt me.’”

The woman glances at her partner as he prepares an IV line. When he finishes inserting the needle into Mae’s arm, he knocks on the sliding glass door that separates them from the driver.

“Ten-sixteen,” he says. “Call it in.”

The driver nods and picks up his radio.

Mae tries to say something, but it’s muffled by the seal of her oxygen mask. Kyung leans down beside her ear. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

He’s told this lie so many times in the past, but something about it feels different now. He’s no longer a small child or a sullen teenager, lifting himself up to play a part. He’s a thirty-six-year-old man with a promise to keep. Kyung was a freshman in college when he threatened to kill his father if he ever raised a hand to Mae again. Even though his voice cracked as he said the words out loud, even though he fully expected to become the object of the beating instead of the observer, the threat was surprisingly effective. Jin started going to counseling once a week. He became a regular at prayer group and Bible study. For eighteen years, he lived like a changed man—not a loving or caring man, but the absence of rage was change enough. Still, Kyung couldn’t rule out the possibility that a day like this would come, and now, of course, it has. Why it started again, why it happened with such a different, demented kind of violence—he can’t even begin to understand. His father was always a hitter. Open hand or closed fist. An occasional kick to the ribs or back. But the patches of pubic hair ripped out by their roots—this is something new. He shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the image. He can’t imagine what his mother did to deserve such a beating, but that was always the point. She didn’t deserve any of them.

Mae falls asleep during their last few minutes in the ambulance, despite a stretch of potholed road that jolts Kyung’s spine. As he sees the hospital approaching in the window, he’s tempted to ask the driver to circle the block. That’s what he used to do with Ethan, who had colic as a baby. The car was one of the few places where he could sleep, so Kyung often drove around the neighborhood, over and over again, to soothe Ethan’s frayed nerves and his. It always felt like a shame to wake him at the end of the ride. Despite everything that’s happened, Mae appears peaceful for the first time since he saw her in the field, a peace that ends as soon as the ambulance stops and the paramedics fling open the doors.

Suddenly, people are coming at them like locusts. Everyone is talking over each other—the doctors, the nurses, the paramedics. Mae is screaming again, banging her head against the gurney with such force, a nurse has to hold her down. Kyung assumes he’ll be allowed to go into the exam room with her, but a doctor waves him off.

“Check in over there,” he says.

Kyung watches as they wheel Mae away, struggling against her restraints like a psych patient. He should be with her, he thinks. He feels terrible for being so impatient in the field, barking questions in her ear while she was asking for help.

At the front desk, a dough-faced woman hands him some forms to fill out and asks for Mae’s insurance card.

“Insurance?”

“Yes, does she have any?”

He isn’t sure what bothers him more—the fact that she’s asking now, or the fact that he doesn’t know.

“I think so.”

“Any idea who she’s covered by?”

“No.”

“Fine,” she sighs. “Just do the best you can.”

Kyung fills out the top section of the cover sheet—Mae’s name, address, telephone number, and birth date. He’s not sure about the answers to anything else, so he slides the clipboard across the counter.

The woman scans the form and tries to slide it back. “You missed a bunch.”

“I can’t fill out the rest.”

“You don’t know if your mother has any preexisting conditions?”