Yolk(63)

Three: the back of Mom’s perm.

Four: Dad singing.

Five: June looking out the navy-blue window.

This is why I’m here. My sister needs our family. And I am a decoy.

“Get over,” says Mom, patting Dad’s forearm and pointing to the left. “This man has no designs on changing lanes. He’s left his blinker on like a lunatic.”

My mom is the worst back-seat driver. Her road rage becomes truly homicidal when it’s secondhand road rage.

“He forgot he switched it on,” says Dad good-naturedly.

“Impossible. He’d hear it.” She taps my father’s forearm repeatedly. “Okay, now. Get over.”

Dad gets over.

“If this psychopath can pass the driver’s test, you’d think Jayne could pull it together,” says June.

That does the trick. I can sense the tension building in Mom’s knotted shoulders.

The three of us may as well count it down under our breaths: three, two, one…

“Jayne, I bet you could get your license on this trip if you tried,” says Mom.

There it is.

I’d kick my sister if it hadn’t gotten Mom off Dad’s back while he’s driving.

“Dad’s car is for dummies,” says Mom. “It beeps whenever another car’s nearby, and there’s a rearview camera for parking. It practically drives itself. You could do it. It’s so easy. Ji-young, you absolutely cannot let this develop into a phobia.” She says “phobia” in English.

“Fifteen-year-olds can drive, Jayne,” says June.

I search for an ally, but my father’s eyes are impassive in the rearview.

With my screen brightness set low, I check to make sure there are available cars near us on Lyft. I download Uber again just in case. If I need to make a getaway, I can. I go to Patrick’s page and deep-like a post instead of responding to his latest text. I like the way it looks on my phone. That the last text from him was asking whether or not I’d arrived safely. This way I can respond whenever. Plus, I want him to stay worried about me.

I’m bucked by the Volvo’s wheels bumping over the tracks as the gate to our neighborhood opens, and a tightness rushes my chest. The sense memory is almost violent.

When we first arrived from Korea, eighteen hours after we’d left, it had been evening then, too. That first night, in our rental car, a stupidly big SUV, on our way to our new house, we were tired and uneasy. June and I watched silently while our parents fell into childlike helplessness at the car rental place, gesturing, pointing at pictures, broken English clattering conspicuously around them, grinning while muttering gravely to each other in Korean.

I looked out the window as we drove.

I’d never known true night before this; it was so dense and black. The quiet was unsettling, and as we turned off the deserted highway onto gentle pitch-black hills, Dad halted at a stop sign for a long time. I’d thought he’d grasped the full weight of his mistake, but instead he whispered with wonder in his voice, “Do you see that?” He pointed through the windshield and flickered his high beams, and we saw them out there. Their outlines.

“Are those deer?” Mom asked.

We waited for them to pass. “It’s a whole family,” June breathed excitedly. I felt as though the car was running out of air. I couldn’t believe we were expected to make a life here. Out in the wilderness. With literal fucking deer.

The quiet screamed in my head.

When we turned onto our street, our tiny brick house stared back at us with white-shuttered eyes. It looked like a home in a picture book. We thought it was hilarious that it had a real pitched roof, the kind of house we’d only seen in cartoons. It wasn’t until daylight that we realized that our brick house wasn’t brick at all. It was brick veneer. Gift wrapping studded with brick tread that was only a half-inch deep. And our home sweet home was a replica of every third in the sprawling anonymous subdivision erected hastily to accommodate the air force base nearby.

“You haven’t had dinner, have you?” Mom asks, struggling with our luggage. She grabs the suitcases, one in each hand. We know better than to offer help.

“I’m starving,” says June.

“I knew you would be.” Mom climbs the short flight of stairs into the house, sets her shoes aside, and presses the button for the garage door to shut.

I follow them in. The garage opens directly into the kitchen, with a pass-through to the living room and the dining room on the left. I’m unprepared for the smells. I’m viscerally transported by the scent of Mom’s floral perfume overlain with the nuttiness of rice and a metallic whiff of oily fish. I feel my fingernails dig into my palms.

The house is a museum, the bright-white overhead lighting only adding to the ghostly quality. Each stick of furniture is exactly where it’s always been. Chair legs eating into their assigned grooves in the cream-colored carpet, black leather couch settled in the middle, the reclining massage chair in the corner. The enormous lacquered coffee table is covered with a lace tablecloth and a pane of glass sandwiched on top. It’s still there, seemingly petrified. A setting indifferent to its inhabitants, one that will outlive us all.

My eye lands on the kitchen counter, on a rectangular vase that’s filled with easily a hundred pens. I’d bet money that a third have dried out. The vase sits in a shallow wooden tray that also corrals several bottles of vitamins and supplements and a green-lidded square Tupperware container filled with condiment packets. I flip over a blister tub of Smucker’s jelly with a peel-back lid. My parents don’t eat jelly. It expired four years ago. There’s also a stack of Reader’s Digests that have been there since I can remember. I’m tempted to believe they were there when we moved in.