Shelter (16 page)

“I'm sorry. You're just so nice. I can't stop thinking about what happened to you. Those men, they were monsters.… We keep hearing about them on TV.”

She's crying too hard to notice Kyung clearing his throat, desperate to send her a signal to stop. The news never referred to his parents by name, but anyone who recognized the house filmed in the background knew what happened to the people who lived inside. Every time Kyung turns on the news or opens the paper, it's the same story, the same onslaught of reminders that he doesn't want his parents to hear or see. How mortified they'd be to realize their shame was so public.

“Our sons are always telling us not to keep so much cash in the house, but we just assumed we were safe here. Shows you what we know.” Carol continues to weep. “Nobody's safe anywhere these days.”

Mort flinches. “Okay, sweetheart. Time to go. We've bothered these folks long enough.” He steers his wife toward the door. “I'm sorry about this,” he says to Mae. “I'm so sorry about everything.”

She smiles at him but says nothing as the Steiners walk down the steps and cut across the lawn toward their house. When they slip out of view, she shuts the door and sighs.

“Are you all right?” Kyung asks.

“I really thought Carol would be happier about that serving piece. It took me such a long time to find it.”

“That's what you're upset about? A fork?”

She looks at him curiously. “I worked really hard to get that for her.”

“But it's just a fork.”

The expression on Mae's face could be the beginning of anything—anger, sadness, frustration. It has no shape yet, no hard edges or creased lines, as if she's still trying to decide what to be.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say it that way. But you don't need to keep pretending like everything's the same as it was before. We all know it's going to be difficult for a while.”

She continues staring at him, almost the same way she stared at Jin in the kitchen. Kyung understands now why his father was the first to blink. It's her eyes—the emptiness of them, like no light will ever break their surface again. As he turns away, Kyung feels the pain before he sees the source of it—Mae's hand, slapping him hard and fast across the cheek. The shock sends him back decades to his childhood home, to a room much like this one, with this miserable woman who was supposed to love him but barely even seemed to like him. He takes a step backward, supporting himself on the banister, waiting for the next hit to come. But Mae just stands there, her expression dissolving into something he doesn't understand.

“What do
you
know?” she shouts. “When have you ever wanted to know anything?”

She picks up the lasagna and walks away, kicking the kitchen door open. As soon as it swings shut, he hears a crash against the wall—not the accidental kind that would send him running to help—but something more intentional, something thrust or thrown with force. He imagines the lasagna pooling on the floor, covered with shards of broken glass, but he doesn't dare take a step in Mae's direction. His hands, he realizes, are balled into fists.

*   *   *

The car is silent during the ride home. Kyung replays the slap over and over again, his blood pressure spiking each time Mae's hand makes contact with his cheek. At first, his impulse is to shout at her, to make her regret what she did, but when he looks at Mae, the anger slowly begins to spiral down his throat. She's sitting in the passenger seat—forehead in her hands, elbows on her knees—gently rocking herself back and forth. She seems wounded, as if she feels more pain than she just inflicted.

“That can't happen again,” he says, his voice quiet but firm.

Not once have they talked about the way she used to treat him. Avoidance was always the price of their détente. But now he worries that he dismissed Gillian's concerns too quickly, and whatever faith or confidence he had in Mae, she's just lost.

“If you ever put a hand on Ethan, if you ever scare him or hurt him in any way, I can't—I won't let you do that.”

She rocks herself harder.

They drive through several lights without speaking, although Kyung keeps thinking that they should. If there was ever a time to have this conversation, to revisit the source of their resentments, now seems right. Now seems like their last best chance. He can't, however, bring himself to start. He knows why she stopped hitting him so many years ago, even though the subject has never been discussed. When he entered his teens, he was big enough to hit back. The thought of this makes his chest tighten, hardening the air in his lungs. He would never. But he allowed her to think so because the threat of violence was the only thing that protected him from harm.

As he turns onto his street, he swerves to avoid a car parked too close to the corner. Mae sits up, startled by the screech of his tires. Dozens of cars are parked along the curb, end to end down the length of the block. Kyung's neighborhood is full of families, young ones not much bigger than his own. Aside from the occasional garage sale or birthday party, crowds like this are rare. He wonders if a neighbor is hosting a barbecue that he and Gillian weren't invited to, but the slower he drives, the more he notices the bumper stickers with the telltale logo, and then there's the familiar red Buick in front of his house.

“No,” Mae says, tapping her window. “No, no.” She grabs her door handle as if she wants to jump out. “I knew they'd do something like this.”

“Why are they all here?”

“I think they came to see me.”

He doesn't need to ask who she means by “they.” It's Sunday, a day they own. When he woke up that morning, he assumed his father would ask for a ride to church, but the hours kept ticking away, and Jin never mentioned it.

“Should I keep going?”

“No,” she sighs. “Just park.”

Kyung pulls in behind the Buick, which has a shiny Jesus fish attached to its bumper. Beside it, there's a sticker that reads
PEACE
, scrawled in childlike cursive letters. He turns to Mae, who's examining herself in the mirror, pinching her cheeks to bring out their color. Her face is smooth but tense—the upper jaw locked tightly against the lower.

“Do you even want to see these people right now?”

“What does it matter? I'll have to see them eventually.”

“But if you're not ready—”

Mae snaps the visor back into place. “Please,” she says quietly. “Please don't make this any worse.”

Reverend Sung is the first to greet them when they open the front door. A kiss on both cheeks for Mae and a stiff handshake for Kyung, followed by something he can't hear above the crowd.

“What did you say?” Kyung asks.

“Your parents couldn't join us at church today,” he repeats. “So we brought church here.”

The reverend makes it sound like he's doing them a favor, and Mae responds with a grateful nod of her head, but Kyung can't stand the sight of so many strangers milling through his house. It feels like they've been invaded.

“Where's my wife?”

The reverend cups his hand to his ear. “What?”

“My wife?”

“In the kitchen, I think.”

He leaves Mae with the reverend and squeezes through the hallway, occasionally throwing his elbows to separate the bodies pressing in around him. He finds Gillian in the dining room, standing in a corner with her arms crossed over her chest. The room is overrun by women, all jabbering away at each other as they organize the meal. The table is covered with huge trays of Korean food, surrounded by neat little containers of paper plates and plastic utensils, bottles of soda, and stacks of napkins embossed with the church's logo. The women take no notice of Gillian as they go about their work, setting up a buffet line that would rival any restaurant's.

Kyung leans down to whisper in her ear. “Why didn't you call me?”

“I did. I've been calling for over an hour.”

Kyung pats down his empty pockets. The last time he saw his phone, his mother was using it. “How long have they been here?”

“Since four, I guess. Did you know this was happening?”

“No, of course not.” He looks around and lowers his voice. “I would have told them not to come.”

“Actually, they've all been very nice. Did you see how much food they brought?”

“Who cares about the food? The point is,
that man
”—he's too frustrated to say the reverend's name out loud—“that man didn't even tell me they were planning this. He should have asked first.”

Gillian just shrugs. She doesn't understand the way these people are—all smiles and politeness one minute, then vicious and judgmental the next. He's known this about them ever since they entered his parents' lives, felt it in their stares and questions and awkward attempts at conversation. They think he's a lesser person because he refuses to believe as they do. And Gillian—lapsed Catholic that she is—she matters even less, but she can't see through their act.

“Where's Ethan?”

“He's with your father in the living room.”

“Doing what?”

“I think he's just playing—”

He leaves her midsentence, sidestepping past the women to rescue Ethan, certain that he's trapped by a gaggle of old ladies who keep asking if he accepts Christ as his savior. Kyung's first memory of them is exactly this. A crowd of pinched faces and perfumed hands, all pestering him about things he didn't understand, words he didn't even know. He's not about to let a stranger click her tongue at Ethan and tell him that hell is for bad children who don't believe.

The living room has been repurposed into a makeshift receiving area, with a long line that extends deep into the hallway. Jin is sitting in an armchair with Ethan on his knee, while Mae is sitting in the chair beside him. The small sofa and love seat are occupied by the very elderly, so the rest have taken to the floor, sitting compactly on their heels or with their legs tucked off to the side. His parents look like a king and queen, surrounded by their court, while a line of visitors slowly moves past to pay their respects. Jin greets them all with the same handshake and hello, but Mae does her best to make conversation, accepting their hugs and kisses with gratitude. Kyung wishes he could hear what people are saying to her and what she's saying so pleasantly in response, but it's too hard to make out anything above the din. Occasionally, someone passes through the line and pats Ethan on the head, but no one seems the least bit interested in him, and he only seems interested in his puzzle.

The reverend wades into the middle of the room and claps his hands in the air. “Attention, please. The ladies tell me they're almost ready, so it's time to give thanks.”

Everyone reaches for the two people sitting nearest them. Ethan looks around; he seems confused by the sight of so many strangers holding hands. Kyung doesn't want him subjected to this, but one step forward, and he sees something that forces him to stop. At first, his parents take each other's hands like everyone else, but as soon as the congregation lowers their heads in prayer, Mae lets go with a violent flick of her wrist. She blames him, he thinks. That's why they've barely spoken ten words to each other since she came home, why she won't let him sleep in the same room with her. Kyung almost feels sorry for his father. Nat and Dell Perry were twice his size and half his age. There was nothing Jin could have done to prevent what happened to her. He assumes Mae will understand this eventually, but he doesn't want to rush her to that conclusion. She needs to get there on her own.

After the prayer, the reverend's wife, Molly, walks into the room and asks everyone to form a line for dinner. The crowd surges toward the buffet as she presents two full plates to Jin and Mae and bows deeply from the waist. Kyung looks for Gillian, who's nowhere to be found. This is why he always has to remind her how to behave around his parents. She says she knows what to do, and can recite the list as proof, but deference doesn't come naturally to her. Molly removes two napkins from the pocket of her skirt and spreads them across Mae's and Jin's laps. Then she bows again and backs away.

Kyung always feels nervous when he runs into Molly, whom he's known since junior high. She went by Mi Young back then, and he remembers her as not terribly pretty or smart, but loud and destructive and loose. Among certain types of boys, this latter quality seemed to make up for most of her failings. By the time they started high school, she'd earned an unfortunate nickname for herself. “The Car Wash.” Whenever fifth period approached, Kyung could overhear boys clad in letterman jackets discuss the impending lunch hour: “So who's going through the Car Wash today?” During their senior year, Molly's parents caught her in bed with a boy and shipped her off to a private Christian college after graduation. Through friends of friends, Kyung heard that she tried to run away on more than one occasion, so it surprised him when she returned home four years later, born-again and perfect wife material for a young reverend. All of this happened so long ago, but Kyung can't help comparing the awkward, trampy-looking girl he remembers with the plain but pretty woman she is now.

“Hello, Kyung.” Molly takes both of his hands in hers. “How are you?”

He wonders if she noticed him staring, although it wouldn't be the first time if she did. Molly, he assumes, is well aware that he admires her, and some part of her secretly enjoys it.

“All right, I guess.”

“I hope you don't mind that I organized this.”

“You?”

“Yes, my husband said it might be too soon, but I thought your wife—I thought she might enjoy a night off from cooking.”

She glances at Jin, who's leaning over his plate, shoveling food into his mouth without coming up for air. Kyung assumed he'd been picking at his meals all week because he wasn't hungry, but he realizes that Jin probably didn't like Gillian's cooking. The blood rushes to his cheeks as he watches his father eat like some kind of wild animal. Slow down, he thinks. People will wonder if he and Gillian have been feeding him at all.