Shelter (19 page)

“Well, I guess you can put it up for sale and see what happens.” He inhales slowly, bracing himself for what he has to offer next. “You and Dad are obviously welcome to stay with us as long as you need to.”

Mae doesn't acknowledge his invitation. The importance of it seems to sail right over her head. “He wants you to call a realtor for him. Get the house listed as soon as you can. He said he doesn't care how much he loses.”

It's a terrible idea—the kind so reckless, it can only be the product of someone who knows how to spend other people's money, but has never earned her own. “Dad didn't really agree to this, did he?”

“Ask him if you don't believe me. Also, we want to move to the beach house for the rest of the summer.”

“The two of you—together?”

“No. All of us. There's more space there. And he said to invite your father-in-law this weekend, to thank him for being so helpful lately.”

The ground beneath him feels like quicksand, sinking each time Mae opens her mouth. There are too many things he doesn't understand, too many scenarios he can't begin to imagine. When did the word “we” suddenly reenter her vocabulary? And when did his parents even have this conversation? It would take weeks, maybe even months for him and Gillian to make these kinds of decisions.

“I don't know,” he says, referring to nothing in particular and everything at once.

“It'd be good for us.”

“But I thought you didn't like the Cape.”

“I like it enough.”

This is news to Kyung. His father bought the house in Orleans years ago. He seemed to enjoy telling people that he owned a second home, but after Mae finished updating every square inch with her decorator, she quickly lost interest. It was too far away, she said. Too isolated from everything. At best, she and Jin spent only a few days a year there, sometimes skipping years altogether.

“The Cape is hours from here.” He struggles to think of another reason not to go. “And my work—I have to go back soon. Maybe Dad does too.”

“It's summer. You don't have to be on campus every day. You can drive back once or twice a week if you need to. We have six bedrooms at the beach house. Everyone can have their own.”

Kyung mentally assigns the rooms. One for him and Gillian. Another for Mae, Jin, Ethan, and Connie. There's still space for one more. “What about Marina?”

“What about her?”

“Would she come with us?”

“No, of course not,” she snaps. “She'll just stay at your house while we're gone. Then she can sit around all day and no one has to see her do it.”

“But how's she supposed to eat? Or get to her doctor's appointments?”

“Let her figure it out. Maybe she'll finally realize she's not welcome and just leave.”

The hostility in Mae's voice is impossible to miss, but Kyung doesn't understand its source. What was Mae doing during her first few days back from the hospital, if not staring at the walls? Where's her sense of empathy for this girl who suffered as much as she did? Although he'd never dare say this out loud, he thinks his parents are partly to blame for what happened to Marina. None of this would have happened to her if she didn't clean their house.

“Listen, I don't like having her around any more than you do, but what you're suggesting—it's not right. Marina needs some time to get over this, so if that means we let her sit around for a while and—”

“No!” Mae stabs her finger at the steering wheel, thrusting it with such force that she accidentally honks the horn. “You have to get up. You have to keep going. If you just think about it and think about it, it won't ever go away. You have to have a plan.”

The “it” she's referring to requires no explanation. It's the thing they haven't been able to talk about, the absence and the everything all at once. For the first time, Kyung sees how much pain she's holding on to, the way it affects everything she's doing, whether he understands it or not. He reaches out and gently lowers her finger, pressing it against the steering wheel until she grips it safely again.

“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?”

“But I make myself useful, Mr. Kyung. I help you and Miss Gillian.”

He's always found Marina's accent charming, but now her sweet trill and broken, insistent English are starting to grate his nerves. He scans the floor, which is covered with pots and pans, a bucket of water and sponges, and rolls of paper towels. He takes the dust broom away and leads her to the table. When he turns around, Marina is standing perfectly straight, staring at his thumb resting over her wrist. He quickly releases it and pulls out a chair, offering her a chance to sit. Marina remains where she is.

“I clean more quiet,” she says. “You don't notice me anymore.”

“It's nice that you want to help—it really is—but you don't have to. You're a
guest.
Do you understand that?”

Marina stares at the floor, nodding as if she does, but clearly, it makes her uncomfortable. He wonders if the idea of being in someone else's home and not having a job to do is simply too strange for her to comprehend. When she looks up at him again, her huge brown eyes are filled with tears.

“What's the matter? What did I say?”

The tears stream down her cheeks as she shakes her head. “I cannot go home again, Mr. Kyung. I cannot see my family, not like this.”

“Who said anything about you going home?” He asks even though he already knows the answer. He just wants to hear it from her. He pulls out the chair a few inches more. “Come sit,” he says, not offering so much as ordering.

Marina does as she's told and knits her fingers together on the table. Up close, her hands don't look like they belong to a twenty-four-year-old girl. The nails have been bitten down to the quick, and her skin is dry and cracked, aged by a lifetime of work. On her right pinky, just below the knuckle, there's a tattoo of a faded black cross, which he's never noticed before. The proportions are uneven; the placement, slightly crooked. It looks like she did it herself. He wonders how long it took to carve the lines into her flesh until they could never go away.

“When did you get that?” he asks.

She looks at the tattoo as if she'd forgotten it was there. “I was teenager. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. Why?”

“It's a cross?”

“Yes?”

“A crucifix?”

“Yes.”

“But—you're from Bosnia. I thought Bosnians were Muslim.” Instantly, he can tell by the look on her face that they're not. “Sorry. I don't know a lot about that part of the world.”

“Orthodox Christian,” she says quietly. And then, in a noticeably sharper tone, she adds: “Not Muslim.”

The tears on her face have dried, but she still seems upset, and Kyung recognizes the same distant expression he sees in his mother, as if her body is here but her mind is somewhere else.

“Does it help you?” he asks. “To believe in something?”

“You mean God?”

He nods.

She reaches for the saltshaker, moving it from one side of the pepper mill to the other and then back again. “The men in my country—they did bad things to people because they believe in something. The Muslims too. They all think God give them the right.”

He was hoping she'd just say yes, hoping for her sake that she still had faith, if nothing else. But it's obvious that Marina is no more of a believer than he is. She's completely on her own.

“So why do you think we're going to send you home?”

“I don't know.”

“I'm just trying to help.”

Marina circles the room with her eyes, trying not to look at him. Then she takes a napkin from the stack on the table and blows her nose.

“It was my mother, wasn't it? She said we didn't want you here anymore?”

“Mrs. Cho,” she says slowly, “she tell me you all go to the Cape on Friday and I leave here before you return. She offer me ticket home, and money, but I cannot see my family like this, Mr. Kyung. My father…” Her eyes well up again and spill over, but she doesn't look sad so much as terrified.

“What about him?”

“He tell me not to come here. He think something bad happen. My father is—coward, afraid of everything since the war. He always talk about girls who go to America, to Europe, how men trick them into being prostitute. But I said no, I go to work, to study. Maybe I come back as lawyer or doctor one day, but he warn me over and over. Something bad happen if I leave.” She blows her nose again, crumpling the wet napkin in her fist. “I have sisters, Mr. Kyung. Four sisters, all younger than me. If I come home like this, my father will never let them leave, not even to study. He will say he was right.”