Shelter (36 page)

Connie has never spoken to Kyung in so many consecutive sentences before. Each one indicts him more harshly than the sentence that preceded it, but he can tell there's more to come, years' worth of more.

“I saw how Gilly sidled up to you so fast. She probably figured, here's a nice-looking guy, something different to bring home to Dad. He's smart; he'll probably make a decent living when he's done with school. That's good enough. And nothing I said would talk her out of it. She never thought she'd do any better than you, and you know how bad it felt to know what I passed on to her, to both my kids?”

“What are you talking about? What did you pass on?”

“There's a saying for it. It was like”—Connie circles his hands, as if to grab the words he's searching for from the air—“like low expectations or something. Gilly's mom and me, we didn't yell or scream at each other, but we didn't enjoy each other either. Eighteen years Marlene and I were married, and I don't ever remember feeling happy with her, or excited to be around her or hear what she had to say. We were just
there.
And that's exactly where I saw Gilly headed with you.”

Kyung knows what this is all about. Connie's newfound romance suddenly has him talking like a philosopher, like someone who thinks he knows about love. If he weren't so tired, it might almost seem funny, but he doesn't see the humor in it now.

“I'm not trying to criticize,” Connie continues. “I understand a lot more about you because of everything that's happened, and I get why you're like this now. My dad was a son of a bitch too. It's hard to be happy when you don't know what it's supposed to look like. But I'm telling you, things can change. That woman in there”—he points to his bedroom door—“that woman makes me happy. She makes me want to be a different person. Maybe if you tried to convince Gilly that you can change too—”

“I cheated on her,” Kyung says. “I cheated and she caught me. That's why she asked me to leave.”

The position they're both sitting in—backs reclined, legs stretched out—is at odds with the sudden tension in the room. Kyung realizes he made a mistake. He wanted Connie to stop babbling like some love-struck teenager, but he didn't think about the consequences before opening his mouth. Now he's staring at a man twice his size who looks like he's about to beat him senseless. Kyung tips his head back and stares at the ceiling, at a small spiderweb fluttering from the vent. He listens to Connie breathing—in, out, in, out—relieved to hear that he still sounds calm. He's not huffing and puffing like someone getting ready to throw a punch.

“I don't know why she didn't tell you herself. Maybe she was just waiting for the right time or something. Anyway, I'm sorry you had to hear it from me.”

Connie doesn't respond. He just sits there with his hands folded over his stomach. Kyung wishes he'd say something. Despite all appearances, he's always respected his father-in-law, always wished for a scrap of that respect in return. Over the past few weeks, Connie has been the steady one, the one who tried to help everyone else, even though he never heard a word of thanks for his efforts. Kyung feels terrible for disappointing him. Or at the very least, he feels terrible for confirming what Connie always knew.

“Gillian deserves better than me. I think we all understand that. So I'm going to let her get on with her life, and you're going to let me get on with mine.” Kyung slowly tilts his seat back up and begins to stand. “I'm sorry, Connie. I appreciate what you're trying to do, but there's no fixing what happened with Gillian. I made sure of that. Maybe—” He stops, realizing there is no maybe. “You were right about me from the start.”

He takes a step toward the door, then another and another, but as he lifts his hand to reach for Tim's jacket, Connie brings his chair upright.

“Sit down,” he says.

Kyung doesn't move.

“Sit your ass down.”

“You're not my father-in-law anymore. You don't need to be responsible for me.”

“You and my daughter have a kid together, so even though you're a miserable little shit, I'm not going to let you run off and do something you can't take back. My grandson's not going to spend his weekends visiting you in prison. Now sit down.”

“But he needs to pay for what he did, Connie.”

“Sit down and shut the fuck up. You don't want to know what's going to happen if I have to get out of this chair.”

Kyung waits, listening for Vivi or Tim to stumble out of their beds. Connie spared no volume, which was meant to intimidate him, to make him behave. He realizes how different he must have sounded when he told Jin not to hit Mae again. He can almost hear his weak, frightened voice, just trying to spit out the words. Connie spoke with the kind of force that Kyung didn't possess as a teenager, leaving no room for doubt about the consequences of his decision. If he doesn't sit down again, he's going to suffer. Kyung is terrified now, terrified and desperate and filled with an overwhelming desire to make his father feel exactly as he does, if only Connie would let him. He rests his hand on a table, and the idea comes to him quickly, so quickly that he doesn't stop to think before he acts. He picks up a candle and swings, hearing the hard strike of bone against glass. Connie slumps forward in his chair, dropping his arms to the floor.

The room is suddenly quiet. Nothing, no one—not even Kyung—moves. He holds the jar in his outstretched hand, counting the seconds as they pass.
Five, ten …
He's never hit a man before; he thinks he hit him much harder than he meant to. Connie remains folded over his lap, his back rising and falling with each breath.
Fifteen, twenty …
As Kyung returns the candle to the table, a single word begins to beat through his head like a drum.
Run.
The longer he waits, the louder he hears it, but he inches toward Connie's chair instead.

“Are you … are you okay?” he whispers, pushing him upright.

Connie slowly opens his eyes at the sound of Kyung's voice, blinking like someone waking from a heavy sleep.

“What”—he reaches up, wincing as he touches the back of his head—“what happened?”

He stares at Kyung, his expression confused. Dazed, almost. And then there's a flicker—a bright, angry flicker in which Connie appears to remember exactly what happened. “Idiot,” he says hoarsely. “You stupid … stupid…” He shifts in his seat, about to get up, but standing seems to require more strength than he has. He winces again as he leans against the headrest. Then his chin rolls forward and he passes out.

The word continues to beat, even louder and faster than it did before.
Run.
And this time, Kyung has to listen. Every muscle in his body is awake now, vibrating with the horror of what he's done and what he knows he has to do next.

*   *   *

There's a single lamp glowing in the living room window, a single figure sitting on the sofa inside. The front door is unlocked, as if Jin is expecting him. There's no use trying to deny it now. He and his father share the same mind. Jin knew what Kyung would learn at the police station, so he returned to his house in the Heights to spare Ethan, to prevent him from witnessing what Kyung had so many times as a child. His choice to come here is the closest thing to an acknowledgment of his wrongdoing, an invitation to end this where it all began.

Kyung makes no effort to enter the house quietly. He announces himself by throwing his keys on the floor. It's not the element of surprise that he's after. What he wants to incite most is dread. He remembers it so clearly from his childhood—hearing something as innocent as a plate or glass break and then the awful wait, wondering when the screaming would start, wondering how long he'd have to count before it stopped. No wall was thick enough, no door closed tightly enough to keep the words from reaching him.
Ha ji mah! Ah pa.
“Don't! It hurts.” There was no such thing as mercy then. No mercy, no pity, no god, no grace. Only open palms and closed fists and the seed of this moment planting somewhere deep inside him.

Jin remains seated on the sofa when Kyung enters the living room. He doesn't seem alarmed, or even worried to see him. He just sits there with his elbow propped up on a pillow, drinking a bourbon or Scotch. He empties what's left of his glass and refills it, three fingers high, from a bottle on the end table. Kyung walks past the sofa, saying nothing as he pours himself a whiskey from the bar.

“You saw him at the police station?” Jin asks.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Was he sorry?” He clears his throat. “About what he did to us?”

Kyung thinks for a moment as he settles into the armchair across from Jin. The word “sorry” never crossed Nat Perry's lips. “No, he wasn't. Not at all. Are you sorry?”

“Would it matter to you if I was?”

Kyung thinks about this too. “No.”

“Then there's no reason to say that I am.”

They sip their drinks, and it all seems strangely civilized. A father and son, sharing a round of cocktails as the night ticks slowly toward dawn. Kyung was hoping for this, this last window of quiet when he could ask the things he's always wanted to know.

“You got mad at Mom for something when I was ten. Something that happened at a party, I think. You ended up knocking out one of her teeth.” He pauses, trying to erase the image of the bloody, broken tooth, an incisor that he later found under the edge of a rug. “What made you mad enough to do that?”

“Is this really what you want to talk about right now?”

Mae was more traumatized by the loss of her tooth than by any bruise or black eye she'd ever received. She cried about it for days, probably because it was something she couldn't hide under her makeup or clothes. Kyung remembers trying to comfort her when they were alone, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as she sat on the bathroom floor. For his efforts, he limped away with a backhand to the face.

“Yes, this is exactly what I want to talk about.”

“It was the price tag,” Jin says, staring into his drink. “My department, they had a reception for everyone who got tenure that year. All the wives were invited. I didn't want your mother to come—the men and women used to socialize separately in those days—but it would have been strange for her not to be there.” He crosses his legs, frowning as he flicks a stray piece of grass from his shoe. “I told her to buy a new outfit, an expensive one. I even gave her a list of things the other wives would be interested in, so it'd be easier for her to make conversation. But during the reception, I noticed some of the women laughing at her, talking about her behind her back, and then some of the husbands too. It kept getting worse and worse. So there I was, trying to feel proud of what I'd done. I'd finally gotten tenure after six years of people whispering about whether I was good enough, whether my research even mattered. I'd put up with my idiot students trying to correct my English and having colleagues pick me apart in meetings because they knew I wouldn't challenge them. I'd survived all these things, and it was like none of it even mattered that night because of her.”

The thought of people talking down to his father or complaining about his work is completely at odds with Kyung's understanding of him. In Korea, everyone openly admired Jin. Their neighbors and relatives called him “professor” long before he even finished his degree. They treated him like someone to be reckoned with, so to come to a place where the opposite was true—Kyung can imagine the shock of it. He can see why his father always held himself to such impossibly high standards. Jin thought he had to be perfect. And Mae and Kyung and the house, they had to be perfect too. They were his extensions into the world, the things by which he was judged, and to hear it now, Kyung understands that people sometimes weren't kind. It makes sense, then, why the smallest things often mattered to Jin, why a burnt dinner or sullen expression or innocent mistake were all cause for a reaction. It makes sense that when the valve opened even slightly, the pressure building up inside needed a form of release. But why take his anger out on his wife instead of the people who mistreated them? This is where everything seizes up for Kyung, where his mind simply narrows and no amount of empathy can squeeze through to the other side.

“I don't understand what a price tag had to do with anything.”

“Your mother was wearing it—she forgot to cut it off. That's why they were laughing at her.” Jin winces, as if his embarrassment is days old, not decades. “The worst part was, she wasn't comfortable spending money back then, so instead of doing what I told her to do, she went out and bought something on sale. Her dress had been marked down so many times, there were bright orange stickers all over the tag.”

“That's the worst thing you can think of? The stickers?” Kyung clutches the armrests of his chair. “That's the worst part of this story for you?”

“You don't know what it was like back then.”

“But I was there, remember? Maybe not in the same room, but I was there. I heard what you did to her.”

“No.” Jin frowns, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I'm talking about the university, the town. It wasn't always like this, with blacks and Asians and Hispanics everywhere. Not in the '70s, it wasn't. I was the only one on campus for years, and people never let me forget that. They went out of their way to make me feel like nothing.”

Kyung tries to imagine his father as a young man, a newly minted Ph.D. coming to America with a woman he didn't want to marry, a woman whose parents simply outbid the family of the other girl he wanted more. He's willing to accept the possibility that life was as hard as Jin claims, being the only nonwhite person to walk into a classroom or an office building. He has memories of his own to confirm this, faded memories of stares and snickers and nicknames that he didn't want, fights in the school yard that he could never win. He never mentioned these indignities to his parents; he assumed he suffered them alone. Kyung knows that he and his mother were a burden to Jin, especially during those early years when they relied on him for everything. What he doesn't understand is who blinked first—if his father was cruel to Mae because she couldn't help him cope, or if she didn't try to help because he was cruel.