Drifting House (17 page)

But there were small betrayals: his tidy professorial look gave way to hair like tangled grapevines that Bacchus would have envied; his teeth browned from forgetting to brush.

Thirsty for somewhere else, he began spending his free time watching Korean soap operas and playing a screeching music he called
pansori,
whose words Jenny could not understand. He began telling Jenny they never should have left. On the day of his twentieth wedding anniversary, she caught him lying in a mountain of her mother’s lingerie, his nose in the 34B cup of a bra, his hand folded around the crotch of a lace panty.

“You look so much like your mother,” he said as he gazed at her waifish figure.

As for Jenny, she felt like an intruder in the home she had found in the church. Where had God been that day? she asked herself. What had they done to be so punished? She quit the seminary she had just entered; with her family’s new notoriety, her presence seemed hypocritical. But then her father would politely ask, “How was church? How was school?” She did not want to worry him, so she did not correct his assumptions.

Instead she furiously walked the city in dresses resembling togas, for she did not approve of many modern practices, including painted-on jeans and fitted T–shirts. Still, men ogled her skin that burned at the slightest sun, her straight black hair under a sun hat as wide as an extravagant sombrero. That day a man with the crotch of his jeans to his knees tugged at himself and said, “Babe, you can suck my blood anytime.” She gave him the finger, giving herself a small thrill, and walked faster. Canal Street. Chinatown. Midtown. She stalled at the entrance of a church, but was too afraid to go in. Most days she forgot to eat. She returned home exhausted to her father sitting on the sofa waiting up for her, the way he had done for her mother. Once, when she returned home, he put his bare feet up on the table by his dinner: caramel popcorn straight from the microwavable bag, a plate of spicy radish kimchi, apple juice. She watched him from across the room; they might as well have been as distant as Flatbush and Seoul. He made room for her in front of an evening soap opera, and for the first time since her childhood, she smelled­ the acrid undertone of rice whiskey on him.

“My lovely daughter.”

He made two pigtails with her hair and tickled her cheeks with their bushy ends.

“Appa
,
” she said, “how can I help you?”

She wanted so much to help him.

“How lovely it is to have a daughter,” he said.

As she used his shoulder as her pillow, Jenny wished she could pray and make their lives intact again, but when she closed her eyes, she saw the boy. Then she could not pray. Her father, who had prayed only for her mother’s sake, pretended not to notice. All the while, she felt God leave the orifices of her body. The being who had been her life force now kept her at a distance, so she regressed into the person she had been before His grace: a battered sliver of weed in the chaos of the universe.

A year went by. It passed like a silent movie. It felt like a long sleep.

One day in August her father showed up at breakfast, his ashy color restored to peach. He twirled a round fish cake between his fingers like a cigar.

“Pack a bag,” he told Jenny. “Today’s a special day.”

“Where’s there to go?” she asked.

He said, “Good daughters don’t ask questions to their parents, they listen.”

“Then I’m not a good daughter,” she said. But she was happy to be anywhere with him.

Within an hour in the Daewoo sedan, shouting over ­low-flying airplanes, he told her that they were driving to see her mother.

“You tricked me,” she said, which was not exactly true.

“It was a surprise.” His forehead creased up the way it did when he was annoyed. “Don’t you want to see Omma?”

She sat erect in the passenger seat. She did not want to see her mother, changed as she was.

She said, “Of course I do.”

“You can’t pretend you were born out of a hat,” he said. He reached out to ruffle her hair, then stopped.

The rows of maple trees blurred as the car accelerated. Green highway signs for Trenton flashed below an awning of clouds. She could see it now, the careful planning. In the suitcase, dried squid strips, her mother’s fuzzy sleeping socks and eye mask, the waterfall music on CD she refused to travel without. As if they, mere mortals, could waltz in and rescue her. As if a visit could restore her father’s stolen happiness.

The ward for the criminally insane was as sad as plastic Jesus souvenirs. No matter how festive the more enterprising guards tried to make ­it—doilies of turkeys across the window sash, a headdressed Pocahontas taped to the door from last year’s holiday ­season—it was a prison for the afflicted. Jenny walked closely behind her father, avoiding the corners of the waiting room that were round and soft, like a used bar of soap. Even the front desk officer had a wandering eye that made her look as if she had been around sickness for too long and had become infected.

Her mother, called Helen Nam in English, Heeyoung in Korean, and now case 6479274 in the ward, was sitting ­cross-legged behind the bars like a lady. Her chin dragged in the air as
it lifted, a beautiful, broken motion. Her mother’s eyes wandered shyly to her and looked at ­her—really looked at her. It almost made her mother human to Jenny, but then her mother’s face shifted away as if embarrassed to be seen. That was it. Her mother disappeared, unable to bear herself anymore, and began rattling an invisible tin tray, smacking her lips as if sucking off a bone. She became again the woman with blood on her sinner’s hands.

Behind a window of Plexiglas opposite them, overlooking the small room, a nurse yawned.

Her father’s gray eyes were narrow, fierce with longing. His hands gripped the bars as if he were about to rip them out. No one else was in the room, for him.

“Dangshin…how’s my
gonju
?” he said.

Behind the concrete wall, Heeyoung’s head dropped and revealed her black hair growing in bluish white, then she haughtily lifted her nose in greeting.

“Hi, Omma,” Jenny said, but she choked on the word for
mother
.

“Jenny–
ah
.” Her voice was as light as spring rain. “It’s Jenny, right? It’s been too long, I almost forgot. How long have I been here?”

“A while, Omma.”

Her mother collapsed back into her seat. She rocked precariously on the chair’s edge, her eyes black splinters that absorbed the light around her. She was there but not, Jenny realized, as if ­murder had changed her and made it impossible for her to return.

Tugging at her hair, her mother seemed exhausted by speaking. Once again the meds had fogged up her world. She spoke
slowly, each word a strain on her ­slowed-down brain. The air, cleared of the din of dim voices, must have become a void of depressing silence.

“Say it,” her mother said. “You’re laughing at ­my—my ballroom ruins.”

“
Omma….”

Her mother’s hands made figure eights in the air.

“I have visited heaven. Yes, I have been with the Lord. My dear, what am I saying?” She struggled, trying to concentrate on Jenny. “You are going to church, aren’t you?”

“Every Sunday,” Jenny lied.

“Make sure you take Daddy with you, or he’ll go to hell,” she said.

“Yes, Omma.”

“Remember when I took you to museums?”

Jenny nodded in encouragement. Her father pushed her away and pressed his face against the bars.

“What can I do for you?” he said. “Anything, anything,” he said, as if this were possible.

Her mother touched the bars between them. They looked hungrily at each other.

The guards and nurse averted their eyes. Jenny thought of the boy in her arms and gagged. A boy who had knocked on their door selling newspaper subscriptions and had been mistaken as the devil. Her chair fell back when she stood up.

“Geejee–be!”
her mother screamed at her, banging her wrists against the bars, bird wrists that looked incapable of harm. “How can you wear my face? You stole my face!”

Her father picked up the chair, scraping it upright. He began cajoling her mother through the bars as if she were a child. “No one’s sick in this house,” he had said when she used to sob in bed all morning. “Your mother is not sick!” he had said until he couldn’t.

He turned to Jenny. “Careful,” he said.

“I have to go,” Jenny could only say. First Corinthians 13:13.
And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
But now there was a dead boy. There was her mother, a murderer, and Jenny, incapable of mercy and love.

“Don’t go,” her mother said. Her hands made gauzy gestures in the air. “Come back,
uri
baby. I’ll be better, I promise.”

“We can make her better,” her father said, and hit the wall with his palm so hard it trembled. “They’ve made her crazy, crazier here. Just listen to her.”

“I’m listening,” her mother said, and a trickle of frightened laughter escaped her. “But I never hear anyone but me, singing.”

Jenny and her father took turns driving past tract homes as ugly as soggy toast, stretches of strip malls with parking lots big enough for a dozen cemeteries, then empty northern roads. They drove as though they were being chased by the story of their lives. As if they were afraid of their dreams, they did not stop for any sustained sleep. He had begged her, please. He never begged, so they were returning to Las Vegas, where the family had spent their first year in America, husband and wife working at a swap meet, as if they could start over again. But two days later in Colorado,
just beyond mountains that made the Appalachians look like molehills, he finally parked at a bar cockily called The Bar. A deer and her fawn stared at them, then picked their way up rocks and disappeared in the fog.

“I’m too young to drink, Dad.”

“They won’t care. This is nowhere.”

He skipped to her door and opened it as if the car were a carriage.

They sat at the bar that was dressed up like a gloomy Victorian drawing room. The wall’s wainscoting was chipped and the bar’s worn varnish grooved with the marks of fingernails and coasters. Behind the bartender, there were bottles of liquor and a wall of postcards of other bars and other parties. One of a man in leather jeans with two girls, a brunette and a blonde, in his arms. Other places that were always better than here. Her father ordered a brandy sour. He had not shaved for days; his eyes had darkened to slate. Jenny drooped onto the counter, her head propped up by her thumbs. What if they had fit into the order of things? Would her mother have become as sick as she had? Immigrants. Indeterminate and silenced.

Her father was darkly determined, and plumbed his second brandy sour.

“This place is riffraff.” She swiveled on the leather stool. “Bird shit.”

He stared at her.

“Young lady, watch your language with your father. Your God up there may be watching.”

“God is always watching,” she said, hoping it was true. “He would want you to stop drinking so damn much!”

It felt good to see his shock, to feel him press his hand hard on her mouth until she promised not to speak that way again. Then he drank.

“I wish I could believe again.” His voice was detached. “I wish it were all true, your God thing. I wish I knew how to.”

She began humming a hymn, a melody of grace as he began drinking again, hoping the words she used to believe in would restore him.
As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul
longeth after you…
But she stopped; she did not feel God in the room.

Her father sang “Aeguka,” the Korean national anthem, over the jukebox. He clapped his hands as his voice became louder, a sentimental vibrato as he seemed to escape from his adopted country. He was asked by a Latino man sipping a piña colada to keep his voice down. Her father looked at the stranger with hatred, as if he were facing the very men who had, at different times, bashed in his storefront window, drilled through the roof, and made off with the family’s livelihood and, eventually, his wife’s health. The man was twirling a paper umbrella between his ­work-worn fingers when her father adjusted his shirtsleeves and, with a sharp swing, punched the man off the stool.

Several bruises later, her father checked them into a motel somewhere in Colorado. He was rumpled, confused.

“How’s your head?” she asked.

“It’s there,” he said.

His eyes did not meet hers; instead he inspected the green ­velvet curtains, their fabric wafting of gas passed after yogurt, the bedspreads on each twin bed that featured mottled brown
versions of a Civil War battle. The room smelled of preserved duck eggs.

He said, “There’s no alarm clock, ­air-conditioning, or shampoo. Funny! Someone even walked off with your Bible.”

Jenny looked up, annoyed.

He said, “There’s nothing here.”

“What you did at the bar,” she said. “There was no love in it.”

But she was also tight with judgment of herself. Love, it was the greatest challenge.

“I’ve told you a dozen times already.” He jabbed at the dry air. “In the bar, it must have been allergies.”

“Appa, you hit a man.” She sat on the bed, legs crossed. The woolly bedspread prickled her awake. “For the hundredth time, it wasn’t allergies.”

“With some allergies there’s a swelling of the brain. Your personality changes.” He sat on his bed and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve read about it.”

“Where? In the
National Enquirer
?”

“It wasn’t me,” he repeated. “It was allergies. It’s true.”

“I’m eighteen, Appa
.
You need to find your way.”

“Why should I find my way?” He picked at a loose thread in the flat sheet. “You saw her. I saw her. She’s gone, forever.”

She fell backward onto the bed, her face now to the ceiling that was exposed and unpainted, the same sallow yellow of her mother’s face that had seen too little sun. She jumped up on the bed and touched the ceiling.

“What am I going to do?” His jaw was slack. “Nothing’s going to change with time. It’s as if our life never really happened.”