Follow Her Home (21 page)

“My own father left us when I was just a little girl. I remember he liked beer and dried squid, and I remember the sound of him sucking his teeth after he ate. I do not remember much else about him. In any case, when our mother left, we stayed with her brother's family.” She sipped at her tea.

“They were a family of five, with two girls and a boy. The boy was the oldest of us children, at thirteen, and the two girls were twins my age. My brother was just six at the time.”

Lori's eyes grew half hooded like a stuck camera lens. She hadn't said a word since we entered the house.

“They were poor. We were poor, but they were not much better off. There were a lot of mouths in that house, and I have never forgotten how hungry I was in those days. I am grateful to my uncle. He took us in when we had nowhere else to go. But I was hungry in that house.”

Lori slumped forward, her cheek on her mother's shoulder. Yujin Chung didn't miss a beat.

“We ate millet. Have you ever had millet?”

I shook my head. Slowly.

“Of course you have not had millet. You have rice. You know, I never had rice once the two years we were in that house. But my brother did. And my cousin. They were growing boys. You have it good here. Watermelon this red and this juicy, just for showing up at a friend's doorstep.”

I remembered that, showing up. It felt like hours ago. I remembered, too, that I wanted to know—the pictures, what about them.

My lips fell apart to let words fall out. “Mrs. Lim, I don't get where is the point is where are you going, Mrs. Chung.”

My tongue felt like a dead oyster in my mouth and my voice passed through the thick sieve of air around my ears like piano music smothered by a stuck pedal. A paralyzing exhaustion washed through my body, unsnapping every sinew, and I thought I felt myself go limp, though I couldn't be sure.

 

Twelve

It was different this time. I blinked slowly, eyelids creasing as they moved against their will. A gummy film of sleep caught on my lashes.

It was naïve of me to take Yujin's offerings and put them in my body. But then again, even Marlowe took drinks from strangers. Sometimes they put him out for a while.

My lenses focused on a man and a woman embracing in the rain. A poster for
The Notebook.
This was not my bedroom, and this was not my bed.

I lay still for a minute, not quite thinking, sloshed brain working its way through my surroundings with the boneless posture used for sorting out Magic Eyes. My head was on a pillow and I lifted it to note that I was lying on a white comforter dotted with orange five-petal flowers. The room was small and square with walls painted the sherbet tone of blended peaches. The bed was against one wall, opposite light wood dressers with surfaces like jewelry junkyards. To its left wall, a closed white door with a gold handle curved like a treble clef. To its right wall, a white bunching of lacy curtains layered heavily over a small square window, letting in the modest, honey rays of a waning summer day. A ceiling lamp hung overhead with lights off and slow fan whirring.

To my left lay Lori Lim, a Snow White and a dwarf in her own right.

I snapped my shoulders off the bed and noticed for the first time that my right arm hadn't been flung over my head by happenstance. Cold metal kissed my wrist and a tin clamor rang behind me. I twisted my head past my shoulder and saw where the handcuff clung to an aluminum headboard painted a cheap off-white to imitate something finer.

The prelude to a shout formed in my throat, but I thought better of it and whispered through nostrils and a gate of teeth, “You've got to be fucking kidding me.”

I rolled over on my right side and landed knees to hard wood. I gave my wrist a halfhearted yank—the handcuffs looked about as pliant as an anvil. Pivoting around my wrist, I climbed back onto the bed, knees sinking slightly into the mattress, and regarded the little sleeping nymph.

She rested in a pose of perfect death, fingers locked snug on her slow-rising, slow-falling chest. With her tooth and her flat-Coke eyes tucked under lips and folds, she was pretty and unerotic as a poisoned princess. In one respect she was better off than I was—her wrists were free as the day she was born.

In other respects, my heart bottomed out with empathy for this poor girl. I knew what it was like to grow up without a father, and I knew, too, the agitated, compensatory watchfulness of the mother who remained. But my mother had never tranquilized me like some unruly beast.

“Hey.” I poked her knobby shoulder, but she lay unruffled. I shook her with my free palm pressed against the peak of her clavicle, gently at first, then with the vigor of a washerwoman scrubbing at a creek. The bed frame gave a rusty moan and Lori came to life with confused languor.

I held a finger to my lips with a quick one-
h
“Sh.”

She blinked at me, her eyes spending double the time closed that they did open.

“
The Notebook
?” I smiled, favoring my right cheek in an attempt to look winsome.

She scraped herself half upright with small-animal agility. The sheets rustled clean and starchy as they bunched under her elbows. She scanned the walls like a curious, anthropomorphized periscope before landing on me, her drugged and impotent Prince Charming. She blinked her way to the appearance of wakefulness with a rhythmic quickening.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi, Lori. This is your room, right?”

She nodded. “I love
The Notebook.
”

“I think your mom might have knocked us out.”

She nodded again. She was no longer looking at me.

“Why aren't you more surprised by this?”

She sighed. It was a voluminous sigh, noisy as it collected through her nostrils, noisy as it let out through limp, pouty, parted lips. “My mom…”

“… Is crazy?”

“She means well. She only does things like this when she's trying to protect me.”

“Well, that's all peaches for you, but I'm not her daughter.” I blinked back at Lori. “Wait, does this happen often?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why?”

I realized the moment I asked that there would be no good answer, and so I waited for the bad one. Lori gave her lower lip a long chew, revealing that wayward tooth, and then she gave me her eyes. “I'm not the smartest fish in the sea, you know? She does it for my own good.”

“You're not a dog, Lori. You can make your own decisions.”

“My mom—she made a lot of mistakes when she was my age. Younger, too. She used to run with some crazy
kkangpae
before she had me.”

“Oh, so what, she
used
to be a criminal?”

She kept twisting her lips, worrying them with her teeth. “She isn't usually like this.”

“You mean she doesn't usually drug perfect strangers? That is very criminal, you know that, right?”

“She's been more, I guess, unstable lately.” Her voice grew quiet. “I think she met a man.”

“A man like William Cook?”

“No, not Mr. Cook.” She flushed. “I don't know who. But she's always influenced by the men she's with. She gets very dependent.”

“So wait, you're trying to tell me that some dude's sweet loving got me in these handcuffs?” I jangled them against the bedpost. “Did you notice I'm in fucking handcuffs?” My attempt at an inside voice as I spit profanity resulted in a wheeze that in any other situation I would have found funny.

She curled her knees to her chest and pivoted on her tailbone to face me completely. The hem of her dress cascaded to her waist, revealing a shy patch of underwear, Bo Peep pink.

With nimble movements she bent forward, and snatched at the cuffs. She examined them with touching concentration and let them go with a soft clang. She fell back on her wrists and shot her legs out over the edge of the bed and walked over to her dresser, where she picked up a single long earring.

She came back and knelt on the bed. For around the eighth time since I'd met her, I marveled at how very tiny she was. She licked her jutting tooth and made a sucking noise as she straightened out the hook of the earring with the delicacy of a fisherman handling a worm.

“You can't pick handcuffs with that.”

“I can try.”

She lowered herself and lay propped diagonally across the bed. The cuffs rested at the corner of the mattress in a stiff loop about the bottom of the headboard. I watched the back of her curly head not without curiosity, not without a doubting but undeniable degree of hope. She fiddled with the earring, jamming it sideways, frontways, backways into the slot designed with a more specific key in mind. Her legs changed tracks toward the ceiling at the knees and she hooked her ankles and swayed them gently as she worked.

We were close enough on the bed that I felt her hesitate. Without looking at me, she asked, “Why were you crying?”

All at once, I was flooded with Diego's death, and I cursed Yujin's poison for its weak effects. I gasped, and my hands tensed in their chains.

Lori stopped working and looked up at me with her vague, sad eyes. For a moment, I let myself hate her, this quicksand girl who had started it all. If she had never been born, then Diego would have lived, and I savored the sweetness of this easy blame.

I glared at her. “Diego was murdered.”

She dropped the earring and her eyes grew wide. “How—”

“I don't want to talk about it. Not with you.”

I was aware that my tone was harsh, that it was unjust to place the weight of another death on her shoulders. When she cast her eyes down, I felt chastened. She picked up the earring and retackled the cuffs without a word.

I watched her hung head, its cloud of wavy hair fluffed with unsolicited sleep. I decided to change the subject. There was plenty to talk about. “If you were to guess, why are we here?”

She tinkered in silence for several seconds. “I wish I knew.”

Her voice came up muffled, but somewhere around the second syllable of
wish
I heard the unmistakable hiccup of a snot globule obstructing the windpipe.

I sighed. For all my grief, I didn't want her to cry. “Hey. What's a robot's favorite food?”

She shook her head.

I cleared my throat and delivered the punch line in my best robotic voice. “BI-BIIIIM-BAP.”

She nodded and let out two weak laughs, breathy
eh
s couched in sounds of sorrow.

“You know what they say.” I sang the line of popular Korean wisdom passed down to me from my mother when I was a child. “If you laugh when you cry, you grow hair on your asshole.”

We sat like that for several minutes, Lori sniffling and working at my freedom, me sitting useless and tired with the puzzle before and around me, a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw of endless black. We held that posture until the doorknob rattled.

Yujin Chung appeared in the sliver of the opening door. She seemed to hover there, watching and leaning without entering, for days.

When she came in I was relieved to see that she was wearing the same clothes as before. Over these was the suspicious covering of a styled black coat ending at midthigh. I dipped my head in a short bow. “Thank you for your hospitality. I'd like to get going now, if you don't mind.”

She smirked in the way that all villains smirk when they no longer have identities to hide. And I the slippery hero with nothing to run with but my mouth.

She walked over to the bed, never losing the smile, a glassy hatred icing her eyes, and she delivered a smack to my right cheek so clean and musical it was its own soundtrack.

I brought my hand to my cheek. Yujin Chung shook out her wrist as if the effort had strained it. Lori's soft sniveling turned to steady, strangled sobs. Yujin Chung spoke first.

“Lori, be quiet. You are embarrassing me.”

I glared at her with such force that I felt my eyeballs test their lidded walls and a twitching in my forehead where some nerve winced from the exertion.

“Before I let you out of those cuffs, I will advise you against doing anything unwise. We have an errand to run.”

“Are you going to strangle Lori to death if I run away?”

She smiled bright as rigor mortis and opened her coat to reveal a cut-out pocket and a harsh-veined hand holding a short kitchen knife, gleaming a wet mercury silver from handle butt to tapered tip.

“We will walk outside together, holding hands.”

She led the way, and her hand felt colder than the touch of death. Lori climbed after me into the backseat, and her mother waited until we had buckled in before taking the wheel. I sat, obedient, wondering whether Yujin Chung would throw the knife into my brainstem if I attempted to try my luck and tumble out of the moving car. The sticky smell of lemon air freshener tickled my sinuses with sharp fingernails, inflaming the headache holding congress around the soggy, swollen patch on my scalp.

Yujin drove at the speed limit. We wound down La Brea and rode the 10 west through the Sunday traffic loose as an uncinched belt. We rode it until it narrowed into the ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway by the ocean at Santa Monica and with a seasick smirk I knew where we were headed. For the rest of the climb up to the Cook mansion in the Palisades Highlands, I predicted each turn with a lean of my neck.

*   *   *

A week after our beach trip, I left Iris at home and drove to Sherman Oaks to see her molester. This time, Quinn answered the door. He looked different from the way I remembered him in high school, and I realized it was because he wasn't dressed like a teacher. He wore a plain black T-shirt and loose, faded blue jeans, and his feet were bare. His hair was shaggy and likely unwashed.

I froze up at the sight of him, with fear, disgust, and rage. No matter Iris's convictions that this man was a helpless Romeo, a pawn of the powers of love and fate, I knew what he really was—a pervert, as she had called him in jest, a child molester, a criminal.