Love Love (25 page)

“Ms. Lee?”

Frank, beads of sweat threatening to roll down his forehead, extended his hand. He was a big man, a fat man, even his bushy mustache bearing a significant amount of weight.

It was like shaking hands with a slab of raw beef. He motioned for her to follow him to the back wall, walking past dark, empty cubicles, some of them turned into makeshift storage spaces for boxes and extra chairs.

In his office, Frank wheezed so much that the sound of his breathing took over the entire room; the more Judy tried to ignore it, the louder it became. When he looked up from reading her resume, she smiled so hard that she probably looked insane.

“So looks like there's a gap in your employment history,” he said.

Judy hadn't put down her latest stint with the temp agency, for obvious reasons, and had already prepared her reply to this inevitable query.

“Yes,” she said, and she lowered her voice a notch. “I've been taking care of my brother. He's been having some personal problems.”

She said this without any guilt, because she and Kevin had a longstanding pact that they could use each other as excuses. It was one of the brighter spots of having a sibling.

“Oh,” Frank said. “I'm sorry.”

“There are days when he's as normal as anyone,” Judy said. She got into it, like an actress locking into character. “But then he has these episodes, and he trusts no one but me. No one else can go near him. That's why I'm still temping after all these years.”

Frank angled the framed photo and pointed at one of the boys in the family picture, the one obviously with Down Syndrome.

“The sacrifices we make,” he said. “You're doing God's work. Let's find you something good, huh?”

There were possibilities: a two-month gig at a doctor's office, filling in for a receptionist on maternity leave, or a three-month assignment at a law firm, working as a personal assistant.

“Sleep on it and let me know which one will work for you.”

“Thank you, Frank,” she said, and she double-stepped out of his office and out the door.

As she drove away, she scrolled through the call list on her cell phone and dialed the hospital. The best way to alleviate her guilt was to put her future earnings to their intended destination.

“Good morning, Ms. Lee,” Connie said. The friendliness in her tone was so unfamiliar that for a second, Judy thought she'd misdialed.

“I wanted to talk to you about my bill,” she said.

There was a pause, and it was as if Judy already knew what she'd say.

“There is no bill,” Connie said.

“Because it's been paid in full.”

“That's correct.”

“Thank you,” Judy said, and she snapped her cell phone shut.

She pulled her car off the road and onto the shoulder. The highway uncoiled in front of her, harsh sunlight flashing off the roof of each passing car. She listened to the tick-tock of her right turn signal, attempting to let its metronomic rhythm bring her a sense of calm, but it didn't work. So she drove. The wealth of conflicting emotions—relief and injustice, gratitude and violation—jolted through her like a continuous electric charge. She should dump Roger right now, tell him what an asshole he was for—

For being there when she was in the hospital bed, unconscious?

For taking care of her while she recuperated from her injuries?

For rescuing her from certain fiscal devastation?

For the rest of the drive, she blasted the heavy metal station on Kevin's satellite radio. This was one genre of music she didn't listen to, but having a bunch of angry-sounding men screech and yell over the crash of guitars and drums cleansed her, their collective noise too big for her to think about anything.

Judy had hoped she would have time to sort things out, but when she pulled into Kevin's driveway, Roger was there, leaning against the hood of his BMW.

She killed the engine but stayed in the car. She watched him through the windshield as he tapped a cigarette out of his pack. He had trouble lighting it, going through three matches before he was able to cup his hands around the temperamental flame and catch the fire. He took in a long drag and exhaled through his nostrils, watching her watching him.

She opened her car door, lifted herself out of the seat, and stood up. It'd been warm in the car, but outside, autumn wind raked through her hair.

“I know you probably hate me,” Roger said.

No
, she thought,
but I don't love you, either. I wish I did.

“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don't know what I feel.”

Judy pushed her door shut and walked up to Roger.

“Why?” she asked.

Roger flicked the ash off his cigarette and took a second long drag.

“I knew doing it would make you angry. Because you told me not to. And yet I wanted to do this for you, because I have money. A lot of money. And it isn't blood money from a gang. I lost both of my parents within a year of each other, and they left me millions.”

“Millions?”

“Over a hundred, the last time I checked, which was three years ago, so probably more than that now.”

“Can I have one?” Judy said, pointing to his cigarette. She used the end of Roger's to light hers. “And yet you work the phones in that brain-dead job.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It keeps me busy. I like the people. I've been there for seven years.”

“This is the most fucked-up thing I've heard yet, and I've heard a lot of fucked-up things,” Judy said.

“I thought doing this for you would make you happy, even if you said it wouldn't.”

“And do you always do things to make other people happy?”

Roger took a final drag, dropped the butt, and crushed it with a quarter turn of his shoe.

“I try.”

“There's something wrong with you, isn't there,” Judy said.

Roger nodded. “I've never been happy. It's not depression—it's different. I've gone through every drug, every treatment. It's always been this way.”

Judy took him in her arms and cradled his head against her chest. She wished she could say something, anything, to make things better, but what good were words now?

“I don't know, Roger.” And she didn't. At this point in her life, she'd gone through enough self-analysis to know that being with somebody like him, somebody in this odd condition, wasn't going to be easy for her.

“That makes two of us,” Roger said.

Holding hands, she led him to the front door and opened it for him. Even though it was the middle of the day, it was dark inside because she'd left the blinds down. She followed him, into the gloom that awaited them.

18

K
evin hadn't known anyone named Norman personally, but now he did, his birth father. At one point during their first dinner together at a little French bistro near the Civic Center, they traded driver's licenses to laugh at their similarly awful pictures. Reading the last name printed on the card, Kwon, Kevin sounded it out in his mind:
Kevin Kwon
. It wasn't bad, the alliterative
K
's downright singsong. Of course, had he been raised by his birth parents, he probably wouldn't have been named Kevin. What had they called him? Kevin thought he wanted to know but then changed his mind. It was sad to consider the boy he didn't grow up to be.

There was more sadness as the evening went on. When Kevin asked about his birth mother, Norman closed his eyes for a moment before continuing.

“I knew you were going to ask about her, but it's still hard for me to say that she's passed on,” he said. “I'll tell you more about her later, but not tonight. Right now, let's enjoy this meal, shall we?”

“Just one thing,” Kevin said. “Her name?”

“Grace.”

Norman and Grace Kwon. Who had they been? Why did they give their son away? There were so many questions, too many.

On their second evening out, Norman suggested they meet in the town of San Leandro, and when they walked by a three-story gray building off Davis Street on their way to dinner, Norman acted as if it was some sort of cosmic coincidence that they happened to be in front of his office.

“Would you like to see it?” he asked Kevin. “Since we're here and everything?”

Kevin wanted to tell him that there was no reason to go through any pretense—Norman was his father, so why wouldn't Kevin want to
see where he worked?—but that felt like a lot to say. So he assured him, “Of course. I'd love to.”

Norman had told him he was a licensed therapist, and the nameplate on the building corroborated this fact:
PRESENCE PERSONAL COUNSELING—NORMAN KWON, LPC
. Norman led him down the beige-carpeted corridor until they arrived at the third door on the right.

The walls were the same color as the carpet outside. There was a high-backed wooden armchair, a brown sofa, and a coffee table, all sitting on top of a circular oriental rug. In the corner by the window, a narrow secretary desk was left open, its oval door flipped out like a tongue. It looked like a cramped living room of someone's city apartment.

“So,” Norman asked, “is it what you expected?”

It was a question loaded with entirely too much baggage. Truth be told, none of it was what Kevin had expected, and the least expected of all was this man who looked like a fast-forwarded version of him. Kevin hadn't exactly counted on his existence, maybe because having seen and held the photograph of his mother, his focus had been entirely on her. Or perhaps because he assumed she'd been a single mother, a woman who'd gotten in trouble with an unwanted pregnancy. Kevin didn't quite know what to do with Norman. They resembled one another, which made the emotional disconnection even more alarming.

On the coffee table, Kevin glanced at the stapled stack of papers.

“That's what we counselors call the intake,” Norman said. He pointed to the sofa, which was a three-seater crowded with throw pillows. “Take a look.”

Kevin moved a few pillows out of the way and sat. The form was five pages long, asking for basic biographical information plus sections for psychological services history, family history, substance use, spiritual activities, just about everything that could be queried about someone's mental health.

“It's baseline stuff, what I ask when people come to see me, though mostly it's for insurance and liability purposes. Once we have the basics down, it's all about presence.”

Kevin nodded, though he didn't understand what Norman meant. “Do your clients lie down when they talk to you?”

“They can do whatever they want, as long as they don't talk about their mothers,” Norman said.

Presence therapy, Norman explained, was about accepting the present moment as the only reality. Traditional psychotherapy involved the client discussing his past while the counselor listened and analyzed to bring subconscious issues out into the conscious. Once these wounds are dragged out, then the healing supposedly began, until the client, free from his emotional distresses, became a complete person.

“But it doesn't work that way,” Norman said. “Believe me, I know, because I used to be one of those therapists. The root of the problem isn't what happened in the past, but rather what you do with the present—the ego and the mind. As humans, we're gifted with our wonderful brains, which spend a lot of time with the past and the future, none of which apply to the present. The goal is to learn to look inward, into the nature of our own minds through systematic self-observation. That might sound like a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but it's the only truth I know.”

Norman had a tendency to hold a gaze a second or two longer than what Kevin felt was comfortable, and he was doing it now.

“You're not saying anything, Kevin, but I can tell you're not buying it.”

Kevin didn't want to disagree, but what Norman had said struck him in a personal way.

“Ignoring your past—it seems like denial.”

“Fair enough. Let's take your situation. You wish your adoptive parents hadn't kept this secret from you. And now it's causing you pain. So to choose to not look at the past feels like a form of denial to you.”

Kevin nodded.

“But the revelation of this secret—this happened weeks ago. So why are you still thinking about what happened in the past? What good is it doing for you? Think it, and then let it move through you. By looking at the past and latching on to it, you're actually in denial of the present. So be here instead, in the now. The Buddhists call this
sati
—mindfulness. For you to not be lost in anticipation or worry of everything that's not here.”

Over the next four days, they shared three more meals, and as much as Kevin tried to see things from Norman's philosophical point of view, he couldn't. The idea of presence seemed like an excuse, a justification, for Norman to not reveal his past, and ergo, Kevin's past. When he told Norman how he felt, his father agreed.