The Hundred-Year Flood (18 page)

CHAPTER 7
HOMECOMINGS

I

In Boston, in the rehabilitation center, Tee would try to figure out what had happened to him. From an article in the
Prague Post
, he learned that Rockefeller was in jail—described as “a former proponent of the Velvet Revolution whose parents are suspected Communists.” Pavel’s new series of paintings made its way to New York, but Tee didn’t care to see the “groundbreaking” works.

As his balance improved, he was cleared for a day out. His parents took him to the Cape for the afternoon, as they used to do when he was little. He walked along the beach and remembered colliding with a random white kid as they both ran for a seagull. The boy had started to cry, and the boy’s father had come up and demanded to know where Tee’s parents were. Tee had pointed at his parents at the top of the beach, but the man hadn’t believed him. The man had scanned the crowd, and then had seemed suddenly to pity Tee. He had shouted for his son to follow, and had turned away. The boy called Tee a Chink as he took off. Tee had made his way back to his parents and had asked them why the man didn’t believe him. His parents could have told him then, perhaps, about his birth mother, but his father had given the old sticks and stones line instead.

What had that pity been? Had the man recognized the similarity between his father and him, and seen no mother? Or was their skin color enough that the man couldn’t see the similarity at all?

A conch shell glinted on the beach, and Tee reached for it and toppled into the water. His mother rushed in and pulled him out. She said the Cape might not have been the best idea.

Back in the rehab center, Tee sat in the library and tried to hear the twanging he’d heard before, to call the ghost woman to him with his imagination. The door opened. It was the man with the old war wound. When the man asked what he was doing, Tee decided to tell him the truth. The man said he often saw people. He’d even learned to accept it when they shot at him, to imagine the bullets passed right through, though really, they lodged in his guts and jiggled like coins as he walked. And then, as if that had conjured her, the woman glowed past the door, her nose small and her cheeks like a short cliff dropping down to the pool of her mouth. Tee thanked the man, and ran after her. “Katka,” he called, but as his voice trembled and his legs held steady for once, he knew it wasn’t her.

That night on the Charles Bridge, the last moments Tee could remember in Prague, he had cried on the bench and Rockefeller had rested a hand on his shoulder. Then Tee had either blacked out, or the force of the impact had blacked him out. He remembered Rockefeller’s hand, flashes of a Czech hospital, not the one Katka was in, his father’s ear against his chest, the long flight home. He imagined what Rockefeller had been thinking. At some point Rockefeller had understood that his promise could not be undone. Maybe as they drank too much and pitied themselves, Tee said that Rockefeller was a fraud, never a friend to Pavel or him or anyone. Or maybe Pavel called and asked if it was over, or called about Katka. Rockefeller swigged the Becherovka, and as he brought his hand down, he saw how easy it could be, and he surprised himself by cracking the bottle over the back of Tee’s head.

Once Tee lay still, Rockefeller remembered the graveyard. Now he was the attacker, the Americans. He poured the rest of the alcohol on Tee’s face to wake him. He shook Tee before noticing the slack neck, the head rattling. He was unable to take it back. He searched for Tee’s cell. When he turned it on, missed calls flashed by. He pressed the call button over the first person on the list, the last person Tee had called, his father, and said Tee was hurt, badly, without explaining why or how.

Then he called emergency. Or did he call emergency first, even before thinking through the consequences? That when they saw the body, they would know what he’d done. They knew bodies, the language of bruises and cuts and attempted murder. The doctor would know, as soon as they got to the hospital. Rockefeller might have to tell them himself, to give Tee the best shot of waking quickly. Rockefeller pictured the café never finished, but even if he was the type of person who could attack Tee, he couldn’t leave Tee in the aftermath.

The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics lifted Tee onto the stretcher, as Katka had been lifted. The moon yawned through the clouds for an instant and disappeared again. Rockefeller got into the front seat, feeling sorry for himself. Maybe on the way, the medics recognized the signs of an assault and called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, a squad car waited. Rockefeller gave up then, or thought that if he accepted his punishment, he wouldn’t be such a monster. Or he even tried to tell them he had found Tee like this. Maybe he took responsibility only at the last moment, since Pavel would not be satisfied if the injury was an accident.

Rockefeller gave his statement, not fumbling his words, not blaming Pavel, and the policemen guided him to the car. He turned and bowed his head, and they slapped the cuffs on him. They might even have said he did the noble thing, taking Tee to the hospital instead of running away. He needed to hear this: he needed to know he wasn’t the Secret Police of his youth, as he had always carried the guilt of his parents’ politics and the guilt of sending them away. He had always wanted forgiveness even more than freedom.

Tee’s father hopped the first flight out. He arrived in Prague in the morning and filed charges before taking his son home.

In the rehab center, Tee wrote and wrote. Sometimes he would imagine a library fished from the flood, ruined books that only had meaning for the people who’d lost them. He would try to rewrite the stories he’d scribbled in the margins of those novels from the Globe, but he would grow so tired trying to remember that he would fall asleep with the typewriter on his lap. He would leave memory behind for dreams. The pages he wrote turned increasingly to his father in Korea. The sun and the sand and the spa. His father waiting for his birth mother to appear at lunch and lift his hand to her belly. When she started showing, had his father denied Tee was his? His father was always a coward. Yet Tee had reason to believe his birth mother had made his father brave. His father had brought Tee back to Boston, saving a Polaroid of her for her son. He had kept her image beside him, as present in Tee’s face as a never-ending film, as a story told and retold.

II

In the rehabilitation center, Tee took care to protect his head, to rest if he felt tired. Time was less like a locked house. He remembered what day it was, and that days passed in a line. For the most part, his parents, too, seemed to let time pass. They had quit complaining about each other, whether for his sake or their own. His aunt, his father said, was getting genuine psychiatric help. Tee was learning not to draw attention to his psychoses. He could make his past appear before him, but at least his visions never spoke, or hurt anyone.

The Monday the rehab center finally released him, his parents took him to dinner. He suggested the fortune-telling restaurant in Chinatown, only it had gone out of business. They ended up down the street at a Thai place. They sat under a mounted sailfish and discussed Tee’s future. He would stay with his mother until the house sold. His father had bought an apartment in Somerville. His mother had her new job and exercise program and even new habits—she rolled her shoulders now, whenever Tee said something that gave her pause. His father had finally given up on Hollywood. Tee would go back to school next fall. As they told him how much they loved him, he wondered where all the desperation of the past year had gone, as if he were the only one who recalled the film and the divorce and Prague. His father cupped Tee’s cheek like a puppy’s. His mother brought out a cake and lit candles. Tee’s container filled—for a moment, he couldn’t tell where he was. He saw the shadows on Katka’s face as she was dying, or in the darkness of the flood, or perhaps in a dream, and he remembered the feeling just before he fell out of her tree, that she had something more to say.

Back in his childhood home, Tee found
The Giving Tree
on a bookshelf in his mother’s bedroom. She still had her favorite children’s books there, ones they had shared when Tee was a boy. His mother, Katka’s father. What was it about this tree that made it a parental favorite? Katka had given Tee everything—her apples, her branches, her trunk—in only a few short months. He missed her with a cinching pain in his lungs.

At the end of the story, the boy the tree loves is an old man, and the tree is a stump. The man uses up everything, both the tree and himself, on a life the reader never sees. Tee put the book back on its shelf. In his bedroom, he stapled a line of yarn to the floor to keep practicing his balance. Online, he would find a list of symptoms common to head trauma: poor memory, poor attention to detail, poor decision-making, impulsiveness, disorientation, language problems, inability to understand when spoken to. How many of these symptoms had already been his before the flood?

Each time Tee went over to his father’s apartment, he wondered if he might find the walls covered in drawings again. But somehow his father had figured out how to stop his fixations. His father would ask what Tee was writing—and Tee admitted that he was writing fiction, that he had to change his story to have any hope of figuring out what it was.

It was the Sunday after his release, Tee would remember, that his father dropped two manila folders on the coffee table between them. Tee felt something about to float through the door. In the first folder was a thick stack of paper. “Thank you for letting me read your stories,” his father said. “But I want to know the truth. Can you tell me what really happened to you in Prague?”

Tee said as far as he knew, he’d gotten a head wound and ended up back in Boston.

“I’ve been receiving something in the mail,” his father said after a moment. In the second folder were two envelopes addressed from Prague.

Immediately Tee could smell rain. He asked what was in the envelopes, who had sent them. Then he took a deep breath. “Katka,” he said mostly to himself, “is dead.”

His father raised an eyebrow. “They’re letters from the guy who did this to you. Rockefeller. His English isn’t great. I was going to wait to show them to you, but your mom didn’t want me to hide anything.”

“Is Katka dead?” Tee asked.

“You’d better look for yourself.”

Tee fingered the slits from the letter opener. The envelopes were addressed to his father. How had Rockefeller found the address? Pavel must have found it on the Internet.

Tee opened the first letter and read slowly. Rockefeller apologized.
Can I saying sorry?
he wrote.
I was too much into my head. I didn’t see I was doing wrong.
He thanked Tee’s father for flying on short notice. In the first letter, Katka was still alive, still in her coma, fighting the bacteria. Tee started planning to return. In the second letter, she slipped away. Rockefeller said Pavel was painting her one final time, and despite their anger, Tee should see the painting; Pavel and Tee should forgive each other. The letter was dated eight days earlier.

“Are you okay?” his father asked.

Tee sensed the ghost woman nearby. Rockefeller still didn’t understand what he had done to Tee; Pavel still believed art had gained and lost him a wife. Tee was a person who couldn’t remember his favorite songs. Without Katka, there was no Prague to return to, no magic in the statue of Jan of Nepomuk. Tee was still in the middle of the flood. He realized he had loved Katka most truly when he wanted Rockefeller to hurt him. He thought about what the man with the old war wound had said—about the bullets jingling inside his body—just before the ghost appeared and the three freckles on the woman came clear. Tee remembered holding his birth mother’s photograph above him, lying in bed, bringing that face down close to his and then away.

“Dad,” he said. “I need to know about her.”

His father tapped the letters and frowned. “I only know what’s written there.”

“No,” Tee said. “I don’t mean Katka. I know Katka. Tell me about my birth mother.”

Finally the room rustled with presence. Tee steadied himself—the flood washed through, and he had nothing to hold on to except for a ghost—and then she was there. He was standing beside his father, and he was standing beside his birth mother. The bird in his throat took flight. He said he knew about the affair, and the truth about his birth. What he didn’t know about was her, the woman he’d come from. All his life, he’d either clung to an empty Korea, or he’d filled it with myths.

His father stood and mixed a drink. “Whatever I say won’t be enough,” he warned.

“Tell me,” Tee said again and again, late into the night.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the decade it took to write this book, I met my wife, became a father, moved at least a dozen times. I am thankful to so many people and places. I have tried to capture a certain idea of Prague, and to that end, I have taken some liberties. For example, the bookstore Tee works in takes its name from a bookstore in Prague, though the physical details differ. The characteristics of Tee’s Globe come from my head.

It is amazing to work with an Asian American editor on an Asian American novel. Thank you to Vivian Lee. Also to Tara Parsons, Al Woodworth, and the rest of Little A. Thank you to Chelsea Lindman, who keeps the faith. Thank you to Patrick Barry for the beautiful cover.

Thanks most of all to my family—to my parents and siblings and especially to Ok Kyung Na, who (in so many ways) is the reason I was able to write this book, and to my daughter, who is the reason I was able to understand it. Thank you, wherever she is, to my birth mother.

Thank you to everyone who read earlier drafts, especially to Margot Livesey, whose wisdom and generosity are a light; to Mako Yoshikawa’s novel-class crew (Katharine Gingrich and Dan Pribble in particular); to Robert Boswell, whose advice guided me through the last stages of revision; to Kirstin Chen, who always reassures me; and to Cathy Chung, Roxane Gay, Laura van den Berg, Alyssa Knickerbocker, Carmie Banasky, James Scott, Ken Calhoun, and Amanda O’Brien.

Thank you to Asmin Tulpule for the medical advice.

I am curiously indebted to a passing remark by Mat Johnson. I am indebted to my EFL students from when I lived in Prague, who told me many of these myths and superstitions in service of their English, and to my old flatmates. I also consulted several guidebooks and several books of myth that I have since, sadly, misplaced. The Internet helped immensely.

Thank-yous to: Emerson College, the
Good Men Project
, the Wiener Center, the Bonchon crew, Grub Street, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fourth Kingdom (especially Alex Chee and Don Lee), the adoptee and APIA communities, the University of Houston, Inprint, Putney (and Henk Rossouw), Michael Seidlinger, Deena Drewis, Mink Choi, and all the editors and writers and friends who have done so much. You are too many to name. I am grateful for that. I am grateful for you.

It’s been a long journey, but in the end, I touched the statue of Jan of Nepomuk twice, once on either side of a decade. A great writer once said, you end the story where you see it starting to return.

Thank you for reading.