“It’s just different for people, that’s all,” Miguel said. “People want to go places that are different. It’s slumming, what rich people do for shits and giggles.”
Margot shook her head. “For me, being different wasn’t a good thing. All I wanted growing up was everything on television—dishwashers and windows that shut properly and a yard.”
“You didn’t have a yard? Even poor people have yards, Margot. With, you know, like clotheslines and roosters and limping dogs . . .” He smiled, and Margot laughed.
“We lived in an apartment, the same one my mom lives in now,” she said. “We never had a house.”
They pulled up to the front of the building that she and her mother had lived in for as long as she could remember—a nondescript, gray stucco three-story complex. The windows on the bottom floor had security bars over them. The large agaves planted out front resembled tired sentinels that badly needed a day off. Margot and her mother lived on the middle floor in a two-bedroom unit with a small north-facing balcony that looked partially out onto another, almost-identical building and back alley.
“Let’s sit here for a bit?” she asked. The old embarrassment rose from the pit of her stomach, the shame she felt when she brought classmates home from school to work on group projects. Margot and her mother never entertained or invited anyone inside for fun. No matter how clean her mother tried to keep things, the space always seemed shabby and disorganized—a closet for storage and sleeping and fighting rather than a home. But what else could her mother afford?
It was easy to see now how a place like this, so different from her Seattle neighborhood of green trees and clean sky and open windows without bars, could make her feel embarrassment and shame about her home. Not that life was less confusing in Seattle, but it was much less in her face all the time—the crowd of emotions, the struggle to put food on the table, the fear of being followed down the street at night, kidnapped or stabbed. Always looking behind her. Maybe this was why she couldn’t leave the past behind—everything about her life had trained her to look back. By never looking forward, she was always tripping, falling over things.
Miguel touched her arm. “Do you want to call your mom again? Does she have a cell phone?”
Margot took a deep breath and unbuckled her seat belt. “She has one that she uses for emergencies, but it’s never on. It’s a flip phone, and she doesn’t know how to check voice mail.”
“Sacrilège,” he said in a bad French accent.
“She’s technologically in the Stone Age,” Margot went on. “She can’t really read English either, and her eyes are kind of bad. My Korean isn’t good enough to help her. It always ends in a fight.”
How many hours had she spent, words stumbling like stones out of her mouth, trying to explain something in Korean to her mother? A utilities bill. How to work the remote control. A car insurance policy. And in those hours, Margot would always slip, somehow yelling at her mother, as her mother had often done to her as a child when she had misbehaved by oversleeping, by missing church, even by falling ill and needing to go to the hospital.
Her mother had once screamed, “How am I going to pay for this? Why don’t you take better care of yourself?” Her mother didn’t have time for empathy. She always had to keep moving. If she stopped, she might drown.
“Would you mind waiting in the car?” Margot asked. The broken security gate shrieked, then slammed behind her. Holding her breath, she climbed the dark, dank staircase, which smelled of wet socks and old paint fumes, to the second floor, where she knocked on the apartment door. The fisheye was empty and dark.
This was no longer her home. Yet with a memory that lived not in her head but in her hands, she turned the key for the dead bolt, which was already unlocked, and then the doorknob. She had spent most of her life, her childhood, dreading the inside of that apartment, not out of fear but out of hatred and spite. Hatred for her mother. Hatred for the money they didn’t have. Hatred for her father, missing, gone, a coward. Hatred for her mother’s accent. Hatred for the furniture, stained, falling apart. Hatred for herself, her life. She hated it all. She wanted this world to disappear, to burn it all down.
As she opened the door, a dark odor of decayed fruit, putrid and sharp, swelled around her head like a tidal wave. Acid erupted from her mouth onto the arm that shielded her face. She flipped on the light. There was a broken ceramic sculpture of the Virgin Mary on the floor, tour brochures on their coffee table, and in this intimate chaos, her mother facedown on the carpet with her right arm extended, the left one by her side, her feet in sheer nude socks.
Later, Margot would remember the screams and would realize that they were coming from her.
She fell to her knees. The hallway’s amber glow was soft like feathers. Face tingling, she lay her forehead on the carpet where the head of a tiny nail pressed against her skin. Miguel’s hands abruptly gripped her shoulders from behind, easing her to her feet. They wobbled, weak, down the stairs into the open air, the street.
As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the sky became the longest bruise—purple and blue. The cruel light left its mark.
She rested on the uneven curb, head in her arms folded on her knees, Miguel next to her. Hiccuping through tears, she struggled to breathe.
Maybe she should have checked her mother’s pulse, maybe she shouldn’t have called the police. What if her mother was only hurt badly, or drunk? No, she never drank and a person that was hurt would not lie on the floor facedown like that. And she couldn’t bear the thought of being near that smell, that body, the first time she had seen her mother in almost a year.
That was her umma. That was her head. Those were her feet.
Sirens blared from a distance, getting louder as they arrived. She directed two police officers and an EMT to her mother’s apartment. Another two officers asked her questions. She was appalled at how little she could answer. But she did tell them miscellaneous things about her mother—that she worked all day at this store and that she went to church.
A wiry Korean man in his sixties, perhaps the landlord or even a janitor, spoke to the officers for about ten minutes. Afterward, he stood on the sidewalk, smoking with a few casual observers who had emerged out of the surrounding buildings, curious about the lights and the noise.
They took her body away in a black bag on a stretcher.
Her name was Mina. Mina Lee.
Yes, that was her mother.
Mina
Summer 1987
MINA STEPPED OFF THE PLANE INTO A FLASH OF HEAT, thinking she had made a grave mistake. But it was too late. The world opened up like a hot mouth devouring her. Yet hadn’t it been that way her whole life already? She reminded herself that this airport, LAX, was actually easier, much more organized than Seoul, or any other great city, much safer even than her own childhood.
She fought back the memory of the screaming, stampeding crowd in which she had been separated from her parents while fleeing the north during the war. Her four-year-old hands groping to grab them. The rush of bodies. The moment she lost sight of her mother and father. Surrounded by the distress, the pain etched into strangers. The dead along the road, the elderly who had fallen, and those shuddering, hungry people who did not have anything left to protect.