Young tilted her head back, clapped her hands, and closed her eyes to the sky, the way her mother always did to praise God for good news. Pak laughed, and she did, too. “Does Mary know?” she said.
“No. Would you like to tell her?” he said. It surprised her, his asking her preference rather than ordering it done a particular way.
Young nodded and smiled, feeling unsure but happy like a bride on her wedding’s eve. “You rest. I’ll go tell her.” Passing him, she put her hand on his shoulder. Instead of rolling away, Pak placed his hand on hers and smiled. Their hands together—a team, a unit.
Young savored the giddiness that frothed through her like helium-infused bubbles, and even Mary’s sadness—apparent in the way she stood before the barn, slumped, gazing at the ruins and crying softly—couldn’t mar it. If anything, Mary’s tears buoyed Young more. Since the explosion, Mary’s personality had flipped from a hot-tempered, talkative girl to a detached, mute facsimile of her daughter. Mary’s doctors had diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, they called it—Americans had such a penchant for reducing phrases to acronyms; saving seconds was so important to them), and said her refusal to discuss that day was “classic PTSD.” She hadn’t wanted to attend the trial, but her doctors said others’ accounts might trigger her memory. And Young had to agree, today had definitely loosened something. The way Mary had focused on Matt’s testimony, intent on learning every detail about that day—the protesters, delays, power outage, all the things she’d missed because she’d been in SAT classes all day. And now, crying. An actual emotion—her first nonblank reaction since the explosion.
Getting closer to Mary, Young realized Mary’s lips were moving, emitting barely audible murmurs. “So quiet … so quiet…,” Mary was saying, but ethereally, hypnotically, like a meditative chant. When Mary first awoke from her coma, she said this a lot, variations in English and Korean on the quietness before the explosion. The doctor explained that trauma victims often focus intently on one sensory element of the event, reliving and turning that single detail over and over in their minds. “Victims of explosions often become haunted by the explosion’s sound,” he’d said. “It’s natural that she’d fixate on the auditory juxtaposition of that moment—the silence before the blast.”
Young stepped next to Mary. Mary didn’t move, kept her eyes focused on the charred submarine, tears still trickling. Young said in Korean, “I know today was hard, but I’m glad you’re able to cry about this, finally,” and reached to rest her hand on Mary’s shoulder.
Mary snatched her shoulder away. “You know nothing,” she said in English, choked in sobs, and ran into their house. The rejection stung, but that was momentary, soothed by Young’s realization that what had just happened—sobbing, yelling, running away, all of it—was typical of the real, pre-explosion Mary. It was funny, how she’d hated the teenage-girl melodrama and scolded Mary to stop that nonsense, and yet had missed it once it was gone and now was relieved at its return.
She followed Mary in and opened the black shower curtain demarcating Mary’s sleeping corner. It was too flimsy to afford her (or Pak and Young on the other side) much privacy and served mostly as a symbol, a visual declaration of a teenager’s demand to be left alone.
Mary was lying on her sleeping mat, face sunken into her pillow. Young sat and smoothed Mary’s long black hair. “I have good news,” Young said, making her words gentle. “Our insurance is coming through, as soon as the trial ends. We can move soon. You’ve always wanted to see California. You can apply to college there, and we can forget all this.”
Mary raised her head a bit, like a baby struggling with the weight of her head, and turned to Young. Crease marks from the wrinkled pillowcase lined Mary’s face, and her eyes were puffy slits. “How can you think about that? How can you talk about college and California when Kitt and Henry are dead?” Mary’s words were accusatory, but her eyes were wide, as if impressed by Young’s ability to focus on nontragic things and searching for clues on how to do the same.
“I know it’s terrible, everything that’s happened. But we need to move on. Focus on our family, your future.” Young smoothed Mary’s forehead lightly, as if ironing silk.
Mary put her head down. “I didn’t know that’s how Henry died. His face…” Mary closed her eyes, and tears dropped and stained her pillowcase.
Young lay down next to her daughter. “Shhh, it’s okay.” She brushed Mary’s hair away from her eyes and combed it with her fingers the way she had every night in Korea. How much she’d missed this. Young hated many things about their American life: being a splintered goose family for four years; discovering (after settling in Baltimore) that their host family expected her to work from six a.m. to midnight, seven days a week; becoming a prisoner, locked away in bulletproofed isolation. But the thing she regretted most was the loss of closeness with her daughter. For four years, she never saw her. Mary was asleep when Young got home and still asleep when she left. Mary visited the store the first few weekends, but she spent the whole time crying about how much she hated school, how mean the kids were, how she couldn’t understand anyone and she missed her father and missed her friends and on and on. Then came anger, Mary’s shouts accusing Young of abandoning her, leaving her an orphan in a strange country. Then finally, worst of all, silent avoidance. No yells, no pleas, no glares.
The thing Young never understood was why Mary directed her anger solely at her. Pak staying in Korea, the Baltimore host-family arrangement—everything had been his plan. Mary knew this, had witnessed him issuing commands and silencing Young’s objections, and yet Mary somehow blamed her. It was as if Mary associated all the transition pains of immigration—separation, loneliness, bullies—with Young (because Young was in America), whereas Pak, by virtue of his location, she grouped with her warm memories of Korea—family, togetherness, fitting in. Their host family said to wait, that Mary would follow the typical pattern of immigrant kids hyperassimilating, too fast and too much, driving parents crazy with their preferences of English to Korean, McDonald’s to kimchi. But Mary never thawed, to Young or to America, even after she started making friends and speaking exclusively in English on the rare occasions she deigned to speak to Young, until eventually those early associations became a mathematical truth, forever constant:
(Pak = Korea = happiness) > (Young = America = misery)
But was that over? For here was her daughter now, letting Young rake her fingers through her hair while she cried, being comforted by this intimate act. After five minutes, maybe ten, Mary’s breathing slowed to an even rhythm, and Young looked at her sleeping face. Awake, Mary’s face was all sharp angles—thin nose, high cheekbones, deep frowns that lined her forehead like train tracks. But asleep, everything softened like melting wax, the angles giving way to gentle curves. Even the scar on Mary’s cheek looked delicate, like she could brush it off.
Young closed her eyes and matched her breathing to her daughter’s, and she felt a pinch of dizziness, of unfamiliarity. How many times had she lain next to Mary and held her? Hundreds of times? Thousands? But all years ago. In the last decade, the only time she’d allowed Young to touch her for sustained periods was in the hospital. People talked so much about the loss of intimacy between married couples as the years progress, so many studies about the number of times a couple has sex in the first year of marriage versus the remaining years, but no one measured the number of hours spent holding your baby in the first year of life versus the remaining years, the dramatic dissipation of intimacy—the sensual familiarity of nursing, holding, comforting—as children pass from infancy and toddlerhood to the teens. You lived in the same house, but the intimacy was gone, replaced by aloofness, with splashes of annoyance. Like an addiction, you could go for years without it, but you never forgot it, never stopped missing it, and when you got a dab of it, like now, you craved it more and wanted to gorge on it.