I shook my head to expel the thought. “Meh-hee-yah.” I yelled out Mary’s Korean name, which she hates. No answer. I knew there wouldn’t be, but it infuriated me just the same. I yelled “Meh-hee-yah” again, louder, elongating the syllables to let them grate my throat, needing it to hurt and drive out the phantom echoes of TJ’s pounding ringing in my ears.
I searched the rest of the house, box by box. With each passing second of not finding the batteries, my frustration grew, and I thought about our fight this morning, my telling her she should do more to help—she was seventeen!—and her walking out without a word. I thought about Pak siding with her, as always. (“We didn’t give up everything and come to America so she could cook and clean,” he always says. “No, that’s my job,” I want to say. But I never do.) I thought of Mary’s eye-rolls, her headphones on her ears, pretending not to hear me. Anything to keep my anger activated, to occupy my mind and keep out the pounding. My ire at my daughter was familiar and comfortable, like an old blanket. It soothed my panic into a dull anxiety.
When I got to the box in Mary’s sleeping corner, I forced the crisscrossed top flaps open and dumped everything out. Teenage junk: torn tickets to movies I’d never seen, pictures of friends I’d never met, a stack of notes, the top one in a hurried scrawl—I waited for you. Maybe tomorrow?
I wanted to scream. Where were the batteries? (And in the back of my mind: Who’d written the note? A boy? Waited to do what?) Just then, my phone rang—Pak again—and I saw 8:22 on the screen and remembered. The alarm. The oxygen.
When I answered, I meant to explain how I hadn’t turned off the oxygen but would soon, and that was no big deal, he sometimes ran the oxygen over an hour, right? But my words came out differently. Like vomit—outpouring in one stream, uncontrollable. “Mary is nowhere,” I said. “We’re doing all this for her, and she’s never here, and I need her, I need her help to find new DVD batteries before TJ busts his head open.”
“You always think the worst of her, but she’s here, helping me,” he said. “And the batteries are under the house kitchen sink, but don’t leave the patients. I’ll send Mary to grab them. Mary, go, right now. Take four D batteries to the barn. I’ll come in one min—”
I hung up. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.
I ran to the kitchen sink. The batteries were there like he said, in a bag I’d assumed was trash, under work gloves covered in dirt and soot. They were clean just yesterday. What had Pak been doing?
I shook my head. The batteries. I had to hurry back to TJ.
When I ran outside, an unfamiliar scent—like charred wet wood—permeated the air and stung my nose. It was getting dark, harder to see, but I saw Pak in the distance, running toward the barn.
Mary was ahead of him, sprinting. I called out, “Mary, slow down. I found the batteries,” but she kept running, not toward the house, but to the barn. “Mary, stop,” I said, but she didn’t. She ran past the barn door, to the back side. I didn’t know why, but it scared me, her being there, and I called again, her Korean name this time, softer. “Meh-hee-yah,” I said, and ran to her. She turned. Something about her face stopped me. It seemed to glow somehow. An orange light coated her skin and shimmered as if she were standing directly in front of the setting sun. I wanted to touch her face and tell her, “You are beautiful.”
From her direction, I heard a noise. It sounded like crackling, but softer and muffled, the way a flock of geese might sound taking off for flight, hundreds of wings flapping at once to scamper skyward. I thought I saw them, a curtain of gray rippling in the wind and rising higher and higher in the dusky violet sky, but I blinked, and the sky was empty. I ran toward the sound, and I saw it then, what she’d seen but I hadn’t, what she’d run toward.
Flames.
Smoke.
The back wall of the barn—on fire.
I don’t know why I didn’t run or scream, why Mary didn’t, either. I wanted to. But I could only walk slowly, carefully, one step at a time, getting closer, my eyes transfixed by the flames in orange and red—fluttering, leaping, and switching places like partners in a step dance.
When the boom sounded, my knees buckled and I fell. But I never took my eyes off my daughter. Every night, when I turn off the light and close my eyes for sleep, I see her, my Meh-hee, in that moment. Her body flings up like a rag doll and arcs through the air. Gracefully. Delicately. Just before she lands on the ground with a soft thud, I see her ponytail, bouncing high. The way it used to when she was a little girl, jumping rope.
A YEAR LATER
THE TRIAL: DAY ONE
Monday, August 17, 2009
YOUNG YOO
SHE FELT LIKE A BRIDE walking into the courtroom. Certainly, her wedding was the last time—the only time—that a roomful of people had fallen silent and turned to stare as she entered. If it weren’t for the variety in hair color and the snippets of whispers in English as she walked down the aisle—“Look, the owners,” “The daughter was in a coma for months, poor thing,” “He’s paralyzed, so awful”—she might have thought she was still in Korea.
The small courtroom even looked like an old church, with creaky wooden pews on both sides of the aisle. She kept her head down, just as she had at her wedding twenty years ago; she wasn’t usually the focus of attention, and it felt wrong. Modesty, blending in, invisibility: those were the virtues of wives, not notoriety and gaudiness. Wasn’t that why brides wore veils—to protect them from stares, to mute the redness of their cheeks? She glanced to the sides. On the right, behind the prosecution, she glimpsed familiar faces, those of their patients’ families.
The patients had all gathered together only once: last July, at the orientation outside the barn. Her husband had opened the doors to show the freshly painted blue chamber. “This,” Pak said, looking proud, “is Miracle Submarine. Pure oxygen. Deep pressure. Healing. Together.” Everyone clapped. Mothers cried. And now, here were the same people, somber, the hope of miracle gone from their faces, replaced by the curiosity of people reaching for tabloids in supermarket lines. That and pity—for her or themselves, she didn’t know. She’d expected anger, but they smiled as she walked by, and she had to remind herself that she was a victim here. She was not the defendant, not the one they blamed for the explosion that killed two patients. She told herself what Pak told her every day—their absence from the barn that night didn’t cause the fire, and he couldn’t have prevented the explosion even if he’d stayed with the patients—and tried to smile back. Their support was a good thing. She knew that. But it felt undeserved, wrong, like a prize won by cheating, and instead of buoying her, it weighed her down with worry that God would see and correct the injustice, make her pay for her lies some other way.
When Young reached the wooden railing, she fought her impulse to hop across and sit at the defense table. She sat with her family behind the prosecutor, next to Matt and Teresa, two of the people trapped in Miracle Submarine that night. She hadn’t seen them in a long time, not since the hospital. But no one said hi. They all looked down. They were the victims.