“Oh, Yoona,” Daiyu says, and I can’t tell if she’s agreeing with Lloyd or understanding that I’ve said the wrong thing to him because his face reddens.
“Jaesung would want you to raise this baby,” I add, because the gun is clenched in his fist. I’m sorry, but I had to say it. Does it matter? Lies will be told in a hundred ways in this room. They already have been.
“Did you say someone is pregnant?” Sax’s voice.
Lloyd turns his attention to the phone again and shouts, YOU’RE NOT GETTING THAT ONE.
“That’s fine,” Sax urges. “It just changes things—if she’s really pregnant, we can tell the president. He’ll want to know. It’s more than four now—it’s five, right, Lloyd? There’s a fetus. You with me?”
IT’S FIVE. TELL HIM FIVE.
53
My mother explained it to me, as an apology, when my sister wasn’t home, that my mother had married a man before our father who lived in her neighborhood in Seoul. I don’t know why she thought she had to apologize, but she called it an apology. “I’m sorry, I want to say I’m sorry,” she said. “This man, who was very kind, he died right after we were married. There was a terrible sickness that winter, we all got sick, but he didn’t recover. I met your father during this time. And we got married sooner than was customary, because he was leaving for the United States. He was never sure about me. That kind of uncertainty can wear someone down. He felt he was second best. And we were too young. I couldn’t work with a baby, and I had no family here. If we’d had a little time before the baby came . . .”
“That baby was Willa?”
“No, I lost that baby in the middle of the pregnancy. We were relieved, both of us. But I think your father thought it was his fault. We couldn’t eat as well as we should have. I was tired all the time. People can romanticize babies all they want, but babies take a lot of time and money. I was glad Willa didn’t come for another two years. But your father, he can never do enough to deserve us. I don’t think he ever forgave himself.”
I wasn’t convinced my father’s pain over some unborn child was at the heart of his rage. But I understood her message. I helped her apply foundation around her bruised eye and decided I’d never have a baby. There was too much pain in the world already. Don’t think I didn’t imagine for a second what we could have had, you and me. But I couldn’t dwell on it. You would never come back to me. And the pregnancy wasn’t real except as a ticking time bomb, a group of cells that were multiplying over and over like a tumor in my body that I had to get rid of as soon as possible. I felt it at night, clawing its way, grabbing at everything around it and taking over my body.
54
It was Heather who told us about the apartheid protests. I was in the dining hall on Monday when Heather handed me a red flyer. “There’s a meeting tonight,” she said. I read: “Divest Now! Your Tuition Supports Apartheid in South Africa. Arts Quad, 8 PM. Be There!!!”
Heather and Daiyu were eager to go. Faye was curious. I hesitated at first, but I had no reason not to join them. I couldn’t go back to my room alone. Panic stretched through me. It had started with the phone call to your house, and though it had loosened up after my conversation with Lloyd, since Lloyd hadn’t arrived, it had become a taut wire in my chest that threatened to cut me in half.
I stood with my friends, and we cheered that night when a woman with a bullhorn stood on the steps leading to Theodore Weston’s larger-than-life-size statue. I looked at the sky full of stars above us. There was talk about making the administration listen, and I listened. I heard them say that South Africa’s racist policy was being supported by money from our school, our tuition, and that people of color were being denied basic human rights. Someone set off firecrackers, and I hit the ground so fast I bruised my elbows and knees. I heard Heather and Faye at my side asking if I was okay, but I couldn’t get up just yet. Finally, Heather moved my arms away and looked at my face, and I realized how worried she was. I said I was fine, couldn’t explain it, just startled. I saw them exchange looks.
They planned to build a living monument, a replica of the conditions people of color in South Africa had to live in. We were handed hammers and a bag of nails to build a house in a shantytown. The boy on the podium said we’d make a statement right here on our campus, since Weston College was investing in companies that did business with South Africa and therefore supporting the South African government.
“What if they arrest us?” I asked.
Heather shrugged. “We’re not getting arrested right now,” she said. “We’re in a public space. No big deal.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” Faye said. “But my dad’s a lawyer. He says they can’t arrest all of us.”
“I’ve got to look something up in the library, and then I’ll come back,” I told them.
“That’s fine, leave us to do all the work,” Heather joked.
I ended up meeting Serena for coffee. She was eager to share her exploits and ask me questions about love. I felt sorry for her that she didn’t know when she was looking for it, because that’s what I sensed behind her questions. She wanted love before she gave her life over to music. They didn’t have to be mutually exclusive, did they? But she seemed to believe it could only be so. It had been three days since I’d spoken to Lloyd about you. Each night I picked up the phone, dialed his number, and hung up.
55
Faye had a boyfriend who was from Turkey. He was a philosophy major who talked about kismet. You would have called it unmyeong: fate. I wondered how someone like you, who believed in fighting for your rights, could believe in something as passive as fate, as curses that couldn’t be broken. How did you know?
56
Heather’s face is still partially bloody from the first bullet that Lloyd fired in the room an hour ago. Only an hour, but it feels as if it’s already been the entire day. Next is Daiyu, whose hair is still tangled, whose face has dried mud on it still, streaked with dirt and tears, and she’s slumped forward—how much of the night was she held by crazy Lloyd? And then Faye, who sits with her back straight, but I can see the pinched expression in her cheeks, and I know she’s scared for her life.
YOU DON’T THINK I’M SERIOUS. I’LL SHOW YOU SERIOUS.
I hold my breath.
Sax’s voice comes through the receiver. “You’re holding girls hostage in a college dorm with weapons, Lloyd. We’re taking you seriously. Work with me here.”
FUCK. CALL ME IN TWO MINUTES.
Lloyd sets the handset on the receiver. More gently than he’s ever handled anything, and it scares me more than the violence.