Here is where I tell you I told Lloyd things about my family that I didn’t tell you in Korea. He knows about my father’s rages. One night after he returned to Weston, after Tongsu Cho said he didn’t remember you or Lloyd or me, when we despaired, my mother called on the phone. After I hung up, Lloyd asked me what was wrong, and I said I felt as if I was failing her and you. And Lloyd’s reaction that night and now in the hospital was the one I didn’t want you to have. Where you looked at my family with prejudice and disdain. And me too—where you looked at me that way too, as a coward who had failed to protect my mother. I wanted you to see me always the way you had in Korea, as someone who stood up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves.
79
My mother used to tell me and Willa when we were little girls how my father suffered. “Forgive him,” she said. “He loves you, and he wants the best for you, but it’s too much. This world is too much for us.” Those were the nights the television flashed lights on the walls of the living room, and we had to be quiet, but we had to be in the room too, to keep our father company after his long day at work. Our mother peeled oranges, taking off the thin skin of each section for pure pulp.
80
Nothing prepared me for seeing my mother in the intensive care room full of curtains and machines. She was on a ventilator, and seeing her with her eyes closed and her facial muscles slack, I realized I’d never seen her asleep in my entire life. How could that be?
“She looks like that because she’s not asleep,” the nurse explained as if reading my mind, adjusting buttons and dials on the machines around us.
“Can she hear us?” Willa said.
“They sedate patients before putting in the ventilator,” she answered and then left us. I held my mother’s hand, trying not to stare at the two intravenous lines taped down to the top. The skin around the tape gleamed as if my mother had applied her daily moisturizing cream minutes earlier. Her tender, smooth skin was her particular beauty. An irony that my father had damaged it routinely. I turned away. The doctor came in and said we would have to wait and see now. They’d done all they could.
When we returned to the waiting room to send our father in, Albert was talking with him. Albert recognized me and gave me a hug when I walked over. “I’m sorry,” he said. I’d had a fantasy when I was a child that Albert would marry Willa, and they’d make me their child and move me away from our father’s fits. She and Albert were four years older than I was. Albert was the perfect peacemaker. He’d stood up for me in school once when some kids my age made fun of what I had brought for lunch. With his Clark Kent glasses, Albert had been my idea of a superhero. Willa didn’t consider him dating material, though they were in the same grade and it was obvious he had eyes only for her. I was glad for his sake that she was spending more time with him. Albert was a good friend.
I saw my sister squeeze his hand and drop it in a hurry. Willa took charge. She figured out a schedule where she and Dad would go home for a few hours and return at dinnertime for us. And then I’d go get some rest and sleep at the house and come back for her and our dad in the morning. “You’ll need your sleep if you have to drive back,” she said, and she nodded toward Lloyd, who was still sitting by the door. I regretted my earlier harsh dismissal of him. “What are you going to do with him?” she said.
“He convinced me to come and drove me here. He’s trying to be respectful,” I explained, because I knew Willa was judging him the way I had.
“Good friend,” Albert summed up. His opinion meant a lot to me, and I was glad when he walked over with me. Lloyd stood up and extended his hand to Albert.
“I’ve heard about you,” Lloyd said, which made me blush. Albert’s amused eyes flicked in my direction for a second.
“Thanks for helping out,” Albert returned. Lloyd relaxed. “So I hear you kids have the first shift? Want me to bring you anything from the real world? Real coffee?” He lifted his eyebrows. I told him that would be perfect.
Later, when Willa, my dad, and Albert returned to the hospital, Lloyd and I went to the house. Every hour or so I’d gone in to check on my mother, who remained unconscious. It rattled me to see her that way.
We had enough money to go out for watery soup, crackers, and coffee at a corner café. Lloyd and I split a piece of chocolate cake that was so dry it crumbled into tiny pieces—but it bought us a place to sit and try not to panic about my mother’s condition for a few hours.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in fact in an alternate universe. Somewhere out there, I was someplace else, and my mother wasn’t in the hospital for pneumonia. The waiter, Mike, yelled that it was good to see me again, and I thought how different I was from a few months ago before I’d gone to Korea, before I’d met you and Lloyd. Now my mother was on the line, and dread hit me like a sledgehammer as it had at the clinic.
“He knows you?” Lloyd said. “Jaesung would be surprised.”
“Why?” I said.
“You’re not listening,” Lloyd said and peered at me as if I’d fainted, and I wondered if I’d lost consciousness of this moment. Time was folding in on itself.
“What are you talking about, Lloyd?” I tried to make my voice brisk and authoritative.
He got up, slid over to my side of the booth, and gave me a hug, but I pulled away. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, but he seemed to be talking to himself more than me. “Listen, I think we lost them when we drove here. Maybe that’s the thing to do, keep moving. I hadn’t thought of that. Only way to be safe.” I let him mumble, but I wasn’t listening.
At the house there was an awkward moment concerning where we’d sleep. Even though my father and Willa weren’t home, I couldn’t sleep with Lloyd near me, not even in my room. I didn’t think he’d assume he would, but he followed me to my room and folded back the covers. “I’m exhausted,” he announced. “We need to talk.” He lay down on my bed and put his hands behind his head like a pillow.
Fury curled my hands. I twisted the doorknob. “Get out, Lloyd. Can’t you see I need a break?”
“A break? Do you think those men are taking a break from tracking us? Is this some game to you?”
“It’s my house, Lloyd. My sister and father could walk in at any time.”
“I know you’re mad at me, but let’s get past it. For now, while you’re in this crisis with your mother, I think we should calm down. I won’t abandon you, no matter how hard you push me away. Friends don’t do that to other friends. I know you’re quick to cut ties. Jaesung said you had a problem with that, so I’ll pretend you didn’t say those fucked-up things to me back at Weston. I’ll give you another chance.”
“Stop talking about him.”
“Why? Because you’d rather he were dead?”