Kyung pulls his hand away. “Just shut up, Gillian.”
He’s never dismissed her like this before, not even as a joke. She isn’t the kind of woman to take that from anyone, which is what he liked about her in the beginning, what he likes about her still. He waits for a response, but the longer nothing happens, the more he begins to accept the fact that she’s given him a bye. When she opens her book again, he sits back in his seat, not certain if he feels terrible or relieved.
At half past six, a doctor appears in the waiting room. He’s an Indian man with dark skin and a full head of shock-white hair. Something about him is different from the others, the ones who wandered in to see what the commotion was about and then left. This one is searching. His eyes sweep the crowd slowly, stopping when they land on Kyung.
“Will you please come with me, Mr. Cho?”
The police back up to clear an aisle, their bodies parting like some strange, biblical sea. Kyung tries not to look at their faces as he and Gillian pass. All he feels in this gauntlet of men is pity. He realizes this is what everyone has been waiting for, the moment in which he learns how bad is bad. Near the end of the row, Connie takes a step forward, volunteering to join them, as if he’d ever thought twice about Mae or Jin in the past. Kyung squeezes Gillian’s hand, hopeful she knows him well enough to understand the message he’s trying to send. Keep him away from me.
“Should I come with?” he hears Connie ask.
“No. Not right now, Dad.” Gillian pats him gently on the chest, her voice lowered to minimize his embarrassment. “I’ll let you know.”
The doctor leads them into a break room and shuts the door behind him. Despite the tables and chairs, no one bothers to sit—Kyung has been sitting long enough. He and Gillian stand next to the window, which overlooks the hospital parking lot below, and just beyond it, the back end of a car dealership. The doctor leans awkwardly on the corner of the table, resting an expensive brown loafer on one of the chairs while he pages through his records. His name is long and unpronounceable, both first and last. Kyung studies the tag clipped to his white coat, trying to parse out the syllables. Ra-jen-dra-ku-mar Ba-nu-su-bra-man-i-am. He should know the name of the man who’s treating his parents, but as he listens to the doctor introduce himself, he still can’t make sense of what to call him.
“Your father’s in stable condition now. His CAT scans and vitals are all good, and we’ve injected an anesthetic into the area around his ribs, which seems to be making him more comfortable.”
“What about my mother?”
“She’s resting now. I suspect she’ll sleep through the night. Normally, I would have let the police talk to her before using that much sedative, but the physical exam was—challenging.”
“She’ll be all right though, won’t she?” Gillian asks.
The doctor nods, but Kyung doesn’t like the way his expression changes. People who work in emergency rooms are supposed to have a high tolerance for the worst kinds of injuries. The discomfort on the doctor’s face suggests that he’s still struggling with Mae’s.
“Physically, her injuries weren’t very severe. Mostly lacerations and bruises. A sprained ankle. All the same, I’d like to keep her here a few days for observation.”
There’s a clock above the water cooler, an old-fashioned one with black hands and a red line that sweeps through the seconds. Kyung has been at the hospital all afternoon. It was light when he arrived, and now the sky outside is turning a deep, ink-washed blue. The streetlights are all lit, their halos swimming with mosquitoes. Six hours, he thinks. Six hours and no one will confirm what he already knows.
“They raped her, didn’t they?”
The doctor lowers himself into a chair, settling into the molded plastic as if preparing for a longer conversation. “There’s evidence of that, yes.” He doesn’t look at Kyung as he says this. Instead, he stares at a scuff mark on the floor. “I’ve taken all the necessary precautions against STDs and HIV—antibiotics and antiretrovirals—but I opted against the morning-after pill since she’s postmenopausal. Like I said, she’ll recover from the cuts and bruises soon enough, but everything else … I think she’ll need quite a lot of counseling to work through.”
Kyung rests his forehead on the window, gently tapping his head against the glass. Postmenopausal, STDs, HIV, morning-after pill. These are words that don’t belong together in any sentence. He doesn’t understand what kind of people would rape a fifty-six-year-old woman. Even the word: “rape.” It rings and rings in his ears, and he can’t make it stop.
“Enough, Kyung. That’s enough.”
Gillian is digging her fingernails into his skin. The doctor is trying to pin back his arms.