“But he already fired you.” Her heart pounded in her chest, her head.

“If that’s enough for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know for sure, but my sense is that he had something to do with Mario getting sent back.”

“What?”

“I don’t have any proof. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.” He shook his head. “The other day, he made this comment about what a good worker Lupe is. Then he said something about Mario not being able to keep himself out of trouble, that he wasn’t smart enough to mind his own business.” A tear leaked out of Mr. Kim’s eye. “I didn’t press him any further. But it’s like he was trying to tell me something. It was like a warning. I don’t know.”

“Why would he call the police on you when you’re the one who was trying to help Lupe? He’s the criminal.”

“Because he knows that she would not call the police. She could risk being deported. He could make up some kind of story about how I assaulted him. She has children. She would never go to the police.”

“But I would say something. I could say something. I was there for everything.”

“He’s more powerful.” His nostrils flared. “It’s his story that gets heard, you see?”

Carefully, she pressed the adhesive of the bandage peeling off his forehead. The cotton had grown brown. She closed her eyes and an explosion blasted in her head. There was no mercy. Even the silence itself was preparation for the most horrible sounds. She had cried out at the people, desperate to save themselves, rushing by her. Umma, she had screamed through her tears. Umma. She couldn’t get the screams and the whistles of the bombs out of her mind. The earth stabbed her knees when she fell to the ground.

She imagined blood spurting out of Mr. Park’s neck.

“I better lie low for a while.” Mr. Kim gripped her hand, nudging her back to the present.

“What do you mean?” She touched his arm in a gesture that urged him to lie back down with her.

“Hide. I don’t know.” His eyes wide. “I should call Lupe first, make sure she’s okay.”

“What? Where are you going to go? This doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know.” He covered his face with his hand.

“Are you thinking of leaving town?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t leave town.” She wanted to say, You can’t leave me now.

“I can’t get arrested. I can’t . . .”

“Nothing will happen. Why do you keep thinking something like that could happen?”

He rubbed between his brows. “I never—I never told you this. When I first came to this country, I came on a student visa, and I let it expire. By then I had given up on everything, and then I found this job.”

“You’re not supposed to be here?”

Neither was she. And the concept of who was and who was not supposed to be here perplexed Mina. Hadn’t he been working all this time? Hadn’t he been paying his taxes, too? Hadn’t the wars, the uprisings, the slaughter in the streets that had destroyed their families and homes, driven them here to this country that glittered untouched by the bombs it dropped everywhere else, been enough? And why did the law take any opportunity to either lock people up or kick them out when the worst kind of people, like Mr. Park, should be in prison rather than getting rich off the labor of everybody else, the terror of everybody else?

Rushing to the bathroom, she knelt in front of the toilet. Nothing came, only a trail of mucous that clung to her mouth. She hadn’t eaten at all that day. The square pink tiles spun as she tried to steady herself standing up. She remembered those days after her husband and daughter died, those days of palms and knees dragging on a wet floor, of brushing her teeth with an index finger because she had already thrown all their toothbrushes in the trash. There were pills in the cabinet that she had jammed in her mouth, forced dry down her throat. Yet here she was, six thousand miles away, still confused, still lost. Would she ever find home?

Entering the bedroom, she jumped at the sight of Mr. Kim seated on the edge of the mattress in the low glow of the lamp, holding a gun—small, black, and matte.

“What are you doing?” she asked, breathless. “Put that away.”

“I want you to have this,” he said. “I’ll show you how—”

“No, I don’t want that. What do I need that for? I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Please put that away.”

He contemplated the gun, shook his head, and returned it to its holster and bag on the bed.

“Why do you even . . .” But she didn’t bother finishing her question. Of course he owned a gun. She had never seen so many guns on men who were not in the military until coming to America. From what were they all protecting themselves? He could hurt himself, if not someone else. She had to take it away from him somehow. It was too easy to hurt someone. She couldn’t lose him. She couldn’t lose anyone again. “Could you please—put that away somewhere? I can’t be in this room with it there.”

He slid open his nightstand drawer, tucked the bag inside.

She closed her eyes, inhaled, and placed her head in her hands. “Should I go to work tomorrow?”

He sighed. “Yes, I think you should.”

“I can’t. I can’t ever go back.” Her lips trembled. She couldn’t hold in her tears anymore.

“I think you should pretend that . . . you weren’t there. You have no idea what happened. Did he see you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“That’s good.” He paused. “I think it’s better if you pretend nothing happened so that he doesn’t think you were there, right?”

“I can’t do that.”

“You have to.” His eyes glowed wet with fear or some profound resignation or both. “His face was bleeding. I probably broke his nose. I doubt he’ll be there tomorrow. If you don’t feel safe, leave, okay? But I think if you’re missing from work, everyone will assume you were involved somehow, and we don’t want that right now. We should keep you out of it. We’ll keep you out of it, okay?”

“Why? Why should I go?”

“You need the work for now.” His voice cracked. “We can all find different jobs later, but you need the work, okay? I know this is terrible. I know, but someone has to . . . We can’t all not go back.”

“I know.”

“Can you do it? Can you go back to work tomorrow?”

Margot

Fall 2014

THE MORNING AFTER VISITING MRS. BAEK AT HER apartment—the cramped living room that smelled of used bookstores and cucumber cold cream—and then riding the Ferris wheel at the pier by herself, Margot woke up early to once again drive to Calabasas, which might take almost an hour in weekday traffic.

The question of her mother’s death zigzagged in Margot’s mind. Regardless of what Mrs. Baek had said—that she had closed her store because she had been struggling financially—her stalker, Mr. Park, with his fake smile and lingering eyes, seemed increasingly dangerous, capable of physically harming someone. But even with the yelling that the landlord had heard the night of her mother’s death, she couldn’t connect Mr. Park with her mother yet. And if she dug deeper into Mr. Park’s life, if she confronted him somehow, could she be responsible for him retaliating against Mrs. Baek and the waitress who had disclosed his behavior? These women were doing their best to navigate their own lives within circumstances driven, stories told by men. Margot also had to protect them.

She was also still upset that, in those final months of his life, her mother had not connected her with her father, as if she had been hoarding him all to herself. Perhaps her mother had everyone’s best interest in mind, but why did her mother get to decide? And she had left unexpectedly the tangle of this net for Margot to unravel by herself.

With her foot on the accelerator, Margot needed to know her father now.

She wanted to know what he had done all those years after he left her mother and why he had fled Los Angeles. These were hard questions, questions she wasn’t even sure she was ready to ask out loud. But she had been presented with this rare opportunity, and in a way, she had been preparing for the answers her entire life.

Maybe that’s what she had been doing this entire time—hardening herself for the truth. Some questions were never meant to be answered, yet ideally, pursuing them might at least shed light on how much you valued yourself, the need you might have to tell your own story, however fragmented it might be. It was okay to yearn for the impossible every now and then as long as in the yearning you discovered something about yourself.

And she was admitting to herself now that all those years of not caring about who her father was, brushing off the idea of him, was a mask she wore to deny what she really wanted—to learn more about him and her mother, to understand her origins. Were her parents in love? Was it a one-night stand? An affair?