“Then take me with you. I have nothing here. Take me with you.”

“I can’t. It’d be easier to hide by myself. It’s safer for you this way.” He paused, gulping breath. “Did you take the gun?”

She didn’t answer, heart racing.

“Be careful with that. It’s loaded, okay? Don’t take it out of the bag unless you need it. Protect yourself, okay? Be careful.”

“I can handle him myself.” Her voice shook like an earthquake, rattling every bone in her body.

“Just, be careful. I’m—I’m sorry. I love you.” He hung up the phone.

She threw the receiver, which hit the wall with a loud crash. The sound of the dial tone drove her to pick the receiver up and smash it into the phone with a crack, crack, a hollow plastic sound. She didn’t care anymore if she broke it. This was the time now. This was the time to end it all. She could hang herself in her room. She had sheets. She could tie them around the door, slip them around her neck and end everything, the way she should’ve ended things before coming to this strange country, before Mr. Park could ruin all of them, before, before . . .

Before the Ferris wheel, before the salt in the air, the taste of hot chocolate, once again, falling prey to the dazzling deception of the world, the blush and the bloom inside her chest.

But she could kill Mr. Park before taking her own life. She could find him in his office. She had the gun. She could end him. She could end him in front of everyone. Who knew how many he had terrorized? How many he had cannibalized for his own gain? How many of them had he hurt? How many more lives could he ruin? She had nothing to lose now.

Someone pounded on the door.

Mina cried out, “Not now.”

“Are you okay?” Mrs. Baek asked.

“Go away.”

She could tell that Mrs. Baek still stood on the other side, waiting for her, for anything.

“Go away,” she screamed. She grabbed a pillow and threw it at the door.

Mrs. Baek tried the knob. Finding it locked, she pushed her way through the flimsy wood.

Shock and terror distorted Mrs. Baek’s face at the sight of Mina on the floor.

Mina saw herself through Mrs. Baek’s eyes. She wanted to kill herself even more.

Mrs. Baek knelt to the ground beside her, trying to help her stand up.

“Get your hands off me.” Mina vomited a yellowish fluid, right onto her own chest.

Mrs. Baek wrapped her arms around Mina, dragging her to the restroom where she had her sit on the f loor beside the toilet. Mina threw up the sad remains of last night’s paltry dinner, the rice porridge. Mrs. Baek grabbed a towel and wiped down Mina’s face, covered in tears and snot like a child’s. She then handed the towel to Mina, who blew her nose.

She couldn’t stop crying, her breath rushing in and out.

Both of them knew as they sat on the floor beside the toilet that Mina was pregnant.

Margot

Winter 2014

THE MONDAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS, MARGOT WAS FINALLY feeling better. She had been in bed for the past several days, overcome by weakness and nausea. Was it simply grief and exhaustion, the beginnings of the flu, or poisoning? Miguel had offered to drive her to a clinic or hospital, but she had refused, unwilling to deal with the worries of insurance, inor out-of-network.

And for the first time in a while, she woke up early this morning with the urge to prepare breakfast, sunny-side up eggs on rice. Afterward, she cleaned out her mother’s kitchen, emptying cupboards and drawers, still sticky from a life rushed between work and home. The nutty dark amber of sesame oil—heavy and clinging—remained in a half-full bottle. A squeeze bottle of honey—crystallized into sugar, rough on the tongue—had glued itself down, leaving a dark footprint, a sweet oval on the lining of a shelf.

Margot had already touched most of everything in the kitchen with a practical intimacy her entire life—no secrets, no other lives. But even the utensils, a hodgepodge of stainless steel, became tiny monuments—sharp, reflective, serrated, and curved with feeling.

Growing up, she had hated using chopsticks. She had refused them, seated at the table with her mother—different instruments in their hands—as if the inches between them were as expansive as a continental divide, the dark rift of an ocean. And yet, despite this daily breach, this rupture between mother and daughter, hands posed around shapes foreign to each other, she remembered the bowls of rice her mother had fed her, the banchan, the stews, the fruit she had meticulously peeled and sliced, and how food was perhaps the most practical and necessary means by which Margot could access the stories and memories, the sap running inside her mother.

They had spoken different languages—drifting further and further apart as Margot had gotten older. Margot’s mother never learned much English in Koreatown, didn’t have to, and Margot, who spent so little time with her mother besides working long hours at the store, distanced herself from Korean culture, which she associated with alienness and poverty and war. She wanted to live like “real Americans” on television with their clean surfaces, their walls without cracks and chipped paint, their dishwashers and shiny appliances. She wanted to live like they did in books—those precarious and fragile skylines in Mrs. Baek’s apartment, paper like teeth once white, now yellow—with beauty and complex feelings, agency, choice interrupted by fate, and vice versa.

Her mother’s life seemed to have little self-determination at all, only the burden of getting by, knowing that no matter how hard she had worked, she would never leave that apartment. And that was exactly what had happened, wasn’t it? Her mother never left that place. A woman, alone, fallen to tragedy and fate, men who would leave and destroy her.

She was like a lot of us. Lonely. But that’s what it’s like for women like us.

The foul stench of the body—bile and rotting fruit.

But was it an accident? Or intentional? There was still Mrs. Kim and her driver, Sungmin. The surprising push of his hand, as if Margot was just an animal who had wandered in off the street. And where was the landlord still? He couldn’t be trusted either.

Retiring to the couch, Margot sketched in her notebook a single fork on one page and a set of chopsticks on the next so that she could flip between them, their shapes. She wanted to live somewhere in that movement, like the beat of a dove’s wing.

There were so many things that she could never explain to her mother. Even if they had spoken the same languages, the chasm that divided them would have still been too great. In some ways, Margot’s success in this country, her independence, relied on this distance from her mother—her poverty, her foreignness, the alienation of her life, the heaviness of her thankless work, the hours and minutes, ignored and even reviled by the world. And there were so many ways to be crushed, to have your heart broken navigating that canyon between them—what they could not say, what they had said to wound each other.

But maybe only here in these pages, in these drawings, if Margot had shown more commitment to their relationship, if she had been unafraid of commitment, could her mother have understood: that Margot would never leave her in the end, that she would, despite the distance that separated them, never let go of her hand.

After finishing the kitchen, Margot cleaned her mother’s room, where she once again found the sneakers covered in fine dust, the condom wrapper beneath the bed. She threw the discarded, forgotten objects away and placed the shoes in the garbage bag, knowing now that these were remnants of her mother’s reunion with her father, Mr. Kim.

On her mother’s bed, that sad teddy bear, dingy with time, clung to a satin red heart attached to its round cartoon paws. She squeezed the heart and felt something hard inside. Her pulse began to pound. She tore apart the seam, sloppy and hand stitched.

A piece of paper with a box number and a bank’s name and a small key fell out.

She ripped open the rest of the bear but didn’t find anything else. She scavenged through her mother’s belongings, checking the pockets and the linings even more carefully now for anything, any clue that could somehow not eliminate but ease the pain, the barrage of questions clawing inside her head. She wanted answers now. She wanted her mother to be alive so that she could finally ask her all the things she had always wanted to ask, all the things she found herself too frightened to ask before this. Her mother’s life and her past had always been so carefully guarded. It always felt like the wrong move, look, touch, or words would break her mother forever.

As a child of four or five seated in the lukewarm tub of milky Dove soap–scented water, scratching the petals of the anti-slip stickers beneath her, Margot had asked, “Where is my father?”

Her mother, knees on the bathroom floor, had winced, pausing to reflect. “I don’t know. He left us a long time ago.”