“Where did he go?” Margot asked the ceiling above, sloshing the water with her feet.

“I don’t know.” Her mother adjusted her legs, hands covered in foam. “I never had a father, too. You ask too many questions.” A tear slid down her face, quick and silent.

Tilting her head back as her mother poured water from above, careful not to splash her face, Margot yearned to push the tears back in her mother’s eyes. It was excruciating to watch her mother, who worked tirelessly and silently day after day, emote, expose herself at once. In these rare moments of great tenderness and fragility, their sanity rattling like glass cups in a cupboard during a quake, Margot learned that families were our greatest source of pain, whether they had lost or abandoned us or simply scrubbed our heads.

All of these feelings had turned into a kind of rage when Margot became a teenager, when the world demanded answers: Where is your dad? You don’t have a dad? What does your mom do for a living? You’ve been living in that apartment for how long? Questions that were judgments around what she and her mother could not afford or control.

It was all about control, wasn’t it?

Money could make the world intimately spotless. That was the illusion.

Kneeling on the carpet, Margot contemplated the small key on the table beside her mother’s bed. A key was such an obvious symbol, yet sometimes the truth was always there, right in front of your face, until you were ready to swallow its shape and all its edges, until you knew you were strong enough to bear its weight.

It had been eight years since she had moved to Seattle, eight years of half-understood conversations over the phone and visits during the holidays that revolved around work. Margot had believed they could go on this way forever, that this distance hurt them both the least.

But she now knew there was so much truth undisclosed. Like a tree that had lost its leaves, silently bracing itself against wind and cold, the sap inside of them could, under the right conditions, push the green, those tender revelations, out of them once more.

With her mother’s safety-deposit key and papers in her purse, Margot opened the apartment door and looked behind her to observe the condition of her mother’s home—donation bags everywhere and piles of junk in the center of the room. The scene both satisfied and terrified her at once. She had finally found a way to get rid of this place, this apartment that had taunted her with its sadness, its poverty, with the dirty windows, the misshapen and faded couch and the coffee table with rings from mugs like wet footprints that had dried on the surface. But then another part of her wanted to throw her body onto those piles and stay there forever like a waiting room until her mother came back, or until the universe somehow delivered the answers that she needed to make decisions, get on with life like the rest of the world. She locked the door behind her.

In the dark and musty stairwell, the landlord climbed the steps, gripping the handrail.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I left you a message about my mom?”

“Oh, yes, yes, sorry. I’ve had so much going on—”

“Why did you lie to the police officer?” Margot interrupted.

“Lie?”

“The police officer?” She folded her arms across her chest. “Officer Choi? He said that you didn’t hear a thing from my mother’s apartment. You told me—”

He smiled as if amused and combed his hand through his thick gray hair. “Didn’t I say that the police weren’t going to do anything? There’s no need to get them involved. I don’t need them hanging around the building, scaring my tenants. What good is that going to do for your mom?”

“But don’t you think—”

“We don’t need police around here.”

“Yeah, but what about my mom? Don’t you think if someone could’ve killed her, that your tenants would care about finding the guy?”

“Shhh,” he said, annoyed. He came up the stairs closer to her. “I’m just trying to run a business, okay? It’s not like I don’t care.”

For a few seconds, she imagined pushing him down the stairwell. His thin-limbed body tumbling to the ground. His head cracked against a step. She flinched at the image, the cruelty. It would look like an accident.

“I just don’t think you can trust the police,” he said. “Why risk yourself? Why get involved? Don’t you think enough people have been hurt? Enough people have been hurt already.”

“You made me look like a liar.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about that. I’m trying—” His voice cracked. “I’m trying really hard to keep things together. Believe me. I’m always about to lose this place.” Tears filled his eyes. “If I thought talking to the police would help your mother, I would, I really would, but I honestly don’t think it would make a difference. I’ve seen a lot in my years.”

Margot hesitated. Her mother might’ve done the same. She might’ve felt the same way.

“Maybe I don’t do the best job around here, but I’m trying my best,” he continued. “I know no one likes the landlord. I didn’t even want to get into any of this—it was my wife’s idea. And now I’m stuck like everyone else. What else can I do? No one would hire me now. Nobody wants a guy like me. Nobody wants any of us, you see?”

“What do you mean?” Margot asked.

“If they could have their way, they’d tear down the whole thing, make it into fancy condos or something. Get rid of us all. They like the work that we do, but they don’t like our faces or language, you see? It’s a big conspiracy and now we’re all stuck. There’s an episode of Twilight Zone—you wouldn’t remember—but the one with the toys that are all trapped in a bin, a big cylinder. That’s us.”

“Well, I can see that,” she said. It was obvious that she had reached the limit of what the landlord could provide regarding her mother’s death and he didn’t seem particularly guilty or capable of harm himself. And now she needed to get to the bank, before it closed, with the safety-deposit key and papers, ripped from the teddy bear’s heart. She climbed down the stairs past him. “Let me know if you remember anything else, okay?”

“She has a friend, right? Lady. Red lipstick. Maybe she can help you?”

She paused, turning to face him. “She has. She already has.”

“She has problems, too, or something, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just remember, one time, she was here—maybe in September or October, something like that. I saw her park on the street and it looked like an older man was sitting in his car, waiting for her. You know? Like he was following her.”

“An older man?”

“Yeah, a different one. Not your mom’s boyfriend.”

“Did he have a kind of . . . square head, big white teeth, big gold watch—”

“Exactly.”

“So he followed the woman with the red lipstick to this apartment?”

“I think so. Yeah, I’m pretty sure of it.”

Margot’s heart pounded in her chest. Mr. Park knew where her mother lived. But would he want to hurt her? Unless somehow her mother had tried to intervene in his behavior, tried to stand up to him? Maybe he had gone to her apartment, asked her where Mrs. Baek lived or worked now, and she had refused to answer. Her mother would do anything to protect Mrs. Baek.

Would this be enough for him to fight with her? Push her?

Margot couldn’t go to the restaurant and confront him now. It might be too dangerous and could jeopardize the waitress as well. If she needed to question Mr. Park, she’d have to find him somewhere else and she’d have to ask Miguel to go with her just in case. Where would he be other than the restaurant? Someone had to know. She couldn’t ask Mrs. Baek because she would be too concerned for Margot. Perhaps Margot and Miguel together would have to follow him after work.

She ran down to the parking lot and opened the car door. Catching her breath, she glanced at the rearview mirror to make sure she was alone. Chills ran down her spine as she thought of the driver’s hand on her shoulder, the push. Maybe that’s all it had taken. There was blood that had pooled and pressed against her mother’s brain. She was getting too close. Mr. Park followed Mrs. Baek to her mother’s apartment. The net had wrapped around her ankles.

A safety-deposit box. A bank that would soon close. A door closing. Margot was on her own.

There were now too many people who might be angry at her mother—Mrs. Kim and her driver-slash-lover, Sungmin, also Mr. Park—too many people who might want to hurt her. Perhaps that was the life of any woman like her mother, a woman who was poor and in so many ways powerless but nonetheless persisted like a kind of miracle, a defiance against the world.

But who would want her mother dead the most?

Mina

Spring 2014