Follow Her Home (24 page)

“Why didn't you tell me? I was fucking scared, Luke.”

“I don't know, what if you'd followed me? Look, I know there are bigger things going on than my Daddy issues—”

“I have never used that phrase.”

“—But I had to talk to him alone. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. I was so pissed off and confused, I just had to do something about it.”

“Incidentally, I asked your dad point-blank if he was sleeping with Lori Lim.”

He nodded.

“Like I said, incidentally.”

He nodded again.

“So you confronted him? What about, exactly?”

“I mean, what not about?”

“He didn't seem to know you were with me when I found those pictures.”

“I might have left out some things he could get on my case about.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Not a whole lot.”

I clenched my teeth. “Do not hold out on me, Luke. Don't even dare. Your dad is a criminal, and he would love it if I disappeared. Don't help him make that happen.”

His eyes were moist and miserable. “I'm on your side, Song.”

I sat back down on the bed. I had to believe him. I had no other choice. “Do you know John?”

He hesitated, and when he answered he looked past me. “Yes.” It was a chastised
yes.

“Did you know who he was when I told you he showed up at my apartment? Did you know he was the one who threatened my family, who broke into my home?”

“No, I didn't know.” He sighed. “I mean, maybe some shadow of a shadow of a shadow? But I only saw it, you know, glimpsed it, like I didn't know until I really knew. You know?”

“No. I don't.”

“Look, if I'd really realized who it was that was putting you in danger—Song, listen—of course I would've said something. I think at most something tugged inside my head, like one of those itches you can't get at because you don't know where it's coming from.”

I leaned back and locked my arms around my knees.

“As it turns out, I can't really afford to put you in the doghouse just now. I'm not sure what would've happened to me if you hadn't shown up when you did.”

“My dad wouldn't have hurt you.”

“Maybe not with his own hands, but I didn't have a whole lot of say as to who was going to take me from his house and where I would be dropped off. The roads are dangerous, and many a ditch would love to have me, I'm sure.”

He shuddered. It was a real shudder, shoulder to shoulder, the likes of which I had rarely seen rise to the description.

“So can I ask you—until this all, I don't know, blows over—can you stay in my sight?”

“You think—”

“I guess more, I'd like to stay in yours.”

He grimaced and found a choice piece of blank wall to fix his gaze on. “Why's that?”

“Your dad dotes on you, and I'm assuming you'd never forgive him if he had my head transferred to any silver platters in your presence.”

“Hah.”

A tickle of neuron fire and I frowned at him. “Would you, then?”

“Never.”

“He knows that. Stay with me.”

“Okay.”

We sat without speech, without eye contact, for several long minutes.

Luke broke the silence, his voice weighted and grainy. “What are we doing?”

“Well, let's start with John. Does John have a last name?”

“Lawson. You can google him if you want, but I don't think it'll get you anywhere.”

“What's his deal?”

“He—” His shoulders rose and slumped like a marionette's. “He's crazy. You were right about that.”

“Never doubted it.”

“He's unpredictable, really a broken human being. But the one thing that's always been true is that he's—how do I put it—I guess he's obsessed with my dad.”

“Like, sexually?”

“Oh, no. He just, well—John didn't have a father of his own, and somehow my dad became the closest he could get. He wants his approval. All the time. And he's pretty single-minded about it.”

“And your dad puts up with it?”

“He doesn't really have a choice. And anyway, he has a soft spot for him.”

“The male ego and its never-ending tolerance for worship.”

He shrugged. “Sure, something like that.”

“Well, I don't like John.”

“You think I do? How do you think he feels about me?” He shook his head, looking suddenly and physically hurt. “He loves my dad. He fucking hates me. For being my father's son.”

“You know, your dad isn't my favorite person right now either. Did you hear what we were talking about when you came in?”

He nodded.

“‘I can't help you'? Give me a fucking break.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It isn't your fault. I'm sure this sucks for you too. I mean, being alive isn't that cool when your family is executing your friends.”

My cheeks tingled as I remembered John's voice talking about Iris. This man was a murderer, and I had crossed the object of his deepest adoration. My head pounded, running worst-case scenarios drawn in blood.

“I need to use your phone.”

He looked at me with clouds in his eyes.

“If I were going to search it, I would've done so while you were conked out. I need to call my mom.”

“Of course.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and handed it to me.

I walked into the living room. It was 12:36
A.M.
, 2:36 in Texas. I dialed my mom. The phone rang brash and unheeded. I hung up on the answering machine's dull recital of digits and tried again. This time my mom's voice answered in a slurring “Hello?” caked with sleep.

“Oh,
umma
.”

“Yoon-Kyung-ah.” Her voice came alive with a sharp angry pitch. “Are you crazy? What time is it?”

“
Umma
, listen to me.”

“What time is it? Is something wrong?”

“
Umma
, listen to me and trust every word I say.”

She paused. “What's wrong?”

“There is a murderer who might be trying to kill me, and I'm afraid he might find you and do something.”

“Yoon-Kyung-ah, what are you talking about?”

“Just get out of the house. Go stay with Uncle Min and don't let anyone else come near you.”

“Song Yoon-Kyung. You—have you lost your—what time is it? Are you drunk?”

I groaned with a shrill crescendo. “I'm so sober it hurts. Have I ever done anything like this before?”

“Okay. Okay, I'll go.”

“Thank you, please, now.”

“But you have to—”

“I'll call and explain tomorrow. But please, hang up and go. Don't call ahead, just go.”

I heard her start to cry, a bewildered, sniffling sound. “I don't know what this is, but be careful, daughter. I love you so much.”

*   *   *

The day after my visit to Quinn, Iris told me she hated me for the first time since we were children. We fought for hours, both crying and sometimes screaming, our mom keeping a vigilant distance from her bedroom next door.

Quinn had called her after my visit, had showered her with the urgency of his love before launching into accusations of betrayal and lack of affection. He told her I was out to ruin him, and that she was turning a blind eye while it happened. He said I was turning him, her Elliot, into a pervert, and that by letting me have my way, she was rejecting him, nullifying all that they'd ever had. He knew just what to say to make Iris hate me.

I told her about Bernadette, said to her breaking face that she was not as special to Quinn as she had thought. He had not counted on my silence, and Iris spit back at me that he told her I'd say that. He'd confessed to her, abject and heartsick, that he'd had an affair with a student before he'd met her. She hated to share his history with another girl, but he assured her that she was different, special, that Bernadette had seduced him, while he and Iris had fallen in love as naturally as earth and sky. The more I insisted that Quinn was a sicko, an incorrigible predator of girls, the more she retreated from me and took his side. I had never dealt with anyone so irrational, and it was the first time that I came face-to-face with the destructive power of love.

So I did what I thought I had to do as a loving sister concerned for Iris and out for revenge. I told our mom everything.

It was a scene. Our mom cried and cursed and wondered how such a thing could happen. To her credit, she didn't give in to her anger with Iris. She fumed about the things she wanted to do to Quinn, and she held my sister like the teenage child she was, spilling tears for her heartbreak and the pain that she'd gone through without sharing the burden with her mother.

I insisted that we see Quinn fired from the school and that he be taken to court for molesting an underage girl. Iris was firmly against it, and when I appealed to our mom, I was surprised to learn that she agreed with my sister. She was delicate, but in the shadows and crooks between her words, I knew what she had on her mind. Reputation, disgrace, the Korean community. Iris was only sixteen, but her choices took her out of the locked world of mischievous teenagers and into the wider, thicker network of adulthood, where wrongs led to lawsuits, and lapsed discretion left permanent marks. If the affair was made public, it would follow her forever.

But one thing our mom could not do was keep Iris in that school. Our uncle and grandparents all lived in Houston, and over the next month our mom found a new job and arrangements were made. The Song family was moving to Texas, and Iris would enroll in a new school. Iris protested, but her efforts were wasted—her very objections led our mom to believe the move was necessary.

I didn't tell them about the picture or my resolve to make sure Quinn never taught again. I didn't have to go through the school—I was not above blackmail. Quinn would not be allowed to claim another victim.

Iris waited until I was back East. She called me one night and told me she loved me, and that she was sorry for what she had put me through on account of her stupidity. I was grateful, and I went to bed that night feeling like the nightmare was over.

In the morning I woke up in Diego's arms with a smile, and we made love without brushing our teeth. I went to class and turned off my cell phone. It was my favorite class, on American detective fiction, that genre I had always loved. As I listened to a lecture on Arthur Conan Doyle's acknowledged debt to Edgar Allen Poe and his man Dupin, I doodled a magnifying glass in the margins of my notebook.

After class I had lunch with Diego and Luke in our dining hall, baked ziti with a lot of cheese and a stale piece of garlic bread. It was a warm day, and we wandered to the lawn by the library and lay out on the grass. We spent a couple of hours in idle conversation, and I mentioned my phone call with Iris. I was in a blissful mood. Diego played with my hair while I talked.

It was past four in the afternoon when I remembered to turn my phone back on and found a desperate voice mail from my uncle. I called him back with only the faintest sense of untargeted worry.

Our mom had found her that morning, hanging from a curtain rod by a long silk scarf, her body lying against cloth and wall. She had been dead for hours, and where her heels had damaged the thin material of the drapes, her feet dangled, toes pointed at the ground. My mother, in her grief and anger, spared me no detail, and she could never forget the scuffed curtains. She never let me forget them, either.

Iris left a short note saying she loved us and that she was sorry. That was all. There was nothing she could have said to save me, but what she did say was not enough.

I flew to Houston for the funeral—it was my first time in the state, a place that had no home or meaning to me or to Iris. It was my mom's decision to keep her there, and I didn't argue. She decided to stay on in Texas, where she had a new job and family nearby, and she wanted to make sure Iris always had fresh flowers.

She moved out of the two-bedroom apartment she'd rented with Iris. She couldn't bear the place, and she stayed with her parents until she bought a small condo for herself. But new building or not, I could never bring myself to look forward to visiting my mom in Texas. When I spent Thanksgivings and spring breaks at school or with Luke and Diego, my mom didn't protest. I loved her and didn't blame her for anything, but over the years I put distance between her life and mine. And she did the same. She rarely called, and where before she had always been interested in my grades, my future, my life, she no longer asked.

In a literal way, my life went on. I ate, and I slept, and in a mechanistic way I continued to function. My grades dropped—for the first time ever I saw Bs on my report card, even the occasional C. I took up cigarettes and I drank a lot, often alone. I had never been outgoing, but I lost interest in people almost completely.

It was in this hour, the longest of my life, that I turned back to my old friend Marlowe. I always loved Chandler, but as I read more and more books, I'd drifted away from the mystery genre. It seemed too shiny, fake and cardboard, with implausible plots and ciphers for people. But after Iris died, the bitter vision embedded in noir struck me as truer, barer, than anything I'd encountered before. For days at a time, I kept myself locked up with my books, eating granola bars when I had to in the dark warmth of my bed.

Diego and Luke dragged me out of the most abysmal stages of depression. They sat with me for hours, while I said nothing, did nothing, catatonic. I didn't talk about Iris, and they learned quickly that I wasn't waiting to be asked. But in their persistent support and ongoing vigil, I found a small salvation.

I broke up with Diego a few months later. We hadn't slept together since Iris's suicide, and the very notion of being in love started to feel disgusting and foreign. I remembered Iris's accusations, that I had become so absorbed in my own romance that I'd stopped listening to the outside world. I thought about what love had done to her. I spent the next eight years in the shallow end of the dating pool, without much desire to swim.