Re Jane (14 page)

“You're so beautiful. I love you,” he said, which only made me more confused. He picked the condom wrapper off the floor and hurried into his clothes before hastening away.

Reader, back then I was too inexperienced to understand what had just happened: Ed Farley could not keep it up.

* * *

Later, after I picked myself off Beth's floor and folded the dusty blanket and sheets, after I went to relieve my aching bladder and a single cloud of blood bloomed in the toilet water, after I showered and scrubbed the surface of my body with a rough cloth, I thought about what had happened with Ed. Had I blundered somehow? Had he wavered in his attraction toward me?
Just the tip,
I remembered hearing Nina and her friends once joke. Ed definitely dipped his toe in the waters, but how deep he had plunged I did not know, having nothing else to compare it to. Did that count? Wasn't it always all in or nothing—or was there such a thing as being half a virgin? Might as well toss that into the bin of other odds and ends: half Korean, half white, half orphan.

The next morning I awoke in my bed; the reality of what I'd done with my boss was slowly sinking in. What would Beth think of me? What would
Devon
think of me? I knew how Sang would react if he knew—
You only want fun time
—and could picture his blackening eyes, his flaring nostrils.

I rose. Showered again. Sat mechanically through breakfast, half listening to Devon's chatter about the sleepover that night, avoiding Ed's gaze across the table. I walked Devon to school, though she was getting too old for this, too. When I returned home, Ed was gone, but he'd left a note on my bed.

Dearest Jane:

Let's start afresh. Will you meet me tonight? At 7pm for a drink at the Greatest Bar on Earth—yes, it's B&T, but the view looks out to the Promenade. The very spot we gazed out at that night. Afterward I've booked a room at the Ash Hotel, on Hay at Church Street. This damn house is charged with too many unsavory memories.

I love you.

Ed

After I finished reading the note, the phone rang: it was Ed, calling from work to confirm, and to apologize, in veiled language, about the night before. “You okay?” he asked. Yes, I said, I'm okay. “Good. Love you,” he whispered quickly into the phone. I repeated the words back to him. “See you tonight.” He paused a beat, as if waiting for me to say something more, before he hung up.

The afternoon came and went. I picked Devon up from school and brought her home. We started on her homework. Her math, science, cultural studies, and literature textbooks and folders were piled high on her desk. Buried beneath all that were her Chinese-school worksheets. We made our way through the stack. But as we approached the bottom, Devon sighed. “Can't we just stop here?”

“No, you can't.”

She got up from the desk and stretched her arms.

“Come on, Devon. The faster you finish this, the faster you can go to Alla's.”

“It just feels kind of pointless.” She sighed again, gesturing at the worksheets. “All the Chinese kids in my class say that stuff's all wrong, and nobody really talks like that. It's like I'm being forced to learn some old textbook version of Chinese.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What's the point of learning all this when I should
be learning how to speak the way
real
Chinese people speak?”

“Because your mom wants you to learn it.”

“I don't care what my mom wants!” she burst out suddenly.

“Devon!”

She looked chagrined. “Sorry. But it's just . . . she makes me so frustrated! Like . . . like that stupid story we made up about my birth mother. I stopped believing it when I was a little kid. I only go along so I don't hurt her feelings. But I think she
actually
believes
it. Mom's, like, so out of touch with reality.”

“Since when did you start calling her ‘Mom'?”

Devon ignored my comment. “For once I'd like to be around someone who just gets the way the world
really
works. Like
you.
”

My heart dropped.

“Your mom gets it, too, Devon.” But I said it without conviction, and Devon knew it.

“I don't know how Dad puts up with it. It'd drive me totally crazy. Sometimes I just wish she'd leave us alone.”

Devon had no idea that by this time tomorrow she would have her wish. Her family would never be the same again. Devon would have to choose between Beth and Ed, and it was all because of me—me indulging my feelings.

There was something about the way Devon was holding her face, creating a ridge between her eyebrows, that struck me as identical to an expression I'd seen on Beth. Mother and daughter, though they shared no actual genetics, were still mirror images of each other.

When we reached Alla's stoop, I folded Devon tightly into my arms. “Ja-ayne!” she said. Just as she was too old for fairy tales, Devon was getting too old for hugs. “Don't be too hard on your mom, okay?” I said.

She scrunched her pliable face into a ball. “Now
you're
acting like a weirdo,” she said. “Oh, and Alla said her mom just surprised her with the new Evv-R-Blü album. She said she's going to lend it to me. Promise me we'll listen to it when I get back?” She didn't wait for my response. “'Bye, Jane.” She was buzzed in. I watched her disappear through the double doors.

I walked back to 646 Thorn Street. When I let myself in, Beth's voice was cutting out on the answering machine. After I unstrapped my bag and put down my keys, I played back her message. It was the usual string of commands, issued in her singsongy voice.

Take our vitamins and wheatgrass.

Water the aloe plants.

Fax over the results of Devon's cultural-studies quiz, so Beth could review her answers on the plane ride home.

I was about to hit
DELETE
when, almost as a postscript, Beth added, “Devon. Sweetie. I popped into a record store today, and guess what I bought? The newest album from Evv-R-Blü!” Beth overenunciated every syllable. “I know it'll be a day late, but you think Alla will like it? Hope so! Love you. Love you all.”

But Alla already owned the new album. Beth would be more than a day late. But she'd tried.

I showered, for the second time that day, the third time in less than twenty-four hours. I packed a bag. I locked the front door behind me. From the sidewalk I looked up at the house. Its hooded bay window, framed in those thick crimson curtains, formed a single slit that stared out at me. From the street, you could not see the countless fissures breaking beneath the surface of this house.

I remembered how just earlier Devon's face had scrunched into that expression that was identical to her mother's. I thought back on all those talks with Ed. Over the course of those heroes, we had each alleviated the other's unhappiness in some small way. We were kindred spirits. I knew what I had to do.

I walked to the subway, descended to the platform, boarded the train, transferred to a bus, and bounced along with the other passengers.

Hours and hours later, as four planes took off from points along the Northeast Corridor, I was already flying west: away from a field in Stonycreek Township, the Pentagon, the Twin Towers.

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I
flew so far west I landed east, in Korea. My mother's homeland—
my
homeland. I don't think I was fully aware of it as I crammed a few articles of clothing into my backpack and hurried to JFK, but as I tossed about in my too-upright seat on the flight over, it was painfully clear: I had come back to atone. From Incheon Airport I would rush to Gangnam Sinnara Hospital and present myself to my grandfather, Sang sitting at his bedside. And I knew they would know. They'd smell it radiating off me. I could still feel the burn of Ed's finger splitting me in two.

But on the other side of the custom gates, a thick, dark tension coated the air. At first I thought it was just nervous energy, the collective aftermath of a long flight. The people in front of me stopped abruptly in their tracks, muttering cries into their cell phones. Impatiently I weaved my way around them toward the exit. A crowd had gathered in front of a TV monitor suspended from the ceiling. And that was when I saw: against a clear blue sky, one of the Twin Towers suddenly crashing in one fell swoop. It went
whoosh!
—disappearing into ballooning clouds of ash, imploding, collapsing in on itself rather than exploding outward, as if even in the midst of disaster it was desperately trying to observe
nunchi
.

What the F—

“Always inconveniencing!” I heard someone shout behind me.

It was Sang, wearing a rumpled black suit, his eyes bloodshot and pouchy with fatigue. He alighted from his spot with his usual harried gait. When he reached me, his tired eyes still mustered enough energy to flash a shiny black. “You! Why you not tell anybody where you go!” he said, gripping me by the shoulders. He whipped his head from me to the television. “Lowood,” he uttered in a hoarse whisper. Lowood's offices had occupied the 103rd floor of the North Tower.

I blinked at the TV screen. The images were still not registering. “How did you know I was here?” I said dumbly.

“Uncle calling here, there. Nobody know! You alive, you not alive. Finally airline say you boarding flight Monday night. I guess you deciding listen your uncle.” He tutted. Then he switched over to Korean, continuing in a more serious tone.
“Jane-ah. New York is like a war zone right now. We've been attacked by terrorists.”

My uncle explained about the four hijacked planes that had taken flight, two of which had crashed into the Towers. It had just happened, that morning, on the eleventh. My flight had left JFK the night of the tenth, and I touched down in Seoul before dawn on the twelfth. As I flew west, the day kept trailing behind me. I never experienced September 11; the day was lodged in a space-time vortex, hovering somewhere over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. And here in Korea, 9/11 was literally yesterday's news.

In those early moments of disorientation, I could barely make sense of my uncle's words. My thoughts skittered in every direction. If I had taken that job at Lowood. If I had spent that night with Ed.
Ed.
He'd been down there—because of me. I had stood him up at the bar. Wasn't the hotel in the shadow of the Towers? What if it had collapsed on top of . . .

“Why you not pay attention?” Sang snapped me back to focus. “I say you make whole family worry about you.”

“You heard from them! Is everybody okay?”

I realized my mistake. Sang, too. “That family worry, too. Uncle already call them.”

“Uncle, please.” I looked to the pay phones. “I need to speak to them.”

He handed me a phone card. “Tell them you okay. Hurry up.”

I punched in the numbers I knew by heart. I heard the foreign dial tone, then a click; someone picked up. “Mazer-Farley residence. Devon speaking.”

There was an unfamiliar, grown-up tinge to her voice, as though she'd matured years in the span of half a day.

“Devon! It's Jane.”

When she cried my name in response, her voice resumed its childlike tone. “Jane! Daddy and Ma are so worried! Your uncle's been calling like a million times.” As Devon explained the sequence of events, starting with the first tower falling, her voice kept modulating: adult, child, adult, child. How my uncle had finally gotten through, demanding to know my whereabouts. But no one knew. How her father, coated in ash, had arrived at her school to take her home early. How they got back to the house to find Beth waiting for them—she'd caught an earlier flight and had arrived at dawn to an empty house. How Devon was relieved she wasn't going to get into trouble about attending Alla's sleepover. And finally—how my uncle had called to say he'd heard from the airline, who confirmed I'd boarded a flight to Seoul the night before.

“Where're your parents?” I demanded.

“Daddy just ran out to pick up some heroes for lunch.”
Heroes.
“No one feels like cooking. Hang on, I'll put Ma on—”

“I . . . can't.” Sang was gesturing for me to wrap it up, but that wasn't the real reason. “I have to go. My grandfather . . .”

“Your uncle said.” Devon paused, then put on her mature voice. “My condolences to your family.”

I had been too late. “Please tell your parents . . .”
I'm sorry for everything.
“I'm sorry for inconveniencing them.”

“Jane, when are you coming back home?”

“As soon as I can,” I murmured.

“Pinkie swear?”

“Pinkie swear.” But I was lying as I said it. After what I'd done, I knew I could never set foot in the Mazer-Farley home again.

I hung up the phone. “I'm sorry. About Grandfather.”

Sang tutted. “What you sorry for? You too late. We all too late.” His usually impatient tone softened. “He die when Uncle flying in airplane.”

The same night I was doing what I had done with Ed. My grandfather's death and my transgression in the attic—like two memories fused together.

“What wrong you? Why you look so suspicious?” Sang's ever-scanning eyes were reading me again; I must have been staring into space.

“Nothing.” I snapped back to reality. “Uncle, you knew I was on this flight. And you left a message with all the hospital info. I could've found my way.”

“Uncle not sure, maybe again something happen. . . .” He blinked, then cast his eyes upward, away from me. He stood like that, not speaking, for a few moments. Then he pointed to my backpack, voice shaking with irritation. “Why you not bring suitcase?”

If I had brought a suitcase, he probably would have said, in the same agitated tone, “Why you bring suitcase?”

He turned on his heel and clomped away from me, the thick, worn soles of his orthopedic shoes squelching against the airport's polished floors. “Hurry up!” he called out. “Everybody waiting for you.”

In the cab ride from the airport, I stared out the window, dawn rising over the sprawl of Seoul. Gray high-rises shot up all around us. They stood tall, erect, and smug, oblivious to the fact that halfway around the world their counterparts had come tumbling down, down, down.

* * *

The taxi pulled up in front of Sinnara Hospital, in the Gangnam district of Seoul. “I thought you said Grandfather already die—I mean, passed away,” I said.

“Here Korea funeral home inside hospital,” he said. “And everybody suppose to have sleepover here until we go cemetery.”

The funeral home was a separate wing of the hospital. It looked like a catering hall, hosting multiple (grieving) parties. Six-foot-tall flower arrangements bearing calligraphied messages of consolation framed the entrance to each private suite.

Sang pried off his shoes in the foyer, but I hesitated. “His body . . . is it in there?”

“They already take away. But you too late, like always.” He jutted his chin in the opposite direction, indicating,
Over there.
“Go hurry up say hello Big Uncle and Emo. They still awake.”

The suite consisted of several chambers. Sang led me to the dining room. A man and a woman were seated on the floor at a low table, speaking in hushed tones. I knew they were siblings of my mother and Sang. The man was Big Uncle, the eldest. Emo, my mother's sister, was the youngest of the four.
“Ga,”
Sang said. With a push of his hand, he launched me forward.

I greeted Big Uncle first, tucking my head into a bow. His cheeks were flushed red.
“You came,”
he said in Korean, pouring himself a drink from a small green
soju
bottle. Then I turned to Emo. Again I lowered my head. She shot up from her spot on the floor. At full height she reached my chin. Although she gazed up at me, her eyes did not feel intrusive but soft and almost gentle. I did not look away.

“I have been waiting for you!”
she said. Or she could have meant “We”
or “They”
or “It.”
In Korean, subjects were often dropped, implied—the onus was on the listener to fill in the blanks.

I was not expecting Emo to take me by the shoulders and fold me so fiercely into her embrace. At first I held myself back, afraid to lean my full weight against her. But she held me tightly, her body fleshy and soft. It was as sturdy as Beth's first hug had been.

“Look, Big Brother,”
Emo said.
“She grew up so beautiful! Just like her mother.”

Beautiful.
The only other person who had ever called me beautiful was Ed. The last time he said it to me, his face was hovering just inches above mine.

“She looks nothing like her,”
Big Uncle said dismissively. He
hraaack-
ed a spit wad into a napkin. Then he jerked his head to the glass-doored refrigerator at the far end of the dining room and told Emo to bring over another bottle.

Emo had started toward it when Sang let out a
hssst!
of reproach.
“Jane,
you
go.”

“Yes, Uncle Number Two,”
I said. In the presence of his elder brother, Sang was relegated to second place.

As I made my way to the fridge, Big Uncle shouted,
“And grab another glass, too!”

I placed the bottle and glass in front of Big Uncle, and he began to fill the second glass.
“Take a drink, Sangduk.”

Sang waved away the proffered glass.
“I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed.”

Emo nudged me toward the door.
“It's late. We should go to sleep, too.”

“Hssst!”

I turned around, but the hiss was not directed at me. Big Uncle was
hssst-
ing Sang.
“I said take the drink.”

Emo pushed me along. But when we reached the doorway, I saw that Sang was not following behind us. Instead he lowered himself to the floor and received the drink from his older brother.

Emo led me to the back room, where two figures—Hannah and Mary—were sleeping on the floor. Guided by the thinnest sliver of light peeking from under the closed door, I changed into a T-shirt and boxer shorts; Emo slipped into long johns. She had already made our floor bed, and she patted the mat.
“It's late, let's sleep.”

We slept. When I woke up at one point in the smallest hours of morning, I found Emo's head nestled in the crook of my shoulder. Her thick, stout arm was thrown over me. She smelled of fresh spittle and warmth.

* * *

The next morning I awoke to the sounds of people bustling about. The whole family was already up. Mary knelt down by my bed. She was dressed in a black two-piece
hanbok
dress with white trim. It strained across her bust, and the skirt's hem trailed the floor. A white ribbon was pinned in her hair. When we were little, she used to wake me up with a jab of her big toe to my ribs. Now she was touching my shoulder gently with her fingers.

“Jane,” she said. “You're . . . okay, right?”

I sat up. She wasn't wearing her usual smirk. Instead she looked stricken. When I met her eye, she looked away. She tugged at her dress. Mary and I didn't really do corny moments—nothing about our family was touchy-feely. Quickly she tossed a packet of clothes onto my lap. After I folded away my blankets, I put on the black
hanbok
dress
.
The cold, cheap fabric—polyester masquerading as linen—chafed against my skin, a different kind of chafing from Ed's stubble grazing my thighs. The sleeves stopped short of my wrists, and the skirt's hem stopped above my ankles, exposing my socked feet. The dress was one-size-fits-all; neither Mary nor I was built for it.

* * *

I had missed most of the funeral. That morning the last of the mourners came to pay their respects to Re Myungsun's altar before we went to the cemetery. And what an altar! It was covered in long-stemmed flowers and lacquered plates of steamed meat, dried fish, sticky rice cakes, and pears and apples with their tops lopped off. Incense burned in a brass bowl. At the center of the altar was a framed portrait of Re Myungsun. His frown was forever memorialized in that photo; his beady eyes casting their displeasure across his funeral spread. Even in death nothing seemed good enough for Re Myungsun.

The mourners came and went. With each new arrival, Big Uncle and Emo let out a renewed cry or yelp of grief. Big Uncle's deep, rumbling shouts especially made a show. Tears spilled from the slits of his eyes. I had never seen a grown Korean man cry, and it was uncomfortable to witness. At some moments Emo would collapse to the floor, wailing,
“Father! Father!”
Her
hanbok
dress spilled out all around her, and she was lost in its many folds.

Their sobs made Sang's reserve seem all the more conspicuous. Unlike his siblings he sat straight in his chair: quiet, dry-eyed, and unmoving. Hannah was rubbing his back, yet his eyes remained fixed on the bowl of incense on the altar. One of the sticks was propped precariously in its bed of ash. It was tilting to the side, trailing a thin wisp of smoke. But my uncle did nothing to right its downward wake.