Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“The Space Station?” Wanda asked.

“Yes,” Jun Do said. “That must be it. Tell me, is it built for peace and brotherhood?”

The ladies looked at each other. “Yes,” the Senator’s wife said. “I suppose it is.”

The Senator’s wife rummaged through kitchen drawers until she found a few doctors’ samples of antibiotics. She slipped two foil packets into his shirt pocket. “For later, if you get sick,” she said. “Take them if you have a fever. Can you tell the difference between a bacterial and a viral infection?”

He nodded.

“No,” Wanda said to the Senator’s wife. “I don’t think he can.”

The Senator’s wife said, “If you have a fever and are bringing up green or brown mucus, then take three of these a day until they’re gone.” She popped the first capsule out of the foil and handed it to him. “We’ll start a cycle now, just in case.”

Wanda poured him a glass of water, but after he’d popped the pill in his mouth and chewed it up, he said, “No thanks, I’m not thirsty.”

“Bless your heart,” the Senator’s wife said.

Pilar opened the cooler. “Ay,” she said and quickly closed it. “What I’m supposed to do with this? Tonight is Tex-Mex.”

“My word,” the Senator’s wife said, shaking her head. “Tiger.”

“I don’t know,” Wanda said. “I kind of want to try it.”

“Did you smell it?” Pilar asked.

“Wanda,” the Senator’s wife said. “We could all go to hell for what’s in that cooler.”

Jun Do jumped off the counter. With one hand, he began tucking in his shirt.

“If my wife were here,” he said, “she’d tell me to throw it out and replace it with flank steak. She’d say you can’t taste the difference, anyway, and now everyone eats, and no one loses face. At dinner, I’d talk about how great it was, how it was the best meat I’d ever had, and that would make her smile.”

Pilar looked to the Senator’s wife. “Tiger tacos?”

The Senator’s wife tried the words in her mouth. “Tiger tacos.”

“Pak Jun Do, what’s called for now is rest,” the Senator’s wife said. “I’m going to show you to your room,” she added with a quiet fierceness, as if she were transgressing somehow by being alone with him. The house had many hallways, lined with more family photos, these framed in wood and metal. The door to the room where he would sleep was slightly open, and when they swung it wide, a dog leaped off the bed. The Senator’s wife didn’t seem concerned. The bed was covered with a quilt, and by pulling it taut, she removed the dog’s impression.

“My grandmother was quite the quilter,” she said, then looked into Jun Do’s eyes. “That’s where you make a blanket out of scraps from your life. It doesn’t take money, and the blanket tells a story.” Then she showed Jun Do how to read the quilt. “There was a mill in Odessa that printed panels of Bible stories on its flour sacks. The panels were like church windows—they let people see the story. This piece of lace is from the window of the house Grandmother left when she was married at fifteen. This panel is Exodus and here is Christ Wandering, both from flour sacks. The black velvet is from the hem of her mother’s funeral dress. She died not long after my grandmother came to Texas, and the family sent her this black swatch. This starts a sad time in her life—a patch of baby blanket from a lost child, a swatch of a graduation gown she purchased but never got to wear, the faded cotton of her husband’s uniform. But look here, see the colors and fabrics of a new wedding, of children and prosperity? And of course the last panel is the Garden. Much loss and uncertainty she had to endure before she could sew that ending to her own story. If I could have reached your wife Sun Moon, that’s what I would have spoken to her about.”

On the bedside table was a Bible. She brought it to him. “Wanda’s right—you’re not an a-hole husband,” she said. “I can tell you care about your wife. I’m just a woman she never met on the other side of the world, but could you give her this for me? These words always bring me solace. Scripture will always be there, no matter what doors are closed to her.”

Jun Do held the book, felt its soft cover.

“I could read some with you,” she said. “Do you know of Christ?”

Jun Do nodded. “I’ve been briefed on him.”

A pain came to the corners of her eyes, then she nodded in acceptance.

He handed back the book. “I’m sorry,” Jun Do told her. “This book is forbidden where I come from. Possessing it comes with a high penalty.”

“You don’t know how it sorrows me to hear that,” she said, then went to the door, where a white guayabera hung. “Hot water on that arm, you hear? And wear this shirt tonight.”

When she left, the dog leaped back onto the bed.

He pulled off his dress shirt and looked around the guest room. It was filled with memorabilia of the Senator—photos of him with proud people, plaques of gold and bronze. There was a small writing desk, and here a phone rested atop a white book. Jun Do lifted the phone’s receiver, listened to its solid tone. He took up the book underneath it, leafed through its pages. Inside were thousands of names. It took him a while to understand that everyone in central Texas was listed here, with their full names and addresses. He couldn’t believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren’t an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents. It was unfathomable that a permanent link existed to mothers and fathers and lost mates, that they were forever fixed in type. He flipped through the pages. Donaldson, Jimenez, Smith—all it took was a book, a little book could save you a lifetime of uncertainty and guesswork. Suddenly he hated his small, backward homeland, a land of mysteries and ghosts and mistaken identities. He tore a page from the back of the book and wrote across the top: Alive and Well in North Korea. Below this he wrote the names of all the people he’d helped kidnap. Next to Mayumi Nota, the girl from the pier, he placed a star of exception.

In the bathroom, there was a basket filled with new razors and miniature tubes of toothpaste and individually wrapped soaps. He didn’t touch them. Instead, he stared in the mirror, seeing himself the way the Senator’s wife had seen him. He touched his lacerations, his broken clavicle, the burn marks, the eleventh rib. Then he touched the face of Sun Moon, the beautiful woman in this halo of wounds.

He went to the toilet and stared into its mouth. It came in a moment, the meat, three heaves of it, and then he was empty. His skin had gone tight, and he felt weak.

In the shower, he made the water hot. He stood there, steeping his wound in the spray, like fire on his arm. When he closed his eyes, it was like being nursed by the Second Mate’s wife again, back when his eyes were still swollen shut and she was just the smell of a woman, the sounds a woman made, and he had a fever and he didn’t know where he was and he had to imagine the face of the woman who would save him.

Toward twilight, Jun Do dressed in his white guayabera shirt, with its stiff collar and fancy stitching. Through the window, he could see Dr. Song and the Minister exit a shiny black mobile home where they had been holding talks with the Senator all afternoon. The dog stood and came to the edge of the bed. There was a harness around its neck. It was kind of a sad thing, a dog without a warren. A band started playing somewhere, perhaps Spanish voices. When Jun Do turned to go out into the night, the dog followed.

The hallway was lined with photographs of the Senator’s family, always smiling. To move toward the kitchen was like going back in time, the graduation photos becoming sports photos, and then there were scouting clubs, pigtails, birthday parties, and finally the pictures were of babies. Was this what a family was, how it grew—straight as the children’s teeth? Sure, there was an arm in a sling and over time the grandparents disappeared from the photos. The occasions changed, as did the dogs. But this was a family, start to finish, without wars or famines or political prisons, without a stranger coming to town to drown your daughter.