Jung Yun - Shelter

No one has seen Marina leave the sofa since she returned from the hospital. She still has bruises and cuts that haven’t healed, a slight limp in her step when she walks. Kyung wonders if her process is similar to Mae’s. Nothing for days, and then a sudden, uncontrolled burst of housekeeping.

“Marina, you’re a guest here. You don’t have to clean anything. Now, why don’t you go back to sleep?”

“But I make myself useful, Mr. Kyung. I help you and Miss Gillian.”

He’s always found Marina’s accent charming, but now her sweet trill and broken, insistent English are starting to grate his nerves. He scans the floor, which is covered with pots and pans, a bucket of water and sponges, and rolls of paper towels. He takes the dust broom away and leads her to the table. When he turns around, Marina is standing perfectly straight, staring at his thumb resting over her wrist. He quickly releases it and pulls out a chair, offering her a chance to sit. Marina remains where she is.

“I clean more quiet,” she says. “You don’t notice me anymore.”

“It’s nice that you want to help — it really is — but you don’t have to. You’re a guest. Do you understand that?”

Marina stares at the floor, nodding as if she does, but clearly, it makes her uncomfortable. He wonders if the idea of being in someone else’s home and not having a job to do is simply too strange for her to comprehend. When she looks up at him again, her huge brown eyes are filled with tears.

“What’s the matter? What did I say?”

The tears stream down her cheeks as she shakes her head. “I cannot go home again, Mr. Kyung. I cannot see my family, not like this.”

“Who said anything about you going home?” He asks even though he already knows the answer. He just wants to hear it from her. He pulls out the chair a few inches more. “Come sit,” he says, not offering so much as ordering.

Marina does as she’s told and knits her fingers together on the table. Up close, her hands don’t look like they belong to a twenty-four-year-old girl. The nails have been bitten down to the quick, and her skin is dry and cracked, aged by a lifetime of work. On her right pinky, just below the knuckle, there’s a tattoo of a faded black cross, which he’s never noticed before. The proportions are uneven; the placement, slightly crooked. It looks like she did it herself. He wonders how long it took to carve the lines into her flesh until they could never go away.

“When did you get that?” he asks.

She looks at the tattoo as if she’d forgotten it was there. “I was teenager. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. Why?”

“It’s a cross?”

“Yes?”

“A crucifix?”

“Yes.”

“But — you’re from Bosnia. I thought Bosnians were Muslim.” Instantly, he can tell by the look on her face that they’re not. “Sorry. I don’t know a lot about that part of the world.”

“Orthodox Christian,” she says quietly. And then, in a noticeably sharper tone, she adds: “Not Muslim.”

The tears on her face have dried, but she still seems upset, and Kyung recognizes the same distant expression he sees in his mother, as if her body is here but her mind is somewhere else.

“Does it help you?” he asks. “To believe in something?”

“You mean God?”

He nods.

She reaches for the saltshaker, moving it from one side of the pepper mill to the other and then back again. “The men in my country — they did bad things to people because they believe in something. The Muslims too. They all think God give them the right.”

He was hoping she’d just say yes, hoping for her sake that she still had faith, if nothing else. But it’s obvious that Marina is no more of a believer than he is. She’s completely on her own.

“So why do you think we’re going to send you home?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

Marina circles the room with her eyes, trying not to look at him. Then she takes a napkin from the stack on the table and blows her nose.

“It was my mother, wasn’t it? She said we didn’t want you here anymore?”

“Mrs. Cho,” she says slowly, “she tell me you all go to the Cape on Friday and I leave here before you return. She offer me ticket home, and money, but I cannot see my family like this, Mr. Kyung. My father…” Her eyes well up again and spill over, but she doesn’t look sad so much as terrified.

“What about him?”

“He tell me not to come here. He think something bad happen. My father is — coward, afraid of everything since the war. He always talk about girls who go to America, to Europe, how men trick them into being prostitute. But I said no, I go to work, to study. Maybe I come back as lawyer or doctor one day, but he warn me over and over. Something bad happen if I leave.” She blows her nose again, crumpling the wet napkin in her fist. “I have sisters, Mr. Kyung. Four sisters, all younger than me. If I come home like this, my father will never let them leave, not even to study. He will say he was right.”

Kyung can’t remember the number of times he’s passed Marina on the couch and wished her gone, blinked somewhere far away. But sitting across from her now, he sees how young she is, how permanent the damage of her life back home and her life here. There’s a point, he thinks, when no amount of psychiatry or pharmacology can help a person lead a normal life. He passed his long ago. There’s no helping her either, but he still feels the need to try, to extend the hand that was never offered to him.

“I won’t let anyone send you away.” Before he has a chance to second-guess himself, he adds: “This is my house, and you can stay here as long as you need to.”

Marina brightens immediately. She doesn’t understand the dynamics of his family or the hell he’ll take to defend this decision, and for the time being, he doesn’t want to think about it either.

“Thank you, Mr. Kyung. I be helpful here, I promise. I make things easy for you and Miss Gillian.”

She gets up from her seat and tiptoes through the maze of cookware, resuming her place beside an empty cabinet. He’s about to tell her no — just leave it — but she’s already kneeling on the floor and leaning into the cabinet, scrubbing the far reaches with a sponge. In this position, the back of Marina’s petite figure resembles a violin. Wide at the shoulders and hips, cinched narrow in the middle. The further she reaches, the higher her nightgown climbs, revealing faded pink underwear with blue and yellow stripes. Nothing about what he sees — the Bugs Bunny shirt, the thick woolen socks, the baggy, stretched-out underwear — should appeal to him, but the longer he stands there, the more turned on he feels. It’s disgusting, he thinks. He’s disgusting. He backs out of the room, his face lit with shame, and walks stiffly up the stairs. For a moment, he considers waking Gillian, but he knows better than that by now, and just the thought of her irritated, exhausted rejection begins to deaden what Marina awoke.

Upstairs, he opens Ethan’s door to check on him and finds the boy asleep next to Jin. The two of them are curled up together on the cot. Ethan’s little bed is empty; the race car — patterned covers are still made up, as if he didn’t spend a minute there before crawling in beside his grandfather. Kyung wonders how many nights they’ve been sleeping like this, and who suggested it first. It’s jarring, such an outward display of tenderness from someone who never seemed the least bit tender. Kyung tiptoes to Ethan’s side of the bed and tries to lift him up. He whines and turns toward Jin, stretching himself out long. The boy is taller now, even taller than when the summer began. It’s hard to believe that anything could grow so fast. Kyung was terrified when Gillian gave birth, watching the doctor raise their tiny baby into the air, so slick and fragile and noisy from his first breath. He didn’t feel any of the joy he expected at the sight of his son, only worry. He worried when Ethan cried and cried for no apparent reason; he worried when he wouldn’t walk like other babies his age and then worried he’d crack his skull open when he did. He worried that Ethan was slow to learn his letters and numbers. He worried that television would make him sullen and rude like the neighborhood kids. Parenthood felt like nothing but a lifetime of worry, which made Kyung worry even more.