Jung Yun - Shelter

“No,” Kyung shouts. Everyone at the table jumps, their shoulders stiff, their spines perfectly straight. He’s not about to let them sit there and act like this is a normal meal, a normal family, a normal life. “Stop with the fucking butter. We’re not going to do this anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Mae says, looking at Connie and Vivi. “My son — I think he’s had too much to drink tonight. It’s not like him—”

“No. No. No,” he repeats. “No more excuses for each other. No more pretending everything’s fine. No fucking more.”

Vivi narrows her eyes at Connie, mouthing the words, Should we go? Poor woman, Kyung thinks. Gold digger or not, he almost feels sorry for her, walking into this sideshow when all she wanted was a free weekend at the beach. He stands up, raising his glass to her as if to give a toast.

“See, Vivi? What you need to know about my parents is that this one”—he points to Jin with his glass, spilling an arc of wine across the tablecloth—“this one used to hit my mother. And this one”—he flicks his finger at Mae—“this one used to hit me. So don’t be fooled by all their nice things and nice manners. They’re not good people.”

Gillian buries her face in her hands, mortified. Jin lifts Ethan out of his chair and whisks him out of the room. Mae throws her knife down so violently, it cracks her plate in two as she runs into the kitchen. Kyung remains standing, teetering from side to side like a tree caught in the wind.

“Why would you do that?” Gillian asks, still holding her face in her hands. “Why, Kyung? What good did that just do?”

“I — have — been — waiting—” He enunciates his words slowly, aware that he’s starting to slur. “—I have been waiting my entire life to say that, Gillian. They needed to know.”

“Know what?” she snaps. “They know. ”

“Do they?” He raises his voice, shouting at the ceiling so his parents will hear. “Those people ruined me. Why don’t they understand — why don’t they act like they understand that?”

“Kyung … you have to let them be sorry. You have to let them make it up to you. They’re trying. Can’t you see how they’re trying?”

“Oh, right.” He sits down, nearly missing the edge of his chair. “Of course that’s what you’d say. You just want my dad to keep writing us checks. That’s how you want them to make it up to me, don’t you? So we can go on vacations again and drink nice wine every night?”

Gillian leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees and clutching the back of her hair. He can’t tell if she’s crying, or simply trying not to look at him. Either way, it doesn’t matter. She’s crossed over to their side, and now he doesn’t want her back.

“Why don’t you tell me what I’m worth, Gillian? Give me a number.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The number. The amount.” He slams his hands on the table, upturning glasses and bottles and shells. “Tell me what my life is worth. Tell me how much they should write the check out for so everything they did to me, everything they did in front of me — how much will it take to make that go away?”

Gillian sits up and looks at her father. Her eyes are completely dry. “I can’t talk to him when he’s screaming at me like this. I’m going to bed.”

Before Kyung has a chance to respond, she walks out of the room, leaving him with Connie and Vivi, who both seem desperate to be somewhere else. Vivi won’t look up from her shell, which she keeps turning over and over again in her hands like a giant worry bead. Kyung waits, expecting Connie to light into him for yelling at Gillian, but no such lecture comes. Instead, his father-in-law just shakes his head and speaks to him quietly, almost tenderly, in a tone that breaks him almost as much as the actual words.

“You poor son of a bitch.”

The car is missing. These are the first words he can make out. The car — his car — is missing. Kyung sits up slowly, shielding his eyes from the light that slices through the open blinds. His head is trapped in a vise again. The pristine white couch he slept on is filthy, trampled with footprints. He should have taken his shoes off before lying down, but this is the least of his worries.

Upstairs, footsteps thunder over his head. People are yelling at each other. “Not in this room.” Doors open and close, then open and close again. “Not in this room either.”

I’m right here, he wants to shout, but his mouth feels dry and sandy, stuffed full with cotton. On the floor, next to his feet, there’s an empty bottle of wine. He doesn’t remember drinking it, or moving his car, or falling asleep in the study, and his lack of recall bothers him. The things he said and did last night — he doesn’t want them diminished by how much he drank. He said exactly what he meant, what he always wanted everyone to know. The alcohol simply made him brave.

In the bathroom, Kyung examines himself in the mirror. His eyes are bloodshot, and a pebbly pink rash is spreading across his unshaven skin. He doesn’t have any clean clothes to change into, not that it really matters. He’s leaving the Cape today; he’s sure of it. As soon as his parents see him, one or both of them will tell him to get out, but the likelihood of this doesn’t concern him. The worst that can happen is another argument, which they’ll want to avoid more than he does.

Kyung washes his face in the sink, feeling the pinch and pull of muscles stretched unnaturally in his sleep. Everything aches, but despite the condition of his body, his mind has never felt more liberated. All the weight he’s been carrying around for years — it’s as if he threw it into the bay last night, and now here he is, blinking at his newer, lighter self in the mirror. He peels the wet bandage from his cheek, revealing three long burrows of red. It’s obvious they weren’t caused by books falling off a shelf. He reaches for the medicine cabinet, tempted to open the door and search for another bandage, but he steels himself with a reminder: No falling back into old habits. No more avoiding what simply is. Kyung hears people coming downstairs, and his natural inclination is to creep away, to delay the confrontation that he knows is coming. Instead, he takes a deep breath and follows the voices into the living room. Connie is there, talking on his cell phone while Gillian looks on.

“I’m calling about a missing person,” Connie says. “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet, but there’s a missing vehicle too.”

“I slept in the study,” Kyung says. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

Gillian jerks her head at him. She has bags under her eyes, and her skin looks gray and bloodless, even in the light. “We’re not looking for you, ” she says. The sharp spike of her voice tacks on the words “you idiot,” even though she didn’t say them out loud.

Connie moves toward the window, plugging his ear as he continues his conversation in the corner.

“What’s going on?” Kyung asks.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

He thought he did, but the more Gillian narrows her eyes at him, the more confused he feels. Dinner is the dividing line of his memory. Everything before and during, he remembers clearly, proudly even. Everything afterward is a blank.

“When?”

Her expression is unlike anything he’s ever seen before. She’s more than just annoyed. She’s searching, as if she asked a question and the answer is imprinted somewhere under his skin. Five years they’ve been together, and she’s staring at him like a stranger, like someone she doesn’t know or wishes she’d never met.