Jung Yun - Shelter

“Five generations of us, all buried in potter’s fields.” Perry shakes his head. “Seems like a fitting end, I guess.”

Kyung should be relieved — relieved to be spared a trial, to know that Perry will spend the rest of his days in prison and then be buried in an unmarked grave like his brother — but he can’t summon anything resembling relief. A prison cell is hardly enough punishment for all the lives this man ruined. He wants Perry to suffer. He wants him to feel more pain, more regret, more loss, more everything. Multiply it tenfold and it still wouldn’t be enough.

“So tell me what happened.” The detective moves the paper bag off to the side and centers the microphone on the table. “Start from the beginning.”

Perry takes a long drink of soda and clears his throat. “My brother, Dell, and I — we’d been watching the neighborhood for about a week. We decided to hit the big blue house on the corner.”

“What blue house?”

“Maybe it was purple? I’ve been told I have trouble with colors.”

“You mean the house next door to Mr. and Mrs. Cho?”

He nods. “We’d been watching the old couple. Three nights in a row, the husband closed up his store downtown, but he never went to the bank afterward. Never went the next morning either, so we figured he kept his money at home.”

“Okay…”

“So that night — I don’t know, Wednesday or Thursday or whenever it was — we headed over there around dark. The plan was to say our car broke down, ask to use their phone or something, but just as we were about to go up the front steps, this little Oriental lady came flying out of the house next door saying ‘Oh, help me, help me.’ So we figured, why not? Anybody living in that neighborhood had to be rich.”

Detective Smalley scribbles a note on the outside of his folder. “So you’re telling me that a complete stranger just invited you into her house?”

“Her husband was beating the crap out of her.” Perry motions toward his face. “She was all banged up, her lip was bleeding everywhere. She needed help, I guess. Didn’t really seem to care who she got it from.”

The detective turns around and looks at the window, visibly startled. Even though he can’t see through the glass, he seems to know exactly where Connie is standing. He lifts his hand as if to scratch his cheek and discreetly points toward the exit.

Kyung immediately feels a tap, followed by a firm grip on his shoulder. The sensation snaps him back, back from a dreamlike state in which nothing he just heard seems right or real. What Perry is describing — it can’t be the way all of this started. It can’t be the cause of everything that happened afterward.

“I made a mistake,” Connie says. “You shouldn’t be here for this.”

“Get your hand off me.”

“Kyung, you don’t need to hear—”

“Get — your — hand — off — me.” He stares at Connie, suddenly feeling much bigger than he is, bloated with adrenaline and anger. “Off,” he repeats, not blinking or breaking until Connie removes his hand.

“So what happened after that?” the detective asks.

“We followed her next door and she let us inside. And there was furniture and stuff in pieces everywhere, like they’d been at it for a while. So for a second I thought we should just leave, but my brother jumped in and told her he wanted the money. There wasn’t much I could do after that but go along with it.” Perry seems almost irritated by this. “My brother was hard up for crystal those last few months. I kept telling him”—he raises his voice, thrusting his finger at the empty chair next to the detective—“‘You got to get off that junk. It does something different to your brain, but no. You can’t be fucking bothered to listen, can you? Always thinking about yourself.’”

Perry appears almost mentally ill, talking to the chair as if his brother were in it. He lingers there for a moment, finger outstretched, and then quickly turns back to his soda, emptying the cup in several large gulps. “So what else?”

“Go back to the beginning.… You’re saying all that damage in the Chos’ house — you didn’t do any of it? It was already there when you walked in?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we did a little of it. I honestly can’t remember. I was pretty far gone the entire time.” He shrugs. “Jesus. Leave it to us to walk in on the middle of something like that. We should have just taken off when we saw her coming.”

In the corner of his eye, Kyung notices Tim shaking his head.

“That piece of shit,” he mutters.

Connie elbows him. “Quiet, Tim.”

“Why? He is a fucking piece of shit.”

Kyung doesn’t know whether he’s talking about his father or Nat Perry, but from the look on Tim’s face, and Connie’s too, it no longer matters.

“Can I get another one of these?” Perry shakes his cup of ice.

“Hold on.” The detective finishes writing something on his folder. “So what exactly did Mrs. Cho say when she saw you outside?”

“What I told you before. She asked us for help.” He scratches himself under the arm. “I think she also said something like ‘Make him stop.’”

“Then what did you say?”

“I’m not sure. It was probably something like, ‘Don’t worry, little lady.’ You know, because she was small and pretty.…”

Kyung throws himself against the window, causing Tim and Connie to jump, but the sound of his fists pounding on the glass doesn’t register on the other side. The detective and Perry continue talking as Kyung tries to push his way out of the room.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Connie asks.

“You know exactly where I’m going.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“I’m going to kill him, Connie. I told him — I told him I would if he ever did this again.”

“You’re not going to kill anyone.”

Connie opens the door and lets him out into the hallway. Kyung bolts toward the elevator, only to be pushed aside as Connie jumps in front of him with his arms out, blocking his path. When he turns around, Tim is standing the same way, blocking the door to the stairs. He’s not sure which of the two he has a better chance with, so he takes a running start at Connie, who sends him stumbling backward with barely a shove.

“I know you’re angry right now.”

“You don’t know what I am.”

“I do. I understand, Kyung. I’d feel exactly the same way if it were me. But let us handle Jin from now on. You’re not the one who has to deal with this.”

But he is, he thinks. He always has been, and he failed at it, miserably. And just as the full force of this thought is about to crush him, another bears down with all of its weight.

“The apartment,” he says, leaning against the wall. “That goddamn apartment.”

“What apartment?”

“She was going to leave him.”

“How do you know?”

“She had a place to live, a job lined up. She was finally going to leave and he wouldn’t let her.”

Connie shakes his head. “Don’t assume things like that, Kyung. You can’t see what goes on behind closed doors.”

What he wants to say, but doesn’t, is that he does see. He sees everything so clearly now. Mae turned on his father for a reason. She exiled him from the guest room, refused to touch him or speak to him for a reason. It was always his father. It all started with him.

* * *

They drive Kyung to a convenience store for food and a gas station for beer. They circle the park and the school and the campus. They go all the way to the town’s northernmost border and all the way back south. Up, down, left, right, over and over again, sometimes retracing the same routes they were on only minutes before. The clock on the dashboard says it’s twenty after midnight, but they continue driving with no particular destination — Connie and Kyung in the Suburban, Tim following close behind in the rental. Kyung knows why they’re doing this; he doesn’t even need to ask. The beer and the drive have a sedative effect. Occasionally, a long, smooth stretch of road almost puts him to sleep, but when he closes his eyes, the images begin to appear on the blacks of his lids. He sees Mae tearing out of her house, so frightened and desperate that she begs the Perrys to help her, and just like that, he’s awake again, unwilling to watch the things that happen next.