Where was she?
Was she somewhere laboring over her devotions? Wiping down the leaves of her showy house plants? Shala-shala-shala with church women on the phone?
Then it dawned on him. Had she left him alone with the boy?
He began to move through the apartment. There were signs of her. At least half-a-dozen pairs of reading glasses; some unfinished work beside a sewing basket; something simmering on the stove. But no wife.
He entered the living room, which was set like a stage for the occasional visitor. Matching armchairs angled as if in conversation. An ornately framed print of a peasant couple praying in a wheat field. A bowl of fancy dusty candies. Even the piano bench wore little crocheted socks. This was all Young-Ja. All this stuff. When had she turned so aspirational?
At that moment, what appeared was the boy—appearing also in Mo-Sae’s cognition—as he struggled to drag a large toy bin down the hall. Mo-Sae moved to help but was dissuaded by the child’s look of fierce refusal. When he reached the living room, he threw his weight into upending the bin. Toys dumped everywhere. Mo-Sae surveyed the mess. He should have been angry at this demonstration, which, he suspected, was aimed at him. Instead, he was transfixed. A stray block. A plastic soldier. A marble on the run, which he nabbed.
Now he was fully engrossed—sorting, retrieving. Puzzle pieces, dinosaurs, cars. He put them in files, rows, ranks, and columns stretching across the living room floor. As he worked, he swore under his breath to mask the pleasure of having something to do, to make that pleasure seem obligatory. TS. Tough Shit. Fuck it got my orders. Goddamn Jodie. Goddamn Gook. Fucking Biscuit Head, shit for the birds.
When he straightened up, he noticed that the sliding door was open. As he drew closer, he heard whoops and shrieking laughter: the sounds of some exclusionary fun. He saw a boy standing on a chair to look way down over the balcony railing. Below, other children played in the communal swimming pool. Waist-high, the boy was clear of the railing.
Mo-Sae was suddenly overwhelmed with love for the boy, that yearning posture pitched against the open air. He was so small and his frustration was so great.
Mo-Sae called to him. “Danger,” he said.
The boy did not move.
“Down, Jonathan,” he said. The name had come to him.
No response.
In a few steps, Mo-Sae crossed the balcony and seized the child around the middle. A naïve fight went up in the live body: sharp kicking feet, valiant muscles.
“Yeobo!” Mo-Sae yelled as he attempted to embrace the struggle.
The kid wrestled free and ran back into the house. Mo-Sae found him back in the living room, breathing hard and scheming. When he saw his grandfather, Jonathan deliberately plowed through the organized toys with his feet. As Mo-Sae approached, he shouted, “No, Grandpa, no!” and picked up a car as if to hurl it.
Young-Ja always rushed home, handbag gaping, outracing disaster. She felt her heart do just what her doctor had said it must not do as she thought of the pool, the gas stove, the three-lane intersection beside their apartment. Sometimes the anxiety kept her homebound, but little by little, she would start again, coming up with errands that were really excuses to leave. Stamps, prescription pick-ups. Sometimes she would drop by T.J. Maxx for the small pleasure of buying something she didn’t need or, as it invariably turned out, even want.
She was never gone long.
This afternoon, she even left a length of pork belly simmering on the stove with some peppercorns and a spoonful of instant coffee. She told herself she would just run to the bank and deposit the monthly check her daughter gave her for childcare. On her way out, she glanced at the mirror. She felt a complicated sense of recognition at her reflection, not unlike the feeling she had toward the look of her full name, Young-Ja Han, written out in her daughter’s hand. Payable to.
As she waited for the elevator, she heard the door of a nearby unit opening. She realized that she had been listening for it.
“Damn chain latch.”
It was Mr. Sorenson. He had trouble with small physical tasks, like opening jars or unhooking a latch from its runners. Sometimes she wondered if he kept his eye to the peephole and watched the elevator all day, so canny were their afternoon meetings.
“Young-Ja!” he called. “An-yeong-ha-sae-yo?” He knew a little Korean because he had been stationed near Seoul during the war.
It always caught her off guard, how handsome he was. White hair, blue eyes, profile like an eagle. He was always bringing her things—jam-centered candies, cuttings of begonias. Always telling her things. Once, he told her he had an organ at home and promised to play it for her someday. He expected her to believe, or act as if she believed, that an instrument of such occasion and size could fit into their modest units.
Still, she gave him what she could in return. Her docile attention. Half-smiles. A secret.
It had been right around the time that Jonathan was born, three years ago, that she had been diagnosed with a condition. She had left the doctor’s office determined to tell no one, not even the children. Especially not the children. But on her way home, she had run into Mr. Sorenson. In his presence, she found herself seeking the exact name of her condition. She could only remember that the doctor had said something that sounded like “a tree.”
“Atrial fibrillation,” pronounced Mr. Sorenson. “Increases your chance of stroke by five.”
Since then, it had become part of their routine. “How’s that atria,” he would ask, and she would become acutely aware that she had one. Actually, two. One on the right and one on the left side of the heart, according to Mr. Sorenson. It gave her a feeling of strangeness toward her body and all its functioning parts, as if they were not to be taken for granted.
Today, he handed her a medicinal brown bottle. “Take this,” he commanded.
She took the bottle.
“No, not all of it,” he said, seeming annoyed that she had not understood the precise measure of his generosity.
This embarrassed her. She was not a person who took more than her due. Even in her discomfort, she performed the small service of loosening the cap of the bottle before returning it to him so he would not have to ask.
ORGANIC INDIA HEART GUARD, the label read.
“Take some,” said Mr. Sorenson. “Take ten.” He shook some capsules into her palm and counted them, moving each pill across her palm with the stiff index finger of his stricken hand, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times.
“Now,” he said. “These are from the bark of the Arjun tree. Buddhists call it the tree of enlightenment. You know Buddha, of course. He’s Oriental.
“See here,” he continued, reading from the label without needing glasses. “Take with food. Take twice a day. Do not take if you’re nursing or pregnant.”
He looked at her with private amusement. His still-keen blue eyes. “Any chance you’re pregnant?
“Come on. Smile.”
When she returned home, Mo-Sae was in the living room, reading the Chosun Daily. He had a certain frowning expression when he was with a paper. She had once been fascinated by this look, had wanted to come under it herself: the look of a man exerting his personal opinion on the ways of the world, the movement of nations. Now she only snuck a glance at the front page to check the date of the paper he was reading.
The headlines referenced the historic summit between North and South Korea, the first such meeting since the country was divided. Could this be the start of reunification? Would there be an easing of military tensions? An opportunity for family reunions?