Last month’s news.
She rubbed her hands, dislodging the sticky, warmed pills that Mr. Sorenson had given her. With that gesture, she reclaimed a kind of housekeeping competence over her mood.
Casting a brisk, efficient glance around, she noticed that the living room was neat and yet strangely occupied. Whatever had happened in her absence, it would never tell. All the toys that she normally swept into bins were categorized and lined up across the floor, some by size, some by type, some by color, some by fancy. It unnerved her, this carefully presented nonsense. The room was empty of the boy.
“Where is he!” she demanded.
“Who?”
“Don’t say who! You know who! Jonathan! Where is he!”
“Jonathan?” asked Mo-Sae, half-rising from the chair. “Why he was here just a moment ago.” He had started doing that: coming up with likely versions of the past that became fixed in his memory.
The boy was not inside the hall closet, hiding in the bedroom, the bathroom, the bedroom again, not crammed into the storage ottoman, suffocated in the front-load washer, splattered on the concrete from a five-story fall. She could not stand Mo-Sae’s forbearing attitude as he trailed her on her frantic search. She whirled to face him. That uncharacteristically meek look. She wanted to beat it out of him. You! No! How!
But then, Jonathan simply appeared, in full view of the door through which she had just entered. She wondered that he hadn’t called to her sooner.
Later that day, in the absence of tragedy, she and Mo-Sae sat in the living room with Jonathan lining up cars between them. The radio was turned to the Christian station, which played arrangements of hymns. “Just As I Am Without One Plea.” “Rock of Ages.” Mo-Sae sat in an armchair with no other occupation. She sat on the floor, with one knee hugged to her chest, snapping the scraggly ends of mung bean sprouts onto a spread section of the newspaper that Mo-Sae had been reading. All this talk of reunification. “Permanent peace.” “Long road ahead.” Her thoughts turned, with gentle reluctance, to the past.
That little room in Busan that she and her sisters had shared—so small that at night they had to sleep alternating heads and toes. They lived above a noodle shop, and day and night, as they went up or down the back staircase, they would pass the open kitchen door. Inside, the red-faced ajuma would work flour with water and a pinch of salt, cutting the dough into long ribbons, lowering the noodles into steaming vats—never once offering them a bowl.
How young she had been then, yet how like an old woman. Her work at the local rubber factory left her always tired, always short of breath, blisters between her fingers, curing fumes in her nose, a constant ringing in the deep cavities of her back teeth.
Once, she had come home from work to find her middle sister missing. The room could be swept in a glance. There was no trace of her. Only her youngest sister crouched in the corner. Her rising panic had felt almost euphoric, how her fatigue lifted, her aches vanished, and the spirit of drudgery and depression that accompanied her suddenly found clarity and purpose. She ran back into the streets, easily skirting the iron bicycles and slow oxen pulling hopeless carts of merchandise. The road beneath her pounding feet began to slope downhill, and she felt the easy momentum, the blood pumping into and out of her heart, her living body.
She realized that she had returned to the factory. There, in the last light, she could make out a humped form on the dusty road alongside the factory wall.
It breathed.
It slept.
Even now, she could feel between her thumb and forefinger, the tender curl of Young-Soo’s ear as she gripped it, hard, right at the lobe, and yanked her to her feet. She could still see the look of distant amazement on her sister’s face, lagging in dreams, emphasized by the dust in her eyebrows and lashes and hair. She had never struck Young-Soo before, but that night she discovered a taste for it. Nothing else could express so well her outrage, her longing for their mother, her need to connect again and again with something solid, resistant, and alive—shoulder, cheekbone, the open mouth that housed the teeth.
That was how it had been. She had forgotten. Her sisters had married and left her charge. They had emigrated—one to Germany, another to Australia. In later years, she had received news of them. One was divorced. The other unexpectedly died of a reaction to penicillin. Distant news, by the time it reached her. Here, in America, she had a different life, a different set of fighting instincts. When she had her own children, she never once laid a finger on them, no, not when they mouthed off or frankly and freely disobeyed. If anything, she was a little shy of them.
She glanced at Mo-Sae on his armchair, half-expecting to find him asleep, with the sense that here was her life. Yes, his eyes were closed. It was that time of day. What did the doctor call it? Sundowning. She had been told to expect increased confusion, even agitation. She had been told that the only way to respond was with patience and kindness. Patience. Kindness. What did they really mean between husband and wife? Sometimes she felt that patience and kindness could be stretched so far in a marriage as to become their opposites.
She studied the face tipped back on the armchair, unconscious yet holding fast to mystery. A face already given to absolution.
Did he know?
She could never directly ask him, never actually say the word Alzheimer’s, chimae, in English or Korean. She would rather pacify, indulge, work around his nonsense. Perhaps this was patience and kindness. Or perhaps it was the worst possible way to be unkind.
Sometimes she wondered. Was it all an act? Would nothing really remain? In the middle of the night, did a dawning horror sometimes spread over his soul? Or did he really think, as it seemed when his defenses were up, that all the world was in error and he was its lone sentinel of truth and fact?
“Number 276,” Mo-Sae suddenly said, as if responding to something she had said aloud. His eyes remained closed.
“Eh?”
“That hymn on the radio. ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness.’ It’s number 276 in the hymnal.”
And then sometimes he could do that: remember something so far-fetched that she would be forced to admit, as the song said, that there was still strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.
It was in this mood that Young-Ja took the call from Elder Lim’s wife the next day.
“Mrs. Han,” said Mrs. Lim, as if no time had passed. “Is Mr. Han aware that we have a new conductor at church?”
It was not such a big church. Everyone was aware. They had also been aware when Mo-Sae quit the choir in a show of outrage over the incompetence of the previous conductor.
So why was Mrs. Lim calling now?
Young-Ja listened as Mrs. Lim complained. That the new conductor wanted to do the entire Messiah for Christmas, not just the “Hallelujah” chorus. That he wanted to do it in English. That he wanted to hire professional soloists. She waited for Mrs. Lim to reach the point of her conversation.
“So-therefore,” said Mrs. Lim.
There it was. That turn of phrase.
“Would Mr. Han consider re-joining the choir? At least for the Christmas cantata?”
Young-Ja had told no one at church about Mo-Sae’s condition. She had only considered it a blessing that Mo-Sae quit the choir when he did instead of blundering on, forgetting lyrics and missing cues, until the truth became all too apparent.
And now he was being asked to return.