Mae is fifty-six years old. She doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t have anything. But Kyung doesn’t bother to correct her because dementia is the only reasonable explanation for what she’s done. As soon as Gertie leaves, he runs out the back door toward the field, the same way he did when he saw Ethan turning blue at a neighbor’s birthday party. He was choking on a piece of candy, a thumb-sized chocolate that he wasn’t supposed to eat. Kyung was terrified at first, and angry later. Now he feels the full force of both. He rips a beach towel from the clothesline, and a plastic pin snaps off and hits him in the face, missing his eye by almost nothing.
The grassy field comes up to his knees, littered with things that he never noticed from a distance. Everywhere he steps, there’s broken glass and pieces of metal and thick patches of thistle that sting and scrape his legs. Even if the ground were free of obstacles, he wouldn’t look up. He can’t. His mother is so conservative, so timid about her body. She’s never even worn a bathing suit. He doesn’t understand how that woman became this one. As they meet near the middle of the field, Kyung turns his head and hugs her with the towel, covering the parts of her that he doesn’t want to see.
“What?” he shouts. But his thoughts are too scattered to finish the question. “Why?”
Mae’s face is filthy. Her skin is covered with dark brown streaks. He worries that it’s excrement, a possibility no stranger than wandering naked from her house to his.
“Where are your clothes?”
Mae’s expression doesn’t change, not even when he shouts the question just inches from her ear.
“Help,” she says, followed by something in Korean—so low, he can barely make out the words.
“English. Speak English. I can’t understand you.”
“Help,” she repeats.
“I’m trying to.” He pulls the towel around her tighter, embarrassed by the sight of Mae so diminished, wrapped in hot pink sea horses and neon green stripes. “Where’s Dad? Can we call him to come get you? Can he bring you some clothes?”
“Aboji ga dachi shuh suh.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“Aboji ga dachi shuh suh.”
Korean is no longer the language he speaks with his parents. They retired it from use years ago, when Kyung was just a child. Like a dog, he sometimes recognizes the sounds of certain words, but doesn’t always grasp their meaning. Aboji ga … your father? Dachi shuh suh … hurt me? Your father hurt me? The air catches in his lungs as the question forms a statement, and suddenly everything forgotten is familiar again. He turns Mae’s face toward his, gently lifting her chin until he notices the bruises. Two in the center of her throat. Eight more fanning out on the sides of her neck. Fingerprints. When he backs away, the towel slides off her shoulders and falls to the ground, but Mae doesn’t reach for it or even cover herself with her hands. She just stands there, trembling as he takes in everything that he missed before. The scratches on her arms and breasts. The bloody patches where her pubic hair has been ripped out. Bruises everywhere. Bruises again.
Behind him, the kitchen door squeaks open and bangs shut.
“Is she all right, Kyung? What’s going on?”
As Gillian approaches, his mother buries herself in his arms and starts to cry, but it’s like no cry he’s ever heard before. She wails, long and low, like a wounded animal that any decent man would have the sense to kill.
*
One of the paramedics asks if Mae speaks English. Kyung insists that she does—she’s fluent, he tells them—but she keeps screaming at all of them in Korean. Twice, she lurches up to a sitting position on the gurney and rips the oxygen mask off her face. When the paramedics try to strap her down, she fights them both, throwing punches as if she’s gone wild. Kyung has never seen his mother act like this before. She’s not the type to resist. He rests his hand on her shoulder, startled by the temperature of her skin, which is burning hot.
The female paramedic covers Mae with a thin, crackly sheet that looks like tinfoil. “Don’t touch her,” she warns. “She has frostbite.”
“But it’s June. And it was warm this morning.”
“But it was raining last night,” she snaps. “Those blisters forming around her ankles? That’s trench foot. She was probably out in the woods since yesterday.”
The woman doesn’t try to hide that she blames Kyung for what happened. He bristles at this, the idea that he’s somehow responsible, or irresponsible.
“My father did this. She told me, right before I called you. She said, ‘Your father hurt me.’”
The woman glances at her partner as he prepares an IV line. When he finishes inserting the needle into Mae’s arm, he knocks on the sliding glass door that separates them from the driver.
“Ten-sixteen,” he says. “Call it in.”
The driver nods and picks up his radio.