Amelia Brown (p

52

Cold

Amelia Brown. “Lime Sweet American Cowboy.”

“Daddy”. When I hear their car pull up on the driveway, I rush to the window and watch them get out. Halmoni and Harbaoji’s house is the only place where Dad opens the car door for Umma and holds her hand all the way to the door.

When I was Soojin’s age and Umma was sick, Halmoni and Haraboji watched me all day. They woke me up and whisked me out of bed and tucked me back in at night. At first they spoke Korean when their English wasn’t fast enough—“Sooyeon, gajima!”—but then I started talking back. Dad used to grumble that I’d forget all my English because I would call him Appa. “Appa, pegopah,” I’d say, and he would hand me Bear, the plush that I still sleep with on really bad nights. Or I’d say, “Appa, Bear juseyo” and he’d find me a snack. He would talk to Umma about it at night, when he

Fiction 53

thought I was asleep. We were living in the three-room apartment then, the one in a squat, ugly building with a parking lot that often filled with dirty snow. Umma and Dad were studying for degrees only Dad would ever get. Umma only shrugged and told Dad that he knew how they were, that she could never just tell her parents no, that it wasn’t that simple. “Besides,” she added, “Sooyeon will pick up English in school. I know I did.”

“She’s not you.”

“She’s my daughter.” Dad stalked off, and I didn’t hear them talk about it again.

The steady murmur of the radio is interrupted by a loud scratchy static that makes Umma almost drop her phone. Soojin claps her hands over her ears and Ddalgi bounces to the floor of the car, in between her car seat and the door. Before Dad and Umma notice, I quickly unbuckle myself and lean over Soojin to retrieve Ddalgi and place him in her lap.

They are already lost in their argument. Umma casts a sidelong scowl. “You can learn a little,” she retorts, but there’s no bite to her words. “You’ve only been married to me for twelve years.”

I don’t hear what Dad says because I turn up my music and face the window instead. I see an orange blur that might be a streetlamp, and a red glow that could be another car. The only thing that is clear is the snow: little, fast-melting crystals that stick to the glass, white flakes that tumble through the air, obedient to how the wind howls. I long to open the window and stick my un-mittened hand outside. I imagine snow catching and sticking to my bare skin, covering me in layers of icy glitter, forming a soft, achingly cold cast around my arm.

The glow of the dashboard casts a reflection of my face against my window, but it is sharp and distorted; my face seems warped and bent. My cheeks, lit up by the dashboard lights, are ghost-white, while my eyes are lost in pockets of shadow. Everyone tells me that Soojin and I have the same eyes, round and brown like wooden beads, and that they come from our mother. They say we all look like our mother, especially Dad’s family, who taps us on our shoulders and pronounces our names delicately, like their mouths are full of marbles. But they are wrong. Umma’s eyes are so dark that they’re almost black, and curve at the tops; Soojin and I have eyes like our dad: almost square-shaped, but not quite.

Behind me, Soojin removes Ddalgi from between her arm and back into her lap. “Ddalgi-ya, jip-gayo,” she sings. I feel the hot air turn on and blast at my neck. Umma says something and Dad’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. The car rolls forward slowly; out of the whirling black-and-white in front of us, a snow-dusted stop sign appears almost out of nowhere, the marker that we are just leaving Halmoni and Haraboji’s neighborhood. It is not too late to go back and warm up by their fireplace and share a bed with Soojin, have her fall asleep against me, to listen to Haraboji tell us the stories his haraboji told him, about a forested Korea full of tigers and rabbits and moonlight. But Dad makes the right turn without even coming to a rolling stop and we slide into the street.

In the driver’s mirror, Umma bites her lip. She nibbles it from the bottom, just like me. Or maybe I’m like her. I try not to be: I smile at Dad and play with Soojin. But when Soojin frowns or Dad doesn’t smile back I worry Umma follows me all the same, a gray shadow that fastens around my shoulders and doesn’t leave. “Slow down,” she insists, touching Dad, “you’re going too fast.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Dad grumbles, and swats her hand away.

Swaddled in my winter coat and the scarf Dad makes me wear, I begin sweating. If I take off my jacket, though, I know I will be too cold. Outside, I watch the snow fall faster, thicker, harder. I count the number of streets we pass: one. Two. Three.

Halmoni and Haraboji wanted us to stay the night. They have the space; between Umma and Samcheon’s old bedrooms, there are two big queen beds. But both Umma and Dad refused. “We can’t impose,” Dad insisted. I watched him clench and unclench his fist as he searched for a reason Umma would let him say. He couldn’t tell them the truth: that he would be sleeping on the floor. He kept glancing at Umma sidelong, jerking his head when he thought Halmoni and Haraboji couldn’t see. Antsy.

Umma was less insistent but equally firm. “Jason has work early tomorrow,” she repeated, until they let us go, warning that the storm would catch us on the way home. They asked if we had a snow shovel in the car, if we had salt, if we had water and food. Halmoni rushed off to the kitchen and started pulling together a basket of the essentials she could find: flashlight, leftover mandu, cookies for Soojin.

“Don’t bother,” Dad said brusquely, and even I winced from the gaze Umma shot him. I was embarrassed that they would be so openly at odds in front of Halmoni and Haraboji. At church they hold each other’s hands and in family photos they know to pose with one arm around the other’s waist.

They taught me to bury anger deep. The first time they fought was when Soojin was a toddler. It was a thunderstorm of a fight that rolled in at dinner and struck just before I went to bed: they never got to tuck me in. They argued so loud that Soojin cried . They argued so loud I did too. I picked up the phone and dialed the only number I knew and said, “Haraboji, museoweo,” and let the sobs and the background shouts fill my grandparents in on the rest of the story. When she successfully got them off the phone,

54

Cold

Umma made me sleep without Bear for the night. “You need to learn that some things go unsaid,” she explained. The next day Dad wordlessly passed me Bear.

I lean against the window, pressing my cheek to the achingly cold glass, and my earbuds catch on my seatbelt. When I lean forward they are yanked out of my ear and bounce somewhere far within the nooks and crannies of the car seat below. I reach under to grab at it, groping blindly and finding small plastic toys, discarded napkins, a Cheerio.

“Umma, Umma.” Soojin bounces in her seat, straining to reach the back of the passenger headrest. Umma is reading something on her phone. The white glow reflected on her window and her deepening frown tell me it’s probably the news. “Umma, Umma.”

When Soojin makes art in preschool, she draws an unsmiling face with wispy strands of pencil-black hair. She puts it into Umma’s yielding grasp and waits for a “thank you” she never gets. But I understand why Soojin remains in Umma’s pull when Dad chases after her with Ddalgi and bedtime stories and love. I’m trapped there too. We suffer together, her and I. I know Umma doesn’t mean to push us away. She does it robotically, like there’s a little lever in her that flips whenever someone shows her something kind and forces all of her emotions off so she doesn’t hear the I love you. I want her to want me. When I get her to smile back, they will stop fighting because when she stopped smiling it all started.

Dad tells me to be patient. “Umma’s medicine will start working soon,” he promises, but he doesn’t tell me what pills they are or what they will do. Once or twice a year he says that the pills “didn’t take” and they’re trying something new soon. If I ask, he’ll go quiet for a long time. Then he clears his throat a lot. “It’s not her fault,” he’ll sigh, or sometimes he wraps me in his arms and doesn’t say anything at all. He leaves wet stains on my head and doesn’t let me meet his eyes.

“I don’t know when we’ll be home, Soojin,” Umma says dully, in a monotone, without looking up. “Have Sooyeon give you a snack if you’re hungry, okay?”

“I’m not her babysitter,” I grumble.

“Sooyeon,” Dad warns, “you will watch out for your sister.” He makes eye contact with me in the mirror and shakes his head. My cheeks grow hot. He wants us to get along, and I like it when Dad is happy, so I give her snacks and sit at her tea parties. I try not to hate her because it’s mostly Soojin’s fault that Umma is this way. Soojin didn’t start it, but babies make it worse. I Googled it once.

“I’m not hungry!” Soojin shouts, a little too loudly, and Dad winces. On the steering wheel, his hands go white.

“Soojin, use your inside voice,” Dad says, a little too harshly to be chiding and not harsh enough to be a full on-scold, but his voice rises and Soojin’s lip begins to quiver all the same.

“Jason, watch your tone,” Umma warns. “She’ll cry.”

“I have to watch my tone?”

The earbuds still remain firmly outside of my grasp.

“Umma, I want a story,” Soojin says. Her face is flushed. I lean over and unzip her coat before she can cry.

“Stories are for bedtime, okay?” Umma sighs and flips open another news report on her phone. I squint, but I can’t make out the words.

I gently try to pry Soojin from the jacket’s fleece-lined sleeves. Her face is flushed but I don’t think she realizes she’s hot. Her gaze is intently fixed on the space between Umma and Dad, and her thumb brushes her cheek, almost at her mouth, so she can suck on it if she gets too distressed for Ddalgi. Soojin is too easy to read. She bites Ddalgi when she’s about to break down and swings him by the arms if she’s happy. She makes our parents give him a kiss at night and throws him against the floor when she’s angry. Sometimes while she cries or yells I watch her from the edge of the room and wonder when Umma will take Ddalgi away.

When Umma and Dad sat me down to tell me that I would be getting a sibling, neither of them were smiling. Umma’s eyes were glassy and bright, but a tear still squeezed itself out of her eyelids and down her cheeks. I was more confused than anything. I knew then that they didn’t want more kids. They didn’t even mean to have me. When I first asked, Dad painted it like a fairytale: he used words I didn’t know like undergraduate and thesis; words that belonged in a Harry Potter book, somewhere in a land far away, with spells and flying and big beautiful castles. He made the world grander each time he told it to me until I turned eight, and then he wouldn’t answer it at all. When I was ten and Soojin began asking me, I realized that for all the time Dad had spent avoiding the word unwanted, he had never said love.

It was one of my many six-year-old refrains: I asked why the sky was blue, why we drove on the right side of the road and not the left, what the story of our family was. Umma left it up to Dad to spin their life into a once upon a time and a happily ever after. Umma had always made it clear: “Your father and I are married because of you,” she’d say, and return to flipping channels on TV. Sometimes she remembered to give me a squeeze. When I told him what Umma said, he sighed, long and deep, and looked more tired than I thought was possible. He explained to me that I was loved and I was wanted, which were too abstract to be kept fully in my head. He never said that what she told me was untrue.