Dad parked the car and I hurried inside, lining my shoes up neatly in the mudroom. I called out to her as I entered through the kitchen, and she stood up from the couch.

“Hello, my baby!” she called back to me.

I went to her, embracing her cautiously. I felt the hard plastic port between us. I ran my hand over her hair.

“It looks so good,” I said. “I love it.”

She sat back down and I slinked off the leather couch and sat on the rug between her and the coffee table. Julia panted beside us, her tongue lobbing over the missing canine my father had accidentally knocked out a few years ago, driving golf balls off the driveway tee. I hugged my mother’s calves and leaned my head on her lap. I had expected our reunion to be emotional, but she seemed calm and unmoved.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” she said. “I feel a little weak, but I feel fine.”

“You have to eat a lot to keep your health up. I want to learn how to make all the Korean dishes you like.”

“Oh yes, you becoming such a good cook from the picture you been sending me. Tomorrow morning how about you make me some fresh tomato juice? I buy two or three organic tomatoes and I blend it in the Vitamix with some honey and ice. Taste so good. Lately I’ve been making that one.”

“Tomato juice. Got it.”

“In two weeks Mommy’s friend Kye is going to come. And then maybe she can teach you how to make some Korean foods.”

Kye was my mother’s friend from my parents’ time in Japan. She was a few years older than my mother and had taken her under her wing while my father worked the used car lots in Misawa. She showed her where to shop, where to drink, how to drive, and how to side hustle, black-marketing items from the PX, the discount department store on base where the GIs did their shopping. Coffee creamer, dish soap, fifths of foreign booze, tins of Spam—my mom would buy these rarities tax-free from the PX for a buck and flip them for five.

They had lost touch after my parents moved to Germany but reconnected a couple of years ago. She lived in Georgia now with her husband, Woody. I’d never met her and I was excited to learn from her, to prove to my mother how useful I could be. I fantasized about the delicious food we’d make together, finally repaying my debts, giving back some of the love and care I’d taken for granted for so many years. Dishes that would comfort her and remind her of Korea. Meals prepared just the way she liked them, to lift her spirits and nourish her body and give her the strength she’d need to recover.

* * *

—

WE WATCHED TELEVISION together for a while, quietly picking the thistles out of Julia’s fur and searching for ticks to burn while she panted on her side, pawing at our wrists, hungry for attention every time our eyes drifted away from her and toward the screen. My mother went to bed early and I brought my bag upstairs.

My bedroom was above my parents’, a wide rectangle tapering into little alcoves with the hips of the roof on either side. My desk was nestled into one niche, my record player cabinet and speakers and a blue-cushioned window seat in the other. The alcoves were painted bright tangerine and the middle section mint, loudly proclaiming from the upper corner of the house: teenage girl was here.

“Stop making all that hole!” my mother would scold from the staircase as I nailed psychedelic tapestries to my ceiling and pinned gigantic Janis Joplin and Star Wars posters to my wall. I found the old record player cabinet and its hideous wooden speakers at Goodwill. “We can paint it!” I said, thrilled at the idea of sharing a creative project with my mother. But once we got them back to the house, I was left to my own devices. I laid out newspaper in the garage and spray-painted the cabinets black and, too impatient to let them dry properly, immediately set in on large white polka dots, which of course dripped and became misshapen, rendering the impression of a melting cow. It reminded me of many such half-baked teenage failures, underscoring the point when I put an old Leonard Cohen album on and remembered that it only played in mono.

I opened the window, the screen of which I’d removed and stashed in a storage closet years ago, and climbed onto the roof. I leaned against the coarse tar paper, setting my feet above the gutter and steadying myself on the slope. There were so many stars out, more brilliant than I’d even remembered, uncorrupted by the lights of the city. The sounds of crickets and frogs resonated from below. At the other end of the roof, when my parents were sleeping, I used to slide down the columns of the portico and meet with whichever kid I’d enlisted to drive for the night. Outside, I’d bound up the gravel driveway to my liberators, engines idling, and I was free.

There wasn’t much to do when we snuck out. Most of the time, the kids who picked me up weren’t even particularly close friends, just bored classmates or older kids with licenses who were still awake with nothing else to do. Every so often there’d be a rave in the woods and we’d dress in elaborate costumes and dance along with the anonymous hippies on ecstasy. Sometimes I would pilfer liquor left over from my parents’ holiday parties and, like a careful chemist, siphon from the various bottles inconspicuous levels of liquid to mix with soda and drink in the park. But most of the time we’d just drive around listening to CDs, occasionally venturing as far as an hour out to Dexter Reservoir or Fern Ridge just to sit on the dock and look out at the black water, dark as oil in the night, a bleak expanse we’d use as a sounding board for how confused we were about ourselves and what exactly it was that we were feeling. Other nights we’d drive up to Skinner Butte to get a good view of the dull city that kept us hostage or drink coffee and eat grated hash browns at the twenty-four-hour IHOP, or sneak our way through some stranger’s acreage where we’d once discovered a rope swing. Once we even drove out to the airport just to watch people at the terminal, flying off to cities where we desperately wished we could travel, a couple of nocturnal teens bonded together by a deep, inexplicable loneliness and AOL instant messenger.

It was not lost on me how different the circumstances were now. Here I was again, this time returned of my own free will, no longer scheming a wild escape into the dark but desperately hoping that a darkness would not come in.

7

Medicine

The first couple of days were quiet and still. We kept waiting to see what would happen, as if something sinister were looming, slowly stalking the perimeter of the house. But for the first few days, she felt fine. I figured, three days in already, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.