He had never met his own father, who’d been a paratrooper in the Second World War. Supposedly, on a crash-landing over Guam, his parachute got caught in a tree and he was stuck up there for days, witness to the slaughter of his entire unit before he was finally rescued. He returned a completely different person. He beat his children. He made them kneel on glass and threw salt in their wounds. He raped his wife, impregnating her with my father. She finally left him, just before my father was born.

Raised by a single working mother who hardly had the time or emotional capacity for the youngest of four, my father grew up without much supervision. His older siblings Gayle and David were ten and eleven years older, respectively, and already out of the house by the time he reached elementary school. Ron, who was six years his senior, perpetuated the abuses he’d endured onto my father, boxing him into unconsciousness and slipping him tabs of acid when my father was only nine, just to see what would happen.

A predictably troubled adolescence followed, culminating in his arrest, rehab and, a handful of relapses thereafter while he worked as an exterminator in his early twenties. It was his fortuitous move abroad that ultimately saved him. If this were my father’s memoir, it’d probably be titled The Greatest Used Car Salesman in the World. More than thirty years later, nothing excites him more than talking about his years on the military base, working his way through the ranks of the company in Misawa, Heidelberg, and Seoul. For a man who came from nothing, life as a used car salesman abroad was a most glamorous calling.

These were the years my father seized the American dream in a foreign country. While he may have been a man with few skills and little education, he could make up for it twice over in pure resilience and die-hard conviction. There was nothing he was too proud for—whatever it took, he was going to be the last one standing.

He took this newfound discipline with him back to Eugene, where he became a successful broker who relished attacking problems and delegating tasks. After a quarter life of failure, he finally found something he was good at, and he gave it everything. Part of that sacrifice meant he lived the life of a greyhound—eyes ahead, smell the blood, and fucking run.

But my mother’s illness was not a problem he could negotiate his way out of or outwork after hours. And so he began to feel helpless, and then he began to run away.

I returned home at noon one day, groggy and exhausted from another night spent on the hospital bench, to find him seated at the kitchen table. The house smelled like burning.

“This isn’t me,” he muttered to himself. He was looking over his car insurance, shaking his head. He held the phone to his ear, waiting to settle the second fender bender he’d gotten into that week, for both of which he had been at fault. In the trash can were two pieces of blackened toast; in the toaster another was beginning to smoke.

I popped the toaster and took a butter knife to scrape some of the burnt bits into the sink. I put it on a plate and set it next to him on the table.

“I’m not like this,” he said.

That night, before I left for the hospital, I found him in the same spot drifting in and out of sleep, mumbling incoherently. He was wearing an undershirt and a pair of white briefs.

It was nine o’clock and he had already polished off two bottles of wine and was sucking on one of the marijuana candies he’d bought from the dispensary for my mother.

“She can’t even look at me,” he said, beginning to blubber. “We can’t even look at each other without crying.”

His big body heaved up and down. The chapped crevices in his lips were inked dark purple with wine. It wasn’t rare to see my father cry. He was a sensitive guy, despite his grit. He did not know how to withhold any part of his truth. Unlike my mother, he saved no 10 percent.

“You have to promise you’re going to be there for me,” he said. “Promise me, okay?”

He reached out for me and held on to my wrist, searching for my reassurance with his eyes half-open. In his other hand he was holding a half-eaten slice of Jarlsberg that folded limply over as he leaned toward me. I fought the urge to rip my arm away from him. I knew I should be feeling sympathy or empathy, camaraderie or compassion, but I only burned with resentment.

He was an undesirable partner in a game with the highest of stakes and insurmountable odds. He was my father and I wanted him to soberly reassure me, not try to goad me into navigating this disheartening path alone. I could not even cry in his presence for fear he would take the moment over, pit his grief against mine in a competition of who loved her more, and who had more to lose. Moreover, it shook me to my core that he had said aloud what I considered to be unspeakable. The possibility that she couldn’t make it, that there could even be an us without her.

* * *

—

TWO WEEKS LATER, my mother was finally able to return home. I set up a space heater in the bathroom and ran her a bath, checking the water frequently to get it to the perfect temperature. I helped her from her bed slowly toward the tub. She was feeble and walked as if she were relearning how. I pulled down her pajama pants and lifted her shirt like she did for me when I was a child. “Man seh,” I joked, something she used to say when undressing me, an instruction to raise my arms above my head.

I braced her weight on my shoulder and helped her step into the tub. I reminded her of the jjimjilbang, of the bet she’d won, how uncomfortable Peter and Dad must have been, sitting naked together. I told her it was lucky we already felt so comfortable with each other. That there were families who were embarrassed by nudity. I washed her black hair carefully, trying my best to rinse it clean without touching her hair at all, fearful it would break off in my hands.

“Look at my veins,” she said, examining her stomach through the water. “Isn’t it scary? They look black. Even when I was pregnant my body didn’t look this weird. It’s like there’s poison in me.”

“Medicine,” I corrected her. “Killing all the bad things.”

I unplugged the drain and helped her out of the tub, patting her down with a plush yellow towel. I worked as quickly as possible, trying to make sure she wouldn’t fall. “Lean on me,” I said, wrapping her in a fleece robe.

As the water drained, I noticed a black residue collecting along the sides of the white tub, ebbing with the surface of the water. When I looked back at my mother, her head was patchy. Large clumps of hair were missing from sections, revealing portions of her pale scalp. Torn between helping her stand and rushing to the tub to rinse away the evidence, I was too slow to keep my mother from catching a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror. I could feel her body go limp, sliding down onto the carpet and out of my arms like sand.

She sat on the floor and confronted the reflection. She ran a hand along her head and stared at the hair that broke off into it. In the same full-length mirror where I had watched her pose for more than half my life. The same mirror where I’d watched her apply cream after cream to preserve her taut, flawless skin. The same mirror where I’d find her trying on outfit after outfit, runway walking with perfect posture, examining herself with pride, posing with a new purse or leather jacket. The mirror where she lingered in all her vanity. In the mirror now there was someone unrecognizable and out of her control. Someone strange and undesirable. She started to cry.

I crouched down beside her and wrapped my arms around her shaking body. I wanted to cry with her, at this image I too did not recognize, this giant physical manifestation of evil that had entered our lives. But instead I felt my body stiffen, my heart harden, my feelings freeze over. An internal voice commanded, “Do not break down. If you cry, it’s acknowledging danger. If you cry, she will not stop.” So instead, I swallowed and steadied my voice, not just to comfort her with a white lie but to truly force myself into believing it.

“It’s just hair, Umma,” I said. “It will grow back.”

8

Unni