“It’s true,” I said. “It almost looks like…Are you wearing makeup?”

I had never realized that my mother had her eyebrows tattooed. They looked so natural it was hard to tell. I thought back to her friend Youngsoon, whose brows had been done poorly, the right one permanently quirked.

“I had it done a long time ago,” she said dismissively. She shifted in her hospital cot, pushing out her legs and shimmying her back up the pillow. “You know your dad should really be the one that’s here.”

“I like being here.”

“Yes, but he’s my husband,” she said. “Even when he’s here he doesn’t know how to take care of me at all. When I ask him to do the mouthwash he just hands it to me; he doesn’t even give me a cup.”

I leaned back on the guest bench and stared at my feet, slowly clapping my left hospital sandal back and forth against my bare heel. A couple years before this we were at an Olive Garden when she alluded to an argument they’d had, the subject of which she’d said she could never reveal. That it would ruin the way I saw my father, like a broken plate you’ve glued back together and have to keep using, but all you can see is the crack.

“Do you think he’ll get married again?”

“I think he will. Probably,” she said. She looked like she didn’t mind it, that it was something they’d discussed together before. “He’ll probably marry another Asian woman.” I cringed, particularly distressed at the thought of it being another Asian woman. It was mortifying to imagine what people might think, that he could just replace her, that he had yellow fever. It cheapened their bond. It cheapened us.

“I don’t think I could stand it,” I said. “I don’t think I could accept it. It’s disgusting.”

There was a dangerous and unspoken prospect looming, that without my mother to bond us, my father and I would drift apart. I was not essential to him in the way I knew I was to my mother, and I could see that in the aftermath, there would be a struggle to coexist. That there was a good chance we would come unmoored, that our family would dissolve entirely. I waited for my mother to scold me, to assert that he was my father, my blood. That I was selfish and spoiled for thinking that way about the man who had provided for us. Instead she rested her hand on my back, resigned to the fact that she could not help what she knew was left unsaid.

“You’ll do whatever you have to do.”

* * *

—

TWO AND A HALF WEEKS into our disastrous vacation I arrived at the hospital to find my father yelling at Seong Young and one of the nurses in the hallway, the whole hospital wing gaping at the large American man and his large American temper.

“That’s my wife!” he shouted. “Speak English!”

“What happened?” I asked.

My father was accusing Seong Young of withholding translations in an effort to spare him from the worst of the news. Seong Young was quiet and nodded his head. He held his hands behind his back as if he were about to bow and listened intently, letting my father get his anger out. The nurse looked nervous and desperate to back away. Inside, my mother was unconscious, her mouth covered by an oxygen mask hooked up to what looked like a high-tech vacuum. Nami was standing over her bed, a taut fist held to her lips. She must have known all along that this was what we were in for.

Seong Young and my father returned, our pretty young doctor filing in behind them. I was shocked by the amount of time the doctor spent with us in Korea. In Oregon, I couldn’t recall seeing a doctor for more than a minute before they rushed off to another room and left the nurses in charge. Here, our doctor seemed genuinely interested in helping us, had even held my mother’s hand when we first arrived. Though she seemed to know quite a bit of English, she was always apologizing for her inability to speak it well. She informed us that my mother had gone into septic shock. That her blood pressure was dangerously low and she would likely have to be moved to a ventilator to stay alive.

It used to be so clear to me, the difference between living and dying. My mother and I had always agreed that we’d rather end our lives than live on as vegetables. But now that we had to confront it, the shreds of physical autonomy torn more ragged every day, the divide had blurred. She was bedridden, unable to walk on her own, her bowels no longer moving. She ate through a bag dripped through her arm and now she could no longer breathe without a machine. It was getting harder every day to say that this was really living.

* * *

—

I WATCHED the arc of the elevator lights illuminate from five to three as my father and I descended, skipping a nonexistent fourth floor, which is considered bad luck because the pronunciation of the number four in Korean recalls the Chinese character for death. My father and I were silent. We’d decided to go out for some fresh air before confronting the decision of how long we’d keep her intubated if that’s what it came to. It was dark out already. Yellow streetlights mobbed by late summer bugs lit the few blocks we walked before we ducked into the nearest bar. We ordered two pints of Kloud and brought them up to the roof, which was empty. We sat at a picnic table and my father reached out for me across the table, closing his large, calloused hand around mine.

“So this is really it,” he said.

He squinted at the surface of the picnic table and with his free hand probed a knot in the wood with his index finger. Then he sniffed loudly and wiped the table with his palm, as if dusting it off. He took a sip of his beer and looked back out at the city as if he was searching for its opinion.

“Wow,” he said, and let go of my hand.

A cool breeze passed and I felt a chill. I was wearing the same cotton summer dress and hospital slides I’d worn practically every day since we’d gotten here. I could hear the whir of a bike engine passing on the street below and remembered how when I was five or so my father used to take me out on his motorcycle. He’d prop me up in front between his legs, and I’d hang on to the gas cap for support. On long drives the rumble of the engine and the warmth of the gas tank below would put me to sleep, and sometimes when I’d wake up we’d already be back in our driveway. And I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.

We had gone out on a limb, traveling to Korea against the doctor’s orders. We had tried to plan something that was worth fighting for, and yet every day had wound up worse than the last. We had tried to choose living over dying and it had turned out to be a horrible mistake. We drank another round, tried to let it wash us over.

* * *

—

WE COULDN’T HAVE BEEN GONE more than two hours, but when we returned my mother was sitting upright. Her eyes were wide and alert, like a bewildered child who has just walked into a room and interrupted a tense discussion between adults.

“Did you guys get something to eat?” she asked.

We took it as a sign. My father began to make arrangements for a medical evacuation back to Oregon. We would have to fly with a registered nurse, and once we arrived in Eugene, immediately check back in to Riverbend. I left the room to phone Peter, hoping to return with something to look forward to.

I walked down the hall and slipped out onto the fire escape, a concrete landing enclosed by tan metal bars. I sat and rested my feet on a step. Peter was on vacation with his family for the weekend in Martha’s Vineyard, where it was early morning.