The Revisionists (48 page)

What was she doing here? Were people really looking for her? Would the Shims blame her for what had happened? Would American police cart her off to jail? In which case, would that be any worse than working for the Shims? Would she serve time here, or in Korea, or back in Indonesia? How had her life reached the point where she was sitting in a strange motel room pondering the existence of extradition treaties? Was Leo really trying to help her, walking the halls of American justice, pleading her case with unknown magistrates?

He had tried to kiss her last night. There had been a time she would have liked that, but no longer. While she’d been trapped in that house, the illusion of romance was something to hold fast to, the possibility of it, the escape. Now she craved a more tangible escape.

She turned the TV back on. It was an American soap opera, weirdly similar to the Korean ones Sang Hee watched. Different races, different language, same obvious problems of sleeping with the wrong people. Did Leo only want to sleep with her? Was he only playing the hero to get her to spread her legs?

No, she wasn’t thinking straight. He had been cold as a machine the previous night, giving her quick, sharp orders and guiding her by her forearm, but he’d steered her to safety. Or to whatever this motel was. Clearly he had done things like this before; he didn’t seem nearly as overwhelmed by the situation as she was, those three punches against his steering wheel notwithstanding.

But that didn’t make sitting in this motel room any easier.

One of the soap operas seamlessly blended into another—she didn’t even realize she was watching a new show until the opening credits scrolled by following a shocking revelation that left a pert blond woman speechless, her mouth wide open. Then there was a knock on Sari’s door.

It wasn’t Leo’s coded knock. Just two knocks, hard.

She slowly stood up from the bed. Considered turning the TV off, but decided against it. Any change in volume would reveal her presence. The two knocks, again. She was holding her breath. The curtains were drawn—she’d checked many times to make sure there were no cracks through which prying eyes might discover her.

The knob wiggled. It was locked, so it didn’t wiggle much, but the existence of a hand on the other side was inescapable.

She backed up silently, thinking,
The bathroom.
She remembered that there was a narrow window there, shoulder-high, opaque, and set in the wall opposite the showerhead. Did she have something to shatter it with? Where did it lead? Her room was on the second floor—how far down could she safely jump?

While bracing herself for the imminent appearance of some large body tearing the door from its hinges, she heard a gentler sound. Footsteps, scuffling a bit at the dirty floor of the outer hallway. The person was walking away.

Then she heard two more knocks, on a different door.

She crept forward this time, making her way to the curtained window. After a few more seconds, she heard the knocks on the other door again. She pulled the curtain just the tiniest fraction of a centimeter so she could peer outside. There was a man in the hallway, standing outside the next room. He was tall and white, with dark hair and sunglasses. He was wearing a suit; would men in suits come to a place like this? Maybe they would. Maybe he was not looking for her.

She stepped back, waiting. Television voices giggled with postcoital bliss.

Thirty more minutes passed as she stood there, then sat on her bed, not even watching the television anymore but afraid to turn it off.

This is insane, she thought. If people really were looking for her, she was not safe here. So there was no reason not to take a walk.

She’d been in such a fugue the night before, and he’d taken her on such a deliberately circuitous route, that she had no idea which way to go. She set off walking to the right, in what seemed to be the direction the sun was setting, based on the relative brightness of the overcast sky, but she soon reached a highway that lacked a pedestrian bridge. So she doubled back, hoping she wasn’t surrounded by such roads, wasn’t completely marooned here.

No one was watching her, because no one was out. This wasn’t an area for wanderers. She walked in the shadows of overpasses, skirting stretches that lacked sidewalks, walking on the road itself, stepping around a few puddles and hoping drivers would pay her enough heed. The wind was picking up and she was cold in her thin track jacket, but at least she was out of her latest prison. If there was another one waiting for her, so be it, but she wasn’t going to sit around waiting for it to show up.

Finally she reached a commercial district. To her left were towering buildings that, based on the familiar logos, she knew to be hotels. She imagined the top floors offered fabulous views of Washington, of the famous monuments and the government buildings decked out in their formal whites. The city looked very different from her plebeian perspective. At least no car had splashed her with a puddle of rainwater.

To her right were some shops, and she gazed into the windows with a sort of longing, not for the goods themselves but for the normalcy of a life that included idle shopping. She had done things like that, once. She’d had very little money when she worked in Korea, but she had survived. She’d cared about how she looked, she’d bargain-hunted and managed to dress well, or well enough. She’d bought CDs from street vendors and seen movies, she’d been a practicing member of the real world.

She dared to enter a bookstore, an odd choice given that she couldn’t read the language. But it seemed the kind of store least likely to have pushy salesclerks chatting her up. She picked up some books, pressed her nose between the pages, and inhaled. She watched the other shoppers, some alone and others on dates, holding hands, killing time before dinner or a movie.

Farther on she passed health-food stores, a bank, what she guessed might be a Mexican restaurant, and a shop selling kitchen knickknacks. Young professionals passed by clutching glossy bags, talking on their phones, laughing. Just another night in the capital of the free world.

This was the amazing thing about Americans: they had no idea how easy it would be for this entire facade to be torn down, for madness to take hold. She wondered whether, if she stayed here long enough, if she herself became
American,
she would forget what she knew about society’s frailty, about the things that lurked beneath the facade. She wondered if she would become so blissfully free of worry, or if she would always retain that fear, that awful knowledge, and if it would keep her from becoming one of these carefree strivers, running to and fro on the sidewalk, off to this business opportunity or that party, always perfectly confident that the conference room or the full bar would be waiting for them as scheduled.

She wished for the millionth time that she spoke even a little English. She’d been very young when she left Indonesia, but even before then she’d run across kids her age who knew English well. Private-school kids, children of the wealthy, who happened to be in her neighborhood for some random reason, stopping in the store to buy candy or a soda. She’d hear them talking to one another, joking and teasing with words she didn’t know. Even the poorer kids sometimes picked up a word or two from a TV show or a pirated movie they’d seen. Sari had not been hip to that trend, however, and then the riots had hit, and whether you knew English words or Bahasa ones didn’t matter, words themselves didn’t matter, only bricks and rocks and fire did.

So, on to Korea, another new language to master. It had taken a while—she’d lived with other Indonesians and worked with them as circumstances allowed, making her ignorance of the country’s native tongue less of a hindrance—but eventually she learned enough Korean to get by. After a few years she found herself speaking in Korean more than in Bahasa. She was a foreigner there, sure, but she was trying to learn the rules. She wasn’t exactly blending in—they didn’t quite want that in Korea—but she wasn’t making herself a target either. The riots back home had taught her that you could never predict where the next danger would come from, a surging sea or a blackening sky or your own customers or friends. She was wary. People commented on this, in the rare instances that they got to know her well enough.
You hold back,
they would say.
You’re very suspicious.
Usually these were Indonesians who’d managed to leave before the riots, or native Koreans. People who didn’t know what it was like to see a crowd of people running toward you. All of them looking at
you
.
Collaborator! Patsy! Stooge!
The rioters had known she worked for the Mings, that her family’s rent and food had been paid for by their labor for the hated Chinese, which, in the eyes of the maddened, bloodthirsty rioters, made her family no better than the Chinese themselves. It made them
worse
.
Traitor! Backstabber!
She and one of her older sisters, Lastri, had been chased for blocks; they’d finally turned into an alley whose brick-walled dead end, they knew from more innocent childhood games, had a small tunnel at the bottom that emerged on the other side of the wall. They crawled through the narrow tunnel—not before some rocks or cans of food struck Sari in the back—their breath bouncing off the walls, tears streaking their vision. Some of the rioters probably had been thin and short enough to follow them through, but no one had pursued the girls into the tunnel. It was a crowd, acting as a crowd does. Together it was all-powerful, but none had dared be the first to crawl after them. None had wanted to separate themselves like that, to become individualized. The spell would have been broken. The sisters had crawled through, emerging in an alley on the other side of the brick wall, hugging themselves. The rioters threw more rocks and cans over the wall, so the girls pressed their backs to it, where the trajectories of the thrown objects couldn’t quite reach them. Until some enterprising or drunk (or both) rioters started throwing glass bottles, which exploded when they landed, sending shards in every direction, biting at the girls like wasps. No, not like wasps—like
shattered glass bottles
. There was no greater metaphor than the thing itself. There was nothing worse than a mob of insane, violent, hateful human beings—that’s what Sari learned that day.

She and Lastri held each other’s hands, deciding through their tears that a sprint past the gauntlet of popping glass was a better risk than standing there and being sliced to death over time. They ran, thankful for the thick-soled shoes their mother had insisted on buying them instead of the more fashionable sneakers they’d pleaded for. They ran, the bottles blasting at their ankles and backs but not, fortunately, landing on their heads. Then they were out of the alley, turning right, because they knew the neighborhood better, and they still hadn’t learned (but were in the process of learning) that just because you know a place doesn’t make it safe.

Later they would hear about the rapes all over the city, what happened to the women and girls that the mob caught.

So, they were lucky. The rioters decided that since the girls had escaped, they would turn their attention to the store itself. They torched it, burning Sari’s mother alive.

She had heard stories afterward, that their mother had stood outside the store calling names at the crowd, throwing the store’s canned goods at the rioters, doing whatever she could to deflect their attention and rage away from her children. Those stories hadn’t made much sense to her, and then she’d blocked them out for a while. Later, she’d thought about them again, imagined her mother like that, hurling cans of water chestnuts and waving a broom before being chased into the building, where maybe she thought she was safe, until she saw them coming with torches and gasoline.

Later in life, when people in Korea commented on Sari’s deeply suspicious nature, when confused friends and frustrated beaux told her she didn’t quite seem
all there,
she told herself she needed to find a way to let go of all of that. To stop expecting the tsunamis to rise up. To let herself trust life a little, and not assume everyone who looked at her was plotting ways to take advantage. When Hyun Ki Shim interviewed her for the nanny position, and she’d been a bit put off by his wife’s brusque manner, she told herself to turn off her internal alarms, to take this chance.

And here she was wandering the streets of America (
Virginia,
Leo had called it) with an arm still sore from her employer’s blade.

She walked into a convenience store and wandered the few aisles. The cashier was darker-skinned than she, maybe Pakistani, and he watched her every move. The immigrant knew his kind, knew she was unmoored and confused and in possession of little cash. So she dropped the pretense and walked up to him, mimed a telephone call. He said something to her that she didn’t understand. Then he held up a box containing a new cell phone, which she imagined cost more than the twenty dollars she’d stolen from Leo, so she shook her head. He put the phone away and instead produced a phone card.

She handed him the bill and he frowned. He put the card back and gave her one of a different color, along with nine dollars and some coins for change. She started to ask another question, unsure how to ask it, but he read her mind. He pointed down the street, held up two fingers, and motioned to the right. She nodded thanks.

Following his directions, she found a pay phone. It was just outside a parking garage and across the street from a grocery store; the noise made it a bad place to call from, but she didn’t know where else to go. She had no idea how to use the card, let alone an American pay phone. But she knew Lastri’s number, as well as the international code for Korea, so she tried a few times before getting it right. Finally she heard an unfamiliar ringing sound, the pulse different from the American one she’d heard when calling Leo.

It would be morning in Seoul; Lastri would already be on her way to work, unless she was running late, or was sick or fired. Sari prayed that one of these minor misfortunes had befallen her sister.