Title: Waiting For Grace
Author: kenzimone
Disclaimer: Don't own.
Rating: G
Word count: 778
Summary: A The Interpreter fic: It is November and Suzy Park is thirty years old.
Note: Written as an assignment for my writing course, in which I was supposed to take a scene from Suki Kim's The Interpreter and displace it to another point in time, rewriting it from another perspective, all while using around 600 words.
The waters off the coast of Montauk are murky and dark. Her parents rest here, their bodies and spirits long since one with the sea, and somewhere in the depths there dwells the phantom of her sister. On the distant shore the restored lighthouse is a dark silhouette against the evening sky.
The boat is small. She sits in the center of it, staring at the shoreline, her hands tightly gripping the edge of her seat. She is alone, a tiny speck in an enormous body of water that rocks her up and down, back and forth. It would be so easy to fall, so simple to topple over the edge and let the shadows swallow her up and pull her down. She wonders what she would see there, in the depths of the crushing darkness. Specters of the ones she's lost? Of her mistakes? Her past? Or worse, her future?
She can't swim. Grace could. Grace could swim through any waters.
"Take me home," she says.
The KL-E onboard computer chirps, and the boat lurches forward as its motor is engaged. It turns, heading back to port, and she keeps her eyes on the dark outline of the lighthouse.
It is November and Suzy Park is thirty years old.
...
It's been many years since mankind claimed the last unknown stretch of land; long since they cleared out the last patch of feral rain forest and repressed the most wide spread of deserts. Nothing is wild anymore, nothing is uncontrollable inside the borders of the cities that stretch for miles and miles, across countries and continents.
Nothing except the sea. The sea is something that cannot be tamed, try as mankind might. Suzy hates the sea. She hates what it has taken and what it has given birth to. The promise of what lies beneath its surface frightens her, and yet she reveres it.
The sea is a lot like Grace.
...
She can't bring herself to sell the Korean market. It remains closed, boarded up and dark. She doesn't know what to do with it.
She can't bring herself to leave New York. The every growing city, spanning as far as the eye can see, across outdated counties and old state lines, the city that never sleeps. She's never been away from it and she doesn't know where to go.
Her apartment is just as bare as it has always been. She sleeps, she eats, she takes baths. Michael calls, and she doesn't answer; when he leaves messages she erases them, unable to suffer the flickering holographic image of his face.
It is November, and she waits for Grace.
...
The irises always arrived a day or two before the anniversary of her parents' deaths. Never on the date itself, never that. That date was holy, even to Suzy. And so she waits.
...
They never found the second body. They scanned the shoreline, used the latest in laser equipment, and still got nothing. It had been the first time in almost three decades that anyone accidentally drowned within the borders of the great city of New York, and it made headlines for just about two days.
The safety protocols on the boat were defective, Detective Lester had told her. I'm sorry.
She still wonders why he came to deliver the news in person.
...
The view from her kitchen window is of steel and glass and sky. The brightness of the outside world is stunning, and the cool off-white of her apartment walls makes the silence inside seem almost tangible.
She is kept waiting, listening to the whirr of the air conditioning and studying the pale skin of her hands. She thinks of her market, of the vast open spaces left empty, and she wonders.
...
The package arrives on the afternoon of the day of. It is a small, heavy thing that has finally violated this holy day, and she can feel herself shaking even as she allows the delivery boy to scan her handprint for identification. The vase which usually holds the irises gapes empty and forgotten as she sinks down into her couch, package in hand.
It is a book. It is 20th century edition of Anna Karenina.
Its spine is cracked, the leather cover cut and ripped in one corner; the pages are worn and well loved, creased and smelling of coffee and a sweet fragrance, and stains mar the old paper in places, drips and spills from a sloppy yet loving owner.
There is no note, but Suzy doesn't need one. She can read between the lines. Finally, she can read between the lines:
I'm sorry. I love you. But mostly, it simply reads Goodbye.
The book leaves a kind of open ending when it comes to Grace's fate, though I think we're supposed to assume that she is still alive(?). Since she was the one to send Suzy the irises every year, I wondered what would happen the next anniversary. Would Grace simply stop sending them, or would she send something final and definite to at least assure Suzy that she was still alive, before cutting off all contact?
The scene with the book is from page 107 of The Interpreter. The way Grace reacted to Suzy's gift fascinated me, and so I couldn't resist making peace between the sisters and referencing that scene.