You and I could quit this scene
Build a town and then secede
Like an Adam and an Eve
Manifest Destiny, Guster
The media call them cute. They're the cutest thing in the world. Nineteen years after the mysterious and troubling disappearance of Flight 316 and its infamous passengers, two of the unwitting survivors find Love in one another. They are a fucking hot couple, a headline splashed across tabloid covers--and not even given the courtesy of a good Photoshop job. Aaron takes a look at his grandmother's copy of People and chuckles. Big whoop, he says. It's enough to make Ji Yeon vomit. Once at the word "cute," once for the baby in her stomach. They are not married--how modern of them, she jokes when she isn't worrying. Aaron thinks it's funny. Their grandmothers do not.
"We can't do this," she tells him, tells him for the tenth time in at least as many years. We need to leave. He knows her well enough to know that this time she is serious. This time is different. This time, he says yes.
They live in Sydney, in a dusty flat near the airport. The walls rattle every time a plane comes in for a landing, and it is almost hokey enough to be amusing. It feels a bit like a bad horror film. The feeling of unreality only worsens as the long nervous weeks begin to wear on them. It's a bit like being drunk, without the benefit of alcohol.
At first it is a laugh, an adventure; they grew up around old women and shrinks and security guards and only occasionally each other and nothing, nothing could be worse than that. It isn't hard to sneak away from Carole (they only dare call her by her first name only in their heads and yet they run away: rebellion is a strange, truncated beast). She only feels vaguely guilty about the money--two thousand dollars is just a drop in the bucket. Aaron leaves a half-hearted note. Late one night, when he is very, very tired, he tells her he signed it Goober. She chokes on her toothpaste.
They are just a block or two from a dingy little record shop--and the best part is that it's still called a record shop, how silly is that. (Sometimes when she can't sleep she wonders why it hasn't been torn down or taken over yet.) They used to go down there once a week, get a new CD (or more often an old one), things like Phil Collins and Petula Clark, music to make you smile. They don't any more; don't dare go out except for the most essential things, like toiletries and her favorite orange juice and the paper (Aaron clips every mention of their names and tacks them on the wall and she almost calls him a narcissist, but at the way his eyes flicker and go blank at the word missing she decides against it). One day he comes home with a gun--she smiles sadly and almost yells at him and when it's her turn to go out she finds a shady no-background-checks place by the harbor that stocks ammunition. The man behind the counter is nosy, tells her that if she's not the killing type there's no refund. She pays him extra to shut him up and hides the box in her sock drawer. Aaron always forgets to finish things; she knows him too well. Almost as little as she knows herself.
They are disturbingly domestic--domestic in a crazy, over-emphasized way. It feels wrong to get up and drink coffee at the kitchen table in the morning and then peek out behind the rolled-down blinds to make sure they haven't been staked out. The adventure has become a real thing, something that creeps into their bed with the remnants of her sleep and covers her mouth with a firm, clammy hand whenever she thinks of screaming. It is survival. This is the part her grandmother never told her about, the after in happily ever. Sometimes when she steps out of the door the sunlight is too bright, blinding, and she blinks like a bat beneath her shades; it is insanity, living holed up in a cave like this, but it is the only way to be safe. If they are even that.
He never asks her why this is necessary. Never asks her if they couldn't try something else. Her grandfather is dead, but Paik Industries is not, and he knows better than anyone what grown-ups with guns are capable of. He never questions her and this is why she could be with no one else. She trusts him implicitly. One of these days she will die for it, she knows, or he will. There are worse ways to go.
When Ji Yeon was little--littler--she used to lean half-out the open window and gaze up at the blue smoggy sky and wait for her mother to fall out of it, heels pressed neatly together, one hand at her hat, the other waving Hello. She tells Aaron this one early morning, her thin pianist's fingers tracing the line of his collarbone up and down and then again, and he scrunches up his nose in that lonely frown of his that always makes her think of coffee grounds and empty rooms.
"Like Mary Poppins," he whispers, almost mischievous, cool, cool air blown against her neck making her shiver, and she giggles, taken aback, and swats his hand away from her long bangs. He likes to play with her hair. She rolls her eyes.
"You watch too much TV."
Aaron has a birthmark on his throat, right on the sensitive juncture of jaw and neck, a round brown moon of a dot. Ji Yeon refers to it as The Freckle. Whenever she kisses it he giggles—he is ticklish. She doesn't kiss it now. She doesn't want him to laugh.
"We are going to name her Hana," she says abruptly, very seriously. He raises one long eyebrow—although no one else would know it to look at him. His eyebrows are so thin so as to be nearly invisible.
"Hannah?"
They decided a long time ago that their baby would be a girl. Every child in her mother's line for generations has been a girl—she checked the records. You cannot fight that sort of mandate.
"No. Hana." She does her best to appear annoyed and he ducks his head, properly chagrined. His Korean is still terrible, though she has been teaching him—he has no natural ear for languages. "Hana. Flower."
He catches his lower lip between his teeth and lays his hand sideways across her stomach. His fingers flutter a little bit and he looks anxiously to her face for approval. He looks like he is trying the role on for size, putting his hand on her stomach because that is what people in the movies do, not because he actually feels anything. That's all right. She doesn't know what she's supposed to feel, either.
"Hana it is, then," he murmurs. She kisses him and then pushes him away, trying to keep the butterflies swirling joyfully in her throat from escaping. She wants orange juice and he needs to get it.
There are things they don't talk about, of course: What they are going to do with a child. How in the world they will keep this up when the baby cries at night. How a man with one of the most recognizable faces in the world and a forged passport will manage to get a job. How a woman with training in four languages and fluency in three will content herself with teaching a kid the ABC's. Why the hell they were stupid enough to go without birth control in the first place. Why he was abandoned by two mothers and she only by one. And given time, the things they don't talk about soon become the things they can't talk about.
She curls around him from behind on the couch in front of their rattly old TV in the morning and presses her lips to his forehead. It is a warm day, unseasonably so; sunlight fills their flat and makes him look like an angel. His skin is cold and damp with sweat and paler than ever and his right leg is twitching, a nervous habit of his from grade school. She pushes his messy hair back from his forehead and speaks over the commercial break.
"You know, it's a statistical certainty that the Sox will lose this one, too," she says, trying to keep the smugness from entering her voice. They have a bet. Whoever loses has to do the shopping today. He purses his lips and makes a shushing motion with his right hand. There is only one inning left. She grimaces and runs one finger lightly over the Freckle. He tenses and then sneezes. She grins. Works every time.
"Do you want some orange juice?" he asks her. His voice is strained and just a bit higher than usual. He must really want the Sox to win today. "Have some orange juice." He pushes a perspiring glass into her hand and watches her anxiously. She hardly knows how to react.
"All right," she says slowly and carefully, as if talking to a child. "I'll have some orange juice." She takes a long sip, one arm wrapped around her ribcage. His eyes don't leave hers. "Is that better?" He smiles shakily. Amusement and annoyance make a sour cocktail in her throat.
There is a knock at the door and Aaron stands up before the sound even has a chance to echo, sending cushions toppling to the floor. She frowns. "What are you doing?" They agreed to never open the door to strangers--and especially not to 'friends'. They have a No Solicitors sign. His hand closes around the doorknob and when he looks back at her tears pop brightly from his eyes. What is he thinking? She gets up to follow him; her knees instantly buckle and give out; she falls backwards onto the couch again. She cannot feel her legs.
Aaron's favorite player—she can't remember his name but the number on his uniform is 23—is making a home run. Aaron's face crumples and he turns the handle, opening the door to a tall man with curly auburn hair and a sensitive brow. Sunlight bursts behind him; it hits her eyes hard. The crowd roars. Her head is dizzy and light. "I don't understand," she gasps. I would never do this to you. Why would you do this to me? The strange man looks at Aaron and puts a sympathetic hand to his shoulder. Aaron flinches.
"I'm sorry," he groans, bringing the palms of his hands to rest in the sockets of his eyes, cradling his skull. She thinks he is speaking to her, but it is hard to tell with the lethargy taking over, stronger than opium, thicker than wine. Bubbles pop behind her eyes. "They said it was the only way, that they would kill us if I didn't—it's going to be okay—I'm going with you—" He makes a frantic grab for her hand; sweat bleeds from his palm to hers. The strange man smiles gently.
"Charlie Hume. I'm sorry we had to meet like this, Ms. Kwon." She can hardly understand him through his accent—or maybe that is the ocean swishing in her ears.
"I'm sorry," Aaron whispers through his tears, again, thick and pearly and crystalline. "I love you." You bastard. "I won't let anything happen to you." I hate you. "I'll explain everything later." How can I believe you? "Go to sleep, sweetheart." You are not my mother. (She does.)