Live worms writhed at the bottom of the vase. I saw them in coitus, rings around rings, squirming.
I had bought the flowers, yellow and fresh, primarily because it was the thing to do. I wasn’t sure how to bring them, if hospitals had vases or anything, so I paid extra at the florist for a mixture of glass and dirt,
My mother was in her grave. Death’s door. Sunlight slanted from room to room. We were high up in Mercy San Juan, and the elevators creaked. People were not sobbing, but they walked without excess motion, rigid and unseeing, from room to room.
Through the sunlight windows, there was a small garden, with manicured rose bushes and Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows in a blue veil. The statue was magnificent. It was not too large, and made of gleaming mock marble. No one prayed at the altar, but some rosaries dangled from her open hands. It reminded me of those benevolent Buddha statues, with great bronze palms in Japan and China, but even as I thought of it, the feeling was blasphemous.
Not that I am a great Catholic anyway. Rosaries and statues were (famously) an imported religiosity, made promising by trade routes and richesse. The Great Church hates this fact, and actually denies it with a crimson rigor. I’m barely Catholic, anyway. I think I’m baptized, but we never went to Church as kids.
Eomma never had time to do that.
I guess I have to believe in miracles though, because of what happened that day in the attic. Our attic near Molly Court was a blue room. Panes of glass everywhere. Sun refused to intrude on the space; the windows were frosted, like a secretary’s office from the 80s. Still, we liked to play up there: kid games. Hide and Go Seek, Tag, and we dragged a doll tea set complete with a baby table. I remember those saucers still. Pale blue china. Pink plastic furniture, dainty.
We had to squat to play up there as we got older and older. I think if I were to go back, I would find battered picture books and comics on the floor. Dried flowers purloined from our front yard, cobwebs, and rat droppings.
We had to believe in miracles because when we first saw the rats, they were walking upright. Like they were circus-trained. I remember Mollie was very excited about this fact, because she thought it was like Coraline, and there would be a hidden door somewhere. We searched for a full week. Peeling back blue wallpaper, knocking on the blue walls. Paint chipping onto our knuckles. Those upright rats.
I thought they wore sunglasses, but it was only as an adult, and after recollection, that I realized I was wrong. Their eyes were simply huge and pane-like, blank lenses that covered half their faces.
I guess we should have known something was wrong. But we were a bunch of kids, barely supervised by our overworked mother, so we thought magic was afoot. Walking rats in a blue attic. Shadowless walls.
Mollie started leaving candle wicks up there, and with a video camera she’d document it, the miracles. (“Look, look!”) And we were young enough to believe in pixie fairies and benign rats, so when she produced small videos of flames igniting from blue to yellow, it seemed very real and logical to us. No shadows on the walls but pure light, burning.
Mollie started spending more and more time up in the attic, entranced by its great mysteries. So did Ben, and Wallace. I was the oldest, so I had school, and then for two bucks a week, Mrs. Larry let me read to her for an hour.
So I had greater obligations than the triplets.
I remember I was fiddling with the downstairs radio, that last plaintive plea of Rigoletto screaming on 88.9 FM. An opera specialty. They usually played those late at night, and I would listen to the fuzzy acts roaring...waves of soft noise...less than pure music, more than final art...and all of a sudden the triplets weren’t downstairs.
So, because it was a little late (nearing 6 PM in the afternoon), I went upstairs. And there the blue room was, pristine attic, and no one in there.
It took Eomma a week or more to file reports, because she kept saying: No. No Eun Ho. The school says they’re there. You’re just not using your eyes.
But I would loiter outside of Junction Elementary for an hour or more, waiting, because I always picked up Mollie and the others after school. After Chilton got out, there I would be, so we could take the bus home together.
When I would enter the sunlit office, the secretaries would shrug.
“They just left,” was the common notation. Even the principal, helpful man, would shrug. “I just saw them leave the gate. Your mom was there waving.” He had that conditional story, as if on automatic response. And I think he was an honest man, but in hindsight, he should have known: my mother never picks up the kids.
But I also think he was right, in the distance, like a shock of lightning, a woman must have been there. Slightly Asiatic and in a prim white dress. Waving mechanically like a doll. I don’t know how I know this, only that the vision is so clear, it’s like I was seeing them off myself. At the front gate. Safe and sound.
And I can imagine the triplicate who arrived at class day after day, patient little dolls. Mouths zipped like sewn-on charcoal lips, blank eyes. Tidy outfits.
“I didn’t walk them to school,” I would tell the staff. But they would shrug. Your mom dropped them off today, the same lady in a prim white skirt. Mollie’s teacher was especially acidic when I cross-examined her. Yes, Mollie was here in class today. Look at the drawings she made. Look at the math test she completed yesterday.
I’m not sure when the vision broke, but after that frantic period, the duplicates stopped showing up to their scheduled activities, and the pieces were jagged. Junction Elementary had security cameras, and they showed no signs of my siblings coming and going to school, just slight hints of blue. My mother railed and raged when the principal insinuated she was wearing white at pickup (“Do I look like a fool? Wearing white? As a nurse?”). It was a desolate time. And I felt a little bad for the staff, because it wasn’t their fault. The principal resigned halfway through the school year. Mollie’s teacher and the secretaries didn’t return.
It was partially my mother’s fault, because she was a good victim. She called every local news outlet. Inundated the police with half-tips, saying “Mollie’s shoe was left on the school yard yesterday”, or other benign details. When told to stop, she would cry and resort to half-babbling, so they forgave her for wasting their time. I don’t know why she did all this, because after the mock-funeral, all the bravado in her evaporated. She returned to the same shiftless woman, incapable of tears or remorse.
One time she even said to me:
“This is better. Four kids is a lot of work, you know.”
I think maybe she liked the pity.
Sometimes I think the triplets’ disappearance was a sort of test for my mother’s nurturing capabilities, and it was one she failed massively. Maybe the vague woman the principal saw would’ve returned them, safe and unharmed, if my mother was genuinely distraught. I imagine the best-case scenario, where Mollie and my brothers were deposited on our doorstep after our mother did something drastic. Quit her job, for instance. Sign us up for therapy.
And they’d be licking lollipops, or sucking popsicle juice off their fingers, with bows or twigs in their hair. Angelic grins. As if nothing ever went wrong.
Or sometimes I think, they must have discovered that portal to some Narnia or otherworld. I always hope it is Narnia, in my fictive weavings. I fear that my siblings struggled against some other-mother without me, although I doubt the Beldam would’ve been any match for Mollie.
Mollie. I talk about her as if my brothers were ancillary to her, and in a way, unfortunately, they were. They did everything she did. They didn’t even learn to talk, or walk, until Mollie did. They were her flanks, one on the right, the other on the based left. They had dark mops of hair, and darting twin eyes. Mollie was their center, the distinguishing focal point of all three.
It was Mollie who discovered the blue room, prodigious child. Mollie who started recording the place, testing it, seeing where it could go. And generally, in my darkest ruminations, I think it is Mollie who would have stayed alive. Out of all three, if they did go somewhere bleak and dastardly.
But maybe I am overatoning for my failures. It wasn’t my fault. But weaving this fantasy, a fiction of blue, is better than the realist alternative. The three were kidnapped. Butchered. Something awful and physical happened to their bodies, their souls.
My mother is dying in the other room, but I wait by reception, because I cannot stand it. She sucks air through a tube, and her eyes are closed. She worked at Mercy San Juan for around 50 years, and still, none of her coworkers drop by with presents or cards. The room is blissfully white and sterile.
I can’t go in. I limit myself to twice a day, standing there, in the gleaming room. It is so pale- I wonder if the white linoleum is the same color as that othermother’s skirt. If her eyes were as dark as my mother’s hair, if she looked the same as her at all.
I bought the yellow flowers because when I go in, I want to think about something else. Anything, really. Anything except the three kids in that blue room, my mother getting ready for work downstairs, and me in the middle. Pretending that, despite all the lack of love, things were going to be okay. Foolish: child: me.
Yuna Kang is a queer, half-deaf, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. She loves postcards, crows, God(x), and cats.
Hola , Buen Relato. Un Saludo.