Sublimation(53)

Soyoung gestures at herself, as if to encompass her entire existence.

“That was, like, you get that was my entire life, right, Mom?”

“Soyoung,” her mom says.

“Umma. Harabeoji gave me his house,” she says, taking the envelope out of her bag.

Her mom looks small and old and alarmed and Soyoung doesn’t care.

“He gave me his house. Me. Rose, or her reintegration. Not Soyoung alone, not your other self.”

She shakes the envelope and spreads the deed to the house on top of the Kumon advertisements. She pushes it toward her mother like it’s a dead piece of meat. Rose’s mom picks it up.

“Soyoung, what do you want me to do?”

“Why would he do that?” Soyoung asks. “Give me the house, I mean. The way he did.”

“You would know better than I do, Soyoung. I haven’t talked to him since we moved.”

“You’re literally his daughter, Mom. You’re deflecting. That’s deflecting. Is he, like—what was the point of this? He didn’t leave it to Soyoung. He left it to Rose, and he told Soyoung to reintegrate. What—why—”

She doesn’t know the question she wants to ask other than in the vague thrust of the emotion, and she’s surprised to care at all about this.

“Soyoung, he’s dead. I haven’t talked to him since I left. I can’t know what he meant by giving you this.”

Rose’s mother looks so bleakly sad that Soyoung wishes she hadn’t gone down this line of questioning, except for the parts of her that want to twist the knife, to ask every cruel question, to uncover every stone, to find the cracks in her mom’s fa?ade that will lead to answers if bashed open with a linguistic knife. She is thinking about standing in the forest next to her grandparents’ graves, she is thinking about Rose’s face in her perfect blank surprise, Soyoung’s face and her set mouth, how it felt to be behind these faces, how it was like she wanted to hammer a response out of her other self, how she wanted honesty, how she didn’t want to turn into her mother.

“Why didn’t you go to the funeral?” Soyoung says, and her mother’s expression is so blank and surprised that the emotion underpinning it can only be anger, but then the waitress steps up to their table and asks, in perfect, accentless Korean, what they would like to order.



* * *



A popular horror-gore story told by labor and delivery nurses is that of the fetus that instances when it drops out of the mother’s womb, leaving a copy stillborn inside. There is no record of this ever happening, but that doesn’t stop trainee nurses from discussing the possibility. They discuss other horror stories too: twins who turn out to be instances, babies and toddlers who instance when getting on a plane. International adoption agencies prefer to adopt out babies under the age of two, to conclusively prevent an instantiation event. When the children are older, adoption staff are instructed to lie to the toddlers, and promise that the children are going to return. That they are just going on a little trip. That this leave-taking is not permanent. This usually works because children don’t know anything about borders, permanence, or death.



* * *



“Can I get the soondubu?” Soyoung says to the waitress.

“And the galbitang,” Rose’s mom adds as the waitress scribbles down their orders and leaves. Rose’s mom folds her hands over each other.

“Rose, why did you go to the funeral? You never cared.”

“I did care,” Soyoung says, speaking before she can think, while in the back of her head she’s doubled, the version of herself watching the conversation happen—this is not how Rose would respond, Rose would have said this viciously, Rose would have felt like this was an attack and would have attacked wildly, ineffectively, but the version of Soyoung that exists now, integrated, plural-turned-singular, has every impulse and no filter. Right now, it feels like a superpower. The version of her mother here is only a version of her mother. When it doesn’t matter, you can ask.

“Look, answer my question. Why’d we move here? Why were you guys fighting? Why’d he want me to reintegrate?”

“Why didn’t you ask your other mother about any of this? Ask her!” Rose’s mom says, her face contorting. Some sort of pain, Soyoung thinks, as if from very far away. Rose’s mom keeps speaking.

“We could have gone back. I could have taken you back, at any point. I could have apologized to my father and you could have gone back to school in Korea and we could have been back, like it never happened at all, other than the memories. Okay? Is that what you want to hear, Soyoung? Is that what you want me to say? I’m sorry, Soyoung. All Umma’s fault, okay?”

Soyoung stands. She puts her hands on the table.

“Yeah, it is! Yeah, this one’s on you! This one’s actually you, Mom!”

“Why didn’t you just go back, then! You’re an adult, Kang Soyoung! You could leave! Anytime before now! So go!”

“I won’t,” Soyoung says, almost shouts, too loud for the restaurant, and she’s still standing, because it feels like it’ll make her point stronger, and really, she’s just angry. She’s just suddenly so angry. “I’m not leaving. I didn’t want to leave the first time, and you can’t make me now!”