Cold

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            It is too cold inside the car. I blow on my chapped hands and place them under my thighs, where they sit like icicles, absorbing the heat from my leggings. I can see my breath in puffs of milky white. 

            Dad shuts the car door and starts it with a growl. Umma straps Soojin in and folds herself into the passenger seat, bringing a blast of icy air with her. I shiver. She taps her phone and winces; the screen is bright in the dark car. I tap her on the shoulder and she wordlessly passes me her earbuds, which I connect to my iPod. It’s really Umma’s iPod, but she stopped using it when she got a phone. It’s one of the old ones. It has a square little screen and a scrolling button you press with your thumb. Dad hints that if I treat it well and don’t lose it, there may be a phone on the way for me when I turn fourteen. When Umma and Dad remember, they sometimes give me an allowance and occasionally encourage me to put it all in the hideously green piggy bank I’ve named Mr. Lump; he contains maybe five dollars and a few coins. I’ve spent all that money on music. I love piano songs, especially ones that go on for so long you lose yourself in the gentle sound of the keys. When I play I always close my eyes. If Umma is feeling good she promises to take me to my recitals, but it’s always Samcheon who picks me up, a battered rose waiting on his car’s passenger seat.  

            “Umma, chuweo,” Soojin complains, her indignant voice piercing through my music. She holds up her tiny red hands as evidence.  She is too little to have figured out the thigh trick, and Umma straps her into her seat so tight I have to fish for her toys if she loses them. Right now she loves Ddalgi, her pink-and-green stuffed tiger, so named for his strawberry color. He sits in her lap everywhere she goes, even to church. He’s tucked in between her right shoulder and torso, ears peeking out of the cheery puffs of her heavy winter coat. She’s only had the jacket since November, but there is already a rip by the zipper and Sharpie stains and glitter streaks on the sleeves. 

            I should take the jacket off. She’ll get too hot like that. If she gets too hot she’ll start to cry and if she starts to cry Umma and Dad will tell me off for making her upset. 

           “Ask Daddy to turn it up,” Umma says, absorbed in her phone. She bites her lip and frowns. I know she’s checking the weather reports. She’ll look at the Weather app, and then Weather.com, the hourly report from CNN, and then she’ll tell Dad to switch from oldies to KWGRZ 88.1, where the newscaster is beginning his evening weather report. It’s not like the forecast will change; when the snow starts falling, it lasts for days at the very least. I crane my neck to read the reflection of Umma’s phone on the passenger window. I like it when the world is blanketed in white, but I hope they don’t cancel school. School is cozy, especially in the winter, and it is so easy to hide. I fill out my worksheets as fast as possible and beg for a library pass, where I linger, reading about dragons and princesses and knights until the bell rings.

            “Appa, chuweo,” Soojin repeats. She crosses her arms.

            “Ask me again in English, honey,” Dad says without turning around, and then to Umma, so low I can barely hear it: “You have to tell her that I don’t know Korean.” He says this to her all the time now because Halmoni and Haraboji watch us after preschool and seventh grade, until our parents finish work, and every day it takes longer and longer to convince Soojin to greet Dad in English, or call him “Daddy”. When I hear their car pull up on the driveway, I rush to the window and watch them get out. Halmoni and Harbaoji’s house is the only place where Dad opens the car door for Umma and holds her hand all the way to the door. 

            When I was Soojin’s age and Umma was sick, Halmoni and Haraboji watched me all day. They woke me up and whisked me out of bed and tucked me back in at night. At first they spoke Korean when their English wasn’t fast enough-- “Sooyeon, gajima!”--but then I started talking back.  Dad used to grumble that I’d forget all my English because I would call him Appa. “Appa, pegopah,” I’d say, and he would hand me Bear, the plush that I still sleep with on really bad nights. Or I’d say, “Appa, Bear juseyo” and he’d find me a snack. He would talk to Umma about it at night, when he thought I was asleep. We were living in the three-room apartment then, the one in a squat, ugly building with a parking lot that often filled with dirty snow. Umma and Dad were studying for degrees only Dad would ever get. Umma only shrugged and told Dad that he knew how they were, that she could never just tell her parents no, that it wasn’t that simple. “Besides,” she added, “Sooyeon will pick up English in school. I know I did.”  

“She’s not you.”

“She’s my daughter.” Dad stalked off, and I didn’t hear them talk about it again. 

The steady murmur of the radio is interrupted by a loud scratchy static that makes Umma almost drop her phone. Soojin claps her hands over her ears and Ddalgi bounces to the floor of the car, in between her car seat and the door. Before Dad and Umma notice, I quickly unbuckle myself and lean over Soojin to retrieve Ddalgi and place him in her lap. 

            They are already lost in their argument. Umma casts a sidelong scowl. “You can learn a little,” she retorts, but there’s no bite to her words. “You’ve only been married to me for twelve years.”

            I don’t hear what Dad says because I turn up my music and face the window instead. I see an orange blur that might be a streetlamp, and a red glow that could be another car. The only thing that is clear is the snow: little, fast-melting crystals that stick to the glass, white flakes that tumble through the air, obedient to how the wind howls.  I long to open the window and stick my un-mittened hand outside. I imagine snow catching and sticking to my bare skin, covering me in layers of icy glitter, forming a soft, achingly cold cast around my arm.

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           The glow of the dashboard casts a reflection of my face against my window, but it is sharp and distorted; my face seems warped and bent. My cheeks, lit up by the dashboard lights, are ghost-white, while my eyes are lost in pockets of shadow. Everyone tells me that Soojin and I have the same eyes, round and brown like wooden beads, and that they come from our mother. They say we all look like our mother, especially Dad’s family, who taps us on our shoulders and pronounces our names delicately, like their mouths are full of marbles. But they are wrong. Umma’s eyes are so dark that they’re almost black, and curve at the tops; Soojin and I have eyes like our dad: almost square-shaped, but not quite. 

           Behind me, Soojin removes Ddalgi from between her arm and back into her lap. “Ddalgi-ya, jip-gayo,” she sings. I feel the hot air turn on and blast at my neck. Umma says something and Dad’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. The car rolls forward slowly; out of the whirling black-and-white in front of us, a snow-dusted stop sign appears almost out of nowhere, the marker that we are just leaving Halmoni and Haraboji’s neighborhood. It is not too late to go back and warm up by their fireplace and share a bed with Soojin, have her fall asleep against me, to listen to Haraboji tell us the stories his haraboji told him, about a forested Korea full of tigers and rabbits and moonlight. But Dad makes the right turn without even coming to a rolling stop and we slide into the street. 

           In the driver’s mirror, Umma bites her lip. She nibbles it from the bottom, just like me. Or maybe I’m like her. I try not to be: I smile at Dad and play with Soojin. But when Soojin frowns or Dad doesn’t smile back I worry Umma follows me all the same, a gray shadow that fastens around my shoulders and doesn’t leave. “Slow down,” she insists, touching Dad, “you’re going too fast.”

            “I know what I’m doing,”  Dad grumbles, and swats her hand away. 

            Swaddled in my winter coat and the scarf Dad makes me wear, I begin sweating. If I take off my jacket, though, I know I will be too cold. Outside, I watch the snow fall faster, thicker, harder. I count the number of streets we pass: one. Two. Three. 

            Halmoni and Haraboji wanted us to stay the night. They have the space; between Umma and Samcheon’s old bedrooms, there are two big queen beds. But both Umma and Dad refused. “We can’t impose,” Dad insisted. I watched him clench and unclench his fist as he searched for a reason Umma would let him say. He couldn’t tell them the truth: that he would be sleeping on the floor. He kept glancing at Umma sidelong, jerking his head when he thought Halmoni and Haraboji couldn’t see. Antsy. 

            Umma was less insistent but equally firm. “Jason has work early tomorrow,” she repeated, until they let us go, warning that the storm would catch us on the way home. They asked if we had a snow shovel in the car, if we had salt, if we had water and food. Halmoni rushed off to the kitchen and started pulling together a basket of the essentials she could find: flashlight, leftover mandu, cookies for Soojin. 

           “Don’t bother,” Dad said brusquely, and even I winced from the gaze Umma shot him. I was embarrassed that they would be so openly at odds in front of Halmoni and Haraboji. At church they hold each other’s hands and in family photos they know to pose with one arm around the other’s waist. 

           They taught me to bury anger deep. The first time they fought was when Soojin was a toddler. It was a thunderstorm of a fight that rolled in at dinner and struck just before I went to bed: they never got to tuck me in. They argued so loud that Soojin cried . They argued so loud I did too. I picked up the phone and dialed the only number I knew and said, “Haraboji, museoweo,” and let the sobs and the background shouts fill my grandparents in on the rest of the story. When she successfully got them off the phone, Umma made me sleep without Bear for the night. “You need to learn that some things go unsaid,” she explained. The next day Dad wordlessly passed me Bear. 

           I lean against the window, pressing my cheek to the achingly cold glass, and my earbuds catch on my seatbelt. When I lean forward they are yanked out of my ear and bounce somewhere far within the nooks and crannies of the car seat below. I reach under to grab at it, groping blindly and finding small plastic toys, discarded napkins, a Cheerio.

            “Umma, Umma.” Soojin bounces in her seat, straining to reach the back of the passenger headrest. Umma is reading something on her phone. The white glow reflected on her window and her deepening frown tell me it’s probably the news. “Umma, Umma.” 

            When Soojin makes art in preschool, she draws an unsmiling face with wispy strands of pencil-black hair. She puts it into Umma’s yielding grasp and waits for a “thank you” she never gets. But I understand why Soojin remains in Umma’s pull when Dad chases after her with Ddalgi and bedtime stories and love. I’m trapped there too. We suffer together, her and I. I know Umma doesn’t mean to push us away. She does it robotically, like there’s a little lever in her that flips whenever someone shows her something kind and forces all of her emotions off so she doesn’t hear the I love you., I want her to want me. When I get her to smile back, they will stop fighting because when she stopped smiling it all started. 

            Dad tells me to be patient. “Umma’s medicine will start working soon,” he promises, but he doesn’t tell me what pills they are or what they will do. Once or twice a year he says that the pills “didn’t take” and they’re trying something new soon. If I ask, he’ll go quiet for a long time. Then he clears his throat a lot. “It’s not her fault,” he’ll sigh, or sometimes he wraps me in his arms and doesn’t say anything at all. He leaves wet stains on my head and doesn’t let me meet his eyes. 

            “I don’t know when we’ll be home, Soojin,” Umma says dully, in a monotone, without looking up. “Have Sooyeon give you a snack if you’re hungry, okay?”

            “I’m not her babysitter,” I grumble. 

            “Sooyeon,” Dad warns, “you will watch out for your sister.” He makes eye contact with me in the mirror and shakes his head. My cheeks grow hot. He wants us to get along, and I like it when Dad is happy, so I give her snacks and sit at her tea parties. I try not to hate her because it’s mostly Soojin’s fault that Umma is this way. Soojin didn’t start it, but babies make it worse. I Googled it once. 

            “I’m not hungry!” Soojin shouts, a little too loudly, and Dad winces. On the steering wheel, his hands go white. 

            “Soojin, use your inside voice,” Dad says, a little too harshly to be chiding and not harsh enough to be a full on-scold, but his voice rises and Soojin’s lip begins to quiver all the same. 

            “Jason, watch your tone,” Umma warns. “She’ll cry.”

            “I have to watch my tone?” 

           The earbuds still remain firmly outside of my grasp.

            “Umma, I want a story,” Soojin says. Her face is flushed. I lean over and unzip her coat before she can cry. 

            “Stories are for bedtime, okay?” Umma sighs and flips open another news report on her phone. I squint, but I can’t make out the words. 

            I gently try to pry Soojin from the jacket’s fleece-lined sleeves. Her face is flushed but I don’t think she realizes she’s hot. Her gaze is intently fixed on the space between Umma and Dad, and her thumb brushes her cheek, almost at her mouth, so she can suck on it if she gets too distressed for Ddalgi. Soojin is too easy to read. She bites Ddalgi when she’s about to break down and swings him by the arms if she’s happy. She makes our parents give him a kiss at night and throws him against the floor when she’s angry. Sometimes while she cries or yells I watch her from the edge of the room and wonder when Umma will take Ddalgi away.

           When Umma and Dad sat me down to tell me that I would be getting a sibling, neither of them were smiling. Umma’s eyes were glassy and bright, but a tear still squeezed itself out of her eyelids and down her cheeks. I was more confused than anything. I knew then that they didn’t want more kids. They didn’t even mean to have me. When I first asked, Dad painted it like a fairytale: he used words I didn’t know like undergraduate and thesis; words that belonged in a Harry Potter book, somewhere in a land far away, with spells and flying and big beautiful castles. He made the world grander each time he told it to me until I turned eight, and then he wouldn’t answer it at all. When I was ten and Soojin began asking me, I realized that for all the time Dad had spent avoiding the word unwanted, he had never said love. 

           It was one of my many six-year-old refrains: I asked why the sky was blue, why we drove on the right side of the road and not the left, what the story of our family was. Umma left it up to Dad to spin their life into a once upon a time and a happily ever after. Umma had always made it clear: “Your father and I are married because of you,” she’d say, and return to flipping channels on TV. Sometimes she remembered to give me a squeeze. When I told him what Umma said, he sighed, long and deep, and looked more tired than I thought was possible. He explained to me that I was loved and I was wanted, which were too abstract to be kept fully in my head. He never said that what she told me was untrue.

             “But I want a story!” Soojin bites Ddalgi on the ears and kicks her feet against her seat. 

            “Have Sooyeon tell you one,” Umma instructs. To Dad, she says, “Jason, they’re saying the storm’s going to get worse.” 

            “Tell me something I don’t know,” Dad snaps, but he slows. Snowflakes dance in the darkness around the car.

            “They’re saying to shelter in place on the road, that the National Guard will be here in the morning.”

            “Unni, I want a story,” Soojin requests. She reaches over to tug on my arm. “Tiger story.” She holds up Ddalgi and wags him expectantly. She has just begun to learn how to read, in Korean and English, and Haraboji and Halmoni only have the old kids’ books they kept when they were trying to teach Umma and Samcheon Korean. The one Soojin likes best is old and battered and made of cardboard; each page is stiff to turn. It has long sentences I no longer know how to pronounce, but she pores over it anyway. 

            Umma turns off her phone and looks at the road for the first time since getting into the car. “We should’ve stayed at my parents’ house,” she says mildly, but Dad’s shoulders go tense. I have the urge to crawl under my seat and hide. To slide out of this big bad adult world and back into mine with the music and the snow. But I am frozen. I could not look away if I wanted to.

            “I thought we couldn’t impose.” He speaks through gritted teeth. “Since we already impose enough with having them watch the girls.” Dad gets angry like they do in the movies: red face, puffed cheeks, dark and stormy at the eyebrows. It’s almost like he swells in size, from giant to gigantic, and everything else in the world zooms out to match. But Umma is calm, indifferent. She cocks her head and regards him like an interestingly shaped grease stain she needs to disappear, like a change in the weather forecast. I’ve never seen Umma mad. She folds into herself when she’s upset like a piece of crumpled paper in a child’s fist. Dad’s the only person who knows how to smooth her out, but sometimes she locks the door and stays in her room and doesn’t let him in for days. When Soojin was born, I didn’t see Umma for weeks. Between Dad’s stories and Halmoni and Haraboji stuffing my head with Korean and mouth with ice cream I almost didn’t notice she had been missing until she reappeared, skinny and washed-out, an Umma unfolded but still creased. 

Out of the darkness, a dull red pair of headlights snap into focus and Dad eases on the brakes until we roll to a crawl. “Jason,” Umma says, “do we still have water in the car?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“We might need to spend the night.” And then there’s a flurry of snow so intense the world seems to disappear: the blizzard swirls around the window, cloaking the beam of the headlights, covering even the darkness of the night. Dad eases the car to a stop. 

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           “I said we’ll be fine.” His voice sounds strained.

            “Unni,” Soojin repeats, “I want a story.” She doesn’t know to keep her voice down. She doesn’t know how hard it is for me to keep her living in a world where wolves can be just magically sent away. She doesn’t know that for all of the drawings and smushed dandelions she dedicates to Umma, it’s really only Dad she’ll ever love.

            So many things she doesn’t know. 

            “Unni, I want a story please,” I correct her, and her face crumbles. It’s too much: leaving her playmates for a cold car and icy parents arguing about things she doesn’t understand. A sister that’s not distracting her like she usually does and is withholding the one bit of fantasy she knows how to find. I can’t help but resent Soojin: she has it so easy. But I don’t want her to be like me either. She knows her world is unstable but can forget it if she tries. Her lower lip, already trembling, gives way to a stream of tears down her cheeks. 

            “Because you insisted on going home!”

            “I want a story! I want a story!” 

            “Oh, so it’s my fault,” Dad hisses, as Umma leans over, quiet resentment bleeding into her words: “Jason, don’t pin this one on me.”

            “I want a story! I want a story!” Soojin has her hands over her ears. She’s crying. “Unni, please,” she hiccups. “Juseyo.” Please.

            “Okay,” I say.  “Let me tell you about the tiger and the rabbit.”

            Umma and Dad continue to argue. 

            “A long, long time ago, in a woods far, far away, there was a rabbit making his dinner over the fire,” I begin.

            Soojin holds up Ddalgi. “Rawr!”

            “I’ll get to that.” I smile so she smiles back through her tears. “Along came the tiger—”

            “Rawr!” Soojin interjects.

            “—who was really, really, hungry,” I say. I poke Ddalgi’s belly. “He saw the rabbit and thought, ‘Ooh! Dinner!’”

            There’s a honk as Dad slams his fist onto the steering wheel. He’s talking to Umma: “They need you—”

            My voice quakes. “So the tiger went up to the rabbit and—”            

            “You think I don’t know?” Umma exclaims. “You’ve known me for a dozen years!” She sighs. “It’s hard for me.”

            Rage drips out of every syllable. “It’s hard for you? You’re their mother—”

            “—and, uh, threatened him by saying, ‘I’m going to have you for dinner!’—”

            “And you’re their father—”

            “And the rabbit had to think quick on his feet—”

            “You were the one who wanted them so badly—”

            “So the rabbit said—”

            “Will you be quiet, Sooyeon!” Umma shouts and something inside me folds and snaps. I can’t take it, the fighting, either. I can’t just take care of Soojin and watch. I think of how Dad asks for me to wait and see all of the time. 

            “No!” I scream so loud my throat feels sore. “No! No! No! No!” I’m only ever doing what they ask and it doesn’t make any difference at all. I pick up Ddalgi from the floor and tell Halmoni and Haraboji that I’m crying at night because I’m still scared of the dark. I sit in the same pew sandwiched between my parents every Sunday and walk out of church holding both of their hands. None of my friends have ever seen the inside of my house. “No!” And then my throat is too raw to say anything more.

            Silence. There is only the sound of the windshield wipers on the snow. Of the radio newscaster urging us to shelter in place. Umma and Dad exchange a look I don’t quite catch. I have a catalogue of what their private glances mean: when I said something I shouldn’t have, when they don’t know how to tell me something I should know but they don’t think I need to, when they need Soojin to stop crying so there can be peace. This one seems heavy: Dad’s eyebrows are furrowed, and Umma’s lip trembles. I try to tear myself away and look down in my lap, at Soojin, outside, but I can’t stop staring. I’m so tired of waiting for medicine or treatment or something that is not Umma to change her back; I don’t want to keep having to put together the pieces of a puzzle I’m not allowed to see.

            Umma sniffles and looks away. Dad clears his throat. “What do you think of the story, Soojin?” Dad finally asks. Umma’s gaze drifts outside the window. She opens her phone, flicks through the weather reports. Mutters something about the National Guard. Her restless fingers swipe through her apps: messages to the Internet to photos to Facebook. I begin hunting again for my earbuds when Soojin takes a deep breath. She stares for a second at the fast-falling flakes outside. 

           “When you and Daddy get divorced, I wanna live with Halmoni and Haraboji,” she admits, staring at nothing, and hugs Ddalgi tight. 

            Several things happen at once. In the rearview mirror, Umma’s face drops and Dad’s turns beet red. He whips around and demands, “Where did you learn that word?” as Umma uncharacteristically snaps, “Soojin!” It’s all too loud for Soojin, who buries her face into Ddalgi and starts sniffling and sobbing. I don’t know what to do. I want to lean over and leave a stinging slap on her cheeks, but I also want to pull her into my lap and whisper thanks. 

            “Sooyeon!” Dad shouts. “Did you tell Soojin that?” His eyes meet mine, wild and hunting for someone to blame. 

            “Nothing she couldn’t see herself,” I answer honestly.  Dad glares at me, eye-to-eye, and Umma says, “Sooyeon, don’t say things like that.” And then Dad says, “What have you been telling the girls?” and Umma’s face gains a pink tinge for the first time since summer and she hisses, “What do you mean, what have I been telling the girls?” and Soojin hiccups and asks if we can go back to Halmoni and Haraboji’s house and I still can’t find the stupid earbud beneath the seat and I’ve searched every corner and the car is still too cold so now my fingers feel like ice again.

            “When you talk to them in Korean, it’s like you’re in your own little world.” A vein pulses on Dad’s forehead. “You’re trying to keep me out of my own family.”

“You pit them against me when you say that connecting with my family’s culture is that bad!” Umma puts down her phone. “Soojin doesn’t even ask me to tuck her in anymore.”

“No, it’s not my fault they love the parent that likes them back!” Dad roars. He slams his hand on the steering wheel and the car honks. “Jason, not on the road!” Umma admonishes. But she doesn’t say he’s wrong.

Dad’s words bounce around my head. They love the parent that likes them back! He has never said that she hates us before. There was a time Umma smiled. Sometimes she packed me lunch in kindergarten. Dad told her that they gave us too much candy in school so I shouldn’t be eating anything sweet, but she always snuck in something small: a tiny Kit-Kat. A bite-size portion of a brownie. A Hershey’s Kiss. Or maybe it was Halmoni packing my lunches then, because they watched me every day. I try to remember who bathed me, who picked me up when I fell down. Was it Umma, Dad, or Halmoni? I find that I don’t know.

Soojin’s eyes are wide and glassy. Ddalgi rests just at the bottom of her chin, squeezed so tight I worry his stitches will rip. That his black button eyes will come out, and that his stuffing will explode, spewing around the car, a blizzard in miniature made leaving us coated in down and fluff. That Umma and Dad will look at us and not look through us. 

           Dad says, “I don’t know why I married you!” and Soojin is tugging on my arm, saying, “Make them stop!” and begins to wail, and so I say, “Umma, Dad, you’re making Soojin cry,” but nothing seems to work and they are yelling at each other, about Dad’s so unhappy now and how Umma doesn’t seem to love anything anymore and how miserable they both make the family, so much so that they don’t notice the the flashlight bobbing  in the front window, not until a man in heavy gray winter gear raps on the car door and makes both of them jump.

            “Caught out in the snow, huh?” the guy says. He’s tall, over six foot. He seems to loom over the car, his smile growing bigger by the second, like a Cheshire Cat of goodwill. He surveys Umma and Dad’s frozen expressions, Soojin’s crumpled-up face. “Drives everyone a little crazy.” He chuckles to fill the heavy silence that grows more awkward and dense. “Listen,” he says, “I live in the house over there. They’re saying this snowstorm’s so bad you shouldn’t move.” And then he’s talking to Dad, asking, “Do you have folks nearby so you can stay with to ride this one out?” and Dad says, “Yes sir, my in-laws,” and I stare at the back of Dad’s head as my anger fades and crumples into something I know, something paper-light that I can refold.