From Sea to Shining Sea

Short story by Michael Croley
Photographs by Arin Yoon

My boys never understood me. They never could have. They grew up here, in America, where everything is easy. That’s how we wanted it for them, but sometimes I wonder if they had it too easy, if maybe we could—or should—have made it harder for them. I say that then I remember they had me as their mother in this small town. My eyes, my hair, my accent always marking me, marking them. I know they hid their teasing from me. They got into fights at school and hid those from me as well. And, on occasion, I made them fight, refused to let them come home or get on a bus to school the next day until they had confronted their bullies or taken up for each other.

When I pushed them that way, I knew it was because the world had been hard on me. I wanted them to rely on each other, but then Henry died last year and Wren has been so lost that I sometimes regret the way I pushed them together but I don’t know that I could have done things any differently. 

I was nineteen when I met Robert. I was working in an orphanage in Incheon, near the American army base. I saw him walking the streets in the afternoons, his red hair glowing in the sun. He carried himself differently than the other soldiers. He was quieter. The quietest. I wasn’t drawn to him right away, but one night my friend Noon-ya and I were together in Seoul and there was Robert. I remembered his red hair and I went up to him to say hello and tell him that he looked lost. He smiled. “I am,” he replied. We have never really been apart since. 

But that’s a story so deep in my own past, so full of hope and promise, it hurts to remember it now, here near our end. I told Henry our story once, when he was still a boy and too young to remember it very well or even be interested. Wren still doesn’t know about that evening, how Robert walked with Noon-ya and me in the city, how his father took my hand as we crossed the street, and the police stopped us for holding hands, which was illegal. They threatened both of us with jail. 

Robert got very upset over that, but I don’t think it was about going to jail. Something told me that wasn’t his concern. It was the triviality of the offense that bothered him. He yelled at the police officer and the officer didn’t understand him, and I knew he resented that this American was in our country. He took us both to the station, leaving Noon-ya on the sidewalk. Wren doesn’t know his mother and father began their life together in jail. 

There’s so much my son doesn’t know about us despite me telling him stories his whole life. So much he knows and can’t understand, which I am sometimes grateful for, but he certainly won’t understand why I must take his father on this trip, why I have to do it for both of our sake’s even if Robert will remember none of it.

Sometimes, and I don’t mean because of the Alzheimer’s, Robert feels like a stranger to me. I wonder how much of that is my doing. I wonder how much I pushed him away over the years despite loving him, needing him. 

I came home from the grocery store the other day and he was asleep in the chair. When I closed the backdoor, he woke up and shouted, “Who is it?” 

“It’s me,” I said. 

“What?” 

“Yobo, it’s me.”

He was standing now, and I saw he was scared, confused. 

“It’s me, Moon-Cha.” I put my hands on his chest. “I went to the grocery.”

His face slackened, into recognition, and then he said, “I fell asleep.”

“I know. You rest.”

But I didn’t want him to rest. I wanted him to the mow the yard. Or plant the flowers he bought from Lowe’s last week that are dying in our driveway. I wanted him to be twenty years younger and freshly shaved, in his white dress shirt and tie, and headed out the door for work. 

“I can help bring the groceries in,” he said. He walked past me and outside. I started putting away what I brought home. Then I began collecting the dirty dishes he leaves all over the house to put in the sink and wash, and it was fifteen minutes later when I realized he wasn’t back. Through the window I saw the trunk of the car open. 

I called out for him and only the sound of the wind in the trees came back to me. I called again, louder, and then I saw something in the corner of my eye. He was in the forest. He was touching the bark of a tree as if he were examining it. I walked to him and when I was close, I said, “Did you hear me call for you?”

“No,” he said without turning. “This tree is dying. If it falls it could hit the house.” 

“I’ll call Roland tomorrow and have him take it down,” I said.

“Don’t let him cheat us,” he said. 

“We’ve known him ten years. I don’t think he’s going to start cheating us now.” I took him by the arm and started leading him back. 

“You never know,” he said. 

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Like I took mine with you,” he said and there was a grin on his face when I looked at him. 

“I’m the one who took the chance,” I said. “I moved to Kentucky,” I said. I laughed but I meant it.

“Those were hard months those early years,” he said.

“Yes they were,” I said. 

I got him settled back in the house and in his chair. I brought the groceries in myself and the whole time he sat in the chair, not really looking at the television not really looking at anything. I wonder where he goes when does this and, at first, I asked him, but he could never really say. He would just look at me and say he didn’t know. 

I don’t know how many more months we have together until he will fade from me, when language will leave him, and it’ll be just a series of grunts and nods and me speaking louder to get him to hear me. 

After I fed him supper and gave him his medicine, he refused to come to bed. I had no energy to fight him and on nights like that he sleeps on the couch, though I know I shouldn’t leave him alone. I let him lie in the living room and I go to our room, where I’ve gotten into the habit of streaming K-dramas on my computer, holding the laptop on my chest deep into the night when I should be sleeping and resting for the day’s work of taking care of him, but I miss something about Korea. I can’t always place it, but I know that I left more than my family behind when I moved to this country with Robert. I left something about who I am—not who I was—there. 

Later that night Robert came into the bedroom, calling my name. “Are you awake?” he said.

“I am now.”

He moved to the bed and pulled the covers up and got in beside me. His body was so warm and he pushed himself into me. It had been twenty years since he did such a thing and I put my arm around him, feeling his smallness and remembering how broad his shoulders once were, how he could fill a wheelbarrow with a hundred pounds of dirt and move it with ease. 

“I’m cold,” he said. He took my fingers in his and they were icy. His teeth chattered. I rubbed his arm. 

“We should move someplace warm,” he said.

“I’ve been asking you to move for forty years,” I said. 

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he said. 

“Now, you tell me,” I said. 

He rolled to his back. “We don’t have to stay. We can go anywhere.”

Even in the dark I could tell he was smiling. 

“You always wanted to travel,” he said.

“And you always wanted to stay,” I said. 

“Not anymore.”

“You can’t do that,” Wren said over text. 

“He wants to go. I can take him.”

“It’s not a good idea. What if something happens?”

“We can make it,” I pecked back. That’s when the phone rang and I tapped the camera button and there was my son, on screen, his face like my father’s, his hair thick like mine.  

“All the way to California, by car?” he said, not giving me a chance to even say hello. “You’re crazy. He needs familiarity.”

“It’s his idea. And if you remember, I’ve driven all over this country. I drove you and your brother to Phoenix. I drove my family to Niagara Falls—”

“When you were a young woman,” he said, cutting me off. “Dad’s not in his right mind.”

“I can handle him. I want to go, too.”

Wren tried to talk me out of it, and I listened to him, but I knew Robert needed this. I needed it. I let Wren yell at me and pretended to listen. Children seem to think we need their permission after a certain age and though I knew my son loved us, he didn’t know what it was like to lose his own child or spouse. His pain is different from mine and because I love him, I have kept my pain hidden and disallowed myself from ever telling him about the hardest parts of these last two years. 

After he calmed down, I said, “It will be okay. I won’t do more than I think I can.”

“You always do more than you think you can. That’s who you are.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I can come for a stretch,” he said. 

“You have your own life. Your own family.”

“You’re my family,” he said. I could see tears welling up in his eyes and he fought them back.

“We have to do this,” I said to him. “It doesn’t make sense to you but we have to.” 

When Henry was fourteen, we were rear-ended on Main Street. He didn’t have on his seatbelt and I reached to try and hold him back, but I wasn’t fast enough and his forehead smacked into the glass. He had a bruise there for weeks. There was no damage to the car but for months on end, and years later, I would remember that moment and the sound of his head hitting and think about what had been avoided, how lucky we had been. 

All those years later, as he got sicker, I kept reaching for him, but I was never going to be fast enough. He was my baby and I couldn’t help him. 

We tried to talk to him almost every night and after, Robert would leave the house and walk in the woods, a miner’s light wrapped around his head, and come back smelling of the cold wind and damp leaves. We didn’t know how to talk to each other about Henry and I didn’t want to admit what I knew to be true: that our son was dying. 

It was during this time, four months after Henry’s diagnosis, that Robert came home from the hardware store and I saw he had left the car running. When I told him, he went outside and turned it off and came back in, but he didn’t say anything. I asked if he was feeling okay and he said he was tired. A little dizzy. “I just need to sleep more,” he said. 

I thought it was the stress of Henry. My mind was always racing about him, too, but I know now that Robert was slipping away from me at the same time as Henry. I couldn’t reach him fast enough, either. 

Wren insisted on coming home to see us off. He brought the whole family with him and Robert and I made a big fuss over our grandchildren. Robert took them outside and they built a bonfire in the backyard and Wren and Allison kept a close watch over their kids while I finished packing our suitcases. When I was done, I brought out ingredients for s’mores, and I held the kids in my lap while they roasted their marshmallows. The weather had just turned and the evenings were cool, so the fire felt comforting. As I looked around the fire, I knew it would never be like this again. The next time I would see Wren, Robert would be a different man. 

I did not think life would change so quickly. When I came to this country at nineteen, still a girl, with the man who sat next to me now, steadying the stick of his granddaughter as she rotated it in the fire, like all young people do, I thought the world would unfurl for us and, in some ways, it had, but I did not think it could also close in on you. 

The fire flickered below us after we put the children to bed. They had rushed downstairs and pulled Allison upstairs with them, leaving Wren and me alone on the back deck, overlooking the woods. 

“You sure you can do this?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m going to.”

He was no longer trying to talk me out of it. 

“I never told you this,” I said, “but a week after Henry died, your dad was on the couch sleeping and I heard him tossing and turning. He was talking in his sleep. I got up and went to the living room and he called out Henry’s name. My heart just broke for him.” What I didn’t tell Wren was that I had wanted to say, I can’t believe he’s gone and you’re leaving me, too.

My voice was cracking and tears formed. “I am so mad at God,” I said. “I don’t understand why He has done this or if I did something to deserve it.”

“You’ve done nothing,” he said. “It’s just a thing that has happened to us.”  He took a deep breath, like his father, and let out a sigh. “I miss my brother, Mom,” he said. He sounded just like a little boy when he said it. 

“I know,” I told him. “I talk to him every day.”

I took his hand in mine and remembered all the times I held it when crossing a street or when he was older, and we made long car trips to his basketball games. Even as a teenager he would let me hold his hand and now I took it and we looked off into the dark woods beyond the house, the last light of the fire fading to a dull red glow. 

“This house was his dream,” he said.

“It’s starting to fall apart,” I said. “I can’t keep up with all of it.”

“Will you sell it?”

“I can’t think about that right now. It’s too much,” I said. “I don’t know when I’ll have time to think.”

At breakfast the next morning Robert said, “I’ve never been to Los Angeles.” 

“Are you going to put your toes in the ocean, Dad?” Wren asked.

“I believe I will,” he said.

“When’s the last time you were in the ocean?” Wren said.

“When I was with your mother in Korea,” Robert said. “Ten years ago?” He looked at me for confirmation. 

I nodded. 

“We picked mussels on the beach with her sister. Big old buckets of them and then we went back to Sook-Cha’s and cooked them. Her husband got ripped,” Robert said, and he let out a deep laugh and it was almost as if he wasn’t sick any longer. I saw the man he had been. 

“What’s ripped mean?” our granddaughter, Molly, asked. 

And that made Robert laugh harder. 

“Pops is just telling a story,” Wren told her and stroked the girl’s hair. He turned to me then. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I think so,” I said. 

“Where are you going?” Molly asked.

“All the way to California,” I said. “All the way across the country.” 

“Will you come back?” she asked.

“Why, of course,” I said. “Pops and I will miss you.” 

“You sure you can do this, Dad?” 

Robert, at first, just nodded. Then he said, “We can get through it. I’ve got my medicine. I’ve got my exercises.” 

Then he stood. “I better load up the car so we can get going.” 

Wren stood to help him but Robert told him to sit down, that he could do it. I grabbed his arm. “Let him do it. He needs to.” 

We watched him carry the bags out to the car.

“I can take some time off work,” Wren said. 

“I’ll manage.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “We never talked about Henry when he was dying. We never made any plans. It’s all happening again,” he said. “You’re just going to go and then come back and then what?”

“I don’t know but we’ll be okay.”

“You don’t know that,” he said. Now, he stood up, walking away from the table and out the back door to the deck, where we sat the night before. I followed him.

He was wiping away his tears.

“We’ll be all right,” I said.

“I’m going to be left all alone, Mom. Don’t you see that?” 

I didn’t know how to respond to him because, of course, he was right. I couldn’t tell him he was wrong. He was a grown man.

“You’re right,” I said. “But we’ve decided we’re going to do this. Your brother was so sick and we couldn’t go see him because of Covid and I never got to say goodbye to him the way I needed to. We watched him die in that hospital room and he was so sick before that I didn’t even recognize him anymore. I can’t let that happen with your dad. I have to have something else to remember him by before it gets bad. I have to hold onto what’s left of him.” 

“Won’t it be easier to make some sort of memory here?”

“Nothing is easy anymore,” I said. “The happiest time in my life was before you and Henry were married and the three of us could travel together. We went to so many places and now this is my last trip,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Korea, either.”

“I still don’t know how you did it all those years ago. How you managed to stay here, in this place.”

“I had you two. I had your dad.” 

“Still,” he said. “You’re a tough woman.”

“I’m the toughest woman I know,” I said, and we both laughed. 

The car was packed. Wren and his family were going to stay another day or two before he headed home. They would make sure the house was shut down and locked up. By the time he made his way home, I thought we’d be past Missouri, headed for the coast. 

“Okay, Darling,” I said and I reached up to him and gave him a hug. “You take care of yourself.”

I had watched him and Henry leave this house for twenty years when they visited, standing by the garage door until their cars disappeared over the hill and I could no longer see them before going inside. Now, I was leaving and he was standing in my spot. 

Wren went to Robert and hugged him, it was something they never did. “Have fun, Dad.”

He turned to me. “I love you. Be safe.”

“Bye, darling,” I said. 

We kissed the kids. We hugged Allison. We got in the car and I took a deep breath. 

“Ready?” I said to Robert.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said with a smile. He was always a funny man. I hoped his humor would last. 

We pulled away and I watched Wren and his family in the rear-view mirror become smaller and smaller until they were out of sight and then I looked for the sun on the horizon. 

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