How afraid they were of each other. How impossible they seemed together. But if only her mother would’ve knocked, and Margot’s response wouldn’t have been, Go away. If only they had a way to embrace each other and say, I don’t understand you, but I’m trying my best. I am trying my very best.

And now being in her mother’s world was like stepping into a wildfire, the edges of which she might not ever contain or even know. An immolation that might clear dead brush, bring seed trapped in perfect pine cones down to the soil.

At the end of the prayer, the crowd stood, flipping through the onionskin pages of black vinyl-covered books, clearing throats to sing. The gentleness of their song above organ music elevated the room, as if their spirits could skim the vaulted ceiling, filling the rib cage of the church. She didn’t understand the words, but her body hummed with the sound, a sound of kindness and belonging, maybe even forgiveness, too. Tears filled her eyes and she wiped the corners with the sleeve of her sweater before they could fall.

When she looked up, she saw the side of a familiar face about twenty feet in front of them.

The red mouth.

Margot nudged Miguel urgently.

“What?” he whispered. The sermon had begun. The priest in his robes spoke with gentle but firm words, stirring the church like a fire. Margot could only catch in the net of her mind the Korean words for giving, love, and God.

“Mrs. Baek,” she said. “Over there.”

“Where?”

“Gray scarf.” A man standing beside Margot shot her a dirty look.

When communion commenced and her row had been called, Mrs. Baek, who wore a deep navy blouse, rose from the pew. Her long blue skirt, closer to indigo, swayed with her body. She bowed when receiving the wafer in her mouth. Margot imagined the taste and texture, the dryness before it dissolved on the tongue, down the throat. She leaned against the wall, looking at the gilded altar above which Jesus hung, pale and lanky, arms spread on the cross.

Returning to her row, Mrs. Baek glanced up and, for a second, Margot thought that she had seen her and Miguel. Of course, they stood out. But then she picked up her songbook and seated herself as if nothing unusual had happened.

At the end of the service, Margot watched as Mrs. Baek gathered her belongings in a black canvas bag from which she pulled out her cell phone. Reading her screen, she stumbled out of the nave, oblivious to her surroundings.

Margot signaled to Miguel, and they followed, maintaining their distance. Before exiting the building, Mrs. Baek turned and descended a flight of stairs into the church’s basement. Stepping as quietly as possible, Margot and Miguel went down into a dusty storage area and waited behind several tall columns of cardboard boxes. They could hear Mrs. Baek speaking with someone, a man in Korean whose voice sounded familiar.

“You look so nice tonight,” he said. “Let me take you out for dinner. It’s Christmas Eve.”

Margot and Miguel glanced at each other as they crouched down lower to the ground.

“How did you get my number?” Mrs. Baek asked.

The man laughed. “What’s wrong with you? Come here.”

“Stay away from me. Don’t ever call me or come here again.”

“I thought maybe you might be looking for a job,” he said. “I could help you find a new one.”

“I don’t need anything from you. Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“Shhh, lower your voice. You’re like an animal,” he said. “Ha, that’s what women are like when they don’t have men around. They’re like animals.”

Mrs. Baek said something, which Margot couldn’t understand, through her teeth.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“Mrs. Lee.” Her voice cracked.

“Ha, which one?”

“Lee Mina.”

“I don’t even know who that is,” he said. “Come here.”

Swiftly, she grunted. He yelped in pain.

“Don’t touch me,” she spat. “I’ll kill you.”

Margot peeked around the boxes to see Mrs. Baek rushing out and Mr. Park following her, cradling his shin.

“Shit,” Margot said, looking at Miguel. “Let’s go.”

They ran up the stairs and out of the building into the cold night, which had rapidly blackened into a street almost empty of people. At the other end of the church’s parking lot, Mrs. Baek slammed the door of her battered gray Toyota Camry and drove off. Mr. Park had disappeared.

“She’s probably going home,” Margot said, catching her breath. “We should make sure she’s okay?”

Why did she say her mother’s name? Did he kill her?

Driving toward Mrs. Baek’s apartment, Margot remembered the stacks of books and magazines in the living room, the layers of paper and text, tenuous skyscrapers, and Mrs. Baek’s face without makeup, the wash of pale skin, and the eyes—intense, defiant, a little terrified. A steady and slow state of shock. She had imagined her in that apartment, poring over books, completely alone.

But Margot had been wrong about both her and her mother: their loneliness was not special, or any worse than anyone else’s. In fact, they each had their own universes, small but constructed in their own way. Who was to say that in their devices, in their plots, they were different from other people?

Margot, who could only see her mother as the impossible foreigner with her rapid-fire Korean and embarrassing, halting English, who could only see her as an oppressive prop in Margot’s own story, realized more and more that, in actuality, her mother was the heroine. She was the one who had been making and breaking and remaking her own life. And in the end, she might’ve paid for it.

Mina

Fall 2014

ON THE SATURDAY PRIOR TO THANKSGIVING, ALMOST one month after Mr. Kim’s death, Mina entered her daughter’s musty bedroom, folded newspaper in hand. She had attempted to snag a copy of the paper every day on her way to work while stopping for inventory at one of the wholesale businesses downtown. Sometimes there would be an unread newspaper on a counter that she would slip into her purse, or she would ask if she could take a look inside for an obituary. A friend had just died. Finally, one of the business owners offered her a stack of newspaper that he had kept from the past few months—saved for the bottom of his birdcage at home. Inside of her parked car, she scavenged through the pile until she found the one from October, the one with Mr. Kim inside.

Now on top of Margot’s desk, where Mina mostly stored her own records and bills, she grabbed a pair of scissors from a wide plastic purple cup jammed with all the pens they had collected over the years. She imagined peering over the shoulder of her daughter, sitting at this desk hunched over a sketchbook with pencil in hand.

Mina lay the newspaper on that desk and flipped carefully through the pages until she found again the black-and-white photo of Mr. Kim, Kim Chang-hee—a slightly younger but much more vibrant manifestation of the man with whom she had traveled to the Grand Canyon two months ago in September.

Hand in hand, they had stared at the largest chasm they could find.

Dark shadows pressed against red-and sand-colored rock striped over billions of years by wind and water. The purest golden light saturated large swathes of the green brush and trees clinging to walls of hard mineral against a soft and hazy azure sky. The warm breeze smelled of pine. The earth was rich.

This was what she had always wanted—a return to feeling minuscule, tiny yet safe somehow again. Here she was so small that she could elude the cruelties that she had endured. Here she could go undetected. Nature in its most extreme forms taught us that there was a design greater than us, and we could unburden ourselves briefly from our individuality in this world, our self-importance. Wasn’t that the relief?

The closest proximity to which she could attain this feeling in her everyday life must have been under God’s roof in a cathedral, where the vaulted ceiling, that arch, was a refuge in which the entire universe, in the form of prayer and song, hummed. Beauty was safety. Beauty kept us from harm.

Cumulus clouds above projected shadows, dark silhouettes, deepening the drama of the peaks. The ornate striations of color and light made the spectacle of yesterday’s overnight stop in Las Vegas—which they had finally experienced together again after all these years—laughable. Standing in front of this chasm was like looking up at heaven and into the deepest part of the earth—its soul, the violence and agony of its billions of years, and the resulting splendor—at once.