“We can go back to hating each other tomorrow,” I whispered. “But right now, I need your strength.”
He stood there frozen, and I wondered if he’d pull away.
But no, in the end, he squeezed my hand. Holding it tight until my mom had disappeared from sight.
Only then did he let me go.
As it turned out, Victor was right. The news came down a few hours later. Mom made it through surgery. They still had to send some tissue samples in for further testing, and she’d need to do some chemo to be sure. But Dr. Kim was “fairly confident” that he had gotten it all.
Cue more tears when my mother woke up, and we got to tell her the news.
“You’re magic,” she insisted to Victor. “The next time I need luck, I’m going to fly to you in Rhode Island and rub the top of your head!”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Victor didn’t live in Rhode Island, and I guess Victor didn’t either. He didn’t correct her.
That wasn’t the last surprise he had in store for us.
Someone from the Audiology appeared with a knock on the door a couple of hours after mom woke up. “Is now a good time for your consultation?”
“What consultation?” Mom and I both asked at the same time.
That was how we found out that Victor had arranged for her to be fitted with a waterproof processing unit for her implant.
It had taken months of appointments to get my mother and brother outfitted with their first implants back in the aughts. But my mom’s was done by the time the nurses came through with mom’s first post-surgery meal.
Victor. This was all Victor.
My entire chest tightened with confusion as I stared at him. When did my monster morph into a prince?
And why.
23
VICTOR
“You’re the Chinese boy, aren’t you?”
Victor jolted in his seat when Gyeong asked him this question. Her daughter had just gone downstairs to the cafeteria to get food for them. It would be the first meal they’d eaten all day. Dawn had been too nervous to consume anything while her mother was in surgery.
Gyeong had lain down and closed her eyes after she finished eating, and he had thought she might be asleep. But no. Victor wondered if she’d been waiting all these hours for a moment alone with him so that she could ask him this question.
She mistook his hesitation to answer for confusion.
“The Chinese boy,” she reiterated. “The one Dawn was secretly dating in high school?”
How much did Gyeong know about her husband’s job? He had assumed wrong once before with Dawn. Nonetheless, he answered, “Yes, I’m the Chinese boy.”
“I thought so,” Gyeong answered with a tired smile. “I still remember the day that phone you gave her arrived. Dawn was so surprised. And all I could think was, ‘this Chinese boy likes her. He likes her very much, and she doesn’t realize it.’ I think my husband thought that too. That’s why he didn’t want her tutoring you after the winter break. I should’ve known it was you she was sneaking around with before that night she came home late. She was so upset when her father forbade her from seeing you again. But it doesn’t matter now, I suppose. You found her.”
Victor stared at Gyeong, who apparently knew nothing of what had happened between him and Dawn after her supposed fight with her father. Yes, he had found her again. But ten years later, he was still at war with himself about their reunion.
“Is that why you two married in secret?” Gyeong asked. “Because you were afraid of our disapproval?”
“No,” he answered honestly. “It is a lot more complicated than that.”
Gyeong clamped her lips the same as Dawn so often did when she was conflicted. “I thought so. You remind me much of my husband. Quiet and angry for some reason, with big secrets you can never tell. You should give Dawn some children. Someone to keep her company when you can’t. That’s what my husband did, and it worked for a long time.”
The thought of children with Dawn twisted his stomach and stabbed at his heart. He hadn’t thought of them when he was eighteen and stupid. But now…
You still can’t think of them, he reminded himself. At least not with Dawn.
Four months. No matter what illusion they were putting on for Dawn’s mother, the fact remained that after May 25th, their deal would dissolve.
“Dawn would make a great mother. Much better than me,” Gyeong said. Her tone was thoughtful, as if she were just now realizing this herself. “Now that I am through my surgery, I probably will never tell her this, but I’m proud of her. I never would have stood up for myself like she did. The only defiant thing I ever did was run away from home to be with a black American soldier boy I met at my family’s farm-stand. And even then, my parents forgave me when we brought them to America and set them up with the dry-cleaning shop. They died right before we left for Japan. Liver cancer for my father too. And my mother just gave up. I don’t think she could bear living in America without him. How about your parents? Are they still alive? What do they think of Dawn?”
