KINTSUGI
Sean stopped by the hospital, sleeping in his office for a couple of hours while waiting for Sang’s bloodwork. He’d had it prioritized, offering a favor to the lab people.
He didn’t need to, but he wanted to do something for her.
When the results finally got to him, he took them to his car, intending to take them home, but before he turned over the engine, he had the paperwork out and checked her file.
High triglycerides. Anemic. Her cortisol levels were through the roof. He’d guessed right.
Too much sugar, not enough good food—her stress levels were too high. They knew all this. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Everything she was going through was completely stress-related.
She was sleeping now, and he hoped she’d continue to do so. Still, even as he calmed down from the argument and considered if Owen might at all be right, and maybe being hasty wasn’t going to work in this case, he couldn’t agree with it. Sang might be telling people she was fine, but she wasn’t. If she continued like this, she’d get something worse. Something life-threatening and unfixable.
He returned home just as the sun was coming up. Bleary-eyed. Unshaven. A complete mess.
Sean dropped everything he’d been carrying onto the floor just inside the door.
There had been no word from the others, except the cross texts to everyone saying the thing to do now was to let her sleep. Don’t wake her. Don’t text her. Let her sleep.
Beyond that…they didn’t know. Come up with another plan. Perhaps Kota could talk to Jimmy and get Carol to relax.
No one was happy with any of it. No one was really talking to him, but Sean sensed no one was talking at all. Like him, they needed to calm down.
This whole situation was going to pull them apart, and not how he’d thought it was going to happen. Trying to decide what was best for Sang was driving them crazier than trying to figure out their relationships.
His head felt heavy, full of sand. He needed sleep, too, but he doubted he could get any right now.
If he’d never introduced himself to Carol, he would have never been invited. Sang could still get out on occasion at least.
This was his mistake. Owen might have been wrong about keeping her in that house, but he was wrong for pushing his way into the house and causing trouble.
No one had to tell him. He’d pushed and made them all follow his plan because he was frustrated. He couldn’t wait, like Owen had wanted to do.
Now they were forced to wait it out. Perhaps longer this time. Instead of making it easier, they’d made it more complicated.
Sean leaned against the wall in the hallway.
Breaking down on the floor in a heap seemed like a fair option at the moment.
Her sweet face swept into his memory. Her pulse under his fingertips had been fast.
Fast for him, or so he liked to think.
That smile. Her kiss. It made him say stupid things.
Now she was trapped.
He sucked in a heavy breath through his nose and tried to hold it, trying to gain control. Focus, or more mistakes might happen.
What could be done?
His shoes and other items he’d tossed onto the floor when he left had been picked up. Owen hadn’t returned. He was still down in the security trailer.
His mother had to have gotten up. It was still a little too early to be awake, even for her.
There was a very tiny sound of glass scraping glass coming from the kitchen.
A heavy, alcoholic scent carried to him. Or was it lacquer?
Sean shuffled across the house quietly, listening.
The kitchen door was wide open. The island was clean with the laptop they’d left closed on top of it. A dull yellow glow illuminated the space.
Sean stepped into the doorway.
His mother sat at the kitchen table. The window blinds had been readjusted to let the natural rising sunlight to come through. Sean’s desk lamp he used for making paper art was sitting on the corner, next to his mother’s arm.
She was hunched over, focused on where the light was shining on the table.
They hadn’t closed the laptop before they’d left, had they?
Did she see the camera windows? Would she know what they were?
Sean sighed. He’d been dodging his mother the last couple of days and being very short and snippy, or simply not being available.
It wasn’t her fault he was screwing up. Again.
He circled the island to go to the far side of the kitchen table. “Good morning,” he said quietly.
“Ohaiyo,” she said in a soft voice. She was dressed in a crisp white shirt with a pair of khaki slacks and wore a hair band, the strands shoved away from her face.
A towel lay flat in front of her over the table. On top were pieces of the bowl they had broken. She had a vial of gold flakes, a mixing bowl, and a small jar of lacquer.
She mixed clear lacquer with the tiny flakes of gold until they blended. The result was a very small dollop of gold. With a thin cotton swab, she picked up a piece of the bowl and used the swab like a paintbrush, tracing the edge of one of the broken bowl pieces.
Sean sat down in a chair across from her. The smell of lacquer was stronger here, and it stung his nose. “What are you doing?”
“Kintsugi,” she said quietly.
He wasn’t familiar with the word and tried to piece it out. “Gold?”
“Golden joinery.” She picked up a second piece of the bowl and pressed it to the first, making a golden seam between them. The effect was creating a golden vein, accentuating the crack.
“We can just get another bowl,” he said. “We don’t have to repair them.”
She spoke without raising her gaze from her work. “I’ve never known you to give up just because something was broken.”
He snorted, shaking his head. He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “And you do it with gold? Not just with glue?”
“Kintsugi isn’t just about repairing,” she said. She picked up the cotton swab and started to paint another edge, layering the gold liquid. “It is about the beauty in the flaws, and acknowledging a harsh history in the past.”
He was familiar with the cultural thought that tragedy was looked upon to be revered instead of avoiding thinking about it. He had nothing to say to this, but was drawn to watching her continue to fix the bowl.
After a few minutes, he wasn’t really watching her, just staring into space. His fingers absently traced the direction of the grain on the wooden table.
Sang was breaking. He was, too. He was a split second away from carrying her out of there. The group would thank him for it later.
It would be worth the lost favors. She’d be out. She’d be with them.
With him…
After a few moments of silence, she spoke. “If you’re tired from being out most of the night, you should call Owen and let him know.”
At the sound of his name, he groaned. “I don’t need his permission to be tired. He can’t help right now.”
“Did you ask him?”
“He isn’t as perfect as you think.”
“No, he isn’t,” she said quietly.
He paused, confused by the comment. “You’re always telling me to talk to him. To be like him. You just told me to call him.”
She placed another piece of the bowl against a golden seam, holding it together until it stuck in place. “Do you remember when you first met him? Every day you would come home and complain this boy thought he knew everything and nothing you said mattered.”
“He’s still like that.”
“While you were in your room one day, he came to the door.” She put down the bowl and used a swab to mix more gold and lacquer. “You two had a particularly bad fight, and you had told him not to contact you.”
Sean blinked. There was a time after they had been paired up within the Academy that they were trying to work out ways to earn more favors, yet they’d argued about how.
He couldn’t remember his argument at the time, but anything Sean would suggest was essentially too risky for two ten-year-olds to do. Owen wouldn’t come up with a solution on his own. They’d butted heads a lot back then about this. “I didn’t know he talked to you.”
“I never told you. Apparently, he didn’t either. Usually when you two fight, you’re not even listening to each other.”
“Mom…he’s not…”
“Are you fighting with him?”
She might have heard them the last couple of days. He sighed. “A little.”
“Then you aren’t understanding each other.”
“Yeah. He’s not listening to me. He’s wrong this time.”
She nodded and then picked up another piece of the bowl. The bowl was now looking more like it used to, just with golden veins. “But you haven’t found a solution you are both completely happy with. Otherwise he would have agreed to it.”
True. “It’s complicated. Too many variables. Too many questions.”
“Maybe you should stop asking so many questions and focus on something else.”
His lips twitched. He tapped a forefinger on the table’s surface. “Is that what you told him? Years ago?”
The corner of her mouth unwrinkled, and there formed the slightest of smiles. “He asked many questions. He wanted to understand how to convince you to listen to a complicated answer.”
“And you told him to stop asking?”
“I told him how, years ago, I found you at the hospital, abandoned.”
Sean tilted his head. “How was that important?”
She put the bowl down, attaching more gold and the last few pieces around the rim. “I wanted to keep you, but it wasn’t so simple. Your father and I disagreed then on how to handle the situation: find someone to adopt you or let the state system take you into their care.”
Sean sat up, eyebrows raised. “You told me you wanted to keep me when you saw me.”
“What I wanted wasn’t really possible for us at the time, or so we thought,” she said. “We were young, with a limited income, and we were here on work visas. We were very sure the system wouldn’t allow foreigners to adopt American children. We didn’t think it was possible…until we changed how we were thinking.”
“How?”
“We found a small church willing to prepare a baptismal record for you, claiming we were the parents. Back then, it was a little easier to convince a judge you were mine, rather than convince one to let us adopt you.”
The information sank in, and he stared at the table. “You didn’t tell me about that. You told him before you told me about it?”
“Does it change anything now? Does it change how I raised you? No. You are who you are now. We are where we are.”
When he did ask about when he was adopted, it was usually about clues as to how he had been found: abandoned in a hospital. He had asked about his real birth mother. He had given up years ago trying to figure it out, as he didn’t want her to be sad thinking that he wanted to replace her.
However, it made sense why Owen had suddenly changed. He’d come up with a solution because he’d stopped asking the same questions. Instead, he’d changed the results he wanted in the first place.
When Owen changed the goal, it changed how they approached it.
Sean stared at the table, and then at the bowl with the golden lines.
There were too many questions around Sang.
Let go of the questions…or maybe change the result they wanted.
Sean tapped at the table, letting the idea sink in. He wasn’t sure he had an answer.
But he knew someone would. Owen. He’d just have to convince him to give up his stubbornness, thinking his way was the only way.
Sean stood up, heading for the door. “I’ll be back later, Mom.”
“I know,” she said.