The Night Before the SAT
I SHOULD BE STUDYING WITH Ham and Seung, in the warm basement of the Rhee residence, not here in the dugout with moonlight reflecting the words typed on my SAT packet. The public library closed at nine, school doors locked earlier than expected, and with all my energy spent chasing after Seung, I forgot to slip the shank in the fire-escape door. I’m huddled on the wood bench, squinting to read about Important Items for Test Day.
Seung shunned me in the hall, even when I shouted his name. It’s unlike him to avoid me this long. He’d normally cave by now. A smile, wink, tickle on the ribs, would cause him to crumble. But not this time. Not after seeing me kiss the same guy, twice. I never kissed back, Seung. But he didn’t stay long enough to know that.
I lean back on the bench, shut my eyes, and picture my future. Brick buildings, bell towers, winding sidewalks, and warmth. Lots and lots of warmth. I rub my arms, then my neck. Tomorrow marks my moment to shine. Perform well on the SAT and take another step in the direction my mother wanted me to go. More distance, away from my past.
My mother would be proud. She wanted me to get an education.
“In order to get ahead in life, Linden,” she’d say, “you have to read. You have to write. You have to finish school, no matter what. Don’t do what your mother did.” She’d dropped out of school when she couldn’t conceal her pregnancy any longer.
“My mother made me do it,” she’d say, “with a push and shove from school officials. Nobody wanted a pregnant girl shuffling the halls of a public high school. Not back then. Might give others ideas, they said. Cause a domino effect. A contagion.”
I can still hear her giggle as she stuffed a pillow in her shirt and waddled around the living room like a penguin. “Can you believe you were once this small?”
My grandmother was the one who created the domino effect. She had my mother quit school, forced her to run away with the guy who got her pregnant. A guy who left us at the hospital with me still in the birth canal. But it wasn’t my grandmother’s fault. Had she known how I’d turn out, she’d have been proud of her daughter. I’d planned to show her proof when I arrived on the doorstep of her nursing home with a bag of cash and a photo of my mother. I’d planned to show her the kind of kid her daughter had raised. Resilient and resourceful.
I figured my grandmother would recognize her daughter from the photograph, even if she didn’t know me. But a rosy reunion never happened. My grandmother’s head was full of dementia and her mouth packed with gibberish. It didn’t stop me, though. I wanted my grandmother to know her daughter did the best she could with what she had, which was nothing but a GED and me. I didn’t need nostalgia or long-winded talks digging up memories of my mother when she was young. I needed one spark, one flicker in her eye to acknowledge my existence. And then it happened one morning, when I’d woken in the chair beside my grandmother’s bed and watched as she swirled her bony finger around the frame of my mother’s face. She pressed the photo to her cheek and held it there until she drifted to sleep.
When I woke again, the picture was on the floor and Eva, my grandmother’s nurse, was shaking my arm. “Linden, Linden. It’s time to go.” She rushed me out of my grandmother’s room before the doctor arrived and they pulled the blanket over my grandmother’s head.
Eva took pity on me. I had no place to go. She let me bunk in a spare room stuffed with extra beds and brooms. “Makes more sense to sleep in a nursing-home living room reserved for visitors who never visit,” she said, “but this will have to do.”
She scolded other aides for questioning my stay. She said, “She’s only here until school starts,” which was a few weeks away. I cleaned toilets, dusted furniture, and smiled a lot. I don’t know how, I’m not sure why. I guess I was happy to earn a roof over my head, and everyone was kind to me. But then school started and everything turned to shit. Eva told me her administrator was beginning to ask questions, but if I needed a place to stay, she could call the pastor of her church and see what could be done. Small-town churches barely have money to feed their own flocks, so I told her I had everything under control. She refused to quiz, even though her eyes begged for answers.
Answers to questions could disrupt my future. I wasn’t ready, now or then, to bounce between strangers as a ward of a state. My mother leaned only on herself, and I was determined to do the same.
So what if the dugout was cold, hard, and filled with ants. It took me about a day to learn how to bunk inside Hinderwood High. Took another day to learn how to hide in plain sight.
In my heart, I know my grandmother caught a glimpse of the woman my mother had become, though they hadn’t spoken in years. The strong, sturdy mother who fought for her life and her child, even while she was dying. I wonder if my grandmother remembered her daughter the way I remember my mom. I wonder how many years pass before your memories fog and fade. How she combed my hair and wiped food from my lips with her knuckle. How she smoothed my eyebrows with her thumb while she read to me in bed. How she made sure the tags were tucked tightly into my shirts. My mother wanted more for me than she ever had.
My promise to you, Linden, is that I’ll always provide a choice. You won’t be forced to do something you don’t want to do. Not on my watch.
She left me with options. An emergency fund stashed in an envelope. Money she could have blown on herself but never did. She left me with choices. None of which I ever wanted to take.
It’s hard, sometimes, to not think about the what-ifs. Like if there was $5,000 in the envelope to begin with and only $3,000 when I needed it. If I had taken off my earphones and screamed before the beating, would there have never been blood? If I’d stayed with the social worker at the morgue, would I have lived a better life?
I stop myself from remembering the past before I go the distance.
I quit before my mother’s beating, before the blood.
My mother wanted to live. For me. For us.
She never deserved to die.