43. Getting on with Her Life

“If I'm the emblem for ‘This is what it looks like to be the lonely girl getting on with her life,’ then so be it. It's fine. I can take it.” —Jennifer Aniston

“Don’t decide now,” said Master Park. “Think about it overnight. You can tell me tomorrow.”

“Okay, but…”

“Tomorrow,” he interrupted. ,. “Or take a week,” he said. “It’s a very important decision. You shouldn’t rush it. Really take your time and think about it.”

“But…”

He held up his hand up as though to block a kick. I closed my mouth. There was no point in telling him that I wanted to make this decision soon, as soon as possible, definitely sooner than a week.

In a week, I said to myself, closing the front door behind me, I’ll be gone.

I drove back to the lake house, feeling lost on the road I had traveled every single day for almost a year. I had fallen asleep last night with the lights still on, my face resting on Paula’s journal. I didn’t feel ready to make the kind of heavy, life-altering decision that Master Park had placed on my shoulders. His offer of opening a taekwondo academy together was an amazing opportunity, one that would solve all the problems of my life by bringing everything I loved into one place: Master Park, taekwondo, Los Angeles, my home, my friends.

Still, the thought of taking my teacher from his rightful home seemed like a violation this town that I had also come to love. It didn’t matter that he was really from Los Angeles, or that he wasn’t actually Korean, or that he wasn’t even really Master Park. His school was my favorite thing about North Middleton, and it would feel unethical to take it with me when I left.

But he wants to go back to LA, I told myself. He might leave even if I didn’t accept his offer, and then nobody would have him. Maybe it was the right thing to take him at his word that he wanted to leave; that part was his decision, not mine.

Then you should do it, I said to myself. You should open a school with Master Park.

It seemed so logical: I wanted to move to LA. He wanted to open a school in LA. We should open a school together. It made perfect sense.

Except when I thought about this hypothetical school, my heart sank. The problem wasn’t the school itself; I would love a school like that. The problem was that this morning, I had woken up with Paula’s journal under my face and a song of unbounded freedom in my heart. That was the reason for my urgency in leaving, right away, within the week, before I became dragged down by complacency and expectations and routine. I needed to go, to stir, to get moving while I was still burning with excitement to start my life again, with an unmarked slate that I could fill up with absolutely anything.

I didn’t want to move back to LA to do what Becky or Chase or Paula or Master Park wanted me to do. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. Except I didn’t know yet what it was that I wanted to do; and what if I gave up this opportunity and then never figured out what I was getting in its place? What if it turned out that this was the thing I wanted to do all along, open a taekwondo school, and I had missed my chance?

Back at the lake house, my first instinct was to do what I had done so many times before when I had to make a decision: consult Thomas Fo. Zen for Times of Crisis still occupied its privileged spot on the living room bookshelf, lying flat in front of the other books, placed there for easy access. But now, when I picked it up, it filled me with anger and betrayal instead of trust and calm as it used to.

It’s still the same book, I told myself. I forced myself to flip through the pages, starting at the back, visiting each of the sections that had provided guidance in the past: Embracing Your Ugliness. Healing the Divide Between Who You “Should” Be and Who You Are. Keeping the Outside Out.

I had underlined a passage—lightly, in pencil, since the book didn’t belong to me—that had inspired me so deeply that I had written it on a piece of paper and taped it on the wall of the bedroom: “Though we may not appreciate it at the time, adversity is our ally. The times when we are defeated, beaten down, broken, these are the times when we grow, the times that hone the metal of our being into the sharpest, strongest steel.”

These words seemed now like grocery-store wisdom, like something that, when you heard it quoted on an afternoon talk show, would cause you to think to yourself, well obviously. I tried to convince myself that it was just my new knowledge of Thomas Fo’s identity that was making his writing sound like a Groundbreaker’s pamphlet. But no matter how many times I reread it, I couldn’t shake the tawdry sound of Groundbreakers off of the words.

It shouldn’t matter that Thomas Fo doesn’t exist, I told myslf. It’s still the same book.

“The problem isn’t that Thomas Fo is a fake name,” I said, speaking aloud, as I often did in the lake house to lesson the loneliness there. “The problem is that it’s a fake name for Vanto Hatch.”

As soon as I said it, I felt better—because I had finally articulated the exact reason for my disturbance. And then I felt worse—because it was so, so disturbing. Vanto Hatch, I said. Vanto Hatch. I hit myself in the face with the open book. Vanto Hatch, I said again. I hit myself harder.

I closed the book again and let it fall back open, knowing already what I would see. It was the page I had read the most, the story of how the author had forced himself to watch every commercial he had ever acted in, all in one afternoon. That’s right, I said to myself. An actor. Becky had mentioned it a few times; “Vanto used to do commercials, too, you know, before he founded Groundbreakers,” she would say. “He knows how hard acting is.”

“You are still an actor,” I said aloud to the book. You were nothing but an actor all along.

As I placed it face-down on the shelf, my eyes fell on Nicolai Snail’s testimonial, printed on the back cover: “I have been a great fan of Fo’s work for many years.”

They all knew, I realized. All those men playing chess at the Snail Plant, complaining about Vanto Hatch and praising Thomas Fo all in the same breath.

The whole thing is fake, I thought in disgust. My guru. I hated the sound of the word, but what else would you call him? For almost a year, I had turned to him for guidance and inspiration, following his philosophy of living, studying his chess strategies, looking to him for reassurance on cold dark nights when the isolation of the lake house felt like too much to bear.

It’s my own fault for believing in anybody, I told myself bitterly, lying down on the couch, although it was still morning, and pulling Paula’s mother’s knitted blanket over my head to shut out this ominous day when everyone I trusted had turned out to be a liar and a fake. Nobody is my guru, I said to myself, as a grim, sickening sleep began to darken my senses. Not anymore. Never, never again.

I couldn’t tell how long I slept, but when I woke up, I felt clearer, ready to work on making a real decision. I sat on the couch—Paula’s mother’s couch, not mine, I thought, feeling horribly uncouth all of a sudden for sleeping on a stranger’s couch—and my eyes fell on a small red paperback book sitting on top of the bookshelf. It was shoved so far back towards the wall that if it had been any thinner, it would have fallen behind the heavy shelf and been lost forever. I had banished it there the moment I finished reading it, disgusted with its message of selfishness, competitiveness, and arrogance.

I’ll give it back to Master Park tomorrow, I had told myself each time my eyes fell on it. But just the sight of the book’s cover was so repugnant to me that I couldn’t bear to move it anywhere more visible. I rose to pick it up now, annoyed by the mere site of the bold, black-outlined font declaring its title.

The New Aggressive Male.

Its cover was already sticky from humidity and dust, and its back cover was speckled lightly with mildew, something I had never seen on a book before I lived in Michigan, where the summer air was wet enough to dampen paper.

I carried it to the kitchen and wiped the cover with a wet paper towel, hoping that Master Park would never find out how I had neglected it. The mildew and sticky dust lifted easily, and after a quick follow-up swipe with a dry towel, the book looked as healthy as when I had first borrowed it.

Turning it over in my hands, I began to wonder what Fred Fawls would have to say about the question I was supposed to be trying to answer.

You know what he would say, I reminded myself. The same exact thing that Thomas Fo would say. Which was the same exact thing that Vanto Hatch would say. Which, based on my morning of research, was absolutely nothing.

I opened the book and scanned the table of contents, looking for something about decisions. The chapter titles reflected a sense of disdainful judgmentalism that seemed to be the exact opposite of Thomas Fo’s message of self-acceptance: Valuing You Over Them. Real Love Doesn’t Hold Us Back. How to Not Care.

As I gave it some thought, though, I couldn’t define what the distinction between the two philosophies was. Don’t care about others; only care about yourself, both incarnations of Vanto Hatch seemed to say.

Then I noticed a chapter at the end of the list, the epilogue, entitled, “The Choices You Will Have to Make.” Although I had forced myself to read the entire book, I didn’t remember this chapter. Perhaps I had rushed through it, so eager to be done that I was no longer actually paying attention to what I was reading, or perhaps in my haste to finish, I had decided that the epilogue didn’t count and considered myself finished after the final chapter.

I sat down on the couch with the book in my lap, scanning the pages of the epilogue quickly, eager to find something useful, even if it was just some offensive recommendation that might help steer me in the opposite direction.

“If you truly want to become a Fully Actualized Male, you will at times need to make decisions that will upset those you care about, that society will not approve of, that will alienate your family and friends, because when you make them, you will be prioritizing yourself over all others.

“You might think that this sounds self-aggrandizing. Who cares about your decisions so much, anyway? It turns out that society places a host of demands on us in the form of conventions, and when we defy them, the people around us will condemn our actions, even when they have caused no harm. If you do not believe me, try returning an RSVP card saying that you will not be attending a friend’s wedding because you don’t feel like going. Refuse a holiday present from a coworker on the grounds that you don’t want to clutter up your house. Tell your wife that you need to leave the country for a few years, and that she can’t come with you.

“At best, these actions will win you any number of unflattering labels: stubborn, uncooperative, eccentric, self-centered. At worse, they will cost you your friendships, your job, your marriage. All because you dared to be honest, to state outright what would make you happy, what would make your life easier, what would further your development as a human being.”

“Vanto Hatch,” I cursed under my breath. “You will need to make decisions that society will not approve of.” I thought of Rob trying to work up the nerve to cheat on his girlfriend. “When we defy conventions, the people around us will condemn our actions.” I nodded in recognition. I wanted so much to hate this book, did in fact hate it, but I had to admit, I learned something profound every time I read it. Usually it was something I would rather not know, something that I had hoped was not the case. Why did Fred Fawls always have to so perfectly explain the actions of every man who had ever made me feel horrible?

“When people tie themselves to the things they think they need—friends, lovers, jobs, families—they gain a feeling of security in exchange for their freedom. It might be surprising to realize how often people willingly surrender their freedom, that thing that we believe is the most vital condition of our humanity.”

Stupid aggressive males, I said to myself. What would they do, I wondered, if we started acting that way, never thinking of anyone but ourselves, prioritizing our own wants and needs above everyone else’s...what would they do?

Really, what would they do? It was something to think about.

I finished reading the chapter. Then I read it once more, and once again after that, before it was time to get ready for class.

Everything was normal at the school that night, except for me. I felt like I was being watched, like cameras were capturing each movement and facial expression as I led Olivia through her usual training routine. I held the kicking pads in fast combinations of high kicks, low kicks, high kicks. We had spent the last month preparing her for her first competition, coming up in a few weeks.

I won’t be here, I realized suddenly, trying not to let the pang of disappointment distract me from the intricate pattern of kicks flying fast at my head and body, blocked only by the pads I was holding. My hands were shaky, and I felt like I might lose the rhythm at any moment. Pay attention, I scolded myself.

I watched Olivia’s back in the mirror, the snap of her hip and shoulder as she whipped the kick out from her body, the moment of perfect balance as her foot made contact. She had come a long way in such a short amount of time, only a few months.

I think I’m going to miss her. The unexpected realization disrupted the precariously balanced rhythm of the pads moving through space, and her foot smacked hard into my cheekbone. She gasped loudly.

“Sorry,” she and I both said at once. I tried to keep my face blank and reset the pads, to keep going rather than dwelling on my embarrassing mistake, but she was already making a fuss.

“Are you alright?” she said, leaning in to examine the side of my face. “That hit you pretty hard, didn’t it?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Look, your cheek is swelling up.” I could feel the side of my face heating up, throbbing a little, but I didn’t want to disrupt her workout any further by worrying about it.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ll put some ice on it after you’re done training.”

“Okay, if you’re sure,” Olivia said, with a motherly tone of skeptical concern in her voice.

“I’m sure,” I said, holding the pad in place for the first kick in the sequence she had been practicing.

Olivia returned to her fighting stance, bending her knees and lifting her arms, then paused. “It looks like you’re going to have an awesome black eye,” she said as she snapped her foot out to meet the pad.

“What happened to your face?” Master Park asked as I took my regular seat across from him at the chess board.

My inclination was to say “nothing,” but I had learned that the proper response to a question from Master Park was always the truth, in its most factual and unembellished form.

“I messed up holding the pads,” I said. I had iced my face for a few minutes before my own workout and should probably have been icing it once again now, but I didn’t want to draw my teacher’s attention to it. I looked down at the board, avoiding eye contact, waiting to see if my answer was satisfactory.

“Your move,” he said.

We played two games, each one lasting about an hour, our usual routine as of late. Master Park never bothered with having me choose a pawn anymore; we just took turns going first.

He still won every game easily, but lately he had seemed more engaged, as though he had to concentrate on his moves. When we had first started playing, it hadn’t bothered me how neatly and easily he could defeat me—after all, I was a brand new player—but his air of distraction while he did it was infuriating. His eyes would never stray from the board in front of him, but the calm, mechanical rhythm of his moves always gave me the feeling that he was reserving part of his brain for some other activity: planning the exercises for tomorrow’s class, perhaps, or making a grocery list, or even playing some other, more stimulating chess game in his mind.

Now, between moves, he stared intently at the board, furrowing his brow. I had even seen flashes of anger blaze through his eyes like quick flashes of lightning after I had made a particularly aggressive attack; that was when I knew I was about to be slaughtered.

After I had been mated on the first game and resigned from the second one to avoid a messy endgame, Master Park reset the board, just as he did each evening after we played.

“I’ve decided,” I said, as he dropped the last pawn into place.

“Wait,” said Master Park, rising from the table to carry our empty tea cups over to a tray on the bookcase. He must wash them in the bathroom, I thought, before remembering that he also had a little kitchen sink somewhere. “Don’t tell me anything today. Give it time.”

“I don’t need any more time,” I said. I cringed as I heard the assertiveness in my voice, so inappropriate for addressing my teacher, but I kept speaking. “I’m ready to tell you now.”

Master Park stopped mid-step, turned, and set the dirty cups back on the table. He sat down in his chair and looked straight at me. His stony expression was the same as ever, but it frightened me. I waited at least half a minute for him to say something before realizing that he was waiting for me to speak.

“Your offer,” I started “It’s a great idea, and I’m really honored.”

Master Park was still looking at me with that blank expression, that waiting expression, waiting calmly for me to throw the kick that would allow him to launch his own attack.

“I don’t want to open a taekwondo school,” I said.

It seemed that the slightest shadow fell across my teacher’s face, though I wouldn’t have been able to say what had moved. His mouth was calm, his eyes were still and quiet. Perhaps it was the skin over his cheeks, which seemed to hang more heavily downward off the bones.

“I am going to try to do what it says in The New Aggressive Male,” I said, hoping to persuade him through recourse to the book he had made me read. But how could I phrase my reasoning? I want unlimited possibility. I don’t want to be restrained by another person’s goals and aspirations. Opening a school with my teacher, my decisions would never truly be my own. I want to prioritize myself.

“I just don’t know what I want to do yet,” I said, finally. “And I need whatever it is to be something I decide on my own.”

I waited for Master Park to respond. He looked at me blankly. I waited. His face didn’t move.

What did I expect? Yelling? Crying? I had only rarely seen the slightest signs of emotions from him. Mild annoyance, at the Snail Plant. The quick anger when I captured one of chess pieces. Faint sorrow, as he spoke about his children. Now I looked at his features and saw nothing at all. I didn’t even see my teacher there anymore. What I saw was a mask: still, blank, unknowable, a wall.

Then, very slowly, he rose and lifted the dirty cups from the table. This time he made it all the way to the bookcase, where he placed them carefully on their tray. Then, without turning to face me, he spoke. I could hear his voice clearly, though he spoke quietly and I could only see the back of his head.

“I understand,” he said. His voice was calm. It’s going to be okay, I told myself. Then, without looking back at me, he walked out of the room.

I could hear him walking down the little hall, hear a key unlocking one of the mysterious doors, hear it open and then close again.

I sat in the room for a while, waiting to see if he would come back. I listened for footsteps, but I couldn’t hear anything except the quiet ticking of the small alarm clock on the bookshelf. I looked around me, trying to be patient and wait. He’ll come back, I said to myself. He just needs to think about it.

The walls of the room were lined with framed documents that I had never had time to examine before. There were certificates for earning his first, second, and third-degree black belts. One of the certificates made him promise to never use his taekwondo skills “in self-defense only, to protect myself, my family, and my country.” His signature below was as neat as computer-cursive.

There were also two awards from chess tournaments and a clipped-out newspaper article with the headline, “Snail Workers Get a Kick out of New Taekwondo Class.”

One frame near the door was so small that I couldn’t make out the words on the paper inside of it. I stood up and walked over to it. Inside the black frame was an aging piece of white typewriter paper with the following words typed on it:

“The times when we are defeated, beaten down, broken, these are the times when we grow, the times that hone the metal of our being into the sharpest, strongest steel.”

He’ll be okay, I said to myself.

I picked up my bag and walked back into the front of the school, shutting each door quietly behind me. The room was dark, and all the students had gone; Rob or one of the other students had closed up. I turned the bolt on the front door to let myself out. Normally Master Park walked me out of the school after our chess games, so that he could lock the door behind me. I hesitated as it shut behind me, not wanting to leave it unlocked.

He’ll lock it, I said, as I headed towards Paula’s mother’s car to drive to Paula’s mother’s house.

When I woke up the next morning, my vision was fuzzy and the skin on my face felt stretched and tight. Oh, right, I said, surveying my swollen, purple lower eyelid.

Maybe I shouldn’t leave until this thing is gone, I said to myself. I had seen this kind of bruising on one of the guys in the class once or twice; I was pretty sure it would take over a week to fully clear up. Becky would freak out when she saw it, and it wouldn’t do much to convince Paula or Chase that I should continue with my taekwondo practice, either. And then, in Los Angeles, there were always the photographers to think about. My stomach turned, thinking of everyone fussing over my face, back in a city where a person’s face was their most valued possession.

But knew that I needed to leave as soon as possible, before I lost my resolve and excitement to go. Besides, the thought of a lengthy goodbye to North Middleton seemed too painful to bear.

“I am going to Los Angeles with a black eye,” I said aloud. “And Becky and Paula and Chase and everyone can just…” I paused, searching for the right expression to please my audience of one. “Suck it.”

I bought the plane ticket myself. It was my first time calling the airline, making the reservation; Becky had always done it for me before. Listening to the dial tone on the lake house phone, I felt so nervous that I almost called Becky instead. Be brave, I told myself.

There was no need to be scared, of course. The perky-sounding lady on the phone helped me purchase a ticket for Saturday afternoon, three days away. That would give me enough time to pack and clean, and no time to sit around and think about my decision. It was a perfect plan, and I had done it all myself.

As I cleaned the house, washing the sticky bookshelves with soap and mopping the equally sticky kitchen floor, I wondered what Master Park would say when I arrived at the school that night. I hoped he would smile, forgive me, that I would train Olivia and then take his advanced class and then play chess with him, and that everything would be all right. But my heart told me this would not happen, that all he would show me would be the blank, stony face, that there would be no forgiveness and no chess.

I was nervous as I trained Olivia that night, waiting for Master Park to emerge from the back room, as he usually did part-way through the beginner’s class, if he wasn’t out already.

Olivia was almost as distracted as I was, buzzing from the effects of so much exciting news at once. “Check out that black eye—I must kick really hard!” “I can’t believe you’re going to move away before my fight!” “It’s going to be so boring around here without you!” “You’ll let me come visit, won’t you?”

I tried not to look around too much as I held the pads for her; one black eye was careless, but two would be ridiculous. But I glanced behind me halfway through Olivia’s workout, and then ten minutes before it was over, and once more when it was done. Master Park had still not appeared.

I warmed up for the advanced class, bracing for my teacher to finally arrive, and to ignore me, which I was now quite sure is what he would do.

But Master Park did not arrive. Instead, Rob taught the advanced class. And he taught it again the next night, and the one after that, on Friday. It was my last night at the school, and my teacher was nowhere to be found.

I hadn’t wanted to ask anyone where he was, to make a show of my anxiety. But that evening, after the advanced class, I pulled Rob aside. I hadn’t spoken to him, beyond responding to his directions when he taught classes, since that first day when we had visited the Snail Plant together, before I had joined the taekwondo school. His expression, when I told him I needed to ask him something, wasn’t just one of surprise; it was one of unexpected pleasure, like receiving a wonderful but excessive birthday present.

“What is it?” he said, smiling warmly at me, as he lead me to the back corner of the room, away from the bustle of the students packing up their uniforms and putting on their street shoes.

“Do you know where Master Park is?” I asked.

“He’s out of town,” he told me. “He said he had some kind of business.”

“Do you know when he’s coming back?” I asked.

“He supposed to be gone for a week,” Rob said.

I didn’t want to cry, especially not in front of Rob. But I could feel my lower lip shaking, and I knew if I tried to speak, my voice would break.

“What is it?” Rob asked, putting his arm gently on mine.

“I’m moving away tomorrow,” I said, my voice quavering at an odd, high frequency. “And he’s angry at me, and now I’m not going to be able to say…”

Rob was hugging me as I sobbed against his arm, a tight, warm hug, clinical-feeling in our crisp, white taekwondo jackets, like a child being hugged by the most kindly, comforting pediatrician. I haven’t hugged anybody since Becky left, I thought, burying my face in his shoulder and crying and crying until I couldn’t anymore.

“Who’s driving you to the airport?” Rob asked, when I pulled myself out of his arms and wiped my face.

“Oh,” I said. “A cab, I think.” I had meant to call and schedule a ride yesterday, but I had been too distracted worrying over Master Park, where he was, whether he was hiding in the back room until I moved away, whether I’d ever see him again.

“Let me drive you,” Rob said.

“No!” I said, horrified at the thought. It was a sweet offer, but it was a three-hour drive; there was no one in North Middleton that I could ask to take six hours out of their Saturday, just to drive me. Especially not Rob.

“No, really, please let me,” Rob said. “What time do you need to leave?”

“Around noon?” I said, hoping he would say that it was impossible, that he needed to teach class or take his kid somewhere, that he was so sorry but it wouldn’t work out.

"I can get someone else to teach the night classes," he said. Before I could protest, he added, "Why don’t I come pick you up for breakfast at nine?”

“Breakfast?” I asked, shocked. It was hard enough to imagine how we would fill three hours of driving time, after not speaking to each other for my entire stay in North Middleton.

“Sure. You won’t want to have food in the house if you’re moving. You should come over to my place and meet my family.”

After so many months of pretending Rob didn't exist, my instincts told me to refuse, to make up an excuse, to extricate myself from this plan.

I looked at Rob, who was smiling at me, as much as he ever smiled, his mouth stretched into an expression of wary approval. He looked a little older than when we'd first met, although that was less than a year ago. Under the harsh florescent lights of the school, I could see the delicate web of wrinkles creeping out from the corners of his eyes.

I thought about The New Aggressive Male. Would a Fully Actualized Man refuse a ride and a meal from someone simply because they had shared an awkward moment in the past? Would he pass up an opportunity just to avoid a few moments of discomfort?

“Okay,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “It’ll be fun.” He pointed at my swollen eye, which had turned a darker, more intense shade of purple. “Plus I can't wait to hear the story of how you did that to your face.”

Saturday morning, Rob picked me up outside the lake house. He lifted my one large suitcase into the back of his small, black sedan, the same one in which we had evaded the chasing reporters by driving through the back allies behind the food co-op.

“This is all you have?” he asked. For a cross-country move, it didn’t seem like much, I had to admit. I had given away all the clothes I had brought from California, donated them to Shane’s favorite thrift store, their tiny limbs far too small to accommodate the bulky muscles in my arms and legs. I had also donated most of the clothes I had bought in Michigan, the down jacket and bulky sweaters and thick, insulated pants that would be useless in Los Angeles. All I had were kept were some pajamas, a few pairs of jeans, some t-shirts and thin sweatshirts.

All of that only took up about a third of the suitcase. The rest was filled with my three taekwondo uniforms and all the books I had bought: two about Zen and three about chess, all by Thomas Fo. I had considered leaving them for Paula’s mother. But looking at them on the bookshelf, I couldn’t imagine not taking them with me. I can’t stay mad at you, Thomas Fo, I said, tucking them safely between my jeans and sweatshirts.

As I climbed into Rob’s car, I handed him the last book I had removed from the lake house: The New Aggressive Male.

“That book,” Rob said, crossing his arms. “That book tried to ruin my life.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “Could you please give it back to Master Park for me?”

Rob took the book and placed it in the backseat, holding it disdainfully between his thumb and index finger, like it might infect his hand with some awful disease.

Master Park had told the truth about Rob living in Cone. His building was only two driveways down the road, a giant house that had been divided into three apartments. In the sparsely populated woods, that still put him almost two miles away from where I had been living. Still, I couldn’t help but think wistfully of how I could have had a neighbor, someone to visit on those cold winter nights when the lake house had felt as frozen and barren and isolated as the North Pole.

The breakfast was heavier than anything I would have made for myself, but good, a hearty, family breakfast. Rob's girlfriend Diana made scrambled eggs and pancakes with fruit in them and a big pot of coffee. She ate a modest portion, instead focusing her energy on putting food onto Rob and Apollo's plates, rising every few minutes to get a serving spoon or the pepper shaker or a napkin. She floated around the small apartment with a frantic energy that reminded me of my own mother, even though her energy had been channeled into organizing erotic seances rather than cooking.

"It's too bad you're moving," Diana said, leaning in from behind me to refill my coffee cup. I had already had two cups, the first two I'd had in several years; there was no way I was going to sleep on the plane, I thought. It was fine; to meet Rob's girlfriend, this specter I had imagined as a dark shadow floating over him, was worth a little discomfort.

"Rob never brings any of his taekwondo friends around," she said. "If I had known you were living right down the street, I would have invited you over a long time ago."

She's fine, I realized, watching her scoop more eggs onto her son's plate. We really could have been friends.

As we ate, I told them the story of my black eye. Diana gasped as I described Olivia's foot hitting my face.

"I've messed up the pads" Rob said. "But I've never gotten a black eye. You must have messed it up really bad." He let out a laugh that was a little bit cruel and mocking, but mostly friendly.

While Rob and Apollo washed the dishes, Diana gave me a tour of the apartment, the two bedrooms and one tiny office that doubled as a guest room, where Master Park slept on a fold-out sofa when he stayed the night. “He's so sweet,” she said, her face melting into a sad expression. “Rob thinks he might be visiting his kids right now.”

“Really?” I asked. I hadn’t considered this possibility. It seemed a little more hopeful than what I had been imagining, that he was hiding in the back rooms, pretending to be out of town until I was gone.

“Well,” she said, “It’s probably just wishful thinking. But Rob said Master Park’s never gone out of town for a whole week before. It would be nice if that’s where he went.”

Breakfast was all cleaned up by eleven, and I didn’t need to leave for the airport until noon.

“Have you ever been out on the lake?” Rob asked me. “We have a canoe.” He saw me hesitate, not wanting to inconvenience him any further. “You can’t leave Cone without a canoe ride on your own lake,” he insisted, dragging me outside by the hand.

It was still mid-February, and just two weeks ago it had snowed, but today was a beautiful day for a ride. The lake was crisp and sparkling and blue, matching the clear cold blue of the winter sky. In two sweatshirts and a pair of gloves borrowed from Rob’s girlfriend, I felt just the slightest bit of bracing chill in my bones. Rob didn’t seem to notice the cold at all, even though he was only wearing one sweatshirt and no gloves, as he rowed us out to the middle of the lake.

He paused at a beautiful calm spot from which I could see the back yard of the lake house, where I used to practice my taekwondo forms on warm days.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?" I asked. I was afraid he was about to have another breakdown, like the first day we met, that he would cry and tell me that he couldn't drive me to the airport because he felt too guilty being alone with me. I knew you shouldn't have trusted him, one part of my mind gloated at the other part.

"For how things started out between us," he said. "I really messed that up."

"It's okay," I said, wondering if I was just falling back into my old habit of saying whatever would get me out of an awkward conversation the most quickly. But no, I realized, I wasn't lying; of course it was okay.

"It was a really bad time in my life," Rob said, his gaze fixed across the lake, back towards the shore where both of us had, until this morning, lived. "We had all just moved in together, because I used to live separately, and things were so stressful, and I was really, really confused.”

“It’s better now?” I asked. I realized as I said it that I truly hoped it was better, that his life was as happy and sweet as it seemed.

“It’s a little better,” he said, without smiling. "I've been talking to Master Park about it, and that helps."

"What does he say?" I asked, wondering what sort of advice my teacher might give about how not to destroy one's family.

"He told me you never really lose the feeling of being trapped," Rob said. "You just get used to it, and it becomes the normal way your life is."

He was quiet for a while, and so was I. We sat staring back at our houses, the cold empty barren one and the one brimming with unbearable affection and connectedness.

Before we headed back to shore, I remembered something I wanted to see. “Look,” I said to Rob, pointing towards the green house on the far side of the lake from Paula’s mother’s house. “Do you see a man sitting on the balcony?”

Rob squinted. “Maybe,” he said.

I squinted, too, unsure of whether he was there today, and whether I could see him from this angle. And then suddenly, he came into sharp focus: the small man, squatting on what seemed to be a stool, his arms crossed over his chest, staring straight across the lake.

“Right there,” I said to Rob, pointing.

“Oh, I do see him,” said Rob. “Sitting on that stool.”

“That’s him!” I said. I lowered my voice, embarrassed to be yelling, but I was so excited to finally have someone confirm the presence of this guardian ghost who had been haunting me for months and months.

“Let’s go check him out,” Rob said, rowing towards the green house.

In all my puzzlement over the eerie figure, it had never occurred to me to simply get closer to him. I could have walked out on the frozen lake, I thought, but I knew I would have been too scared to ever try it; I had heard enough horror stories about what could happen to foolish, naïve Californians testing out ice for the first time.

“Hmm,” said Rob, as we grew closer. “Do you think he’s a statue or a real person?”

I stared at the figure, who was growing into sharper and sharper focus as we approached, now only a hundred feet away from shore. His eyes were staring fixed ahead of him, frozen like stone. But his crossed arms seemed to wave and shift with gentle liveliness.

And then we were fifty feet from shore, and as I stared at his stony eyes and swaying arms, they began to move slowly away from each other. One eye moved right, and the other eye moved left. The arms moved down, and the head moved up.

And then the left eye became the stubby end of a tree branch, just in front of the balcony, and the right eye was the top of a shovel leaning against the balcony’s railing. And the arms and body were a bush, an evergreen in a pot, squat and healthy in its cozy spot by the back wall of the balcony.

“He’s gone!” said Rob, his voice hushed in amazement. "Just dissolved into nothing."

But my guardian hadn't dissolved into nothing. He had dissolved into plants and tools and the wooden rail of a balcony and the sparkle of shimmering blue water.

"It's beautiful," I said. I wasn't lying. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.


The End