Before I can think too hard about it, I grab my weekend travel bag and throw in some underwear, toiletries, and a change of clothes.
Then I text the girl next door to see if she can check in on Betty tomorrow—she can. With that confirmed, I put my stuff into my car and make the drive to LAX.
Ann Arbor. That’s where my dad lives. A city I’ve even been to once, with an ex whose family lived there. A leafy college town that looks like something straight off of a postcard. My hands clench the steering wheel.
I start dictating a text to the Park women group chat. “Sunny told me everything. About my parents and how they were fated. I can’t believe that my own family lied to me my entire life. I can’t see or talk to you guys right now. I’m taking a week off from work, please don’t try and contact me.” I’m glad they can’t hear the trembling in my voice.
Then I turn off my phone so I don’t see their responses. When I get to LAX, I do something that people only do in the movies: Ibook a one-way trip to Detroit, the best option to get into Ann Arbor, on a red-eye. It’s not for a couple hours, so I decide to walk through the sprawling hellscape that is my city’s international airport.
There’s a comfort to my anonymity, the chaos of everyone else’s plans not touching me in any way, acting as white noise for my thoughts. People from all over the world finding themselves in this one place. The news I’m processing is life-changing, and seeing the rest of the world go on, business as usual, calms me.
I don’t even know why I’m doing this. All I know is, I can’t be in L.A. right now, I can’t be near my family. If I saw Halmoni, I would lose my shit.
As I walk through the terminals, I keep replaying Ellis confessing his feelings to me after the fight. The hurt on his face when I didn’t reciprocate. The hurt on Daniel’s face before it turned to anger. This revelation about fateds—it should release me from this indecision. I’m free to go running to Ellis!
But instead, it makes it one million times more complicated. Do I really want to be with Ellis, or was it just me having second thoughts about Daniel? Even without the fated aspect—Ellis doesn’t make sense for my life. My very tidy, peaceful life that I’ve spent forty years building. A life I love. Throw a twenty-eight-year-old into the mix and it just goes upside down. Will I have to teach him how to deep clean a fridge? I’d rather get a root canal. Learn to “go with the flow”? Will I always worry that he’ll leave me for a younger woman? What if I’m out there doing CrossFit and dieting at sixty to keep my young man close? I’d rather die.
Will he even want children? WillDanielever want children?
I get in about thirty million steps before I’m on my flight. As the plane ascends, I look out the window at the dark, deep blue of the Pacific. I think about my dad leaving L.A. to move to Michigan. There are so many questions I can finally ask him. Why did he leaveus? Was it just the freaked-out-by-fatherhood thing? Wouldn’t the strength of his fated love to my mom be strong enough? A thought sneaks in like a whisper, a hiss low in my ear. Why wasInot enough?
I feel exhaustion drop over me like a weighted blanket. I give in happily, easily to sleep.
When I wake up, we’ve landed and a single line of drool has dried on my face. I wipe it off with my hand and look out the window. It’s dark and overcast but the pilot says it’s eighty-four degrees and humid. The sun is just starting to rise.
According to the navigation in my rental, the car ride to Ann Arbor is another forty-five minutes. I blast the AC as high as it will go because my cotton T-shirt is already stuck to my back, the humidity an assault on my California body. As I drive away from the airport, the enormity of what I’m doing hits me. What am I going to say to him? This man is a stranger to me. But I do know that he’s the only one outside of my family whoknewmy mom and knew about our family secret. An outsider and an insider at the same time.
I’m not ready for this talk, but I’ve never been.
The landscape starts to change from city highways to industrial to more suburban landscapes. I drive through Ann Arbor proper, which is quiet in the early morning and as charming as I remember it—brick buildings, tree-lined roads, local cafés. Then Google Maps takes me into a neighborhood filled with different architectural styles—some Gothic Revival, Tudor, and Craftsmans. It’s not fancy, but it’s lovely, especially with everything framed by huge, stately trees. You feel the age and history of the area immediately.
I come to a stop in front of a modest, sage-green two-story Colonial. There are tall maple and beech trees planted around it, and blooming lantana and petunias lining the brick pathway through the green lawn.
I park on the curb and stare at the house. This is where my dadhas been living. Halfway across the country in this quaint neighborhood that feels like a different country from L.A. What’s his life like? I don’t even know if he has another family, or what. Or if he’s even home. It’s early, what if he’s still sleeping? I finally muster the nerve to get out of the car and walk up the path, my heart beating in my throat every step of the way.
This is surely the most impulsive and nutjob thing I have ever done in my life. And if I think about it too much I will chicken out and will have flown out here for fucking nothing. So I reach out and ring the doorbell.
43
He answers the door.
I know it’s him despite not having seen a picture of him since I was six. He’s still got a head of dark hair, thinning but dark. He’s wearing black-framed glasses that remind me slightly of Stu. He has the square face of an older, handsome Korean man. In fact, it’s the benign-ness of how he looks that fills me with absolute devastation.
He looks like an average Korean dad. But I never had that dad.
I take this all in as his expression goes from curious to shocked. “Cassia?”
His recognition of me catches me off guard. “Yes. Are you Matthew?” I manage to croak out.
His expression turns from shock to what I can only describe as astonishment. His eyes widen, his mouth drops open, and he makes a small, instinctual movement toward me. “How…What are you, I mean—”
“Sorry to surprise you so early,” I say, annoyed that I have to begin with an apology. “But I just found out something and needed to talk to you. Sunny gave me your address.”
“Are you okay?” he asks, his eyes flying over me, as if checking me for injuries. Something about it makes me want to cry.
“Yes. I mean physically,” I say with a weird, tortured laugh.
After looking at my face with the same stunned shock for a few seconds, he shakes his head and steps aside, holding the door open. “Please, come inside.”
