Read Online The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee - Free Book Online Page B

It was a monstrous thing to do, but the boy had not written her in more than a year and in her weakened state she couldn’t help but give herself over to the sharpest, cruelest impulse. She felt immediately sickened and so called the operator right away to see if she could dial the caller back, but it was no use. She waited for her phone to ring again but it stayed quiet and she eventually fell asleep and by the morning it seemed it had all been a wicked and terrible nightmare.
    A couple of weeks later she did in fact receive a postcard from him in the mail, saying that he was writing from a rural hospital because he had broken his leg, and quite badly, while riding a horse at a friend’s country estate.
I’m going to be fine
, he wrote.
Maybe just a little crooked!
He didn’t ask for money or anything else and she was happy that nothing had come of her hideous conduct on the phone, and the next time he wrote he didn’t mention the accident, or his leg, only how he was going to continue his travels, now indulging in a slightly more expansive tone. The postcards didn’t actually sound like him, but to her it was a signal that they’d turned a corner, that something new was beginning.
    He hadn’t asked her for money until recently, when suddenly he began to send postcards with requests for small sums to be wired to post offices in Amsterdam, then Frankfurt, then Nice. They were modest requests, $200 or $300, but that last one, for $1,000 (for which she sent $2,000 and mailed an enthusiastic note about his coming birthday), made her certain they would be reunited soon. She needed it to be soon. But then no word came. Each day afterward she awaited the arrival of the mailman, who soon enough knew what she was looking for and told her each day by the sorrowful hang of his eyes that he had nothing in his bag. It was through the mailman, in fact, that she got the idea of hiring Clines. The mailman was a chatty fellow with an oddly high voice who was a little off in the head, one of those reasonably functional people who was perhaps mildly mentally disabled. He didn’t hesitate in telling her how he’d hired an investigator to follow his wife, as he suspected she was cheating on him. Clines eventually discovered that she was having an affair, but with the mailman’s own brother. This is what Clines had meant when he asked if she truly wanted to find Nicholas: the truth is often more difficult than one might wish to believe.
    But June was rarely hesitant in her life, and certainly would not be now. She said to Clines, “So it’s good that you found Hector Brennan last week.”
    Clines nodded, clearing his throat. His face soured, as though he could not agree with her less.
    “Where does he live, exactly?”
    “In New Jersey. Fort Lee.”
    June’s pulse suddenly spiked with the notion; all these years she’d assumed, for no reason, that Hector was still somewhere in the North-west, or maybe in Canada or Mexico, or else gone back to his home-town somewhere in upstate New York. That he was so close, just across the George Washington Bridge, and oddly-or not so oddly-where many Korean immigrants were starting to settle and live, gave her a fresh bloom of optimism.
    “How long has he been there?”
    “Apparently, at least ten years,” Clines said. “If not more.” He took out another folder from his briefcase and handed it to her. It was all he had been able to gather on Hector, details of what he had already told her over the phone: a couple of faxed arrest sheets and a list of convictions that went back to soon after he left her, ranging widely from Washington to Texas to Pennsylvania and, in the last ten or so years, New Jersey. All were for minor offenses, possession of stolen goods, assault, resisting arrest. Typical drifter trouble, Clines told her. Hector apparently had no phone, no credit cards, no driver’s license or car registrations, no bank accounts or loans. It had been pure chance that Clines had found