Page 57 of Free Fall
“Oh? You a mama’s boy?” I ask.
“Was. Iwasa mama’s boy,” he says. “She died, remember?”
“Oh. Right.” I recall that he’d mentioned that before and feel guilty that I forgot. I don’t know what to say about it either. I never had a mother to call my own, but people seem really attached to theirs most of the time. I imagine how I’d feel if Peggy Jo died. It’s not a great feeling. I put my hand on his shoulder. “That sucks.”
“It does,” he agrees. His black lashes glow like gold in the firelight, and I squeeze his arm. He smiles with closed lips and doesn’t look at me. “What about your family?”
“Don’t have one,” I say, removing my hand and going back to stirring the canned chili. It’s steaming now, and ready to be served over the chips I’ve brought, sprinkled, of course, with cheese. Impromptu camp nachos.
“No?” Sejin asks. “Like no family at all?” Again, he sounds skeptical. Which makes sense. It takes a certain amount of effort in life to end up with absolutely no family. I’m not going to lie and say there was zero choice involved for me, but at the same time there were circumstances.
“To pervert Oscar Wilde, losing one parent—like you have—can be seen as a misfortune, but losing an entire family starts to look like carelessness. Did I guess where your skepticism is coming from?” I open the chips and dump a goodly amount into two biggish bowls I’ve brought, and then grab the bag of grated cheese from the supplies. When we’re done here, I’ll have to secure all of this well to prevent any bears or other animals from moseying up the back way while we’re out here tonight.
“No, no, of course not,” Sejin says. “I’m just trying to imagine life with no family. Mine’s pretty big. Sixteen cousins, half a dozen aunts, a bunch of uncles, and loads of meddling. You really have no one?”
“No one at all.”
“How…” He clears his throat, watching me stir the chili some more. Then I guess he decides to just go for it, and I admire that he has the balls to ask. “How did that happen?”
“Ah, it just kind of did.” I add as an aside, “Remember, I never claimed to be a good cook.”
I use a big serving spoon scavenged from the depths of my silverware drawer back in my van to scoop the goop over the bowls of chips. “But I guess it all began when my mother abandoned me sometime after my sixth birthday, and I got passed around twelve or so different foster homes before I finally just set out on my own a few months before I turned eighteen.”
“Twelve homes? Over eleven years?”
“Yup. My cute little mug didn’t seem to stir their hearts enough to make up for my weirdness, I guess.”
“I’m…sorry.”
“Cheese okay?” I sprinkle it on liberally when he nods, and then pass the bowl over to him, along with a spoon to grab whatever the chips don’t hold. “I don’t remember a lot of my childhood, to be honest, so it’s probably okay. I rememberalmost nothing of my mother, except that she had long brown hair. I think? I’m not even sure of that. In fact, I don’t remember much of anything until my second or third foster home.”
“Wow. What do you remember from there?”
“Eating rocks.”
Sejin blinks at me as he tries to process what I’ve just said. “Did you say eating rocks?”
“Yeah. I used to take handfuls of the gravel from their driveway, put it in my mouth, kind of chew it around, and then spit it out again.” I take a big bite of nachos, enough to keep me from having to talk for a few seconds, and he does the same.
“Was it pica?” he asks, once he swallows. “You know, some nutritional deficiency that made you want to put rocks in your mouth?”
“Maybe. I mean, I wasn’t getting a lot of nourishment back then for a lot of reasons. It was hard to get me to eat. I was super picky.”
“I was picky when I was young too. Nothing but my mom’s PB&J would do for lunches. I must have eaten three thousand of them.”
“What about you?” I ask, glad to change the topic to him. “What do you remember from Korea?”
“Korea? Oh, nothing.” He shakes his head. “I was brought over when I was eight months old. My parents picked me up from the airport. They had me delivered to them, basically. They used to joke that they should have named me Air-Mail.” He laughs, and his eyes do that half-moon thing. “Anyway, there was a woman who took me from my foster mother in Korea and delivered me to my parents in West Virginia. I remember none of that. My first memory is of my grandfather dangling my feet in the Pocatalico river—that’s a little river near to where I grew up, and close to my grandparents’ house. I was probably three.”
“Were they a white family?” I ask, though I suspect I know the answer.
“Yep. Good ol’ redneck white Appalachians,” he says. “I was the only non-white person in my family and, like I said, it was a big family.” He pops a nacho in his mouth, seeming to consider as he chews. “Another early memory I have is of being in a crowd of my girl cousins, all of them arguing over who got to pretend I was their baby, and all of them kissing me—cheeks, head, arms—until I started to cry. They smothered me with love!” He laughs, and my heart lightens.
Sejin might have lost his mom, but it’s obvious the concept of family isn’t the dead space that it is for me.
“Did you feel different? Growing up non-white in an all-white family?”
“Sometimes. I remember wondering why my skin was darker than everyone else’s, why my eyes had a different shape, but I didn’t worry too much about it. My mom and dad were upfront about my adoption—I mean they kind of had to be—so I knew that I looked different from the rest of the family because I was born in another country. I know other kids in my situation might have had more problems with the whole thing than I did, but sometimes I think that’s a failure in myself, you know?”