Her phone rings in the middle of breakfast, startling her more than she’ll admit. She fumbles it out, squinting at the unfamiliar number, and, not in the mood to entertain a telemarketer at seven am, sets it down to wait it out. She returns to her cereal.
The phone stops ringing.
Less than a minute passes before it rings again.
She checks the screen—it’s the same number. That unsettles her, but she shakes her head. It could be an unusually stubborn spam-caller. A wrong number. Anything, really.
The ringing ends.
When it starts up again, she’s had enough. She swipes her thumb to accept the call and lifts the phone to her ear.
“Hello,” she says. “Who’s this?”
A beat of silence.
“Alice,” someone says on the other end of the call.
***
Alice Moon wakes up at two am to the incessant buzzing of her phone. She rolls over, fumbling around, finds it and answers with a swipe of her thumb.
“H’llo,” she says, sitting up to rub her eyes. She stifles a yawn. “Who—Who’s this?”
Silence.
“Alice,” someone says on the other end of the call.
It takes her a moment to note that the voice is familiar. Another to determine why exactly it’s familiar. Only then does it settle into her who exactly is calling her at this ungodly hour, and suddenly she can’t remember how to breathe.
“Alice,” the voice repeats, and she ends the call before she has to hear anything more.
For a moment the room is quiet and cold and empty. The only illumination comes from the dim phone screen, clutched in her white fingers, until that too disappears and all that is left is her reflection, opaque against the black glass.
The screen lights up again.
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.
She considers ignoring it. Blocking the number. Getting a new phone—though, considering she hadn’t given them her current number, they could probably find the new one. She even entertains the idea of moving to Alaska.
She shakes her head. She’s being ridiculous.
Her thumb moves over accept call.
“Alice?” the voice repeats—no, a different voice, though no less familiar.
“Umma,” Alice says, tongue slipping, out of habit, into Korean. “What do you want?”
There’s a brief pause. “Your brother,” her mother says. She uses the Korean word—dong-saeng. What you call one who is younger than you. What you call one you have a duty to look after. “Have you heard anything from him? Is he with you?”
Alice’s fist crumples the edge of her sheets. “No to both,” she says, then, “Umma, what did you do?”
“Nothing.” Rustling, soft staticky murmurs. “Just . . . your brother’s missing, Alice.”
Alice’s mouth is dry. She swallows, then says, carefully, “What the fuck?”
“Language.”
Her mouth clicks shut automatically. “Sorry. I just— Sorry.” Swallow. “What happened?”
“We don’t know. He simply left, just last week. We’ve been looking. We haven’t found anything.” Hesitation. “We . . . wanted to know if he told you anything.”
She doesn’t know why her mother thinks she would know anything. She doesn’t know why they waited a week to tell her. Five years, she thinks, bitter; five years and this is what finally breaks the walls they’ve built oh-so-carefully between them.
Alice says, “No.”
She hangs up.
The next morning, there’s a text from an unknown number: Message us if anything happens.
She considers blocking or deleting the contact.
Instead, she saves it.
Alice is six years old. She doesn’t remember anything before this: the hospital, the waiting, her father’s impatient foot-tapping. She’s reading a book, but not really; she’s too excited to bother concentrating on the letters swimming in and out of her vision.
The door opens, and her father comes in. Nanny stands up to approach him. They exchange a brief, whispered conversation before her father turns and leaves again. Nanny, noticing Alice, who’s watching them wide-eyed and anxious, smiles and holds out her hand. “Come on, Miss,” she says.
“Is Umma alright?” Alice asks. She slips her tiny hand into Nanny’s.
“Yes,” Nanny reassures. “They both are.” Nanny leads them out of the waiting room, pausing in the hallway to wink at Alice. “Let’s go meet your baby brother now, shall we?”
Later, Alice will try to retrace her steps, the years she knows existed before this moment. She’ll fail. It seems, in all memory, that the first thing she ever laid eyes upon was a shriveled chicken nugget in her mother’s arms, screaming with lungs she doesn’t think an hour-old really deserves.
“He’s ugly,” she observes. He looks like something you stick in a microwave.
“He’s your baby brother,” her mother reminds her sharply, exhaustion leaving her short-tempered. Well, more short-tempered than usual. “Your dong-saeng. You take care of him, you know. We’re depending on you.” The lines in her face soften when she looks down at the bawling chicken nugget, shifting it to plant a kiss on its hairless scalp. Her father, who hovers uncertainly by her side, softens as well, hand settling on his wife’s bony shoulder.
Alice looks again at her brother. He looks back. Raising a hand, she pokes his cheek with her pinkie; her mother’s eyebrows bunch, like she’s going to yell at her again, but they drop when a tiny, tiny hand, sticky with saliva, wraps around the finger. Alice blinks. The baby blinks back.
“Okay,” she says, because if anything she’s been raised to be dutiful. “I’ll take care of him.”
Two days after the phone call, there’s a knock on the door.
Alice should ignore it. She’s busy working—which, in her experience, means trying to figure out who the hell miscarried the one in the budget this time, surely she can’t be the only competent at basic algebra—and if her neighbor really has that much of a problem with her sleeping schedule, he can go get three jobs himself. But an excuse to procrastinate this mess isn’t sounding so bad, so she shuts her laptop to head over to the door.
Alice opens the door, and Jace Moon stands on the steps, hand still raised in the shape of a knock.
“Hey,” he says when she doesn’t. “Can I come in?”
Wordlessly, Alice shuffles aside, opening just enough room for him to squeeze under her arm. He has to duck now, which she finds disconcerting from someone who used to barely reach her chest. Behind him, she closes the door, and after a moment of contemplation, slides in the chain lock. When she turns around, Jace is peeling off his shoes and socks to line up against the wall with her own sneakers. It’s habit more than anything else now for the two of them to take their shoes off at home. When he’s done, he straightens up and, accident or not, meets her eyes.
The first thing Alice says to her brother in five years is, “Please don’t tell me you hitchhiked from Maryland to Panama.”
“Do buses count as hitchhiking?” he asks. He sounds genuine about that. “The train might, with that whole hobo stereotype, but all transport was paid for and completely safe.”
That’s . . . okay. He’s fourteen now. (Fourteen already.) That’s technically old enough to travel alone—she thinks. The last time she saw him he was nine years old, all nervous and wide-eyed and hair like their father’s, too fluffy to be gelled down right. He’s grown into his awkward pre-puberty features, the soft baby-fat in his cheeks and gangly spider limbs. His eyes are different. She can’t pin down how just yet.
“Well, you’re intact, at any rate,” she says. It feels awkward. She wishes this wasn’t so awkward. “Right?”
Something flickers over Jace’s expression, fleeting and nameless. Alice barely catches it. Alice doesn’t know what it means.
“Right,” he echoes. He shakes his head. “Can I—stay? Not forever,” he adds hurriedly, like he’s trying to cut off whatever he anticipates her reply to be, “just . . . just until.” He sighs.
She wants to know why. She wants to ask if something happened with their parents, with school, with his friends.
(A darker, more bitter part of her wants to say no.)
“Fine,” she says. “Not forever.” Then, because she can’t help but be spiteful, “Should I call Umma and Appa to let them know?”
Jace doesn’t seem to react, but his shoulders curl up into themselves, wire-tight tension locking over his muscles. “Nah, they already know,” he says, much too casually. “They’re alright with it. And, you know, winter break’s coming up. I won’t miss anything at school.”
He’s lying. She knows, as certain as quadratics, that her brother has just lied to her face.
And when he finally meets her eyes, she knows that he knows that she knows.
“Well, can’t argue with them, can I?” Alice jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “The couch is comfy enough, and there’s a couple extra blankets and pillows in the closet. Wash up first—I’m not letting a five-state hitchhiker sleep in my living room without a shower. I’ll make dinner.”
