“You know he will put you in a home eventually,” Sara hissed, the cruelty dripping off every syllable. “Right after the wedding is done. It will be a nice facility. Very clean. You will have your little books. But you absolutely will not have this view. You won’t have the private garden. You won’t have your son visiting you. Because I will sit him down and explain that the facility has much better medical care. And he will believe me. He always believes me.”
Then came Eun-ji’s voice. It was so small, so devastatingly fragile. “Please don’t.”
“Then do not make me do it,” Sara snapped back. “When the new doctor comes next week, you will tell him you have been feeling confused. You will say you keep forgetting things. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
I stood frozen in the hallway, the heavy silver tea tray trembling slightly in my hands. My knuckles were bone-white around the ornate handles. I took a deep, steadying breath, forced a pleasant, vacant smile onto my face, and pushed the door open. I walked in like everything was perfectly normal. Sara immediately straightened up. The blinding, camera-ready smile snapped back onto her face in a fraction of a second. But I had heard everything. And from that second on, I started watching her every single move.
By day twelve, I found the first piece of physical evidence. I was carefully helping Eun-ji change into a fresh cardigan for the evening. When I slipped the sleeve down, I saw it. On the soft, pale inside of her upper left arm was a dark purple bruise. It was distinctly shaped like three harsh, digging fingertips. The smooth, padded arms of a wheelchair do not leave fingerprints.
Eun-ji flinched and quickly pulled her arm away, hiding the mark against her side. “I am just clumsy,” she muttered, refusing to meet my eyes.
“I bathed my grandmother every single day for sixteen years,” I said quietly, keeping my voice perfectly level. “I know the exact difference between a simple bump against a doorframe and an angry grab.”
Eun-ji’s jaw clamped shut. She turned her face toward the window. “It is nothing.”
Two days later, on day fourteen, I walked into the room for my late afternoon shift. The sight made my stomach violently drop. The heavy, motorized wheelchair was turned entirely around, facing the blank, stark white wall of the room. Eun-ji was sitting in absolute, crushing silence. She was staring blankly at the paint from merely six inches away. She couldn’t turn the heavy chair back around by herself. Her thin arms simply weren’t strong enough to maneuver the dead weight.
“How long have you been sitting exactly like this?” I asked, my voice tight.
“I do not know,” she whispered into the white wall. “What time is it?”
“It is exactly four o’clock.”
“Since eleven.”
Five excruciating hours. A seventy-one-year-old paralyzed woman had been left facing a blank wall for five hours simply because someone had deliberately turned her chair around and walked out of the room. I marched forward and gripped the rubber handles tight enough to make my palms ache. I hauled the heavy chair back around to face the massive window.
The golden afternoon light immediately slammed into Eun-ji’s face. She blinked rapidly, wincing slightly, like a hostage finally being dragged out of a dark cave.
“She told me I desperately needed to rest,” Eun-ji said, her voice trembling. “She claimed the sunlight was violently bothering my eyes.”
“Was it bothering you?” I asked softly.
“No.”
I didn’t say another word. I carefully adjusted the thick wool blanket over her unmoving legs. I reached over to the bedside table, picked up her thick novel, and gently placed it into her lap. Then, I walked over to the heavy drapes and pulled them wide open, letting the spectacular, glittering view of the Han River flood the entire space. The light poured over us. Eun-ji opened the book. Her fragile hands shook violently for the entire first page. By the time she reached the second page, they were perfectly steady. By the third page, the commanding voice of the university professor was back, reading the printed words aloud, filling the room that had been deliberately suffocated with silence for five hours. I stood silently by the glass, listening to her read. My jaw was clenched so tight my teeth physically ached.
A few days later, I found Eun-ji’s wire-rimmed glasses shoved all the way to the back of a dark bureau drawer. Sara had purposefully hidden them. Eun-ji had been trapped sitting in a terrifying blur for two entire days. She was completely unable to read her beloved poetry. She couldn’t see the shimmering river view. She couldn’t be the brilliant professor. She was reduced to nothing but a helpless woman trapped in a hazy fog.
I pulled the glasses from the drawer and thoroughly cleaned the smudged lenses with the hem of my white apron. I walked over and knelt quietly beside the heavy wheelchair. Gently, holding my breath, I slid the wire frames onto Eun-ji’s face, exactly the same way I used to carefully place my grandmother’s reading glasses on her face before church.
Eun-ji blinked. Her dark eyes rapidly focused. The blurred edges of the room sharpened into reality. The towering bookshelf. The bright window. My face.
“Thank you,” Eun-ji whispered, a solitary tear escaping her right eye.
That night, I lay flat on my back in my tiny, cramped room at the absolute end of the service corridor. I stared up at the cracked plaster ceiling. I didn’t cry for my own exhaustion, or for my lonely distance from home. I cried for the brilliant, broken woman down the hall who stubbornly refused to cry for herself.