At 11:15 on Thursday night I opened my locker at the parcel warehouse in Muncie and found two things on my phone.
One was a text from my sister Monique, sent at 6:50: “Have a good shift, Kare ❤️”
The other was a hospital voicemail.
My daughter Yuna is thirteen and has lived with asthma since the age of four. The night before, her rescue inhaler had been nearly empty. I’d left $70 cash under the salt shaker for my husband, Sung, so he could get the $68 refill before his Thursday bowling league. He said, “Got it.” He’d been bowling every Thursday since April. It always ended at ten, he said.
I left for my shift at 6:30. He left at 7:15. Yuna stayed home alone.
From the parking lot I called him six times between 11:20 and 11:45. He never picked up. I reached the children’s wing at 11:50. By then they’d moved her up to pediatric ICU, sedated and masked, her chest working too fast.
A paramedic gave me her cracked phone in a plastic bag. She had called 911 herself at 10:44. Vernon, our neighbor, who is seventy-one and has bad knees, saw the lights and stayed with her until they loaded her into the ambulance.
Sung came in at 1:30. “My phone died at the lanes, Kari,” he said. He sat in the chair by the window with his phone face down on his knee. He’d gotten busy. The money was gone.
I knew her passcode. Her call log said Daddy thirty-eight times, 9:02 to 10:40. At 10:39 she’d texted “daddy i cant breathe.” At 10:41 his number had answered: “Sweetie he’s asleep. Stop calling, he’ll see you in the morning ❤️”
I read it to him three times.
He turned his phone over, and the screen lit up in his lap. He looked at it before he looked at me.
Mo ❤️
The phone in his lap said Mo ❤️ and it was ringing. Mo, with a little red heart, the way you’d save your mother or your wife.
I have one person in my life called Mo.
I was out of my chair before he could close his hand. He grabbed for it and missed, because Sung has never been fast at anything except leaving. I backed up against the window with his phone in one hand and Yuna’s in the other.
“Kari. Give it.”
“Sit down.”
“Kari, you don’t…”
I answered and put it on speaker.
“Is she okay?” my sister said. “Sung? You said you’d text me. Is she okay?”
Sung stood at the foot of our daughter’s bed with his hands out like he was trying to calm a dog.
“She’s on oxygen, Monique,” I said.
Nothing came from the phone. Then she said my name in the voice she used at nine, when she broke my good mirror and hid the pieces in her sock drawer.
“Kari. Oh God. Kari, I didn’t…”
“You didn’t what?”
“I didn’t know it was bad. I swear to God. She calls him all the time. She calls him when she can’t find the remote.”
I looked at Yuna’s text again. Four words with no capitals.
“She wrote ‘i cant breathe,'” I said. “You read it. You put a heart on it.”
Monique started crying, the loud kind, and I hung up on her in the middle of it. I’d never hung up on my sister before, not even the year she borrowed my car and brought it back with a cracked axle and a parking ticket from Indianapolis.
Sung sat back down. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“How long,” I said.
“It’s not what…”
“How long, Sung.”
He rubbed his face with both hands. He wears his wedding ring on a chain at the lanes so it won’t catch on the ball, he told me once. It was on the chain now, against his shirt.
“April,” he said.
“Every Thursday.”
“Most.”
“There’s no league.”
“There’s a league. I just don’t…” He stopped. “I fell asleep, Kari. I had a couple beers and I fell asleep on her couch. I didn’t hear the phone. She must’ve had it on the counter.”
“She silenced it,” I said. “Thirty-eight calls. You don’t sleep through thirty-eight calls unless somebody turns them off.”
His mouth opened and shut.
“And the seventy dollars?”
“We got pizza. Beer. I was going to put it back Friday, I get paid Friday…”
“She needed the inhaler Thursday.”
A nurse came in. Her badge said LEAH. She had seen the whole thing through the glass, I think, because she looked at Sung and not at me.
“Everything all right in here?”
“No,” I said. “Can I talk to somebody? A social worker. Whoever you have at night.”
Sung stood up. “Kari, come on. This is family.”
“It was,” I said.
Leah left. Sung stood there looking at our daughter, finally, the way he should have looked at her at 1:30. Yuna’s hair was stuck to her forehead. There was a red line across her cheek from the mask strap.
“I’m her father,” he said.
“Then where were you?”
He didn’t answer. Mo called back four times while we sat there, and I watched each call ring out on his screen until it stopped.
At 3:10 a woman named Tricia came up in a cardigan with a lanyard and a legal pad. She was about sixty and had the face of somebody who’d been woken up for this exact conversation a hundred times and was still mad about it.
She asked Sung to step into the hall. He looked at me like I’d save him.
I didn’t move.
When he was gone she said, “Tell me what you found.”
I handed her Yuna’s phone, opened to the thread.
She read it, set it on her knee and breathed out through her nose.
“I’m going to need a copy of that,” Tricia said.
“There’s a printer at work,” I said. “I’ll print every page of it.”
“Good. Print the call log too.”
Through the glass, Sung was on his phone in the hall. He had his back to the window and his free hand on his head. He was calling her.
The family room on four
Yuna woke up a little before six on Friday evening. The first thing she did was look around the room for her dad.
“Hi, baby,” I said.
Her voice was scraped. “Is Daddy mad?”
That was the first thing she was worried about. Not her lungs, not the ambulance. Whether she’d bothered him.
“Nobody’s mad at you,” I said. “Not one person on this earth.”
“I kept calling.”
“I know. You did right. You did everything right.”
She shut her eyes. “Somebody told me to stop.”
“I know that too.”
At seven I went home to shower. The front door was still unlocked. The salt shaker was still on the counter with nothing under it. Somebody had stepped on her empty inhaler in the hallway, probably a paramedic, and it was flattened.
I picked it up and put it in my coat pocket.
Vernon came over while I was standing in the kitchen. He walks with a cane now and he looked like he hadn’t slept either.
“She was sitting on the porch steps when I got there,” he said. “She’d gone out for air. Holding that phone in both hands.”
“Thank you, Vernon.”
“She kept saying she was sorry. Sorry to bother me.” He shook his head. “I’ve got grandkids. I’d have walked through the wall.”
“Will you come tomorrow? At two?”
“What’s at two?”
“My husband and my sister.”
He looked at me for a long time. “I’ll wear a tie,” he said.
I printed the thread at the warehouse at nine that night. Eleven pages, with the call log and both texts. My supervisor, Don, stood beside the printer and watched it come out sheet by sheet and didn’t ask one question. Then he told me to take the week, paid, and walked off before I could cry on him.
Saturday at two Tricia let us use the family room on the fourth floor. It had a fake ficus, a box of tissues and a painting of a lighthouse somebody had bolted to the wall. I sat on the end of the couch with the eleven pages in my lap. Vernon sat by the door in a brown tie.
Sung came in first, shaved, in the blue shirt I’d bought him for our fifteenth. I want it known that I noticed the shirt.
Monique came in ten minutes late with her eyes swollen and her car keys still in her hand. She stopped when she saw Vernon.
“Who’s he?”
“He’s the one who came,” I said.
She sat as far from Sung as the couch allowed.
Tricia sat in the corner with her legal pad and said, “I’m here as a witness. Go ahead.”
Monique started talking before anybody asked her anything. She talks when she’s scared. She always has.
“I need everybody to understand I didn’t know. She calls him constantly, Kari, you know she does, she calls him about homework, about the dog next door, he had it on the counter and it kept buzzing and buzzing and he was out cold and I thought, she’s thirteen, she’s being dramatic…”
“She wrote ‘i cant breathe,'” I said.
“I thought it was a figure of speech. Like when you’re bored. ‘I can’t breathe, this is so boring.’ Kids say that.”
“She has asthma.”
“I know she has asthma.”
“You were at her fourth birthday when it started. You held her in the ER while I filled out forms.”
Monique stopped.
“So you knew,” I said.
She looked at Sung for help. Sung looked at the lighthouse.
“I put my phone on silent for her,” Monique said, much quieter. “His. I silenced her number. Just for tonight, I thought. So he could sleep.”
“And then you wrote back.”
“So she’d stop worrying.”
“So she’d stop calling,” I said.
I picked up the first page and read it aloud, the way I’d read it to Sung in the ICU. All of it, the heart too. I said “red heart” out loud.
Monique covered her face.
“You sign everything with that heart,” I said. “You put it on my texts. You put it on Thursday at 6:50. ‘Have a good shift, Kare.’ Heart. You sent me that, and then you went home and waited for my husband.”
Sung said, “Kari, that’s enough.”
That was when Vernon stood up. It takes him a while with the knees. Everybody waited.
“I’ll tell you what enough is,” Vernon said. “Enough is a little girl sitting on a cold step trying to talk to a 911 operator between breaths. Enough is her asking me if her dad was coming. I said yes. I said, ‘Sure, honey, he’s on his way.’ I lied to that child for you.”
Sung’s face did something. He put his hand over his mouth.
“I’m not the bad guy,” he said through his fingers. “I fell asleep. That’s all I did. I fell asleep.”
“On my sister’s couch,” I said. “With the money for her medicine in your wallet.”
“I’ll pay it back.”
“You spent it on pizza.”
“Seventy dollars, Kari, Jesus…”
“Sixty-eight,” I said. “The refill is sixty-eight. You got two dollars of change, and I know you kept it.”
Tricia wrote something down.
Sung stood up and his chair hit the wall.
“What do you want? You want me to say it? Fine. I was there every Thursday. I lied to you. I’m a piece of shit. But I didn’t hurt her. Mo answered the phone. Not me.”
Monique stood up too, and they were facing each other over the coffee table with its box of tissues.
“You told me she always cries wolf,” Monique said. “You said that. You said, ‘Ignore it, she’ll call Kari’s work line if it’s real.’ You said that the first month.”
“I never…”
“You said it in my kitchen, Sung.”
He turned to me. “She’s lying.”
“She doesn’t have to be,” I said. “You were asleep. Your phone was dead. And here we are.”
He didn’t have an answer to that.
Tricia closed her legal pad.
“Mr. Han,” she said, “I’ve filed a neglect report with the county. It went in Friday morning. A caseworker will be in touch Monday about a safety plan. Until that’s done, I’d recommend you not be alone with your daughter.”
“I’m her father.”
“Then act like it on Monday,” Tricia said.
Sung looked at me. For sixteen years I’d been the one who smoothed things over. I was the one who called his mother on her birthday for him, and the one who found his keys.
“Kari.”
“Your bag’s on the porch,” I said. “Vernon’s watching it.”
“You packed my stuff?”
“Not all of it. The bowling ball is at the curb.”
Monique made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. I turned to her.
“Give me your key to my house.”
“Kari, please. I’m your sister.”
“Key.”
She dug it off her ring with shaking fingers. It was on a little plastic charm shaped like a strawberry that Yuna had given her two Christmases ago. She held it out and I took it, strawberry and all.
“Don’t call me,” I said. “Don’t call Mom. She knows. I called her this morning, and she hung up on you, right? Don’t call Yuna. Not on her birthday. Not ever.”
“She’s my niece.”
“She asked you for air,” I said.
Monique walked out. She left her coffee and forgot her purse. Vernon carried it to the elevator for her, slowly, without a word, and set it in her hands as the doors closed.
Sung was the last one in the room besides Tricia and me.
“Can I see her?” he said.
“Ask the caseworker Monday.”
He stood in the doorway in the shirt I’d bought him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know,” I said, and opened my folder to page one again.
November 11
Yuna came home six days later, on Wednesday, November 11, with a nebulizer, a new rescue inhaler, a backup inhaler and a printed care plan with her name at the top in bold.
In between there was the arithmetic.
The county caseworker came Monday. Sung got supervised visits, two hours on Sunday afternoons, in the hospital family room first and a library meeting room after. He signed the papers. His lawyer called mine on Friday. Sung moved into a one-bedroom over a vape shop on McGalliard. He couldn’t move in with Monique. Her landlord had heard everything through the wall on Saturday night, when Sung went over there and they screamed at each other for an hour. He gave her thirty days.
My mother sent Monique’s birthday card back unopened.
Our bowling-league friends found out there’d been no league for Sung since April. One of them, Rakesh, drove Sung’s ball from my curb to his apartment and told me later Sung had cried in the parking lot over it. I didn’t ask for more.
On Monday Sung slid an envelope under my door. It held a fold of bills and a note that said for her medicine. I counted it. There were seventy-two. Even then he couldn’t get the number right.
I bought the inhaler myself on Tuesday. Then the backup. Then a third one for her backpack. The pharmacist, a tall man named Evan, rang it up and said, “Stocking up?”
“Never again low,” I said.
He handed me the bag and said, “Good.”
On Wednesday Vernon was on his porch when we pulled in. He’d put up a hand-lettered sign on cardboard that said WELCOME HOME YUNA. The Y was bigger than the rest because he’d started too large. He stood up when he saw her, cane and all.
Yuna got out of the car and walked straight across the yard to him, the same yard he’d crossed in the dark on Thursday. She hugged him around the middle.
“You came,” she said.
“Sure I came,” Vernon said. “You called.”
I had to go look at the mailbox for a while.
Inside, she went to the kitchen first. The salt shaker was where it always was. Under it I’d put the backup inhaler, the new one, still in its box.
She picked it up.
“Why’s it under the salt?”
“So everybody knows where it is.”
“Who’s everybody?” she said, and then she understood, and she put it back exactly where I had it.
That night I didn’t go in. Don had given me the week, and I’d decided to take two. We ate grilled cheese on the couch and she corrected my spelling on a grocery list while the dog next door barked.
Around nine she went up to her room, and I sat on the stairs for a while. At 9:02 my phone rang.
It was Yuna, calling from upstairs.
I answered on the first ring.
“I’m right here,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I was just checking it works.”
“It works, baby. Every time.”
She hung up. She called again at 9:05 to say goodnight. I picked up on the first ring that time too.
If you know a kid who’s ever had to call twice, send this to somebody who’d pick up on the first ring.
Family tensions can surface in the most painful ways – see how they unfold in a wedding-day clash over ruined chairs and a fiancé’s broken promise to adopt. For another story about standing up for a child, read what happened when a grandfather objected to his grandson’s nail polish.
