Terrace House

I entered Terrace House, the Kims’ residence, late in the afternoon, carrying a gift and the party invitation addressed to my mother, who had passed away in the spring. Though I hadn’t seen the Kims in five years, I was no stranger to Dr. Kim’s annual autumn party; they were thrown to celebrate his patients’ victories over tumors and traumas, depression and injury. I had worked for the family while an undergraduate, caring for their son David, shuttling their daughter Nadine to and from school, and running household errands so that Alice, Dr. Kim’s wife, could spend a few hours each day in her art studio across the park from their home. It had once been my job to send out the party invitations. I, too, must have accidentally invited the dead.

This year’s guests were spread across the three offset indoor levels that made up Terrace House. When I worked here, an architecture class visited as part of a field trip that included other 1940s-era Case Study Houses. The instructor talked about the architect’s vision, the challenges of the steep terrain, and the way the long staircase on the left wall unified the terraces. She didn’t mention the metal playground slides Dr. Kim added to allow his son David to descend easily from one terrace to the next, while also forcing his son to climb the stairs with his arms and build upper-body strength. The slides were a hit with the architecture students, just as they were now with the dozen kids at the party. Children and grandchildren of Dr. Kim’s patients barreled in through the front door and went down the chutes, their form practiced and precise, like lugers trying to shave milliseconds from their start times. At the door at the bottom terrace, the kids sprang outside and took the corner. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass on the right side of the house, I could see them racing across the hillside of ivy, whose tendrils curled against the bottom panes. The kids disappeared for a few moments around the corner, then reentered and repeated their circuit. I didn’t remember the ivy on the hillside from when I’d worked here. There had been a cacti and succulent garden and, taped to the glass, a piece of paper with the dates various plants first bloomed.

I spotted Dr. Kim on the terrace below. There were gray patches at his temples, but he looked ebullient, his face a smiling moon. I watched as he pulled a few of his patients together and made introductions. He believed in the benefits of connection. The gift I’d brought was a porcelain plate Dr. Kim had given my mother years ago with his mantra inscribed along the rim. Good Company Feeds Good Health. The plate had hung in my mother’s kitchen, beneath the clock. I had planned to return it to him, to tell him about my mother’s passing and how much the doctor’s philosophy had meant to her—she had highlighted all his books. But I saw now that I’d need to wait; I didn’t want to cloud his happiness on a day set aside to honor the good health of his patients.

At the lowest terrace I saw Mrs. Kim talking to a couple. Her back was to me, one thick band of gray hair tucked behind her right ear, but she’d had that five years ago. I didn’t see David. In my time, this level had been where David and Nadine’s toys had been, plus bicycles, David’s wheelchair and bike trailer, and, in winter, drying umbrellas and coats. Those things were missing now, and no new furniture had replaced them, only a folding table set up with juice boxes, sparkling waters, and carafes of coffee.

A trio of children ran past me squealing with delight, their faces incandescent, their circuit through and around Terrace House now a pursuit of—or escape from—other children. They flew outside, then around the corner and up through the ivy-covered hillside. I stood in their wake, looking out over the long narrow park that began across the street. From here, the sea was another dozen blocks down the hill. It had been David’s favorite place to visit when I’d worked for the Kims. The city kept a beach wheelchair near the breaker, and we used it in the summers. My arms would be exhausted by day’s end from pushing the wheelchair through the surf, and my legs would burn pulling him back uphill to Terrace House in his bike trailer as we clicked into our late afternoon routine. By six, Alice Kim would return from her art studio and take a shower, then start on dinner before Mr. Kim returned from his practice. I usually left just as he came home, off to my night classes, or, exhausted, to sleep.

“You shaved off your mustache,” said a woman, just outside.

“Nadine?” Dr. Kim’s daughter wasn’t taller than I remembered, but she’d grown up, and in a baroque sort of way: frilled suede boots, purple tights, and a leather jacket with a dozen unfastened flaps that looked like studded tongues. Her hair was thickly curled and black.

She cocked a beer bottle in my direction. “Want one?”

I followed her outside and around the corner of the house. She shooed away a couple of boys who were looking through a paper bag.

“It’s BYOB around here,” she said, pulling a bottle from the sack. She used an opener on her keychain, then handed me a beer. She tucked the bag back into the thick ivy with her boot. She nodded toward the park. “I’m bored nasty. Walk with me?”

We crossed the road. “The Kims look good,” I said. Nadine was a Kim, too, by adoption, and I hoped she knew what I meant.

“The Kims always look good. The Kims look perfect.”

“How are things here?”

“Don’t know. I’m in the dorms.” She looked at the wrapped gift in my hand. “You even brought them a present.”

“Chocolates.” I didn’t want to tell her I was returning my mother’s plate. It would seem maudlin, and perhaps it was.

We continued down through the wealthy neighborhood’s idea of a park: dusty paths through a grove of olive trees, stands of lavender, no playground, no baseball diamond, no public tennis courts.

“I used to hate you,” Nadine said. “You were always hanging out with Dave and telling me what I couldn’t eat or couldn’t do, then telling Alice on me.”

“I was?”

We went down the first cascade of steps, then around the sculpture skinned in squares of colorful tile, then down the next cascade.

“Girlfriend?” Nadine asked.

“No. Boyfriend?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

When I’d last seen Nadine, she was a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old. I found her confidence now to be unsettlingly alluring. “Good summer?”

She grunted. “Got lost exploring a slot canyon. We came out at this backcountry campsite, but the people there wouldn’t drive us out because they were doing ayahuasca. They thought we were rock spirits.”

“Really?” I asked, then remembered the fabulist Nadine had been, and perhaps still was. Because of her, I had believed that the sculpture in the park was Alice’s; that Dr. Kim didn’t like the look of jeans, which had made me give them up; and that her birth parents had been murdered.

Nadine pulled up one sleeve, revealing a ragged unstitched scar. But it could have been from anything—a curling iron, or the handle of a stove pan straight out of the oven—just as much as from climbing through canyons. I half-remembered her having it when I’d worked for her parents.

At the end of the park, Nadine crossed the street to Mrs. Kim’s art studio. The tiny white bungalow’s brick chimney leaned more than I remembered and had gained a metal brace. Nadine lifted a potted succulent and ripped out a key held by thin white roots. “Let’s see what Alice has been up to.”

The studio was everything Terrace House was not: small, messy, the floor tile cracked and paint-splattered and crowded with work tables and artist’s ephemera. A dirty couch with a purple throw sat against the fireplace, a line of empty wine bottles on the mantlepiece above it. In Terrace House, the only artworks of Mrs. Kim’s were small woodblock prints of the zodiac, which hung in the kitchen. Here, though, large abstract paintings leaned against the walls and windows, each with dark, scimitar-shaped motifs. In the corner sat a large welded tangle of metal and childhood toys about six feet across. I wasn’t sure how the piece would ever fit out of her studio door. I recognized the handle of David’s wheelchair in the sculpture, and the footrests I had folded and unfolded a thousand times. It seemed as though a giant had gathered together David’s childhood and Alice’s motherhood and crushed them into a ball.

“What happened to David?” I asked, fearful of the answer.

“Nothing. Want to see where Alice sleeps?” She pulled my hand, then let go. “You don’t know, do you? They divorced a year after you left.” She made the sound of an explosion.

I hadn’t known. I also couldn’t imagine Alice Kim spending all her time in this cluttered space, even though it was where she had always gone during the hours I worked for the Kims, like a rock rolling down the steep hillside to where it can rest. It was equally impossible imagining Dr. Kim living in Terrace House, alone.

“And David?” I asked.

“He has his own place now.”

I followed her and there it was, the bedroom, with a simple white bed in the corner. On a table sat a framed photograph of David at the beach, taken when he was very young, when he could still walk. I had never seen any photos from that time.

“You know why they hired you, don’t you?” Nadine said, sitting on the unmade bed.

“To help with David.”

“Because I wouldn’t. They adopted me to watch Dave. It took me long enough to figure it out.”

“The Kims would never—”

“The Kims did.”

“C’mon,” I said.

“The Kim Show is a charade,” Nadine said, stretching out on the bed, her shirt riding up, her navel glinting from some sort of stud. “And you’re still in it.”

Even if Nadine was telling the truth about the Kims, I didn’t care for how she seemed to relish tainting her parents. “David was a handful,” I said. “They needed my help. You were a handful, too.”

“Forgive me?” Nadine said, and held her arms up to me. I saw the girl in her, wanting help getting out of the beanbag in the playroom, imitating her brother. Now, though, Nadine flapped her fingers forward, and I knew that if I touched her, she would pull me down onto the bed.

She dropped her arms and pouted. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m going back,” I said. I unwrapped the gift and stuffed the plate within the round metal assemblage in the corner, where it seemed to belong. Then I headed back uphill through the park.

Outside Terrace House, I poured my half-finished beer into the ivy and put the bottle back into the paper sack. The kids had given up their chase and were climbing higher up the hillside now, throwing clods of dirt that made low thunks against the glass. Inside, music was playing loudly as the guests danced in a conga line that wound through the bottom terrace and up the stairs to the other levels. I was relieved to spot David finally. He was sitting in Dr. Kim’s lounge chair, a pair of white crutches lying atop the footrest. David had grown tall and thin and wore his hair in a ponytail. He was watching the kids throwing their dirt clods and he was laughing.

I continued past the line of patients on the stairs and noticed, as though for the first time, the limps and scars, the sallowness and shaved heads. It must have been like this every year, even when I worked here. So many were broken, but dancing; hurt, but hoping to heal. Every life is a sad tale at the end of it, but Dr. Kim didn’t let anyone skip ahead. He was there, at the head of the conga line, snaking it around David, who gave out high fives to his father’s patients. Today everything is good, said the dance. Today we are whole. Today we are in good company.

There was a commotion at the top of the steps. A man was shouting Bible verses. He was beach-wizened and unkempt and looked to have drifted in through the open front door. Several guests were trying to quiet him. I grabbed a bottle of water and a sandwich from the spread on the dining table and put them into the man’s hands, then guided him—forced him—outside so the others could continue to trot up and down the stairs in Dr. Kim’s chutes-and ladders-home. I closed the door to Terrace House.

“I might as well go back to Arizona,” the party crasher said.

“Go then,” I said, angrier than I meant to be. “Go back to Arizona.”

I walked to my car thinking of what Nadine had called The Kim Show; and also of Nadine there in her mother’s bed, arms outstretched toward me. I thought about my own mother and how much Dr. Kim had buoyed her, even if her body didn’t have the capacity to fulfill her hopes. I wanted to explain to Nadine that she was wrong, that I wasn’t in the show any more, that I knew that things always ended badly. I drove down the winding roads, then cut across to Alice’s studio. I tried the door and found it still unlocked.

“Nadine,” I said, but found Mrs. Kim in the front room instead, sweeping the tile floor.

She looked at me, then at Nadine, who emerged from the bedroom. “One of the kids fell down the hill,” Alice said. “He’s unconscious.”

“Why are you here, then?” Nadine said, coolly, the question for all of us.

I knew Alice’s unspoken answer. She was hiding, here in her sanctuary. She had played the part of wife and mother for years, and reprised the role for this day—just as Nadine had half-assed her own obligatory part as daughter—all for the sake of The Kim Show.

This is what I was sure would happen: the unconscious boy would wake from his concussion and Dr. Kim would drive with the parents and their son to the hospital for a scan, but everything would be all right. That’s how life worked in Dr. Kim’s world. The conga line would wind through Terrace House again next year.

“Go help your father,” Alice said sternly, and Nadine walked out, obeying or not obeying—it might have been either.

I had walked into Alice’s studio once, five years ago, shortly before I quit working for the Kims. It was David who had fallen, then. He’d broken a tooth on one of the metal slides. I thought the tooth might be reattached somehow and was holding it in my hand, like a shard of porcelain. There had been a man in the studio with Alice that afternoon. I saw him for only a brief moment, the bare side of him, one ropey arm swinging back as he disappeared behind a corner toward what I knew now was Alice’s bedroom. I don’t suppose it was the first time she had been with someone while I was watching David and Nadine. We didn’t speak of it then. I’m not sure she even remembered, now. I stepped outside and she followed.

We could hear it now, an ambulance far away, coming up the hill, its siren the surest sound that the burden of optimism was no longer ours, here at the end of the show. I could see Nadine, in the park, her gait speeding up, changing to a run. I wondered whether the paramedics would arrive at the lower entrance of Terrace House or the upper, and I wondered where the boy lay, if he could be seen through the glass panes, if he was awake yet, if he had broken any bones, if his mind would be cloaked gray for a few months or riddled with headaches, and I wondered if people at the party were leaving, quickly, or staying on in support as the music stopped playing, as the last child was pulled off a slide and told, no more, not now, can’t you see, the boy’s hurt, the boy’s hurt.