Mrs. Kim
Chapter 6: Mrs. Kim
Emma Watts had been taken from a foster home in Roanoke, Virginia, nine months before the rally.
Her foster mother was a woman named Soo-Jin Kim — Mrs. Kim to everyone who knew her, which was most of Roanoke's social services community. She was sixty-one, Korean-American, five foot one, and had been running a licensed foster home for twenty-two years with the fierce, practical devotion of a woman who had decided, after raising two biological children and watching them leave, that she was not done mothering.
She'd fostered thirty-seven children in those twenty-two years. Some stayed weeks. Some stayed years. Emma had been with her for fourteen months — long enough to have a bedroom with her name on the door, long enough to have a Saturday pancake routine, long enough that Mrs. Kim had started the adoption paperwork because Emma had looked at her one evening over dinner and said, "Can I stay forever?" and Mrs. Kim had said, "Yes," because that was the only honest answer.
Emma had been taken on a Tuesday night in January. Mrs. Kim had put her to bed at 8:30 — the usual routine, the usual story, the usual goodnight. At 6 AM Wednesday, the bedroom was empty. The window was open. The screen had been removed from the outside.
Mrs. Kim had called the police at 6:03. She'd called social services at 6:05. She'd called every parent, every neighbor, every person she could think of who might have seen something, heard something, known something. She'd driven through Roanoke for three days in her Honda Civic, showing Emma's photograph to strangers, knocking on doors, doing the desperate, irrational, completely understandable work of a mother searching for a child.
The police investigated. Social services investigated. Virginia State Police investigated. Emma's case was entered into the NCMEC database. Her photograph was distributed. The systems did what systems do — they processed, they documented, they moved information from one desk to another at the particular pace of institutions that handle too many cases with too few people.
Nine months later, a seven-year-old girl at a motorcycle rally in Connecticut handed a note to a biker, and everything that the systems had failed to do was done in forty-five seconds by a man with a rag and a Harley.
Mrs. Kim drove from Roanoke on Wednesday morning, the day after Torres confirmed Emma's identity.
She drove the way she did everything — directly, without stops, with a packed lunch in the passenger seat because Mrs. Kim did not believe in spending money on highway food when perfectly good rice and kimchi existed. She arrived at the Fairfield County child services office at 2:47 PM, eleven hours and six hundred miles from the moment she'd gotten in the car.
Bull was in the lobby. He'd been there every morning since the rally, because Emma — who was in a temporary foster placement with round-the-clock supervision — had asked the caseworker, every morning, "Is the big man here today?" and the caseworker, after three days of this, had called Bull and said, in the exhausted voice of a woman who processed fifty cases a month, "Mr. Hendricks, could you please just come sit in the lobby?"
He sat. He brought the Hartford Courant. He read it. He didn't absorb a word of it, but he read it, because sitting in a government lobby without doing something made him feel like a patient waiting for a diagnosis, and he had enough of that feeling in other parts of his life.
Mrs. Kim came through the front door at 2:47 and stopped when she saw him.
She was small. Not in the way that words like petite or delicate implied — small the way a stone is small, compact and dense and not going anywhere. She wore a dark jacket and flat shoes and she carried a bag that probably contained more food than a woman alone needed for a road trip, because Mrs. Kim did not travel without provisions.
She looked at Bull. She looked at him the way everyone looked at him — the assessment, the categorization — but her assessment was different from most people's. She was not evaluating his threat level. She was evaluating his heart.
"You're the one from the rally," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You picked up the note."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I've been trying to find her for nine months. I called every agency in four states. I drove to three cities. I put her picture on every telephone pole in Roanoke." She set down her bag. "And you picked up a piece of paper."
"That's — yes. That's what happened."
Mrs. Kim stepped forward. She was a foot shorter than Bull and approximately one-third his weight. She put her arms around him and hugged him, standing in the lobby of a government building, with the particular force of a woman who has been carrying a weight for nine months and has just been handed a receipt.
"Thank you," she said into his chest.
Bull stood very still. He was not a man who was hugged frequently. He put one hand — carefully, the way you touch something you're afraid of breaking — on Mrs. Kim's shoulder.
"She's a good kid," he said. "She's brave."
"She's the bravest person I know." Mrs. Kim pulled back. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Where is she?"
"Through those doors. The caseworker will take you."
Mrs. Kim picked up her bag. She walked to the inner door. She stopped.
"Mr. Hendricks."
"Ma'am."
"If you're ever in Roanoke, you come to the house. Saturday mornings. I make pancakes." She looked at him with the directness that was, he was learning, her fundamental operating mode. "Emma would like that."
"I'd like that too."
She went through the doors. Bull sat back down. He picked up the newspaper.
May you like
Three minutes later, he heard it through the walls — the particular, piercing scream of a child who has just seen the person they love most in the world and whose body has decided, before their mind can catch up, to express nine months of absence in a single sound.
Bull set down the paper. He pressed his hand over his eyes. He sat in the government lobby and let the sound of reunion wash through him and waited for the machinery in his chest to do what it needed to do.
