by Mi-ae Seo
How horrific it must have been. Upon learning why the child sat there expressionless, as if she didn’t belong to this world, Seonkyeong felt overcome with sympathy.
“I know this is very sudden and I feel terrible, but could she . . . stay with us?” Jaeseong asked.
“What are you saying? Of course she’s staying!” Seonkyeong said.
Jaeseong’s eyes widened in surprise, and he looked at her. She saw his lips tremble. She could see just how much he had hesitated before bringing up the question. He seemed to find it hard to believe how easily she’d consented.
“You . . . you really mean that?” he asked, sounding baffled.
“You’re her father. Of course she’s staying with us,” Seonkyeong repeated.
“Honey, thank you . . . and I’m sorry.”
He was moved to tears. She saw his shoulders relax, on a sigh of relief. She quietly went to him and took him in her arms.
“Was it so hard to tell me?” she asked.
Seonkyeong had actually thought that something like this might happen, after he’d told her before they got married that he’d been divorced and had a child. He said he had not seen her since the divorce because his ex-wife was so adamant about it, but Seonkyeong didn’t think that the tie between him and the child was severed. A parent and a child are bound to meet someday, somehow.
It was perhaps then that she had begun to prepare herself for the inevitable.
“I . . . didn’t think you’d consent so easily,” Jaeseong said in a congested voice. Seonkyeong patted him on the back without saying anything.
This isn’t easy for me. But there’s no other way. And I’d seen it coming.
Many thoughts reared their heads in her mind, but with effort, Seonkyeong suppressed them.
She couldn’t say that they should send the child somewhere else when she had nowhere to go, especially when she had a father. At least, that wasn’t the way Seonkyeong had been brought up. She had already pictured the scenario in her mind and had come to a conclusion about it. If it was something she was to take on, it was better to accept it quickly and adjust to it. It wouldn’t be easy living with a child, but they would get used to it, she thought. That’s what a family is.
Once she made up her mind about it, Seonkyeong thought of all the things that would need to be done.
“The room on the second floor would be nice, don’t you think? She’ll like it, with the sun streaming in. We can move the stuff in there to storage, and we can put a bed and a desk in there. Oh, and we need to hang new curtains, too,” Seonkyeong said, thinking aloud.
There were more than just one or two things the child would need.
What was she going to wear right away? And was the empty room clean? Would the walls have to be redone? Seonkyeong felt overwhelmed, thinking about what should be done first. She stood with her thoughts in a flurry, when Jaeseong took her hand.
“You should go say hi to her.”
Only then did Seonkyeong remember the child sitting alone on the living room sofa.
If they made her wait too long, she might misunderstand and feel hurt. Seonkyeong quickly nodded and followed him out to the living room.
The child was clutching the filthy stuffed bear to her chest, and still sitting on the sofa like a picture.
“Say hello to the lady, Hayeong. The three of us are going to be living together from now on,” Jaeseong said, going up to her and embracing her shoulder. The child, who had been looking at her father, slowly turned her face toward Seonkyeong. Then she took a good look at her, unlike before. Her eyes were full of fear and anxiety.
Seonkyeong bent down and looked into her eyes.
“Your name is Hayeong, right? What a pretty name. My name is Yi Seonkyeong. This is your home from now on,” she said warmly.
Hayeong, who had been staring at her, looked up at her father and said, “Dad . . . I’m sleepy.”
“Oh, you are? I’ll get your bed ready,” he said, but then he looked helplessly at Seonkyeong.
“Let her sleep in our room tonight,” Seonkyeong said without hesitation. There really was nowhere else for the child to sleep. She must have had a hard day, so they couldn’t make her sleep in a room that hadn’t been tidied up yet, or on the sofa.
Seonkyeong rushed to the room and drew back the blanket on the bed. The child, who came into the room holding her father’s hand, crawled under the blanket without a word. She looked so fragile that it seemed she would break any minute.
“Will you hand me your teddy bear?”
Seonkyeong reached out to take the teddy bear from the child’s arms. But Hayeong hugged the bear’s neck tighter, and glared at Seonkyeong with her lips clamped shut, as if to say that she wouldn’t let her take it.
“Let her keep it. She always carries it with her.”
The word “but” came right up to her throat, but she took a deep breath and swallowed it. She was worried that the blanket would get dirty, but it could be laundered. She didn’t want to quarrel with the child over something petty. The child was exhausted as it was, and the most important thing now was to let her get some good rest.
“Sure, keep it if you want,” Seonkyeong said reassuringly, and tucked the child in and beamed.
“Dad, stay with me till I fall asleep,” Hayeong pleaded.
Jaeseong looked into Seonkyeong’s eyes for a moment, then nodded at Hayeong and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be at your side.”
He sat on the bed and patted Hayeong on the head. Feeling relieved at last, the child closed her eyes. Seonkyeong left the two alone in the room, worried that she might disturb the child, and went out to the living room.
WHILE SEONKYEONG WAS SITTING at the table writing down the things Hayeong would need as well as the things that had to be purchased right away, and thinking about how she should decorate the room, Jaeseong came out of the room and carefully shut the door. The child must have fallen asleep.
“Is she sleeping already?” she asked.
“Yeah, she fell asleep quickly.”
“If you went to take her early in the morning, why didn’t you come right home?”
“I didn’t know what to do, so I took her to the hospital. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Were you planning on going back out with her, then?”
“I was going to take her to a hotel. I needed your consent.”
He looked cheerful, with a big burden off his mind. Seonkyeong knew that he was a simple man, but felt a little peeved that he looked so carefree already.
“What would you have done if I’d said no?”
“I would’ve worried about it then. But I thought you would consent.”
Seonkyeong gave him a little sidelong glare. He gently placed his hand over hers on the table.
“I knew you’d understand how Hayeong felt better than anyone.”
Seonkyeong nodded in spite of herself. She, too, had lost her mother at a young age.
“Let’s not wake her. She’ll get up on her own or when she feels hungry. She must be exhausted,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s best to sleep when you’re really tired and worn out.”
After losing each of her parents and after their funerals, Seonkyeong had spent her days sleeping as if dead. It was better to forget everything in the oblivion of sleep than to wake up and feel the painful reality.
When she lost her mother at the age of fifteen, it was her father who woke her up. He did so after making curry, which her mother had often made. She didn’t feel like eating anything. She hated her father for waking her up to eat when her mother had passed away. She wanted to go on sleeping, but in the end, she was led by her father’s hand to sit down at the table.
The smell of curry stimulated her nose, but she did not want to eat. She took a spoonful at her father’s urging and swallowed it, and suddenly she felt unbearably hungry. She polished off the plate in an instant. Without a word, her father filled her plate again.
Two years ago when her father p
assed away, Seonkyeong had sat huddled in bed, thinking about that day. She fell asleep and woke up again and again, imagining that her father would be waiting with curry on the table when she opened her eyes. But no one called to her.
She missed the smell of the curry her father had made for her. There was no one now who would lead her by the hand to the table and give her the strength to go on again. It dawned on her at last that she was alone. She wanted to close her eyes and go where her mother and father were.
It was Jaeseong, who was her husband now, who got Seonkyeong back on her feet.
She met him in front of the operating room at the hospital. She had rushed to the hospital upon hearing that her father had collapsed due to a cerebral hemorrhage; when she got there, he was already unconscious. The doctor, who had finished taking the CT scans, diagnosed it as a ruptured aneurysm, and recommended an angiography along with an operation. The medical team said it was urgent and handed her a surgery consent form, so she signed it in a hurry and waited six hours in front of the operating room.
He’ll be all right after the operation, she thought. No, it would be okay even if he wasn’t all right. If he just stayed alive, Seonkyeong decided, she would be at his side at all times, and never leave him alone. She prayed, calling out to a god she had never called out to before, but the operation, conducted too late, was of no use.
Whatever had gone wrong, her father passed away during the operation, and the surgeon offered her his condolences without meeting her eyes.
As she sat dazed in a chair in front of the operating room, someone handed her a bottle of water.
That someone was Jaeseong.
She drank the cold water, and finally managed to come to herself. Jaeseong, who had just finished an operation and was coming out of another room as her father was being operated on, saw Seonkyeong and could not just pass her by.
He took care of all the funeral arrangements for Seonkyeong, who couldn’t pull herself together. He even came and helped her in the morgue in the basement of the hospital.
If only her father had been taken to the hospital earlier, if only she had paid more attention when he would occasionally say that he had a splitting headache. . . . No, if only we had lived together. . . . As Seonkyeong reproached herself endlessly, Jaeseong offered genuine comfort. Seonkyeong, deep in grief, didn’t even realize that he was at her side during the funeral.
Then he called her on the phone out of the blue. He said he was worried about her, and Seonkyeong asked him to take her out to eat.
They went to a curry restaurant.
When the curry was served, Seonkyeong picked up her spoon, then started crying. He was flustered. He handed her tissues as she wept bitterly.
She finally calmed down and told him about her father’s curry. And as she ate curry with him, she remembered that he had always been there at her side during the past several days of the funeral process. Working at the hospital, he must have seen people like Seonkyeong, families of patients, countless times. There was no reason for him to care for someone he didn’t even know.
Seonkyeong asked him why he had helped her so. He smiled, and said that he didn’t know. When she saw that smile, she felt as if he were someone her father had sent, out of sympathy for his daughter who was left alone.
Taking Jaeseong’s hand, Seonkyeong stepped back into the world, and married him within a year.
As she looked at his face now, she remembered that time. She decided that when Hayeong woke up, she would make her some curry.
“I’m so sorry, but I have to go back to the hospital.”
“Oh, then you must go. I’ll see you later.”
“I’ll be back soon.”
He put his arm around her shoulder.
“Thank you,” he said, and rushed out of the house.
Seonkyeong, sitting alone in the kitchen and looking around the living room, feeling dazed, realized then she hadn’t even changed her clothes yet. Her meeting with Yi Byeongdo seemed like a dream. She felt heavy and sluggish all of a sudden, and thought she would take a warm bath and doze for a bit while the child slept.
Carefully, Seonkyeong opened the bedroom door and went inside.
The child was asleep, clutching the stuffed bear tightly in her hands as if afraid she would lose it.
Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead. Seonkyeong hastily opened the blanket chest and changed the blanket to a single-layer quilt. The child tossed and turned, then fell back into deep sleep. Seonkyeong took some clothes out of the closet and left the room.
11.
SEONKYEONG BRUSHED HER TEETH WHILE THE TUB FILLED.
Staring into the mirror without thinking about it, she thought of Yi Byeongdo. She was having difficulty shaking off the words he’d said, and the way he’d looked at her. The song he’d sung kept going around in her head.
She quickly finished brushing her teeth, and sat down in the half-filled tub. The hot water felt nice against her body.
Seonkyeong had thought that meeting Yi Byeongdo would answer her first question. But he seemed to have no intention of giving her an answer. On the contrary, he seemed to enjoy keeping her in suspense. Only when the first question was answered could the next question be resolved as well.
How does he know me? Why does he want to meet me? And what is it about me that draws his attention? Seonkyeong wondered, thinking back to the moment when he entered the visitors’ room—the way he’d walked in, the way he’d looked at her, the affected smile and those cold eyes, and the song he’d sung slowly in a low voice.
Seonkyeong could see why his victims had taken to him easily.
The subtle changes in his expression appealed to the maternal instinct. One minute, Yi Byeongdo would look intensely into your eyes; the next, he would look away, revealing his vulnerability. He feigned composure, but he was anxious about the way people responded to him. Seonkyeong felt that he was like a child.
He was quite different from what she’d imagined, after reading materials on him for the past several days. If not for his prison garb, he would look like an ordinary man in his thirties, who was somewhat fragile and sensitive. It was when she’d asked him about the meaning of the song, and when he was with other people, that she noticed something unusual about him.
When the prison guard was away, Yi Byeongdo focused solely on Seonkyeong. He probably displayed extraordinary powers of concentration when it came to things he wanted to accomplish. She recalled how the investigators had said that he’d focused entirely on himself during the reenactment, oblivious to his surroundings. When it came to things that did not concern himself or what he wanted to accomplish, however, he was astonishingly indifferent and selfish.
When the guard approached him, he began to show off, to conceal his vulnerability, in a power struggle to take control of the situation. The guard seemed used to this attitude.
The hot water, now reaching above Seonkyeong’s shoulders, eased the tension in her body and lulled her eyelids shut. Feeling her mind grow dim, she lowered herself deeper into the tub.
With her body relaxing in hot water, Seonkyeong thought about what Yi Byeongdo had said. She huddled up, pulling her knees to her chest. Although she couldn’t remember, she imagined that if her physical senses remembered the time when she was still in her mother’s womb, she must have felt as warm and comfortable as she did now. One by one, she recalled the memories of the days when she’d fallen asleep in her mother’s warm embrace. She felt a surge of longing in her heart. She hadn’t thought about her mother for some time.
She must have fallen asleep; her shoulders felt cold all of a sudden. She could feel the tub against her back and neck.
Someone had opened the bathroom door and was looking in. She could feel it, even with her eyes closed. She wanted to open her eyes and see who it was, but her eyelids were heavy. She could not open her eyes.
The water was cold—a long time must have passed. The water, which had warmed up her body, was now taking heat away from her.
She was trembling all over. The person who had been standing by the open door entered slowly. She heard the footsteps, approaching nearer and nearer. She had to open her eyes, but couldn’t. She tried to move her hands and grab the edge of the tub, but could not move at all. Her feet felt numb as well.
The person, who was now by the tub, was looking down at Seonkyeong.
The person’s face was so close to her own that she could feel breath on her forehead. Then the face grew distant. And then the hands came. The hands pressed down on her head. Her head sank down into the tub. The water, which had come up to her shoulders, was now up to her neck. She reached out a hand in an effort to get up. No matter how she struggled, though, there was nothing to grab onto. Her body kept slipping. The hands that had pushed her head down were gone, but she couldn’t get to her feet. She felt frightened. What if she ended up drowning?
Suddenly, the tub felt as big as an indoor swimming pool. No matter how she flailed her arms and legs, nothing came into contact. Her body kept sinking under the water. The water now came up to her chin. Her mouth became submerged, and water came in through her nostrils. She burst into a fit of coughing. She couldn’t hold out any longer, and opened her eyes in desperation.
There were corpses floating all around her—corpses of women with long, loose hair. The women, their faces pale, were all reaching out their arms toward her. She couldn’t hear them, but she felt their cries for help. She screamed silently, and writhed to escape their hands. Frantically flailing her arms and legs, she barely managed to free herself of them. Finding her bearings with difficulty, she headed for the surface, when the women clutched her ankles. Cold, slippery hands pulled her down.
She screamed and struggled; then she came to herself and saw that she was lying in the tub.
Her legs had gone numb, it seemed, as she dozed. Her cold body was covered in goose bumps. Her chin trembled. Her entire body was shaking, because of either the women in the dream, or the chill in her body.
Quickly, she got to her feet, pulled the bathtub plug, and turned on the shower. The water in the tub drained swiftly and hot water rained on her. She stood under the pouring water for a while so that her cold body would warm up again.