If You Leave Me

by Crystal Hana Kim

  “It’s cold out, Jisoo. She’ll only get sick.”

  “Don’t fight,” Solee yelled, louder than us both. I swung her onto my back. I would handle the hurt later.

  We walked to the main road, where the evening was alive with hunched vendors and idling neighbors. I’d remembered Solee’s jacket and hat but not her gloves. Still on my back, she stuck her hands underneath my shirt collar and collected my heat. I told her the stories I’d learned at the orphanage, imitating the characters Yuri acted out so well, and clung to the sound of my daughter’s laughter. When the pain in my arm flared, I let her down, and we walked aimlessly. I knew she was cold, but she didn’t complain.

  I watched her as she pulled her jacket sleeves over her fingers and packed snowballs. She looked nothing like her mother. Haemi, that sixteen-year-old girl I’d chosen in Busan. I had wanted to confirm that life’s rituals continued before leaving to fight, to find comfort in this during the war. But with each passing day, I realized the truth. Haemi didn’t fit the life I’d envisioned.

  “Mommy says your arm hurts and it makes you grumpy.” Solee cocked her capped head, the words so easy in her mouth.

  I swept her bangs to the side. “What else does she say?”

  “A president speaks from the moon.” She dusted snow off her sleeves.

  “Which president?”

  She shook her head, but I understood. Eisenhower. Haemi focused on the good of other countries over our own. “We’re going to make Korean radios. We’ll catch up.”

  “I sing to the radio,” Solee said. “Mommy listens to the bad man.”

  I sighed. Rhee had become an oppressor in his third term, but we would force him out soon. We would move to Seoul and live there as our country rebuilt itself. I knew it. Korea would recover quicker than any American thought possible.

  At one of the market stands, I bought a roasted sweet potato wrapped in foil. I broke it into pieces and fed Solee. “You’d want to move to Seoul, wouldn’t you?”

  She licked her fingers. “Seoul?”

  “It’s where I grew up,” I said. “We can buy you real ice skates. We could buy a Korean radio as soon as they’re for sale.”

  “I want to go there.” She pointed to the elementary school at the end of the road. After the war, they painted it bright colors—blue walls, a red roof. A poor attempt at cheeriness.

  We walked to it and Solee peered into one of the snowy windows. “Mommy says I start in one year. I know my letters and numbers.”

  She was only four and already so smart. Jieun would grow to be smart, too. But a son would be smarter and have more chances in our world. I imagined us, a man and his wife, two girls and a boy. Maybe two boys. One raised to be a scholar, and the other a doctor. A hanok in Seoul near the Han River. The girls with Haemi’s delicate face and someone else’s temperament. They would go to college and meet the right husbands, men who would be their brothers’ peers.

  Snow collected between Solee’s reddened fingers as she clutched the windowsill. She had my square jaw, my slight eyes. She looked up at me. “Can we go home now, Daddy?”

  Haemi woke when I entered our room. Her curly hair, released from its bun, stuck to her face as she blinked awake. Seeing her with that dim sleep in her eyes, I wanted her to forgive me. I crouched beside her and stroked her head. “Solee wanted to stay with Hyunki,” I said. “He’s still studying. She’s asleep in his room.”

  “Jieun would only go with Mother.” Haemi rubbed her face. She wore the yellow sweater I’d bought her in Daegu.

  “We’ll get a decent night’s sleep then,” I said.

  “Why is age two so much harder for her? I try to remember what Solee was like then, and I can’t.” She closed her eyes. “I’m not as good with Jieun.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re doing fine.” I slid in beside her, and she shifted away. Her eyes were closed and I couldn’t tell if she’d meant to flinch. “I was serious about Seoul,” I said.

  She turned to the wall. “Let me sleep.”

  “Haemi?” I studied the angle of her shoulders without touching her. It was hard. Unless I was drunk, I had become too aware of her growing indifference. I twisted a curl of her hair into a tight circle. “Solee and Hyunki. Eventually Jieun. They’ll all have a better education in Seoul. They have universities for women there. If we have the means, why should we stay here?”

  “You’d let them go to college?”

  “I want our children to do better than us. Don’t you?”

  I slid my hands under her clothes, up her back, and touched each ridge of her spine. She was always cold during the day—she wore layers and socks, and sometimes even a coat indoors—but her skin flamed in the night. Come morning, her sweater lay inside out by her head. Sometimes even her shirt. She’d blush if I woke before her, if I saw her that way.

  Her shoulders loosened when I pressed into the muscles of her back. I skimmed up to her neck, my palms warmed with her heat. Haemi turned to me, her face relaxing into a smile. I touched her, her ribs, the stretched stomach and small breasts with their sweet, nutty milk. She laughed a little at how cold my hands were. Haemi was a soft creature. I forgot it too often.

  She raised her arms for me. I pulled off the sweater and shirt, kissed her neck down to the long, flat bone between her breasts. I listened to her soft panting as I raised her skirt. With my hands on her hips, I told her the truth. “I miss my home. I miss seeing the city where my family raised me.”

  “I know.” She threaded her fingers through my hair, trailed her nails down the tendons in my neck. She unbuttoned my shirt and touched my bad arm. “I was mean about this.” She held me by my shoulder joint. Underneath the skin, the cup and ball-shaped bone, the withered muscles. She felt it all. “If you promise about the girls, then we can go. Next year.”

  “I promise.” I pulled her closer. It surprised me every time, how small she was. How easily I could carry her, and yet how easily she held me in her sway.

  She kissed me. “One more thing. The way I felt after Jieun’s birth—I don’t want that ever again.”

  “It’s not always hard. Solee only took a few hours, remember?”

  “No. After. It still hasn’t gone away, even if you don’t believe me. I’m tired, my joints ache. I’m—” She shook her head, a laugh limped out. “I feel like something’s breaching inside me, like I’ve left something undone all the time. I don’t like it, Jisoo.”

  She was right. I didn’t believe her. She touched me only when she wanted comfort, when she wanted her way. She placed her moony fingernails on my face. I pulled away. “You don’t want more children? A son?”

  “I don’t want to feel the way I did, that I do still.”

  A sound like a laugh escaped me. “You know what I’ll say.”

  “Then I won’t go to Seoul.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I’m doing it now.”

  She made me want to hit her. I crushed a pillow in my hand instead. I threw the chamber pot against the wall.

  “You’ll wake the girls,” she said.

  I pulled the blanket off the soft, bare body she used as a weapon. My fickle wife. “You can’t do whatever you want. We don’t live in a world of your making.”

  “Oh, but we live in your world?”

  “You don’t get to choose how many children we have.”

  “That’s all I have to choose.” She reset the chamber pot. The piss had spilled and she sopped it up with the shirt I’d taken off her moments before. In the darkness, she seemed smaller than she had in years. “Leave me alone, Jisoo.”

  I crouched beside her. “You’ll feel different. Once you’re pregnant again.” I could hear the appeal in my voice. I couldn’t help it. I tried to touch her stomach. “The way you were when Solee and Jieun started kicking. You were so happy.”

  Haemi lay back down, the piss-stained shirt still in her hand. “I don’t feel twenty-three. Do you? Like you’re twenty-five?”

  “What ar
e you talking about?”

  “I feel like an old, old lady with an old, old husband.”

  I left so I wouldn’t yell. I heard her call after me, “Where are you going now?” But she didn’t mean it. She didn’t care.

  Hours later, I walked up the muddied, slushy path to the orphanage. Leaning against its wooden, slatted walls, I knocked. Yuri opened the door with just as much anger as the wife I’d left earlier in the night. In a thick gray robe, American style, with a fuzzy belt looped around her waist, she glared. She shouldered a kerosene lamp against the wind. “What are you doing here this late?”

  “I was angry.” I propped myself up with my good arm, bowed until the ground seemed too close. “Now I’m drunk.”

  She looked past me at the night’s shadows. “You can’t come in here.”

  “It’s dark. Who would see me?”

  She stood in my way. Behind her, the playroom and kitchen were silent, empty. “You’ll wake the children. Grandmother Lee’s room is right above us.”

  “Let me in for a little while.” I held on to my shoulder and remembered the chamber pot, Haemi’s threats. “My wife’s driving me crazy.”

  Yuri lowered the lamp. I searched for a sign of jealousy, but I couldn’t see her face. She touched my shoulder, probing with her sharp, knowing fingers. I tried not to show any emotion. But the alcohol had weakened me. I groaned.

  “You would be hard to live with, too,” she said. “You think of that? Acting like you’re able when you’re not. I’ll get a warm compress and then you’re leaving.”

  In the kitchen, she undressed me in the swift, efficient way she had years before. The uneven muscles of my arms were now visible, no longer covered by clothes. I wondered what she thought of me now. What she’d thought of me then. She slathered a dense paste on my shoulder. The kerosene lamp’s light spilled across the table beside us, revealing long strips of cloth, herbs, a mortar and pestle.

  “Nothing for the aching? Some pills or an injection?”

  “This is all I have.” She wrapped a bandage over the salve, and I remembered when her hair was short. The red pin. The pain that had dulled but never went away. She acted indifferent, but she was a compassionate woman. I’d always seen that in her. How she winced with each patient’s suffering. She turned to the table and formed a mound with the remaining paste. Her robe was too large, trailing the ground and hiding her body.

  “Hey, Yuri?”

  “I know it hurts, and that it’s been hard to get used to, but you can’t act like your arm is fine,” she said.

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  She didn’t look at me. She wrapped the paste in cloth. “Don’t overexert the muscle. Your nerves will deteriorate.”

  “They already have.” I grabbed her hand. “Yuri, I don’t want to go home.”

  “You don’t mean that. Put this on every night.” She placed the bundle by my side and handed me my shirt. She didn’t help me when I struggled to put it on. She retrieved my coat instead. “Your wife’s waiting.”

  She wouldn’t even give me a cup of tea. She lent me a scarf and kicked me out. “Come tomorrow. I need to tell you something when you’re sober,” she said.

  I leaned into her at the doorway. She had a good, wholesome face with a small, round nose that rumpled when she laughed at the kids. “I don’t know where I put the red pin. The one you gave me. Do you remember?” I asked.

  “Go home, Jisoo.”

  “It’s all right.” I touched her cheek. She was wearing new earrings. Dark blue buttons rimmed in silver. “I’m here with you.”

  She laid her hand against my elbow. Then gently, she pushed. “Good night.”

  My footprints disappeared behind me. In the falling snow, I felt small, invisible. Even my grunts were eaten up by the winter’s thickness. I walked in the middle of the road and didn’t care who saw. I’d done nothing wrong, not with Yuri, at least. I wondered if she and Haemi had heard of the others—nameless bar girls on nameless nights—and if that was why they guarded themselves from me. The town passed by in clumps. Unusable winter fields, common stores, houses upon houses. I had left Seoul for this.

  “Jisoo!” Haemi waited in front of our house. With my coat over her shoulders, her hands stuffed inside the pockets. “I watched you,” she said, as I approached, her voice heated and fierce.

  “Get inside.” I pointed. “I can’t even see you.”

  “See me then.” She surged toward me. “Don’t lie to me. Do you want to adopt or do you want to fuck that woman?”

  I shoved her. I pushed her shoulder with one hard sweep, and she tumbled. Frail, a little thing swept up in snow. As soon as she hit the ground, her elbows sprawling and her head snapping back, I feared she’d disappear, smothered in all that whiteness. I kneeled down and crawled to her.

  She might have been crying. It was too dark, too hazy. I watched her mouth open and close and tried to say I was sorry.

  I picked her up. She clutched my neck as I walked us through the gate, past the snow that clumped all around us. I felt the bandage around my shoulder tear open, but I couldn’t feel my arm. I couldn’t hear anything.

  In the morning after breakfast, I led the girls to Hyunki’s room. Solee slid to a stop beside his desk, where he sat studying. “I need you to watch these two,” I said.

  Hyunki placed his finger on an equation before looking up. “I have a test tomorrow, Hyung.”

  I picked up his book—physics, at fourteen. The subjects seemed to grow harder each year. “Get out of the house for a few hours. Why don’t you all go with Mother to church?”

  “Let’s play the number game! Can we?” Solee asked.

  Hyunki stood as Jieun grabbed his legs. I wondered if he’d heard us arguing in the night. “All right,” he said, sighing. “Let’s see what Halmuni’s doing.”

  When everyone left, I told Haemi to get dressed.

  “Why?” she asked, listless. There wasn’t a mark on her, but she glared at me like she was hurt.

  “Because I’m asking.”

  We walked to Yuri. On the way, I told her what I could about the hospital and how Yuri had helped me recover. “She wrote last year saying she had no one, and the orphanage needed another hand. That’s all.” I didn’t feel guilty. I ended with “You’re the one with the bad mind,” to prove it.

  Haemi gave a humorless laugh. “That’s true.”

  One of the older children answered the door. “Uncle.” He bowed and brought us to the playroom. “Would you like a chair, Auntie?”

  “I’d rather sit on the floor.”

  “Get Yuri for us,” I said.

  The little ones ran to Haemi as we waited. They watched as she untangled her scarf. They touched her hands, her wavy hair. I remembered that she was beautiful. She didn’t wear makeup like the other women in town. Her features were perfect already, with a pale, wide face that made her eyes seem larger and darker, a shapely mouth. The bold stare and arched brows that held me to her. She rustled her shoulders, finding pleasure in their bright, loving attention. The children poked fingers through her curls.

  Sangwoo ran in with his toy duck. “Uncle’s here!”

  “This is my wife,” I said.

  He bowed, the way I had taught him. “Hello, wife. Nice to meet you.”

  Haemi smiled. I imagined Sangwoo as our own. He and Solee and Jieun could chase one another around, trailing the rattling duck behind them.

  When Yuri entered, she didn’t hide her surprise. She touched her hair, a nervous habit I hadn’t seen in years. She spoke only to Haemi and motioned away the children. “I would have put on a nicer outfit if I’d known.” She wore the same blue dress she always wore.

  “I don’t see what that would have done,” Haemi said.

  Yuri smiled through the remark. She dragged over a low table and fetched a tin of cookies. “It’s perfect that you’re here. I’ve asked your husband to bring you so many times, and I thought he never would.”

  “I wanted
Haemi to know we weren’t having an affair,” I said.

  They both turned to me, similar in their anger. Rigid seething that quickly returned to impassive faces, even while their cheeks flared red.

  “I can’t believe you,” Haemi said, lightly.

  “I’m sorry.” Yuri broke a rectangular cookie in two. “I don’t know what’s happening here, or what you mean, but—” The halves disintegrated in her hands. “These are butter cookies.”

  Haemi grabbed one and, staring at Yuri, fractured it into pieces. “What are we doing here?”

  Yuri skirted her gaze. She surveyed the children at the far end of the room. The older ones were playing house, adding details from their lives before this place. “I get to be the mama this time,” a tall girl whined.

  “I never found my brothers after the war,” Yuri finally said. “Your husband helped me. He’s been kind. I asked him to come today because I wanted him to meet Andrew.” She gestured behind her. “He’s here now.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  Haemi straightened. She motioned to the closed doors. “One of the soldiers. I thought I heard English.”

  It was true. American voices came from the kitchen—male, deep, unfamiliar. Grandmother Lee laughed among them. A child yelled in accented English.

  “Am I right?” Haemi asked.

  Yuri nodded. “He comes on Sundays, and Jisoo doesn’t usually.” She looked at me. “I wanted you to meet him.”

  “Are you going to marry him?” Haemi bit into a cookie beaded with sugar.

  Yuri’s face flushed. “He’s working to get me a passport. A visa.” She laughed. “He wants me to move to California with him.”

  “When?” I asked. “A white man? One of the Americans?”

  Haemi took another cookie. “You’ll go?”

  “I think so. He wants to leave before the New Year.”

  “You’re brave enough?” Haemi asked. “California? With his foreign family?”

  Yuri touched her hair, her ears. “I’m scared. An American and everything. I won’t know anyone.”

  Haemi nodded, said something in return. They loosened in each other’s presence as I tried to understand. Yuri, relieved, fluttered her hands and unraveled the story of this soldier. Andrew. “He’s volunteered here for the past few months, but he’s ready to go home. We’ll leave by the end of the month, if it all works out.”