“One more time,” they mumbled together. I stroked their heads, told the story again.
When they fell asleep, I climbed onto our desk and slid open the window. It was dark outside. I wondered if Mommy and Kyunghwan could see through the night.
I slept in the hallway, my hand against Kyunghwan’s door. When I woke, I was floating. “And who do I love?” I heard him say. Kyunghwan held me in his arms. Before I could respond, I heard Mommy’s laugh.
“Go to sleep, Kyunghwan.” Her voice slow and gliding, like a flat river.
“What if I don’t want to?” His words sounded strange, like he had gonggi stones in his mouth. It didn’t matter. I nudged my face into his shoulder so she wouldn’t see my gloating. He loved me.
“Good night, Kyunghwan.”
“Good night, Haemi.”
In my room, when he pulled my blanket over me, I opened my eyes. “I love you, too, Uncle Kyunghwan.”
His laughter washed me with the scent of persimmons. He brushed my hair, too quickly, and left.
I sat up in the middle of the night, unsure of what had knocked me from my dreams. At first I thought it was Kyunghwan returning to me. But it was Mommy and Daddy fighting, the deep snarl in his voice. I tried to sleep despite the noise, a strange thud. Mommy’s shouts grew louder. Daddy was silent. It was shameful, and I worried Kyunghwan would hear.
I ran out of the room to yell at them. How embarrassing! I would say. The way Teacher Han did when we answered a question wrong in front of the principal. You are embarrassing yourselves!
I stopped when I saw her. Mommy hunched low, headed toward Kyunghwan’s room, her hair loose and thick with heat. With her nose and mouth smudged by the shadows, she looked like someone else. She closed his door behind her.
I checked on Daddy. He lay on his back, his stomach bulging. One hand between his legs and the other clasping a stick he used against our calves and palms when we were bad. He didn’t wake when I shoved his shoulder.
“Mother is in Uncle Kyunghwan’s room,” I said loudly. I prodded him again. He grunted, and a mess of noise erupted from his mouth. “Did you hear me?” My voice rose higher and higher. “They’re in Uncle Hyunki’s room together. Wake up!”
The dead-asleep look on his face didn’t change.
I sat outside Kyunghwan’s door. I thought I could hear them. It sounded like Mommy was crying. It sounded so painful I clutched my stomach. She was sad. He was comforting her. They were whispering each other’s names. I imagined. They were kissing. They were naked, with her round breasts and his hairy, musty armpits.
I took off my shirt and pants and laid them out underneath me. I made another person, the sleeves draped over my back and the legs twisted around my ankles. My mouth to the floor, I kissed him. When I stuck out my tongue, dust collected all over. It tasted dirty, not how I’d imagined.
In the morning, I dressed in my best shorts, light blue with orange stitching. Kyunghwan would hike with me after school today, and I would again tell him that I loved him.
When I entered the kitchen, he wasn’t there waiting for me. I had won for the first time. I set two cups of tea across from each other and placed the kettle in the middle, the way he did. I tried to fold his napkin into a flower but gave up. A simple square would have to do.
Instead of finding me in the kitchen, he rushed out of the house. I watched as his tall shadow dashed past the window.
I ran outside. “Where are you going?” I grabbed him as he petted Dokkaebi’s nose at the front gate.
“I have something to do today. Sorry, Miss Solee.” He squeezed my hand. His eyes were misty. He was fading from me, the way Mommy did sometimes. She had infected him.
“Stay,” I said.
“I have to go.” He lifted his bag and headed to his motorcycle.
“Hiking tomorrow?” I asked.
“Maybe.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Are you mad at me?”
He untied the handkerchief from my neck. I thought he was going to take it back, that he was angry. But he only wiped my eyes.
“I don’t want you to go,” I said.
“I’ll try to come back soon, Miss Solee.”
“You don’t love me.”
When he hugged me, I thrust my face forward so he would kiss me this once, but he shifted and pulled an envelope from his pocket instead. “Can you give this to Haemi? When Jisoo goes to work? I’ll bring back a surprise for you.”
He shoved the letter into my closed hand.
He didn’t kiss me goodbye.
Dokkaebi walked alongside him as he pushed his motorcycle all the way to the end of our road. Kyunghwan turned, a little speck waving. A dog thief. A bad man.
I didn’t wave back this time.
I ripped up his stupid letter instead. I threw the pieces into the air. There was no wind and they fell to the ground. I picked them up one by one. I collected his words.
I buried them all.
Haemi
1963
I bled. Yesterday, from the cuts on my hands, a careless knife. A week ago, tripping over the stones Mila had placed around the house in the shape of clouds. The sharp taste when I bit down on my tongue the morning Kyunghwan had left, like the discarded C ration tins we used to lick during the war. He’d once dared me to touch the silver, sharp edge with the tip of my tongue. A blood-red river.
I paced the girls’ room trying to count the days since I’d last bled between my legs. Mila, surrounded by colored pencils, mumbled at her picture. When I passed, she tugged at the hem of my hanbok skirt.
“I want a cookie.” She held up a wet palmful of crumbs. “More for me?” Her hair, the oily stink of it, made me want to retch.
“I don’t have any right now.” My stomach roiled at the sudden flare of smells—grease, spit, boiled beef bones from the kitchen, a vile sweetness I couldn’t place. The thought of the outhouse soured my spit, too. “Mommy needs to go outside.”
Mila grabbed my leg. “Take me.” Sitting at my feet, she looked tiny. My youngest, a dreamer. I must have been dreaming, too.
Months. Months since I had bled.
“Mommy?”
She toddled after me.
I staggered to the tree in the backyard and retched. Green potato sprigs and white rice, my early breakfast. The acid stench so nauseating I had to lean against the stone wall. The air itself seemed to knock me unsteady. I slid to the ground.
Mila wrinkled her nose and hid her face behind her hands. “Mommy sick?”
“Shush, please.” I laid my cheek against the cool stones. “I can’t think.”
“You going to be all right.” She stroked my ankle.
“I don’t think so.” I cupped her hand with my own. Even gentle Mila had left me suffocating for a year after she was born. I sank in guilt, confusion, fear. How unlike the other mothers I seemed to be. I had never felt more captive than following childbirth.
How could I not have kept track of my bleeding? For months now, I’d been wretched with mourning—my mind like spiderlings bursting from their egg sac, scattering in all directions. Forgetting what I was doing even when I was doing nothing.
I willed myself to bleed. I spat a thick scum of mucus.
“Look!” Mila pried a rock from under one of the tree’s roots. It was gray with a small white center, like a nipple or a flower. “I bring in house?”
Our damn house. I walked the length of every room every day. With Mila following, sleeping, slung on my back, hip, or chest, I treaded the wooden floors of our scythe-shaped home. When Jieun and Solee returned, I made dinner. When Jisoo returned, I made more dinner. When I felt as though my mind would disappear, I ate or walked or stared at the sky through the leaves of our one lonely tree. I didn’t allow myself to think about him. I was like a mouse in an earthen jar, crawling up sloped, impossible walls.
“What if I ran away right now?” I pointed to the roads beyond the stone wall. “What would you do if I left, Mila?”
/> She rolled the rock between my toes, up my foot. “Where you going? I hungry.”
I wanted to cry and scream and burn the fear that roiled inside me. The air felt all wrong, too thin or too thick for me to breathe. I picked up Mila and threw her stone into my vomit.
“I’m going to tell you a secret.” She smiled like an idiot child and grasped my nose. “I think I’m pregnant.”
In the kitchen, I held in another swell of spit and stirred a pot of tteokguk. The oval white rice cakes swirled around silvery, shiny broth. In another vat, I skimmed the scum off boiling beef bones. The thick, oily scent made me think of cows. How Kyunghwan and I used to bellow at those lazy, grazing animals on our way to grade school. Queasiness sloshed inside me.
“Not too hot, please.” Mila waited at her small table, already holding a napkin. I concentrated on her expectant face. Wide cheeks, like mine. Jisoo’s full lips softened into a kinder shape. Wispy, straight hair that she pawed off her face. “Many, many rice cakes, please.”
I poured her a bowl of tteokguk. She raised her spoon. “Mommy join?”
“You eat for us both,” I said.
“Mommy watch?”
“I’ll be right here.”
She slurped and hunted for rice cakes with her spoon. Mila always had a good appetite. Like their father, all the girls were such good eaters.
* * *
The morning Kyunghwan had left, I returned from my search to find Jisoo waiting for me at the front entrance. He looked hungover and miserable. As I approached—the hem of my hanbok muddy, my feet bare—he turned away from the embarrassment of me, unmoored.
“Have you seen Kyunghwan?” I asked. “Did you see him this morning?”
I stared at his twitching mouth. His eyes slid over mine, refusing to catch. The blurred ankles, ears, silhouette of the man who was my husband. He didn’t speak, and I realized. He knew.
I waited for him to drag me by the hair, to call me a whore. I would laugh at him until he released me. Why was it unthinkable for me to love someone, when he slept with other women whenever he desired? He came home smelling of their perfume. Their lipstick smeared on his ears, the back of his neck, along the seams where he couldn’t see but the wife could.
I stared at him and readied myself.
He looked beyond me, his shoulders raised. As if there was something worth seeing in the distance. “Kyunghwan left. Some sort of emergency. He told me this morning.”
I searched his face. “What kind of emergency?”
“How the hell should I know?”
I tried to think. I didn’t understand. My face crumpled and a small gasp escaped my mouth, my body revealing too much. I pressed a hand to my eyes.
Jisoo cleared his throat. “The girls are hungry. I need to go to work. I’ll see you this evening?”
I nodded and tried to will myself to walk back into our house. I took a few steps, forcing my feet to rise and land—but I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed Jisoo’s shoulder. “Is he returning soon? What did he say, exactly? I need to find him.” I turned toward town, letting go, hurrying again, lifting my skirt to run.
Jisoo yanked my arm with his thick, stout fingers. Anger fired his cheeks, mouth, and eyes until he looked right at me. “Did something happen last night?”
I tried to rearrange my features into a look of contempt, except my body didn’t feel like my own, the fear slippery in my throat. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not an idiot.” He shoved me into the stone wall, his hands grinding my shoulders, pinning me. I couldn’t breathe. How hard he pushed, until I felt all the bones in my back—a long, curved spine he could break. He wanted to hurt me and was scared of what that meant. About me, us, Kyunghwan. “Don’t lie to me, Haemi. What did you do?”
I laughed as hard and loud as I could. “What are you talking about?” I whipped his arm off me, both of us now heaving with fear. “Solee was crying in her room. She said she was supposed to go hiking with him. That’s why I’m asking.”
I rushed past him into the house.
“Don’t walk away from me,” he called.
“What kind of uncle leaves after making a promise like that?”
He followed me into our room. The stench of him was everywhere. I pointed at the brimming basin. At his acrid green vomit. “You’re disgusting.”
I cringed when I thought of that morning. How hurt Jisoo had been to see me undone. How, in the months following, he’d drowned his suspicions with drink, soaring into rages as frightening as the stars. How he’d kissed me in the mornings with a desperate hunger, a sloppy desire for my mouth that made me want to hold him.
I tried to make it up to my husband. After that first morning, I allowed myself to mourn only in the quiet of our home. Alone with Mila, I wept, unraveling until I blamed Kyunghwan, then myself. In Hyunki’s room, I lay on the floor and remembered. How I had longed to take pleasure in Kyunghwan’s body and how I’d refused to leave with him. His talk of the future. I knew what a life together in Seoul would do to us, and I didn’t have the courage.
When the girls returned from school, I frenzied around the house. I tried to be the perfect mother. At night, I reached for Jisoo’s body, disgusted with myself. With his lopsided shoulders and his useless arm and the heavy way he panted from the effort of holding himself above me. I wanted the disgust to overtake me so I would no longer think of Kyunghwan. So when I was alone and my mind wandered to his arms muscling over mine, I could conjure my husband instead. The heat of them both and how they loved me too much, and yet not enough.
* * *
I touched my stomach, its still-flat surface. A child grew inside me with Jisoo’s or Kyunghwan’s face.
If only he had waited for me to gather my nerve. If only we had left together.
Here, I couldn’t do it again. I knew myself.
Even in my little life, there were things I wanted to do. I wanted to return to the orphanage once Mila started school, if Grandmother Lee would have me back despite my vanishing these past few months. I wanted to visit Hyunki in Seoul. My only brother. Brilliant, forgiving Hyunki had asked me to come see his new world. I wanted to find out what kind of man he had become. I wanted to breathe in the city my girls would leave me for when they were ready for college.
I squeezed my stomach. I wanted things for myself. My daughters. My body.
I dressed Mila in long pants and pulled a knit sweater over her head. She pressed her hands against the orange wool. “Where we going?”
“On an adventure with Mommy.” I steered her outside, where the sunlight made me squint. It was too warm for fall. “To a river where lots of plants grow.”
Sweat slipped down my back as I swung Mila’s arm. She sang a tuneless melody, stringing the words that she knew together. I couldn’t recall the last time I had taken her anywhere besides the school or the market.
“You’ll help me look for pretty flowers,” I said.
“I like flowers.” She wiped her wide, sweating face. “I draw good flowers.”
“We’re going to find some that my mommy showed me once,” I said. “Flowers that will help me feel better.”
I tried to remember what they looked like. Long stalks, dark blooms. Before the war, before Hyunki was even born, Mother had taken me to a neighbor’s house. The woman had lost her baby, and I understood this was a solemn occasion. As we walked, other village women joined us. She did it to herself, a few of them said. She’d eaten plants until blood, clotted and thick, ran between her legs.
Mother had clucked at their gossip. When we reached the woman’s home, she instructed me to wait in the courtyard. I stayed by the door, trying to hear what was happening inside. They spoke over one another in clouds of soothing tones. The woman who had lost her baby wailed.
When a grandmother emerged, I snuck a look. Blood, bright and gashing red, was everywhere. Strips of hemp in a muddled pile, stained crimson. A basin, kimchi water. On everyone’s hands and between the legs of the woman lying
on the ground. Her skirt the color of chestnuts, jujubes, red pepper.
I screamed. I looked at my hands, scared for one wild moment that the blood had gotten on me somehow. That it was all over me. I had seen the round, hard bellies of pregnant women before. I had seen infants. I had not understood, though, the violence of birth.
“Out!” Mother screamed. One long, stained finger pointing to the door. “Stay outside like I told you.”
On the walk home, Mother pulled at my wrist.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I tripped along. “I shouldn’t have looked.”
“It’s not you.” She unfolded a handkerchief. Inside, a thick green stalk dotted with purplish-black flowers. “She did it to herself.”
I combed the ground with my fingers without any luck. Mila collected stones. She had already found a crop of cosmos flowers and stuck them in her hair. I searched the hills, but there were no long-stemmed, night-dark flowers growing on Whul-ae.
As I inspected the mossy slope, I recalled florets the color of pure, unpressed tofu. A little boy, a classmate from grade school, had sucked on the pale yellow petals of a mountain plant and died. Or had he eaten the root? I wished Kyunghwan were with me so we could remember together. So he could watch me chew one petal at a time and bleed out his mistake. I could tell him that if he’d waited one more day, I would have been ready.
Shaded by a canopy of leaves, a chill swept through me. I wouldn’t find them here. I didn’t even know if I wanted to find them. I lay beside Mila.
She tucked flowers into my hair. “Mommy, you sleepy?”
I squeezed my stomach and saw a child with Kyunghwan’s narrow cheeks, a son or daughter. I knuckled my flesh until it hurt, muscling the skin, organs, blood, until I cramped. Sharp slivers slicing whatever was inside me. Maybe I could force my bleeding to come.
If You Leave Me Page 22