If You Leave Me

by Crystal Hana Kim

  He looked at me in the light, fully, for the first time in two years. At my eyes, nose, at the mouth that had always wanted his.

  A floral scent rose from his clothes. I wondered if I looked old, if a woman waited for him inside. If he knew what he had done to me.

  “Let’s eat.” He pointed to a bench in front of his building. “I have a strict landlady.”

  “It’s freezing.”

  He walked away. Hyunki’s pale, closed eyes took his place, floating before me. Dark lashes, a strong brow. A mouth I used to feed, frothing with phlegm and blood and sickness.

  “Wait, Kyunghwan.”

  I followed, resenting myself more with each step. Seated on the bench, Kyunghwan busied his gloved hands with napkins and chopsticks. He balanced the bowl on the armrest between our seats. My neck prickled with cold and I hoped I would catch pneumonia.

  “I need you to get me drunk,” I said. “I need you to help me.”

  “I’m hungry and need to think.” He ate one noodle at a time, a habit I’d always hated. Black sauce crusted his mouth. The smell of pork masked that earlier flowery odor.

  I could fill myself with details of Kyunghwan. I could remember a different, lesser pain, a time when I didn’t care about anything but myself. I could tell him how I awoke two years ago, frightened. Not of being found by Jisoo or beaten in public, divorced, or jailed. I’d stared at the ceiling, afraid that what had happened in the night hadn’t really happened at all. In the kitchen, I’d leaned against a jar of rice, pulled up my dress, and touched myself. My fingers had turned slick and I was relieved. I’d thought of his face. The small, double-lined scar on his cheek, barely visible, but textured against my tongue. I’d held him inside me and hoped.

  I stood, found Kyunghwan’s address, and threw it at him. “You stay and eat. I’m leaving.”

  He set down his noodles. “Don’t be angry with me—”

  “Forget it, Kyunghwan.” I dumped his napkins on the ground and walked away.

  “Haemi.” He grabbed my arm. I felt the warmth of his hands, the width of his palms. They seemed larger, kinder. As he held me, I knew. I wanted him. Still, I wanted.

  “Let’s move to Japan,” he said. “We can bring the girls.”

  He didn’t know. Not about Hyunki or Eunhee or how his leaving had turned me into a woman who trawled her memories for meaning, signs, misunderstandings. I splayed my fingers against his back and pulled him close. I wanted Kyunghwan to remember me the way I’d been before. When we were young and thought our meager, hungry childhoods were enough.

  “What if we went to Japan, just us?” I asked. I rolled a new, foreign name around my tongue. Hibari or simpler—Hisae.

  “I’ll say they’re mine, Haemi.”

  I followed the straight line of his mouth. I kissed him.

  He wouldn’t take me to a bar. Instead, we stood on opposite ends of an enormous room. A sea of plush chairs, rooted to the floor in rows, stretched between us. In the Citizen’s Center, we faced a shining wooden stage at the end of a sloped floor.

  “They hold performances and concerts here. Business events, too. My company’s hosting an exhibition tomorrow,” Kyunghwan said.

  “Your company?”

  He pointed. Colorful boxes and bottles filled four tables on the stage, and banners strung above announced korean soap! and korean shampoo! “The beauty products company. Remember? We’re getting into the export business now. It’s not mine yet, but I’m doing well.”

  I played with a seat’s hinge at my side. He’d been in Seoul all this time and he still sold soaps. He didn’t own a home. He ate Chinese noodles for dinner. “Let’s get onstage,” I said.

  He followed me up the stairs. “What were you going to tell me?”

  At the first table, I picked up a block of soap that was shaped like an oversize grain. I tore through the clear plastic with my nails. Perfume, pungent and floral, rubbed off on my hands. Hyunki was dead, and I couldn’t form the words. I opened more boxes, found new bars. One package smelled like sesame seeds, another like peaches, too fragrant.

  Kyunghwan held my waist from behind. “The company’s expanding to Japan. We’re starting a partnership. I could ask them to move us. If I was sponsored, we could do well there.” He sifted through my hair, skimmed my shoulder. “A little apartment in Tokyo. What do you think?”

  I withdrew from his grasp and sat on the edge of the stage. He followed and sat beside me. I wanted to wash Hyunki’s face with one of these soaps, the pink one that smelled like morning glories. I would rub until color stained his cheeks and he returned to me. “Hyunki died. That’s why I’m here. I didn’t come for you.”

  Kyunghwan reared back. “When? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I pulled out the school photograph. It seemed too small and flimsy in my palm. Panic filled my mouth with spit. I should have taken a photo of the body. I could have found that grandfather and paid him to draw my brother’s likeness. Hyunki was dead because of me, and I would never see him again.

  “I’m sorry.” Kyunghwan stroked my knee, insistent, his fingers digging into my dress. “I’m so sorry.”

  A streak of anger. “You said he was fine. When Jisoo called, you said he was safe.”

  “That was—” He drew back his hand. “That was last year.”

  As he dragged his knuckles across his face, I noticed the sagging skin around his eyes, the new wrinkles. They made me hate him. “Did you know he was protesting?” I asked.

  He shook his head. I wished he would turn into Hyunki. That I could tear off his features and replace them with my brother’s.

  I looked out at the empty audience, at the ghosts in plush seats laughing at the spectacle of us. I knew Kyunghwan, and I didn’t have the energy to hate him any more than I already did. “You’re lying.”

  He turned to me. “Hyunki didn’t want to worry you. He said the demos were safe. I don’t understand. There haven’t been any protests in months.”

  “I hate you, Kyunghwan.”

  He wrapped his arms around me as a wail tore through the room. I clung to his neck, but I couldn’t feel him. His familiar body. His mouth against my hair. Even with him all around me, I was alone.

  I would never bury my brother. I would bring Hyunki to my room and sleep beside him, as we’d done throughout childhood, his giggles stitching us together in the night. I would place soaps around his body and cleanse him every day until the scents came to life. Morning glories would blossom around us in thick clusters; grass would grow beneath us, rose balsams, yellow forsythias. Peaches. We would devour them with the juice running down our fingers.

  “Haemi? What should I do?”

  I pushed my face into his chest. “Make me forget. Tell me about your life here.”

  I listened to his droning words. About his job, the apartment, how he was going to get rich. He explained how the government was supporting a movement to buy products made in Korea, and that whatever the politics of Park Chung-hee, at least he was helping his people. He spoke as if the company where he worked were important. As if I cared about his small, solitary life. I steadied my breathing until I could sit on my own.

  His suit was loose around his shoulders. His shoes were made of more scuff than shine. He didn’t have a woman. We were strangers now.

  “I think something’s wrong with me,” I said. “Inside my head. It leaks into my bones until I feel so heavy. I blamed it on the pregnancies, but maybe it’s me.”

  “You’re mourning. You’ll feel better when we get the girls.”

  A laugh, bitter as pith, rocked through me. No, we weren’t strangers. I knew him. He was the same. At sixteen, joining the war to avoid me. At twenty-eight, leaving. At thirty, talking about running off to Japan to hide from his cousin. He was the selfish one.

  I pulled myself up. “It’s not going to happen, Kyunghwan.”

  He grabbed the hem of my hanbok. “You look at me now.”

  I did and saw his earnestness. Seated with his
legs dangling off the stage, my hanbok in his fist, like a child. I knew what he was picturing—our perfect, imaginary life.

  “We can do this,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this since we were sixteen. Now we have a way.”

  “Nothing’s changed. I’d go to jail, or if we’re lucky, we’d be outcasts. It would be worse than if I were a widow. Take my girls and come live here?”

  “We could move to Japan.”

  “To the country that took my father and ruled over us? Where we couldn’t ever be citizens?”

  “Why are you doing this?” He stood and reached for my waist. His firm fingers sifted through my hanbok to find the curve of my ribs. The taste and press of him returned to me. How he’d made me gasp, always, with want. “You’re thinking too much. What about America then? Anywhere.”

  I pulled away.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “You have no money.” I stopped at the tables. With my hands outspread, I looked at him, the perfect line of his nose. Those thick eyebrows I loved to touch. Underneath his clothes, the freckles I’d once traced across his chest, his arms. “I don’t want to suffer anymore.”

  “Why do you always imagine the worst?”

  I turned, annoyed at his insistence, and underneath that, at my own stupidity. Kyunghwan would never free me. He and Jisoo only wanted to declare me their own. As if I were barley, soap, a cow, a vessel for birth. Kyunghwan had never been confined, and he couldn’t ever understand.

  At the table, I balanced scented soaps atop each other, as high as I could go. Orange, pink, yellow. Green, white. He would never see as I did. As my world constricted, he dreamed of silly, impossible futures.

  “It won’t work,” I said. “I gave up already.”

  He strode to me and pushed the bars over. Color spread across the floor, the soft soaps denting, barely making a sound. “I have a plan. It’ll work.”

  I dug my nail into a white bar that smelled like cream. The shaving butted against my thumb, curling into a perfect wave. “We missed our chance, Kyunghwan. There’s no point anymore.”

  He returned to the edge of the stage and sat down. I loved his back, the way his shoulders sloped and his bones jutted out like wings. I loved the taste of him—salt, musk, a filmy sweetness like persimmons.

  “Why did you even find me, then?” His voice slunk low. “If you’re going back?”

  If only I had his assurance, his confidence in our world. “Because you knew me once,” I said.

  He let out a small, hurt sound.

  I wanted to cradle him, to stroke his head as he fell asleep against my lap. The image stopped me. All I knew was how to mother.

  “Kyunghwan,” I called.

  I would never see him again after this night. I would return home to my daughters. I didn’t want to fight. “Let’s get drunk. Let’s be happy, the way we used to be.”

  Kyunghwan wanted to sneak me into his apartment or find a makgeolli bar that reminded us of our youth. I wanted to go back to the construction site. I liked the unfinished beams, the risk of collapse, the cold numbing my bones. Kyunghwan bought soju, and we returned to that open space. The soju was too harsh on the tongue, but I took it. Lying beside him and staring at the clouds, I did most of the drinking.

  He only wanted to touch me. He concentrated on lining up the bottom scoop of our palms, his thick wrist to my thin. We had the same hands. The shape of our narrow fingers and squat nails, even the palm lines.

  “You’re frozen. Come to my apartment,” he said. “The landlady’s asleep by now.”

  I turned to him, my cheek touching concrete, his face too close to mine. White clouds plumed from his open mouth. “I’m staying here,” I said.

  He guided our hands through the air like mirrored birds. “Dance with me, then.”

  “We’re not children anymore.”

  “Do it for me, tonight.”

  I let him lift me. We moved across the concrete floor, hands around each other’s waists, digging into our coat folds for warmth, listening to nothing.

  He kissed my hair, still a coward.

  I kissed his lips and remembered a long-ago night in a ditch, the way the stars had dusted the night sky. I touched his short hair, the scar on his cheek. I let the alcohol loosen my thoughts.

  “Do you remember that dog? When I visited?” he asked.

  When he’d finally returned to me, he’d spent too much time with Jisoo and the girls. I had ached at his indifference, the keen gaze he swept over everyone else. One slow day, as he and I circled the land behind the house, I promised myself that I’d stop wanting him. It was almost evening. The clouds were streaky and thin, patterning the air with strips of purple. Solee’s dog had trotted toward us. I touched the tree and watched Kyunghwan squat down.

  “Feisty boy.” He ruffled the dog’s hair. “This one needs a wash.”

  “He’s a dirty stray.”

  “Wash him with me.” Kyunghwan looked up with a smile, the same tilted grin he had used on the aunties. “It’ll be fun.”

  I found myself beside him, my hanbok skirt knotted above my knees. We turned a bucket of water over the dog’s head and back and tail. We rinsed away the dirt. At first I wasn’t sure. The water had numbed my fingers. Threading through the fur, Kyunghwan found my hands. I glanced beyond the house. Jisoo would return for dinner soon, but I didn’t care. I’d wanted to stay there with our fingers interlaced, the animal breathing between us.

  “I remember the dog,” I said.

  Kyunghwan hummed and circled us to the outer edges of the construction site. My dress caught on a splintery beam. He touched the bracelet I wore, rubbing the jade between his fingers. When I got home, I would put it away. I would stop thinking about him.

  “That dog followed me the next morning, when I left,” he said. “He stayed with me while I waited.”

  We knocked into the one raised wall. Kyunghwan slipped his hands underneath my coat. “I thought you would come,” he said.

  I pulled my thoughts away from his hands, from the thin cotton between our skins. I focused on his words. “Waited.” I stopped. “That I would come?”

  He tensed and gripped my hip. “At the bar—like I wrote.”

  “Wrote?”

  I knew that morning. Over the past two years, I’d returned to it so often those early hours were like a film I carried with me. There was no note left behind. No explanation of when he would return, if he’d left for good.

  I stepped back and the cold rushed between us. I closed my coat across my throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I gave Solee a letter for you.” Shadowed by the wall, in his black coat and gray suit, he was a surface of darkness, a smudged face.

  I looked up at the unfinished beams puncturing the sky. There had once been a letter. A piece of paper he’d left with my child and that I’d never received, a thin sheaf, almost insubstantial, almost a bit of nothing.

  I drew myself to him until we touched. Kyunghwan kept talking. He stroked my hands, my waist, my hair. Here was the yearning I had wanted from him all those years ago. It was too late.

  I didn’t want to know anymore. I was tired of the possibilities given to us in this life, and how bluntly even these slight chances burned away. I shifted his hands to hold me. His fingers behind my back, my cheek against his chest.

  “Keep dancing, Kyunghwan.”

  I closed my eyes. I wouldn’t open them until I heard movement, the swish of my dress across the concrete.

  Solee

  1966

  At my friend Kyunghee’s, we stuffed our shirts with chamoes. Their rippled oval shape made awkward breasts, but it didn’t matter. We were movie stars. In her room, we flung open the windows to let in the spring warmth and screamed into the streets, holding up our new chamoe parts. Youngsook and I followed Kyunghee, who shimmied the best. Later, when Kyunghee’s mother offered us the fruit as a snack, we crackled with laughter.

  Kyunghee held a melon slice to
her lips like an oversize white smile. She sucked the seeds and sang along to her LP record. “Unforgettable woman, I cannot forget her.” With her sticky palms, she grabbed me and Youngsook. “Sing!”

  “Watching the raindrops fall, without words, we walked in silence. Unforgettable woman!” We jived to the guitar, stroking the air in front of us with flappy wrists. I mouthed the words, copying Kyunghee’s shoulder rolling and Youngsook’s hip shaking.

  At the end of the song, Kyunghee collapsed onto her raised Western bed. “That is rock.”

  Youngsook draped herself over the bed, too. With her eyes closed and head propped on her elbow, she snapped her fingers to the next song. “I’m going to marry him. He’ll teach me drums and then we’ll be the rock couple of Korea.”

  I stood next to the bedside table. There wasn’t room for me with them both sprawled out like that, and I couldn’t think of anything clever or breathless enough to say. I didn’t even know the rocker’s name. We were the same age, Kyunghee, Youngsook, and I, but I felt colorless beside them.

  “I wonder what kind of girls he likes,” Youngsook said.

  “He likes women,” Kyunghee replied. “I saw a picture of him once. He was smoking a cigarette. He kind of looked like Teacher Shim.”

  “Maybe they’re related. Or it’s Teacher Shim’s secret identity,” Youngsook said.

  “Teacher Shim?” I looked between them, wondering if they knew. “Why him?”

  Youngsook flipped onto her stomach. “Why not? He’s handsome.”

  “Except for his tic.” Kyunghee twitched her eye. “If it weren’t for that, he’d be perfect.”

  I laughed. Our science teacher had a boring, square face with his hair always combed and parted, but I knew his secret. Yesterday, I’d returned to class, searching for a barrette, a bright orange hair clip Uncle Hyunki had sent before he died. In the room, Teacher Shim sat on the edge of his desk. A girl I didn’t recognize, a high schooler maybe, stood before him, her hand on his knee. He touched the skin of her waist, underneath her white shirt. They broke apart when I entered, but I saw their cheeks color.