In my hand, a rope. An opening I have made, with its perfect circle.
Here is what I imagine: a thick, smothering cloud escaping my open mouth.
“Mama?”
Eunhee shakes my shoulder. I awaken, still under the tree. She wipes my face with a fist. Her knuckles press into my eyes, the sweep of my cheeks. Her rucksack lays open and abandoned, its tongue flapping in the middle of the yard. The sun is gone, painted over by evening blues.
“We’re home. Unnies are inside,” she says.
“Sit with me.” I pat the ground. “Did you eat?”
She crawls into my lap and her knees dig into my hips. She swings her arms across my neck, pushes her face against my chest. “You’re sweaty.”
“Let’s stay here together for a while.”
She lifts my arm, examines the rope I still grip in my hands. She follows the lines of my wrist, where the bristles chafed my skin. “What are you doing?”
“It’s a game.” I hold the circle above my head. “A crown for Mama.”
She grabs it and puts it around her neck. “Do you like my jewelry?” She dabs the remnants of pepper and pine. She preens and smiles like a lady.
“Beautiful,” I say. “Can I try your necklace, too?”
She touches my wrist again, pauses at the peeling skin. “But the bracelet was too small?”
“Yes, Mama didn’t realize.” I hold her closer. I brush heat-swollen curls from her face. My perfect Eunhee. She has harnessed all the best parts of her sisters, of me, inside her body.
“Hey.” She swats my arms. “Too tight.”
I kiss her. “Tell me, Eunhee. How was my baby’s day?”
“I got this. My nose was running.” She wriggles to face me, points to a handkerchief pinned to her shirt. “I learned a song. Can I teach you?”
“Let’s put the game away first.” I lift the rope from her neck and set it on the ground.
The circle loosens, loses its shape. One thick rope unravels into four.
“Don’t cry, Mama.”
“Sing for me.”
And she does.
And I listen. I listen to my daughter sing.
Kyunghwan
1967
“You’re meant to be alone.” A woman told me that once. My last matchmaker, a grandmother with lines rivuleting her face. With my papers spread across her table, she’d shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do with you.”
“What do you know?” I had swept up my jacket, almost yelling at her. “I don’t need your help.”
Her words followed me, though, a portent I pushed away only to have it return again and again. I realized the truth after a dance in the night. Across a concrete floor, with my hands on Haemi’s hips, I knew.
“Find someone else,” she’d said.
“If you leave me, I’ll be alone.” I’d sunk to the ground. “I know it.”
“You’ll forget me.”
We were both right. Haemi would always be an ache inside me, a reminder of my loneliness, but now I was thirty-two and for the first time, almost happy. I lived in Seoul and made good money as a supervisor for a beauty products company. I had managed to push aside any thoughts of her, and him, and everything I’d done to my family. I had found someone.
* * *
The loud trill of the phone shook us awake. “I still can’t get used to that sound in our apartment.” Miyun pulled the blanket across her face. “Go get it.”
I pressed my forehead into the pillow. “It’s probably a misdialed call.”
“Oh, fine. I’ll go.” She took the blanket with her.
I met Miyun while I was overseeing a shipment of soaps to a fancy women’s shop near her university. She was considering a scarf, holding it against her chest to see if it matched her shirt. She was too young, I could see that right away, but something in her easy movements had excited me. She was unimaginably rich and from the city. You could tell from the way she stared at you, all bluntness. Like she owned everything she saw. There was a naïveté to her privilege that I liked. Sometimes I’d find myself thinking of her in a more permanent way and I’d panic. But I was nearly happy.
“You were right,” Miyun said, returning to me. “Wrong call.”
“It’s my apartment.” I sat up against the pillows. “Mine. Not ours.”
She stood there, her naked little body shivering even with the blanket caped across her shoulders. I don’t know what pushed me to say things like that to her.
“I paid for the telephone,” she said.
“Get in bed.”
“Why should I?”
I turned over. I didn’t want to watch her decide if she’d stretch this out into a fight. Or maybe I was scared that she would finally realize I was a shit, and I didn’t want to see it all fall apart. She eventually slid in beside me, rubbed her face against my back, and called me a dog. I turned over and put my mouth on hers, on her breasts, and stomach, between her legs. When I pushed inside her, she forgave me.
Miyun woke early the next day. Her parents had gone to Tokyo for an anniversary trip, and I had her to myself for two weeks. Each morning, she sang the same tune as she did her makeup, her alto voice a little off on the higher notes. It was a nice picture to wake up to. She smelled like a better life. I knew it was the aromatic oils she used, but I liked to imagine some of that richness emanating from me as well. Before she left, she crawled on top of me. I felt ready, all of a sudden, for the panic.
“I have study group for my midwinter exams.” She kissed me. “I’ll see you after?”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
She tilted her head. “See me?”
“See your parents.”
“Really?” She kissed me again, her mouth splitting into a smile so wide our teeth clicked.
“Really,” I said, carrying her into the kitchen. We laughed and couldn’t stop touching each other. I felt the way you did when you’re scared and praying to something out there that you’re ready.
“Let’s celebrate. Let’s start right now,” she said. I lifted her onto the table and she raised her skirt, her hand already guiding mine.
We went out and she bought me a new suit. We planned how she’d introduce me to her parents. She was their only living child. They were pliable, she said. They wanted a son again, even if it was me. I told her to savor one accomplishment at a time.
In the evening, Miyun rolled ground beef in egg yolk and I opened our third bottle of soju. As she placed the patties on the frying pan, the phone trilled again. She handed me the receiver. “Can you?”
I cradled the phone against my neck as I poured two glasses. “Hello?”
After some static, a buried voice seemed to wade toward me. A man panting out words and air. The sounds distorted by his heaving, loud and wet, like an animal.
I set down the bottle. “Who is this? Who are you?”
He spoke quickly. About a body, water, currents, the police, someone skipping stones, a discovery. “The river, Kyunghwan. They found her.”
I gripped the receiver. I felt bodiless, a hand and an ear, nothing else. I tried to palm the kitchen wall. Muted flowers and vines, Western wallpaper. But my hand shook, looked strange, like someone else’s.
“She’s dead.”
And I knew. I knew who was calling and who had left and who was I to know all this so soon? Before he started to wail, beating her name into my ear, I knew.
Miyun’s fingers were alarmed on my neck. “What’s wrong?”
I caught sight of her earrings. I focused on their white sheen, how they swung from her lobes. Pearls rimmed with silver. I held on to the receiver and stared at those orbs, trying to disappear all sound, to collapse everything around me—Jisoo’s crying, Miyun’s questions, and eventually, my own strange gurgling. I tried to push away these swelling feelings, to deny them, but in the end, the line disconnected, Miyun stopped holding me, and only my choked breathing was left.
A chicken clucked in the back of the train. I wanted to shov
e it out a window. I’d never liked farm animals. Haemi, though, she had loved them. One afternoon, when we were young, we’d found a hen pecking at my lunch tin. I threatened to pluck out its feathers, but Haemi scooped the bird into her arms and kissed its sharp yellow beak. She sat on the road, skirt splayed, holding the animal above her head, away from my reach. She dared me to kiss the hen, too, and when I refused, her laughter shook the fields around us.
“That’s a nice suit.” The woman seated next to me nodded. She looked about my age, but when she smiled, a missing tooth aged her. “What are you going down for?”
I ignored her and stared at the frosted winter landscape as it passed by—bare branches slapping in the wind, a cloudless sky. The emptiness of the fields reminded me of Haemi and I had to turn away. She’d taken this train home two years ago. I had let her.
An accident, Kyunghwan.
Haemi, the ache of her, in my chest.
“Is everything all right?” The woman reached out her hand.
Her touch, a stranger stroking my shoulder, unmoored me. I had harbored my want and anger and regret all these years. Finally, I wept out the words. I was too late. Haemi was dead. Fierce, unknowable Haemi—was gone.
The last time I saw her, in a half-built structure in Seoul, she told me how she felt. I didn’t want to listen. The misery, she said, clouded her mind and took up all the space inside her. She felt heavy, not right, as if snatches of her being had been stolen. Then she had laughed. “What am I saying?”
As she spoke, I had only watched her lips. How they were slightly bitten, pink, wry with beauty. I watched her all night, savored every sense of her. She still walked the same, with that light lope that swayed her body from side to side. She looked older at thirty. A mother. Those three girls had pulled her body into a different shape, but even so, I wanted her.
“An accident,” Jisoo had said. A river. A drowning. I thought of her body and mouth and laugh and mind as I walked from the train station to her home. I hadn’t wanted to listen to her, worried that it would ruin my time with her, worried that she would blame me. I had been too absorbed with my own selfish wants.
When I reached the house, I found Jisoo in the back, hacking at a tree with an ax. He hewed, thrusting back and forth, yet the ax landed soft and aimless on the trunk. He kept his bad arm loose and shifted with each swing to maintain his balance.
“Jisoo?” I stood, unsure, as he straightened. He looked away as soon as he recognized me, but I saw how his jaw clenched. “I took the earliest train.”
“What are you doing here?” Jisoo, still gripping the ax, cut me with a quick glare. “Why are you on my property?”
I hadn’t thought of what I’d say to him if he didn’t want me here. “I came for the funeral,” I said, steadying my words.
He tested the trunk with one hand. His body, still like a boxer’s, was square and squat and stronger than mine. His voice, though, shook. “I didn’t ask you to come.”
“You shouldn’t have to prepare everything yourself.” I walked toward him, trying to buoy my tone. I slid a smile onto my face. “I can help.”
“Don’t bullshit me.” He met my gaze, finally, and leaned the ax against his shoulder. The weight tugged at his shirt, revealing the scar that roped his right arm. “You’re not here for anyone but yourself.”
I shifted my feet, suddenly aware of how alone we were. “You’re the one who called me.” Jisoo had Haemi for all these years, and he’d failed, so what did it matter who I was here for? I turned to the house. “Where are the girls? I’m their uncle.” I started toward the rear kitchen. “I can console them if I want.”
He circled around me quick, his ax out, the thick blade pointing at my chest. “You don’t get to come here like this.”
I stopped in the middle of his yard. He was right. There wasn’t any use in lying. “Let me go to the burial,” I said, “and then I’ll leave.”
He fell into a growling laugh, the gray blade shuddering with his movement. His voice unhinged. “You think I’d be stupid enough to call you before the funeral? It’s done. You’re too late. She’s buried.”
“You didn’t—” Jisoo lifted the ax when I stepped toward him. I threw my hands up. He laughed again.
“You’re pathetic.” He spat the words, his measured face slipping. “Go home, Kyunghwan.”
He threw down the ax. It bounced, almost hitting him, before it slashed the earth. He staggered to the tree, a low cry ugly and thick in his throat. Without the ax, he started clawing the bark with his hands, peeling with his fingers, scattering splinters around him. He split through the middle, like a seed, and I saw myself from the night before. How his words had cored me. Here was steady Jisoo, undone.
I put my arms around him, his muscled and damaged shoulders, and squeezed. Using the whole of me, I held fast against his pawing, his shoves against my chest. We butted against the trunk, my arms still encasing his, both of us crying. I held him as hard as I could until he yielded, until he closed his eyes and grew quiet.
Slumped against him, spent and shadowed, I looked up at the tree. Its raw, gouged trunk. Chop it down, I wanted to say. Take me down, too. Take me to her.
I promised Jisoo I’d get him drunk. Really, I was desperate for a drink myself. The bar was nearly empty when we arrived and we chose the table closest to the exit. A waitress came over, rested a hand on Jisoo’s shoulder.
“Everyone consoles me to my face.” His gaze traveled up her hand. “Then they gossip about my wretched family once I’ve left.”
The woman, sheepish, rolled her finger along the hem of her apron. She glanced back at the kitchen, where two other waitresses stood, watching us. “What would you like to eat today?”
I ordered for us both. Soju and lemons, samgyeopsal, boiled blood sausage. “Bring the drinks first,” I said.
Jisoo jerked his head as she retreated. “They’re saying Haemi walked into the river on purpose.” He shredded a paper napkin in front of him. “They’re filling their mouths with shit.”
I watched denial paint over his features. “She knew how to swim,” I said, as careful as I could manage. “It’s winter.”
He leaned across the table, his whole being on edge. “Don’t talk about what you don’t know. Don’t be an idiot like the rest of them.”
I steadied the tipped table and tried not to flinch. “You’re right, Jisoo. You’re right.”
“Fuck you all.” He pushed back his chair, but he didn’t get up and leave. “She was doing the laundry.”
We didn’t speak to each other again until the waitress returned. As we drank, Jisoo steered the conversation to business. He spoke about how agriculture as a way of life was dying in our country. “The government only cares about producing rice, not about us,” he said. Farmers were leaving to become city-dwelling industrialists like me. I thought it strange, how he’d forgotten what it meant to be from Seoul, but I nodded along. When he grunted at me to say something, I mentioned Miyun. We emptied bottles at an even pace and skirted any talk of Haemi. Jisoo and I hadn’t spoken in years, and I thought, stupidly, that we were united in our grief.
When the air around us trembled, Jisoo looked at me. “So.” He squeezed the juice out of a lemon, wringing its round body. He poured soju on top of the pulpy liquid. “Haemi turned strange after you left.”
I popped a slice of sausage into my mouth. As the thin skin broke between my teeth, I concentrated on the taste of cellophane noodles, pork blood, barley. “Oh?”
“You can say it.”
I shook my glass, watched the lemon juice and alcohol mix.
“We would get drunk some nights,” I said.
He swung his shot into his mouth. He grabbed mine and drank it, too. “Tell me something else.”
“I don’t have anything else to say.”
“Liar.”
He pushed my head against the wall, his knuckles driving into my temple until we tipped to the ground. I wanted to let him hurt me, but I couldn’t g
ive him even that. He lifted his leg into a swing and I rolled away. He was clumsy, his bad arm hampering his speed, but still he pinned me down. Hit me with a cross. I tried to grab his crippled shoulder. He had always been faster, stronger.
The drunks shouted. I saw a flash of the waitress’s black apron. She jittered in frantic side steps. We pushed and shoved each other in a tight circle. He punched me until I felt bruises stretch the skin on my face. “I didn’t,” and “Liar,” the only words either of us could manage. His breathing, quick and deep, took up all the space in my head.
When I was ruined enough, he left.
The waitress held cabbage leaves against my swelling skin and guided me to a seat. “He’s having a hard time.” She slid a chunk of ice over my cheek. “You know about his wife?”
“I can take care of myself,” I said.
As soon as the bleeding stopped, I headed to his house. I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I only knew that I wanted him to hurt me again.
When I reached his land, I heard the girls crying. I stood in the neighbor’s field and listened. The high, constant howl of children in mourning. Solee. Jieun. Mila. I remembered their names, their faces. Behind the stone wall, they wept for her.
Their sounds swept through me and I understood. I hadn’t thought about the girls and their future, about Haemi as a mother and what it meant to have her gone. They would be alone, orphans in an already motherless country. Those girls and their unfathomable fates.
One of them had found her in the river while skipping stones. I imagined the screams, the confusion and torture of seeing her body wedged against the rocks, drenched and unmoving.
I made myself listen.
I found my way to the river. Jagged gray rocks lined the banks as the current rushed on, slipping south toward some open mouth. Standing there, I understood why Jisoo had hacked down the tree. There was nothing you could do to revenge against water.
I walked in, gasping at the cold. I trudged to the center, where the land gave way and the water deepened. Almost slipping, I waded in to my chest. I didn’t know if I was in the right place. The river had already erased her.
If You Leave Me Page 34