I had missed it all. I hadn’t mourned or bowed or called her name. I hadn’t helped bathe or bury her body.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry and that I missed her. I only stood there, unable to breathe, imagining what it would feel like to let go, wondering if she had loved me in the end. If she knew how much I had loved her.
When I could no longer control my shivering, I climbed out.
It took a lot of begging and wandering around town before I found a store that would let me use their telephone. Wet and still drunk, I dialed. After the second ring, I heard Miyun’s voice. Sometimes, when I woke her in the middle of the night, gauziness cobwebbed her words together. I wanted her to talk to me in that voice and tell me everything would be all right. My words came out all wrong.
“I’m a dog,” I said. “You should leave.”
“Kyunghwan?” Her voice was sharp, awake. It was only evening after all. “I’ve been waiting all day.”
“I made a mistake with you. Get out of my apartment.”
“Stop fooling around. Are you drunk?”
I wanted to hurt her and myself. “Even for all that money, I wouldn’t marry you,” I said.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I’ve had you. You’re a rag. Dirty. Disgusting. You’re nothing to me.”
“You dog.” Her voice tilted. I imagined her trying to tamp down her hurt, not wanting her weakness to cut through the line. “Why are you saying all this?”
“Take the telephone with you when you leave.”
I told myself I was saving her. But really, I wanted to hurt someone. I wanted to push the pain in me onto another.
After the call, I paid for a woman. She was younger than I requested. A slender girl who looked too scared for what I needed. Her eyes were large against her anemic face. In a brothel room behind a cluster of bars, I told her to close her eyes and turn around. Afterward, she pulled up her skirt. I stopped her and asked for one more.
“There’s no discount,” she said.
She had the hands of a child. Those thin fingers took the bills from my wallet. Only then did she drop the skirt and step out of its circle. She slipped underneath me, facedown into the blanket the way I had placed her the first time. I turned her over. She let me fix the hair around her forehead. I tried to make her look older, softer.
“I want you to do something,” I said. “Slide your hand across my neck, like this, until I open my eyes.”
She looked at me for a long time, my face already bruising and red, then gave a simple “All right.” She was careful and exacting, but her fingers were cold.
I pulled her on top of me. “Put your mouth on my temple. Down my nose.”
When she leaned over, the curtain of her hair covered me, and I asked her to stay this way for a while.
“Don’t ask. Just tell me.”
She did it all, even the hushed strain of her voice against my ear. She roamed my back with her hands and crossed her ankles with mine. She did everything, but the requests hung in the air, turning it all thick and false. When we were done, she didn’t leave to empty my come in the bathroom. Instead, she turned toward the wall and slept. Her skin smelled thick and metallic. I kissed the space between her shoulder blades, and I let myself pretend.
I woke hungover and alone. I crawled to the public bathroom, heaved into the basin of shit and piss, and lay there until the smell made me retch once more. Outside, the clouds hung heavy with snow. I wanted a storm, a blinding both clean and monstrous.
At the market, I sat at a food stall and ordered a bottle of makgeolli, some pig’s feet, anchovies, sweet potatoes, gosari—her favorites. I set a plate across from me and pretended I was waiting for someone, even going so far as to lay some food aside for my date. I looked around for the girl from the night before, or the waitress, or even the woman from the train. There was no one.
I thought about the first night of my visit four years ago, when we’d gotten drunk together. Jisoo had slung his good arm around Haemi, and I’d wanted to strike him, to feel my fingers smart with the impact of hitting bone. Mila had clapped and said, “Kissy, kissy,” until Jisoo leaned over and kissed Haemi on the cheek. I remembered how the girls had squealed with embarrassment and excitement.
I should have turned away right then and let them have each other. But I was in love and certain I had a right to her. I had found her first. She was mine.
I walked to Haemi with flowers. I would leave them at the house and say goodbye. In the backyard, on the steps leading to the kitchen, I found Solee crying, still dressed in the white hemp of her mourning clothes. The thin fabric wasn’t enough. It didn’t cover her throat or wrists or feet. Her fingers twirled something small around and around.
“Solee,” I called. “It’s too cold for you to be outside.”
She gasped at the mash of purple and red on my face. The item she held, a piece of jewelry, fell into her lap.
I lifted the flowers to hide my bruises and remembered my knuckles were swollen, too. “I fell.”
She folded into herself, as if I could hurt her. “You fell on your face?”
“Don’t be smart.” I started to sit, but she raised her hand. With her lips set and eyebrows drawn together, she looked too much like Jisoo. A plain, square face without any hint of Haemi’s grace.
She bared her teeth. “Father says you’re not allowed here. We’re leaving for the burial soon.”
“The burial?” I started. “The funeral’s today?”
“You’re not invited.” A hard edge in her voice. “You can’t come.”
I looked past her for someone else who might confirm this news. The funeral hadn’t happened yet.
“Do you know what this is?” Solee picked up the object in her lap and slipped it on her wrist. A thin gold bracelet.
I recognized it immediately. I had lifted it for Haemi, folded it in the whitest paper. I had tasted the stone in my mouth as I’d kissed her limbs.
“This used to be hers. She drowned. She drowned herself.” Solee shook her wrist. The bracelet slid up and down without making a sound. Her skin was chicken-fleshed and too pale.
“Solee—” But my tongue was too thick. I didn’t know what to say, how to comfort her.
“We went to the river all the time, and now she’s dead.” She pushed the bracelet up, trying to reach her elbow. “You told me you’d come back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” Solee mimicked. “She hated you. I heard her say it. She gave me the bracelet and said she didn’t want anything from you anymore.”
I sat beside Solee, ignoring her attempts to push me away. I tried to adjust the bracelet, scared for some senseless reason that it would cut off her blood flow. She hit me, against the fresh bruises. It hurt and I must have groaned because her eyes widened. For a second, I saw the girl from the night before, the same fear. The thought of harming Solee passed through me. She had never given Haemi my letter. But I was the stupid one. I had trusted a child with my hopes.
“I’m all right.” I clutched my cheek and tried to smile. “I know it was an accident.”
“I hit you on purpose.” She slid to the other end of the steps. “Because you said you’d come back and you didn’t. Because you—” She pressed her nails into her palms until it looked like it hurt. I was scared she’d cut into her skin.
“Solee—”
“Go away.” She tucked her head between her knees. “You don’t belong here.”
I stood and set down the flowers beside her. They were white, their smell too strong. “Take these in at least. Do that for me.”
“Go!” she yelled.
But I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I watched as she pulled off the flower heads until only the green stalks remained. Round bulbs rolled at her feet, shedding petals. Her sniffling was the only sound between us. I stared at the stone wall that gated their home. I would go. I wouldn’t speak to them again.
I turned to apologize one last time, t
o tell her that she wouldn’t have to see me anymore, to ask her to say goodbye for me, to say I was done—but when I turned, the words finally ready after all these years, I saw him.
Jisoo ran to the back steps. He pulled Solee up by the arm. “Get inside now.”
She scrambled away, her face and body a blur, the bracelet rolling onto the ground as her bare feet kicked at the door.
Jisoo, dressed in white, surged toward me. “You”—he pointed—“should have left yesterday.”
I squared myself, ready. “You said the funeral was over. I should be allowed.”
He grabbed my arms and I waited for his fist. I would take his anger, if it meant I could see Haemi. He worked his jaw, the bones moving as he ground his teeth.
“I’m going with you,” I said. “I deserve to say goodbye.”
“You think you deserve anything?”
“Wait!” Solee appeared at the back door and ran toward us. “Come,” she yelled.
The girls rushed out of the house, half-dressed, confused. “Stop arguing!” Young bodies invaded the space that separated us, their small hands pushing us apart and wrapping around our legs.
“No fighting,” one of them said.
“No fighting.”
“No fighting.”
They swarmed around us. Jisoo tried to steer them to the house. With his arms outspread, he worked to shift the girls behind him. But I saw. There were too many faces, too many bodies. A little girl held on to Solee’s leg. She had the round face of her mother, the same loose curls. There were four of them now.
The way he grabbed her, holding her close to his chest, hot with some fear as he glanced back at me—it made me understand.
“When? How old?” I reached out to them. I turned to Solee. “Somebody tell me.”
Jisoo gripped the child tighter, tried to walk up the steps. The other girls yelled, flashes of white holding on to our legs, sliding between us. They slowed him down.
“Let me see her.” I reached over Jieun’s or Solee’s head. I grabbed one soft arm. Jisoo shouldered me, but I held on to what I could of the girl. “Let me see her face. If—”
“She’s mine.” Jisoo swung a sharp elbow. A scab across my nose cracked open, a rush of tears hitting me on impact, a smear of red on his sleeve. I didn’t let go.
I shoved one hand under the girl’s bottom for leverage. I could take her from him now, if he only loosened. She was slick, sweating, her head tucked into his chest. I pried at his fingers. Her face was shaped like Haemi’s, but the eyes. I caught her right shoulder and one leg by the knee. I almost had her, and then—she screamed.
All of them, shrieking.
“You’re hurting her!” Solee yelled.
The girl’s face was red, fully red, and wet with tears. “Don’t,” she whispered. Her limbs, where I held her, streaked pink.
I let go.
Jisoo shrouded her, hoisted her closer. He murmured to her, forgetting me, and stroked her arms and legs and stomach and hair. She gripped him, buried her face into his neck. Our white imprints faded from her skin.
I stepped back, a swell of acid in my throat, my awful hands. “I’m sorry.”
Jisoo stood under the shadow of the roof holding the child. The girls ran to his side. They petted their sister’s pale, bare feet, shushing and soothing, even though they were crying themselves. The back door, behind them all, opened into a house where I had once slept.
It was winter, cold, and we were shivering. I squatted down. I beckoned to Solee, Jieun, Mila. To the little girl. I wanted to hug their little waists. I wanted to be forgiven.
Coda
Solee
Some days, we look for her.
In the beginning, we searched the corners of empty rooms, the fields she’d walked when lonesome, each other’s growing faces. The tree we used to lie under together cut down, we searched the skies above and wondered where she could have gone. Now, we look for her in our work, our partners, our children. We fret, especially, over our own girls. And when we are alone, we examine ourselves for all the ways we can and cannot be her daughters.
Our mother left us. She slipped. She let go. In a white dress, she dragged herself into the winter river. No shoes on the bank, no basket of clothes, no morning-glory soap. There was no sign for us to follow, but Jieun knew. She rushed to the river alone that day, an excuse tucked inside her pocket. Once, years later, while angry with me, Jieun told me what she’d seen. How Mother’s face had been covered by her wet black hair, how the pink of her tongue poked through, like a dead limp fish. I pushed my fist into Jieun’s face again and again when she told me. She didn’t cry or fight back. I cannot forget the image now, of my sister lying in the grass, one cheek reddening from my blows, yelling, “I shouldn’t be the only one.”
After Mother’s death, we turned inward. The four of us as one, like a flower petaling in on itself in the night. Father, separate, rotated on his own mournful axis. Kyunghwan vanished, nothing but a specter haunting the capital. In the room we shared, my nighttime stories changed. Lee Haemi was still a goddess from the heavens, but in the end, she was never meant for this world, where a name, a life, a woman, could be taken whole.
Some of us have forgiven her and some of us have not. Jieun, with her temper that flares like a switch, rides the train every year, and climbs the hills to visit Mother’s tumulus. She weeps the most for all of us.
I try to hold on to them, the way we clasped together those first nights without her. Our fingers laced, our legs locked. We slept with our cheeks on each other’s backs. Now we are separate. We slip through days and months without speaking. Like water, without shape or hold. Mila calls each of us, frets she cannot be closer. Eunhee maintains her distance, flitting from country to country, never still for a moment, never coming home. Mother loved her most, but it is Eunhee who has forgotten her completely.
I hunger for them, my sisters. To know they thrive is to remind myself. Look, Solee. We are alive.
Look, Mother.
We are still here.
Acknowledgments
First, always, thank you to my parents, Kim Juchon and Kim Aelee, for your strength, sacrifice, and understanding. I have felt your love and support every step of the way. Appa, you are my foundation. Your generosity and quiet devotion to your family, friends, and the mountains do not go unnoticed. Umma, I admire your passion for the world. You’ve taught me to embrace all challenges with fierce confidence. Thanks to my best sister, Diana Beena Kim, for being my earliest listener and friend. Thank you also to my grandmother, Park Soonnam, and to my Kwak family in Korea and my Kim family here in the States.
Thank you to Juliana Chyu and David Whitney for embracing me as a daughter. Love to the rest of the Chyu, Whitney, and Leonard families.
Thank you to my inimitable agent and advocate, Katherine Fausset, for believing in this novel since its infant stages. I am grateful for your faith in me and my words. And to the rest of the Curtis Brown team, for their support and kindness.
I am grateful to my brilliant and fierce editor, Jessica Williams, for guiding me with such care, wisdom, and grace. You have helped make my dream possible, and I am forever indebted to you. I feel so lucky to have worked with you on my first book. Thank you. Huge thanks to everyone at William Morrow, especially Sharyn Rosenblum, Katherine Turro, and Ploy Siripant, and to Laura Cherkas and Laurie McGee.
Many thanks to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellowship, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and PEN America. These communities have provided me time, friendship, and support along the way. A special thank-you to Emily Nemens for selecting “Solee” for The Southern Review and for cheering me on ever since.
A profound thank-you to everyone at Columbia University for making me a stronger and more thoughtful writer, particularly Nicholas Christopher, Stacey D’Erasmo, David Ebershoff, Deborah Eisenberg, John Freeman, Gary Shteyngart, and Elissa Schappell. Special
thanks to Ben Metcalf for insisting I write this novel and to Richard Ford for his wisdom and encouragement throughout the years. To my MFA women—a coven I admire and am so grateful for—Kerry Cullen, Sanaë Lemoine, Alexandra Watson, Diksha Basu, Essie Chambers, Andrea Morrison, and Naima Coster.
And to all my friends who have fed me, housed me, laughed with me, and reminded me of a world outside of writing, I give you all my hugs and thanks. Special cheers to Sujean Park, Deborah Ma, Steven Shlivko, Rohan Sud, Sam Rothschild, Dave Williams, Mickey Brener, Michael Vieten, Rachel Hall, Kate Sandlin, Dave Resnick, Taylor Simeone, Kyle Snow, Amy Ahn, Jinee Lee, Jennifer Kung, Annie Bae, and Ashley Kim for listening to me talk about this novel for many years.
Thank you, finally, to my love and greatest champion, Eric Whitney. For reading all of my drafts, for your unwavering faith in me even when I doubted myself, for always being my person. Without you, I would not have written this book. I love you, always.
About the Author
CRYSTAL HANA KIM holds an MFA from Columbia University and has received numerous awards, including PEN America’s Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, along with fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal and the director of writing instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America. Her work has been published in the Washington Post, the Southern Review, Electric Literature, The Millions, and more. She currently lives in New York City. This is her first novel.
www.CrystalHanaKim.com
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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