Once the Shore

by Paul Yoon

  “The one on the left,” he said.

  The sun was high and she lifted her hand and squinted. She saw what looked like two windows. Surrounding it were trees, in their thickness the semblance of invulnerability.

  “It’s mine,” he said. “I bought it.”

  She congratulated him. Home was the start of things, she told him. He agreed, his eyes alighting on each passerby. They grew silent, standing there among the pedestrians. Voices hung in the air and she felt them against her skin, thick, like a curtain.

  He asked about her father. Married to the television, she said, to make a joke of it. He was doing fine, she added. It seemed the sensible answer, although the truth was that he was dying and there wasn’t much left in his body to be taken.

  She invited him to dinner. “I don’t cook as well as Mama,” she said, wiping her forehead, damp from the afternoon heat.

  “I am sorry, Sojin,” he said. “I should’ve written. I would’ve come.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “We thought of you.”

  They noticed a man waiting at the register inside.

  “I’ll see you,” he said.

  “I’ll see you, Kori,” she said, and took pleasure in saying his name, already feeling as though he had never left. It occurred to her, watching him move through the crowd, that time, in some ways, had nothing to do with how you thought of someone. And she did not know how that was possible because time was, she thought, how you defined yourself. It was what made you and what finished you as well.

  The man in the store came outside and began to speak but she couldn’t understand him. He wore sunglasses. He was tall and his dark hair was long and tied by a rubber band. She smiled at him, attempting to decipher the words in some way. He gestured with his hands. She didn’t know what to say so she watched his fingers. They were like birds. She tried to guess his intentions. A restroom? A taxi? The ocean? Schoolchildren approached and she was forced to step closer to him. She, too, motioned with her hands. For a moment, it was as though she were looking through a mirror, both of them with their hands raised, forming shapes, and she wasn’t sure why but she grew afraid and stopped.

  She said, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” and returned inside. Eventually the man wandered away and she checked the counters to see if anything was missing. By then Kori had gone as well and the shop was empty. She searched for music on the radio. She felt a breeze; the pinwheels spun. At the window there were faces pressed against the glass, looking in.

  He was their first guest in over a year. They sat at the kitchen table, her father at the head. A large red cloth had been placed over the table, covering its metal legs and its plastic top stained with oil. Her father ate the rice noodles slowly, lowering his mouth to meet his chopsticks. They were quiet at first, listening to the cars on the road and a child’s laughter. Through the window behind Kori was a view of the darkening field and the surrounding woods.

  He had worked at the railway, he told them, as a conductor. He wore a uniform and a cardboard hat and punched holes into tickets. He straightened his shoulders and said, “Tickets, please,” in a stern voice and Sojin laughed. He saw the country in this way. From Pusan to Seoul, and up and down the coast. There was decent money to be earned, especially on the longer trips, but the time had come to leave it.

  “This is about as good a home as I can imagine,” he said. He had begun thinking about that these past years, now that he had been gone for so long. It was why he returned. He found little comfort elsewhere. There was childhood here, the memory of his mother. Her death left him with an emptiness, he said, and spoke the words calmly. Sojin didn’t answer. Perhaps all his life he had been striving to fill it, he added, and had looked everywhere but the very place where it started.

  “She was a good woman,” he said.

  “We were too hard,” Sojin said, although she meant others and not herself. “It was a different time.”

  “Do you think so?”

  She couldn’t tell if he meant it earnestly or with sarcasm. “Yes,” she said, conscious of her sincerity.

  After dinner her father retired early to his room and she showed Kori around the house. In the hallway he studied the watercolors and the framed medal her father had earned for helping civilians cross the Han River during the first days of the war. On a shelf he examined the wooden animals she had purchased at a flea market. He walked through the rooms as though he were at a museum. In Sojin’s bedroom he commented on each photograph, then he looked around at the vase on her desk, a notebook, and the shop keys hanging on the wall.

  “I thought you’d be married,” he said. “I thought there would be children.”

  She laughed. “I forgot,” she said.

  He pointed at the plain wooden box on the bureau. She opened it and showed him the necklaces and the rings. “It’s what I kept,” she said. “Of hers.”

  “You never wear them,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You should.” He lifted one of the necklaces to the light, admiring the chain and the pendant in the shape of a teardrop. “And you’re well?” he asked, meaning the business.

  “We have tourists now,” she said. “You saw. It’s more than I could ever want.”

  He seemed pleased but distracted. He returned the necklace to the box. “It’ll hold you, then?” he asked, and she nodded.

  He was let go, she realized suddenly. It was why he returned. With his savings he bought a home up in the hills, one he could afford. He didn’t want to tell her. She felt affection for him then and wanted to reach for his arm but chose not to.

  “And you’ll work here?” she said.

  “At the club,” he said. “In a little while. Cutting grass, keeping the course trimmed. I’ll work the machines.”

  “You’ll do well.”

  On the back steps they drank tea, looking out at the hills and the last light of day. The fields were quiet, the air cool. In the dark, televisions flickered behind half-shut curtains.

  “You must show me the house,” she said.

  “Soon,” he said.

  She offered help if he needed it, unpacking boxes, cleaning.

  “I can manage,” he said.

  She was surprised at her disappointment. And then she remembered. “I have something for you,” she said, standing. “Something I’ve been waiting to give you.”

  She led him around to a shed. She opened the door and went inside to turn on the light. She waved away the floating dust. Mosquitoes and moths gathered around the bulb. Her bicycle stood against the far wall, along with a wheelbarrow and tools. Beside that was something covered in a tarp. She lifted the tarp to reveal a blue motorbike leaning on its stand.

  “Bring it home with you,” she said.

  “You saved it,” he said, astonished.

  “Well, of course I did.”

  She drove it on occasion to the coast but she didn’t tell him this. She handed him a plastic jug containing fuel. He looked doubtful as he pushed the motorbike out of the shed, filled the tank, and wiped the seat with his hand. He started it. It rumbled, then hummed. He switched on the headlight and a slim white path spread against the grass and the trees. A neighbor looked out his window but then lost interest. In the field a brother and sister were kicking a ball.

  He asked if she wanted to go for a ride but she shook her head. “Not tonight,” she said, mentioning her father.

  From the front of her house Sojin watched as Kori headed down the street. She finished her tea and drank his as well. She stayed to see the glow of his headlight move up the hills to his new home, expecting it would. Instead it cut through the road in the woods and then dimmed. She held the cups, unsure of where he had gone.

  He used to spend his nights in the burned forest. She followed him once, from a distance, guided by his flashlight. He carried a small rucksack. He stopped often and bent down on one knee, speaking to himself. Remnants of the fire lay scattered everywhere. He collected pots and knives, mirrors and
melted lipstick canisters. He found watches and rings and necklaces and wore them. He unearthed a possum’s skull and called it human.

  Throughout that week he visited the store every day. “Getting the house ready,” he told her. At the start of the weekend Sojin prepared lunch and dinner for her father and then she and Kori drove along the coastal road on his motorbike. She held him by his narrow hips. To their left lay the ocean, the tide high in the late afternoon. There were surfers, three of them, wearing wetsuits the color of sealskin, their bellies against the boards, each wave lifting them. To the right was the forest and beyond that the peak of Tamra Mountain at the center of the island.

  They went to the caves. She hoped, like a child, that they would use a shirt and a stick for a torch. “Did you bring them with you?” she joked with him, taking his arm. They sat inside the cave and listened to the hollow sound of water dripping and she thought of whales. She shut her eyes. She felt the walls move, the way she used to imagine, and the world receded with the light of day.

  The next week, in the evening, they went to the beach. Campers were there now and she heard the various languages spoken among them. Some lit a bonfire. Sojin and Kori sat against a hollowed log at the edge of the woods. Smoke towered up toward the stars, obscuring the sky, turning it violet. She was content to observe the large crowd and thought now that time had everything to do with how you thought of someone and that it had helped him and she was thankful. She planted her palms against the sand, wondering how long the beach had existed, how long it had felt the sun and been cooled by the stars. The sand formed to the shape of her body and she found comfort in this.

  She smelled the sweetness of the ocean, heard the slow hum of the swells. Down the beach, the drunks poured vodka into the flames and then danced. A girl, tall with blond hair woven into thin braids, stood to stretch. Sojin saw a man who resembled the one who had come to her store, the one she couldn’t understand. He sat beside a woman and their mouths moved. There were others, too, their faces familiar against the fire.

  “It’s the settled life I want,” Kori said. “You yearn for that after being away.”

  She believed him because he knew it better than she did. She supposed staying here was what she had always wanted, that by not leaving, she had made a choice. Or perhaps there had never been a choice and that the town, this island, had kept her. She had been willing. Still was.

  He went to retrieve his rucksack from the motorbike. It was small and dark blue, made of nylon with heavy zippers. He took out a notebook, one he used when they were children, he said. She hadn’t known. He opened it now to show her what he had written—I have found three types of trees in the hills, her eyes change color—statements that made little sense to him anymore. But he wanted her to see it, he insisted.

  It wasn’t charity, she said to herself, looking at him. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t sympathy either. There was a life in this and she felt both the old hope and the questions, her lack of courage. There was affection still but at this moment she wasn’t sure whether she had ever known him or had known him too well.

  There was loneliness here, it rose from her skin like a scent, she wouldn’t deny it. There were the men who were drawn to that. She remained silent, bringing her knees up toward her chest. He took her hand.

  She thought of the days when she did not see him and the days when she looked for him. She thought of how they used to fight the boys and kick balls of tape and it all seemed to her just then that it wasn’t her at all but a different person, one that had left. The caves, too, even though they had visited them a week ago. The memory was already slipping. And she did not know why.

  She was surprised at the words she spoke: “We knew an island once, Kori. But it wasn’t this one. It wasn’t the one back then either. It was ours. And it was imagined.” She didn’t regret saying so.

  “We’ll run your store,” he said. “Together.”

  “Have patience with me, Kori.”

  “We’ll care for your father. Until the end.” He grew excited, the words coming out fast. “It’ll be a new life. We’ll go places.” He leaned closer and his fingertips brushed against her hair and the string around her neck and she instinctively pressed her hand against her chest.

  “No,” she said.

  He pulled away. He flipped through his notebook and she glanced at the cloud faces he had drawn.

  “Kori,” she said, reaching for his hand. There was time, she told him. He was here to stay. She asked for patience again.

  On the beach the campers had grown silent, gathered around the fire. She brushed sand from her legs, then stood to go. They left the beach and returned to the coastal road. Once more, on the motorbike, she held his hips. The shoreline darkened. As they went faster she pressed her ear against his back and thought of swimming and listened for his heart.

  That night she joined her father in his bedroom. Together, in the darkness, on the small couch beside his bed, they watched television. The blinds were closed, the way her father preferred. His face glowed silver blue and appeared much younger, smooth and untainted. She thought of Kori as an old man and then as a boy and she wondered what his father looked like, as she often did, and whether he was still alive and what it was he had done and how he had come to know Kori’s mother. She used to think of all this during school lessons, or later, when they took their day trips, in the quiet hours when they spoke little, their silence another language, an altogether different conversation through which he told her: I am afraid of myself. And in her mind she held him the way she should have.

  She took her father’s hand. It was warm and soft and he rubbed her fingers with his thumb, slowly, the way a blind person might read. They were watching a show with singers performing and the camera turned to the crowd during the songs, young girls clapping and old women shaking their hips and raising their arms. It was a show her mother used to watch, for the singing. Her father had bought her mother a karaoke machine one Christmas and she used to spend hours with the microphone. She was an awful singer. And Sojin would laugh in her room, covering her mouth, loving her.

  She rested her head against him and inhaled his old smell. He had crossed rivers. He had once carried a rifle and saw faces that bled. He had run and shouted and wept. He had found love and raised a child.

  With her lips close to his ear, she said to him: “You did all that was right. Know that it was of worth, if you don’t already.” And then she pressed her cheek against the side of his face. She wiped her eyes. He laughed at something on the television. Although it was warm, she pulled his blanket over him and tucked it under his chin. She shut his door as quietly as she could, leaving the television on.

  For the rest of the evening she sat on the front step and watched the line of hills blend into the sky. The low stars. The lights above the street burst white as they came on, then flickered dimly. The brother and sister appeared, kicking a ball down the street. They spent every night out here, until their parents called through the windows. She hoped to watch them grow old.

  Beyond them lay the fields and the forest that once caught fire, though she first saw the sky. It resembled the sun rising in darkness, she remembered, swallowing everything it touched. She heard shouting and saw through the window her neighbors running, the bare feet of a man who left footprints against the dirt, the tapping slippers of a woman. She rushed across the fields with her parents as the sirens approached. She looked for Kori. She watched the planes come in from the mainland and sweep by the hills, the firemen lifting their spitting hoses. Trees thinned, heat causing the forest to flutter. The sky was red and thick, as though it were slowly descending. She heard wood crack, the barking of dogs. The bystanders silent. The fire raged. It seemed the earth had opened to reveal the great mouth of a dragon. Kori, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

  It was then a figure—a woman or a girl, she couldn’t tell—emerged from the burning forest and onto the field, stumbling. And then the flames behind her turned into
fingers, a hand, and it reached for her, hungrily, as though it had been wanting to for years. It touched her, placing a halo over her head, and the halo glowed blue and green, the woman’s mouth opening, her coal eyes, her twisting shape. The length of her hair. The rush of firemen. Her father running. The sigh of leaves.

  Sojin held her mother’s hand, her body warm against the fire. The burning woman like an escaped angel. And although she never admitted it to anyone, she thought it beautiful.

  She never forgave herself for thinking that.

  It had been the pig farmer’s daughter. Her dog had fled and she had gone looking for him.

  Kori did not come to the store the next day. After closing and locking the doors, she walked home in the early evening, stopping at the country club to watch the golfers, the white flashes flying over the hills like stars. She walked beside the fields and turned onto her road, waving at a neighbor who was tending to a garden. A girl rode past her on a bicycle, kicking dust.

  She did not go immediately into the house but stood by its entrance. Through the window she saw her father sitting on the couch, holding his cane as if he were about to stand any minute now. She thought: if she stayed out here in front of the door, how long would it take for him to notice she had yet to return, before he approached the window and looked out?

  When she was young she had once watched him run the length of the field with the neighborhood children. She had been helping her mother in the kitchen. She did not know exactly what he was doing at first but then spotted the ball he was kicking through the grass, his arms gesturing high in the air, his body growing dimmer as he ran farther and farther into the distance. “Mama,” she said, tugging on her sleeve, pressing her palm against the window. “Mama. Is Papa coming back?”

  Now she entered the house and brought her father to the kitchen. At the table she sat beside him while he ate his noodles and she spoke of the shop. When he was finished she lifted the napkin from his shirt collar and folded it for tomorrow. On his way to his room, he said, “Someone came by for you today.” She placed the bowl in the sink. “Was it Kori, Papa? Do you remember?” He looked at her blankly. She held his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said.