Everything Belongs to Us

by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

  There was a permanent ridge between her mother’s brows that hadn’t been there before Kyungmin first left home, a slump to her back that made her seem like somebody’s ancient grandmother instead of her own recently vigorous mother. Despite these obvious signs of grief, she spoke about Kyungmin as if discussing someone else’s daughter. What’s done is done, she seemed to say. What’s spilt is spilt. It was Namin who felt newly rattled each time she saw the baby, as if he had only ever been an idea, a symbol of her sister’s rebellion that would eventually vanish. Even though she had seen her sister’s pregnant belly and, indirectly, in a photo at his apartment, the father of the child—she found she was still unprepared for the reality of his existence. And now Kyungmin was gone, leaving him in her place like a conjuring trick. One for one. An unequal exchange.

  “She’s made her decision,” her mother said. “Can’t force someone to be a mother.”

  “She made her decision, but what about us?” Namin asked. “What are we supposed to do with him?” Already she had a sinking feeling about who would end up caring for him in Kyungmin’s absence. Her parents had to work—and who else was there?

  Her mother looked critically at the child. “He’s weaker than a day-old hatchling. I imagine we’d better get some weight on him.”

  Namin waited to hear the end of that sentence, but there wasn’t anything else. We’d better get some weight on him—and then what? Would they keep him? If not, what difference did it make how much he weighed?

  “And then?”

  “And then the next thing,” her mother snapped. Her eyes flashed, daring Namin to ask another question. She shut her mouth.

  Namin wrung out the boiled diapers to hang on the line in the courtyard. The steaming cloths quickly cooled to cold, heavy lumps. Wringing the excess water felt like trying to squeeze barely thawed meat. Her hands turned bright red, then fell numb. By the morning, the fabric would have dried to planks on the line, rough on the baby’s skin.

  Sterilizing cloth, dissolving formula, they were already making decisions. The baby, as small as he was, seemed wise to his predicament. Whether they wrapped him in Namin’s undershirts—the smallest clothing they had available—or rags, whether they fed him cold, lumpy milk or neglected to change him for hours, he made small mewing noises like a kitten but did not cry. He took his bottle with single-minded determination, as if he had been given his work order. Gain weight. Thrive.

  He was building his case, becoming a person his family could not deny.

  The case for kin.

  —

  METHODICALLY, NAMIN WENT to every bar in Itaewon. She took a photo of her sister. She described Hal. Have you seen them? Have they been here? The hostesses and bar owners treated her as if she were some kind of door-to-door evangelist, oozing that same naive high-mindedness that embarrassed and bored them. They glanced at the photo. Namin hadn’t been able to find a recent one, so it was Kyungmin in her black-and-white high school uniform, her hair cut severely to the ear. Nope, not here. Try down the street. They were tired of family members coming with photos of girls who had once been predictable and good, girls who had disappeared into the night.

  Namin went into a bar called Starlight, where the proprietor plainly did not believe she was looking for her sister.

  “Your sister?” He cocked his head and seemed to peer around her, as if considering how she might look in a different dress. “What did you say her name was?” When Namin repeated her name, she knew he wasn’t listening.

  “How old are you? You’ll do all right. I can offer you Thursday and Friday nights to start.” He smiled broadly, a man happy with his decision. “You’ll be making good money in no time. With your looks?” He winked. “No time at all.”

  Namin thought, This must be the place. This must be where her sister had started. Not because Kyungmin wouldn’t have seen through him, but because she must have been desperate enough to agree.

  “If my sister comes here”—she enunciated coldly, carefully—“tell her we need her at home. Tell her to get in touch. It’s important. Please—”

  “Thursdays and Fridays.” He wet his finger and smoothed out an air bubble in the black vinyl covering the windows. Namin imagined all the smears of spit layered on that window, all the air bubbles flattened and folded into slits. “You think about it,” he said.

  Kyungmin’s son came to be called Dori, which was not a proper name but a nonsense baby word. Dori-dori-dori, something you said while tickling an infant to make him gurgle and smile. When Kyungmin had arrived with the baby in such scandalous shape, they hadn’t stopped to ask what she’d named him. Thinking there was plenty of time later, thinking it was the least of their concerns. They were preoccupied with rash ointments and cheap formula that, rather than dissolve, gathered in gray clumps inside the bottle. If they were honest, they knew they were punishing her by not asking his name. Not fully acknowledging her right to be a mother. Kyungmin had matched that expectation by walking away.

  That first week Namin stared at the child, peering into his eyes, willing him to tell her what Kyungmin had called him. She realized he would never be able to say, not even when he was older and able to speak. It would be buried so far in his nascent consciousness—if a name had ever existed at all. It was possible that her sister had never called him anything. Sunam had told her what Kyungmin had said at the bar in Itaewon. If it has no father, why should it have a mother?

  It was this fact that made Namin pity him more than anything else: that he would never know what his own mother had imagined for his identity. The elemental gift of a name.

  No one said the family words: grandson, grandmother, nephew. No one counted the days to plan his baekil, his one-hundredth-day celebration. Everything surrounding his existence was suspended in uncertainty. Who was he? Did he belong to them or to his other family in America? Would they keep him and, if so, for how long? If they didn’t, what reason would they ultimately give themselves for letting him go? Would they justify abandoning the baby as they had justified leaving Hyun? He’ll be more comfortable there….

  Until then, Dori was a permanent visitor, a burden, a future, a past. A homeless orphan with a startlingly familiar face.

  To help with expenses, they found a boarder to rent Namin’s room. Namin was relocated to the living room and the baby placed under her care. Her parents, the only income earners, needed to sleep if they were to survive sixteen-hour days on their feet in the cold, with only a plastic tent to protect them from the elements. To clear room for her sleeping mat, all the living room furniture was shoved against the wall. When she could find the time to study, she had to climb over the sofa and wedge herself into her desk like a puzzle piece, shimmying sideways into the chair since there wasn’t enough room to pull it out. It was like being suspended in the eye of a tornado, living and sleeping with all the artifacts of her life crowded around as if ready to tumble down.

  In a few days, the Kang household regained a semblance of its pre-Dori rhythm. Her parents went to work. Kyungmin was still missing. Only Namin’s life was completely upturned. The baby colonized huge portions of her day that she should have spent studying. Instead she was washing his diapers, feeding him, changing him, walking him around when he was fussy, begging him to sleep.

  The first weeks passed this way in a black haze of panic. Namin was so exhausted, she fell asleep as soon as she sat down. The bitter taste of bile was constant in the back of her throat, threatening to spill over. Everything she ate turned to lead in her stomach.

  The neighborhood seemed to come alive with advice flung at her door, as if she had suddenly become an underdog fighter facing a fierce opponent. Don’t pick him up the minute he starts crying, he’ll become a terror. Don’t mention his mother, they hear everything even at this age, you know. Better watch he doesn’t eat you out of house and home, must take after his father. They were no longer fans wishing her well, but a nosy mob jeering her rough odds. Namin became jittery about leaving the house. She wan
ted to hide out in her room and not see or speak to anyone until she had regained what she remembered of her composure. Only she no longer had a room to hide in, and she could not be alone in her house. She had an infant and a boarder—both strangers, both intruders. And even if she tried to hide away, people came to her door. People who never listened when she told them to go away.

  “What you should have done is taken in a female boarder,” Jisun said. Namin had said nothing about the baby, and here she was, playing with Dori on the floor; Sunam must have told her. Just thinking about him talking about her problems, especially to Jisun, enraged her. But Namin didn’t have the energy to fight anyone other than herself. Herself and this creature, who as the days wore on discovered his voice. Who wailed with full-throated agony, making up for lost time. Jisun was bent over Dori, letting him grab her little finger, pulling it back and forth as if he were a fish on a line. “Look at him. He’s so serious,” she said. “I guess he really is related to you guys after all.

  “Anyway, back to what I was saying. A female boarder, someone with experience with babies. She could take care of the baby and pay you a little less for the room. Or pay no rent. Whatever makes sense.”

  Whatever makes sense. Nothing made sense. She hated how Jisun’s glib suggestions implied that they had overlooked an obvious solution, as if they only needed guidance from someone like her to haul themselves out of their troubles.

  “Just the room wouldn’t be enough—whoever it was would want to be paid.” It was like explaining physics to a child. “Anyway, why would a woman like that board all the way out here? She could make a lot more working for a richer family.” Or even the factory, she was going to say, but she didn’t want to incite another one of Jisun’s speeches. “Like your ajumma,” Namin said instead.

  “You know I wasn’t a baby when she came. She didn’t raise me.”

  “The point is, she was a young woman once when she hired herself out to live with another family. Can you imagine someone like your ajumma living here? As it is, we pay the neighbor when I have to go to campus. We couldn’t afford to pay for more than that.”

  “Maybe I could help,” Jisun said.

  Namin looked at her. “You want to watch the baby?”

  “Well, no. Not that. But I can help you find someone to watch him—”

  “I already told you, we can’t afford it.”

  “But couldn’t you let me pay for it? I’m sure I have the money. Let me, Namin. It would be so much easier for you,” Jisun said in a rush, as if heaping on more words would prevent Namin from turning her down. “You wouldn’t have to do a thing. I’ll take care of everything. You don’t even have to think about it.”

  Namin felt the blood rush to her face, darts of heat and pain as if she were being attacked from the inside. She ached to say yes, to finally surrender to the reality between them. It would be so easy for Jisun; the money made no difference to her. But for Namin, it would be lifesaving. Like being lifted from a scene moments before a catastrophic explosion and taken away to safety, as if she had never been in danger.

  But she couldn’t say yes. She couldn’t agree that she was powerless and Jisun so carelessly powerful. I’m sure I have the money. She had to give it away to remember she even had it.

  “People want to think about their own lives. At least I do,” Namin said. “I can’t accept.”

  “But wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t have to think about certain things? Like rushing back to pick up the kid. Or how long it’s been since his last bottle. You’re already so busy, Namin. This can’t be what you want to think about right now.”

  It was so absurd that she almost laughed. Of course it wasn’t what she wanted to think about. But it didn’t mean she would take Jisun’s money. Was that what she would do, have Jisun and her money solve all her problems going forward? First, Hyun. Now Dori. The laughter died in her throat.

  “We all have things we have to think about. Even if we don’t want to.”

  “What difference does it make who pays for it? It isn’t even my money, you know that.”

  “And yet you get to give it away,” Namin said. “Seems like your money to me.”

  Jisun didn’t leave immediately after that. She lingered, as if aware of the fact that the door to their relationship was closing for good. This would be one of the last times they were alone together. One of the last times they would remember being young. Though they didn’t feel it at the moment, in retrospect they would see. They were still young then.

  “Do you remember when we visited Hyun, how he thought we were both his sisters?” Jisun asked before leaving. Namin nodded. She remembered how long it had taken her brother to fix her in his mind. So you’re my sister?

  “I always wished we were,” Jisun said. “Sisters, I mean.” She seemed to pause, to give Namin a chance to echo the sentiment. When Namin didn’t, Jisun busied herself tickling the baby, arranging his hair over his soft, bumpy skull, waving his arms in jerky approximations of dancing.

  “She’ll come back,” Jisun said. They both knew she didn’t mean it. It was another form of charity, a small kindness Namin could accept without debt.

  “Sure,” Namin said. “Maybe.”

  It was not true that you could not force someone to be a mother. You could easily make it happen. Namin knew because it was happening to her.

  Every moment Dori was awake, she was longing for the moment when he would close his eyes and sleep.

  She could tie him to her back and walk the length of the small courtyard with a book in her hand. If she kept moving, he was more likely to let her read in peace. But trying to study with an infant on her back was like being hunted, constantly looking over her shoulder and jumping at the smallest sounds. She told herself she would get used to it. She would emulate those women in the market, walking with a platoon of children variously wrapped and hanging from their bodies. But not too used to it. Namin had never felt overly keen about babies to begin with, but now she was certain she would not want any of her own. In one month, she had already paid the penalty of a lifetime.

  She read the same phrases in her texts over and over, her eyes clearly going over the print but her mind shuttered against the meaning. It seemed so long ago that she had been able to read for hours uninterrupted, soaking up oceans of information, limited only by the parameters of her patience and wakefulness. Now every mundane task required a dedicated strategy, combined with dexterities of hand and mind she had not previously considered possible.

  And instead of learning her organic chemistry, her infectious diseases, her general anatomy—Namin learned about babies.

  Why they went naked in the summer. Why they were ever present on a woman’s back. One minute of inattention—he could drown in bathwater too shallow to properly wash a grown man’s foot. He could suffocate from the weight of his own head. Everything was a threat against his life. Everything, including himself.

  Every day, Namin boiled diapers in the same basin she washed him in. First she scraped the soiled muslin with a flat gray stone, washing the mess off her hands afterward. Then she scrubbed it with a hard brush, raising a dun-specked lather more disgusting than the original mess. Then rinse. Boil. Hang dry. Postponing the wash for another day only made it worse—the mess caked into the fabric, becoming harder to scour. The boiling took longer, the stirring and inspecting seemingly endless, while the baby cried and cried. Namin trained herself to do the wash in the afternoon, midway between lunch and dinner, but even the briefest thought of the task ruined whatever she was eating. Sometimes she bolted awake in the middle of the night, gagging.

  A thick rubber cord tied with an overhand knot held the diaper at Dori’s waist. The cord was hollow and soft, more like tubing than a band. As the baby grew, Namin let out the knot. If she forgot and the cord grew tight, it left a red welt around his belly. He grew plump while Namin lost weight. Her shirts billowed around her waist. Pants legs swished at her ankles, slapping like sails in the wind.

&
nbsp; She dreamed constantly about Hyun. He was showing her the house they had built together, the floors glistening with polish. The halls wide enough for his chair. The rooms glided past, every color and texture and smell. See, we did it, we really did it. Inside the house there was a courtyard lined with potted trees. Mature figs and dwarf laceleaf maples and a leaning juniper tree, buffeted by invisible wind. The tree roots grew over the rims of the pots as if at any minute they could crawl up and out. A blue jay screamed from the topmost eave of the roof.

  They need bigger pots, she said. Look, the clay is cracking. They’ll topple.

  Hyun shrugged. But let me show you this other room—the rooms were endless. On and on. You could live in this house for a lifetime and never see the same room twice.

  See what we did, Hyun said. It’s even better than we ever said it would be. Why are you crying?

  She woke up with tears on her face, gasping. The smell of that juniper was still in her nostrils—as if it were planted right outside the door.

  The baby was sleeping on his back, one arm raised to his ear. A frown wrinkled his brow. She could no longer pretend he looked just like Kyungmin. He was becoming a stranger, his foreign genes swallowing up whatever might have been familiar. Namin could already see how he’d look in a year. Three years. Ten. A kid she’d raised. A kid who had nothing to do with her.

  Busan Mother had six children of her own, the eldest twelve and the youngest three. She had arrived in Seoul as a bride more than a decade prior, when her young face, round like a silk cushion, belied the shrewd mannerisms of a woman four times her age. Her regional accent and dialect were so colorful that people in Miari collected her phrases like souvenirs. In the market, the vendors remarked how she always knew when they were fibbing a price or saving a better product for someone else. Like a little devil, they said, affectionately at first but with increasing wariness as the years passed. She had the honeyed tongue of a snake charmer, they said, but the bite of a cobra.