I'll Be Right There

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  The three of us used the same notebook when we took turns writing stories. We would go to the library or to a café, and she would open to a clean page in that notebook filled with lists of food organized by date. One of us would begin by writing down a sentence. The next person would write the next sentence, and so on. It would begin with random thoughts, but after a while we would get more serious about what we were writing. Once, Miru wrote, Hands are my favorite part of a person. I followed that with Pitiful, gracious hands that never have a moment’s rest. Myungsuh wrote, You can tell a person’s life from their hands. Watching our sentences accumulate one line after another felt like watering a bean and waiting for the sprout to appear. I thought about how Miru would rest her left hand on top of her copy of We Are Breathing whenever the three of us continued one another’s sentences.

  “What’s wrong?” Miru asked me again.

  This time, she was the one who looked worried. Her eyes were fixed on me. The slender fold in her left eyelid looked deeper than the one on the right. I had never looked this closely at her eyes before, my own having always been drawn to her scarred hands first. Her glossy black hair blew in the wind and covered her smooth forehead. Was everything Miru had written about hands that day not fiction after all? After Myungsuh wrote, I bow my head in respect to all hands rough with labor, Miru had added a very long passage: To hold someone’s hand, you must first know when to let go. If you miss the chance to let go of a hand that you have carelessly grabbed, the moment will pass and turn awkward. I had gotten off the bus and was coming out of the underpass in front of the school when I bumped into him. I meant to say hello but grabbed his hand instead. His thin hand rested in mine. His strong bones. The skin felt rough. He smiled with his eyes and squeezed my hand back. I should have let go then, but we started walking together hand in hand. The pleasantness vanished and was replaced with an uncomfortable silence. Since we had missed the chance to let go naturally, I became more and more aware of my hand. It would have been too awkward to drop his, but I couldn’t keep holding it either. He must have felt the same. We didn’t say a word but continued walking to school, awkwardly holding hands. Sweat was dripping from mine, I was so intent on figuring out when I should let go. On pins and needles I walked and, after a while, I started to calm down. I wanted to stay that way forever, walking hand in hand with him. We passed a hotel. We passed a bookstore and a clothing store. When we crossed the street and reached that spot across from the auditorium, the campus was noisy. There were students sitting on every bench and standing around every pay phone and bulletin board. He looked at me and asked, “Can I have my hand back now?” He sounded like he was asking for my permission. I finally let go. He patted me on the shoulder and strode on ahead of me. Was the hand that belonged to “him” in Miru’s story that day Professor Yoon’s hand?

  “Ouch! Let go of my hand!”

  I loosened my grip.

  “Do you hold Myungsuh’s hand that tightly, too?”

  “What?”

  “You squeeze too tight!”

  We looked at each other and started laughing. Miru tried to wiggle her hand free, but I held on. Suddenly she asked me to meet her in front of the Dongsung Bathhouse at three on Saturday afternoon. It was a neighborhood bathhouse. From my room, I could see the redbrick chimney rising up between the old houses and the white letters that spelled out “Dongsung Bathhouse,” but I had never been inside.

  “Are you asking me to go to the public bath with you?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  It was the first time she had invited me somewhere alone—and to a public bath, of all places, not the movies or a café? I looked at Nak Sujang. He was standing on top of the fortress wall and pointing east, as if his body were a compass, showing the others where Samseon-dong and Changsin-dong were. He explained that we had climbed up the western slope of Naksan Mountain, and down there was Dongsung-dong, and over there was Ihwa-dong, and over there was Changshindong. Myungsuh looked back at Miru and me. The setting sun bathed him in its light.

  Natsume Sōseki was an esteemed Japanese writer from the Meiji period who traveled to England on a Japanese government scholarship. His experience in England was so upsetting that he temporarily suffered a nervous breakdown. After becoming a writer, he quit his post as professor at Tokyo Imperial University, which was an honorable position to have held, in order to concentrate on writing novels. Writing seemed to be the only way for him to accept and overcome the shock of modernity that had so scarred him mentally. They said that in his later years he spent his mornings studying English literature and writing the modern fiction that he had mastered, and his afternoons composing Chinese poetry. You could say that he split his day in half in order to travel between East and West. Some say that it shows how refined he was, but I see it as a mental struggle to not be sucked under by either side.

  |||

  Today, I was over at Yoon’s, sitting on the wooden deck outside, when she showed me something in Miru’s notebook. It had been a while since we last wrote stories together, and we were getting ready to start a new round of sentences. Miru had gone inside to wash her hands first. Listed in Miru’s notebook were the names of people who had disappeared for suspicious reasons and the details of their cases.

  “Do you think she’ll ever find out what happened to her sister’s boyfriend?” she asked.

  As we continued searching for him, all we found were other missing people who had died gruesome deaths—we never found any trace of Mirae’s boyfriend. While Yoon was poring over the notebook, I pushed her hair back and peered at her face. Her dark, questioning eyes met mine.

  “If Miru ever asks you to help her look, say no!” I said.

  I sounded crazy, but she just looked at me.

  “Promise me,” I said. “You won’t be helping her if you do.”

  She asked me what on earth was wrong and looked back down at Miru’s notebook.

  “Don’t let her leave,” I said.

  She looked back and forth between me and the notebook and then suddenly kissed me on the lips.

  —Brown Notebook 5

  CHAPTER 6

  Empty House

  On Saturday, I was just about to leave when he called.

  “What are you up to?” he asked.

  “I’m heading out the door to meet Miru.”

  “You’re meeting Miru?”

  I could have just said yes and left it at that, but I hesitated. It was the first time she and I would be hanging out without him.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “We’re going to the public bath.”

  “Dongsung Bathhouse?”

  “How did you know?”

  He let out a long sigh. I felt bad for leaving him out. But he couldn’t exactly go to the public bath with us. Neither of us said anything for a moment. I looked down at my shower basket filled with a towel, a comb, shampoo, and other bath items.

  “It’s good,” he said finally.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that exactly, so I kept listening.

  “It’s good that Miru has you.”

  He hung up without saying goodbye. His voice was so flat that I was caught off guard by how distant he seemed. It felt like very long ago that we had walked around the city together and watched Miru straighten crooked signs and line up scattered flowerpots, or drank coffee and went to the Twelve Young Artists Exhibit, or wrote stories together, or went to Professor Yoon’s class. I stood there with the phone in my hand long after he had hung up

  My father had brought the telephone the last time he and my cousin came to visit. He had applied for a phone number and installed it for me. The whole time he was visiting, he fretted over the fact that I lived on top of such a steep hill. He always called early in the morning or late at night. The phone would ring, and I would know at once that it was him. I was never wrong. My father and cousin called the most often, followed by Myungsuh. I had written my phone number on his and Miru’s palms. Miru called me exactly once to s
ay, “So this is the right number,” and hung up.

  When I stepped outside, I saw the mailman putting a letter in my mailbox. Since I had never received any mail at that address, I was going to just leave it there, but the handwriting on the envelope sticking out of the mailbox looked familiar. I bent down and peeked inside to discover it was from Dahn. I opened it immediately.

  October 9

  Yoon,

  I’m heading up to the city. I’ll call you in a few days before I get on the train. I got your address and phone number from your father.

  Dahn

  Dahn’s letter, written in his energetic handwriting, was so brief that it could have been sent by telegram. He didn’t ask how I was or say how he was doing. I had not told Dahn that I had moved back to the city. I hadn’t even sent him my contact information. It must have hurt his feelings, but he never mentioned it. I put Dahn’s letter in my pocket with my mother’s ring and walked down the alley. A cold breeze blew down the back of my neck. As I walked in silence with my head down on the way to meet Miru, I kept touching the letter in my pocket. I realized that this was the longest I had ever gone without talking to him. I saw Myungsuh and Miru every day, but I had not told Dahn how to find me. The truth was that I couldn’t bring myself to. Each time I thought of him, I was reminded of the way he had said, “You don’t love me.”

  As soon as I saw the public bath, Miru’s skirt caught my eye. She stood out everywhere she went because of that skirt. Even more so when the seasons changed. She stood out in the summer because the pattern clashed with everything around her, and the rest of the year, she stood out because the fabric was meant for warm weather. Miru was holding the tickets for the public bath—she had already paid for us to get in. When I walked up to her, she handed me a locker key. We went in and stood in front of locker numbers sixty-one and sixty-two. I took my clothes off and started folding them. I glanced over at Miru, who was unhooking her skirt.

  “Why do you always wear that?” I asked.

  Miru hesitated. Then she folded the skirt and put it in the locker without answering. She took off her shirt as well, folded it, and put it inside. Even when we were alone together, Miru was often so lost in thought that I felt compelled to ask what she was thinking. She slipped off her underwear and placed it on top of her clothes. Everything—her bra, her underwear, and even the shirt she wore with the skirt—was white.

  Though it was a Saturday, there weren’t many other women. In one corner, a young mother was shampooing her daughter’s hair. The girl looked like she was around four years old. There were two women in the tub: one who looked old enough to be a grandmother and a middle-aged woman who looked like her daughter-in-law. Miru and I rinsed off first under the standing showers.

  “We had a public bath like this close to where we grew up. My sister and I went there all the time. Our mother would buy us a month’s worth of bath tickets at a time. We would get up in the morning and head straight there to wash our faces, shampoo our hair, and play in the water …” With her face covered in water droplets, Miru smiled as if she had just remembered something. Her cheeks were red from the heat.

  “The owner of the bath had four sons. He used to get drunk and line them up out front and recite their business motto. Passersby would stop and watch. All four of the boys were very handsome, not to mention good students, good athletes, and well behaved. The other boys were constantly being compared with them. ‘They get good grades, so why can’t you?’ ‘They’re tall, so why are you so short?’ I think the owner did that so he could show them off. He had a big smile on his face each time. My sister and I used to go there just to hear him. After a while, everyone in the neighborhood had all but memorized the bathhouse’s business motto.”

  I asked her what it was and, with a solemn look on her face, she recited it for me line by line: “You all have to clean up sometime. It’s just a matter of time. And if we do our job right, we’ll clean up, too.”

  We laughed at the pun. The woman washing her daughter’s hair must have been listening because she also started giggling. Even the grandmother soaking in the tub had a smile on her face.

  “One of those boys was Myungsuh!” Miru said.

  “What?”

  I plopped down on the floor under the shower and burst out laughing. The more I tried to stop, the harder I laughed until I was almost in tears. I could see Miru’s body clearly, even through the cloud of steam. Her legs, which were always covered up by the skirt, were long and her back was straight. Her hair was pinned up with a gold barrette, baring the line of her neck where it curved gently into her shoulders. While we were showering, the tub emptied. I climbed in first, and Miru followed. We leaned against the tiled wall side by side, stretched our legs out, and sank into the water. My cousin used to invite me to the public bath with her, but I always avoided it, saying, “Who goes bathing together?” She would counter by saying, “We can scrub each other’s backs.” But I would retreat into my room. What would she have said if she saw Miru and me in the public bath together? The only person I had ever gone to a public bath with was my mother. I pictured the way my mother used to bathe me at home when I was little: boiling water on the stove, pouring it into a big tub, adding cold water, and testing the temperature with her elbow. She was so young back then. I remembered copying her and dipping my little elbow into the water. She used to pluck peach blossoms when they were in bloom and float them in the bathwater. “To whiten our little Yoon’s skin,” she would say. She also used to clip the irises that bloomed all along the alley outside our gate and boil them in a large pot of water to add to my bath. I remembered dozing off in the water as she scrubbed my back and washed my face, the soft, delicate scent of blossoms tickling my nose.

  I felt sad suddenly, so I poked Miru’s foot with my own under the water. She tapped mine back in response. I kicked her again, a little harder than before. She followed suit. Our little game started off quietly but soon turned to splashing. The middle-aged woman, who was washing the grandmother’s hair, looked over at us. Embarrassed, I rolled over onto my stomach and rested my arms against the edge of the tub; Miru copied me. The scars on her hands shimmered in the water.

  “She used to sit in the water and wonder what the weather was like outside,” Miru said.

  “Who?”

  “My sister,” she said. “Do you wonder what the weather’s like outside, too?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “When you’re in here, it feels like another world. Sometimes I do wonder, is it raining out there? Or maybe snowing?”

  “My sister used to say that, too.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Miru dipped her face in the water. Drops of water hung from her eyelashes.

  “She wore the same clothes every summer for four years. But the next summer, she took them out to discover that they were threadbare and unwearable. The sleeves were frayed. She took them to a seamstress and asked her to make her a new set in the exact same style from the exact same fabric. The tailor examined the frayed clothes and said she could make the same style but the fabric was no longer available. So my sister left. I told her the tailor could make her something better, but she said there was no point if it wasn’t the same fabric … That’s what she was like.”

  I began to wonder about Miru’s older sister.

  “She also had a sweater our mother knitted for her in elementary school that she wore until middle school. She grew and grew, but she kept putting it on even when it rode up in the back. The year she started middle school, she grew fourteen centimeters. The sweater didn’t fit anymore. She asked our mother to knit her the exact same sweater as a birthday present. Our mother had stopped knitting by then, but my sister badgered her until she started re-knitting it with new yarn in the same color. She even learned a new knitting technique and added a pocket, which the first sweater did not have. When she gave my sister the sweater, my sister said it was different from the old one and refused to wear it. That’s what she was like.”

>   Miru’s face suddenly darkened. “To tell the truth, I don’t really know. What kind of person she was, I mean. We were only a year apart in age, but she was born twelve years after our parents got married. They said they thought they couldn’t have a baby and had given up when my sister suddenly came along. Our mother became pregnant with me just two months after my sister was born. I guess that’s why I felt like I had been keeping an eye on her ever since I was in our mother’s belly. I must have been really attached to her. When we were little, I did everything she did. If she bobbed her hair, I got mine bobbed, and when she started learning piano, I started learning piano. When we played hide-and-go-seek with the other kids, they only had to look for my sister to find me. I was always right there beside her. It wasn’t because she was older than me. I just didn’t feel like myself unless I was with her. Do you know what I mean?”

  I was an only child, so it was hard for me to understand.

  “When she was nine, my sister announced that she wanted to become a ballerina. I still remember the look on her face when she said it. She was enrolled in elementary school first, of course, but I went to school right along with her. When she moved up to the second grade, I stayed behind in the first grade. So I was in second grade and she was in third grade when she said she was going to be a ballerina when she grew up. Up until then, I had assumed she had no secrets from me, but I had no idea what ballet was. I felt like ballet was pushing us apart for the first time. Maybe it would have been better if we had grown apart then …”

  Water dripped from the ceiling onto Miru’s shoulder.

  “I decided that I had to do whatever it took to become a ballerina like my sister. We started taking lessons every day after school. One of the girls in our class had been studying ballet since she was six. My sister burst into tears when she heard that. She thought she couldn’t compete with the girl and complained that she would “never get that time back.” She wept hysterically. She was only nine, but she already knew what it felt like to have her heart broken. Because she came along so late, my sister was very special to our parents. To console her, they not only had her take lessons at the academy but they even installed a barre in the house so she could practice. They invited the ballet teacher over to give her private lessons. I followed along beside her. I heard the ballet teacher whisper to her that she had the right body type for ballet, but the teacher just looked at me apologetically. I didn’t care. She was right. I wasn’t as flexible as my sister, and I didn’t enjoy it the way she did. I just followed along because she was doing it.”