I'll Be Right There

by Kyung-Sook Shin

  “Please, don’t hang up,” I pleaded. During the silence that followed, my fingers felt like they were splitting apart.

  “Who is this?” She finally broke the silence.

  “My name is Jung Yoon.”

  “Jung Yoon?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly.

  “So you’re Jung Yoon.”

  I got down on my knees, the phone gripped in my hands.

  “I read the diary you all wrote,” she said, referring to it as “our” diary, rather than as “Miru’s” diary. “It’s at her grandmother’s house.”

  “Please let me speak to Miru,” I said.

  All of my strength drained out of me. It was like I already knew that I would never hear Miru’s voice again.

  “Please put Miru on,” I begged.

  Her mother sighed.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  The phone went silent.

  “Please don’t hang up.”

  “She’s dead.”

  I didn’t comprehend her words at first.

  “She starved herself.”

  Finally, it sank in.

  “Do you hear me?” she said. “She’s gone.”

  I stared blankly out the window at Namsan Tower in the distance. I felt like it was tipping over and crashing down on me.

  Miru’s mother said she’d had no idea that Miru had gone to live in the empty house her grandmother left to her. Likewise, Myungsuh and I had been too caught up in the frenzy happening in the streets to know where Miru was. While he and I were asking if anyone had heard from Miru, she was alone in her grandmother’s house. I wanted to hear more, but her mother said, “It’s all in the past now,” and hung up. A few days later, she called me back. When I answered the phone, she addressed me affectionately as “Yoon-ah.” It felt natural. She told me she was going to Miru’s grandmother’s house and asked if I wanted to join her.

  I went to the station in the city where Miru’s family lived, as her mother instructed. A man who looked like a hired driver came up to me and asked if I was Jung Yoon. I followed him to where Miru’s mother was sitting inside a silvery gray car. She was dressed all in black. I started to get in the front, but she motioned for me to sit next to her in the backseat. Emily was stretched out on the rear dash but didn’t seem to remember me. Miru’s mother and I didn’t say a word to each other on the way to the countryside. Only when the car banked around a sharp curve did she look directly at me. Maybe it was all the black clothes, but her face looked pale. She took my hand—I had been holding on tight to the seat to keep from sliding each time the car took another turn. Her face was blank, but I could feel her warmth and strength as she tried to protect me. I stared straight ahead. Though I didn’t look at her directly, I could sense Miru’s features in her profile: the same nose, forehead, and lips. The long, graceful neck. It was like looking at an older version of Miru. When the curving mountain road finally straightened out, she gently let go of my hand. She glanced at me now and then but mostly stared out the window until we arrived at Miru’s grandmother’s house.

  The house sat at the foot of a mountain. The village was tiny—only three scattered houses.

  “I guess she wanted to live here like her grandmother.” Miru’s mother spoke for the first time since leaving the station.

  “One of the neighbors told me they saw her wearing a hat and baggy pants, carrying a hoe, and working in the yard and the vegetable garden. They were shocked. They thought it was her grandmother’s ghost at first.”

  The house was exactly as Miru had described it. It was as familiar to me as if I had already been there. In the courtyard stood the persimmon tree, plum tree, and cherry tree, and in the cupboard were the brass bowls and brass spoons and chopsticks. In the shed, the farming equipment and tools were neatly organized, and hanging on the wall were all of the things that Miru’s grandmother had used or worn during her life. Her hat, her rubber boots, her raincoat. This must have been the place Miru’s grandmother had built after coming south alone during the war with Miru’s newborn mother on her back. The place that looked just like the childhood home she could never return to. The place where Miru’s older sister injured her knee and was never able to dance again. Where Miru spent her final days alone. I stared at the base of the plum tree. That was where, on the day of the accident, Miru’s sister held a branch like a ballet barre and gave her final performance.

  “The house is going to be knocked down.” Miru’s mother’s hollow voice floated on the air. “That’s why I asked you to come. I wanted you to see it. Since this is where she spent her final days.”

  I pictured a young Miru fitting every pointed object she could find into the padlock and chanting open, open, open.

  Miru’s mother opened the front door of the empty house and turned to look at me. As I turned my gaze away from the plum tree and started to walk toward her, she stepped inside.

  “She had an eating disorder,” Miru’s mother mumbled. “Miru blamed herself for the fact that her sister couldn’t do ballet anymore. Her anorexia started when she refused to eat until her sister was out of the hospital.”

  I pictured how Miru used to write down everything she ate.

  “Once it starts, you can’t stop it. Even when she got as thin as a bamboo skewer, she would start crying and not stop. I don’t know where she got the strength. She used to shake the walls with her crying. She would get better for a while, and then it would flare up again. Even after she started middle school, she was still in treatment. Sometimes we had to force-feed her through a tube when she refused to eat. After she turned fifteen, she stopped having relapses, so we thought it was over.”

  I’d had no idea. I wondered if recording everything she ate was her way of battling the part of her that didn’t want to eat. Miru’s mother went into a room on the far side of the living room. I peeked inside. The floor was scratched, wallpaper torn, wardrobe cracked, and windowsill chipped.

  “Here.” Miru’s mother knelt down and traced her fingers over the scratch marks. “Emily did this.”

  I felt numb, unable to take in what had happened to Miru, but when her mother pointed out the claw marks, I burst into tears. Was Emily all she had as she was dying? I stepped into the room and stroked the scratched wardrobe. Some of the marks were distinct, others faint, and others very long. I pictured the cat’s tiny claws. Emily. I hurriedly wiped my eyes and stood next to Miru’s mother. We stared down at the scratched floor.

  “We had no idea Miru would be here in this rundown place. I made a mistake. I should never have sold that house in the city. She begged us to let her live there with you. Back then, we didn’t think it was good for Miru. At the time I thought that if she moved back into that house, she would never get over what happened to her sister. I was in so much grief that I couldn’t pull myself together. I didn’t have the strength left over to look after Miru. After we sold the house, Miru never spoke to us again … You said your name is Jung Yoon?”

  Miru’s mother’s eyes looked unfocused. She was using my full name, as if she had just learned it for the first time and had never called me Yoon-ah.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I was a bad mother. Especially to Miru.”

  She opened the wardrobe and took a box down from the shelf.

  “These belonged to her.”

  The box held her diary and a bundle of folded letters with bits of tape on them.

  “We took down everything she had taped to the wall.”

  They were letters Miru had written to Myungsuh and me, and to Professor Yoon. She had never sent them.

  “Will you take them?”

  Miru’s mother looked at me quietly. I bit my lip and nodded. There was nothing more I could do—nothing but stand there and watch as her mother wrapped the box in a carrying cloth.

  On the way back to the city, Miru’s mother suddenly said, “We had her cremated and scattered her ashes there.” She kept tying and untying the knot on the carrying cloth, so I could not tel
l where “there” was. She told me Miru had grown so thin that she barely looked human. I turned to look out the window; there was nothing but mountains. “Her body was as light as a snowflake,” she said. Her voice grew faint in my ears. My vision grew hazy until the trees on the hillsides blurred. While Miru was alone in that empty house, while she was refusing to eat, while Emily was clawing the floors, what was I doing? Looking back on it now, I was running around in the streets every day with Myungsuh, my cheeks red with excitement, lost in a sea of a million people. While he and I were banding together with strangers, locking arms and singing, and marching on City Hall, Miru was rustling like a leaf alone in this empty house at the foot of the mountains, writing endless letters to us and taping them to the walls.

  When we arrived back at the station, Miru’s mother did not get out of the car. She wouldn’t even look at me. I stepped out of the car, unable to ask if I could take Emily with me. I hugged the box containing Miru’s diary to my chest and headed toward the station, but I kept glancing back at the car. It showed no signs of leaving. I walked a few more steps and looked back again. It was still there. My own mother’s face came to mind just then. Mama, who felt sorry for dying. Mama, who sent me away when she found out she was sick.

  I turned and ran back to the car, stumbling over my own feet in my urgency to reach her, worried they might take off before I could get there. I knocked on the window. Only when the window began to roll down did I start to breathe again.

  “Please open the door,” I said.

  Miru’s mother looked at me with her empty eyes.

  “Please,” I said.

  She pushed it open. I set the box on the ground, leaned inside, and hugged her. Her dry cheek brushed against mine.

  “I’m sure Miru was very sorry,” I said. “I’m sure she would tell you if she could.”

  “Thank you.” She patted me on the back. “Thank you for not asking why I left her there.”

  I bit my lip. I was in no place to ask her that question. I, too, had abandoned Miru.

  “Go now.” She pushed me away. “Let’s never see each other ag—.”

  Her throat locked up and she couldn’t get the last word out. She struggled to regain her voice. I got into the car and closed the door behind me. It saddened me to think there were relationships like this. Relationships like the one between me and Miru’s mother, where we could not help but say, Let’s never see each other again, despite just meeting for the first time. We sat in the car for a long time, unable to part ways. When I did not get out, the driver retrieved the box. We ignored the annoyed looks from pedestrians who had to walk around the car. Finally, Miru’s mother broke the silence and asked, “Will you take the cat?”

  I cleared my throat and squeezed the books together to make room on the shelf. I was about to slide the diary between the books when Myungsuh, who had been standing there watching, said, “Yoon, wait.” I paused and looked at him. He pulled something from an inside pocket of his coat. It was a folded letter.

  “Let’s put this in there, too.”

  I stared at it. Had Miru sent him a letter? As if guessing my thoughts, he said, “I wrote it.” I thought about how I had written Dahn a letter six months after learning that he had died. In the letter, I invited Dahn to see the pavilion at Gyeongbokgung Palace with me. Myungsuh had not said a single word about Miru after finding out that she was dead. All he did lately was pass out drunk in random places and call me from a pay phone in the middle of the night. I felt a little relieved that he had written her a letter. I opened the diary so he could add his farewell letter to Miru.

  “Would you like to read it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  I must have sounded too firm. He stared at me for a moment.

  “It was meant for her,” I said.

  “What are these?” he asked.

  As he was slipping his letter into the diary, he looked at the other letters pasted onto the pages. They were once taped to the walls of Miru’s grandmother’s house. Letters that she had written to us but never sent. Letters I had pasted one by one into the blank pages of her diary. The page he happened to open to contained a postcard addressed to Professor Yoon. A single faded leaf was glued to the back of the postcard; the silhouette showed through. He gazed down at Miru’s handwriting.

  “You shouldn’t read them,” I said. He looked at me. “She would have sent them if we were meant to read them.”

  I had debated for a long time before pasting each of the letters and postcards Miru had written in the house into her diary. Initially, it seemed like the right thing to do would be to give the letters to Myungsuh and Professor Yoon, as well as to read the ones she had addressed to me. But she never sent them, and now there was no way of knowing whether she had meant for us to read them. I had left the box Miru’s mother gave me on my desk for a month. From time to time, I would run my hand over the postcards and letters she had written to the three of us. Then, late one night, I decided to seal them within the diary that Miru had carried with her everywhere, and I pasted the letters onto the blank pages. As I did so, I knew I had to add this to Professor Yoon’s shelf, the one that held his collection of books by young writers who died before the age of thirty-three. It was difficult not to read those letters while touching each of them in turn. Her sentences swirled before my eyes. I thought I spotted something about planting seed potatoes in the ground. Letters addressed to me contained Dahn’s name. I would start to read, only to look away, spread on the glue, and paste the letter facedown onto the page. Even so, I accidentally read I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise and a few more sentences about the days we’d spent walking around the city. One letter, addressed “Dear Myungsuh,” mentioned riding a sled one winter and falling into a river. I saw lines that looked like they were quoted from books she’d read. “His daily life was the suffering of a person who loves the internal, and writing was a form of prayer for salvation.”—Kafka. “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”—Yeats. “Lived, wrote, loved.”—Stendhal. One of the postcards contained a poem by Jules Supervielle: “Behind three walls and two doors, / you never think of me. / But no stone, no heat, no cold, / not even you can stop me / as I make and remake you / to my liking, inside of myself, / just as the seasons make forests / on the surface of the earth.” One of the letters looked like an apology to Professor Yoon.

  Calmly and without a word, Myungsuh placed his farewell letter to Miru inside her diary. I closed it and shelved it spine-first between the other books. He gave it a pat. We stood there for a moment looking at Miru’s diary mixed in with the other books. He put his hand in his pocket. I put my hand in my pocket. He raised his left hand to scratch his head. I raised my left hand to scratch my head. He looked at the floor and stomped his feet twice. I looked at the floor and stomped my feet twice. Finally, he looked at me.

  “Why are you copying me?” he asked.

  “To make you laugh!”

  But he didn’t laugh and just stared at me.

  “Jung Yoon,” he said. “Don’t try so hard.”

  “No, we have to try,” I said firmly. “We have to.”

  He stood with his back to the bookshelf. I stood beside him with my back to the shelves as well.

  “Move in with me,” I said.

  My words wandered among the shelves and returned to me like an echo. He didn’t say anything. My phone had rung at three in the morning a couple of nights earlier. Emily, who had been lying right next to the telephone, was startled by the vibration and hid beneath the desk. The call was from Myungsuh. I asked where he was, and he said he didn’t know. He was drunk, and it was hard to understand him. Without meaning to, I yelled at him to sober up and find a building or landmark nearby. The last thing I heard him say was “Hongik University.” I layered on some clothes and was on my way out of the room when Emily followed me to the door. I told her I would be back soon and pushed her inside. I could hear her clawing at the door as I tied my shoelaces tight. It was be
low zero, and the wind was bitterly cold. I wrapped a scarf around my neck, pulled on my gloves, went downstairs, and hailed a cab. I assumed he had called from somewhere near the campus. I asked the driver to go slowly around the main road in front of the university. The bars were still open, their lights blazing, and people were stumbling out to the street to hail cabs. Why had he gone there? I couldn’t find him on the main street, so I got out of the cab. I picked a block and started walking down each of the alleys. But even after searching each brightly lit alley, I could not find him. I wandered through the streets calling his name as alley cats ran and hid at the sound of my approach and trash blew around in the wind.

  I must have combed through those streets for over an hour. I finally found him behind a dark stairwell near Sanwoolim Theater. There was a phone booth there. I walked right up to him, but he didn’t recognize me. There was blood on his forehead, as if he’d run into something, and the back of his hand was injured. He could not have done all that drinking on his own, and yet there he was, alone. I had no idea how he managed to dial my number in his condition. His body was freezing cold. But he had still managed to fall asleep. The bottom of the staircase was covered in a thick sheet of ice. Icicles dangled overhead. He could have passed out and never woken up. I had to help him up somehow and get him into a taxi, but the alley was hidden from view, and he was laid out flat, which made it hard to handle him. I thought of how he had once found me barefoot in the middle of downtown, my shoes and bag lost in the melee, and carried me easily on his back. I took off my scarf and wrapped it around his neck and then covered his body with my jacket. I rubbed his cold hands to keep them from freezing and waited for someone to walk by so I could ask for help. As I did so, I thought, We have to stay together and never part, not even at night.

  I managed to get him back to my room, but even by the afternoon, he was still not sober. I gave him something to eat, but he immediately threw it up. Emily curled up in a ball and kept her eye on the two of us. He didn’t sober up until evening. He asked what he was doing in my room. Instead of answering, I said, “Move in with me.” What had I said when Miru asked me to live with her? I’d told her I needed time to think about it. I pictured the look of disappointment on her face. He stared at the back of his injured hand and said nothing.