If You Leave Me Read online

  “Don’t lie to me, Hyung.”

  “I’m doing it for them both. Why do you care?”

  Kyunghwan shrugged. “I don’t. I’m going to be late.”

  I caught the back of his shirt as he turned. “What is it?”

  “Get off me.”

  We walked a few steps like that, me slowing him down, him desperate to pull free. I was stronger than him, though. I pushed him against a tree. His shoulders thudded against the bark and he hit his head harder than I’d intended. I winced at the blow. His face, sallow moments before, mottled red.

  “Tell me. What’re you upset about?” I asked.

  “Get off.” He grabbed my arms and, when that didn’t work, kicked at me like a child.

  I let go, more from surprise than pain, and then a thought—so obvious—came to me. “You’re jealous?”

  He straightened his shirt, tried to force a laugh. “It’s a good idea. The medicine. Must be nice to have the money to go around saving sick kids.”

  I grabbed his collar. He smelled like a drunk. “Admit it. You’re jealous.”

  Kyunghwan’s bloodshot eyes blinked at me. “It’s pathetic, how hard you’re trying for someone you won’t get. Go ahead, good luck.” He pulled his collar from my grip and walked toward the school.

  “I’m going to win her,” I yelled after him. “You don’t know anything about her anymore!”

  Under the last bit of shade before the entrance, half-shadowed by the long branches, Kyunghwan stared back at me with that same expression on his face—like I was the dumb country kid.

  Haemi

  1951

  Hyunki waved his straw bag and pretended to catch invisible dragonflies as we strolled to the market. With him, the walk took twenty minutes instead of ten, but he prized the visits, the chance to leave the house.

  “Can I look for Jisoo-hyung when we get there?” he asked. “Watching you trade is boring.”

  “No wandering away.” I hadn’t seen the boys in days. Maybe Kyunghwan had finally confessed our nighttime adventures. Maybe they had given up on me. I caught Hyunki by the shoulders and tickled him. “I don’t want you to get lost in the crowds.”

  Hyunki jumped and tried to tickle me back. “Hyung doesn’t like me because I’m sick?”

  “No, I probably scared him with my crankiness at dinner,” I said. “I don’t want to see him anyway.”

  It was true, for both of them. If Jisoo or Kyunghwan was at the market, that’s what I would say. I don’t want to see you anymore.

  Hyunki wove from one side of the dirt path to the other, kicking stones. “But Jisoo-hyung’s my friend, too.”

  I hitched the strap of my bag of barley higher on my shoulder. “Too bad. Nuna says no.”

  He swooped in front of me and pulled my hands through his bag’s handles. “Caught you.” Then, holding me captive, he led me along the path. “When I’m old, I’m going to boss you around. Come on, cow. This way.”

  I bellowed like a bull calf. “Eum-meh.” Hyunki laughed and copied me.

  As we lowed back and forth, a sallow cat slunk past with a mouse gripped in its teeth. I felt closer to that rodent than a cow, caught between Jisoo and Kyunghwan, Hyunki and myself. “If you could boss me around, what would you make me do?” I asked.

  “Order you to get meat this time! I’m sick of bones.”

  “Then you need to stay by my side and look hungry for the butcher,” I said.

  Hyunki unlooped my hands. “But I am hungry.” He stared at me, his face lusterless, even in the sunlight.

  I touched his high forehead and tried to push aside my guilt. “Always so hungry!” I squeezed his stomach. “Do you have tiny creatures in there eating up your food?”

  He laughed, wormed out of my grasp, and skipped ahead. I let him. He drank his ginseng tea without complaint these days and had slept easy for three nights straight. Three nights I could have snuck out but didn’t.

  “We’re almost there.” He clutched a tangle of twine that was tied around the lamppost. It marked the beginning of our village, where the marketplace stalls eventually opened into crowds of shelters. An orange strip of fabric woven into the twine slapped in the wind.

  The wooden lamppost looked frail and ordinary in the daytime. Bleached by the sun, it blended into the surrounding fields. As I ran my hands across its knots, I noticed that a smattering of cigarette butts, half-hidden by the grass, circled the base. Kyunghwan. He hadn’t forgotten about me, then. I hadn’t joined him since the night we fell asleep together, but he had still come and waited.

  “Help me pick these up,” I said.

  “Why?” Hyunki pinched a bitten stub. He peered at it with one eye closed, his head cocked.

  “Do it for me and I’ll try to get you stone candies.”

  He sniffed one ashy end and then helped without asking more questions. I hugged him for his silence. One of the cigarettes was barely smoked. A few others were stubby, wet licked, tamped down at the ends.

  “Ready, Nuna?”

  We were done, the ground picked clean.

  Hyunki pointed to the market. “Let’s go before people leave.”

  As he walked ahead, I watched his small, round head of hair ruffle in the wind. “Come on,” he called, from farther along the path.

  I stroked my hip, where Kyunghwan had wound his fingers that night in the ditch. I didn’t understand him. He acted jealous of Jisoo, and still he refused me. Embarrassment heated my face and chest. I wanted to slough away the memory of that night. The way Kyunghwan had turned his head—how pitiful I must have looked with my eyes closed. I wouldn’t ask him again.

  “Nuna?”

  I hurried on, wondering if Kyunghwan would be at the market, and if I would show him the proof I had found on the ground.

  The market was crowded with vendors from nearby villages and neighbors in search of bargains. Grandmothers in hanboks laid their found aluminum cans, driftwood, and careful mounds of red pepper flakes on large square wrapping cloths. Crouched over their goods, they yelled out the prices in strident, whittled voices. We walked past fish dangling on strings and wove among women carrying children on their hips or wrapped in podaegi slings on their backs. Always, whispers of the war thickened the air.

  Auntie Chyu, a seamstress from our old village, called us over to her stall, a wooden plank on two boulders. She handed us small squares of cloth dyed a bright blue. “For a bit of good luck.” She held one against Hyunki’s shirt. “Doesn’t it make you happy to look at color?”

  We bowed our thank-yous. Hyunki pointed to Auntie’s sons. Three boys kneeled by the roadside with dark bottles and greasy cloths. “Can I help them?” he asked.

  “Sangchul,” Auntie Chyu called to the eldest, “show Hyunki how you shine shoes.” She turned back to me. “I told them no one has leather shoes here, but they want to help.” She leaned against the stall and stared into the crowd. A man sat on an overturned bucket selling woven bags. A grandfather advertised battered and fried carrot slices at high prices. “Just yesterday Uncle Han was beaten over there and carted off, and today we’re milling around.” She clucked. “We can get used to anything.”

  “Yes, Auntie.” I traced the end seam on a swath of red fabric on her table. She spoke to me like I was a friend. It made me shy.

  Auntie nodded at a woman breastfeeding an infant while she bartered for anchovies. “You know what she told me?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear the latest gossip. It scared me, how easily I clung to the slightest hope of returning home, and how swiftly the rumors proved false. “Do you have any new stories to share instead?”

  She stretched her fingers and cleared her throat. I lost myself in the sound of her unbound voice as she told me about her middle son, who dreamed that she had turned into a fox, and upon waking, believed she was a kumiho monster. She laughed openmouthed, without hiding behind her hand. When I was with her, I did this, too. The sharp crack of our laughter turned the heads of those around us
.

  “Oh, that hurts.” She massaged her stomach, still chuckling. She pulled at her laugh lines with two fingers. “What I really wanted to tell you is that new soldiers arrived yesterday. Be careful, especially once it’s dark.”

  I nodded. “Thank you. We should go before it’s too late.” I called to Hyunki, who stood with one straw shoe held out for the boys to shine.

  “What is it you have there?” Auntie pulled the bag’s strap off my shoulder and peered at the barley inside. “You have plenty! I know there’s going to be more of that for you. Can I get a handful? For a lonely woman and her children? Boys, come over here and beg!”

  The three sons and Auntie Chyu offered up their bowled hands.

  Hyunki dipped his fist into their curved palms, thinking it was a game.

  We found the butcher’s stand in the market. His wife snatched my bag before we even bowed. “You two are lucky,” she said, evaluating the weight with her hands. “We don’t have much to give.”

  “Leave them alone.” The butcher walked around the wooden stand that separated us. His large stomach bounced as he squatted before Hyunki. “My wife’s heart grasps when it should try to share. We’ve got enough for your family.”

  When we arrived in Busan, the butcher had searched for us. He claimed to have known Father in Japan. I didn’t trust him so easily, even if Mother did. She would believe anything about her husband. She still set aside a bowl for Father at every meal, six years later and now in a new war. A few grains of barley, never cooked food we could eat—but still, she was consistent.

  “Do you have any meat for us?” Hyunki asked.

  The butcher smiled. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that for too long.” He glanced at me. “Am I right?”

  The wife returned my bag. From the way it rattled, I knew she had given us bones. “Yun Jisoo has been courting you.” Her eyes flicked down to my neck and chest and hands before she smiled. “What good news. Your mother is pleased?”

  “Where did you hear that, Auntie?” I folded my hands and stared at my knuckles. “Is that what people are saying?”

  “What’s courting?” Hyunki asked.

  “That boy wandered from stall to stall asking for that chicken. He even had his cousin help him,” the wife said.

  The butcher nodded. “Did you enjoy it, Hyunki?”

  “I ate a whole drumstick!” They bent their heads together as Hyunki described the broth, the elaborate meal.

  “Yun Kyunghwan helped?” I asked.

  She touched my shoulder and leaned in. “That isn’t all people are saying. You be careful with yourself. Young people think they can do anything these days. War doesn’t mean decency’s been killed off, too.” Her lips curled into a closemouthed smile. “Think about your mother’s shame.”

  Heat prickled my hands. I tried to tamp down my sudden blush. “I don’t know what you mean, Auntie.”

  “The night’s darkness does not make you invisible. You think a poor disguise can hide you?”

  “You must be mistaken.” I glanced around. It seemed no one else had heard. “We should get back to our mother.”

  “I’m only telling you what’s already being said throughout the stalls. I wouldn’t be surprised if some refused to sell to your family now.”

  “Hyunki,” I called. “Let’s go.”

  “Already?” The butcher and Hyunki asked at once, and then laughed.

  The wife nodded at her husband. “Time for us to get back to work.”

  The butcher patted Hyunki’s head and my arm. “Come again soon. We’ll give you even more next time.”

  I shook the bag as I slung the straps over my shoulder. I watched the butcher’s face, avoiding his hateful wife. “Thank you for the bones.”

  The fields at the back of our house were dying from heat. Yellow-white barley swayed and bristled in the dry wind. It was the hour before sunset, when reds and oranges and a hazy pink light spilled over the country.

  I rolled a cigarette butt in my hand, feeling the tobacco shift inside its slim body. Kyunghwan had helped Jisoo find the chicken. Someone had found out about us and whispered to that wrinkled woman that I was a girl who crept out in the night.

  “You have hairy wrists!” I yelled, flinging the butt. “You have no friends! You smell like soot and dog sweat!” I hoped my words would soar through the air and into Kyunghwan’s empty head. “I know you stole that bike! I know who you get your money from!”

  “Haemi!” Mother yelled from the front of the house, her voice a knife cutting my name in two.

  Punishments surfaced and sank in my mind. The backs of my legs beaten. Arms held up to the skies for hours. My hair hacked to the scalp, so anyone I encountered would know I’d shamed my family. I stuffed the remaining cigarettes into my underwear. The butcher’s wife had told, or Mother had found out from someone else. The village had turned against us.

  Mother came charging, dragging Hyunki by the arm. “Tell me! Why weren’t you watching him?” She waved a broken cigarette, still lit but dying. “He was smoking. He said he picked it up on the road to the market.”

  “He was smoking?”

  Hyunki ran to me. “I did it when Haemi-nuna wasn’t looking,” he said, words muffled by my stomach. “Nuna didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, my voice a weak echo.

  Hyunki turned to Mother. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” He pushed out his bottom lip and widened his eyes into the pout that made Mother soften. He coughed and buried his face in my skirt again.

  She grabbed his shoulder but spoke to me. “You can see the sickness as well as I can. Haul your eyes out from inside your head.”

  Hyunki twisted under her grasp.

  “No more going to the market,” she said to him.

  “Please! I’m fine.”

  “I’ll watch him better.” I tried to pry her hand away. “Mother, I’ll watch him.”

  She stooped to Hyunki, her fingers still clawed around his shoulder. “You think you’re healthy enough? Then you get treated like the other boys. I see you at the market or with a cigarette again and you’ll be fetching me sticks.”

  She released him, then squatted and crushed the cigarette beneath a gray stone. There was nothing left, only ash and brown, but she kept grinding anyway. “I’ll whip you. You know I will.”

  Hyunki rubbed his shoulder and avoided my gaze. He hurt so easily these days. I felt the wing bones of his back, how delicate they were. He was weakening, and here I was thinking about a boy.

  “It’s my fault. I’m sorry.” I squatted beside her. “Mother, I’m sorry.” I wanted to show her somehow.

  “I’m putting him to bed, and then we’ll talk,” she said.

  As they walked inside, I pictured little Hyunki smoking. The cigarette’s blistering tip, the coughing that followed.

  I had been careless. It was Kyunghwan’s fault for making me so curious. I had to be better.

  I pulled off my underwear and the hidden remains fell to the ground. I rubbed them all out as Mother had done, until there was nothing left to hold on to, only gray ash in dirt and grass. Kyunghwan’s lips, those chewed-up bits that pressed together when I asked him to kiss me—I rubbed it all away.

  Days had passed since the smoking incident, yet Hyunki’s cough still flamed through him. Every afternoon during his naps, I searched for enough herbs to grind into a paste. I hiked and scavenged the hillsides, avoiding the slums, the ROK campouts, and the prostitutes’ huts.

  As I climbed the tallest hill, I passed the elementary school Hyunki wasn’t allowed to attend because of his sickness. Children sat on the grass in neat rows, reciting the alphabet. Farther up, I looked for the boys’ high school tent, for a glimpse of Kyunghwan or Jisoo, but I saw no one.

  With my hanbok skirt scuffed green and five paltry herbs in my woven sedge basket, I walked home. I had picked the land clean, and I didn’t want Hyunki to wake up alone. But as I returned through the fields, I noticed a figure
waiting in the entranceway. Jisoo. He wore a dark, Western-style jacket I’d never seen before. The fabric looked thick, almost shiny. He had a wide smile on his lips.

  “Why are you dressed so nicely?” I asked.

  “I don’t even get a welcome?”

  “You haven’t been here in more than a week. I forgot about you.” I walked into the house. He followed me with that smile still on his face.

  “You’ve noticed I’ve been gone, at least.” He nodded at my basket. “Are those herbs for Hyunki?”

  Something about his probing, the satisfied knowing that threaded his words, made me want to lie. I shook my head. “I’m making tea for myself.”

  He raised a hemp bag. “I brought something for your family.”

  “I don’t want your charity, Jisoo.”

  I walked toward the kitchen, but he snagged my elbow and pulled me back. His eyes were small but so evenly placed in his broad, square face that it suited him. I remembered why I’d let him walk me home that first time. “I’m here to take care of my cousin,” he’d said. Carrying a paper cone of sunflower seeds, he had spat empty shells through the air as if nothing scared him. Even though we were powerless, hungry, and abandoned, he’d acted as if he were in control, as if he’d come to this city of his own wanting.

  “Hyung?” Hyunki emerged from the back room and shyly hugged Jisoo’s hip. “Where did you go?”

  “I went on a little journey, but I’m back now. Are you feeling better?”

  Hyunki curved his arms above his head. “I’m a shark. I feel great.” He squiggled around the sitting room and pretended to eat us up.

  “Don’t run around too much,” I said. Hyunki had no sense of his own weakness. He spent all his energy in a few hours only to lie limp for days afterward.

  He gobbled Jisoo’s stomach with his hands. “I don’t want to. I rested all day.”

  Jisoo found a floor cushion. “Why don’t you sit with me?” He curved his arms, too. “I’m an even bigger shark and I’m hungry for tiny Hyunki fish unless he sits right here,” he growled.