If You Leave Me Page 6

  Hyunki laughed. “All right, but first, I have something!” He ran into the back room, calling, “Wait!,” and returned with a note. “For you, Nuna.”

  “For me?” I snatched it quickly. From the way my name was written, the letters all crowded into one another, I knew it was from Kyunghwan.

  Jisoo watched us. “What is that?”

  “Just a letter.” My fingers itched with want. I folded the note as carelessly as I could and flicked it into my basket.

  “Hyung came while you were gone.” Hyunki sat and leaned his arm on his upright knee, copying Jisoo’s pose. “I made sure to keep the letter safe for you.”

  “He came here?” I asked.

  “Who? Which hyung?” Jisoo asked.

  “Kyunghwan-hyung,” Hyunki said.

  “Kyunghwan?” Jisoo studied me. “Why is he writing you?”

  “I don’t know.” I turned to straighten the cushions, but they were already in order. “I have no idea.”

  “I thought you two didn’t talk anymore.”

  I spun the basket around, watched the letter flutter among the dead herbs. “Sometimes we do. Why does that matter?”

  “He steals things.”

  “You know Kyunghwan-hyung, too?” Hyunki asked.

  “Do you two still talk?”

  “I can do what I want, Jisoo.”

  “Then maybe I should leave.” He stood and brushed his knees, as if our floor had dirtied his pants. “I don’t need to stay here with a liar.”

  “Leave then.” I thrust my head at the door. “You don’t get to call me a liar in my own home.”

  “Why is everyone mad?” Hyunki hugged his knees.

  Jisoo grabbed his bag. Hyunki asked again. I strode to the entrance. Right then, the door slid open and Mother appeared.

  She walked in with a bundle of wood gathered in her skirt. “Yun Jisoo! We were worried not seeing you for so long. What are you doing here?”

  He turned to me. “What am I doing here?”

  No one spoke. Hyunki watched with his curious, wounded eyes. I wished I were alone—in the ditch, or on the hillside still looking for herbs. Even on the open sea. But I hadn’t been allowed the space or time or means to truly be by myself in years, and we were far from home.

  “I should go,” Jisoo said.

  Mother set down the firewood. She stopped him with one hand. “Haemi hasn’t even brought you a cup of tea. You can’t leave before you’re offered a refreshment.” She guided Jisoo to the cushion and pricked my side. “Be good, Haemi. Get some tea.”

  I set down the basket in the outdoor kitchen and rattled items around, pretending to lift pots and search nearly empty sacks. When I was sure Mother wouldn’t follow, I opened the note. Hating him and wanting him, I read Kyunghwan’s words:

  Come tonight, Haemi. I won’t wait around anymore. I’ll be at the market today, so find me.

  I need to see you.

  His command, the sudden assurance in his words, surprised me. I folded the note so I couldn’t look. So he couldn’t tell me what to do. I didn’t know where he fit in my life anymore.

  As I stood there, Jisoo’s broad, weighty laughter came through the door. Mother laughed, too, and Hyunki’s earnest voice tried to climb above theirs.

  I thought of the day Jisoo and I had met, a month after my family had arrived in Busan. He’d approached me with such confidence in the center of the market. Like a man who knew how to move through the world. I’d listened to his greeting but hadn’t heard him mention Kyunghwan’s name, instead focusing on the deep grit of his voice. With each new word, I’d felt myself loosen. A simple, whole sense of release, like how I felt on wash day after Mother’s scrubbing—raw and thankful.

  I heated a stone pot of barley and water over the fire pit, and I decided.

  I wouldn’t go.

  I wiped down our tea tray, the cups.

  I would be good.

  As I waited for the water to boil, I watched the summer rays collect in a patch of trees in the distance. I wished I were underneath that cluster, in that small haven of light. A swallow floated from leaf to leaf and I pretended it was Kyunghwan. I would be firm and tell him there would be no more drinking.

  The coward. He hadn’t even signed his name. Yun Kyunghwan. He was clumsy when he drank. Lean and tall and always too quiet. The smell of persimmons, that ripe chalky sweetness, rose from his skin when he stood too close. Handsome. His beauty rooted in his gaze, his focused stare. When he smiled, looser, drowsy, and unassuming, I wanted him near, always.

  It seemed the world was moving away from me, as if I were expanding and dissolving all at once. I thought I heard his horselike breathing, the way it turned shallow yet thick when he cycled us uphill—but it was me. I was breathing too fast.

  I knocked over a cup.

  In its clacking, I again heard Jisoo’s laughter. It seemed like a small bit of dust that had come in with the wind, or like the clatter of pheasant bones in a tin can. Why was it that as soon as Kyunghwan came into my mind, Jisoo turned to nothing?

  “Nuna?” Hyunki stood at the door, scratching his ankle. “Mother says hurry.”

  “Get me a pencil.”

  I wrote on the back of Kyunghwan’s letter. “Go to the market and find the hyung who gave this to you.”

  “I don’t want to.” Hyunki rocked on his heels. “You’re doing something bad. Mother and Jisoo-hyung are mad at you.”

  “No one’s mad.” I forced the letter into his grip. The muscles on my cheek twitched. I covered my face. “We’re just talking. It’s fine now.”

  “Take this back.” He thrust the letter at me, but I clasped my hands around his.

  “You got me in trouble before, now do this for me. I’ll tell them you have a stomachache, that you’re in the outhouse. Walk quickly,” I said.

  He scrunched his nose. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  Sweat rimmed his small, serious face. I parted his damp hair and wiped his forehead. “I’m not angry with you, but I need you to do this for me. Please. The sun’s setting soon.”

  He shrank from me. “I want to stay here.”

  I smiled, too wide, and tried to breathe cheeriness into my words. “Do this for your nuna and I’ll do something nice for you, all right?”

  Mother appeared then, arms crossed against her chest. “Why is this taking so long?”

  I stooped to the fallen cup. “I’m pouring the tea right now.”

  “Hyunki?”

  He curled his toes into the dirt and glanced my way, the letter tucked behind his back. “I don’t feel good. I’m going to the outhouse.”

  As he left, he whispered something to me, but I only saw the new layer of sweat that shone across his big, rectangular forehead. His lips were so pale they seemed invisible, like bellflower roots sunk in water. He was too sick to walk alone.

  “I need to check on Hyunki,” I said.

  “He can go to the outhouse by himself.” Mother seized my arm. “Jisoo is a good boy.”

  I turned to her. “When you say good, you mean rich. What if I don’t love him?”

  “No one’s telling you to love anybody.” She released me with a look of agitation. “What do you think will happen to our country? To us? I’m telling you to bring the boy some tea.”

  She dumped our saved rice cakes into a bowl and turned to leave. At the door, she stopped. “Your father and I—the first time I met him was on marriage day. Affection grows between a woman and a man. You can’t expect it from the beginning.”

  I walked into a room of happiness. Beneath the open window, Jisoo and Mother sat on our best straw cushions. White square packages lay before them on the floor. Mother picked one up and held it far from her chest, as if it was both precious and dangerous. “Jisoo’s brought medicine.”

  “This is why I’ve been away. The field hospital couldn’t help, so I went farther north. These are modern medicines for Hyunki. I took as many treatments as possible. I’m hopeful that one of
them will help.”

  Mother clutched the package. With two fingers, she pulled out a brown tube of liquid, a bottle of pills. She was shaking. Even her bones seemed to tremble. “This will work, Haemi.”

  I looked at Jisoo, at his assured posture, his open hands, and saw the kindness in him that I’d ignored. My instincts had been right. He took care of those around him. Even though I’d told him to leave, he had given us the medicine. “Thank you.” The quiet in my voice shamed me. I cleared my throat. “Thank you so much. Thank you.”

  “I wanted to do this, for all of you. There’s one more thing.” He rooted around in his bag. Two wooden objects emerged. “I have some news, too.”

  They were carved ducks, the outlines of their wings and beaks crudely formed.

  “Oh, Jisoo,” Mother said.

  “Wedding ducks?” I asked.

  Jisoo kneeled in front of Mother. He folded his hands into a neat triangle. “I have a proposal.”

  Mother beckoned to me.

  I didn’t move. I couldn’t.

  Mother and Jisoo had always wanted this. I knew, had known all along, and still I’d continued with the courting, willing myself to disbelieve. I thought I would have more time. I thought we were living in an uncertain world, one without rules. But Mother and Jisoo were not reckless. They were not me, blindly groping through the war without expectation.

  “Haemi?”

  Outside, the whistle of leaves. A sudden mass of thick gray clouds. I thought of the swallow I’d seen flying through the trees. How he had soared, slanting toward the sun.

  Kyunghwan

  1951

  One year ago, Haemi and I found each other at the entrance to our village. I was tying a piece of wrapping cloth to the lamppost out of boredom and fear when I heard her call my name.

  “Kyunghwan—is that you?”

  I had wanted to touch her, to feel the flesh of her face and confirm she was real. She hadn’t been caught by the Reds or taken to the hills on her way south. She was standing before me, safe and whole. The year before we had fled, she’d stopped speaking to me, punishment for some senseless argument, but her anger seemed to dissolve as soon as we saw each other.

  She bowed, aware of the searching gazes of strangers. “You’re here,” she said. When a crowd of new arrivals surrounded us on their way to the market, calling out the names of relatives they hoped to find safe in Busan, she touched my wrist. “No more fighting.”

  I concentrated on the feel of her fingers. How cool they felt against my pulse. She had changed. I could see the soft humps of her breasts underneath her hanbok jacket. The small, gritty Haemi I’d known all my life had been winnowed into this new person—a woman.

  She drew a map in the dirt with the tip of a twig. “As soon as the fighting ends, we’ll meet here and go back together. All right?”

  “All right.” I tried not to smile. She was speaking to me again. She was here.

  That night, we snuck away to explore our new village in the moonlight. We stood on a hill and looked south at the jumble of tin-roofed shacks, straw-thatched homes, and brick buildings turned into shelters. Haemi gasped at the mess of muddy alleys, outhouses, walls scribbled with messages—Looking for Jungsoon from Gangneung. Little boy Younggi in blue jacket, have you seen? Migyeong, we are with Uncle Kang. Farther out near the sea, we saw the field hospital, tented and foreign. Haemi leaned her head on my shoulder. We could smell the salt, but she didn’t want to go any closer to the water. Afterward, I followed her through the fields to her new home. She walked parallel to the road, never on it, and raised her hem so it wouldn’t graze the ground. I think she liked the prickle of grass and barley against her ankles, the feel of the earth on her bare skin.

  * * *

  With a letter for Haemi in my pocket, I looked in on Father. He sat on his side of the room, smoking his long reed pipe. He bit the brass mouthpiece as I entered. “What is it?”

  “I’m going to the market, but I’ve brought you lunch.” I set a bowl of millet grains covered in bean sauce on the small square table in front of him.

  “What about yours?” he asked.

  “I ate already.”

  He adjusted his glasses and inspected me. The whole shape of him had changed since our march south. He was gaunt of hope and body. Even the glasses Mother had given him years ago slipped down his nose, as if his features had shrunk from the inside out. “You’re lying,” he said.

  “You shared your portion yesterday.” I burped to convince him and pushed the bowl until it was directly below his chin.

  He dragged his chopsticks through the smeary brown sauce. Thick paste clung to the lines of his knuckles as he dug in. He offered me a bite. I took it.

  “How was the water line this morning?” I asked to fill the silence. Father grew quieter with each month. It unnerved me. His life had become a cycle of sleeping, drinking, eating—all alone. On the days he peddled wood at the market, he silently bargained with the villagers, using hand signals.

  “Long line, as usual,” he said.

  “At least it’s free.”

  Father snorted and then clutched his jaw. A back molar had loosened in his mouth, and pain shot through him with any sudden movement. I went to make him a cup of tea.

  When I returned, he held a bowl of bartered makgeolli with both hands. “It’s too early,” I said.

  “I’m not collecting wood today.” He gestured to the window. “It’s going to rain.”

  I watched his toes as he sipped. He always squeezed them on the first gulp. Mother had loved this habit because of its whimsy, and he’d always kept his feet clean just for her, even now.

  He passed me the bowl. I drank with my toes clenched, too. Dirt packed the undersides of my nails, though. He noticed and swatted me. “Wash your feet.”

  “Do you know when Jisoo’s returning?” I asked.

  “Jisoo-hyung,” Father corrected. “He’s your elder.” He lay down on his side. His hair, white at the roots, still black at the tips, puffed up on his cylindrical pillow. “He wants to take you to Seoul when the war’s over. What do you think about that?”

  “Will we go with him?”

  “You know where I’m heading.”

  Father would return to our clutch of earth, to our farm, which was nestled in the rabbit’s back of our country. When I was little, he’d traced a rabbit in profile onto the borders of Korea. The tapered ears the northeasternmost point, encroaching on China, the paws jutting out into the Yellow Sea. Seoul tucked safely beneath its belly. We the humped back, and Busan its soft tail.

  “We’ll go home together. I won’t leave you,” I said.

  “You’ll be smart and follow the money.” Father turned over. “Wake me in a few hours if there’s anything to eat.”

  It was barely past noon. I covered the hole he used as a window. “I’m staying with you,” I said again, but he had already fallen asleep.

  I circled the perimeter of Haemi’s fields with the note in my hands. I wanted to leave it somewhere for her to find. I’d sneak it onto the doorstep or set it against the front window. Entering the house didn’t seem like an option, I don’t know why. Maybe I really was a coward.

  When confronted with the silent structure, though, I was disappointed. There was no Haemi slipping past or cooking outside. Since reuniting in Busan, I took pleasure in the look of her—a flash of throat as she thrust out her chin at one of my pert comments, her hair brushing my face when she tilted back on the handlebars, her open lips when she sang up to the clouds. Even when she dressed as a boy, her thin legs swishing in her father’s old pants, I watched her.

  I sat on a rush mat in the yard behind her house and turned my words over in my head, in my mouth, really. I conducted imaginary conversations and sifted through the meaning of my letter. I had rewritten it three times—first mean, then apologetic, and then as simply as I could.

  A head poked through the window beside me. Hyunki waved. “Hi. What are you doing here?”

&n
bsp; “Looking for your nuna. Are you home alone?” I asked.

  “Wait for me.” He disappeared into the room and resurfaced at the back door, still in his bedclothes. They were green, and his neckline was stained with saliva. He lay beside me and rested his head in my lap. “I don’t feel good. Do I have a fever?”

  I touched his forehead. He was warm and sticky, his sweat dampening my pant leg. I didn’t know what a fever felt like on a kid. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I think so.”

  He peered up at me. “What kind of adult are you?”

  “I’m not an adult.”

  He mulled that over, rolling his head until his nose touched my knee, as if that would tell him something new. “Do this.” He lifted my hand and motioned for me to brush his hair.

  “I’m Yun Kyunghwan,” I said. “From your hometown.”

  “I’m Lee Hyunki. I’m seven years old.”

  “I know.” I laughed. “We’ve met before.” I brushed his hair. He didn’t look much like Haemi, but they had the same funny hairline. It peaked at the temples like mountains. I wondered if this was what Jisoo did when he visited—act like a big brother to Hyunki. Jisoo was less than two years older than me, but he was the sort of adult Haemi and her mother could trust.

  “I want to go back to my room,” Hyunki said. “Will you carry me?”

  I gathered him in my arms. He was so light I almost hoped Jisoo would hurry back with the medicine. Hyunki rubbed his face against my shoulder and directed me through the back door. When he closed his eyes, I shook him. “Are you all right? What should I do?”

  “I’m tired. Inside, on the right.”

  Haemi’s belongings were scattered throughout the small room they shared. The palm-length strips of twine she used to hold her braid were strewn across the floor. On our rides home, I’d graze my finger against their roughness. In a corner, there was a rumple of blankets, and a set of clothes—her bedclothes maybe—lay on top. Hyunki’s side of the room was immaculate, everything folded into piles.

  “You’re neat.” I jostled him in my arms. “Hey, stay awake.”