If You Leave Me Read online

Page 7


  He shook his head. “Nuna cleans for me.”

  “Why doesn’t she tidy her things, too?”

  “Mother gets mad and Nuna thinks it’s funny.” I set him down, and Hyunki crawled onto his sleeping mat and dragged a sheet over himself. He coughed hard. His face looked paler, his features larger than they’d seemed moments ago.

  “Should I find someone?”

  Lying on his stomach, he patted the space beside him, where I imagined Haemi sat on the nights she wouldn’t come to me. “I’m going to sleep and then you can leave. Can I hold your hand?”

  I cupped his fingers as best I could. “I know you,” I said. “I grew up with your nuna. I met you when you were a little baby.” I touched his shoulder. “Hyunki?”

  He pushed his cheek into his pillow, crunching the buckwheat husks inside. “I’m sleepy.”

  “Does she talk about me? Have you heard my name—Kyunghwan?”

  “I’m tired, Hyung.”

  “Will you give her this letter, then?”

  He blinked a few times, staving off the lure of sleep. “Why don’t you give it to her yourself?”

  “I have to go. Make sure she gets it, all right? As soon as you see her. It’s important.”

  “I promise.” Hyunki slipped the note under his pillow. Seriousness suited his face. It made the boniness seem a natural part of him. “Once I fall asleep, you can leave. That’s what Nuna does.”

  I tried to think of a song or story to soothe him. I patted his back and listened to his breathing. “Steady and slow,” Haemi would say. “I can only meet you if his breathing is steady and slow.”

  * * *

  I didn’t want to lose her again. One day, two years ago, during the peaceful lull between this war and the last one, Haemi stopped talking to me. We were fourteen and we had been friends for years.

  On that day, I found her waiting in my middle-school nook with an empty wicker basket on her head. “Mother wants me to find acorns. Come help?”

  She spun the basket and tried to keep it from falling. As she flailed her arms for balance, I noticed her fingernails—they were stained orange. “You’re spending time with girls now?” I asked.

  “What?” She started walking our usual way, still spinning the basket. We had an elaborate route to the crossroads where we split and went to our separate homes. It began at my school entrance, trailed down the stone steps of a hilly cemetery, wound around a small pond that was more mud than water, and crossed a deadened field no one had claimed in years. Old folks said a leper colony had once lived there and contaminated the whole area, but no lesions ever formed on our skin.

  “Coloring your nails with rose balsam petals?” I yanked her wrist and flicked her fingers. The basket fell off her head. “Are you finally turning into a proper girl?”

  “This is nothing. I was only playing.” Her embarrassment came through in the volume of her denial. She whipped out of my grip. “I could still beat you in arm wrestling.”

  “Nah.” I fluttered and pretended to braid my hair. “You’re a good little girl.”

  “You’re a babo.”

  “I think it’s smart you’re learning to be more feminine. How else will you find a suitable husband?”

  She punched me, her small knuckles driving into my chest. I pretended to fall backward from her great strength. She didn’t watch. She crossed the cemetery path, jumping from stone to stone. “You’re an idiot.” She threw the words back lightly, across her shoulder.

  I wish I could remember her face, the other insults she’d lobbed at me. I wasn’t paying attention because I hadn’t realized how angry she was at the time. She sucked her fingers and spit orange-tinged blobs onto the ground. I thought she was renouncing her dip into girlish ways. I spit, too, to show her I approved.

  “Who’d you stain your nails with?” I asked as we approached the small pond.

  “No one. I was watching Hyunki.” She said something about the neighborhood girls and their schooling, how they weren’t interested in her. She didn’t say what she really meant—that she was smarter than them, that if her father hadn’t died, she’d still be in school, and if she ever returned, she would slaughter their haughtiness with her intelligence. Haemi shrugged off my question and returned to an old conversation about tadpoles. Every time we reached the pond, she talked about the almost-frogs. She thought there was something beautiful about their bodies right before transformation, when they were thick and round and alert, like an eyeball with a small tail. I thought they were about as exhilarating as larval amphibians could get.

  “I go to school,” I said, “and we’re friends.”

  “You aren’t too snooty to teach me.”

  She stuck her hand into the mud pit and caught a tadpole. It was black, slick with water, and its back legs were two nubs, just beginning to grow. It squirmed against her flesh. Viscous. Disgusting. I threw it back in the water.

  “Why’d you do that? You probably hurt him,” she said.

  I couldn’t explain.

  Instead, I wiped Haemi’s palm against my chest.

  My teasing that day wasn’t any more vicious than usual, but Haemi stopped coming to see me afterward. She no longer snuck away from her mother’s constant chores. She acquired a few girlfriends. With my words, I had spurred her to create a world without me.

  * * *

  After leaving the letter with Hyunki, I sat on a wobbly crate a few meters from the market entrance, under the lamppost where we always met. I waited for a reply, for her to come running with an apology.

  I missed her. I missed having her all to myself. I had lost her before to a meaningless spat, and I didn’t want to lose her to Jisoo now.

  Jisoo was Seoul born, from a different class than us. When he first asked me about Haemi, I hadn’t thought anything of giving him her name. New refugees arrived every day, and he was seeking reports of his family. When he began to court her, I dismissed it again. He hated our rural life; he was desperate to return to his precious city; his parents and sister were missing. Haemi was a distraction, nothing more. As soon as the war ended, he would leave.

  Now, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to watch any longer. I would tell her so, if she came. You are like the moon, I would say, getting romantic. Your upturned eyes are the color of unearthed soil. When we sat across from each other that night in the hideaway bar, I only pretended I wasn’t paying attention to you. I was watching your face. Wide like an apple. Your ears poking through your hair, sharp like the first sweep of January pine.

  I should have kissed you when you demanded it in the fields, I’d say. But I was surprised by your forcefulness, the clever look of your mouth. I’d thought about Jisoo, too. He was generous and took care of me and Father without coveting money or means for himself. But I didn’t care about that sort of loyalty anymore. “Jisoo doesn’t know you the way I do,” I practiced. The words sounded small even to me.

  “Hyung!” A high-pitched voice. Hyunki rushed toward me, his face both pale and blotchy at the cheeks.

  I sat him on my crate and squatted beside him. “What’s wrong?” His shirt was sheer with sweat. A dark birthmark across his right rib cage showed through like a stain. “Are you sick?”

  “Everyone’s mad.”

  From his pocket, he retrieved the letter I’d written.

  “She didn’t read it?” I circled around him. “I don’t want it, then.”

  “She did. She wrote ‘yes.’ See?” He showed me the single word, pencil soft and written in quick strokes.

  I laughed. Relief crawled up my back and into my cheeks. I sat on the ground and read the note—my words and her one—again and again.

  I had found her before Jisoo. She would come to me.

  Hyunki coughed, his frame shuddering with each breath. I rubbed his back, asked him what I should do. The wet scraping sound continued. He pointed at the path and tried to say he had to go back.

  “I’ll walk with you. We can try to find some water,” I said.r />
  He shook his head and spoke between hackings. “Everyone’s mad. Tell Nuna I did a good job.” His breathing slowed to a gummy hiccup. “I can go now. Bye, Hyung.”

  Partway down the road, he waved. I listened to the faint rumblings of his cough as he walked on alone.

  When I returned home, the smell of meat drew me to Jisoo’s room. Rice topped with slices of thin, almost translucent meat waited in three bowls. Father raised his arms as if he were a shaman. “Let’s eat.”

  “Is Jisoo back?” I asked.

  “How else would we have gotten this?” Father settled onto a floor cushion. “He said he’d eat his later.”

  “Where is he?”

  Father caught my ankle before I could look. “I need to talk to you.”

  “About?” I asked.

  “Sit. Let’s eat first.”

  We bit into real rice that stuck to the grooves of our teeth. There was even a strip of fat in one of my beef slices. I held the meat on my tongue and imagined it melting into me.

  Father sighed and closed his eyes. “Savor this. We don’t know when the next time will be.” He gave me half of his boiled quail egg. “I spoke to Jisoo. He’s joining the ROK.”

  “Good,” I said. “He’s been talking about it for months.” I tried to sneak an extra slice of beef from Jisoo’s bowl, but Father caught me.

  He snatched it back. “You should join with him.”

  I withdrew my chopsticks, surprised. “I’m only sixteen.”

  “He’s going to look for his family. I found these under his blankets.” Father set a pile of newspapers on the table. He pointed to a headline from a few months before. no shadows of humans in seoul. “His family’s dead. I can feel it.” I didn’t want to look at the image below that headline, but Father jabbed his finger at it. “This is what’s happening.” The picture showed mounds of debris strewn across the streets, and above that, a tall building being bombed. A large hole gaped like a wound. Rubble exploded outward like broken teeth.

  I hadn’t brought up Jisoo’s family in months. I didn’t want to remind him of their unknown state, but more than that, I didn’t want to dwell on the unknown myself. “They must have paid someone to get out of Seoul safely. They’re probably fine. They might even be nearby.”

  Father sucked his teeth. “Don’t be an idiot. You two should stay together.”

  “Other fathers try to save their sons from the war, and you’re telling me to join?” I picked up my spoon. “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re in a stalemate.” Father sighed. “The fighting’s almost over. You’ll be fine. Jisoo’s here because of you, you know.”

  “Then I saved his life.”

  Father looked away. He spat a piece of gristle on the floor.

  Jisoo had come to us in the summer of 1950, because I’d run away earlier that spring. When he arrived, he beat me up and dragged me home. But I wasn’t the one who needed to reexamine my life. Father had given up first, drinking and no longer working. “Don’t be so self-centered,” Jisoo had said as he dabbed at my face. A week later, Seoul fell and we headed south. He came with us. He had no other choice.

  I looked at Father across the table. “I’ll help Hyung find them after the war. Enlisting doesn’t make sense. They wouldn’t even take me.”

  “It would be the right thing.”

  “Do you really want me to leave?”

  “His family is our family.” Father leaned back from the table, gazed at the ceiling. A slow, quiet drizzle tapped against the roof. “You’ve always been this way—concerned only with yourself. What about your kin? What if Korea’s overtaken?”

  I wanted to tell him that I remembered our years under Japanese rule. How we were perpetually hungry, how we weren’t even allowed to speak our own tongue. We had no power in this fight, either. We were pawns, tossed around by Japan, then the Soviets and the United States. I didn’t want to join their cause. And above all, I was too weak, untrained. I would be killed.

  “A man who doesn’t care isn’t worth his place in our nation,” Father said.

  I snorted. “You haven’t cared about anything besides your drinking in a long time.”

  He finished his meal in silence, set Jisoo’s on a crate on the other side of the room, and left.

  I brought Jisoo’s bowl back to the table. I would eat it. I didn’t care. Thousands of people had died. Millions more were starving. It wasn’t my fault.

  A throat cleared behind me. “Hungry?”

  Jisoo leaned against the wall in a fancy jacket, his smugness stamped all over his face. It was part of him—in the shape of his thickset nose, his meaty mouth, and his tiny eyes. He had the body of a high school boxer. “I didn’t know about your family,” I said.

  “Never mind.”

  I pushed his bowl to the other side of the table.

  “You can have my share.” Jisoo glanced at my hands, my empty bowl, and his full one. “I’m not hungry. Really.”

  I lifted a slice of meat and he smiled. Dangling it from my chopsticks, I ate.

  Later in the night, I left Jisoo and Father to confer between themselves about what a selfish son and cousin I was. I went to see Haemi.

  We sat across from each other on unsteady crates in an alley where a man sold local brews. Soaked and skittish with alcohol, we grimaced at each other inside the narrow tent. Haemi’s hair was wet from the rain, and her peaked hairline made her look like a balding boy. Her fingers, scavenging the anchovies I’d bought with Father’s—no, Jisoo’s—won, were greased and impatient.

  “You’re a delicate eater tonight,” I said.

  “I’m a delicate, graceful woman.” She held her fingers up to my mouth. Flecks of fish skin stuck to her nails. “Don’t you think?”

  “Is that why you didn’t dress as a boy?”

  “What good does that do? Do you think anybody believes us?” She swept her arm, knocking into the other end of the tarp. She held her fingers up to me again, oblivious and daring, and then pulled away. “When a girl does that, you’re supposed to lick her fingers.”

  “I thought you were a woman now.” I pretended to devour my own knuckles, gnashing my teeth. “Is this how to do it then?”

  She drank makgeolli quickly with little exhales. “Tell me why you came to my house.”

  “Because you said yes,” I said.

  She looked up, her crescent eyes focusing. “To?”

  I nodded at the small bowl we shared, her fingers gripping the rim. “Coming here. I missed our adventures.”

  Her gaze skimmed over me, and her mouth loosened as she raised the bowl. “You joke and you pretend. Hyunki’s sick and it’s my fault, so stop playing.”

  I took away the makgeolli. She was already drunk. “Fine, I asked to see you because I’ve made a decision,” I said.

  She slapped the table and swayed. “Today’s the day of big decisions. Big decisions!”

  “Jisoo’s going to enlist, but I’m going to stay right here.”

  A loud, openmouthed laugh shot out of her. “Your decision is that you’re staying?”

  “To stay with you.”

  She tilted her head as if the alcohol could leak out of her that way, a stream of makgeolli pouring from her ear to the ground. “Nothing’s changed with you.”

  I showed her my bundle of papers. “These are school notes. I wrote them for you. We can go back to studying together.”

  She riffled through the papers. Her fingers traced the words and numbers I had written. The sketches that could help her learn. Her lips moved to the rhythm of history, science, arithmetic.

  I caught the smell of grass and rain that had swept in from the sea on her clothes. She was beautiful, even with that hair. I wanted to tell her—how her gaze gnawed at me until I turned mocking, how she unsteadied me. “You think I don’t care, but I’ve been rewriting my notes for you for months now,” I said.

  “Kyunghwan.” She pressed her fingertips to the back of my hand. “You were right about Jis
oo. He came to my house today.”

  I nodded. “He’s going to enlist. He and Father tried to convince me, but—I want to stay here with you.”

  “Before he leaves, he wants to marry me.”

  I stood. Too quickly. The end of the table knocked into her. “You’re lying.”

  It was Jisoo’s nature to care for others, but he couldn’t marry someone he didn’t know. Without a matchmaker, his parents, a date-setting ceremony. Even if he was serious, he would have to wait until the war was over.

  “Tell me you’re lying.”

  Haemi, with her apple face and small breasts that pressed against the table, with her braid that she released on drunken nights and the curls I wanted to run my fingers through. I couldn’t say any of it. We were sixteen, in a city where we didn’t belong, and I had nothing to offer her.

  “He asked me.” Haemi spread her fingers, examined them. “He asked my mother.”

  “I saw him,” I said. “A few hours ago. He didn’t say anything.”

  “Kyunghwan—” Haemi’s gaze shifted behind me. “Look—” She stood and pointed.

  But I couldn’t hear anymore. I didn’t turn.

  All I could see was the shape of the alley we occupied—a bottle upright on our small share of table. Makgeolli puddles swirling with miniature clouds, a bowl wobbling on its curve. I stayed inside the silence, seeing only what lay in front of me for a flushed, precious second—until she yelled, “Behind you! Kyunghwan!”

  I turned and ducked as soon as I recognized the boxy face. Jisoo’s fist raged past where my head had been, his arm arching from anger.

  “You want to fight?” I shoved, but he was beyond me.

  He grabbed her wrist. “What’re you doing here?”

  Haemi tried to sit back down. “I’m getting drunk. I’m celebrating all of today’s big decisions.” She cast him an indifferent gaze, but her knuckles were white and shiny as she gripped the table.

  I seized his shoulder. “Did you do it? Did you ask her?”

  He pushed me off, easy. “We need to go, Haemi.”

  “I don’t want to.” She tried to dump makgeolli on her wrist, as if that could loosen his grip.