Chapter 33
I didn’t know what to do but stand outside in the Yuns’ yard where he had spent his most recent days.
The closest I could be to him now. I’d been afraid and avoided rain whenever possible, but today I had to be in it.
He’d always said, “We’re part of the land.
” Which I never understood. Today I wanted to try.
From my place under the shelter of this small tree, I could see the window of the second-story bedroom where he might have looked out at this very terrain where I stood now.
What had he seen the afternoon before he died?
What had he heard through the open window?
No matter the weather, he always opened the window—even a crack in winter for what he called refreshing air.
Tiny crystals fell on my hair and face, my arms and legs.
I tried to stay still. If I touched them, they vanished.
They clumped on my eyelashes, blurring my vision.
I was wrapped in the smell of the dense underground hammered by rain, churned and carried upward by the winds, mixed with tart grass, sweet white abelia belled buds, salty ocean water.
Birds made themselves known to each other through sharp-pitched declarations.
How did they have the nerve to call to each other in this strange climate? I wouldn’t call them songs.
Come back, come back, come back.
I couldn’t stop the tears from destroying those prisms of frost.
The ceremony for my grandfather was simple, the way he would have wanted it.
He was cremated and buried in a plot near my aunt in East End.
Would he have preferred to be buried in South Korea?
I didn’t know. We’d never talked about it.
Why hadn’t I asked? His death seemed like an impossibility before now.
Channing, similarly, had no idea. She did as directed and stayed by my side.
My parents handled all the details. Some Korean families in East End attended the short service.
A couple of newer friends in Boston came down for the day.
My father drove up to the rehab facility to pick up my uncle.
My parents flanked him for the duration of the service, shielding him from curious stares.
He was frail and shrunken, with white hair and a bent frame.
Channing spoke to him briefly. I saw her embrace him, and then he was whisked back to Boston by my father.
During these few days, my parents stayed at a motel outside of town, in Little Brookton near the Asian market.
The beach club was more convenient and had vacancies, but my parents preferred paying less for the motel.
Most of the time, they’d be at the funeral home anyway, they said.
The Yuns insisted Channing and I stay with them.
When we hesitated, Paul offered his apartment.
He would move temporarily into the house with his grandparents.
It was a generosity I made sure to tell him I appreciated, and followed it up with a hug.
I remembered Channing’s words in her journal about how rarely I embraced people. I hadn’t realized this tendency.
Early the next morning, I drove out to my parents’ motel to see them before they left. I knew they were eager to get on the road and on their flight back to Canada.
“Are you okay?” my mother asked. We were sitting in their room. It was cleaner than I thought it would be, with a marine theme: anchors and thick rope motifs. I sat on a bed facing my parents, who were packing the things they’d brought into their bags.
“What about your job?” my father said, folding a shirt.
“How can I leave Channing here by herself?” I reminded them. “It’s a serious charge. Kent’s framed her and has a hold on this town, so she might be sent to prison for years.”
I could tell they didn’t understand how Channing could be accused of stealing a watch. My mother unplugged her phone from the outlet by the bed and then returned to my side to say, “This is why we didn’t join the Korean church. They’re always gossiping.”
“This isn’t gossip, Eomma.” I tried to explain again about how Kent was obsessed with Channing and repeated how he’d assaulted her.
“In a bigger city, this wouldn’t happen. Too many Koreans here,” she replied.
“That’s not the point either,” I said.
“How much is this lawyer going to cost? Is he the best one?” my father asked. He zipped up his bag and set it by the door.
I shrugged. “Mr. Yun recommended him, and he got her out for now.”
“We’re going to pay for it, it’s fine, if she didn’t do anything wrong, Channing will be fine,” my mother said.
“What do you mean ‘if’? Kent framed her. She didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“It’s a serious charge. Mr. Yun said the watch is worth fifty thousand dollars, making her crime a felony,” my father said.
“We’ve had to press charges for shoplifters in our store.
Not this much—only misdemeanors.” He looked at my mother.
“We’ll have to come back for the trial. Once we know the dates. ”
They seemed so matter-of-fact; I didn’t know how to respond.
“Isn’t there something else we can do before then? We can’t let Kent ruin Channing’s life,” I said.
My mother breathed in and then let out a big sigh. “If we have to appeal, it’ll cost more money.” She turned to my father. “Maybe we should sell the second store. This new rehab is more than we were told, and now Channing’s lawyer’s fees.”
As I walked them to their rental car for the drive to the airport, they promised to check their phones more often.
It was the best they could do. I couldn’t ask them for more.
My father trudged along, and my mother kept patting him on the shoulder and brushing lint I couldn’t see off the back of his plaid shirt. I’d never seen my father look so lost.
The Korean custom is to cry at funerals.
Harabeoji had told me this. Mourners wail and express their grief, their regrets.
They comfort each other. Some pounded their hearts with a fist and shouted my grandfather’s praises.
There were tears at Harabeoji’s service.
Mrs. Ku and both Yuns showed them. My father however kept his sorrow to himself.
So did his brother, Channing, me, and my mother.
Paul and Ames, Alice and her husband looked uncomfortable.
So many marriages but not that many funerals yet in this seaside town.
I knew my father was waiting to return home with my mother to share his grief with her, and she seemed to know it, too.
“We’re your eomma and appa. We’ll check our phones every day. We’ll make enough money for the lawyer or lawyers; sometimes you need more than one. Tell Channing we will pay for whatever she needs,” they said to me before they drove away in their rental car, as if money would keep us safe.
When I returned to the apartment, Channing was curled up on the couch, with her laptop open to an episode of the Chunhyang K-drama. I grabbed a pillow and blanket and settled on the floor. She got up and arranged her blankets and pillow on the floor beside me and brought the laptop over.
“From the beginning?” she said.
I agreed. We watched all sixteen episodes, sixteen hours.
Paul had left almond butter and raspberry jam and a new loaf of bread in the kitchen.
We ate the whole thing, took a break at episode ten, and slept until dawn the next day before watching six more before noon.
Not the complete episode. We fast-forwarded the parts where Chunhyang was in prison, with a horrible cangue around her neck, behind thick wooden bars in the evil magistrate’s prison that looked like a shed for animals.
Straw was at her feet, and they never showed her being fed.
The prison scenes filled many episodes, but neither of us could watch her suffer.
In the past, Channing had been able, but now it was clear she couldn’t.
The beginning and the end, that was what we played over and over again.
The beginning especially held our attention with Chunhyang’s mother wishing for a child and dreaming a blue crane appeared before her as a sign that she would have a baby.
I told Channing how her mother had explained that it was likely a Himalayan monal, and we looked it up on the internet.
“Even if blue cranes aren’t in Korea, this one was fantastical, so it might have been a crane that was magical with blue feathers instead of an actual bird that exists,” Channing said.
“It’s a dream, and things are not real in dreams.”
I wished in that moment that my aunt was in that room with us to discuss these birds.
She would have loved her daughter’s interpretation.
Turns out it wasn’t books necessarily but stories that brought us together.
And if the story was experienced in a K-drama, then that was just as good.
I told Channing I agreed with her. I could picture it: this beautiful blue crane, brighter than the real ones with that name, in defiance of reality.
It rained and sleeted and rained again outside of Paul’s tiny apartment. We heard it more than saw it because we kept the curtains closed. There was no news from our lawyer. At random moments, Channing said, “I miss Harabeoji.”
“Me too,” I told her. “I’m pretending he’s right over there in the Yuns’ house. It’s the only way I can keep going.”
“He always hated Labor Day weekend, the end of summer,” she said. “Maybe he knew somehow it would be when he left us.”
I would have argued with her in the past about ideas like that, but this time I didn’t.
Maybe she was right. When my aunt had died, I’d felt the loss of all the days ahead when she could have talked to me about books.
But for Channing, losing her mother had radically changed her at the core.
She was on her own. I’d imagined that the financial loss and the outward signs, all the comfort and privileges that had been ripped away, had been the change in her life.
Now with Harabeoji’s death, I understood her loss better.
The future seemed unfathomable. We were on our own.
No one was going to help us. It was as if the years ahead had vanished. Time had collapsed.