Chapter 67 2018
“Hell of a show you put on back there.”
My head snapped to the voice, and Dylan stepped from the shadows of the ice arena, a stranger until he smiled. It was the same crooked grin he’d had when we were children, higher on the left than the right, shy with a hint of rebel just beneath the surface.
He was dressed in a thick green-and-gold plaid flannel jacket, his hands shoved deep in the pockets.
Snow fell from the sky and dusted his hair and shoulders.
It was midmorning, and the day was blindingly bright.
A delivery truck beeped as it backed into the warehouse bay for the restaurant that served the building.
“I had a feeling you might fall back to your old ways.” He nodded to the door of the kitchen behind me. I’d scouted out the escape route the day before, kitchens and the people who worked in them safe havens all my life.
“I figured if I was right,” he went on, “then it was meant for us to see each other again. If I wasn’t, then our destinies weren’t meant to cross.”
I stared, unable to believe he was there. In South Korea. Standing a few feet away.
“You’re here?” I said stupidly, question and statement.
He nodded in the direction of the ocean. “I got a cooking gig on a cruise ship that was heading to the Olympics, thinking you might get a second chance. It’s not often you get to see a friend realize a dream, and I hated that I missed it the first time.”
He shrugged like it was no big deal. Though it was a big deal, a great, astounding big deal.
He was tall, well over six feet, and scruffy, his dark-gold hair long to his shoulders and several days of beard shadowing his chin and cheeks. His soft boyish features had sharpened into a chiseled face. But he was still undeniably good looking, with sun-kissed skin and sinewy, long muscles.
“Hungry?” he asked as if it was the most natural question in the world.
“Starving.”
“I passed a taco place on the walk over here.”
“Tacos? We’re in South Korea.”
“Is that a problem?”
I laughed, and my nerves settled. He was twenty-two, and I was twenty, but in that moment, it was as if no time had passed at all and we were two mischievous kids sneaking out the back door of Gaines to escape into the woods.
“Tacos it is,” I said.
I fell into step beside him, me taking two steps to each of his one.
It’s strange, thinking back on it, how I didn’t think about what I’d done moments before on the ice. It was as if that part of my life had ended, slammed shut like a book I knew I wasn’t going to open again.
“So you’re still cooking?” I asked.
I knew from his letters that, since he’d left Georgia, he’d bounced around place to place and job to job.
He’d done construction in New York City, worked on a pipeline in Alaska, picked grapes in California.
Then a couple of years ago, he landed at a restaurant in Los Angeles, working for a famous chef.
“Apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” he said, and offered his crooked grin, his eyes square on my face, still entirely unaffected by my nevus.
“Here it is,” he said.
The hole-in-wall restaurant, Gusto Taco, was wedged between a hardware store and a laundry. I smiled when I saw the sign in the window that said Vegetarians and vegans welcome! And I knew it was why Dylan had chosen it.
“What would you like?” Dylan asked when we reached the counter.
I scanned the chalkboard and ordered two mushroom feta tacos with beans and rice, and pulled my wallet from my backpack.
“My treat,” Dylan said.
I wanted to protest. His clothes looked worn, and he’d come all that way to watch me. Plus, thanks to Netflix and Mother’s passing, I had more money than I needed in this lifetime or ten lifetimes after. But his determined eyes stopped me.
“I’ll have the same,” he said to the woman at the counter. “And a Dos Equis.”
He pulled several thousand won from an old Velcro wallet and thanked the woman politely in Korean when she gave him his change.
We chose a booth beside the window.
Sitting across from him, I could see him more clearly. His eyes were red rimmed, and I noticed a tremor in his hand when he lifted the beer to his lips. He guzzled it greedily, though I could tell how hard he was trying not to.
“What?” I said, realizing he was studying me as well.
“It’s just . . .” He hesitated. “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“You. I mean you put in all that effort, all that training. You worked so hard and went through all the trouble to get to the Olympics. And then you went out there and did what you did, and I know I said don’t worry about the jewelry, but that was when I didn’t think you had a chance.
But then you skated the way you did, and you were so close.
Didn’t you want a medal? Wasn’t that the point? ”
I took a second before answering, trying to figure out how to put my thoughts into words. Finally I said, “The point was to skate the way I wanted to skate.” And to prove to the judges, and myself, and perhaps the world, what I was capable of. This last part I didn’t say out loud.
“So it wasn’t to give the judges the finger?” he said.
“Is that what it looked like?” I said with a laugh.
“Absolutely. Like you were saying screw you, screw the scores, and screw your self-righteous judgment. It was beautiful.”
“That wasn’t my intention,” I said, chuckling again.
He laughed as well, and for a moment, his face looked young again. “You’re one of a kind, Patch. Only you could blow up the world without even trying.”
After the most delicious tacos I’d ever eaten and a wonderful conversation that avoided talk of anything serious, we walked from the restaurant into a snowstorm.
Dylan peeled off his flannel jacket and held it toward me.
I was extremely underdressed for the weather in my warm-up suit.
In my defense, I had planned on taking an Uber back to my hotel after leaving the arena.
I shook my head. “It’s freezing.”
“Exactly,” he said and continued to hold the jacket toward me. “I want to walk with you some more, and I run hot, while you have zero body fat and are shivering.”
I took it, shrugged it on, and laughed as I held up the arms, which were so long they flopped off my hands.
He laughed as well, then reached down and rolled the cuffs past my hands and onto my wrists. When he bent to button the jacket, I jolted.
“You okay?” he asked, eyes wide.
My heart scatter-fired in my chest. The last time someone had reached toward the buttons on my jacket was Bart all those years ago.
“Sorry,” I said and reminded myself I was no longer that scared little girl and this was not then.
It was a magical afternoon. At a small shop we bought a wool hat, and I pulled it low over my head so not a soul recognized me as we wandered the streets of Pyeongchang.
I ate so much street food I thought my stomach might burst, and Dylan told so many funny stories I wished I’d had a tape recorder so I could replay every word.
We were on a footbridge over a recently thawed pond when we encountered the woman.
I was throwing bits of a hotteok, Korean pancake, into the water for the swallows that had returned early from their migration.
The woman, middle aged and Korean, saw my face and quickly made the sign of the cross before hurrying around us and giving me a wide berth.
“What the hell?” Dylan said.
I opened my mouth to tell him to ignore it, but he was already racing to catch up with her.
Stepping in her path, he said, “That’s my friend.”
He was a little drunk, having had a beer at each place we’d stopped to eat. The woman clearly didn’t understand him. So he pointed to his eye, then at me, then glared at her.
“Dylan, don’t,” I said. “It’s okay.”
Dylan turned, and the woman, seeing her opportunity, fled.
“People are idiots,” he muttered as he returned to where I stood, his breath huffing angrily through his nose.
I giggled. “Including you. What did you think you were going to accomplish, scare her into not being scared of something she’s naturally scared of?”
“She shouldn’t be scared.”
“But she is. People are scared of things they don’t understand.” I nudged him. “But thank you. That was very chivalrous.”
A dark shadow crossed his face, and he turned to look at the water, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. I understood from his letters that he felt enormous guilt over his mom’s death, condemning himself in the same way I had when Profe died.
“You can’t blame yourself for things you can’t control,” I said, the lesson hard learned over months of reflection and conversations with Boodo and Tiny, who knew a lot about such things.
“You do not blame the squirrel who dropped the acorn that caused an avalanche,” Boodo liked to say.
While Tiny was more straightforward about it.
“Bad things happen all the time, and you are not as important as you think.”
Dylan leaned his elbows on the railing and looked out at the water, and I set my hand on his back.
I felt the tension coiled in his muscles, so I rubbed circles between his shoulder blades the way Boodo did when I was upset.
I didn’t mean anything by it, but then he looked at me, and our eyes connected, and the air shifted.
My hand fell away, and he straightened. And I’m not sure if I moved first or he did, but he bent toward me as I lifted up on my toes.
And on a bridge, in a park in South Korea, with snow falling softly around us and a hundred swallows watching, the boy I’d loved since I was a girl put his lips on mine.
He tasted of beer and hotteok, and it was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.
He pulled away as if startled and took a step back. “I’m sorry,” he stammered.
“For kissing me?”
He shook his head hard once, and I understood. It was as if, in that moment, I knew his soul. Sometimes the tunnel is so dark that the smallest flicker of light hurts, and anything other than putting one foot in front of the other is too much. He was still in the tunnel.
“I’m not asking for anything beyond today and this moment,” I said, then reached up and pulled his mouth back to mine.