4. Chapter For
The motel room’s AC unit sputters and rattles against the window frame, I’ve been staring at it, bouncing my knee, phone in my hand, working up the nerve to make this call.
Now as I listen to the call tone, I try to concentrate on something other than the outdated carpeting and instead try to practice my request in my head.
Taesung picks up on the third ring, sounding exhausted, the side effect of being a new father.
“Seyeon.” He sounds surprised. “Everything okay? Principal Oh’s been asking about you.”
“Everything’s fine.” It’s not, but that’s not a conversation I want to have halfway across the country standing in a motel room. “Family stuff. It’s taking a bit longer than I thought.”
“Right, of course. Should I tell them you’ll be back by—”
“I’m not sure yet.” I cut him off before he can pin me down to a date.
Guilt needles at me, thinking of my classroom sitting empty, a substitute fumbling through my lesson plans on particle usage, but that’s a problem for another time.
“Actually, I was hoping you could help me with something. It’s a bit of a strange favor. ”
There’s a pause, the sound of him shifting, maybe adjusting the baby on his shoulder. “Okay. Shoot.”
“Your brother-in-law. He’s a police officer, right? In Daegu?”
“Yeah, Jeonyoung. Why?”
I sit down on the edge of the bed, elbow braced on my knee.
This part I’ve rehearsed, but the words still sound clumsy out loud.
“I need to find someone. An old friend I lost touch with years ago. I’ve been trying to track him down myself, but I haven’t had any luck, and I was wondering if your brother-in-law might be able to do a records search for me.
Criminal records. Maybe even incarceration history, just to check. ”
Another pause, longer this time. “Incarceration? Seyeon, what’s going on?”
I press the heel of my hand against my eye, wishing there was a way to say this that didn’t sound the way it sounds.
“It’s not what you think. He’s not—he wasn’t a criminal or anything like that.
It’s just, the life he was living, when I knew him, wasn’t exactly stable.
I don’t know what happened to him after he left. I need to rule it out.”
Even saying it makes me feel sick. I hate that this is a possibility I have to consider, hate that I know Ryowoon well enough to know it isn’t out of the question.
He was always running some scheme, some hustle, buying and selling parts that fell off a truck somewhere, fixing engines for men who paid him in cash and didn’t ask for receipts.
He used to say rules were for people who had the luxury of following them.
I used to laugh when he said it, but I’m not laughing now.
“I mean, I can ask him,” Taesung says slowly. “I don’t know if he’ll be able to do much unofficially, but he owes me a favor or two. What’s the name?”
“Cha Ryowoon.” I spell it out for him, hear him repeating it back, writing it on whatever’s within reach. I tell him his birthdate and city of birth, the weird echo I always feel because it’s exactly the same as mine.
“Got it. I’ll text him tonight.” A beat. “You sure you’re okay? You sound tired.”
“I’m fine. Just a lot going on with my hometown right now.” It’s not a lie, but simpler than the whole truth. “Thank you, Taesung. I really appreciate this.”
“Yeah, of course. Family looks out for family.” He says breezily, and I feel a fresh stab of shame, because Ryowoon isn’t family to Taesung, isn’t anyone to him but a stranger’s name in a text message. But he is that to me. He’s always been that to me.
We say a few more things, he tells me about the baby’s first laugh, I make the appropriate sounds of delight, and then I hang up and sit there with the phone loose in my hand, listening to the AC unit click through another cycle.
I drag the notepad off the nightstand. A cheap spiral bound one I bought at the corner store, a few pages already damp from when I left the window cracked in Suncheon and it rained.
The pages are covered in my handwriting, cramped and slanted, lists of addresses I’ve compiled from public records searches, ordered by district, by town, by the small chance any one of them could be him.
There are eleven names on the current page.
Cha Ryowoon, 34, registered address in Yeosu.
Cha Ryowoon, 33, registered in Mokpo. I’ve crossed most of them out already, thick black lines through the ink with an aggressive scratch from disappointment.
None of them were him. One was a factory worker with three kids who looked at me like I’d lost my mind when I showed up at his door.
Another was in his sixties, some clerical error in the database that listed his birth year wrong.
I apologized to both of them, bowed my way out feeling foolish, and got back in the car.
I flip to the next page, where I started widening the search after Yeosu turned up nothing.
His mother’s family name is Jin, and it occurred to me around the third day of driving that Ryowoon might’ve used it, might’ve wanted to bury Cha entirely if he was trying to disappear from a father he hated as much as he hated his own name.
I had to call my own mother to ask, feeling strange about it, my mother’s voice quieting on the other end of the line when she understood what I was asking and why.
“You think he’d change his name,” she’d said.
“I don’t know. I’m trying everything.”
So now half the notepad is full of Jin Ryowoons too, a scattering of them up and down the southern coast, and I’ve been chasing them the same way, town to town, looking for a face that only exists in my memory now, a boy of eighteen with wiry arms and a scowl that could curdle milk, hoping some trace of him survived into whatever man he’s become.
I close the notepad and set it back on the nightstand, next to the water glass I haven’t touched and the room key with its plastic tag advertising a seafood restaurant three blocks from here.
Tomorrow it’s Gwangju addresses first, then I head toward Naju if nothing turns up.
I’ve planned it out like a grid, working my way across every place he could’ve landed, every corner of this country he might’ve crawled into to lick his wounds after everything that happened.
I lie back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and think about how strange it is, to spend ten years actively not looking for someone, tiptoeing around his absence, and then to spend every waking hour like this, hunting for any sign he still exists.
Somewhere out there, in one of these towns stacked up along the coast like beads on a string, I have to believe he’s still breathing, still stubborn enough to still be alive to find.
The address takes me an hour out of the city, past the last bus stop and onto a road that turns to gravel after the second rice paddy.
I keep checking my phone, the map app showing a blinking dot that insists I’m close, but there’s nothing here except fields and the start of a foothill trail marked with a wooden post so weathered I can barely read the characters carved into it.
I park my car on the shoulder, next to a rusted guardrail, and sit there a moment, second-guessing the address again.
The registration going back to some property up here that hasn’t changed hands in decades according to the records I dug up.
I don’t know what I expected. A house or some elderly relative who’d blink at me through a screen door and ask what I want with the Cha boy. I didn’t expect a hiking trail.
I get out anyway, lock the car, and start up the path in my button-up and slacks because I didn’t think to bring anything else, because every stop on this search feels like it should be treated with a little decency even when I have no idea what I’m walking into.
Within ten minutes sweat soaks through the collar and down the middle of my back, my dress shoes slipping on loose dirt, the incline steeper than it looked from the road.
Cicadas scream out of the trees on either side.
I keep going, telling myself it can’t be much further, and only stopping once to catch my breath against the trunk of a pine, palm pressed flat against the bark, lungs heaving.
When the trail levels out at the top I don’t see a house. I see graves.
They spread across a clearing cut into the hillside, mounded and grass-covered, each one fronted by a stone marker, some new and polished, some so old that the moss has crept into the carved characters and softened them.
A family site like the ones dotting hills all over this country, tucked away from the roads, visited twice a year if the descendants remember to come.
I stand there a minute, catching the last of my breath, watching the morning light spill over the ridge and spill golden light across the grass.
Then I start walking between the mounds, reading the names carved into each stone, because there’s nothing else to do and some part of me thinks maybe I’ll find something here that leads me somewhere useful.
The dates go back generations. A man who died in 1951, another in 1938, wives and sons listed beneath husbands and fathers in smaller script, the family tree laid out in stone instead of paper.
I crouch in front of one marker with fresher edges, a woman who died only twenty years ago, and beside her name a string of children’s names, some crossed off with a different date carved beneath, infants who didn’t survive their first winter.
I read them all. I don’t know why. Maybe because it feels disrespectful not to, walking through a place like this and only looking for one name among the rest.
I pause on one stone smaller than most, tucked at the edge of the plot like it was added after the rest, and the age carved beneath the name makes me take a short breath. Twenty-one.