5. Chapter Five #2
At night I go back to any motel I’ve found for the evening and pull my laptop onto the bed, propping myself against the headboard with a pillow that smells storngly of bleach.
I search public ledgers for every county along the coast, scroll through digitized newspaper archives for anything involving unidentified remains, drowning victims, hikers found in the mountains months after they went missing.
My eyes burn by midnight every night, the blue light of the screen the only thing lighting the room.
I read obituaries. I read police blotters translated into the flat, procedural language of local news.
Sometimes I find an article about a body pulled from the water near a fishing pier, description vague, and my stomach drops through the floor before I click through and see the estimated age is wrong, or the clothing described doesn’t match anything Ryowoon would wear even now, ten years removed from the boy I knew.
Every single day feels like holding my breath underwater, waiting for the moment I break the surface and gasp in air that tastes like relief or grief.
I eat because I have to, not because I’m hungry.
I sleep in short, restless stretches, waking every few hours convinced I’ve missed a call, that Taesung’s tried to reach me and I slept through it.
I haven’t. My phone sits on the nightstand every night, screen dark, notifications empty.
A week passes like this. Seven days of county offices and digital archives and exhaustion from grief you’re not allowed to have yet because you don’t know if you have reason to.
Then, on the eighth day, my phone rings while I’m sitting in the parking lot of a gas station outside Tongyeong, a paper cup of coffee cold in the cupholder beside me. I see Taesung’s name on the screen and my hand freezes on the gear shift.
I let it ring twice before I answer, some superstitious part of me convinced that if I wait, if I don’t rush toward the answer, it’ll be kinder.
“Hey,” I say, sounding gravelly from disuse, from too many nights of silence.
“Seyeon. Hey, sorry it took a while. My brother-in-law had to pull some strings to get access to that database, took some convincing.”
“It’s fine,” I say quickly. “What did he find?”
There’s a pause on the line, brief but long enough for my heart to climb into my throat.
“Nothing,” Taesung says. “He went through everyone logged as unidentified in the last ten years, coastal counties and inland both, checked against the description you gave me. Nobody matches. No unidentified male in that age range with a scar like that. Nothing.”
The breath leaves me in a rush, my forehead dropping against the steering wheel. Relief floods through me, my eyes stinging with it. He’s not there. He’s not in a drawer somewhere with a number instead of a name.
But underneath that relief, almost as fast, the other feeling creeps back in, the one that’s been chasing me for weeks now. He’s not there. Which means he’s still out here, somewhere, and I still have no idea where.
“Thank you,” I manage to say. “Thank you, and thank your brother-in-law for me. I know that wasn’t an easy thing to ask.”
“Of course, man. I just wish I had better news, something that actually helped you find him instead of just … ruling stuff out.”
“It helps,” I say, even though it doesn’t feel like it. “It helps more than you know.”
We talk for another minute, him asking gently again when I might be coming back, me deflecting with vague answers about needing more time, and then we hang up.
I sit in the gas station parking lot for a long while after that, watching cars pull in and out, watching a woman argue with her kid about buying candy near the entrance, watching the ordinary motions of a world that has no idea what I’m looking for.
I drive back to my motel that night and sit on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the dark shapes of buildings I don’t recognize, in a town I only know because I’m looking for a ghost in it.
He’s alive. I have to believe that now, have to hold onto that with white-knuckled desperation. Ryowoon is out there somewhere, breathing, existing, maybe close enough that I’ve already driven past him without knowing it.
But knowing he’s alive doesn’t make him any easier to find. If anything, it just means the search keeps going, that there’s no morgue drawer to close the door on, only more roads, more county offices, more nights spent scrolling through names that will never be his.
I came here thinking I was hunting for a person. Now it just feels like I’m chasing a shadow that doesn’t want to be caught, something that slips further away every time I think I’m close.
12 Years Old
The suit itches. It’s too big in the shoulders, some cousin’s hand-me-down that my mother pinned at the sleeves last night while I stood there wordlessly staring at the wall behind her head.
The yellow armband keeps sliding down toward my elbow.
I keep pushing it back up with my other hand, over and over, something to do with my fingers that isn’t clenching them.
I’ve folded myself into the corner of the hall, knees pulled to my chest, my back against the cold wall.
From here I can see the whole room without anyone really seeing me.
My father’s picture sits at the front, black and white, a photo my mother picked because she said it was the one where he looked most like himself, though I don’t think it looks like him at all.
The version of him in that photograph is younger, smoother, missing the small burn scar on his jaw he got from a spark off the factory line years back.
The flowers around the frame are too white and clean for a man who came home every night smelling of metal and oil.
The incense on the altar sends up a thin curl of smoke that climbs toward the ceiling. Watching it gives my eyes something to do besides look at the picture, or at the shoes of the people who keep filing past to bow before it.
My mother moves between the low tables set up along the room, a bottle of soju in one hand, filling cups for men who barely knew my father beyond a nod in the street.
She bows her head when they reach for her arm, when they murmur their sorries, repeating words like too soon and good man and taken from us.
Her eyes are red-rimmed, swollen, but she keeps moving, keeps pouring, like if she stops the whole room might collapse in on itself.
I don’t cry. I want to, I think, somewhere underneath the numbness, but nothing comes.
I just watch. Watch the old men from the docks who worked beside my father for twenty years kneel in front of his photo, watch their shoulders shake, watch them wipe at their faces with the backs of rough hands before they stand and shuffle toward my mother to offer their condolences that mean nothing to me.
None of it brings him back. None of the bows or the tears or the murmured phrases change the fact that he isn’t walking through that door tonight, that he isn’t coming home ever again.
My friends find me eventually.
Jinwon comes over quietly, sits down cross-legged next to me without saying anything for a long moment.
Then he leans in and wraps his arms around me, an awkward, tight hug that smells like his mother’s fabric softener.
He doesn’t let go right away. When he pulls back his eyes are wet but he doesn’t cry, just pats my shoulder twice like he’s trying to remember what adults do in movies when someone’s hurting.
Haeil hangs back near the doorway a beat longer before he shuffles over, hands shoved deep into his pockets. He stares up at my father’s photo on the altar, his jaw working. When he finally looks at me his eyes are red-rimmed and swollen.
“Hang in there,” he mutters roughly. It’s such a stupid, useless thing to say, but I nod anyway.
Sihyung and Yoohan settle in on either side of me a few minutes later, not saying much either.
Sihyung opens a carton of banana milk and presses it into my hand without asking if I want it.
Yoohan brought a bag of shrimp chips, tears it open and sets it between us like an offering.
We sit there together, the four of us in a row against the wall, nobody eating much of anything, just watching the room move around us, the adults bowing and murmuring and pouring drinks.
My legs go numb underneath me from sitting cross-legged so long, the itchy fabric of the borrowed suit sticking to my skin.
My aunt comes over eventually, kneeling down in front of me with her knees together, her hand landing softly against my cheek.
“Seyeon,” she says gently. “Why don’t you come sit with the family for a while. Help your mom.”
I don’t answer her, but I start to push myself up off the floor, my knees ache from being folded for so long. Jinwon and the others watch me go without a word, with silence that says they understand there’s nothing left to say.
I’m halfway across the room, my aunt’s hand hovering near my back, as the doors at the entrance bang open hard, wood cracking against the frame. A ripple of noise moves through the hall, murmurs turning to gasps as heads swivel toward the sound.
Ryowoon’s father stumbles through the doorway.
He’s a mess even from where I’m standing.
His shirt is untucked on one side, buttons done wrong so the collar sits crooked against his throat.
His hair is greasy, sticking up at odd angles like he ran his hands through it too many times.
He weaves as he walks, one hand out to catch himself against the wall, and I can smell the alcohol on him before he gets anywhere close, thick and sour, clinging to him like a second skin.
His eyes find me across the room. His face crumples and he lurches forward, my name coming out of his mouth in a gasp.
“Seyeon.”