8. Chapter Eight #5
We’re sorry for breaking in. We found this dog badly hurt and had nowhere else to bring her. We don’t have money to pay for her treatment but please take care of her. Her name is Nuri. She’s a good dog. Please help her.
I leave it on the counter where they’ll see it in the morning, then stop.
I go back and add one more line.
She likes to be scratched behind her left ear.
I set the pen down and turn back.
Ryowoon is on his knees beside Nuri. His hand moves over her fur in long, gentle strokes, tracing the shape of her head, down her neck, along her spine. He’s talking to her again, so quietly I have to stand still and hold my breath to hear.
“People are gonna take care of you here,” he says, his fingers working behind her ear, the spot she always loved. Her tail gives one weak wag. “They’ll fix you up. You’ll be safe. Okay? No one’s gonna hurt you here.”
His voice chokes up.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his shoulders start to shake. “Nuri, I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you out of there a long time ago. I should’ve…”
He presses his face into her fur, against the warm spot between her shoulders where she’s not cut up, and his arms wrap around her.
She whines softly and he makes a gasping sound, his body curling around her, holding her the way he used to hold her when they were little and she’d fall asleep in his lap in the yard.
“I can’t take you back with me,” he whispers into her fur. “You know that, don’t you? You can’t come back. He’ll…”
He can’t finish. His body shudders and he makes an agonized sound. I have to look away because my own eyes are burning so badly I can’t see.
I stare at the ceiling and bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste copper, my hands balled up at my sides, my nails digging into my palms. Tears slip down my face and I let them fall, not bothering to wipe them because it doesn’t matter, nobody’s watching, nobody cares what I look like right now.
Ryowoon stays bent over Nuri for a long time. He tells her she’s brave. He tells her she’s the best dog in the world and that he loves her and he’s sorry, over and over, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, until the words are just one continuous sound of grief.
I wait.
When he finally lifts his head his eyes are swollen, red-rimmed, his face twisted with a kind of pain I’ve never seen on him before. He presses his lips to the top of Nuri’s head, holds there for a moment, and then slowly unwraps his arms and stands.
He doesn’t look at me.
“Let’s go,” he says quietly.
I nod.
We leave the clinic. I pull the door shut behind us as best I can, the lock busted now but at least it’s closed. The truck is still running where I left it idling on the sidewalk.
We climb in. I put it in gear and pull out onto the road.
The drive back is the longest forty minutes of my life.
Ryowoon cries the whole way.
He turns his face toward the window and his shoulders heave silently, his breath hitching. He presses his forehead against the glass.
I’ve never seen Ryowoon cry. Not once. Not any of the times his dad beat him bloody, not at my father’s funeral, not even when his mother disappeared and left him alone with the worst person either of us has ever known.
Now he sobs for his dog and I keep my hands on the steering wheel and my eyes on the road and let my own tears fall in silence. I drive and I listen to my best friend grieve and there’s nothing I can do.
By the time we reach Haemok it’s almost two in the morning. The streets are dead, not a light on anywhere. I pull the truck back around to Mrs. Nam’s and park it where Ryowoon found it, turn off the engine and sit there for a minute in the quiet.
Ryowoon’s stopped crying. He sits motionless in the passenger seat, his hands in his lap, his face turned away from me. He’s stopped making any sound at all. The silence is worse than the sobbing was. It’s like something inside him has gone out.
I’ve seen Ryowoon angry. I’ve seen him hurt, defiant, sarcastic, tender. But I’ve never seen him like this. Hollow. Like someone reached in and took what kept him going and left the shell behind.
Mrs. Nam never asks about the truck. I don’t know if she noticed the mileage or the fact that someone moved it in the night, and if she did, she never says a word. She feeds us breakfast the next morning and looks at Ryowoon’s face and the bruises on his arms and doesn’t ask about those either.
No one says anything about the missing dog.
Ryowoon doesn’t go home for a week. He sleeps in Mrs. Nam’s back room, works his shifts at the store. He goes through the motions. Eats when Mrs. Nam puts food in front of him, works when there’s work to do, smokes on the curb outside the store in the evenings.
But he’s different.
His eyes are flat. His mouth doesn’t curve. He doesn’t pick fights, doesn’t crack jokes, doesn’t throw his arm over my shoulder when we walk. He sits where I put him and stares at nothing and goes somewhere far away inside his own head.
A week later he goes home. When he comes back the next morning he tells me his dad doesn’t remember the fight. Doesn’t remember Nuri. Doesn’t remember any of it.
I’ve never hated a person more.