11. Chapter Eleven #5
His face twitches, the friendliness slipping. He nods, scratches at his neck where the skin is flaking and inflamed.
“Yeah,” he mutters. “Right.”
He steps aside. I move past him without looking at him again, I can smell the sour reek rising off his body, alcohol and sweat. I breathe through my mouth and keep walking.
The inside of the house is gutted. Bottles everywhere, lined up on every surface, rolling loose on the floor, some broken with the shards still where they fell.
The kitchen table is propped up on two legs and a stack of old newspapers where a third leg snapped off.
A cabinet door hangs crooked by one hinge.
Garbage bags pile in the corner, split open, spilling their contents across the floor.
Clothes, food wrappers, crushed cans. The TV in the family room plays static, the screen cracked down one corner.
The air is stale and reeks so badly that I have to swallow against the nausea climbing my throat.
I step over the wreckage. My feet know the way even after all these years, the muscle memory of a hundred visits still ingrained in my bones. Down the hall, turn left. Ryowoon’s room.
The door sticks as I put my shoulder into it, scraping over something on the floor behind it. Inside it’s dim, the window covered by a shirt that’s been tacked up as a curtain.
I grab his gym bag from the top of the closet and unzip it, working fast. I pull open the dresser and grab clothes, shirts, jeans, socks, whatever’s in there.
Not much. I stuff them into the bag and move to the closet, pull out the two jackets hanging there and fold them in.
Grab his books from the shelf above the mat, the worn paperbacks and the car magazines with pages folded over and paragraphs circled.
I pull down the ad spread taped above where he sleeps, the one he tore from a magazine years ago, a Kawasaki motorcycle he’s been talking about buying since we were fifteen.
I fold it carefully and tuck it between the books.
Duck under the bed, pull out boxes and a sealed can.
I yank open the desk drawer and stop.
My hand hovers over a photograph, face up, the colors faded with age.
Two boys sitting at a kitchen table, a small cake with candles between them.
Eight years old. I recognize my family’s kitchen in the basement apartment.
In the picture I’m grinning at the camera with frosting on my chin.
Ryowoon sits beside me, leaning in, one arm thrown over my shoulder, his grin so wide it takes up his whole face.
It was the one time my parents bought us a cake.
They couldn’t afford two, so they made us share, one cake for both birthdays.
Ryowoon didn’t care. He blew out every candle before I got to mine and I shoved his face into the frosting and my dad had to pull us apart.
I lift the picture out and hold it for a second. Then I slip it between the pages of one of his books and close the bag.
The hall is narrow. When I come out with the bag over my shoulder, Ryowoon’s father is standing there, hovering, filling up space without purpose.
He watches me with rheumy eyes. I meet his gaze and take a second to look at him.
He looks twenty years older than he is. Like something already dead that hasn’t had the decency to fall down yet.
“I’ll be going,” I say.
He clears his throat with a wet, phlegmy sound.
“Yeah. Right.”
I turn toward the front door. My hand is on the frame when his voice calls out from behind me.
“And you tell that son of mine I better not see his face around here again.” His tone hardens, the drink making him bolder. “I’m taking him off the family register.”
I stop walking.
My fingers curl around the doorframe. I can feel my pulse in my temples, in the base of my throat, behind my eyes. Every muscle in my body draws taut. I should walk out. I should step through this door and cross the yard and shut the gate behind me and never look back.
I turn around.
He leans against the hall wall, trying to look authoritative, trying to look like a father exercising his right. His chin juts out. His arms fold across his swollen gut.
I look at him and I say, “You know what the worst part of losing my dad was?”
His face changes. The bluster drains out of it. He goes still.
“It’s knowing that he lost his life for nothing.”
My voice is tremendously clear, each word comes out steady and with confidence. It’s the bare truth I’ve been holding back since I was twelve years old.
“You should have been the one to die that day.” I hold his eyes. “I’ve always wanted to tell you that. That all of our lives would have been better if it had been you.”
He doesn’t speak. His arms drop to his sides. His mouth opens and closes. For just a moment he looks like a man who’s been hit, and I feel nothing for him. Not guilt, not pity, not even satisfaction.
I turn and walk out. Through the wreckage, across the yard, through the gate. The iron creaks on its hinges when I slam it shut behind me.