16. Chapter Sixteen #2
Then it gains momentum.
You useless bitch. What the fuck did I marry you for? Can’t even keep a house clean. Can’t even cook a decent meal. What good are you? Huh? What good are you?
I squeeze my eyes shut. Pull the blanket tighter. Press my palms flat over my ears until my head hurts from the pressure. It doesn’t help. The sounds bleed through anyway. The crack of something breaking, glass or ceramic or wood. My mother’s voice filled with raw terror, climbing through the wall.
Please. Please, Sungkyu, please calm down. Please stop. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please.
She begs. Every time she begs. And every time the begging doesn’t work.
The sounds get worse, the thuds, her crying, a crash that shakes the wall between our rooms. I flinch so hard my teeth clack together.
Curl tighter. Count the cracks in the ceiling.
Try to make my mind go somewhere else, anywhere else, but my mother’s voice keeps pulling me back.
Sungkyu, please. The boy is sleeping. Please don’t.
As if I’m sleeping. As if anyone could sleep through this.
When I come out in the morning the house looks like a storm tore through it.
Chairs overturned. A broken plate in pieces near the kitchen threshold.
The TV knocked sideways on its stand, a crack across the screen.
The soju bottles from last night scattered across the floor, some empty, one on its side with a puddle beneath it soaking into the mat.
My mother sits at the kitchen table staring blankly at the wall. The left side of her face is so swollen and dark it barely looks like a face anymore. Her eye puffed shut. Her lip split in two places. A bruise crawling down the side of her neck shaped like fingers.
I stand in the doorway and look at her. She doesn’t turn or acknowledge me.
I don’t say anything to her because there’s nothing to say.
I’ve said everything there is. I’m sorry.
Are you okay. We should leave. He’s going to kill you.
None of it changes anything. None of it makes her get up from that table.
I leave the house. The door clicks shut behind me and her screams from last night stay in my head, looping, leaving a vast black emptiness in my chest. A hole so deep I can’t find the bottom.
I walk with it sitting in me, this sucking emptiness that makes everything around me look flat and pointless.
The sky, the houses, the people walking to work. All of it cardboard and fake.
Then Seyeon and I go down to the creek and he says he wants to catch dragonflies.
I shove the emptiness away while Seyeon wades through the water in his rolled up pants, his calves pale and skinny, slapping at the air with cupped hands and missing every dragonfly by a mile.
I sit on the bank and watch him fail spectacularly and feel my face move for the first time all day.
He gets tired eventually. Climbs up the bank and drops down beside me, stretching out on his back with his arm thrown over his eyes, and within ten minutes he’s asleep.
His breathing slows and his mouth falls open and I don’t wake him.
Partly because he looks peaceful and I don’t want to ruin it, but mostly because if he wakes up we’ll have to leave and if we leave I’ll have to go home.
So I let him sleep. Sit there pulling up grass, flicking pebbles into the creek, watching the light shift through the canopy. An hour passes, maybe two. The afternoon becomes golden and warm and the creek trickles on beside us.
A flicker of light catches my eye, of color, hovering near Seyeon’s hip. I turn my head and still.
A dragonfly. One of the blue and green ones with the see-through wings, the kind we’ve been chasing up and down the creek bed all summer.
It floats down out of nowhere weightlessly and settles on the curve of Seyeon’s hip where his shirt has ridden up.
Its body shimmers, wings catching the sun, glassy and still. Like it chose him on purpose.
I stare at it for a long time, afraid to breathe. Then I reach over, nudge Seyeon’s shoulder, and whisper, “Yah. Don’t move. Look.”
Seyeon’s eyes open blearily, then they find the dragonfly and go round.
He holds perfectly still, barely breathing, his lips parting as he watches it flex its wings once, twice.
His eyes sparkle. They catch the light the same way the dragonfly’s wings do, bright and full of wonder, and Seyeon looks up at me with this awed and delighted expression, like I just showed him something sacred.
I stare at him. At the dragonfly on his hip and the wonder on his face and the way the light falls on him.
He’s like something out of a fairytale. Like Seyeon has some kind of magic in him, something so quiet and warm that even a creature as small as a dragonfly can sense it and wants to be near him.
And I think, not for the first time, that I’m the luckiest person alive that he lets me sit beside him.
The dragonfly lifts off. We watch it disappear over the creek and Seyeon grins at me brightly and says, “Did you see that? Did you see it?” as if I wasn’t the one who woke him up.
The years go on and it’s all the same.
My father drinks. He breaks things. He breaks my mother.
He breaks me. The cycle turns and turns and turns with the monotony of seasons, and I sometimes wonder as I lie in my bed counting ceiling cracks and listening to the sounds on the other side of the wall if someday my father will just kill all of us.
Other adults try to help, in their way. The neighbors call the police.
They’ve been calling the police since before I can remember.
I have memories from when I was little, four or five, too young to understand what was happening but old enough to remember the flashing lights outside, the knock at the door.
My mother answering it with her hair pulled down to cover one side of her face.
Her voice, thin and shaking, assuring the officers on the step that everything was fine.
We’re fine. Just a small disagreement, nothing to worry about.
Thank you for coming. Her smile, ghastly, stretched over the swelling.
The officers nodding, looking past her into the house where my father sat in the kitchen with his arms crossed and his jaw set, daring them.
The door closing. The lock clicking. And then my father’s low and venomous voice.
What did you tell them? What did you say?
If you opened your mouth I swear to God.
Nosey sons of bitches coming to my house telling me how to run my family.
This is your fault. You’re the one who’s got them thinking there’s a problem.
Keep your goddamn mouth shut or I’ll give you something real to cry about.
He told her a lot of things. My father. Over and over until I knew the words by heart.
That she was nothing without him. That no one else would want her.
That she should be grateful, grateful, that he kept her fed and kept a roof over her head.
That his family should be his first priority and she owed him everything, her attention, her obedience, her silence.
He was her life, the only person in the world who would ever care about her.
Where would you go? He’d scream, red-faced, stinking of soju.
Where would you go, you stupid woman? Back to your parents’ grave?
You think anyone out there wants you? You’ve got nothing. You’re nothing without me.
I understood early on there was nowhere for her to go. My father made sure of that. Cut off her family. Cut off her friends. Cut off every escape route until the walls of our house became the boundaries of her world and he was the gatekeeper.
I tried to help her sometimes. When I was old enough to understand what was happening and dumb enough to think I could stop it.
Tried to step between them. Grabbed at my father’s arm once when he had my mother backed against the kitchen counter with his hand around her throat.
Screamed at him. Begged him. Stop, stop hurting her, please stop.
It only made things worse. He let go of my mother, turned on me, and the fury in his eyes tripled because now I’d insulted him on top of everything else.
A child daring to tell him what to do in his own house.
He threw me across the room. I hit the wall so hard the picture frame above me cracked and fell on my head.
And when he was done with me, when I was curled up on the kitchen floor with my arms over my head trying to protect the parts of me that hurt the most, he turned back to my mother and picked up where he left off.
So I tried not to be home. Stayed away as long as possible.
Hid when I could, slept in the tunnel at the playground or beneath the market stalls when I couldn’t bear to go back.
Accepted when other adults tried to shield me.
When Mrs. Nam pulled me into her back room and locked the door and told me I was staying the night.
When Seyeon’s dad clapped a hand on my shoulder and said, stay for dinner, Ryowoon-ah, we’ve got plenty.
Knowing full well that when I went home the punishment would be twice as bad for staying away, because my father treated my absence like personal betrayal.
But at least for those borrowed hours there wasn’t pain.
There was Mrs. Nam’s cooking and Seyeon’s dad’s card games and a room where nobody screamed.