20. Chapter Twenty #5
The house looks worse than I remember. Smaller too, the way places from childhood always shrink when you come back to them with adult eyes.
The concrete walls are stained dark with years of coastal damp, paint peeling in long, curling strips.
The courtyard out front is overgrown, weeds pushing through the cracked cement, the rusted gate hanging crooked on one hinge.
I haven’t been here in years. Haven’t had a reason to.
My father could be inside or he could be dead in a ditch somewhere and I honestly couldn’t care either way.
I kill the engine and sit on the bike, looking at it.
I get off and walk through the courtyard. Past the overgrown weeds, past the faded doghouse with Nuri’s chain still lying coiled in the dirt beside it, the clip rusted shut.
The front door is locked but the lock’s been cheap garbage since before I was born. One solid kick just below the handle and the frame splinters inward, the door swinging open and bouncing off the wall. The sound echoes through the empty house. Nobody comes running. Nobody’s here.
It smells the same. Stale cigarettes and soju and mildew, the smell of a house where nothing good happened for a long time. The floors are filthy. Dishes crusted in the sink. Bottles on the counter and the table and the floor by the couch, lined up like soldiers. My father’s handiwork.
I don’t linger. Don’t look at the kitchen table where I sat across from him with my eyes dead and my hands in my lap while he told me what a waste I was.
Don’t look at the hallway wall where the plaster is still dented from the shape of my shoulder.
I walk past all of it to the back bedroom, the one my mother used, and open the closet.
The safe is still there. Shoved in the back corner behind a box of my mother’s old clothes she never came back for.
A squat ugly thing, scuffed metal. My father thought he was clever hiding it here.
Thought nobody knew about it but my mother because she’s the only one who put anything worth keeping inside it in the first place.
I used to watch her through the crack in the door when I was supposed to be sleeping.
I crouch down and spin the dial. 0-4-1-7. His birthday. The idiot never changed it.
The lock clicks. I pull the door open.
Not much inside. Some folded cash, maybe three hundred thousand won in mixed bills.
A couple of old documents, insurance papers, something from the factory.
My mother’s wedding ring in a small velvet pouch, the gold worn.
I take the cash and count it, fold it into my jacket pocket.
Leave the ring. Leave the papers. Close the safe and spin the dial.
I close the closet door and walk back through the house without stopping.
I get on the bike and ride.
There’s one more stop before I go.
Mrs. Nam’s store is quiet when I pull up out front. The roll down doors are up and I can hear the tinny sound of her TV playing a drama through the open doorway. No customers. Mid afternoon lull. The same as it’s been a thousand times before.
I pull off my helmet and sit on the bike for a minute, looking at the storefront. The faded awning. The old freezer by the entrance. The hand painted sign she’s never replaced. I can see the scorch marks on one side where the fire damaged the exterior, faded now.
I swing off the bike and walk in.
She’s behind the counter, perched on her stool, arms folded, watching her drama.
The volume is up too loud because she won’t admit her hearing’s gotten worse.
She turns her head when my shadow falls across the counter and looks at me in my riding jacket.
My bag is strapped to the back of the bike, visible through the open doors.
My face must look the way it feels because Mrs. Nam’s expression doesn’t shift into surprise or confusion. She looks resigned.
She comes around the counter slowly, her joints giving her trouble though she’d bite the head off anyone who mentioned it. She stops in front of me and takes my hand in both of hers, her small fingers wrapping around mine, and she looks up at me and nods once.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
My throat clenches. I grip her hands back and make myself look her in the eye. She deserves more than that from me, deserves more than I could give her in a hundred lifetimes.
“Halme,” I say hoarsely. “I wanted to say thank you. For everything you’ve done for me. For all of it.” I swallow. “You didn’t have to take us in. You didn’t have to feed us or protect us or put up with any of our bullshit. And I don’t think I ever said it properly.”
Her eyes are bright. She squeezes my hand, her grip stronger than it has any right to be for a woman her age. “You say it every time you walk through that door, child. You always have.”
I press my lips together hard. Keep it together.
“I figured this might be coming,” she says, her voice steady but her chin trembling just slightly. “Saw the look in that boy’s eyes when he got on the bus.” She searches my face. “He didn’t know, did he? What was really happening between you two this summer. What you were feeling.”
I laugh. “He knew. He always knows. That’s the problem.”
She gives me a long look. Seeing me clearly.
“Do you really have to do it this way, Ryowoon?”
I hold her gaze. Grip her hands tighter. “He’s better off,” I say. “Without me. He’s better off.”
Mrs. Nam presses her lips together. I can see she wants to argue. Wants to grab me by the ear and sit me down in the courtyard and talk sense into me the way she’s done a hundred times. But my face must tell her I’m past reaching because she lets out a breath and pulls me down.
I have to bend nearly in half to let her hug me and she wraps her arms around my neck with surprising force, pressing my head against her shoulder the way she used to when I was small enough to fit properly in her arms. She holds me and I hold her back, my hands fisting in the fabric of her vest, my eyes burning.
“You will always have a home here,” she says against my ear. Firmly. “You hear me? Always. No matter where you go or how long you’re gone. This door is open for you.”
I nod. Can’t speak. She pats the back of my head, smooths my hair down the way my mother never did or at least never did enough.
Then she pulls back, cups my face in her palms, and looks at me.
Her eyes are wet but she doesn’t let the tears fall.
Stubborn woman. Never cried in front of us. Not once.
“Let me get you something for the road,” she says. “You’re too skinny. You’ll blow off that motorcycle.”
I choke out a laugh. She bustles into the kitchen and I hear her moving around, opening containers, wrapping things.
She comes back with her arms full. Packages of kimbap, rice balls, a thermos of barley tea, a bag of the honey cookies she keeps in the tin behind the register.
She presses all of it into my hands, piling them up until I’m juggling.
“Halme, I can’t carry all of—”
“You’ll manage.” She shoves the last package at me and closes my fingers around it. Then she holds my hands again, the food pinned between us, and looks up at me one final time.
“Go,” she says quietly. “Go find your way. But you come back when you’re ready. You hear me?”
I lean down and kiss her forehead. Feel her hand pat my cheek one more time, calloused and warm.
I walk out of the store into the late golden light.
My arms full of more food than one person can eat in three days, my chest so tight I can’t pull in a full breath.
I strap the packages to the back of the bike alongside my bag, fitting them into the gaps, making it work. Pull my helmet on. Straddle the seat.
I look back.
She’s standing in the entrance. Small and upright between the roll down doors, her hands folded in front of her, the TV still playing behind her.
The light on her silver hair, on the worn fabric of her apron.
She doesn’t wave. Just stands there, watching, her face calm and bright eyed.
The same thing she’s given me since I was six.
A safe place. A warm meal. The certainty that someone in the world would notice if I disappeared.
I turn back to the road. Kick the bike to life.
Haemok unspools behind me as I ride. The harbor shrinking in the mirror.
The rooftops of the houses on the hill growing smaller, blurring.
The road curves along the coast and the town slips sideways, tucking itself behind the bluffs, and I watch it go.
Watch the last sliver of familiar coastline thin to a line and then to nothing.
I have to go. I know I have to go. Because if I stay he’ll come back for me. Because the poison in my blood will seep into his life the way it seeps into everything I touch and I would rather bleed out alone on the side of this road than watch Heo Seyeon dim.
The wind picks up as the road straightens and the town vanishes from the mirror entirely. Just open road and open sky and the flat grey line of the sea to my left. I twist the throttle and the engine screams beneath me and the coast blurs and I ride.
But I feel it. The pull.
Haemok. That miserable beautiful suffocating town.
The salt-stained streets and the screaming gulls and the foghorns at dawn and the smell of frying food at the pojangmacha and the sound of Mrs. Nam’s TV and the harbor at sunset turning copper and the view from the hill where Seyeon drew the Rose of Sharon and the creek where the dragonflies lived and the crossroads where I waited for him every morning of my life.
I hated it. I loved it. I survived it by the skin of my teeth and I’m tearing myself out of it now like ripping a tooth from a living jaw and it’s going to bleed for a long, long time.
The road stretches north. The mirror is empty. I ride until the sun touches the water and the sky goes red and gold and then dark, and I don’t look back again.