I'll Be Right There (20 page)

“The crabs went all over the place, their claws snapping. They were so full of life that it took all three of us to catch them. And she hadn’t stopped at crabs. My sister had bought a little of everything that comes from the ocean. She seemed determined to move the entire fish market to our house. Abalone, scallops, sea squirts, sea cucumbers … She must have spent half of the allowance our parents sent us—money we were supposed to live on for the month. The kitchen was a disaster area. Those crabs were so strong. I remember how
she stared at them with a helpless look on her face and asked Myungsuh what she was supposed to do with them. He said, ‘Maybe they’ll die if you remove their shells?’ She tried to pull the shell off a live crab with her bare hand. She almost got her hand pinched in its claws. I would never have imagined it. When we lived in Busan, my sister couldn’t stand the smell of low tide, so she wouldn’t even go down to the harbor. By sunset the crabs had stopped moving, as if they’d finally died of exhaustion. She steamed several pots of crabs and stacked them on a tray. We tried to help her, but she did it all on her own. My curiosity about her boyfriend kept building—what kind of person could transform my sister so completely? Myungsuh apparently had never seen crabs being cooked before. He said he thought they were always red. He was so fascinated by the way they turned red while steaming that he kept lifting the lid to peek at them in disbelief. I complained, ‘Why blue crabs, of all things?’ They’re difficult to eat, especially in front of someone you’ve just met for the first time. You have to smash them open and dig out the meat … I couldn’t imagine digging out crabmeat in front of someone I didn’t know. I thought,
How can one person eat this many blue crabs, even if they love them?
It was strange to watch my sister cook, but at the same time, I felt surprised and happy. It was the first time I’d ever seen her cook. She lived in a boardinghouse when she first moved to the city, and when we lived together, Myungsuh and I did most of the cooking. It wasn’t that I wanted her to. I never really expected anything from her. And yet, there she was, making flounder-and-mugwort soup with mugwort that she had cleaned and trimmed herself.”

“Did it taste good?”

“I have no idea. No one got to eat any of it. That page is blank in my notebook.”

“What happened?”

“He never showed up.”

Miru mumbled the words, her voice as faint as if it had sunk to the deepest reaches.

“He called while my sister was boiling the crabs. I heard her say that he didn’t need to bring anything, so I figured he had asked if he should buy something on the way. He must have kept asking because then I heard her say, ‘Miru likes lilies. But only get one …’ I looked at her, and she crinkled her eyes at me. He seemed to know where we lived. I don’t think he asked for directions. But two hours went by, the crabs got cold, and he never showed. After a while, it got dark. My sister looked so worried that I said, ‘Something must have come up. We can just eat together another time.’ She mumbled to herself and then said, ‘Of course we can eat another time.’ She added, ‘It’s not the dinner that’s worrying me. Let’s pray that nothing happened to him.’ I didn’t understand what she was talking about. She asked if we wanted to go ahead and eat. But no one was in the mood, and she looked too worried. She went to the phone and made a few short calls. Then she pulled on her shoes and dashed out of the house. Emily followed her to the door, but she left without so much as a glance back. Myungsuh was worried and decided to follow her. Her behavior was so erratic. When we got to the bottom of the hill, she was standing on the curb. It was dark, and the street was lined on both sides with trees. She stepped down into the
road and was about to run across. A bus sped by just in front of her, and a taxi pulled up. The driver stuck his head out and started cursing at her. Myungsuh guided her back onto the sidewalk, but she kept trying to run out into the road. We stood close and kept an eye on her. She wouldn’t listen to us, but she looked so anxious that we couldn’t leave her alone, either. Finally, I told Myungsuh we should drag her back to the house, but she jumped into a cab that had just pulled up the curb and vanished before our eyes. We stood there staring after the cab for a long time before finally trudging back up the hill. It was late at night. Myungsuh covered up the boiled crabs and put away the food that was on the table. With my sister gone, we couldn’t imagine touching any of it.”

The phone rang again, drowning out the sound of the concerto that had started over. The ringing stopped and started again. I was so distracted by the phone that I missed some of what Miru said. She didn’t react at all. In fact, she was so oblivious that I couldn’t bring myself to ask why she didn’t answer it. The ringing of the phone threaded into the line of piano music and then faded back out.

“My sister didn’t come home that night or the next day. We went to her school and checked every classroom where she might have been, but we couldn’t find her. She was gone for two days. I had no idea where she’d been or what she’d been doing, but she returned looking haggard. Her eyes were bloodshot, like she hadn’t slept a wink. I asked her what happened, but she just looked at me wide-eyed and passed out on the bed. Myungsuh and I had to throw out all of the seafood that she’d bought. The crab had spoiled and smelled terrible.

We cleaned and swept the kitchen to get rid of the stench. Each time I opened her bedroom door to check on her, she was still asleep.

“Emily sat on her pillow and kept watch over her. Myungsuh wiped her face with a damp washcloth. I cleaned her hands and feet. She was so exhausted that she slept through all of it. After sleeping like the dead for maybe a dozen hours, she bolted awake as if someone had startled her and started making more calls. She grew paler with each phone call. Finally she hung up and held her face in her hands for a long time, and then she grabbed her bag. I asked her where she was going, but she didn’t answer. I couldn’t let her leave again. I yelled, ‘What about us? You can’t leave us in the dark like this! You have to tell us something before you go!’ It was the first time since the accident at our grandmother’s house that I had yelled at her. She plopped down on the floor and looked at me through bloodshot eyes. She said, ‘Miru, he’s missing.’ I didn’t know what she meant at first. How could I have known? How I wish I could have seen what was coming, if only just a little. If I had, I would never have let her leave. She said, ‘I have to find him.’ But she looked calm, not like how she was when she was making those phone calls or collapsing on the floor in front of me.

“She asked if it was okay to send him to our grandmother’s house if she found him. It was the first time since we were kids that we had ever talked about that house. I pressed the key into the palm of her hand. Yoon, I had no idea why he disappeared, but I genuinely hoped he would find sanctuary at our grandmother’s house. If he had to go into hiding, then I
wanted him to hide there. I didn’t know if he was a good person or a bad person or what he had done. But my sister looked so exhausted because of him that I hoped he was somewhere she could reach him. I never thought I could feel that way toward a person I’d never met. I followed my sister to the front door and asked her to call me every day at the same time. She said she would call at midnight. At first, she kept her promise. I would ask her if everything was okay, and she would answer brightly that it was. But her voice would trail off when I started asking more questions. Her calls became infrequent, from once every three days to once every five days, and then the phone stopped ringing altogether. Every now and then she would show up in person, looking terrible, and sleep like the dead until she got her energy back. Then she would grab some cash and leave again. Sometimes she would pet Emily, a vacant look in her eyes, as if she’d only come to see the cat. The days that she came home to sleep off her fatigue seemed to be the days that she got really bad news about her missing boyfriend. After she had stumbled home and slept it off, she would suddenly start talking about him. She told me that the day he was supposed to come over for dinner, some men came looking for him. Judging by the time, it must have been right before he would have left for our place. ‘Who were they, and why did he go with them instead of coming over here?’ She kept asking me questions I could not answer. She looked worse and worse each time she came home. ‘Someone saw him get in a cab with those men, but then he jumped out and ran away. What happened in the cab that made him run away?’ She would mumble to herself. One day, she told me
his real name was Minho. I assumed she had met his family. I think she and his older brother were looking for him together. She seemed hopeful and said his brother might be able to find him, and that his brother looked just like him. ‘He calls him Minho.’ She kept mumbling his name to herself. Another time, she came home and said someone had seen him escaping into the woods in front of a police checkpoint, but she looked disappointed and said that it turned out it wasn’t him. Then she said, ‘No, no, that’s good. What would he be doing hiding in the woods?’ I could only tell where she had been by the things she blurted out. Someone told her they saw his body floating under a bridge in the Cheongna Reservoir, but when she went to Cheongna, there was no one there, let alone anyone she could ask. Another day, she mumbled, ‘Miru, why would he have gotten on that train?’ She would come home, say things I didn’t understand, sleep like the dead, and leave again. Each time, I got another unfulfilled promise that she would call me once a day. It was ridiculous how powerless I was. Even though it made her grimace, the only thing I could say to her was, ‘If you don’t promise to call me every day, then I won’t let you leave!’ What I learned from her searches was that countless numbers of people had gone missing—not just her boyfriend. While she searched for him, I started to notice how many people there were wandering around in search of loved ones, friends, coworkers, and sons who had abruptly vanished. How could something like that happen?”

Miru stopped talking for a moment. I sensed that she was torn between needing to continue and knowing she should
stop. She looked tortured by the words she could not swallow, as if there were a giant thorn in her throat. I placed my hand on top of hers.

“If it’s too much,” I said, “you can stop. We can finish the story later.”

“No, I want to talk about it. But only if you’re okay.”

The telephone rang again. Miru continued.

“I got a phone call from my sister early one morning. She said she was back and needed a bath. She asked me to meet her at the bathhouse. I thought she meant she was back for good. I packed a change of clothes for her. Underwear, a toothbrush, a towel … and this skirt.”

She pushed my hand away and pointed to the floral skirt she was still wearing.

“It was your sister’s?”

“Yes. She always wore it around the house.

“I packed up her shower basket and went to that public bath where you and I went last time. She was already inside. We bathed together like we used to when we were kids. We scrubbed each other’s backs and rinsed each other off. My sister’s face, which had looked so anxious ever since her boyfriend disappeared, looked peaceful that day. I thought maybe she had found him. She offered to wash my hair for me. She used to do that sometimes when we were younger. I loved it when she would wash my hair. She squeezed shampoo into the palm of her hand and gently scrubbed my scalp with her fingers. She washed away the suds and rinsed my hair over and over until the water ran clear. Then she combed my hair straight, rolled it up into curls, and pinned them in place. She
stroked the back of my neck and asked me how school was. My eyes stung with tears. I thought the fact that she was asking me about school meant that she had come back to her senses. We stayed in the bathhouse for a long time. When we went back into the locker room, our toes were swollen and wrinkled from the water. My sister dried me off with a towel. She even took her time drying my hair. Then she put lotion on my back. She dressed herself in the clothes I had brought for her, but when she saw the skirt, she said she would wear it at home. I thought her jeans were too dirty to wear again, but I didn’t think much of it. We came out of the bathhouse, and she retrieved her bag from the counter. It was a big backpack that I had never seen before, the kind you use to go camping in the woods or trekking cross-country. It looked heavy, so I suggested that she take it off so we could carry it together. She said it wasn’t as heavy as it looked. She suggested we get something to eat even though it wasn’t lunchtime, so I figured she was hungry and followed her without a word. She led me to a new sushi restaurant on the main street that I had been wanting to go to. She didn’t like sushi. I had mentioned that it looked good, but we had never gone. We ordered a combination plate and some udon noodles. To my surprise, she seemed to enjoy the food, even though she kept saying, ‘I’ve never had this before.’ Her forehead was sweating, and she didn’t leave a single piece of sushi uneaten. After we were done, she took a wrinkled manila envelope out of her backpack and asked me to hold on to it. I asked if she was coming home, and she said she had to return the backpack. She told me to go home first and said she would join me later. She
sounded like she meant it. On the way out of the restaurant, she told me to hurry home. I said, ‘Promise you’ll come back?’ She nodded. As she walked away from me, I said once more, ‘Promise?’ She said yes. Then she told me to hurry up and go home. I said I would wait until she got into a cab, but she told me to leave and gave me a little push. There was nothing I could do, so I turned to go. But then she called me back and gave me a hug. She smelled like the soap we had shared in the bathhouse. ‘Miru, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ She said it twice. I told her, ‘It’s okay, as long as you come home.’ She let go of me and told me to hurry off again. I said, ‘See you soon,
Unni,’
and started walking toward home. When I glanced back, she was standing there watching me. Then she quickly turned and left. I don’t know what it was, but something didn’t seem right. I sensed that I shouldn’t let her get away. I ran after her. I saw her cross the street, carrying that heavy backpack, and flag down a taxi. I hurried across as well and jumped into another cab. I pointed out the cab she was in and asked the driver to follow her.”