I'll Be Right There (25 page)

Do you remember how we used to go sledding over the ice in the winter? I mean the icy road next to the levee where the water parsley sprouts up fast and green in the spring. We would throw a rock at the ice before getting on the sleds. We did that to see if it was thick enough to support our weight. Do you remember the time we threw a rock and the thin ice cracked? As I was climbing up to the second floor of the pavilion, I thought I could hear that
keerack!
in my head. I raced up the rest of the stairs but managed to calm down once I got to the top. My forehead was sweaty, but it immediately cooled. I stood there in a daze. My eyes ached from all that beauty. The floor was lined with planks of wood of varying heights. I felt like I had uncovered one of the city’s secrets. I was so thrilled at my triumph that I couldn’t stop smiling. Now I know that anytime you see a “no trespassing” sign, it means you’ve got to go in and take a look. Maybe that sign was the reason I had never noticed the wooden stairs, despite the many times I walked around the outside of the pavilion or sat gazing at it from a wooden bench
.

I stood there for a long time and then tiptoed carefully onto the wooden floor. I walked as lightly as I could, creeping forward one step at a time. The lotus pond looked amazing from above. The floating water hyacinth waved in the breeze, and the raindrops sent ripples, big ones and little ones, skidding across the water. On very clear days, you can probably see the pavilion’s reflection in the pond. I’ve seen all the way to Inwangsan, Bugaksan, and Namsan Mountains before. The soil that was dug up when the lotus pond was built had been used to create Amisan Garden, behind the queen’s living quarters. I could see that, too, right before my eyes
.

I carefully sat down. The moment I did, all the nervousness I felt about trespassing vanished, and I relaxed. I’d been feeling angry at myself for not keeping the promise I made to Miru to help her look for him, and now she’s gone off on her own again. But as I sat on the wooden floor of the pavilion, even that anger seemed to loosen its grip just a little. The floorboards seemed to speak—their words, muted for a hundred years, pierced through a deep silence and rose into the air
.

Dear Dahn
,

Remember how both of our houses where we grew up had narrow wooden verandas that ran around the sides of the building?

My mother always kept the wood polished. She told me my father built it himself using trees from the mountain behind our house that had fallen during a typhoon. She said the wood would last a long time if you took good care of it and kept it swept and cleaned and lacquered. Do you remember how we used to lie on our stomachs reading books on the veranda, and how we would fall asleep facedown on the wooden floor while doing our homework or playing?

Don’t laugh
.

That day, I woke up on the second floor of Gyeonghoeru Pavilion to find someone shaking me. It was the groundskeeper. I must have been asleep there for forty minutes. After you get out of the army, I’ll tell you how I managed to get away from him. It’ll be my discharge gift to you
.

Dear Dahn
,

Someday, Dahn. Someday. I’ll take you there
.

I stopped writing. With my face nearly grazing the paper and the fountain pen clenched in my hand, I stared at the sentences I had just written.

The tiny letters in the word
someday
grew bigger and bigger until they were all I could see.

How I wish I could take Dahn up to the second floor of Gyeonghoeru Pavilion someday. If the day were ever to come when we could go there together, I would tell him the rest of the story. I would tell him that when the groundskeeper shook me, I bolted upright from where I had fallen asleep facedown on the wooden floor. That the first thing on my mind was not
“What am I doing here?” but rather “Where on earth am I?” That I then remembered walking around the lotus pond in the falling rain, seeing the “no trespassing” sign, and climbing the stairs to the second floor. I would tell him how the rain kept falling. How the dirt ground of Gyeongbokgung Palace was wet, and how Inwangsan Mountain was covered in mist. I would tell him that the groundskeeper gave me a hard look and scolded me and asked what I thought I was doing sleeping in a restricted area. That I immediately dropped to my knees and swore to the groundskeeper that I would scrub and polish the floorboards myself. I would come every day and polish them until they shone. The groundskeeper stared at my sleep-addled face and let out a hearty laugh. He said that I couldn’t polish the floor, since visitors were not supposed to be up there without permission, but that I should never forget my promise. “If the day ever comes that people can come and go up here as they please, you’ll keep your promise then, right?” He asked the question again, but with a softer look this time. Before I could even answer, he said, “As long as you never forget your promise, as long as you mean it when you say you would scrub this floor everyday, then I’ll let you go this time.”

So many forgotten promises. Broken promises that have long since vanished from memory.

I placed the tip of the fountain pen beneath the words
Someday, Dahn. Someday. I’ll take you there
, and prepared to write the last line, but instead I sat there without moving. All I had meant to write was
Sincerely
or some other closing
word, but I felt like I had driven myself into a corner. Like someone stammering for words because they have reached a dead end but have to say something, I wrote,
Take care
, and then crossed it out. I wrote,
Stay strong
, and crossed that out. Then I wrote,
I’ll write to you again
, and crossed that out, too. My last image of Dahn standing there with his head hanging down flickered over the blacked-out letters of my final farewell to him. The blue of his shaved head spread in my mind like ink. I bit my lip and crossed out the words
Someday, Dahn. Someday. I’ll take you there
. I wrote them again. I erased them again. Wrote them, erased them, rewrote them.

The page was one giant smudge.

“Yoon!”

I had fallen asleep at my desk when I heard someone calling me. I lifted my head from the smudged notebook and listened carefully to the sound coming from outside the door.

“Yoon!”

It was my cousin. I got up and opened the door. My pregnant cousin’s freckled face looked happy to see me. She was carrying a container of kimchi.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she asked.

The phone had rung? She set the kimchi down in the kitchen and looked at me.

“Your father said he tried to call this morning,” she said.

He had?

Early one morning six months ago, my father had called to tell me about Dahn. He said he thought it was better for me
to hear the news from him rather than through someone else. I think he still walks to my mother’s grave every day at sunrise and sunset. When the days grow cold, he wraps straw around the base of my mother’s crepe-myrtle tree to insulate it, and when spring returns, the very first thing he does is remove the straw. The branches grew out wide over my mother’s grave, like an umbrella on rainy days and a parasol on sunny days. It didn’t look like it had been uprooted and replanted but rather like it had always been there.

“He asked me to come check on you because he’s been trying to call since the day before yesterday. Do you know what time he called me today?”

I looked at her without answering.

“Six in the morning. He must have been waiting for the sun to come up first. Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I didn’t hear it ring.”

“I tried calling several times as well.”

I looked over at the phone. My father had delivered it to me personally so he could check on me in the city.

“Is it unplugged?” she asked as she ran the telephone line through her hand to check. “Looks fine to me. Why didn’t you hear it ring?”

After that rainy Sunday when I had walked all the way to Gyeongbokgung Palace and back, I stayed in for several days. Whenever my room got too stuffy, I would go out onto the rooftop and look down at the city. I would stare for a long time at Namsan Tower shining in the same spot as always like some kind of symbol. When was the last time I’d left my room? I suppose it was the day I had put on my sneakers and walked
to school, as I always did, and found out about Professor Yoon. I went to look for Myungsuh, who barely showed his face at school anymore since he was busy participating in a hunger strike that had been going on at Myeongdong Cathedral. I told him that Professor Yoon had submitted his letter of resignation to the university. He had resigned voluntarily. The reason he gave was that he could not continue teaching when so many of his cohorts in the university were being fired for political reasons. Myungsuh did not look surprised. Even when I gave him a copy of Professor Yoon’s letter—the one that began,
To my students
—Myungsuh just took it calmly and said, “I guess Miru won’t be going back to school now.” Even when I told him that Professor Yoon was leaving the city and moving to the countryside, all he said was, “That sounds like something he would do.” Sure enough, once Professor Yoon’s classes were canceled, Miru stopped going to school. After her old house was sold, she would sometimes come by my place and gaze down at it. Once, she muttered, “They’re fixing it up,” so I assumed she had been by there. After the new tenant moved in and the house was lit up again at night, Miru said, “I hope they’re happy there.” It was strange to hear those words coming from her, after she had fought so vehemently with her parents about selling the house. I stared at her face as it glimmered in the city lights. She looked sad and asked me how Dahn was doing. I told her, “He’s probably fine.”

“Yoon, what’s wrong?” My cousin asked as I stared at the phone. Her freckles seemed to have taken over her once-white face since the last time I had seen her. My eyes dropped to her enormous belly.

“I’m huge, right?” She smiled and rested her hands on top of her stomach. “They say if you’re carrying high, it’s a girl.”

She moved her hands down to support her stomach. It was the protective instinct of an expectant mother toward her unborn child. I couldn’t believe that she had walked up all those stairs to my place, carrying that big container of kimchi, holding her belly, face full of freckles.

“I must have been sound asleep,” I said.

“But how could you sleep through all those rings?”

“I walked a lot yesterday.”

Actually, I had stayed in the day before, but I didn’t know what else to tell her.

“You’re still taking those walks?” She looked worried. “You better call your dad.”

I did as she told me and called him immediately. I had no memory of hearing the phone ring the night before. I didn’t even remember hearing it in the morning, when I had been sleeping at my desk. I picked up the phone, placed it to my ear, and dialed the number with one hand while closing the notebook that held my letter to Dahn with the other. The blacked out lines filled my eyes. His letters had fallen onto the floor. Just as my father answered the telephone, my cousin picked up the letters and set them on the desk. She rested her hands on her belly and gazed down at the letters. She did not take her eyes off them.

“Dad, I’m fine. I must have fallen sound asleep last night and didn’t hear the phone. How are you?”

“I’m fine, too.”

Those words echoed inside of me like a bell. I would never have thought that such an ordinary phrase,
I’m fine, too
, could
hit me so hard. If only I could hear the same words from Miru, who had stopped calling. If only I could hear them from him, who was getting thinner with each passing day. I held the receiver and listened to the sound of my father’s breathing. If only I could hear those ordinary words from Dahn.

“Yoon? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” I said finally.

“If things are tough, just come home.”

I thought about the year I spent at home after my mother died. That year spent hanging around the country house. The quiet dinners with my father. My father’s voice as he called to me on his way in the front gate. The silence that would return to the house after I answered him from my room or the kitchen. Though we never did anything for each other besides just being there, perhaps by calling to each other and responding, we had helped each other to slowly accept my mother’s absence. When we were children, Dahn used to call my name from the alley before reaching the gate and stepping into the courtyard. Whenever he found a dead bird or saw a snake that had been run over by a train, he would take me with him to look at it. I must have called his name, as well, countless times. Whenever I slipped in the snow or fell in a ditch, his was the name I yelled. Because he was always there, right beside me, or walking ahead.

“That’s okay, Dad.”

When I hung up, my cousin was staring at me.

“Yoon.” She sounded just like my father. She gently picked the letters up from the desk. She looked like she either had something to say or things she wanted to ask. Neither of us spoke for a moment.

“Why don’t you come stay with me?” she said. “My husband is flying to Europe.”

That meant he would be gone for several days.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

She slowly bent down and sat on the floor. She stretched out her legs and leaned against the wall, but in a moment she was sprawled out flat. Her round stomach pointed up at the ceiling. I thought of the book of poetry Dahn had given me the night before I left home the first time. Because of the quote he had written on the first page—
I began to tread softly
 … 
Poor people shouldn’t be disturbed when they’re deep in thought
—the very first book I had bought in the city was
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
. The first chapter in the book describes a pregnant woman pushing herself along the wall of a hospital. The dedication read:
The most beautiful woman in the world is one who is pregnant with new life
. My cousin’s hands kept moving to her belly. Her freckles spread across her cheek and over the cheekbone to her temples. It was not hot, but there were drops of sweat on her forehead. Each time she took a breath, her round belly rose and fell. I went over and lay down beside her. We used to take naps together, back when I lived with her. She smiled, pushing her freckles up toward her ears. She took her left hand off her stomach and reached out to stroke my cheek. Her hand warmed my face.