I'll Be Right There (29 page)

The woman nodded politely to me as if I were Miru herself
.

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The phone in the office often rings in the middle of the night. Sometimes I am woken up by the rings and cannot get back to sleep. When I unzip my sleeping bag, the sound vibrates in my ear like a sympathetic resonance. It rings and rings the whole time I am slipping out of the sleeping bag, like a snake molting, and walking over to the phone
.

Once, I picked up the receiver, and a young female voice said, “I have to find Jisu.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jisu.” Her voice sounded urgent. “I said I have to find Jisu.”

Why on earth would she be calling a magazine company in the middle of the night to say she needs to find Jisu? I knew she had the wrong number, but she sounded so desperate that I could not hang up on her. I started to tell her that I didn’t know any Jisu, but then I heard the beep beep of the dial tone. She had hung up. I put the receiver back in the cradle and was about to return to my sleeping bag when the phone rang again. I thought I should at least tell her that I did not know who Jisu was and picked up the phone, but it hung up immediately. I guess Miru was not the only one. A lot of people were searching for someone. In other places as well, places I’d never heard of, there were probably other phones ringing off the hook in search of someone
.

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Another call came, and I thought it would be the same desperatesounding woman—the one who was looking for Jisu. I stayed in my sleeping bag and let it ring. I thought it would stop eventually, but it didn’t. I frowned, slipped out of the sleeping bag, and picked up the phone. It was Yoon
.

“Can I come over?” she asked calmly
.

I was usually the one who said that to her. I looked at my watch. It was three in the morning. I could hear her breathing over the phone. I hadn’t heard from her all day. I had tried calling her sometime after midnight, but she hadn’t picked up
.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. “I’ll be right there.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll go to you.”

I felt like the wind was knocked out of me
.

“I won’t keep it a secret,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

My hands started to sweat. I didn’t have to ask. I knew she was calling to tell me about Miru
.

—Brown Notebook 9

CHAPTER 10

Us in the Fire

T
he signal changed, and I crossed the street. Hail struck the asphalt and the tops of cars with a sound like glass breaking. On the other side, people were huddled under the bus stop shelter. The blank looks on their faces vanished at once. As if to mock them as they stood there stranded and looking nervous, the hail eased up and then stopped completely. It had come and gone in an instant, like a brief dream during a catnap. Rays of winter sunlight wedged their way back down between the buildings as if it had never hailed at all. But the people at the bus stop did not budge. They looked up at the sky in doubt and eyeballed me as I walked past.

The school was empty. It was winter vacation and the weather was freezing. Myungsuh was already waiting for me in front of the auditorium. He must have been cold, because his face was deathly pale. No scarf or gloves, either.

“Did you get it?” I asked him.

He nodded. “But why do we need Professor Yoon’s office key?”

“I brought Miru’s diary.”

He was usually quick to give me a smile, but this time he looked at me blankly. I braced myself. I had promised myself I wouldn’t stammer when I told him about Miru.

“Let’s go to his office first.”

He started to walk ahead of me, but I grabbed his arm. He wouldn’t take his hands out of his pockets. I took off my glove, put it in my bag, and slipped my hand into the pocket of his coat. When I held his hand, he seemed to flinch.

“I called you again last night, didn’t I?” he asked.

I gave his hand a squeeze instead of responding. I wanted to tell him it was okay, but I had already said those words too many times. It was okay that he called. He could call me any time, any hour of the day or night. So long as I knew where he was calling from. But often, when I asked him where he was, he had no idea. Sometimes it sounded like he was going to say something, but the line would suddenly disconnect.
When would we be okay again?
My hand was too small to wrap around his.

On the way to Professor Yoon’s office, he turned to look back at the zelkova tree. I looked back, too. Usually surrounded by students, the tree stood alone in the winter air. I remembered the day I had stood in this same spot and looked back to see Miru walking beneath the tree with her bag over her shoulder and a book in her hand. Her walking hunched over with her shoulders rounded as if staring at her own heart. Her white cotton jacket and flared skirt with its pattern of white flowers against a dark blue background. In a flash, I remembered how her skirt had floated up in the breeze, and
I squeezed Myungsuh’s hand hard. Maybe he was thinking about her at that moment, too.

I kept my hand in his pocket until we got to Professor Yoon’s office and he needed to take out the key. Even though I knew the office was empty, I knocked on the door anyway as he was fitting the key into the lock.

When we stepped into the office, we were hit with a musty smell. The chilly winter air and the dampness overwhelmed us at first. Myungsuh shut the door and turned on the light. Like a curtain opening, the dim office brightened, and the outlines of books came into view. The books stared blankly down at us. I looked at Professor Yoon’s desk on the other side of the stack of books. I could still hear him saying, “Come right in,” the way he had the first time I had knocked on his office door long ago. If only he would poke his head out from the other side of the books and say, “Have a seat over there …”

“No one’s here,” Myungsuh muttered, though he had known that on the way in.

I went over to the desk. Normally littered with open books and manuscripts, it was spotless. I pictured Professor Yoon straightening up his things and ran my hand over the surface. Dust coated my palm. I had only meant to touch his desk, but I started dusting it with my bare hand instead. When that wasn’t enough, I grabbed a tissue. A cloud of dust rose up from the box. Myungsuh went to the sink installed in one corner of the office and turned on the water. The long-unused tap creaked. He turned the water off and then on again with more force. Water gushed out. He stepped back, brushing off
the drops that had splashed onto his clothes, and bent down. Beneath the sink was a pail with a dry cloth inside it. He held the cloth under the tap, wrung it out, and came over to me. Without saying a word, he wiped down the desk that I had been dusting with my hand.

“Give it to me,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

He ignored me and focused on cleaning Professor Yoon’s desk. He looked like he had come expressly to clean the desk. I watched as the white cloth grew dusty, and then I propped open the window. A cold breeze rattled in.

“It’s a good thing they left his office untouched,” I said.

“He might come back someday,” he said. “I heard they still haven’t accepted his resignation.”

Someday
 … I murmured the word to myself. He finished cleaning the desk and then removed the cushion from the chair and cleaned the chair, too. He beat the dust out of the cushion and put it back on the chair before giving it a few more firm pats with the palm of his hand. He looked haggard. He had called me the night before, sometime after four in the morning. He must have been drinking, because I could barely understand him. I had asked him where he was but couldn’t make out his answer. This sort of thing had been happening more frequently, and even though it was the next day, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what had happened. He would probably just say the last thing he remembered was boarding the subway and that he must have fallen asleep.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asked me.

“Very.”

After he was done dusting Professor Yoon’s desk and chair, he closed the window that I had just opened and peered out between the blinds. No one would be out there.

With his back to me, he asked, “Why did you bring me here?”

“To add Miru’s diary to the bookshelf.”

I opened my bag, took out Miru’s thick diary, and went to the shelf where the books stood with their spines facing in. He let go of the blinds and looked at me.

The first thing that had caught my eye when I visited this office for the first time were those old books that looked like they would crumble at the slightest touch—the books by writers who died young. Holding Miru’s diary, I ran my hand over them, still shelved with their spines to the wall so neither author nor title could be seen. I felt like they were speaking to me but I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I remembered how Professor Yoon asked me, “Are you wondering why I shelved them that way?” And I unconsciously turned to look at the desk. Myungsuh was standing there looking my way, his face frigid with cold.

“Would you like to do it?” I asked.

His gaze moved to Miru’s diary in my hand. “Have you had it the whole time?”

“I went to Miru’s grandmother’s house. Remember when you tried to call me in the middle of the night, but I wasn’t home? It was that day.”

“How did you find the house?”

“I met Miru’s mother and went with her.”

He stood there quietly.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell him, so I had gone to meet her on my own. Afterward, I had sat in front of the telephone until late into the night before finally calling him. He and I were like twins. I had lost Dahn, and now he had lost Miru. He came over to me and took her diary. We were probably both picturing her hands, the scarred hands that recorded what she ate, leaving nothing out. I even pictured myself, as if that me were another being entirely, staring in fascination, having never seen someone who wrote down everything they ate with such devotion. All those days we spent writing stories in her journal. Whenever we were together, our faces would grow flushed with our love for each other. When Miru started filling her diary with the stories of people who had disappeared, we should have paid more attention. Those diary entries were Miru’s distress calls. Myungsuh leafed through the diary and ran his hand over the pages. Then he handed it back to me.

“You do it,” he said.

T
he diary must have been the reason Miru’s mother didn’t hang up that morning when I called. She usually hung up the moment I said Miru’s name. But I could not resist calling their house whenever she came to mind. I knew her parents didn’t want to talk to anyone about her, but I didn’t know what else to do except to keep calling. Then, one morning, several months after my last failed attempt at making contact, the moment I heard Miru’s mother say hello, I quickly said, “Don’t hang up!”

“Please, don’t hang up,” I pleaded. During the silence that followed, my fingers felt like they were splitting apart.

“Who is this?” She finally broke the silence.

“My name is Jung Yoon.”

“Jung Yoon?”

“Yes,” I said quickly.

“So you’re Jung Yoon.”

I got down on my knees, the phone gripped in my hands.

“I read the diary you all wrote,” she said, referring to it as “our” diary, rather than as “Miru’s” diary. “It’s at her grandmother’s house.”

“Please let me speak to Miru,” I said.

All of my strength drained out of me. It was like I already knew that I would never hear Miru’s voice again.

“Please put Miru on,” I begged.

Her mother sighed.

“Where is she?” I asked.

The phone went silent.

“Please don’t hang up.”

“She’s dead.”

I didn’t comprehend her words at first.

“She starved herself.”

Finally, it sank in.

“Do you hear me?” she said. “She’s gone.”

I stared blankly out the window at Namsan Tower in the distance. I felt like it was tipping over and crashing down on me.

Miru’s mother said she’d had no idea that Miru had gone to live in the empty house her grandmother left to her. Likewise, Myungsuh and I had been too caught up in the frenzy
happening in the streets to know where Miru was. While he and I were asking if anyone had heard from Miru, she was alone in her grandmother’s house. I wanted to hear more, but her mother said, “It’s all in the past now,” and hung up. A few days later, she called me back. When I answered the phone, she addressed me affectionately as “Yoon-ah.” It felt natural. She told me she was going to Miru’s grandmother’s house and asked if I wanted to join her.

I went to the station in the city where Miru’s family lived, as her mother instructed. A man who looked like a hired driver came up to me and asked if I was Jung Yoon. I followed him to where Miru’s mother was sitting inside a silvery gray car. She was dressed all in black. I started to get in the front, but she motioned for me to sit next to her in the backseat. Emily was stretched out on the rear dash but didn’t seem to remember me. Miru’s mother and I didn’t say a word to each other on the way to the countryside. Only when the car banked around a sharp curve did she look directly at me. Maybe it was all the black clothes, but her face looked pale. She took my hand—I had been holding on tight to the seat to keep from sliding each time the car took another turn. Her face was blank, but I could feel her warmth and strength as she tried to protect me. I stared straight ahead. Though I didn’t look at her directly, I could sense Miru’s features in her profile: the same nose, forehead, and lips. The long, graceful neck. It was like looking at an older version of Miru. When the curving mountain road finally straightened out, she gently let go of my hand. She glanced at me now and then but mostly stared out the window until we arrived at Miru’s grandmother’s house.