I'll Be Right There (3 page)

As if it had been waiting for me, the telephone rang again.

CHAPTER 1

Parting

W
hen I turned twenty, I returned to the city and made five promises to myself:

Start reading again.

Write down new words and their definitions.

Memorize one poem a week.

Do not go to Mom’s grave before the Chuseok holiday.

Walk around the city for at least two hours every day.

My mother passed away before the end of my first semester of college.

The first thing she did after she found out she was sick was to send me to live with my older female cousin in the city. I was in middle school at the time. For my mother, sending me away was her way of loving me. She said I was too young to be tied down to a sick mother and that I had too much to live
for. Everybody has to say goodbye eventually, she told me, so you may as well start practicing. I cannot say she was right. I think that if we all have to say goodbye eventually then the best we can do is try to stay together as long as we possibly can. But it’s not that one of us was right and the other was wrong. We just saw things differently.

Up until her illness took a turn for the worse, I used to get her medication for her at a big hospital in the city, where she had once been admitted. Every Wednesday, I ordered her prescription at the pharmacy, sat in the waiting room, and waited for the number written on the piece of paper I was given to appear on the electronic display. When my number popped up with a ding, I pushed the slip of paper through the window. After a brief wait, a basket with a week’s worth of my mother’s medication was pushed back to me. I repeated this trip to the pharmacy every Wednesday to purchase my mother’s pills and mail them to her. Each time I called to tell her they were in the mail, she said, “That’s my daughter!” Always in the same unchanging voice.
Good work, daughter! Thank you, daughter!

Four days before she died, she sent me a package. It contained a ring she always wore and some perilla leaf kimchi.

“Perilla leaf kimchi is your favorite.” She sounded cheerful over the phone. “I’ve looked forward to leaving that ring to you!”

I didn’t know she would die so soon.

Whenever I thought about the fact that she had packed perilla leaf kimchi for me and then took off her ring, wrapped it in paper, and sent it to me before dying, I rubbed my eyes hard, as if to dig them out. There was no more medicine for
me to pick up on Wednesdays, yet every Wednesday morning I could be found sitting in the waiting room of that hospital. It was my Wednesday routine. I no longer had a number to wait for, but each time the pager dinged, I looked up and watched the display change. After a while, I would tell myself it was time to get to class, and I would leave the waiting room. But before I knew it, I would find myself heading toward the train station instead and boarding a train. Some mornings, I even made it to the steep road that led up to the school only to turn around and head for the station. There, I would buy a ticket for the first train out.

There were always empty seats on the train in the middle of the day. I could sit wherever I wanted regardless of the seat number printed on my ticket. Some days, I was the only person in the entire train car. I would stare out the window until the conductor announced that the train had arrived at the station in the small town where I was born. Along the way, when the river appeared, I turned my head and stared until I could not see the water anymore, and when distant mountains suddenly slid into view, I leaned back in my seat. Once, a flock of birds appeared from out of nowhere and flew across a field. I watched them until the train went into a tunnel, and then I shut my eyes tight even though there was nothing to see anyway. I was always famished by the time the train stopped. I would slurp down a bowl of noodles in a shop in front of the station, and only then would I realize where I was and murmur to myself,
Mama, I’m back
.

My mother’s death was not the only reason I decided to take a break from school. I was studying at a university for
the arts. The campus had a freewheeling atmosphere that was characteristic of art schools. Some people fit right in, while others were left out. I was in the latter group. I doubt anyone there even knew what my voice sounded like. The male students were more interested in protesting or drinking than in going to class, and the female students were busy preening or being dramatically depressed. It was the kind of place where, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, you could burst into Hamlet’s or Ophelia’s lines and nobody thought anything of it. There, it was considered a performance and a mark of individuality to sing incessantly or to sit in one spot and stare at someone without blinking. Even if you weren’t trying to spot someone doing something unusual, someone would catch your eye nonetheless. With my ordinary looks, I felt as if I was always alone. Everything they said sounded to me like a foreign language from some far-off land. But that was not the only reason I decided to take a leave of absence. Back then, I would have been the odd one out no matter where I was.

O
ne day, one of my male classmates disappeared. He was a friendly guy whom everyone called Pedal, because he had this powerful walk that made him look like he was pedaling his legs. The day he stopped coming to school, he came running up to me where I was seated on a bench. He told me his younger brother was in town and that he had to send money home with him right away. He talked me into giving him all of the cash I had on me. He even took a book of poems from me—a collection by Emily Dickinson that Dahn,
my childhood friend, had given me when I left home. Later, I found out that Pedal had borrowed money, as well as a fountain pen, books, and notebooks, from more than ten other girls that same day and then disappeared without a trace. Too late, it was discovered that he was not even a registered student. But while my classmates were exploding with rage, saying it was unbelievable that he had been taking classes with them for several months and that they needed to do something about it, I left to apply for a leave of absence.

The night Dahn had given me that book of poems, he showed up at our front gate and called out my name. Dahn and I snuck through the darkened alleys of our hometown, where hundreds of thousands of our footprints were stamped in the dirt, and walked to an open field on the edge of town. We sat next to each other beside the railroad tracks. A night train chugged and rattled past us. The light coming from each of the cars was luminous. If not for the chugging of the engine, it could have been just glowing windows racing through the dark.

“We have to go to college.” Dahn sounded like he was making a pledge.

I was too surprised to respond.

“I’m going to be an artist,” he said.

I felt like I was going to burst. The night breeze blew toward us over the field and seemed to carry our hopes with it, departing before us into some distant time. When Dahn and I parted ways that night, he handed me a paperback book of poetry. He said that he had just finished reading it and so was giving it to me. It was too dark for me to make out the title.

“They say that when she died, she left over seventeen hundred poems stashed in a drawer,” he said. “Her first collection was published four years after her death.”

“Who?”

“Emily Dickinson.”

“
E-mi-ly Di-ckin-son.”
Even after sounding out the syllables, I still did not recognize the name. Dahn had always known from a young age what he wanted to do; he thought deeply about things and conducted himself differently from our peers. He read different books, owned different things, and had a different way of speaking.

“She seemed to see things that were not of this world,” he said.

“Not of this world?”

“Things we can’t see. Like death … and so on.”

It was the first time I had heard someone my age talk about death or things that were not of this world. That was probably why Dahn always seemed like he was a few years older than he really was. When I got home and flipped to the first page of the book, the first thing I saw was Dahn’s handwriting.

I began to tread softly … Poor people shouldn’t be disturbed when they’re deep in thought.
—Rainer Maria Rilke,
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I liked Dahn’s handwriting. It looked scribbled, but the style was so energetic that it reminded me of the hoofbeats of a galloping horse. I stared at the quote and realized it was goodbye. I put the book in the bottom of my bag.

Because I could not stop for Death
,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality
.

When I read Dickinson’s poetry, I pictured my mother’s face. I wanted to savor the poems, so I read them slowly, going over each one five times. When I finished the book, I took my first subway ride to a large bookstore on Jongno Street, clinging to the strap the whole way to keep from swaying. The first book I spent money on in this city was
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
. With no clue as to what it was about, I selected it because it was the title Dahn had written in the book. On the subway ride back, I opened to the first page.

Here, then, is where people come to live.

As I stared vacantly at the first sentence, a single tear fell from my eye, a tear that had refused to come even when I left home. Was I, too, one of those who had come to live? This city was not kind to me. It had tall buildings and many houses and countless people, but no one to greet me gladly or take my hand. Too many wide and narrow streets made me lose my way frequently. And I had no intention of getting to know the people of this city. I grew accustomed to not greeting people when I met them and behaved like a young exile.

The cousin I lived with in the city served as my legal guardian until I finished high school. She got married around the time that I started college. At that point, it made sense for me
to move out, but I had nowhere else to go. Even though my mother had sent me away, she did not want me to be alone. I stayed with my cousin in order to reassure my mother, who was still fighting her illness. But once she passed on, it became harder for me to stay there. My cousin’s husband was an airline pilot, which meant he was often gone on long flights to places like Paris and London, but he was not gone all the time, and I did not want to intrude. I would have preferred to stay with my mother, even if only for a short time before starting college, but she refused to let me. By then, she did not have a single strand of hair left.

The next line in
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
, “I’d have thought it more a place to die in,” was ringing in my head when I applied for a leave of absence, the first semester not yet over. I had no friends, so there was no one for me to say goodbye to before returning to my parents’ house in the countryside. When I moved out of my cousin’s apartment, she gave me a look of regret and asked if I really had to go.

“Sorry,” I said. It was not the right way to answer her question.

“Sorry? What are you sorry for?”

“Everything.”

I meant it. I felt especially sorry toward my cousin. Sorry for not smiling more, sorry for taping black paper over a window in a newlywed’s house, sorry for not being nicer, and sorry for forcing her to look after me because I had lost my mother. I had noticed the sympathy that flashed in her eyes whenever she looked at me. After all, we had lived together for over four years. She urged me to stay, telling me to think
it over once more. I told her I had already made my decision. She asked me again if I would change my mind. I shook my head. With a sad look on her face, she gave me a long hug.

“Come back anytime, if things get tough.”

From my cousin’s body came the fresh scent of a newlywed woman. She smelled like strawberries, leaves, a peach. The moment I caught that sweet scent, I knew I had made the right decision. Though the space I had taken up was only one small room, it was still a newlywed’s home. To think that I had taped over the windows of that room and forced them to mind how they laughed or smiled around me. To think that, even then, my cousin had never once frowned at me. Once, her husband asked me, “Isn’t the room too dark?” I told him it was fine, and he never brought it up again.

My year at home was dull and boring. Dahn had also left for college and was living in another city, and my father’s daily routine never varied, whether I was there or not. Seasons changed: new buds appeared, typhoons passed through, persimmons swelled, heavy snow fell. In the space of a year, my father’s back grew more stooped, and he turned into an old man. He had grown accustomed to taking care of himself during my mother’s long illness, so things were no harder for him than they were before she was gone. Nevertheless, he grew old quickly. My aging father grew even more taciturn. I wondered sometimes if my presence in the house made him uncomfortable. I would go to bed late and struggle to wake up the next day; meanwhile, the first thing he did every morning was visit my mother’s grave. He laid fresh sod over it and even dug up her favorite crepe-myrtle tree that grew in the
courtyard and replanted it close to her grave. I accompanied him a few times but otherwise avoided going with him. As I walked behind my father on the way to her headstone, he looked like a house that was caving in. So instead, I timed my visits for midday or when the sun was setting. That way, there was no chance I would run into him.

My mother had not been afraid of dying. Rather, apologetic.

I
t rained continuously for several days and then stopped. When it did, two things happened.

My father returned from town, took off his shirt, and tossed it up on the porch, and then, dressed only in a sleeveless undershirt, he grabbed a shovel and went back out the front gate. A pack of cigarettes had fallen out of the shirt he had tossed. I grabbed the cigarettes and found a lighter and went to the back of the house. The backyard was overgrown with pumpkin and taro leaves. I squatted down and looked at the green taro leaves that had unfurled after the rain. Then I took a cigarette from the pack, put it in my mouth, flicked the lighter, and raised it to the cigarette. I kept looking nervously in one direction, worried someone might catch me, but my father suddenly appeared from behind me. There was no time to mask what I was doing. My father’s eyes met mine just as the flame touched the cigarette. He stopped in his tracks and eyed me for a moment, and then he turned around and walked away without saying a word. I prepared to be scolded harshly. I even thought that if we argued, it might take away the silence and solitude that had drawn a heavy curtain between father and daughter. But to my surprise, he did not say a word at the dinner table. I thought
maybe it was painful for him to see me lighting a cigarette and he had chosen to pretend he saw nothing instead. A strange anger rose up inside me. I wanted him to scold me. That way, I could smoke without feeling guilty. I started to clear the table, but he suddenly asked if I wanted to dye my nails.