“She searched all over for something to pick the padlock with—anything long and thin and strong enough to fit inside the lock. But nothing worked. The sun was setting and we were hungry, so we were starting to panic. We forgot all about waiting for our grandmother and became fixated on picking the lock. We racked our brains trying to find something that would fit in the keyhole. The persimmon, plum, and cherry trees in the yard kept watch as we ran around frantically. We must have trampled all over the cockscomb in our frenzy to find something sharp. My sister found a wooden toolbox in the shed and carried it to the front door, groaning from the weight. By then, the sun was on the horizon. We crouched in front of the door and stuck every pointed object we found in the toolbox into the lock. But nothing fit. It was as if the locked door expected some kind of sacrifice first. We stared at the toolbox in disappointment. Our grandmother’s neatly organized tools were jumbled together and strewn everywhere.
“My sister said she had to pee and went behind the plum tree. Even though she loved our grandmother’s house, she hated using the outhouse. Whenever she had to go, she would make one of us wait outside. She would call out to us to make sure we were standing right outside. I would say, ‘I’m right here!’ And she would say, ‘Stay there and don’t move.’ I thought it was funny that my big sister preferred to pee behind a tree than use the outhouse, just because the house was empty, and I said to myself, ‘Unni is a chicken.’ As she lifted her skirt and squatted behind the tree, I took the awl out of the toolbox and fitted it into the keyhole. I was hoping to impress her by getting the lock open before she came back. I started chanting, ‘Open, open, open …’ But if she couldn’t pick the lock, why would I be able to? I struggled with it for a while, and then got mad and threw the awl down as hard as I could. My sister called to me. She was standing in front of the tree, the hem of her white skirt in her hand, one foot raised high into the air. Her hand was resting on a low branch like it was a ballet barre. She began moving to invisible music.
“She called out my name again and asked, ‘What did Fokine say to Pavlova?’ Fokine was the one who choreographed the Dying Swan solo for Pavlova. My sister used to share everything she had learned about ballet with me. She would read me the stories from her ballet books and then quiz me on them later. She asked me questions like ‘Who was it who said that any song can be made into a ballet?’ I rarely knew the answer. But every now and then, the answer would come to me. ‘George Balanchine!’ I would say, and she would stroke my head. That was how we talked about ballet. You know how, before a performance starts, the soloists come onstage to give the audience a brief preview of what’s coming? My sister was doing turns like that. She wasn’t wearing her toe shoes, but she managed a few light turns and called to me again. ‘Miru! I asked you what Fokine said to Pavlova!’ I answered: ‘You are a swan.’ That was her favorite quote. When I answered correctly, she collapsed forward, gently and quietly. She was mimicking the way a swan folds its wings as it dies. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She really did look like a dying swan. Once, we had watched some very old footage of Pavlova dancing the Dying Swan solo. It was from long before my sister and I were born. The film quality was quite bad, and the lines on the film made my eyes hurt, but my sister couldn’t stop crying as she watched it. Later that night, I woke to find my sister on the floor next to our bed—she was curled up like a swan with its wings folded over its head. When I saw her lying under the plum tree, I burst into tears. She looked like she really was dying. It was just so beautiful. She was surprised to hear me cry and folded back her swan wings and flew to where I sat in front of the door. She kept asking me what was wrong. The darkness was rolling in behind her. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked, but I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t stop crying, either. Maybe I sensed it—that it was the last time my sister would ever dance. Something was bothering me. But I couldn’t explain why I felt so scared and sad. Since I wouldn’t stop crying, my sister went back to the door to try again to unlock it. She grabbed the padlock and dropped to her knees. Suddenly her sharp scream pierced my eardrums. I felt like I had jumped off a cliff. I immediately stopped crying and ran to her. She was clutching her knee. The awl that I had hurled away in anger had gotten lodged between two floorboards and was sticking straight up. It was embedded in her knee. She leaned forward and fell flat.
“After that day, my sister never danced again.”
I sat up and looked at Miru. She was scratching Emily’s neck with one hand and resting the other on her forehead. I grabbed her hand. Her scarred, winkled skin felt warm.
“It’s hard to listen to, isn’t it?” she asked.
I could not get the words out to tell her it was okay. “Miru.”
She looked at me.
“Finish the story,” I said. “Don’t hold it all inside.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’ll get through it together.”
Would sharing her story help heal her wounds? She couldn’t forget what had happened, but I wanted her to start putting it behind her. I wanted her to overcome her faded scars and move on.
“My sister’s accident has been stamped in my memory ever since. Maybe if she had hated me for it, I would have gotten over it. But we never said a word about it. Not once after that day. While she was in the hospital, I watched as my parents took down her ballet barre. And then it was like everyone forgot. No one said another word about it—not my grandmother, not my parents, not my sister, and not me. I don’t remember anymore why my grandmother wasn’t home that day or what time she finally showed up. All I remember is that she took one look at my sister lying on the ground and ran to the nearest village, which was on the other side of a hill. I also remember going with her to the hospital with a young man from the village who put my sister in the back of a tractor with the awl still lodged in her knee … When my grandmother passed away, she left the house to me. She said she wanted me to look after it. There are traces of my grandmother all over that house. She planted the same trees that grew in her hometown up north. If only the accident had never happened, I could have loved that house. My grandmother made all her own blankets and coverlets on her sewing machine, and she planted the courtyard so that different flowers bloomed every season. Some of the flowers resembled the wildflowers that she had seen up north when she was young, so there were always unfamiliar flowers blooming and fading and then blooming again in her garden. Now there’s no one to keep the place up, so it’s probably falling apart.”
“We should go there someday.” I said it with the same intonation with which Miru had said we should go to Basel someday. I could feel the word someday making its way back to me. After my mother died, I had stopped saying the word, but before then, I used to say it to myself all the time. Back then, it was the only word that could comfort me. When my mother learned that she was dying, the first thing she did was to send me to live with my cousin in the city. I didn’t want to leave her. I wanted to be with her as badly as she did not want me to see her suffer. But I had to obey her. She had already spent more time persuading me to leave than getting treatment for herself. I had to leave in order for her to start getting proper care. The day I left, I said, “Someday, Mama.” Those words would repeat themselves in my mind countless times. When she did not have a single strand of hair left on her head, all I could say to her even then was “Someday, Mama.” What I most longed for—to see my mother regain her health and go back to her old self—never came true. When I lost my mother, I threw out the word someday. The word became meaningless, a phantom word with no power to change anything. After I stopped using it, my habits of swallowing a bitter laugh, biting my lip, furrowing my forehead, and walking alone to console myself returned intact.
“Do you mean it?” Miru asked.
“Mean what?”
“That we should go to my grandmother’s house someday?”
“Yes … someday.” I felt a sudden urgent desire to keep that promise.
“Will that day ever come?” she
asked. It was as if she were reading my mind.
“As long as we don’t forget,” I said.
“If we don’t forget?”
I felt sad so I sat up beside her and said, “Let’s take Emily, too.”
“And Myungsuh,” added Miru. Then she closed her eyes and said in a monotone, “And Professor Yoon, too.”
We were both quiet for a moment. Had she and Professor Yoon become so close that she could propose taking him with us? As if to dispel the silence between us, Miru added, “And Nak Sujang, too.” I laughed. We started listing every single person we knew. I added Dahn’s name, though Miru had never met him before.
“Who’s Dahn?” she asked.
“We grew up together.”
“I want to meet him.”
“You will.”
“Yoon, I want to live in that house someday. I want to till the land with my own hands, like my grandmother did. Plant seeds in the spring and harvest the fruit in the fall. Plant vegetables in the garden, live off the land, and write. My grandmother must have left the house to me and not my sister because she knew that’s what I wanted. Even though I never went back after that summer, she knew. The house is vacant right now, but I plan to return and open it up again. After my sister’s accident, that house became a forbidden place that we never spoke of, even though no one had told us not to. Even when my grandmother left it to me, my sister didn’t say a word. It’s not that things were bad between us. We were as close as any other sisters. But we never spoke of the accident or that house again. The only time my sister mentioned it to me was when she wanted to hide him there.”
“Him?”
“The man she loved as much as ballet,” she replied. “When my sister started college, she took Emily and moved to the city. By the time Myungsuh and I joined her the following year, she was like a different person. The dark cloud that had hung over her after she stopped doing ballet was gone. Even her voice returned to normal. She had a way of saying, ‘Miru! Look at this!’ whenever she saw something that she liked or that surprised her or that she wanted to brag about. She didn’t come home often, so I had seen very little of her that year. She was always busy, and I was preparing for the college entrance exam. After a year apart, my sister’s black hair shone and her cheeks glowed. Her steps seemed lighter, too. She’d returned to who she was before the accident. It was all thanks to the new man in her life. Her days revolved around him rather than around school. Words like ‘socialism’ and ‘the labor theory of value’ and ‘human rights’ seemed to fall naturally from her lips. And that wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Books I had never heard of before were sitting on her desk. They had titles like Western Economic History and Capital. There were books by Frantz Fanon. A Stone’s Cry and How the Steel Was Tempered. The Communist Manifesto. Pedagogy. History and Class Consciousness. I would wake up in the morning to find my sister sitting at the table, reading books like The White Rose the way she used to read books on ballet in the old days. She would be so absorbed in reading that I could walk right up to her without her realizing it. I became more and more curious about this man who was making my sister read Liberation Theology. But all I knew of him was what she had told me. He had yet to appear before us. Then, one day, my sister told me he was coming to dinner. She asked me if it would be okay, but all I could think was that I was finally going to meet him. I will never forget that day. Not because of him, but because of how my sister acted. She got up at dawn and took Myungsuh to the Noryangjin Fish Market to buy a load of blue crabs. She said they were his favorite. Blue crabs? I was surprised. They didn’t seem to go with the type of person who could make my sister read A Critical Biography of Che Guevara. But she and Myungsuh bought the crabs and released them into the kitchen sink.
“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.