Once the Shore (9 page)

She took her father’s hand. It was warm and soft and he
rubbed her fingers with his thumb, slowly, the way a blind person might read. They were watching a show with singers performing and the camera turned to the crowd during the songs, young girls clapping and old women shaking their hips and raising their arms. It was a show her mother used to watch, for the singing. Her father had bought her mother a karaoke machine one Christmas and she used to spend hours with the microphone. She was an awful singer. And Sojin would laugh in her room, covering her mouth, loving her.

She rested her head against him and inhaled his old smell. He had crossed rivers. He had once carried a rifle and saw faces that bled. He had run and shouted and wept. He had found love and raised a child.

With her lips close to his ear, she said to him: “You did all that was right. Know that it was of worth, if you don’t already.” And then she pressed her cheek against the side of his face. She wiped her eyes. He laughed at something on the television. Although it was warm, she pulled his blanket over him and tucked it under his chin. She shut his door as quietly as she could, leaving the television on.

For the rest of the evening she sat on the front step and watched the line of hills blend into the sky. The low stars. The lights above the street burst white as they came on, then flickered dimly. The brother and sister appeared, kicking a ball down the street. They spent every night out here, until their parents called through the windows. She hoped to watch them grow old.

Beyond them lay the fields and the forest that once caught fire, though she first saw the sky. It resembled the sun rising in darkness, she remembered, swallowing everything it touched. She heard shouting and saw through the window her neighbors running, the bare feet of a man who left footprints against the dirt, the tapping slippers of a woman. She rushed across the fields with her parents as the sirens approached. She looked for Kori. She watched the planes come in from the mainland and sweep by the hills, the firemen lifting their spitting hoses. Trees thinned, heat causing the forest to flutter. The sky was red and thick, as though it were slowly descending. She heard wood crack, the barking of dogs. The bystanders silent. The fire raged. It seemed the earth had opened to reveal the great mouth of a dragon. Kori, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

It was then a figure—a woman or a girl, she couldn’t tell—emerged from the burning forest and onto the field, stumbling. And then the flames behind her turned into fingers, a hand, and it reached for her, hungrily, as though it had been wanting to for years. It touched her, placing a halo over her head, and the halo glowed blue and green, the woman’s mouth opening, her coal eyes, her twisting shape. The length of her hair. The rush of firemen. Her father running. The sigh of leaves.

Sojin held her mother’s hand, her body warm against the fire. The burning woman like an escaped angel. And although she never admitted it to anyone, she thought it beautiful.

She never forgave herself for thinking that.

It had been the pig farmer’s daughter. Her dog had fled and she had gone looking for him.

 

Kori did not come to the store the next day. After closing and locking the doors, she walked home in the early evening, stopping at the country club to watch the golfers, the white flashes flying over the hills like stars. She walked beside the fields and turned onto her road, waving at a neighbor who was tending to a garden. A girl rode past her on a bicycle, kicking dust.

She did not go immediately into the house but stood by its entrance. Through the window she saw her father sitting on the couch, holding his cane as if he were about to stand any minute now. She thought: if she stayed out here in front of the door, how long would it take for him to notice she had yet to return, before he approached the window and looked out?

When she was young she had once watched him run the length of the field with the neighborhood children. She had been helping her mother in the kitchen. She did not know exactly what he was doing at first but then spotted the ball he was kicking through the grass, his arms gesturing high in the air, his body growing dimmer as he ran farther and farther into the distance. “Mama,” she said, tugging on her sleeve, pressing her palm against the window. “Mama. Is Papa coming back?”

Now she entered the house and brought her father to the kitchen. At the table she sat beside him while he ate his noodles
and she spoke of the shop. When he was finished she lifted the napkin from his shirt collar and folded it for tomorrow. On his way to his room, he said, “Someone came by for you today.” She placed the bowl in the sink. “Was it Kori, Papa? Do you remember?” He looked at her blankly. She held his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said.

She went into her bedroom to change. She would visit him. She had yet to see his home. For it was a home he wanted, the reason why he returned, he said, and perhaps that was as good a reason as anyone could give. Perhaps she was wrong, she had thought all day. She would tell him she had been afraid. He was too quick. Whether they deserved each other or not seemed irrelevant. There was history, there was that. In front of the mirror she imagined her naked stomach growing. She gave a quick smile at her image.

She opened her mother’s jewelry box. Her hand jerked away, her body went weightless. The box was empty. She knew at once, though at the same time refused to believe it, the way it had always been. She reached for the string around her neck. The key was still there. Hurrying, she dressed.

The sun was setting. She pushed her bicycle down the road, the gears groaning and rusted. She pedaled up the hill, standing, passing the fields, the cows motionless and indifferent. She climbed as fast as she could, her neighborhood receding. She felt the pressure of the warm winds, the monsoon season approaching.

Kori’s house, a one-story, stood on the slope of the hill. Two windows, their glass broken, faced the distant town. The front door of the house was boarded with plywood, a hazard notice nailed to it. She called his name, though realized it was useless. She went around the back. A stray dog licked the end of a rusted hose, then ran away upon seeing her. The rear windows were boarded as well. There was a space that a board didn’t cover, near the bottom of one window, but she saw nothing inside. Dust colored the glass.

She pedaled down the hill. She rode into the woods where his mother’s house once stood, though she could no longer recall where exactly. There were new houses now. In a small clearing she found a pair of socks and empty bottles but she couldn’t tell how long they had been there. She looked for his tire tracks but found several, unable to distinguish the motorbike’s.

She would have given him the jewelry if he had asked, she told herself now. She would have given him cash if he preferred it. She would have. When Kori left the island she gave him all her savings, which wasn’t much, but enough for a few days. To get used to things, she told him, and then they embraced and she placed her lips against his neck. She did it quickly, without thinking, tasting the salt of his skin. It had been morning, early, the sun not yet warm. She waved to him as the plane sped across the water and lifted, soaring. He would have remembered it. He should have known she would have helped him again.

She never asked him where he was on the evening when the trees and his mother burned. He never said.

She rode fast, past the fields and to the town. The day was fading. At the country club she looked for him. “He was going to work here,” she said to a man behind the reception desk. “Cutting the grass. He was to work the machines.” They didn’t know who he was.

There had been times when she feared him, knew what it was he had done. “You’re imagining things,” he might have said. And perhaps he would have been right. But even if it were true, she would have been quick to forgive. Because she understood. Because in fear there had been love, though she didn’t say that either. She had said nothing, not to anyone. She had lived with that, she wanted to tell him now.

At the house her father was sitting in front of a muted television. The lights were off, the shades drawn. “Papa,” she said, rushing to him, leaning forward. “Did Kori visit again? The man who came for dinner the other night?” She gripped his shoulders and shook him. “Papa,” she said, and shook him harder, and he looked at her uncomprehending, his breath salty from the noodles he had eaten. He had not bathed in weeks. She shook him and he groaned, his neck craning sharply from her pushing.

She let go.

Her father’s lips trembled and she could hear his breathing. His hands, in loose fists, rested on his thighs. He was looking at
a point behind her. She sank to the floor and pressed her head against his knees. The room was lit from the television. On the screen a man was boarding a ship.

“Was it Kori?” she said one last time. She steadied her father’s hands. His chin was damp with his spit and she wiped it away with her thumbs, brushing over his coarse stubble. “I will tell you about him,” she said. “You will remember.” She picked up his cane, which he had dropped, and placed it across her lap. She turned and sat with her back against his legs. “I knew him as a boy,” she said. “And then he left.”

Her father did not respond.

“He traveled great distances. He started fires.”

She heard her father stir, his breathing slow.

“And I thought it beautiful. And loved him.”

Cityscapes flickered on the television.

Her father, his chin against his chest, had fallen asleep. Sojin remained beside him. She felt the heat of the closed room, the bare walls and the shaded windows. The blue light. She waited, unaware that across the entire island there had been others before her and others who would, in the following months, find certain valuables missing. That he had made a life of this. That he had come not for her but for many.

Outside, the hills opened into night. The winds, like great birds, came in from the sea.

THEY WERE KNOWN AS THE SEA WOMEN and she was one of them. On the beach, clad in a wetsuit, Ahrim walked barefoot toward the water’s edge, carrying an empty cage tied with rope across her back. A pocketknife hung from a leather strap around her wrist. In her hands were a pair of rubber fins and a set of goggles. She walked with the gait of the young and her posture had remained straight all these years. She had, last spring, turned sixty-six.

Three of the women had already arrived on this morning and as Ahrim performed her stretches, she asked of their children and their grandchildren. They asked of her house and her neighbors. The sun was rising and with it the waves shifted in color, striped red and violet. Above them, gulls hovered in the air, taking the slight winds. Summer was ending; the monsoons had calmed. Soon the cold would come. There was a sense of transition in the water, the sand losing its warmth.
She liked this time best, the days in between seasons. She slipped on her fins and wished the others a good journey. She rubbed her fingers, as she always did, to bring them luck. And then together the women swam out to the sea.

When her body had warmed and she had swum far enough away from the shore, away from the others, Ahrim leaned into the water, kicked her legs, and forgot for a moment that she ever needed air. She dove blind. The sea was dense, constricting. Then the water cleared and made room for her. She felt it shudder. The ocean floor lay twelve meters below. Now eleven. Submersion and the world consisted of light towers, sunlit, and she swam among them.

There was the market to consider. What sold, what didn’t, the time of year. Fresh mussels and clams, eaten raw with a spicy dip, seemed more popular during the spring and summer; seaweed in a beef broth was preferred in colder weather. She considered this, thought it through, sacrificed one for another. Octopus she often caught, in part due to her own pleasure at touching their bodies, their childlike gestures.

She stayed under for two minutes. Then the dizziness arrived and her vision began to blur. At first she ignored it, pushing herself forward, but her chest took over, caving. Pressure attacked the sides of her head as though a sea god were yanking her by the hair and she succumbed to the shock of it, straightening her body, her eyes focused upward on the aqueous sun. When she surfaced she sucked in air,
too fast at times, so that she was suffocated by it, coughing, swallowing the seawater.

There was the common fear, each and every time. But always she looked down to see her hand below the water, clutching her prize. She had not let go. And always she dove again. She had done so for over fifty years now, as her mother did and her grandmother before that.

She went on until she was satisfied with her catches, her cage full, and only then did she return to shore. The others, too, waded to the beach and they gathered in a circle in the shallow water, and she joked with them, relieved that all of them had returned. They compared their catches and sometimes they traded. They spoke of the houses several of them were building with the money they had earned. They spoke of the growing tourism industry and the export business that had, over the recent years, provided for them. They spoke of profit.