Tacoma, 2010
At the dry cleaners Sungho leased in downtown Tacoma, he got news that his twenty-seven-year-old son had received a callback for a desk job in Seattle. They were looking for somebody to type on a computer without fuss. They would note his son’s diligence if he showed up in a suit. Jennie, who worked with Sungho, reassured him she would close that night. The cleaners took up a thousand-square-foot space in a squat brick building shared with an antique shop near the college campus. Jennie wasn’t the sort of person who did nothing. She was finishing her degree program online and helping Sungho at the front desk. Jennie was so careful she could pass through a spider’s web on a line hung between Sungho and Insuk, Henry and Haru, without ever breaking it.
Sungho didn’t worry about her like he did for Henry’s future. After leaving the key ring with Jennie, Sungho rushed home to dress Henry in the navy pants and white shirt he had ironed himself. Sungho offered his own navy tie, but Henry changed his mind about wearing one, and Sungho decided his son was right. Sungho insisted on driving him, but Henry declined, and they walked to the bus stop. Sungho couldn’t predict what Henry would need. Sungho, staring at his son’s frame, made a feeble joke about his suit making him taller. “One thing I’ve learned is clothes meet you at every stage of your life,” and Sungho could hear the wind machine against the relaxing crinkle of plastic garment bags. Baby gowns. School uniforms. Wedding tuxes. Dress shirts. Black garments. “Clothes make you feel sure of where you’re going.”
Sungho regretted that his wife was busy now at the beach with Haru, who had turned nine this year. Henry was almost the age of Sungho’s father when he disappeared. Sungho observed his father’s mark on Henry. Henry messed up his hair or untucked his shirt, as if these were traits of his own. Henry gathered magnolia leaves off the road and fanned them out like cards in his hands, as if he chose, moment by moment, the path ahead of him. Sungho sensed that something was wrong, but Henry wouldn’t tell him what it was. Henry said he only did things he had to do. Sungho felt threatened by the sadness in his voice, so he told Henry that despite what he believed, if he would reconcile himself to the soft focus of a daily routine, he would not stumble but progress toward a real and concrete joy as a human being.
After Henry bused to the city, Sungho went upstairs to his son’s bedroom. Jennie and Haru shared a bigger room across the hall since Haru hated to sleep alone. With his family, Henry couldn’t fathom what years were speeding toward him now. It occurred to Sungho to drive Henry home, but he might embarrass his son by showing up outside the building. Normally, it would be Insuk who was concerned about Henry, but she seemed focused on Jennie, spending hours to cook her a dish for the first time. Sungho started to make the bed before he realized that Henry had done it already. The blanket folded like a hospital sheet. It was an ordinary sight, but for Henry it was unusual. It was what Sungho expected out of a son but not what he expected out of Henry. Sungho thought of his father, who left as suddenly as a note struck on a keyboard, ringing in his ears ever since.
~
Sungho noticed Henry’s bike leaning against the entryway. Now in his fifties, Sungho couldn’t remember when he last rode a bike. He guessed it was during college in Daejeon. Sungho took the bike down to the main road. Letting the pedals go, the metal frame rattled. Sungho couldn’t stop shaking, out of excitement. He pumped his legs at the bottom of the road. The crank going, his wheels turning. Sungho was young again—his youth a flag waving on its stand. Sungho could imagine a version of his life along the path of the bike. Sungho understood, after all these years, that his father must have longed for himself. Sungho gripped the handlebars, let the wheels loose on the corners, molding the line behind him. His eyes followed the reflectors. Then he kicked off the road into the high brush. With a hand, Sungho parted the grass to a clear view of the water at the field’s edge. The dusk wore brightly colored pants—red, orange, blue, and purple.
~
It was dark outside—no sign of Henry. Insuk stirred a pot of jjigae for when Henry came home. She seemed sensitive to the sounds of Jennie and Haru reading upstairs—her ears like coiled fiddleheads unfurling into fronds. Insuk worried it would be a waste if Henry had eaten already, and Sungho reassured her the girls would be hungry. Sungho coached Insuk on not asking too many questions after the interview. “We don’t want to disappoint him if it’s not good news,” and he repeated it in case she hadn’t heard it the first time. “If he’s happy, then we can double it. If he’s sad, then we must cut it in half.”
Sungho switched on the porch light. Insuk told him to wait since Henry had his own way of doing things. The girls finished the jjigae before it turned cold.
Two hours passed. Sungho walked down the driveway. Streetlamps stood in nests of light. Sungho roamed farther, thinking he’d seen Henry. At the corner, no one was there.
Sungho called the downtown office. There was no answer in the middle of the night. Sungho left a message explaining that he was looking for Henry, who was supposed to have arrived that afternoon. Sungho tried again at six in the morning. At six thirty, a young man came on and put him on hold. When he came back, there was the sound of keyboard strokes and the mouse clicking as repetitious as a clock ticking beneath its lidded face. Sungho asked whether he should come in person. The young man remembered, just then, what had happened with the candidate. Henry had never showed at the interview.
~
Sungho drove a mile down the road to the bus stop. Black, shiny trash bags lined the street. Sungho had been fooled into thinking his father’s mistakes remained in the past. Sungho wanted to know whether it was his fault Henry couldn’t place both feet on the ground comfortably enough to stay. Who but a son could abandon his father? How could the girls not accuse Sungho of his disappearance? Sungho left the stop, parked on the hill, and walked to the beach.
As he stepped onto the sand, a thing buried in Sungho surfaced. Henry could’ve thrown himself into the sea.
Still in his clothes, Sungho leaped into the water.
Wading into the current, he caught a full wave in the face. Sungho swam on, swallowing water. He was certain he felt a wing or a branch. Sungho dove headfirst into the gray layers. His eyes stung in the water. Somebody must’ve seen Henry.
When Sungho came up, Insuk was tearing down the beach like a column of light. She yanked him out of the riptide and onto shore with the vigor of her years.
He couldn’t hear anything until she shouted, “Henry’s not in there, Sungho. He’s not in there.”
Sungho’s heart was beating against his chest, like the tied-up boats hitting the dock. “How do you know?”
“I know a little about my son,” she said. “He’s not like us.”
This put him at ease, and Insuk wrung out his clothes.
Insuk brought him to the car and drove them home. She washed him and hung their clothes. Insuk pressed his wrinkled fingertips. It was possible Henry would never return to them. Sungho wondered at some feeling—his father and his son walking off in broad daylight without words. It left Sungho with the question of who he had been as a son, then as a father. The shadows they cast were longer than the years.
Sungho had wanted his son to care for him as he aged—for his son to iron his clothes and dress him. For his son to complain about what a hassle Sungho had become. It was natural to return to a son after being a father. For his father, Jeha, to return to a building after being a person. “You think Henry knows,” he asked, “his father’s heart?” Insuk placed her hands on his throat and face—her thumb on the bud of his lower lip.
~
Two days after he searched the beach, Sungho was standing in the driveway when over the hill came Jennie and Haru hopping toward him, and between them was Henry. His son’s words were difficult to make out, but his warm tones were familiar. Sungho watched them quietly from a distance. When the girls’ laughter reached his ears, Sungho noticed how Jennie seemed never to have feared Henry would disappear. Haru carried a bouquet of milkweeds and lilies. Sungho was awestruck, as if it were Jeha returning to him and his mother over the road and to the basement rental. His shirt wrapped around his head, his slacks wrinkled and cuffed at the ankles, and grinning wide, he flapped his arms, and kicked his knees higher and higher as if he could fly off in a moment, but Henry wouldn’t because he wasn’t Jeha, because his son would stay, because his son was a father.
Tacoma, 2014
Eighty or ninety birds in a bare mulberry tree in the morning, and by noon, they moved as one dark net to capture another tree in the distance. After the incident with his interview, Henry had changed to sleeping on a floor pad in Jennie and Haru’s room, leaving the room across the hall empty. This room had the largest window with a decent view of the hillside, covered with wildflowers, and nobody wanted it to themselves. The fuss Huran once made over rooms almost seemed sensible. In the kitchen, Sungho asked me, “When do you think they’ll need to eat again?” Sungho spoke quietly because they were asleep upstairs. “Should I run to the market?”
“It’s better I stay here,” I said. “Go quick.”
“I’m surprised Haru hasn’t asked for beer yet.”
I pushed Sungho out the door. “She eats like you,” and feeling pleased, said, “Haru’s diapers used to be heavy, weren’t they?”
“You never cook like this for me. If I’m hungry, you tell me to pick up something for myself.”
“Oh, get out before they hear you whining.”
Jennie had stayed in the casual way she’d come. Shortly after they’d arrived, I had asked Sungho to park her van with its new engine in the garage. Every morning for the first decade they lived with us, I took Haru to the beach to let Jennie rest. By the time Jennie came downstairs, I had her coffee on the kitchen counter. Jennie would leave to meet Sungho at the cleaners. Henry woke up around then and applied for jobs until, at Sungho’s suggestion, he’d started work at the wildlife sanctuary. Henry brought back feathers, fur, and scales into the house. Haru volunteered on weekdays after school. Haru loved a tapir she described as a baby elephant mixed with a boar.
The room Jennie, Haru, and Henry shared was bigger, and they could see the shore and the pale-trunked silvering trees that sloped low as if in midfall over the road. They could smell their clothes drying in the wind. The sky lashed with deep purple and gray. When Sungho returned with groceries, he wanted to look, but I swatted him away. Maybe Jennie had arrived expecting nothing from me. But when she appeared at my door, I came to the realization that I had been preparing a place all this time not for my son but for Jennie and Haru. The room was filled with their clean scent. A mesh of light caught them from the window. They slept like dead fish one atop the other.
~
It was mid-April when we saw the news on TV. The ferry Sewol had sunk en route from Incheon to Jeju Island. The vessel was overloaded. The cargo improperly secured. Of the four hundred forty-three on board, three hundred twenty-five were high school students. As the vessel capsized and water flooded the cabins, announcements from the speakers told them to stay put. The students obeyed. But the crew escaped. The captain was seen abandoning the ship in his underwear. Footage recovered from the ship was broadcast. The faces were blurred. Their voices were changed. They were laughing for a brief second of nervous excitement. “Do you think we’ll become famous,” somebody said, “like the Titanic?”
Sungho urged Haru to her room, where she could ask him questions. Henry, shaking his head, left to be outside. Jennie knotted her fingers painfully. She might never have seen a thing so horrific. I rocked her—embraced her tightly with my shoulders. Haru could be heard asking why the students never jumped. Americans would’ve jumped. Each of us looked for answers. What happened in the pitch-black? Where could they go in the water? “If you are on a sinking ship, don’t trust anybody,” Sungho said. “Don’t listen to anybody.”
The way a ship sinks in compartments, from one partition to another, was the way a country sank. A rescue diver testified: “Now I urge the government not to seek the people’s help in any disaster but to look to itself.” Henry came back, and he stiffly walked upstairs to their room. I spoke to Jennie about the many things that gave life meaning, in any position, even in suffering and death. Jennie sighed—her head tipped back, listening to my words. I said she must not struggle against hope, that we must not become miserable or disappointed, no matter the circumstances, because the sun still shone upon the wreckage and the water, and upon everyone and everywhere in the world.
~
April wind rattled the windows at night as I washed the dishes with Jennie, standing side by side, a light overhead. A misty screen across the moon. Jennie and I were close enough that I’d seen how the lines on her hips had changed from giving birth, as if the waves had shaped her like sand.
Jennie was handing me a plate when I told her about Huran. “Maybe I should’ve been more like you,” I said. “You brought me closer to my son.”
“I know what it’s like to carry yourself on your shoulders.” She teased me, “You’re no pushover, ma’am.”
We laughed easily. “I’m not talking about me, I’m different, you know.”
Jennie splashed me with her fingers.
As it happened in kitchens, I was lulled into staring at nothing at all, and I missed the plate that rolled off the drying rack and crashed onto the floor. In a moment of suspension, I saw the plate as a sphere of light, falling before my eyes, as the very force in my life which had brought me here.
Jennie picked up the silver pieces, tossed them in the trash. “You’re lucky that broke just perfectly,” and Jennie cleaned and wiped the area by our feet. “Are you okay?”
When I looked at the dry cracks in my heels, I couldn’t recognize my feet as my own. They must’ve been the age of my mother’s feet. I nodded at Jennie, and reminded myself how I had rehearsed for this moment: “I think I’m ready to be a mom,” I said to her.
“Good,” she said. “I’m pretty tired.”
This time I flicked the water. “You’re not done yet,” I said. “The heart of a mother has to fold many times.”
“Call me origami,” she said, grinning.
“No—jongijeobgi.”
Jennie threw her head back. “Yes, exactly!”
“By the way,” I said in a serious tone, looking at her. “What’s it like, sleeping with my son?”
“I don’t know,” and she raised an eyebrow at me. “It’s kind of like going for a swim.” We burst into giggles.
After we dried our hands, I took my mother’s green hanbok out from the bundle in my closet.
That night in the living room I dressed Jennie—turning and turning her for the ties. Huran had knotted them tight on me, so I kept them loose. “I never knew the beauty of this hanbok,” I said, stepping back, “until I saw it on you.”
I called everyone to the living room. Sungho and Henry were refitting the spare room as Haru’s new room, putting in skylights. Haru was rolling herself sandals out of jute rope.
“Are you sure?” Jennie exhaled, and her shoulders dropped. “Areumdaweo-yo.”
“It’s yours,” I said. “It was the whole time.”
Haru ran down the stairs and into her mother’s arms. She squealed to see the hanbok, followed by Sungho and Henry beaming at Jennie, who twirled for them. The lush topmost layer of her skirt glowed. Jennie, buoyed by her glossy reflection, stepped into the foreground, and stood under the chandelier’s springing, beaded lights. I stared at her in awe—we all did, even Huran could see how the jacket and full skirt touched Jennie as lovingly as they had me and my mother years ago. The fabric folded smoothly across Jennie’s top and draped evenly around her to the floor—the ribbon falling down the front, a new verdant path.