15.
What have you done?
Tae-yul ran in, yelling at me. How could I have been so stupid, how could I have made such a mistake? Did I realize what I’d done?
He grabbed my arm hard, shaking me. Suddenly, our parents were there. Abuji pulled Tae-yul away, while Omoni stepped between us.
“Tae-yul! Calm yourself,” Abuji said sternly. “What is the matter?”
“You heard her! Uncle has gone into hiding—she told him he had to, so he did!” Tae-yul wrenched himself free of Abuji’s grasp, still panting. “He’s gone! But she was wrong—they weren’t about to arrest him. They only wanted the metal! I went to his shop—there was nothing going on there. No raid, nothing! How could she have gotten so mixed up? Why didn’t she tell someone first?”
I still couldn’t move, but my mind had started working again. I closed my eyes and thought back to the conversation with Tomo. What had he said, exactly? Your uncle . . . a shame . . . not safe . . . I couldn’t remember anything clearly. The little things—he’d kept mentioning them. The little things made of wire—
Wire.
Metal wire.
That was what Tomo had been talking about. He’d been warning me that our metal things were about to be taken away. Maybe he thought that if we knew in advance, we could hide some things before it happened. But telling me straight out would have made him a traitor to the Japanese, his own people. He’d been telling me the only way he could—and I hadn’t understood.
Behind my closed eyelids I could feel the heat of tears starting to rise.
When I opened my eyes, it felt like hours later, but Tae-yul’s lips were still moving. I couldn’t hear him; it was as if his voice were outside my hearing.
Abuji held up his hand. Tae-yul cut off his words abruptly. And I could hear again—a silence like iron, Tae-yul’s heavy breathing the only sound.
Then Abuji said, “It does not matter how it happened. It is done now.”
Tae-yul spoke between clenched teeth. “We have to get word to Uncle. We have to tell him it’s all right, that he can come home. If we can send a message—if we tell the right people—”
Abuji shook his head. “I have already thought about this. It would be very dangerous to try to contact him. And it would take time—long enough so the authorities would hear of his untimely disappearance before he could return. If they were uncertain about his activities before now, they will surely know by then.”
They again. The Japanese. Always the Japanese. My eyes were dry now, and I didn’t feel I was about to cry. I hardly felt anything at all.
Abuji paused and spoke again, each word careful and deliberate. “To be honest, I do not even know whom to get in touch with. My brother was cautious that way. He thought it best for me to know as little as possible.”
“You mean, we’re not going to do anything?” Tae-yul blurted out. “We’re just going to—to live without him from now on?”
Abuji cleared his throat. “Tae-yul, you need to understand this. What your uncle was doing was very dangerous. It was only a matter of time. Sooner or later he would have been arrested or else forced to escape.” He paused. “If he had been arrested, who knows what they would have done to him.”
Abuji moved toward me and put one hand on my shoulder. I could see it there, although I barely felt it. He turned his head and continued speaking to Tae-yul. “He is safe now. Safer than he would be if he were here.”
He was trying to comfort me, I could tell, trying to tell me that the rash and terrible thing I’d done wasn’t so terrible after all. I wanted to believe him, but in my head I could still hear the echoes—stupid, stupid, stupid. . . .
Tae-yul didn’t believe him either. He shuffled his feet impatiently, then lifted his arms and let them drop by his sides again. “When will he be able to come home?” he asked.
There was no answer.
When Tae-yul was a baby, he’d slept with Omoni and Abuji. A few years later, when I was born, I slept in my parents’ room and he moved into Uncle’s bedroom. That was how we always slept now.
As I went to bed that night, I realized that Tae-yul would have the whole room to himself. If I hadn’t been so numb, I might have laughed. What a thing to think at such a time.
I undressed and lay down. In the darkness I began to feel things again. First, a huge dry lump in my throat. I swallowed and swallowed, trying to get rid of it. Instead, it swelled until I nearly choked on it. At long last the tears began.
I cried and cried. Not sobbing or gasping for air, but silently. Tears poured out of my eyes without stopping. When I was on my back, they ran into my ears. So I turned onto my stomach and let my pillow catch them all.
I wasn’t making any noise, but a long time after everyone was in bed Omoni rose and tiptoed to my side of the room. She knelt down beside me, but I couldn’t make myself turn toward her.
“Sun-hee,” she whispered, “a mistake made with good in your heart is still a mistake, but it is one for which you must forgive yourself.”
She reached out and smoothed my hair away from my hot, wet face. “Perhaps now you cannot. One day you will.” She stroked my hair again, but after a long moment, when it was clear that I wasn’t going to answer, she went back to her own bed.
I curled into a little ball, tight around the pain in my middle. Her words had only made me feel worse. Because the truth was, there hadn’t been good in my heart.
There had been some good, of course. I was worried about Uncle; I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. But there were other things, too. I wanted to be the one to save him. I wanted to be the one with the important news, the one who’d figured everything out. Not my parents. And especially not Tae-yul.
Instead of saving Uncle, I’d put him in terrible danger. When the Japanese found out he had left suddenly, they’d know for certain that he was a rebel, working for independence. If they found him, he’d be arrested, jailed for years . . . tortured . . . maybe even killed.
I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself until Uncle came home safely.
But who knew when that would be?