18

There had been an accident at Jae-hyun’s military base. A shooting rampage. Breaking news on the front page. I renewed the web browser, hoping for an update. I downloaded the radio apps, switching from one channel to another. An upcoming shad-fishing festival. An advertisement about pesticide control. Sister drove, Mother in the passenger seat. I sat in the back, the pizza sitting cold beside me. Mother told us to eat, but neither of us could. We sat in fear—it felt like the moment when we heard about the accident in Saudi Arabia.

Mother had heard on the radio. An accident at the 5th infantry division, but she didn’t know which regiment. Mother called the commander. We can’t disclose any information, he told her. Not until we have verified the situation. Mother sputtered—my son, my son.

If they called, it would mean something had happened to Jae-hyun. They had not called yet.

The last time we were sitting like this, they were screaming. Mother insisting. Sister refusing. Eun-woo, listening. I’d sat on the outside, staring at the clock and whispering we should be quiet. Neighbors could hear us. Their voices had picked up volume again.

Now, outside the window, the dawn was dark without the promise of morning. The lampposts carpeted the highway with bright clarity. The last time we drove on this highway, it was morning—our car had reeked with the smell of fried chicken and home-cooked braised beef short ribs with boiled chestnuts, stir-fried glass noodles with vegetables, and rice rolls stuffed with stir-fried ham, egg, carrot, spinach, and yellow pickled radish. All for Jae-hyun to share with his comrades and seniors who shared the same barrack. It was Mother’s way of saying please keep him safe.

“Any news?”

Sister glanced at me in the rearview mirror.

“No,” I said. “I can’t find anything.”

“Did Jae-hyun read your text? Your email? Any word from him?” Sister asked.

“No,” I said.

“Mom, you can’t remember which channel?”

“I don’t know.” Mother shook her head. “I heard it from Mrs. Lim’s radio.”

Both of them looked exhausted. Mother lowered the window a little, letting cold air into the car. Sister sighed, pushing up her glasses, unwrapping another stick of gum. Two pieces already inside her mouth. She struggled to chew. Both of them looked out at the road ahead—but they had seen. Sister had seen Mother’s wrists. Mother had seen Sister’s apartment, the taped boxes, the photos taken down from the wall. So much of the furniture, gone. Mother scratched at her splint.

“Get some sleep. You’re not going to get better if you don’t rest. We’ll wake you up when we arrive. It’s going to take another hour,” Sister said.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Did you take medicine?”

“I did.”

“Didn’t the doctor say you should take it after a meal?”

“You took it on an empty stomach?” Mother turned to me.

“I’m fine.”

On the opposite road, there were many cars heading down to Seoul. Few were leaving the city, heading up like us. I folded my arms and leaned my head against the window. The passing lampposts were terrifyingly bright, like a live electric fence paving the way for our car. Mother gripped her cell phone, the screen flashing onto her pale face. Mother asked me to call her to see if her cell phone was working. Then she said, No, no, don’t. If you call, I might miss their call. Sister switched the radio station again, looking for the channel where Mother had heard the news. When Mother had arrived, pounding on the door, I thought Sister would say something. That Mother was overreacting again, that Jae-hyun was fine. But she grabbed the car key and two coats, one for me and one for herself. Then we drove out. We were close now, nearing the border between South Korea and North Korea.

I should tell them about the hotel, about seeing Jae-hyun inside. His key, his hands on the doorknob.

The moon. The moon’s luminous body ran ahead, going faster than we could ever hope to. Mother watched it with me, holding her cell phone close to her chest, my ears picking up on her quiet prayer. The moon’s large face kept watch.

Tae-kwun had texted. He was in New York, just arrived. A boy, Min had said. Her cousin gave birth to a boy. I turned off my cell phone. Would they have fought? Min’s cousin would have protested, but I knew she had given birth in the bones. I grabbed the blanket beside me and spread it over. It smelled faintly of Ms. Han’s withering bloom. Back in Dalbit, Min and her aunt would be washing the blood and tissues from the bones. My eyes began to drift shut, thinking only of Jae-hyun.

Jae-hyun was at the border.

But here. He is here.

Inside the hotel.

I am back. In the bar, in the lounge. It’s been ravaged. The bar stools, the billiard table, and the armchair have all been axed, their legs severed from their bodies. Knifed furiously. I put my hand over the bar, lightly sweeping my fingers along its scars. I look behind the counter, at the wall where a shelf should have been mounted, holding bottles of whiskey, scotch, vodka, glasses. There is nothing here. The bar is ruined, empty.

I imagine: thick smoke curling from the tips of burning cigars. The strong smell of tar, mixing with the waft of alcohol and the wooden furniture. Ice cubes clanking against glass. A bartender gently putting down a drink. Women in elegant dresses swirling their glasses, crossing their legs as they sat on the bar stools, sipping their drinks. Men in suits, holding on to their cue sticks as they walked around the billiard table, pulling up their sleeves to make a careful, perfect shot.

But now, all I can smell is gasoline, scattered sawdust rough on my lips. The billiard table and the armchair sit legless, collapsed onto the floor. The stools, just their leather seats. Every piece of wood here, axed, scavenged. The splintered pieces were piled up, heaped onto one broken billiard table, placed in the center of the room. As if someone tried to make a bonfire here. Someone intended to burn.

I turn away from the heap. I am here for a reason, this time.

Jae-hyun.

I remember the day I saw the tanks on the highway, the boys carried off to the front line. I saw Jae-hyun inside the hotel. He stood with the boys in their military uniforms, his hands on a doorknob. That room was here. Somewhere inside this hotel.

I walk past the pile of firewood, searching for a door, when my eyes catch the paper. Kindling. Buried under the remains of the furniture on the billiard table. I pull out what I can, without tearing the pages. Most of the letters are too smeared to read, or lost to the thousands of wrinkles. I take them to the bar, spreading them out on the countertop, trying so carefully not to tear the papers as I unfold and flatten each page.

They are scribbles. Each in a different handwriting.

Sung-rae, if you find this. We’re waiting for you in the ballroom.

Bong-soon. Ten years old. A girl with short hair and wearing a white hanbok. Please if anyone finds her, tell her we’re in Room 1306.

Mom, Dad, we are okay. Myung-ok and I, we’ve arrived here.

Another note.

We’re running out of gas. Running out of food. There are rumors North Korean and Chinese troops are killing everyone in the city. Soldiers dead. No help yet. No sight of our troops. People keep asking when this will end. What will happen to us?

The last one has the same handwriting as the note I first found in the lobby. Poised, calm. Left by someone who was once in charge. But on this note, his words scream, scrawling off in hopelessness. I need to find Jae-hyun. I need to make sure he does not open that door—enter his room, go far beyond my reach. He is all right. Safe. Alive. He has to be.

The lobby. The kitchen. The dining room. These hallways are always the same. I stare at the notes, imagining the possibilities. The only place I can rule out is the mossy, decrepit pool. Jae-hyun wouldn’t go anywhere near the pool. He doesn’t like to swim. Even when we went to the creek or the beach for the summer, he would always sit away from the water, watching a movie on his cell phone or helping Father with the barbecue. Something about the feel of water that he doesn’t like. Like that time he refused to wash, for days, or maybe even weeks. Even the teasing he got from his kindergarten classmates and the neighborhood kids would not change his mind. Soon, his hair thickened like dead tree roots. Mother and Father finally had enough and dragged him to the bathroom sink.

I whip around. The faint sound of footsteps coming from the other side of the hotel bar. I stand still, listening, praying it is Jae-hyun. I ready my body to run for him at the smallest hint. The footsteps are panicked. So fast, so desperate. They come closer, echoing from a room across the bar. They are coming from the ballroom.

“I thought maybe we could even live together.”

I blinked, awake again. In the back of the car.

“All three of us.”

Sister’s voice.

“—your hands. You can’t live there all alone.”

I pushed myself up, feeling the warmth spread out from the car’s heater. Too comforting, luring me in. My body was swaying, nauseated, carsick.

“What if something happened to you? If Yewon transfers to a school in Seoul, she’ll have to leave Dalbit. Jae-hyun’ll live in a dorm. No one will be there.”

Sister was talking about moving in together.

“If we sold our house in Dalbit, we could get a decent two-room apartment. We could look for a place near Seoul, or maybe we could find a place halfway between Inje and Seoul.”

Mother whispered.

“It’s my fault.”

Mother whispering again.

“I haven’t been a good mother to you.”

Sister muttered something back. Frail, barely holding volume. I had never heard her voice like this. All the words she had held back were coming out in shreds, spilling.

“I was going to tell you, I really was.”

Her hands gripped the steering wheel too tightly, the leather squeaking.

“I was afraid of what you’d say, what all of you might say to me. That all of you would suddenly see Ji-hye differently, not a granddaughter, not a niece, not anymore.”

Mother muttered something, but Sister cut in.

“No, I still love him, I do. It’s just—”

Sister stuttered.

“Being with Eun-woo reminds me.”

She paused to take a breath.

“If I lose another child again, Mom, I can’t.”

She was trying so hard. To go back to how she normally sounded, how she wanted to sound, but she couldn’t.

“Mom, I don’t know what to do.”

I should have done so much more. I had known, months ago, that Sister started sleeping in the nursery room. I overheard Eun-woo on the phone with Mother. He was worried. Sister would not leave the nursery. She spent her days and nights there, dusting off the boxes, the cradle, the bookshelf. Cleaning the room, scrubbing the floor. I heard, and I did nothing, thinking that she wouldn’t want to talk about it. I watched in silence. Waiting for Sister to heal, waiting for Mother and Sister to make up. Waiting for Jae-hyun to come home. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for a rupture, a break in my stillness.

Watch, Jae-hyun had said to me, standing in front of the bathtub of bones. All you do is watch.

I should have known him better—I shouldn’t have let this distance sit between us, living and growing with time. Closing myself off until silence became our only language. A few days before he was enlisted, Jae-hyun came to the convenience store, the first and the last time he had ever visited me at work. Jae-hyun put five bottles of soju on the counter. I looked around for the manager, who was nowhere in sight. I stared at him. What are you doing? He smiled. I pushed away the bottles. What, you trying to get me fired? He laughed. That laugh, he made us laugh.

About two weeks after Father passed away, Jae-hyun suddenly screamed from the front yard. Cat! Cat! Mother, who had been lying on the sofa for days, jumped up. Eun-woo peeked out from the kitchen. Sister opened the curtains. Jae-hyun was driving out a stray cat, his face flushed, his shoes flung off, flying through the air. He sputtered. How did that cat get in our shed! Pissed! He pissed everywhere! Sister bit down her smile. An orange-striped cat hissed as it teased him, prancing around our yard. Sister laughed. Mom, I think he’s losing his mind. Mother laughed for the first time in weeks.

But now, Jae-hyun.

The least I could do was find Jae-hyun.

I had to bring him home.

My eyes drifted shut again.

Mattresses. There are mattresses, stretching out to the far end of the room, strewn across the white marble floor. I am in the ballroom now. Inside, more than a hundred mattresses formed a strange pathway, carelessly and hastily placed, too close to one another. Blankets are heaped on the mattresses, or flung down onto the floor. Kicked and shoved aside, as if the sleeping guests had stirred awake many years ago. The fabric of the mattresses shows so much age and filth. No one can sleep on them now. They are yellow, covered in dark stains. Like hardened blood. I see shoe prints. Military boots. Boot prints, stomping and kicking across the mattresses. On the floor, I can see empty shells, rusted and old. Blackened feathers, shredded. Holes. Bullet holes pierced through the mattresses.

I grip my hands together, my gut twisting.

The hotel was a refugee camp. The restaurant ravaged. The bar become a site for firewood. The ballroom, turned into a temporary shelter. Every place only holds brokenness, left in the hands of decomposition and neglect. For how many years and how many more. No one is coming to save us. The hotel, it is ownerless. The guests. The staff. Inside, everyone, all of us, have become refugees.

“Noona—”

His voice. I run into the hallway, searching. Begging Jae-hyun to call to me one more time. I follow the echo of the sound, chasing the fading trail of Jae-hyun’s sobs, trying so hard to not lose his voice, to hold on to it as long as I can. I force myself forward, murmuring my prayers. Jae-hyun, please don’t open your door. There is a window here. A window. You can get out.

I stop to listen. His voice disappeared, but here is an open door. Slightly ajar. From inside, I hear a moan. Someone struggling, wheezing. Their hurt, pain leaking out into the hallway with just a slant of light.

“Jae-hyun?”

Inside the room, a grungy yellow light casts the space in a stale hue. It is a storage closet. It smells of aged wood and sour leather, with something sweet laced in the air. Sugar and milk. Ice cream. The shelves on the walls are empty, collecting only dust and that musty smell. This room, it used to hold suitcases and luggage, but it was now gutted-out clean. I search for the sound, that moan, that voice, desperate to find Jae-hyun.

A murmur. I walk to the very end of the room, around the shelf. In the cave of a small nook, there is a woman, her back leaning against the wall. She sits on the floor, caressing her stomach. The rhythm of her hands, slow. Her dress exposes her bare legs as she moans, words dropping onto her swollen stomach.

“My baby.”

I step back.

“My baby.”

I open my eyes. The car is rolling inside the four walls of the hotel. Mother and Sister are speaking, unusually quietly. My eyes dart from the lampposts on the road to the ceiling of the car to Mother’s and Sister’s shoulders to where the pregnant woman moans.

“You don’t have to.”

Mother was talking.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

Gentle and soft. Her voice.

“If you ever want to bear a child again, you don’t have to bear in the bathtub.”

But the bones. Wasn’t everything because of the bones?

“With Ji-hye, I just wanted it to be a happy thing.”

Mother nodded.

“Mom, you know how I used to throw up when I was young, whenever I went to the bathroom, near that bathtub.”

Sister shook as she continued.

“Growing up, I couldn’t understand.”

She wiped her cheeks.

“Why you guys would force us to wash them, to bear in them.”

Swallowing back her tears.

“I’d look at them and think, was that how I was going to be, after I died?”

She sniffled.

“I didn’t understand why you’d do that to your own children. Scare us, terrify us.”

Scared. We had been so scared. The bones had smelled like our flesh. When we washed a rib, we would think about our own ribs, our femurs, our tibias. Bent over and hunched. Carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges, reminding us of our hurting and tired fingers. A mandible, reminding us of our clattering jaws. Scaring us about our mortality.

“Why you and Grandmother would choose to put yourselves through so much pain. The bones would remind me. They’d tell me I’d die. That she would die. That you would die.”

Sister, speaking in one tone lower.

“I didn’t want to remember the dead, the war. I didn’t want to go through what you went through.”

What we were born into. Into the bones.

“But those past days in the nursery room and now, with Jae-hyun … I think I know. I understand, a little, what it meant for you.”

The car was completely dark. We were the only people on the road, driving on a narrow two-lane street. Not even a single lamppost. Only our headlights pushed through the darkness. I groaned at the pain in my neck. Neither Sister nor Mother noticed me. Was I really back? Or still in the hotel? The car echoed with their whispers, the darkness drawing out their hidden words. The things unsaid. The moon lit the path of their confessions.

“I wanted the best for my child,” Sister said. “I tried to do what was best for her, for Ji-hye.”

The car moved slowly.

“I think I understand what you were trying to do. You were just trying to do what was best for us, weren’t you, Mom? You believed it was best for us. You lived with the war. You wanted us to know.”

Back in the storage closet, the pregnant woman is breathing heavily. She tilts back her head, her jaw dropping open. A cry that should have come out, silent. She squirms, her hands clutching her stomach, clawing at it, her nails digging deep. Her legs spread wide, sweat running down her forehead. Her dress soaked wet. The pregnant woman’s face twists and contorts, her breath wheezing in a fast, desperate rhythm, sweat breaking out on her limbs. Bloody red, her skin. Her head thrashing. Her pain, it is real. The woman is giving birth.

“Sometimes, I dream the same dream, the same nightmare.”

Mother’s shoulders dropped. Her voice, too quiet.

“In my dream, Jae-hyun isn’t in his room. I go to Yewon’s room, and she’s not there either. I call you, and you don’t answer.”

She nodded.

“An accident, the war. Something happened to all of you. You’re gone.”

In my dream, his hands were on the doorknob.

“When Grandma washed the bones, she would tell me at least she had their bones to wash,” Mother said. “At least, she knew where they had gone. She could take care of them.”

Mother sighed.

“And when I wash those bones, I think too. At least. At least they know where they will lie.”

I cracked open my mouth.

“Having a child, becoming a mother in this country—”

A lump in my throat.

“—it’s living a life of fear, passing on fear.”

Gurgling as I tried to scream.

“Fear, passed on from your grandma to me, and now, to you.”

Please, can’t you hear me?

“I feared, I fear, for all of you—”

Mom, Sister, I heaved.

“I thought the bathtub would remind you. You were born here, and we can’t change that. But you could remember. You could prepare. Hopefully, better than us, better than your grandparents had.”

“I should have been there for you more,” Sister said.

“You have your own family now. It was bad timing for all of you. With Jae-hyun’s enlistment and your dad. Your sister and her plan to go to Australia.”

“I should have been a better daughter. I should have.”

Mother shook her head.

“When you lost Ji-hye, I should have been there with you. I could have done so much more. I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

“Mom.”

“I failed you as a mother.”

Mother breathed out. Her soft voice reaching, stepping somewhere new. We were drowning, sinking.

“Your dad and I, we just wanted all of you to be happy. Safe.”

Sister flicked on the high beam.

“That’s all I want,” Mother said.

The pregnant woman begins to writhe. She is breathing faster and much louder, strands of hair falling into her open mouth. The pregnant woman screams, tugging me back into a memory.

The day Jae-hyun was born. Our bathtub reeking of sweat, with a burst of a sob. Mother’s womb torn, bleeding into the bones, her legs spread open, her hands gripping the rim. Her heaving body pushing into the bones, sinking as she fought to lift herself out of the drowning. The bones rattled under her pregnant weight, scratching against her back and bottom. The sticky, repulsive smell of fresh blood mixing with the smell of exhausted flesh. She screamed. She gasped. She cried. Sister squeezed my hand. Push. The midwife wiped Mother’s forehead. Push, breathe in, push. Father knelt on the floor. Holding Mother’s hand tightly. Grandmother cried. That day, I watched them mourn. They mourned as they gave birth. Grandmother, bearing my father in the bones. Mother bearing my sister, me, and Jae-hyun in the bones. They shed the same tears as when they washed the bones, for those whom they had lost. Whom they will give birth to. Mother cried as she held Jae-hyun in the bathtub.

The pregnant woman is tossing in pain.

Under her twisting body, bones. They scream their silent cries. Buried in age and death. War. The bones scream, War.

The pregnant woman’s hands slide down from her stomach, falling onto the floor. The fabric of her dress stretched over her swollen stomach, rippling. The woman, shuddering with the life trembling inside. Her chest collapses, her arms hanging. One last scream. Her stomach. It is much smaller. Shrunken, emptied. In between her legs, a baby. Spitting out mucus and blood clots as he cries. In his tiny purple fist, the baby holds a key.

Jae-hyun. I have to find him. To bring him home, out of the hotel. Out of the war that he, we, have been born into. We were born inside the hotel. All of us were born here and given a key to our rooms. Our wars to own.

Down the hall, finally, I see Jae-hyun. He is standing twenty steps away, far down the long corridor. In his uniform and in his military boots, Jae-hyun faces a door, his arm hanging in midair. In his hand, his key. I hear the cry of the baby, his first breaths ringing inside these walls. I swallow back the tears that are starting to rise up from my throat. Jae-hyun, I cry. Please, Jae-hyun. Please don’t open your door. Screaming his name. Noona. He watched me remove the soju bottles from the basket. He smiled. What, I’m too young, Noona? Drunk. His face, flushed from drinking with his friends in town. Yes, you are too young. I’ll fix the light, he said. After I come back from the military, I’ll finish Father’s project with Mr. Kim. After I come back, I’ll be here for Mom. Even if I get into a university in Seoul, I can come home on the weekends. Noona, you are going to take care of Mom, right? I fight to keep my eyes open. A little bit more, a little bit longer. To stay in the hotel. To hold on to Jae-hyun.

I had seen him, in the early morning, before we drove him to the military. He had been in the bathroom, standing beside the bathtub, looking over the bones. The water was running. His eyes, just how I had seen them at Father’s funeral. He murmured, If I lost thirty kilograms. If my eyesight was really poor. If I was crazy or suicidal. He smiled. Then I wouldn’t have to go to the military, Noona. His eyes flickered toward me. Noona, are you going to wash my bones too?

In the hallway, I run toward him. I have to stop him from opening that door, grab his arms. His fingers clutch his rifle. Why do you wash when you can’t get it off? His eyes on the water, on his fear. On the bones. Noona, can we ever wash it off us? I scream. I reach for him.

At least I know where Jae-hyun will lie.

Back home, in our bathtub.

I jerked up, clutching my chest, pulling my body from the seat. The car was rattling on the unpaved road. The moon, still watching over us. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save Jae-hyun from the hotel. From his door. The car began to slow. Mother unbuckled her seat belt. Sister grabbed Mother’s hand.

We had arrived.

In front of the military base, people were standing, crowded. Three cars were parked on the side of the road. I couldn’t see any faces, but the figures waved our car forward, our arrival confirming their fears. Their presence, confirming ours. Our headlights brushed past them. A middle-aged couple. A family of four. A woman. The families held each other’s hands. The middle-aged couple tended to the woman, who had collapsed. Screaming for anyone, anything. Something terrible had happened. I felt for my key, heavy in my pocket.