Everything Belongs to Us Read online

  “Tell me what she said exactly,” her mother demanded.

  “She said she might stay if she was too tired—and not to worry if we didn’t see her tonight.” Immediately Namin regretted the might, which opened the door to other possibilities. The point of the lie was to establish Kyungmin’s whereabouts as a firm fact. Might made it a question.

  “She must have been joking.”

  “Maybe. I thought she sounded serious.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “Just that she’s been tired and might get more rest if she didn’t commute.”

  Her mother’s expression revealed everything they were thinking but dared not say. With her heels planted in front of her, she yanked back the toes, cracking all the knuckles at once. Each night she applied the same brutal pragmatism to her feet that she did to her aching calves, her shoulders, her two brooding daughters. It was always her strategy to meet force with force. Pain with pain.

  “Go ahead and wash up,” she said finally. “I’ll listen for the door.”

  In her room, Namin lay down and stared at the milky white bowl covering the dim ceiling bulb. Over the years, insect carcasses had collected inside it, forming a kind of pattern in the glass. She thought of the generations of bugs that must be mixed up in there. Whole family trees. She wondered if they considered it any consolation. At least we’re here together. Or if, like her family, they barely knew one another at all. A random leg here, a nameless antenna there. Her mother was now smashing her shoulders with her fist. Right fist crossed over the chest, smashing left shoulder. Left fist over the chest, smashing right shoulder. The rhythmic thumping of her exhausted flesh reverberated across the yard.

  The gate hinges screeched and Namin sat up, listening for Kyungmin. She heard her mother’s voice instead—“Just me”—and lay back down. Her mother continued to speak, her disembodied voice carrying through Namin’s closed door. It seemed they were always speaking through walls.

  “You got Mr. Hong, I see.”

  “I did.”

  “Aren’t you washing up?”

  “Coming.”

  Namin hauled herself off the floor and went back out to the courtyard to wash. The curved neck of the faucet glinted dully in the moonlight. She filled the basin halfway, rolling up her sleeves and cuffing her pants, pulling them as far up her shins as they would go. The water was bracingly cold, but she didn’t mind. She splashed her arms and legs, scrubbing hard between each toe, getting a fingernail under each toenail. She threw water in cupped handfuls behind her neck and washed until her earlobes squeaked clean. Water dripped down her neck and into her bra, trailing icy fingers. She flicked her head impatiently, shaking off the shivers. Her shirt would dry overnight and be fine in the morning, cleaner for having been partially doused.

  When everything else she could reach was clean, she washed her face and brushed her teeth, the now damp towel hung around her neck. She bade her parents good night and slid her bedroom door closed. When she lay down under the quilts, her face was still half-numb, almost sterilized with cold. Her teeth tingled with the taste of toothpaste.

  She heard her parents wash up. She heard her father’s newspaper being carefully closed. She heard their light click off, the sound instantly corroborated by a deeper settling in her own room. They were all listening for the squeal of the door. The absence of it had its own sound, a kind of hollow echoing. It badgered her, making her doubt her senses.

  If Kyungmin came home, nothing would change. The Kang family would continue as before in their unequal division of labor. Parents running the food tent, Kyungmin at the factory. Namin at the top of the pyramid with her books and exam scores and degrees, buffered from the worst of her family’s poverty by the expectation that one day her great success would rescue them all. Everyone understood their respective roles, and Namin for her part did not resent the burden of carrying her family’s future. It was only the past that truly haunted her, particularly on a night like this when it was impossible not to remember and take stock.

  In mentally listing the members of her family, she had left out her younger brother, Hyun. Five years younger, he had been born with physical disabilities that she now knew represented a form of cerebral palsy. As a child, Namin was told nothing to explain why he appeared different from other babies, why she was not to speak of him to friends or neighbors, or why he was never to be taken outside of the house. She was too young to understand the shame his condition caused her parents, the belief that outsiders would see him as a curse on the family, a sign of some deserved misfortune. After his second birthday, Hyun was taken to live with their grandparents in their rural village. Afterward, their parents never spoke of him and—as far as she knew—never saw him again.

  If success meant rescuing her family, then Namin was determined to include her brother, who mattered more to her than anyone else. Years ago, against her parents’ wishes, Namin had begun to visit him in the countryside. She made the trip whenever she could get away for a weekend. They had been raised apart, but there was a bond between them that Namin had never felt with any other member of her family. Each of the five Kangs was tough, resourceful, resilient; but her parents’ and Kyungmin’s inner lives were locked within armored exteriors that rarely showed a crack. Only Hyun, with his slow, careful speech and affectionate manner, was truly accessible to her. She planned for their future together as assiduously as if she were his sole guardian. Their grandparents had taken faithful care of him, but they were getting old and would not live forever. She hated to think what would happen if they fell ill or died, leaving Hyun without a caretaker. When that time came, Namin was determined that he would not be abandoned a second time. He would come to Seoul and live with her.

  And so it was critical for everything to remain on course. Kyungmin had to come home. Namin had to graduate and secure a good job. All this so she could afford to take care of Hyun when the time came. She would not let herself—or him—down.

  Namin traced the contours of the silence, feeling the dark, inky night. In his room, her father coughed three times. She strained to check the stillness of the door over the coughing. But it was the same. Silence.

  When she finally fell asleep around dawn and her sister still had not returned—her first overnight absence—it was with the knowledge that Kyungmin had as good as declared war on their family, wiping out their future and replacing it with a new script that no one wanted.

  In the morning, the three of them went about their usual business, refusing to acknowledge the advent of their new reality. Her parents left at the usual time, wearing their usual clothes. Everyone said and did the usual things. “Lock the door,” Namin’s mother said, the last thing she always said before leaving. Namin nodded and did as she was told, though she wondered what was worth safeguarding now within their family’s gate.

  In the following weeks, Kyungmin’s overnight absences became more frequent. The first few times, her mother dragged Kyungmin into her room and slapped her hard across the face and demanded to know where she’d been. Each time, her sister said nothing. She did not cry or beg forgiveness. She did not try to explain. It was this total lack of fear that terrified Namin more than anything: it signaled that her sister had already made irreversible choices. That the force of their disappointment no longer carried enough weight to matter.

  On the nights she did return, Kyungmin slunk through the gate minutes before midnight and went straight to the room she shared with Namin. Around her eyes and lips were lurid traces of makeup. The skin around her lips was stained and swollen pink. Not bothering to wash up or even greet anyone, she simply lay down and went to sleep. Finally, Namin would call over the courtyard, “She’s home!”—which her parents knew, but acknowledging it temporarily defused the alarm. For another night, the family settled into an uneasy détente.

  “I gave you girls everything I could—and this is how she repays me,” her mother said bitterly. “Everyone told me it was useless to put too much stock in a dau
ghter. Why bother worrying over someone else’s daughter-in-law, why waste your heart, but I said no. I said girl or not, they’re mine. Haven’t I always treated you as I would a son?” Namin flinched at that, thinking how her mother had treated her only son. Her mother went on, seemingly oblivious to her mistake. “My only sin is being poor. I grant you that. But I’m not punished enough as it is being poor; my own daughter becomes a—” She always stopped short of saying the word. Taking a deep breath as if to reset herself.

  The final time began as usual. Seventeen minutes before midnight, the family watching the clock. Waiting.

  Eleven minutes before midnight, the gate shrieked on its hinge. Namin slid open her bedroom door and peered into the darkness.

  Her mother and sister faced off in the courtyard. The light from the bedroom cast uneven shadows over their features and emphasized Kyungmin’s dark eye makeup. Her hair was teased and swept back around her cheekbones. She looked beautiful and fierce, like a woman onstage.

  Her mother’s voice was cramped with the effort of controlling herself. “Come in and talk to me.”

  “I’m tired. Another time.”

  “Then we’ll talk here. We don’t need to be long. I want to give you the chance to tell me the truth. Have you been staying in the dorms? Are you too tired to come home?”

  Silently, Namin begged her sister to agree. It wasn’t the truth her mother was after, but a way for them to live together in peace for a little while longer. Whatever the real story, here was a pardon, a truce. Say yes, she pleaded into the darkness. Perhaps it was even true, and perhaps they would believe her. Say yes.

  Namin strained to hear her sister’s response. But there was nothing. No acceptance, no rebuttal. Silence.

  “Did you hear me—” her mother said. Her voice caught, and Namin knew she was crying. “I asked you a question.”

  Kyungmin said, “Do you think I’m in the dorms?”

  “That’s where I hope you are.”

  “Then that’s where I am.”

  Her mother recoiled as if Kyungmin had struck her. Her chest heaved as her sobs became wails.

  Kyungmin started speaking in a low voice. Calmly, as if she’d rehearsed the speech for years. “I’m twenty-seven years old. Three more years to get her to graduation and I’m thirty. Namin will have her degree and what will I have? Nothing.”

  “Namin having her degree is not nothing,” her mother shouted. “It’s for all of us.”

  “But I don’t need her to help me! I can help myself. And I don’t have to wait until I’m halfway dead. I can help myself now.”

  “Looking like that? By being a whore?”

  The word she’d refused to say all these weeks uncoiled and snapped like a snake from its nest. Namin trembled, not because of what it would do to her sister or even the shock she felt herself, but what it had meant for her mother. To finally release the word that had been stuck in her throat.

  Kyungmin shrugged. Her eyes stayed hooded, unalarmed. “Namin has people to impress and so do I.”

  Namin sensed it before she truly saw it—her mother’s hands around Kyungmin’s throat. Her sister’s face white against the dark gate. Her mother screaming.

  Her father was already there, trying to break her grip. He pried at the fingers one by one, methodical as always. Working with all the concentration in his body, his fists bunched around her fingers so tightly, it looked as if Kyungmin were being doubly strangled.

  Namin ran and grabbed her mother by the shoulders. She heaved with all her strength, but her mother’s body was as rigid as a boulder and she would not let go.

  They breathed as a family. They collapsed as a family. Her father had his arms wrapped around her mother like a human straitjacket, holding her tight. Her body looked so small, depleted. She lay in his arms crying and choking as if she had been the one near strangled.

  Kyungmin, who had fallen a few paces away, was straining on all fours like a dog, heaving for air. With a huge gasp she vomited a clear, syrupy liquid, then lay down with her face in the dirt.

  For several minutes the four of them stayed where each had fallen, listening to the ragged edges of one another’s breath.

  “Take her to bed,” her father told Namin finally.

  Her mother was still sobbing. He half carried, half dragged her away to their room. Namin heard the sounds of sleeping mats being taken out and arranged, of her father saying, “Lie down, Mother. You must rest.” She heard her mother’s fists pounding the floor, her cries becoming a kind of keening, more animal sounding than human. It was a rolling, high-pitched wail that frightened Namin more than the welts rising on Kyungmin’s neck. In the neighborhood, two dogs began to howl. Namin wanted to clamp her hands over her ears and howl along with them. She wanted to curl up in the dirt next to her sister and discover that this had been a terrible nightmare and she’d soon wake up.

  Instead she balanced on her haunches next to her sister, timidly stroking her back. She felt Kyungmin’s shuddering breath vibrate under her fingertips. She was so skinny, the knobs of her spine clearly defined under her hands. They had shared the same bedroom her whole life, their bodies always in proximity, but she could not remember the last time they had touched each other out of affection.

  When Kyungmin could sit up, Namin asked, “Can you stand?”

  She nodded, wiping her chin with the dirty palms of her hands.

  Namin helped her to her feet and to their room. She brought a wet towel to wipe her face and hands. Despite the intimacy of these gestures, it was like ministering to a stranger. Kyungmin accepted the help but did not thank her. She lay down under her quilt and turned her face to the wall.

  For a long time Namin sat up, watching her sister sleep, blotting her sweating forehead with the towel, smoothing her hair. Even in sleep, Kyungmin’s face never relaxed. Her complexion retained a pale gray cast like watered-down milk.

  Finally she lay down next to her sister, sharing her quilt the way they used to as children. She slept with her head nestled near Kyungmin’s bruised neck, careful not to hurt her but close enough to feel her sister’s breath in her ear, the warm air on her cheek.

  —

  IN THE MORNING, she was gone. Namin combed their room for clues, looking for something her sister might have left behind as a message. She found nothing. The things she had taken were concise and pragmatic: underwear and bras. Her favorite cosmetics. Clothes. Anything they shared that Namin might miss—a red resin comb, hairpins, stockings, picture frames—were all left behind. Books, papers, pens. Untouched.

  Something was nagging at Namin’s subconscious. Something important was missing.

  With a sinking feeling, Namin slid open the bottom drawer where she kept her only framed photo of the three of them. Kyungmin aged fourteen, Namin aged seven, and Hyun, two years old, sprawled over her lap like an oversize rag doll. Even before she felt the weightless slide of the drawer, she knew it was gone.

  Kyungmin had taken it, and Namin knew that meant her sister was gone for good.

  Four thirty-five A.M. The predawn mornings still had the breath of winter, a soft-focus chill that seemed to move her destination farther away, as in the never-ending journeys of childhood. In Namin’s memory, the long bus trips to her grandparents’ village always seemed to be accompanied by extreme weather. Every New Year, they would pack up bundles of traditional food their mother had spent days preparing and squeeze onto the bus next to other similarly laden families, everyone wearing layers of their warmest thermal underwear and pressing the hot food bundles against their bodies to endure the hours of unheated travel. If it was snowing or sleeting, the bus driver would have to periodically pull off the road and hack at the dirty black ice encrusting the windshield wipers. But the freezing cold was preferable to the stifling heat and humidity of the summer trips. At least in the winter there was the comfort of eating freshly boiled potatoes, licking the melting salt off her fingers as steam wafted into her nose. Or the pleasure of peeling a roasted ya
m, bit by bit, as she nibbled at the sweet yellow flesh. During the hot months, there were no treats and no relief. The adults grew short-tempered and liberal with punishing slaps, easier to land on limbs bared in summer T-shirts and shorts. It was inevitable that some kid would become sick and need to throw up in a plastic bag, which his mother would tie up and toss out the window without looking where it might land in traffic. Trapped within the pressure-cooker environment, the vomit smell lingered in the bus, and Namin, fearful of suffering a similar outcome, would force herself to breathe through her mouth for the remainder of the trip.

  After Hyun was born, there were no more trips to see her grandparents. As if his disability had infected the whole family, as if they were all as paralyzed as he was. Namin recalled the heavy stillness, the sense that she must not bother her parents or talk to anyone in the neighborhood about the new baby.

  “But why shouldn’t we talk about the baby?” Namin remembered asking her sister one day. “People are always asking about him. What am I supposed to do?”

  Her sister’s eyes flashed contempt, letting Namin know how dumb she was to even ask such questions. “What’s there to be so proud of that you want to chatter about him, anyway? A baby like that should never have been born. Better for all of us—including him.” Her voice sounded strained and unfamiliar, and Namin understood she was only parroting what she had heard and what they were supposed to believe. Still, the harsh words stung. The baby was barely old enough to seem like a real person, but he was still her baby brother. Their brother. Her eyes welled with tears.