Everything Belongs to Us Page 9

  Kyungmin sighed in exasperation. “Just say you don’t know anything. Better yet, say nothing. They’ll stop asking soon enough.”

  “It seems rude,” Namin said in a small voice.

  “Well, princess. We’re not exactly living at the royal palace, are we. Only well-off people get to worry about being rude.”

  This time it was her sister’s real voice. Her own mocking words, which Namin had heard a hundred times before.

  “I’m not a princess,” she said.

  Her sister rolled her eyes. “I know.”

  Hyun was sent away when Namin was seven, too young to understand, thinking she was merely getting an afternoon’s break from her brother. Thinking it was about time her mother finally took him out of the house.

  “Say goodbye,” her mother had said, and Namin barely waved from the floor, where she was arranging her paper dolls in a parade. She remembered she’d felt glad to see them go. What luxury to have the place empty of him for a change. His rickety, smelly chair was always in the way, and he was never quiet, not babbling normally like other little brothers but squawking and hooting like some kind of human chicken. After they left, Namin had spent the afternoon drawing new dolls and outfits for her collection. She had been in such a good mood, she had drawn herself a brand-new house.

  Two days passed. Saturday, Sunday. The house was so quiet, she could hear the suck of the filter each time her father inhaled on a cigarette. She could hear the slight rattle of the pot lid over boiling rice. At night, there was a rustling under the floor, sharp, scuttling sounds and a drone of persistent chewing. Namin stayed awake the entire first night listening to it, at first afraid she was imagining things, then afraid to ask what it was.

  “Rats,” her sister said the next morning. The light was painful to Namin’s scratchy eyes. “Have you really never heard them before?”

  Namin admitted she hadn’t. She always fell asleep with the lights on while her sister stayed up poking at herself in a red plastic mirror, applying one or another potion to her face or hair. Namin had never in her life slept in a room by herself. She had never stayed awake long enough to see the lights turned out. The revelation of the rodents seemed to add another week to her mother’s absence. Their arrival, new to her, seemed an ill omen.

  When her mother finally returned, Namin, so intent on telling her about the rats, did not immediately realize Hyun wasn’t with her. She had already begun the story of the sleepless night, the strange sounds that had concerned her, the speechless terror—when suddenly she noticed how quiet it still was.

  “Where’s Hyun?”

  “Hyun?” Her mother repeated the name vacantly, and Namin suddenly saw what she should have noticed earlier. The mismatched buttons of her mother’s blouse. Her collar pointing jaggedly at her throat. Her face looked gray and rumpled, like old newspapers.

  “Didn’t he come with you? Where is he?” Namin looked to her sister, but Kyungmin had turned her back. Her father, too, refused to meet her eyes.

  Her mother murmured, “Hyun needs to stay in the country awhile. He has more room with your grandparents. He’ll be more comfortable there.”

  Namin pictured the tiny farm hut where her grandparents lived. The thatch-roof structure struck her more like a freestanding cave than a house. Everything was small and dim and low. Even her mother had to duck through the doorways. The walls smelled like glue from the constantly peeling wallpaper, and there were no light switches, only strings hanging from the bare bulb in the ceiling that she could not reach. Worst of all, the bathroom was in an outhouse beyond an overgrown hedge. At night, the thorny bushes swayed and took on beastly shapes. Terrified, Namin limited food and water so she would never have to use it, which insulted her grandmother so much that she did not even pretend to like her.

  The only good thing about the place was the nearby stream, where she looked for snails under the rocks. The water was cool and clean. In the rice fields, there were frogs the color of new clover and fat-bodied tadpoles. Namin tried to stay outside as much as possible. She would rather pee in the stream while pretending to swim than do it at home.

  But Hyun would never be able to walk or swim in the stream, looking for snails. His chair wouldn’t roll very well over the dirt roads.

  “For how long?” she asked warily. “When’s he coming back?”

  “Try to understand,” her mother said.

  “But how long, how long?” Namin shrieked.

  Kyungmin’s shoulders jerked, and she kept wetting her lips as if she would speak. But instead of the grief or outrage Namin expected, her sister made only a thin gulping sound, a sound like crying without tears.

  Only then did Namin realize her family already knew. They had planned it together and agreed to keep it from her.

  Betrayal was a word she knew, but it was not sharp enough or big enough to express this event. Namin suddenly understood that families were not permanent. They could abandon you without explanation or warning. They could erase a member without so much as a tear. Wasn’t the world full of strict hierarchical words meant to tie everyone together? Unni: older sister of a girl. Nuna: older sister of a boy. Nam-dongsaeng: younger sibling, boy. Yuh-dongsaeng: younger sibling, girl. Aunts on your mother’s side, a different word from aunts on your father’s side. Your father’s brothers, more honorific than your mother’s brothers. So much careful specificity built into the language so no one could forget. And none of it mattered.

  That day, Namin dropped them all as lies. She never again called Kyungmin by her expected title, Kyungmin unni, older sister. Scandalized, the neighbors criticized their parents for permitting such a breach of basic manners, but there was nothing anyone could do to change Namin’s mind.

  Hyun hadn’t died, but he became a ghost. He followed Namin everywhere she went, making her see how things weren’t always the way she thought. People said she had an uncanny air about her, what they called a heavy presence. Namin thought this only natural, since she was carrying two people in the space of one.

  —

  WAS SHE ASHAMED? Jisun asked her once. This was soon after she found out about Hyun. At home, Hyun was a taboo topic, strictly avoided. It had been so long since Namin had even said his name out loud that she had felt superstitious and fearful, as if she were somehow harming him by doing so.

  Of course Namin was ashamed. But not the way Jisun thought. It was never that Namin was ashamed of Hyun. It was more complicated than that. To be ashamed of him because his body was twisted and weak or because he had been marked with an illness people considered a judgment on the family would have been a more straightforward thing, a reason she could explain to herself the way her parents had—neatly and permanently. Instead her feelings were a tangled confusion, gnarled around the shame of knowing her parents had abandoned him so easily. Of having accepted his disappearance as a child because she had been told to forget him.

  Young as she was, shouldn’t she have resisted letting him go? Shouldn’t she have known better? And since she had done nothing to stop it, didn’t it make her just as bad as the rest of her family?

  Shame was not just about secrets or covering up. Or about failure and not having the things other people casually had.

  Shame was being afraid that she was from crippled, graceless stock, unworthy of the good things other people had. That the mistakes that would chart her life forever had already been made.

  Maybe Kyungmin was right. Maybe it was only well-off people who had the luxury of behaving with dignity.

  —

  FOUR THIRTY-FIVE A.M. Namin boarded the bus and chose a seat on the right side, two-thirds of the way back. She tried to make this trip as often as she could. Monthly, she promised herself. That wasn’t too hard, was it? Visiting her brother once a month? But time had never been on her side, and the visits stretched to once every other month, sometimes once a season. Each time, this journey stirred up her most vulnerable insecurities about the past and the future. How she would make it up to Hyun for
all the years of his life she’d missed, denying his existence. And how she would ever repay Jisun for forcing her to finally acknowledge her brother when she might have allowed him to fade out of her life forever.

  It was toward the end of Namin and Jisun’s first year of middle school when a girl named Minju jumped from the roof of their school, impaling herself on the wrought-iron fence below. A notoriously bad student and a jokester who flaunted not only her poor ranking but also the abuse she received from the teachers, Minju had seemed the last person who would do something so serious as killing herself. It seemed like one of her bad jokes. For days after her death, even the teachers went around with looks of puzzled suspicion, as if they believed they’d been pranked. Then the wisecracks started.

  People said she’d jumped from that spot on purpose to cause the biggest headache. A mangled body on school property? What a nuisance! They also said it had been the smartest thing Minju had ever done—to correctly calculate the right distance and velocity to land on just that spot. It mustn’t have been that easy, they said. Let’s see the equations.

  When rumors of a ghost sighting began to circulate the week after her burial, the faculty didn’t pay much attention. It had been a grisly death. The students were at a vulnerable age, prone to imagination and hysteria. They were stretched too thin by their new academic responsibilities. The student who reported it was told to get more rest and to think before making up stories that would only upset the rest of her classmates.

  But no one could blame it on nerves or adolescent hormones when Mr. Kwon saw Minju as he was locking up the faculty lounge at the end of the day. An eternal bachelor and scholarly expert in ancient Korean naval tactics, Mr. Kwon was the strictest teacher in school. Behind his back, the girls called him “Professor Ostrich” because of his long, protruding neck and the way his throat jumped each time he swallowed. No one thought him at all capable of imagination or hysteria. While he seemed unhappy to talk about it—he must have thought it diminished his authority—his ghost sighting actually made him popular for the first time in his tenure. The students flocked to hear details, then magnified them for their own retelling.

  Namin never heard the original points, only the inevitable exaggerations. Considering ghosts a kind of personal specialty, she declined to muddy her experiences with secondhand tales.

  To say she expected to see Minju next would seem facile in retrospect. But leading up to it, there had been that ticklish feeling. A kind of wriggle at the back of her knees and throat that felt half like sleepwalking and half like the moment before a sneeze, extended.

  It had been several weeks since Mr. Kwon’s sighting, the day before an important math exam. Namin and half a dozen others had stayed after school to study together. It was around eight o’clock and they had finally broken into their dinner boxes. On long study days like this, their mothers packed two meals—lunch and dinner. Some girls always ate their better meal earlier in the day and bartered for choice bits during dinner. The second group dealt with dinner as a kind of longer-term investment. They could either trade for favors from the first group or enjoy the simple satisfaction of being envied. Usually Namin had the most coveted meals since she had the pick of her parents’ cart, but that day she’d overslept and had time only to grab the first thing at hand: cold rice and a few vegetable banchans, truly disappointing fare after a long day of studying. Having no patience for hunger, she’d managed to haggle a fried bindaeduk out of Jisun in exchange for the hated task of filling up the enormous water kettle downstairs.

  The kettle, as round and wide as a ripe watermelon, was heavy and awkward to haul up three flights of stairs. A taller person could possibly hold it in one hand, throwing her weight the other way as a cantilever. But Namin, among the shortest girls in class, didn’t have the height to leverage. She had to use both hands to lug the kettle in front of her. It knocked against her knees at every step, sloshing cold water over her feet. She stopped to rest at each landing.

  Namin saw her first out of the corner of her eye. Thinking it was one of her study group friends coming to help, she said, “Hey, that bindaeduk is mine. No sharing—” And realized with a lurch that it was not her friend, but the recently dead girl, Minju. Namin had always heard of ghosts wearing white clothing, floating on air, but Minju appeared as solid and unghostlike as ever, only less rumpled. Her school uniform appeared crisply ironed, collar straight, shoes shiny. Actually, Namin had never seen the girl look so neat.

  The ghost gave her a friendly smile.

  “Do you need some help?” she asked. Her expression was so warm and open, Namin felt obliged to stay and talk. She shook her head. When she was alive, Namin had always taken great pains to stay away from her, if only to avoid the inevitable lecture they’d both endure if any teacher happened to notice them together. Now look, Minju. Why can’t you be more like Namin here? So nice and quiet, studies hard. You could learn a thing or two from her. They might have thought they were motivating Minju, but the attention only heaped further humiliation on Namin. The other girl might gain a little sympathy from classmates who pitied her for always being in trouble. No one ever felt sorry for the teacher’s pet.

  “I know you think I can’t do it, but I can,” Minju was saying. “I can lift all sorts of things. I could carry that kettle with one hand.” Her neat appearance had fooled Namin into thinking that perhaps in shedding her life, she had also managed to come free from her burdensome persona. But the petulant, boastful girl who was always arguing, always tilting the conversation in her favor, had not changed. “Everyone thought I couldn’t do it, but I can. You wouldn’t believe the things I can do now.” The more she talked, the more her voice took on a menacing edge, as if she would not take no for an answer. Namin took a tiny step back, hoping the ghost girl wouldn’t notice. She did not want to see what Minju could do now.

  “No, it’s really fine,” she said. “I know you can do it, but I’m sure I can manage. It’s only one more flight and—”

  “You don’t want to scare the others.” Minju nodded sagely. “Of course. I understand.”

  And she did seem to understand. Her expression softened and she ran a hand through her hair as if embarrassed to find herself in this position. Namin held her breath, wondering if the ghost girl would simply vanish or if it was up to her to walk away. But she couldn’t bring herself to turn her back. Perhaps if she said something comforting…“I hope you’re not suffering now. It’s terrible…what happened.”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” Minju said. “At least I don’t have to worry about exams. I do whatever I want all day. I guess you’d better get back to your studying.”

  “Yes. Well. Good chatting with you.”

  “Likewise.” Minju gave a stiff little wave, her fingers wiggling in an uncomfortable way as if they no longer bent at the knuckles. Flickering ever so slightly, the ghost girl turned and sauntered back into the corridor. “Oh, by the way—”

  Namin looked up. “Yes?”

  “Your brother’s dead.”

  —

  THE OTHERS IN the study group later said that Namin’s screams were so loud, they searched the wrong floor, thinking she was closer. When they finally found her, she was slumped on the floor, the kettle completely overturned at her feet. They assumed she had slipped and kept asking where it hurt, but she could not stop sobbing long enough to answer.

  Finally, Jisun told the others to leave her with Namin. “Let me talk to her. We’re crowding her, she’s obviously overwhelmed.” The others retreated, promising to track down towels to dry her off. Walking away, they rolled their eyes. It seemed like a crazy display over nothing, too much for a simple fall. She didn’t even seem hurt.

  Jisun waited until they were completely alone.

  “You saw her, didn’t you. The ghost, I mean. What did she say?” she demanded. “Come on, tell me.”

  Namin shuddered. “I can’t.”

  Jisun sat back on her heels. She looked right at the spot where the ghost
girl had been. “Then I won’t tell you what she told me.”

  So Namin told her everything.

  The ghost, her brother, the disappearance. The story came out in a rush, like water over a shattered dam. When she was through, she felt the immediate panic of having released a secret she had never told anyone else. Now that Jisun knew, they would have to be friends forever. She could not bear to have her secrets walking around, unguarded. “Now you tell me what she told you,” she said quickly, hoping to regain some balance between them. She hoped Jisun’s secret was just as awful as hers, although Jisun was so careless about her family that she always told Namin everything without an ounce of shame.

  Jisun made an innocent face. “Who? Told me what?”

  “You said you saw her too.” Namin couldn’t dare say Minju’s name in case she reappeared. “The ghost.”

  “I never said I saw anything,” Jisun said. “I only implied. You filled in the rest.”

  “But you were looking right where she was standing.”

  “Was I?” Jisun smiled, unable to hide her delight. “Then it was just great luck.”

  Namin was stunned. She had told her worst secret to a liar. A liar and a cheat.

  “Don’t be mad,” Jisun said. “I won’t tell a soul. And listen, I’ll help you.”

  “Help me with what?” Namin said. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Well—we have to find out if what she said about your brother is true, don’t we?” Jisun said. “I suppose you couldn’t just ask your parents.”

  Namin shook her head. “Of course not. They’re the ones who sent him away. Anyway, we never talk about him. They pretend he doesn’t exist.”