Blood Sisters Read online

  13. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

  Russian Blue

  There is a ladder. It’s made of wood, its rungs are narrow, and it leans against the wall. I believe the ladder has been there since before we moved here. You’d never know it’s there, though. Only when the ivy’s vines dry out and the leaves fall off does it reveal itself. The ladder only shows itself to those who seek it, always hiding under the ivy, behind the persimmon tree. I buried a glass jar under the ladder. Inside the jar there are photographs, letters, locks of hair, and a little musical ocarina … I don’t remember what else. So many secrets are filling me up … Perhaps I buried the jar because I didn’t want to remember what I cherished. If possible, I want to cover my memories with vines. I want to be buried like a glass jar under the tangled grass. I’m too tired.

  “Leche, I’m home!” Dad looks up in the middle of cutting his toenails, curled up into a ball over the newspaper. In his wide, surprised eyes, I see something that resembles anger. He drops his head and collects the toenails. “Where’s Leche?”

  “Where have you been? I heard you ran away from home.” My aunt, or actually my stepmother’s youngest sister who runs a hair salon in Daegu, takes a jab at me.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask coldly.

  “Look at her,” my aunt says to my father as if I’m not here. “You act like I shouldn’t be here! Your hair looks terrible. You look like a drowned rat. Take a shower, then I’ll give you a haircut.”

  I sneer. “You are so predictable.”

  “What’s predictable? They say the tamest cat is the first one to jump on the stove. You’ve been going around town like a cat in heat. That’s predictable.”

  “Screw you. Don’t make me laugh. Where’s my cat? And what are you cooking? That pot is huge. My cat could fit in there. Where is she?”

  My father interrupts. “Shut up! You keep popping in and out of the house as you please. Don’t act like you live here. And what, as soon as you get back, you don’t even say hello to your own parents, too busy looking for your cat?”

  I turn to my father. “Well, did you say hello to your own daughter? You never treated me like a person. You wish I would die on the street, don’t you? You must be so disappointed that I keep turning up alive.”

  “The way you talk …” He grits his teeth.

  I hear a purring sound coming from my room and turn away from him. “Leche, is that you? Baby, your sister is here.” I walk into my room.

  What the hell. Beneath the window where Leche and I liked to look out to the street below, against the wall with the torn wallpaper Leche liked to scratch, a baby is whimpering. The crib is filled with lacey blankets—it looks like it’s topped with cream—and a baby sticks her little hand out and waves. My stepmother is spooning powdered milk into a bottle.

  At first, my stepmother seems startled at the sight of me walking in. But then she casually taps the measuring spoon against the bottle and drops it into the powdered milk container.

  “Yes, yes, little Yeondu. Hungry, aren’t you? Let’s have some milk.” Gently holding the baby like a fragile and precious object, my stepmother stares mockingly into my face. I flinch and step back, closing the door behind me.

  “What is that? Dad! Who is that?”

  “Lower your voice. You are scaring the baby!”

  “Whose baby is that? Where’s Leche?”

  “Of course he’s your brother. I gave away the cat. I heard cats are bad for babies.”

  “No way. Fuck this. Give me back my baby!”

  “A cat isn’t a person. Don’t call a cat a baby. I gave some cat food and the litter box to the person who adopted her, so Leche will do just fine. If you’re worried, go check on her, I won’t stop you.”

  “So you threw out my baby, and adopted this baby? Wait, you guys made him? You and Stepmom? At your age? Why? When did she get pregnant?”

  “You knew that. I told you last summer. You don’t care about your family. Where’s your mind?”

  “Don’t lie! Can you even have sex at your age? You’re a sex-addicted monster! A slave to your own desire! You can’t even take care of what you’ve already ejaculated!”

  An awkward and bitter silence hangs in the air.

  “Yeoul, you idiot. Stop stressing out your mom. Your mom had a hard time giving birth at forty-five. She had a bad case of pre-eclampsia. Stop being a brat, you’re grown up now! Haven’t you watched Extraordinary Stories from Abroad? People conceive children in their seventies and eighties now. So stop with your psychotic act and take a shower. Eat some seaweed soup.” My so-called aunt tries to put a towel against my tear- and snot-covered face.

  “Don’t touch me! Just go home! Take your sister with you! Why do I need to call her Mom? I have my own mom! That woman had a husband and a child before all this, right?” I turn to her. “How could you act like none of that happened and live with another man? Even beasts don’t do that. I’m not going to be like you!”

  Dad hits me across the face.

  “How many times do I need to tell you? Your stepmom is not that kind of person. I don’t know where you heard those stories, but we love each other. That’s why we stay together. The woman who gave birth to you despised me. What’s the point in me saying all this … Hyunwoo and you are both precious to me. And that goes the same for the baby in the room.”

  “Well, keep on loving each other, for thousands and thousands of years.”

  “Yeoul, sit here. Tell me, what brings you home? You weren’t gone for a month or two, no, you were gone for six months! Tell me where you’ve been.”

  “Why? Don’t you hate that I’m back? What do you want to know? You didn’t worry a bit, I don’t think. You even changed the lock!”

  “When did you stop by? There was a minor burglary, someone took the camera, so your mom changed the lock. We thought you might’ve taken the camera. We worried you wouldn’t come back if you kept making money with petty theft.”

  “What? Oh, I remember now. You believe all the bullshit stories that woman tells about me. Forget it. You don’t hear anything I say, do you?”

  “Honey, honey!” Stepmother walks out into the living room. I’m surprised it took this long for her to jump in. “Honey, don’t bother. She’s just feeling all uppity because she got to see her mom. That ungrateful bitch. Tell her to leave!”

  I drop my head like a soldier who’d lost the will to fight on. I stuff my feet into my wet sneakers, crumpling their backs. There were things I so badly wanted to ask—Did you worry about me? Did you miss me? Did you worry about my mom? Do you think about her? Would you like to meet her again someday?—Why didn’t I ask these questions before? What was I afraid he’d say? I wanted to tell him that I found her, that now we could all get together. I planned to act all mature, to say it like I was giving advice. Come on, you guys need to see each other at least once before you die, no? How about you guys bury the hatchet before it’s too late?

  But now I get it. It’s all pointless. I get this too: I didn’t announce my independence like a Korean fighter against the Japanese colonists, but I am officially emancipated. I don’t need to come up with an eloquent Declaration of Independence. I don’t need to nudge him. I hear Americans move out when they graduate from high school. So I will too. Everything is cleared up. Easy peasy.

  No. I believe my dad will soon run out the door to stop me from leaving. It’s just taking a while for him to put on his shoes because he’s heavy. His eyes will be bloodshot, he will reach out to grab me, keeping me from leaving. I wait in the empty lot in front of my house, kicking around a deflated ball. The flat ball rolls over to the torn vinyl greenhouse. I have no energy to go after it. I’m hungry and my eyes hurt. I decide to believe that my father tried to run out after me, but my stepmother and aunt stopped him, saying things like, No, this is a good thing. We don’t need to pay her tuition any longer. She must be damaged goods by now, anyway. No one would want to marry her. It’s better to kick her ou
t now. She needs some hardship to scare her straight.

  Father wholeheartedly trusts whatever my stepmom says, like, “Things were fishy between Yeoul and Hyunwoo, even though they are supposed to be sister and brother. She must’ve coaxed naive Hyunwoo into changing his major. She must’ve asked for pocket money from him—why else would he have gotten a part-time tutoring job? That’s how he got into a car accident late at night!” If my stepmother said it, my father believed it. Even a lovesick, no, libido-sick fool like my father should be able to see how absurd these accusations are. Someday I will clear things up. There will be a chance for me to tell him everything.

  It’s raining again, and the cold wind is blowing. Whether it was the camera that was swiped or how I’m swiping my tears, it doesn’t matter—it will rain, wind will blow, and once the rain stops, new, green leaves will sprout and spread. Aged trees will still bloom, fruits will grow off the branch and dangle helplessly before they fall. The old trees will bloom and fruit again. Stepmom once told me, If your father didn’t stop me, I would’ve had five more children with him. It was your fault I had to abort three of my children. She ripped my books and notebooks into shreds while glaring at me hatefully. I don’t think I will ever understand her obsession with having more children, but I can almost see why she hated me. My cat knew when I was ignoring her, and she ripped up the scratching mat with her fierce claws. If I step back and think about it, my stepmom is a sad person. Is God laughing at the sight of my stepmother’s aborted babies, bloody and torn? Is he saying, Come to me. I’m the Way. I shall save you? How much of a sick bastard is God? How awful can life be that humanity needed to come up with a fantasy like God?

  A Game of Roulette

  I’m still fuming. I want to beat someone up or be beaten up. I wouldn’t hesitate to taunt a world-class boxer. Hello, Mr. Stone Hands, let’s see what you’ve got.

  Dark clouds are gathering, and the sky is darkening to the color of Russian blue, like my Leche’s eyes.

  My home, no, the house that my father, the evil stepmom, and their baby—was his name Yeondu?—live in is on the uphill road that leads into the forest from the Temple Beomuh subway station. To get there from the station you have to walk past the city cemetery and go farther into the forest until you see a small cluster of houses. Taxi drivers are reluctant to drive anyone there because there is nearly no chance of finding a customer on their way out.

  When my dad was running a factory workshop at home and my grandmother was dying from lung cancer, I was taken back by my father. I held his hand to his car, got in, and arrived at his place—our home was the largest house in the entire town. It was always loud with machines and workers, but father was rarely stressed out about money. The men at the workshop teased and bullied me, but it wasn’t unbearable. I heard the slippers we produced in the workshop sold very well. My father couldn’t produce enough to meet the demand, so he and his friend decided to build another workshop, a huge factory. They got cutting-edge machinery and recruited more workers. Our family moved into a Western-style two-story house in Sajikd District. We had a live-in maid and driver. My father drank and partied, and Stepmom didn’t have to do any chores. But neither of them gave me any money or bought me the things I needed, like underwear, so I shared underwear with the maid. My crotch was so itchy when I shared underwear with her, and she told me, “I caught the crabs from your dad, anyway.”

  In less than three years my father’s business went bankrupt, and we had to move to the apartment complex when I started the second year of middle school.

  People say, “When the rich go bankrupt, they still get their meals for three years.” Perhaps that was the case for us, since I don’t remember Stepmom or Dad working. They sure demanded that we tighten our belts, though. But I recall seeing my stepmom going shopping, my dad’s golf clubs in the car trunk. They kept buying Hyunwoo perfectly fitting pants as he grew up, but would scold me when I outgrew the school gym uniform. It’s no good for a girl to grow so tall, you better stop eating so much food, they said. If I talked on the phone with my friend for too long, Stepmom would pull out the cord and throw it against the wall. She grew hysterical every day, and the quarrels between her and my dad grew more frequent.

  I’ve been walking down the road, tracing my memories for quite a while but am still far from the subway station. I stop at the city cemetery bathroom. I need to pee and wash my face. In a rush, I run into the stall, and sit on the toilet. It feels unhygienic and a little creepy, so my pee comes out in hesitant spurts. What is this strange noise that I hear? Is someone sobbing? No, I don’t think that’s it. It sounds like Leche’s whining. I leave the stall to search for the source of the sound, and knock on the next stall. I don’t hear any response. Did I imagine that? Is there a stray cat in here? I drop to my hands and knees and bend down to look under the stall. I see a pair of sneakers, a boot. I knock on the door loudly.

  “Is everything okay?”

  No response.

  When I press my ear against the door I can hear strained breathing.

  “Crazy assholes.” I mutter to myself and turn around to wash my hands and face. The bathroom door flies open and two people spill out.

  “What the fuck did you call us? Crazy assholes?” A girl who looks a lot younger than me, at best a middle schooler, yells at me without using the honorific.

  “Yes, that’s what I said. What are you going to do about that?”

  “So you got a gaping piehole you can’t control, huh?” The girl’s fist in the air trembles. Her other fist is holding a pair of hot-pink panties. Her boyfriend smirks like he was watching some sort of tournament.

  “Your panties are off, I see. What were you doing in there? Making porn? Your mom’s blood hasn’t even dried from your scalp yet, you baby …” As I say this I feel in my gut, Oh shit, this is a bad idea. Her fist flies into my face. I fall to the ground, hitting my head against the door. I crawl on my elbow to grab her boot, but her sneakers give my head a good kick. I spin on the floor like a windmill. I give up, I give up, sorry, sorry! I’m so scared they will keep kicking me, but they stop at my surrender. Perhaps they are drained from what they were doing in the stall. They tell me to pay up instead. I hand over the eight thousand won, all the money I have, but beg for some change so I can pay the subway fare. They look proud, like they won a prize from spinning the Wheel of Fortune. I actually feel pretty good, too. My chest feels lighter now that my nose is bleeding. I can make more money. And I have a good amount of money in the bag I left at Jihyun’s place. Money saved from the café and German tutoring. Jeong Yeoul, you are doing your best. Good job! And these wounds are just mild scratches. Wait, no, they’ll probably leave some serious marks. Shit, where did those little assholes go?

  Bravo, My Life

  “After I come back, she and I will get married.” I hear Jihyun saying to Donghyuk, his best friend, as I’m coming out of the bathroom after a shower. I feel like he is saying it for me to hear.

  “Is this bastard for real?” his friend asks me.

  “Of course.”Jihyun doesn’t give me a chance to speak, and starts rambling. “Yeoul, you can keep going in college as a married woman. I’m going to persuade my father in Italy. My mom is more or less on board. Don’t worry about a thing. You want this too, right? I take that as a yes.” Jihyun and Donghyuk seem pretty wasted. When I arrived at Jihyun’s place for my bag, there were already several empty wine bottles on the table. Jihyun was surprised to see my mangled face, but Donghyuk acted as though he expected it.

  “Sungyun did that, right?” Donghyuk asks. He goes on to tell me my attacker has been looking for me, inquiring about my whereabouts. He paid off the police, too, so that their investigation won’t go anywhere.

  * * *

  Jihyun lifts the piano cover and starts to play. This man is capable of all kinds of things.

  “No, no, no. Play Erik Satie. ‘Je te veux,’ I want you.” Donghyuk grabs my hand and places it on his shoulder, and wraps his hand around m
y other hand. His left hand holds my waist. I am held awkwardly against his chest as he leads me in a circle. Continuing with his piano, Jihyun turns to look at us. He smiles.

  “This is called a waltz. Yeoul, you’re a natural.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’d learn how to dance quickly, I think.” There’s a pause and then Donghyuk presses his nose against my cheek to sniff. “Yeoul, you smell very nice.”

  “You must be smelling the shampoo. I want to stop.” I plop down on the carpet, but the piano won’t stop. “Jihyun, where is my bag?”

  “I hid it.”

  “Give it back!”

  “For what? You didn’t seem to have much in there.”

  “I have to take care of some business.”

  “It’s getting late. Can’t it wait?” Donghyuk brings in a new bottle of wine, stabs the cork with the opener. There is cheese and smoked salmon too.

  “Yes, Yeoul, don’t leave. Let’s drink! After tomorrow you won’t see Jihyun for a while.”

  “Jihyun, when are you leaving?”

  “The flight is on the day after tomorrow, but I need to leave for Seoul tomorrow. I’m spending the night near the airport so I can catch the early flight. I wish you could come with me, but you don’t have a passport, do you?”

  “I have no such thing, no.”

  “While I’m gone, get yourself one. You need one for our honeymoon trip.”

  “Who said I’d marry you?”

  “That nonsense again! We bathed together, and we saw everything. So …”

  Donghyuk grabs his head with both hands and squeals, “Wait, you guys are at that stage?Yeoul! Are you really going to marry this homo? He can’t get hard with women. His cock is tiny, like this!” He lifts his pinky, and Jihyun wraps his arm around Donhyuk’s neck, pretending to put him in a choke hold.