Blood Sisters Read online

  “When did your parents separate?”

  “As soon as I got into university. So it’s been a while. My mom had an affair with a movie director, someone my father knew too. And the director was … a woman. Does that surprise you?”

  “So you’re saying, the person your mother fell in love with was a woman?” I’ve never heard anyone say this out loud.

  “Yeah, they couldn’t live without each other, or so I heard. This is the first time I’ve talked about this. I can’t tell anyone, how am I supposed to explain this kind of situation? Do I just say my mom is … a lesbian? How do I make sense of things like that for myself and others? I have no word. I guess the correct term would be … bisexual?” He covers his face with his hands, and his shoulders shake. He looks like a distressed adolescent. No, a child. I get up from the bed and walk around him to pat his back from behind. I open my arms, wrap my arms around his curled-up-body, and pull him into my chest. It’s like I’ve become a mama bird nesting her egg. A sob jumps out of my mouth unexpectedly. We are thinking of different things, but we are crying together. When our tears stop and our eyes slowly open, will we find ourselves different from before? Will we be able to love each other as we have become—these new images of each other?

  I feel a light come on inside my body. I get a glimpse of where to go next. Why couldn’t I have thought like this before? I limp out with Jihyun. We kiss in the elevator. I smell formaldehyde from his lips. He touches my leg. He tells me I need to keep using my crutch after the discharge (which is in a few hours), even if it’s uncomfortable. After he leaves, I turn to face the quiet corridor. The sound of my footsteps reverberates in the air. I catch myself trying not to step on the lines between the square tiles as I hobble. I dunno. What the hell. I’m just following my crutch as it leads me on. Where are you going? Where are you taking me? Are you taking me to the rooftop so I can jump off? Are you going to have me kill myself before I can kill that bastard? Coward. I’ve been asking myself these questions all day. The dark corridor never comes to an end. I stop at the open door with a plaque that reads HOSPITAL DIRECTOR, KIM INJA.

  The doctor welcomes me in. “I was about to head out. Sit, sit. Did Jihyun head home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was going to talk to you tomorrow, but since you are here now …”

  “There’s no tomorrow for me.”

  “Hohoho.”

  Why is she always so cheerful? I feel small and pathetic. She touches my hair like I’m Juliet Binoche from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Mauvais Sang, or Le Rayon Vert. I feel like I’ve known this woman for a long time. I like her short hair, her long legs. I like her voice, her laugh, and her smell … my leg aches.

  “Yeoul, Yeoul, Yeoul … Jeong Yeoul.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yeoul, when your mother was naming you, I was there. I tried to steer her away from the name. I thought it wasn’t a good name for a baby. Yeoul, rapids, the rocky part of the river where the water is rough, is hard to paddle through, and I worried naming you that way would make your life a rough one.”

  “What are you talking about? Oh, I see, you’re kidding. Don’t joke about things like that.”

  The hospital director hands me a folded piece of paper. “Go to this address.” She says. “The person you miss lives there.”

  What? Why is she speaking nonsense? What? … All I hear is static noise, Psssssst. I turn the dial but keep missing the radio signal …

  … We now speak in an alien language, one from the Andromeda galaxy. I’m stranded in this universe. A train cuts through the darkness and crosses the Milky Way to arrive. Hello Galaxy Express,8 I grin as I get on the train. I chuck the crutch into the night sky. We need to kill the cyborgs, need to save Maetel from the villains, and … Even in my fantasy I’m being hounded by things I must do. Shut up, shut up! Stop making things up as if my life were a kid’s cartoon.

  8. Galaxy Express 999 is an animated sci-fi series broadcast in Korea during the 1980s. The series follows an orphan boy traveling to the Andromeda galaxy on a space-train called the Galaxy Express 999. He runs into Maetel, a woman who looks exactly like his dead mother.

  Hey Hey Hey

  “How are you? Isn’t it nice to be out of the hospital? Congratulations!”Jihyun seems elated as if he were the one who just got released.

  I take a step back like a piece of glass was kicked up into my face. “The sun feels super bright.”

  “It feels good though, right?” Jihyun touches my face, and lightly hugs me.

  “Yes.” Deep breath. The air is fresher out here. The wind is blowing.

  “The wind is rising. We must try to live.” Jimin said on one windy day.

  “That was pretty, Sunbe, what you just said.” I watched Jimin’s face, feeling full of love and admiration for her. She seemed embarrassed at the sight of my enthusiasm and curtly replied, “That’s from a Paul Valéry poem. I can’t take credit for that.”

  “Regardless, I like it.”

  Regardless, the wind is rising. Ah, I want to live, I’m going mad with the desire to live madly. When I push open the door to exit the hospital, I’m no longer the same me from yesterday. The wind blows away those tangled threads of thoughts that I had woven, unwoven, and woven again, and while I’m absorbing my surroundings a sleek black car pulls into the hospital’s gate, so close that it almost hit me, and comes to a stop. A man exits the driver’s side, and walks around to open the rear door—shiny high heels emerge first, then black stockinged legs, then a violet skirt—a woman in a fancy outfit gets out.

  “Oh? Jihyun! So good to see you. How are you do—” The woman pauses midsentence and scans me.

  “Oh, hi Yuna.” Jihyun replies, “What brings you here? Are you feeling sick?”

  “No,” she laughs, “I’m fine. Just visiting my cousin. Good to see you. Let’s grab coffee sometime.”

  “Yes, let’s.” Jihyun opens the door for the woman as she brings her fist to her ear, her thumb and her pinky extended, gesturing him to call her sometime. She unfurls her hand and waves before she enters.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Someone I had a blind date with last year.”

  “She’s so pretty. Is she Miss Korea or something?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Whoa.”

  I notice a man holding a cigarette in his lips. He lifts his chin in my direction, and a man next to him crumples a paper cup in his hand and throws it to the ground. They watch me intently. I feel paranoid. Maybe they were just checking out the woman who went into the hospital. Today, I coach myself, I’m not going to try predicting the future. Not gonna try anything stupid. Please. The wind is rising today.

  Jihyun holds my hand with one of his and pulls my suitcase with the other, guiding me to the parking lot. Early in the morning he arrived at the hospital, pulled out all the stuff I’d been keeping in paper bags, and transferred them gently into the suitcase. Now he opens the trunk of his car.

  “Yeoul, Yeoul!” It’s Sol and Eunyong, running over to me with their shirts billowing behind them. They each hold plastic bags full of stuff with the name of the supermarket. When they reach us, they are huffing and puffing. The beads of sweat on Sol’s forehead reflect the sun and glisten; it feels like they should make the sounds of jingling bells. Eunyong speaks: “We almost missed you leaving! You were gonna take off before we got here, just like that?” I can’t tell if she’s teasing or genuinely hurt. “Well, this is your stuff from your old place. Your clothes and books. We packed them up for you.” Only then does she really see me. “Wait. You look nice. Where did you get the new clothes?” Eunyong makes me twirl to see my clothes from all directions.

  “Well, the hospital director insisted …”

  “Huh. So you’re like her new daughter-in-law or something?” Eunyong turns to Jihyun and comfortably addresses him. “Hello. We’ve met. I’m Yeoul’s friend.”

  “Of course I remember. No need to reintroduce yourself.”


  Sol watches me in silence.

  * * *

  “The wind is blasting in my face back here. Close the window!” Eunyong breaks the awkward silence in the car. Jihyun has been driving, stiffly looking ahead, never turning his gaze anywhere else even when we were at a red light. But at Eunyong’s complaint, he briefly glances at the back seat through the mirror.

  “Sol, why are you so quiet? Are you upset or something?”

  “No, I’m just tired from sprinting earlier.”

  Eunyong interrupts, “Why didn’t you wait for me? Did you think we weren’t gonna show up on the day you get to leave the hospital? It’s a day to celebrate!”

  “I waited for you to come all morning. I thought you guys couldn’t make it, so that’s why we were taking off … Hey, I want to show you guys something later.”

  “What is it?”

  “A piece of paper that I got … It might be a letter. I want us to read it together later.” I turn away from the back seat, holding the folded piece of the doctor gave me, and through the mirror I watch Sol, very still, with her gaze fixated somewhere beyond the window.

  “Let’s all go out for lunch together.” Jihyun suggests, “I made a reservation at a restaurant. How does that sound? It’s on me, of course.”

  “Hurray! I thought we were going to have some cheap rice cake or gimbap roll at a snack bar. Thanks!” Eunyong claps with overexcitement.

  There aren’t any good places to park, so Jihyun loops around the restaurant a few times and parks somewhere down the back alley, pulling up close to the brick fence. “We’re a bit far from the restaurant. Are you okay to walk?” When Jihyun tries to help me out of the car after taking my crutch out of the trunk, Sol grabs my hand, tightly interlaces her fingers with mine, and leads me away from him.

  “I’m feeling fine. Really.” I lift my right leg to prove it.

  There’s a beautiful courtyard at the restaurant. Fish as large as a man’s forearm languidly swim in the pond. A pathway framed by cedar trees leads us to the restaurant, and several servers respectfully bow at Jihyun. He whispers something to the man who looks like the restaurant’s manager, and we are led to a large room with windows framed with elegant geometric patterns.

  “First, we’ll get five servings of ribeye, and when we are almost done with the meat, please bring in the bamboo rice and miso soup.” Jihyun continues, “and three large bottles of beer. Anything else?”

  “I have a class today, so I can’t drink. And I don’t particularly care for meat.” Sol says curtly, as she pulls her jacket off her arm.

  Eunyong pokes her in the waist. “Don’t complain. He’s the one who’s buying!” The two of them seem to have become friends while visiting me at the hospital.

  As the night goes on, we keep ordering extra meat. By the end of the night, we have finished nine servings, but we didn’t eat that much. Each “serving” was about the size of my palm, and technically speaking, there aren’t four of us eating here. There are five. Eunyong scrapes the grill attached to the table with her spoon to get the charred bits of meat. I tell her to stop. “Eunyong, don’t eat that. Don’t you know you have to eat only pretty things when you are pregnant? Otherwise, you have an ugly kid.”

  Eunyong’s showing. Her belly is sticking out, and the hormonal freckles are spreading across her face.

  “You’re pregnant?” Jihyun pauses on his way to the cashier and sits back down.

  “Heh …” Eunyong awkwardly laughs.

  “Whose is it? How long has it been? How could you? You aren’t married!”

  “Stop asking so many questions! I haven’t even told my mom. The café owner is nagging me to get an abortion, telling me Sungyun isn’t coming back. But then my obstetrician told me it’s too late for an abortion. You’re a doctor. What do you think? Everybody is scolding me, and scaring me, telling me that I’ve made the worst mistake, and that I’ll forever be a single mom, everybody will point their fingers at me. I was even told to check myself into the single-mom facility! I was told international adoption would be a good option. Well, Sol, you’re the one who told me about that. How many kids are adopted abroad again?”

  “Since the end of the Korean War, about 140,000 kids have been adopted abroad. But that’s just according to the government survey, so I bet there are more.”

  “Wait, wait. Are you considering giving away your child?” Jihyun frowns as though he is looking at a criminal accused of a heinous crime.

  “She never said she was committed to that idea. I was just educating this mother-to-be about her options. We’ve been talking about the reality of things, the limited options available to women in this position, how to be a resilient mom, given the circumstances. Who knows what the right choice will be?” Sol shrugs.

  Suddenly Eunyong starts bawling. “What am I supposed to do? What am I going to do with the baby when he arrives? I want to have the baby. Please help me find Sungyun.”

  Sol is mortified. Jihyun leaves the room to pay the cashier for the meal.

  I put my hand over Eunyong’s mouth. “Are you crazy? Everybody can hear you.” My hand gets soaked in her tears and snot. She starts coughing, the way Nana did when she swallowed something wrong and I had to put my finger down her throat to get it out. “Stop crying, Eunyong. You idiot. The world isn’t going to end, I promise. Everything will be okay. You have me. I’m here for you, okay?” I try to comfort her, taking on a confident tone and tapping my chest, but my chest feels tight like I’ve swallowed something wrong. Like Eunyong, I want to find Sungyun too, but for a very different reason. But what would I do if I find Sungyun? I hate him so much I don’t know what I’d do. Eunyong, my friend, is pregnant with his baby. If she actually delivers the baby, how will I feel? “Alright, we’re supposed to be celebrating me being discharged from the hospital today, right? Then I say, let’s go somewhere. That’ll make all of us feel better. And you will be making my wish come true.”

  “What are your wishes?” Eunyong asks. Her face is still red from crying, but she is now smiling.

  “Taking a road trip.”

  “That’s your wish?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  “Alright, my princesses. Where shall we go now?” Jihyun asks from the driver’s seat. He is smiling, but his smile is vacant. I think he’s still in shock from Eunyong’s emotional outburst.

  “Don’t you need to head back to work?” I ask.

  “Well, I closed the office today. I posted a note that I had to go take a dentistry seminar.”

  “You must be a good liar. Do you lie often?”

  “Nope. But for you I will.”

  “Ugh, cheesy!” Sol and Eunyong make gagging noises from the back seat. Without turning around, I can see the faces they are making. I feel nauseated too.

  “Less lying, more driving.” Eunyong adds from the back seat.

  “Well, I can’t start driving unless you decide on the destination.”

  “Let’s get out of town. Taejong Beach, I heard it’s hard to get there by public transportation. Let’s go there.” Sol readily makes this suggestion, she must have thought about going there before.

  I hesitate. “That’s in the Youngdo District …”

  “What? You don’t like Youngdo?”

  “No. I’ve been thinking about going to Youngdo. I’m just surprised that you and I are on the same page. I felt like you read my mind.”

  “Is that right? Cool, telepathy!” Sol smiles her pretty smile for the first time today.

  “But Sol, you said you have a class today, right?” I ask.

  “I’m already late for it anyway. Whatever. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Aren’t you worried about the class? I thought that’s why you were being moody.”

  “No, it’s just … I’ve got a lot on my plate.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m having a hard time keeping up with course loads, the Feminist Students’ Association is falling apart, one Sunbe is harassing me to
join his band, but most of all: you, you troublemaker. And you, Ms. Preggers. You guys give me a headache.”

  Sol points at Eunyong, and Eunyong protests. “What have I done? Yeoul is constantly stirring stuff up, but I didn’t do anything.” She changes the topic, “Anyway, do you know there’s a huge boulder at Taejong Beach that people keep throwing themselves off of? It got so bad that the city council had to post a sign to discourage suicide.”

  Jihyun asks, “What does the sign say?”

  “I heard it says, citizens, please think it over!”

  “That’s stupid,” I sneer. I’m getting sleepy.

  “I heard a funny story about the boulder.” Jihyun offers. “One day, this guy climbed the suicide boulder to kill himself, right? But then, when he looked down from the boulder and saw how tall it was, he got scared. It was a stormy day, and he turned around to try to get out of there. But then what did he see? The sign: Think it over! So he thought it over, and threw himself off the boulder.”

  Only Jihyun laughs. He glances at me, so I make a halfhearted snort.

  “Alright. To Taejong Beach!” Jihyun turns the music on, and grabs the steering wheel. The sound of the guitar suddenly penetrates and shatters me.

  Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.

  Take a sad song and make it better.

  Remember to let her into your heart.

  Then you can start to make it better.

  Someone once told me that the book on someone’s bedside table reveals a lot about the person—their tastes, but also the mental space they’re in. Perhaps Jihyun—based on this song—is dreaming of a simple, conventional life. He might always have been that way. It’s a good thing, I think, to listen to a popular song and be able to feel something. That means you are part of the larger world, the majority of people. I want that life—it’s a simple, pleasant way to live.

  Listening to this song, I wonder, is Jihyun also afraid of letting “her” into his heart? Could that “her” be me? I hope he realizes that he is being stupid, acting so cool and nonchalant toward me. He might already know.