If I Had Your Face(12)

My uncle, however—as he closed the gate and looked toward the house, I saw from his expression that he was one of us. He stood at the gate for a minute and I could see that he did not want to come in.



* * *



—

I STILL REMEMBER the sunflower dress my cousin was wearing that day. It flared out at the waist in a way I had never seen a dress do, and she had a matching yellow and red hairband adorned with a tiny sunflower. And her gold shoes! I think that was the first time I was ever struck speechless by the power of clothing.



* * *



—

WHILE MY AUNT was opening the suitcase of gifts they had brought from America, my grandmother had a look on her face that I knew meant serious trouble.

“Can I show Somin my vegetable garden in the churchyard?” I asked quickly. My uncle said yes and patted my head. He felt very sorry for me, I could see that.

“It’s not too far, is it?” my aunt asked, a little worried. “Will they be okay on their own?”

“This isn’t America,” my grandmother said in a steely voice. “There are no madmen with guns. The children will be fine.”

“Me too!” said Hyungshik, tugging at Somin’s hand.

“Yes, you too,” said my uncle, gazing at him with such fondness that it made me look away. Then my uncle met my eye and he and I knew that a scene was coming. He wanted both of his children out of the house when it happened.

“Let’s go then,” I said, springing up.



* * *



—

I TOOK the long way to the church, up the little hill behind our house and past the shops at the end of the street. It was my aim to spend as much time out, and to have as many people see my expensively dressed cousins, as possible—this was a way of thinking that I had picked up from my grandmother, perhaps.

To my disappointment we only passed two or three people I did not know, and no one I wanted to see. The only thing I had accomplished by taking the long way was to make Hyungshik tired.

“My feet hurt,” he whined, kicking at the curb. “I want to go back to my daddy. This is boring.”

I looked at him with hatred welling in my chest. The walk was not going anything like I had hoped. Somin had not been very responsive as I’d chattered nervously about the nuns at the church, especially Sister Maria, who was my favorite. She was more preoccupied with getting Hyungshik to behave. He was walking erratically—lurching along for a few steps, then swaying from side to side. “Look, I’m a dead elephant,” he would say with a giggle. And then he would whine again about being tired.

Instead of yelling at him, Somin laughed too. I couldn’t understand why she was being so nice to him. She kept taking Hyungshik’s hand, even as he would shake it off, and she would make a game out of it. “Look, I caught you!” she said.

I gave up talking to her while she was so preoccupied with her brother and sullenly led the way to the church. When we finally reached the church garden, I could have cried with relief. My small plot was in the far corner, right on the stream bank, and I had spent the entire summer making it into an orderly vision of beauty, with geometrically strung cucumbers and green peppers and squash.

“Here it is,” I said with a dramatic sweep of the arm. Sister Maria had told me kindly the week before that she had never seen so many cucumbers from one flowering plant.

“This is your garden?” Somin was looking at me with her eyebrow raised. “This is why you made us walk that entire way? My garden in Washington is twenty times bigger than this,” she said, starting to laugh. When she saw my face, she must have felt bad because she stopped talking, but Hyungshik had started to laugh too and then he broke away from her grip and ran toward my cucumber plants at top speed.

“Oiiii!” he yelled and reached for a particularly large one that I had been watching for days, grasping it with all his might. He did not see that it was covered with spikes.

The pain must have been delayed because he didn’t start shrieking until a few seconds later, and then I watched as he clutched the thorny cucumber even tighter.

We both started running toward him—Somin and I—but I got to him first and wrenched his hand free and pulled him toward me by the back of his shirt. But he began screaming even louder, startling me, so I let go abruptly, causing him to trip and fall face-forward into my cucumber plant.



* * *



—

THE SCENE—I CAN see it, perfectly, in its entirety—the sky, the garden, Hyungshik’s eyes, the gashes—it comes to me often. The horror of it all. I cannot wish it away.

Hyungshik gets up, and as he lifts his face, crying hysterically, we can see that it is bleeding. His face has gotten caught on some of the wires I’d rigged to support the vines. He puts his hands to his face and then sees the blood on his hands. When I start toward him again, he begins backing away, even as he keeps screaming.



* * *



—

A FEW YEARS AGO, during my junior year of college, my father actually took me to a mental health clinic. It was a small second-floor office in Itaewon, across the street from the tree-shielded American base. There were still prostitutes and hawkers and late-night murders in Itaewon back then, but it was the only neighborhood with a handful of psychiatrists who would accept cash on the spot and no questions asked about insurance or patients’ names.