If I Had Your Face(44)

A lone taxi loops around the deserted street and we load ourselves in with sighs of relief while Sujin gives the driver the address.

“There’s a big hanok estate around there, right?” says the driver, taking another look at us in the rearview mirror. “I heard they film a lot of TV shows there. That actor Lee Hoonki came a few months ago, my buddy drove him there once. You girls live in the area?”

“No, no,” says Sujin. “We just somehow are staying there for a few days because we know some people.”

There is a silence, and then Sujin abruptly starts chatting up the driver again, which is unusual for her. I wonder if she is remembering what I am remembering—that we are going to pass The Arch on the way to my house.



* * *



—

MAYBE IF I THINK about it hard enough, I will arrive at the conclusion that I didn’t come home for three years because I didn’t want to walk past the site of my injury. You see, there is only one road to the Big House and there is no way to avoid it.

I am sure most people don’t even register the little stone arch when they walk or drive past it—it is faded and so far off the dirt path that it is a wonder it was ever built. I must be the only person that attaches any significance to it whatsoever. When we were in middle school, that was where the bad kids liked to hang out after dark—every crevice was crammed with cigarette butts and gum wrappers and broken lighters. In the years following my accident, I never saw anyone linger there. Rumors about bloodstains and bad luck had made the rounds at the local schools.



* * *



—

UNTIL I LOST my voice, my parents had been saving money to buy a small apartment in the city, which they had been assured would double in value in the following decade. One of the other housekeepers in the Big House had a son who was a real estate agent with connections on the local zoning council, who tipped him off to government developments.

So, it was not only I who lost my way in life that day, but my parents. That’s why I left. I cannot bear to see my parents still living in the little annex on the Big House estate, when they should be going home every night to a gleaming new apartment now worth four times what they would have paid, thanks to the new train station. According to social media posts by old classmates, the formerly decaying district reverberates with fresh life and money. Instead, that money was counted out to specialist after specialist who told me what I already knew—that I had lost my voice and was unlikely to ever speak again.

I think the hardest part was seeing my parents so terrified on my behalf. I do not know what kind of life they thought I had been heading toward, given that I had never stood out academically in any way and had no flaming career ambitions, but my mother in particular became catatonic with grief and had to be hospitalized herself at one point.

It was only recently that I understood they were now worried that no normal man would marry me. The idea that I would never experience motherhood was so distressing that it unleashed a separate wave of guilt for their not having given me siblings. “We thought we were too old,” said my mother, twisting her hands. “We were selfish, and now you will have no one when we die.”



* * *



—

OFTEN WHEN I am in a place that is crowded and loud, I look around at all the people who are talking and I think about how much of their being is concentrated in their voices, and how I am living a fraction of that life. And then I play a useless game with myself—would it have been preferable to have lost my hearing or sight instead? The sickening self-pity sharpens when I actually listen to what people are talking about.



* * *



—

WHEN OUR TAXI pulls up to the main gate of the Big House, I have to tell the driver to keep going.

“Isn’t this the front door?” he says, confused. Sujin has to tell him there’s another entrance around the corner and Miho presses her nose against the window to get a better look as we whisk past.

It’s not as if my family is forced to use the back entrance—my parents use the front gate several times a day as they go about their jobs—but the back way is the shortest way to our little annex and I’d rather not see anyone from the Big House right now. The black car is parked out front—the bulky Equus, which must be fifteen years old but still as glossy as a mirror, thanks to my father.

My father, or Changee, as he is known by everyone in the neighborhood, has been the Big House chauffeur since he came back from the army in his early twenties. He was the master’s manservant’s youngest son, and he married my mother, the maid’s daughter; they had me very late in life. My father is a quiet man and he did not inherit any of his own father’s interest in weaponry. I heard Jun, the youngest son of the Big House, talking about my notorious grandfather to some school friends once. They were examining the enormous wooden staff displayed in his father’s meditation room.

“Seo-sshi made that—he was my grandfather’s ‘slave of the body,’?” Jun was saying. “They say he killed several men with it.”

“Can he make us one? Is he still around?” asked one of his friends, and I leaned closer from where I had been cleaning the windows of the living room to try to catch a glimpse of them.

“Well, we have Changee, who’s the son of Seo-sshi, but he’s just a driver and I don’t think he knows how to make weapons. But maybe I’ll tell him to go learn and make me one,” he said. I had been about to muster up the nerve to tell them what I knew about that staff—how it had been used in a fight against a local gang in the market, and how a foreign man had offered a great deal of money for it. But when I heard what Jun said, I threw the wet rag I had been cleaning with on the floor, which was as rebellious a gesture as I could make. Vowing never to set foot in that house again, I stormed off to the annex, only to be told by my mother to run some rice cakes over to Big House kitchen because Jun had brought company over.