If I Had Your Face(49)

“I heard from her mother,” he says. “That’s really impressive.”

“Are you spending the New Year here in the salon?” asks Miho. I frown at her but she pretends not to see me.

“Yes, well,” he says. “Nothing much else to do, I’m afraid. And I actually had a few customers come in this morning. Busy people, you know, who don’t have the time otherwise.”

I reach over and tap Sujin on the shoulder and jerk my head in the direction of the bakery.

“Oh, we were on our way to say hi to our friend at the bakery who’s getting married,” says Sujin. Clearly I have been tortured enough. She hops back on her bicycle. “Good seeing you!”

I am about to hop onto my own seat when Mr. Moon says, “Actually, I have something for you, Ara. Could you come in for a second?”

“We’ll be in the bakery, Ara!” says Miho, and they push off together, the traitors. I put the brake down on my bike and slowly follow him up the steps and into the salon again.

Inside, the world is muted and smells of hairspray and wax and hair oil. It is the familiar smell that abruptly wakes me up—I hadn’t realized until now that I had been in an almost dreamlike state. Coming back home, seeing Jun, biking through barren streets had not felt real.

In the back of the salon, Mr. Moon opens a drawer in a wooden dresser and shuffles through a pile of notebooks. Up close, I see that he is much older—he looks tired and has gained some weight in the face. His skin is darker and more leathery than it used to be, but his eyes had taken on an alarmingly emotional light when he looked at me. I pick up a finishing spray and pretend to look at it, then set it back down.

“I was cleaning out all the drawers and I found this the other day,” he says, handing it to me. “I think it’s yours?”

It’s a bright blue notebook of mine from high school, from my ethics and morality class. I must have left it behind one of the evenings I was working here. I flip through it and wonder at my neat handwriting. “Public Order and Social Ethics,” “Rules of Modern Society,” “Philosophy of Morality.” It had been an easy class and I had been surprised to have been ranked in the top ten across the entire grade—in all three years of high school that had been the only subject I had found effortless. Perhaps it was years of heightened noonchi—my skill of reading people was rarely wrong—but the answers in the multiple-choice tests had seemed to me clear to the point of idiocy.

I give a little smile and bow of thank you, and roll up the notebook to put in my bag. As I turn to leave Mr. Moon clears his throat.

“I’m glad to hear that you are doing well in Seoul,” he says. His tone indicates that he wants to say something else. I sigh inwardly and send a mental distress signal to Sujin.

“You probably have everything you need in terms of supplies, huh?” he says, waving awkwardly around the shop. “Otherwise I would give you something…some finishing oil, hair packs…”

I shake my head.

“Well then,” he says. He takes a breath and faces me. “You know, I always thought I would live in Seoul. It’s a funny thing. You don’t realize how set you get in your ways as you grow older.”

I wait to hear what he is trying to say.

“I’m glad you are living your life in this adventurous way that I never got to. It makes me feel so proud when I hear about you. It’s a strange thing. I imagine it will be that way with my son one day, but people say never to expect much from children so I don’t know. I suppose I feel this way because I had a hand in your life, and that these adventures have been possible because of me.”

He coughs self-consciously and I feel very confused. Wiping his hands on his pants, he continues.

“I know, I have come to the realization these days that I am a foolish man. Not having a kid to hurry home to, and not having his cries and tantrums and needs filling up every waking moment of my life—it leaves a lot of time for thinking and remembering conversations that should have happened, but did not. And I want to rid my life of any regret. If I were to die tomorrow, I want to have said everything I should have to the people I know.”

He proceeds to tell me that he was the person who had called the police that night—that night of my injury. He had been walking to the Big House that day because Lady Chang had come into the shop for the first time and had left her scarf there. He couldn’t bear to think of Lady Chang worrying about the fate of her expensive scarf at the hands of his customers and he did not have her phone number, so he’d put it carefully into a shopping bag and set off for the Big House after his last customer of the evening.

In the twilight he had enjoyed the walk very much until he began hearing the unmistakable sounds of violence. His first reaction had been fear—he had turned around and started walking quickly away, but almost instantly he had come back to his senses and realized that the screams were those of young girls. He imagined the worst and he had to step up. He called the police from his phone and gave them the location and a description of what he was hearing, and as soon as he hung up, he crept toward the arch.

He saw me first, he says. He recognized me from my trips to the salon with my mother. In fact, she had been the one who had introduced him to Lady Chang, who continued to this day to be a loyal customer.

He saw me and what was happening to me and he began running toward us. It looked—he said—as if the girl was going to kill me. She appeared entirely crazed and was brutally smashing something against my head and showing no signs of stopping. He started yelling “Police! Police!” and other things he could not remember. In an instant, all the students, including me, had disappeared so fast that he had been dumbfounded. He’d taken a few halfhearted steps in the direction I had gone, but then had heard sirens and decided to stay to talk to the police so that they would not see him running and mistake him for a villain in the scenario. And sure enough, the police had seemed suspicious of his involvement, but luckily his clothes were free of bloodstains and a great deal of blood had been spilled that night. They asked if he had recognized anyone and he said that it had been one of his younger customers but he did not know my name, which was true. At the time, he had also not known that I lived at the Big House.