Page 105 of The Way Back Home

My heart is pounding from this feeling in my chest. This ferocious, burning feeling that floods through me every time I put myself between Seyeon and anything trying to hurt him. I’d do it again. I’d bust my hands bloody a thousand times over, break every bone I’ve got if it meant keeping him safe, keeping that grin on his face.

I push him again, lighter this time, and Seyeon looks back at me one more time with that bruised, beaming face, and I think there is nothing in this world I wouldn’t do for you, Heo Seyeon. Nothing.

In the years that follow I think it over and over.

Every time I drag myself up that hill with my ribs throbbing and my eye puffed shut and my head buzzing with static hum that never quite goes away, I round the corner to the crossroads and there he is. Standing on the curb with his hands in his pockets or crouched down poking at a beetle or leaning against the wall reading a book he found in the Parks’ garbage. He sees me coming and his smile is like a beam of light cutting through the fog I walked out of, and it’s like someone peels a grey film off a window. Colors come back. Sound comes back. The ache in my side dulls.

The hours I spend running the streets beside him undo everything. Bruises stop throbbing. The cuts on my knees scab over and I forget they’re there. The noise in my head quiets when Seyeon is talking. And Seyeon is always talking.

Then night comes and I go home and it starts again.

I lie in my bed with the covers pulled over my head, knees tucked to my chest, and listen to my mother scream.

The walls in our house are thin. Paper and plaster, nothing more. I can hear everything from my room. The heavy shuffle of my father’s feet as he moves through the living room, the clink of a bottle being set down, the low rumble of his voice building. It always starts with a low grumble. A complaint. Something about dinner, about money, about the way my mother looked at him or didn’t look at him or breathed too loud.

Then it gains momentum.

You useless bitch. What the fuck did I marry you for? Can’t even keep a house clean. Can’t even cook a decent meal. What good are you? Huh? What good are you?

I squeeze my eyes shut. Pull the blanket tighter. Press my palms flat over my ears until my head hurts from the pressure. It doesn’t help. The sounds bleed through anyway. The crack of something breaking, glass or ceramic or wood. My mother’s voice filled with raw terror, climbing through the wall.

Please. Please, Sungkyu, please calm down. Please stop. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please.

She begs. Every time she begs. And every time the begging doesn’t work. The sounds get worse, the thuds, her crying, a crash that shakes the wall between our rooms. I flinch so hard my teeth clack together. Curl tighter. Count the cracks in the ceiling. Try to make my mind go somewhere else, anywhere else, but my mother’s voice keeps pulling me back.

Sungkyu, please. The boy is sleeping. Please don’t.

As if I’m sleeping. As if anyone could sleep through this.

When I come out in the morning the house looks like a storm tore through it. Chairs overturned. A broken plate in pieces near the kitchen threshold. The TV knocked sideways on its stand, a crack across the screen. The soju bottles from last night scattered across the floor, some empty, one on its side with a puddle beneath it soaking into the mat.

My mother sits at the kitchen table staring blankly at the wall. The left side of her face is so swollen and dark it barely looks like a face anymore. Her eye puffed shut. Her lip split in two places. A bruise crawling down the side of her neck shaped like fingers.

I stand in the doorway and look at her. She doesn’t turn or acknowledge me. I don’t say anything to her because there’s nothing to say. I’ve said everything there is. I’m sorry. Are you okay. We should leave. He’s going to kill you. None of it changes anything. None of it makes her get up from that table.

I leave the house. The door clicks shut behind me and her screams from last night stay in my head, looping, leaving a vast black emptiness in my chest. A hole so deep I can’t find the bottom. I walk with it sitting in me, this sucking emptiness that makes everything around me look flat and pointless. The sky, the houses, the people walking to work. All of it cardboard and fake.

Then Seyeon and I go down to the creek and he says he wants to catch dragonflies. I shove the emptiness away while Seyeon wades through the water in his rolled up pants, his calves pale and skinny, slapping at the air with cupped hands and missing every dragonfly by a mile. I sit on the bank and watch him fail spectacularly and feel my face move for the first time all day.

He gets tired eventually. Climbs up the bank and drops down beside me, stretching out on his back with his arm thrown over his eyes, and within ten minutes he’s asleep. His breathing slows and his mouth falls open and I don’t wake him. Partly because he looks peaceful and I don’t want to ruin it, but mostly because if he wakes up we’ll have to leave and if we leave I’ll have to go home.

So I let him sleep. Sit there pulling up grass, flicking pebbles into the creek, watching the light shift through the canopy. An hour passes, maybe two. The afternoon becomes golden and warm and the creek trickles on beside us.

A flicker of light catches my eye, of color, hovering near Seyeon’s hip. I turn my head and still.

A dragonfly. One of the blue and green ones with the see-through wings, the kind we’ve been chasing up and down the creek bed all summer. It floats down out of nowhere weightlessly and settles on the curve of Seyeon’s hip where his shirt has ridden up. Its body shimmers, wings catching the sun, glassy and still. Like it chose him on purpose.

I stare at it for a long time, afraid to breathe. Then I reach over, nudge Seyeon’s shoulder, and whisper, “Yah. Don’t move. Look.”

Seyeon’s eyes open blearily, then they find the dragonfly and go round. He holds perfectly still, barely breathing, his lips parting as he watches it flex its wings once, twice. His eyes sparkle. They catch the light the same way the dragonfly’s wings do, bright and full of wonder, and Seyeon looks up at me with this awed and delighted expression, like I just showed him something sacred.

I stare at him. At the dragonfly on his hip and the wonder on his face and the way the light falls on him. He’s like something out of a fairytale. Like Seyeon has some kind of magic in him, something so quiet and warm that even a creature as small as a dragonfly can sense it and wants to be near him. And I think, not for the first time, that I’m the luckiest person alive that he lets me sit beside him.

The dragonfly lifts off. We watch it disappear over the creek and Seyeon grins at me brightly and says, “Did you see that? Did you see it?” as if I wasn’t the one who woke him up.

The years go on and it’s all the same.

My father drinks. He breaks things. He breaks my mother. He breaks me. The cycle turns and turns and turns with the monotony of seasons, and I sometimes wonder as I lie in my bed counting ceiling cracks and listening to the sounds on the other side of the wall if someday my father will just kill all of us.