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‘‘No’’, said Ik Sun, voice trembling, as hot tears started flowing down her cheeks.
Ik Jun shifted uncomfortably before taking a careful step closer to her. She had her back turned to him, eyes looking through his living room’s window, nervously biting on her nail as she willed her whimpers into a semblance of silence.
‘‘Ik Sun-ah’’, he called as his hand came to a rest on her shoulder, prompting her to turn around and face him.
‘‘I can’t put you through this, oppa. I won’t. You don’t deserve to go through this’’, she sobbed.
In truth, he had expected her fervent denial from the moment his brain computed that her latest test results indicated an inevitable need for a liver transplant. He remembered rehearsing in his head what he planned to say, something level-headed and logical about the difficulties of finding a liver donor who wasn’t a family member and whatnot. His speech was ready, calculated, convincing, at least to a detached audience in a conference’s auditorium. But a frightened Ik Sun drowning in her own tears was a different story. So, his words died on his tongue as his mind went blank.
For all his qualities, Ik Jun was never really good at comforting his little sister.
Ah. He did have a flaw after all.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as his mind let go of the steering wheel, his heart grasping its chance.
‘‘Ik Sun-ah, listen to me’’, he started, his eyes boring into hers. ‘‘I want to do this for you. I know I wasn’t always there for you, and I lack in so many ways as a big brother, but…let me—let me do this for you. Please. Hm?’’, he urged, lowering his head, his eyes searching hers for understanding and affirmation.
She attempted to dry her tears with the back of her hand, but it seemed futile as they kept flowing unbidden.
‘‘We’ll do it at the hospital tomorrow night. My chief will be doing your surgery, and my trusted friend will do mine’’, he added cautiously, expecting the sudden alertness of her prior unfocused gaze.
‘‘No one will be there. Jun Wan won’t be there’’, he quickly added for emphasis. What he hadn’t expected, however, was the way his jaw clenched as his hand reached up to grip the windowsill.
He had done his absolute best. When he found out about Jun Wan and Ik Sun, he did everything he could to act indifferently, unbothered. And he did, for the better part of a year. Part of it was to keep his promise to Ik Sun, but that was the tip of the iceberg.
Because the truth of the matter was, it didn’t just bother him; It pierced right through him. But the bubbled anger, the effervescent feeling of betrayal, the quaking trust at the base of his friendship with Jun Wan were all drowned underneath by an impossibly stubborn Ik Jun.
But shoving a dead body under water doesn’t make it miraculously vanish. It just resurfaces the moment you carelessly let go and take a step back.
Whatever remained of his resentment toward Jun Wan, he had practically ignored for an entire year. But on a day like today, heretofore imperceptible fissures widen into the greatest of fjords.
Deep down, down below, Ik Jun knew that his way of sweeping past his negative emotions was becoming an unhealthy habit. His wife cheated on him, and he acted bright and bubbly shortly thereafter. Song Hwa rejected him, and the zest in his humour toward her only multiplied. Jun Wan dated his sister behind his back, and he just coughed it off like a simple drop of water had gone down the wrong pipe.
It was his desperate love for his friends, and the dire need to preserve those friendships for as long as he lived, that had unknowingly made him into a scapegoat in more ways than one. He cherished all four of them so strongly that he never wanted to be the source of bad news, uncomfortable truths, or hard conversations.
And as badly as Jun Wan had acted, he was his best friend, and he loved him dearly. He never wanted to risk that, even if it meant swallowing down his bitterness at his own expense.
‘‘Look, Ik Sun. Your priority right now should be your health. Nothing else should matter’’, he stated seriously. ‘‘So let’s do this, no matter what.’’
‘‘...Okay’’, she resigned, sniffling, her shoulders sagging after racking her brain only to find no other course of action.
He hesitated for a moment, then pulled her into an embrace, tapping her back lightly in what he hoped was a comforting gesture.
Ik Sun let her chin rest on his shoulder as she tried to remember the last time her brother had hugged her. It may have been that one time after she fell from her bike in 6th grade, after running home with scraped knees and fresh bruises on her forearms.
Well, it feels nice all the same.
***
Ik Jun dropped Ik Sun off at his parents’ house in Changwon and headed straight back to Seoul. His parents insisted that she’d spend the night with them before they all made the trip to Seoul the next day for the siblings' surgeries. His mind was reeling from swirling thoughts, about Ik Sun, and about Jun Wan, and it was a wonder that he didn’t cause an accident on the highway. He was driving on autopilot, his muscle memory rescuing him from mishaps at every turn of the wheel.
He felt like he was holding his breath under water, his chest tight and eyes bleary, when the car came to a screeching halt as he realized that he had made it to Song Hwa’s place.
Song Hwa.
He let out a breathy chuckle at his pitiful predictability, as his head lolled sideways to rest on the car’s window with a muted thud. His hands gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white as the voice in his head kept urging him to put the car back into gear and drive away. He had promised himself that he wouldn’t let Song Hwa get wind of what’s going on, and shrewd as she was, if she were to cast a single look at him in this state, every alarm in her body would start blaring.
But Ik Jun was infamously bad at listening to the reasonable voice in his head.
He cast a look at the passenger seat beside him, narrowing his eyes pensively at the gigantic box of fresh perilla leaves his mother had briskly forced through the window in the seconds it took Ik Sun to get out of the car. Concocting a flimsy excuse that wouldn’t convince Song Hwa even in her sleep, but good enough to persuade his weary mind, he grabbed the box and lunged out of the car.
***
Song Hwa wiped the sweat off her forehead as she dragged another cardboard box toward her, beginning to empty it of its constituents. Frames and stationery, she noted, as she moved toward her desk to organize the new batch of materials she had unboxed. The move back to Seoul had taken place three weeks prior, but between surgeries, conferences and Seon bin’s thesis review, unpacking had been pushed to the back end of the to-do list. Since she miraculously had the day off, she assiduously decided to wrap it up in one go for fear of seeing spiders move back into the house with her, taking shelter in-between dusty old remnants of Sokcho.
She brushed a hand through her hair as the doorbell rang, and she mentally thanked whoever the visitor was for procuring her with a momentary distraction from her dreary task, which seemed all but endless. Suddenly infused with energy, she strode to the door and opened it wide without bothering to look through the peephole.
Song Hwa blinked once, confusion slowly etching itself across her features as her eyes took in Ik Jun, standing there in a rumpled shirt, the ghost of a shadow underlining his eyes. He hadn’t taken the time to style his hair upward as he usually did, nor to switch his eyeglasses for his contact lenses, which he usually preferred. Both of his hands were propped up against the door’s frame, and she wondered for a second if he would fall over with a push of her finger.
‘‘Hey! What are you doing here?’’, she inquired, a small but encouraging smile sent his way.
‘‘Just…this’’, he laconically replied as he suddenly crouched to pull something up from behind the wall next to him, producing a box that seemed about to buckle with the weight of the perilla leaves it was stuffed with.
‘‘I know I already gave you the ten percent we agreed on, but I thought you should get a tax for your long stay in Sokcho. So I brought 30 percent more’’, he nonchalantly declared as he set the box past her threshold onto the floor.
Song Hwa was befuddled as anyone would have under the circumstances, but only for an instant, as habit reminded her of Ik Jun’s usual attempts at diversion whenever things went awry. She knew that the perilla leaves were a silly excuse for needing to see her urgently to ease his mind.
She pursed her lips as she mused on the situation, eyeing him carefully. She settled on playing along to humour him, only to see if she could glean enough information out of him to deduce the rest since something was clearly troubling his mind. Something serious.
‘‘I never agreed to this’’, she demurred, acting appalled at the amount of food he was trying to pin on her unjustifiably.
‘‘You don’t have to. It’s tax…For Sokcho’’, he reiterated, the usual mirth in his eyes dimmed by the slightest glint of pettiness. It dawned on her then, how much her absence from Seoul had affected him, as it had deprived him of the one thing that brought him peace in his hectic schedule. But she sensed that there was more, something far more worrisome that gnawed at him insatiably. Something that needed a proper and long-winded conversation.
‘‘Ik Jun-ah. Why don’t you come in? You could help me finish unboxing everything from the move. I’ll throw in some coffee to sweeten the deal?’’, she asked, hopeful, playing on his weakness, suddenly desperate to keep him there, a feeling of dread encroaching upon her heart at the thought of the aftermath of whatever it was that made him so melancholy.
However innocent her request had been, it made Ik Jun unknowingly take a small step back, his teeth digging into his lower lip as he gathered his wits to find a convincing excuse so he could make a subtle yet swift escape.
That was his only boundary in the post-confession period: their respective homes. Ever since the infamous rejection, things had gone back to normal with Song Hwa, some even better than before, but he hadn’t allowed himself into her place, neither in Sokcho nor in Seoul, nor had he invited her over at his. It was like the shadows of his past confessions loomed over him, and the simple act of crossing each other’s threshold would force yet another admission out of him, especially if he was in a vulnerable state. It had been after the energy drained out of him following the scare of Uju’s fever the first time, his mentally fragile state being taken advantage of at the neurosurgery party the second time, and the sudden fearsome loneliness that had struck him upon Song Hwa’s departure for Sokcho the third. And now…Well, now was worse than ever before.
He shouldn’t risk it. He couldn’t.
I won’t.
And so he stood, feet seemingly cemented in place, his nail digging into the doorframe.
‘‘I have to go pick Uju up. I promised him jajangmyeon’’, he justified in what he deemed a convincing tone. But he saw suspicion flash briefly through Song Hwa’s eyes, which had until then been a backdrop of concern, although she nodded, relenting.
‘‘I’ll come back with the guys another time’’, he promised as he started walking backward.
‘‘Ik Jun-ah’’, she called, stopping him in his tracks. ‘‘You’d tell me if something was going on, right?’’, she asked, voice strained.
Some things, rather. She suspected a panoply of worries were weighing Ik Jun down, but obstinate as he was, he preferred to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders rather than risk inconveniencing anyone with his troubles. She wished that once, just once, he’d open up and let her in on his problems, wash the clown makeup off and show her his raw, bare face, but she heard his reply before he even spoke it, with dutifully tamed frustration.
‘‘Of course! Everything’s okay, don’t worry’’, he assured, flashing her a lackluster smile as he turned around and walked away for good, leaving her no time to contest.
***
The following day, Ik Jun drove his family to Yulje, showering Ik Sun with one last flurry of reassurances about both of their surgeries that were to take place that same evening. He left her hospital room, promising to check on her before she went into the OR in an hour, right before heading in for his own surgery.
He came back to his empty office, emotionally drained, between worrying about his sister’s surgery and keeping the whole ordeal a secret from his friends. He sighed, frazzled, collapsing onto the couch.
He got only two minutes of a peaceful staring contest with the ceiling before his door swung open, barely hanging on its hinges, with a panting Song Hwa bursting into the middle of the office.
Ik Jun, who was laying down, leaped into a sitting position, mouth agape.
‘‘Tell me it’s not true’’, she said, breathless.
‘‘What isn’t?’’, he replied apprehensively, eyes evasive.
‘‘That Ik Sun’s having a liver transplant, and that you’re the donor. And that the surgeries are happening tonight’’, she enunciated gravely, hoping against all odds that this was just some nightmare she was bound to wake up from.
Ik Jun swallowed as he mustered up the courage to look her in the eye. ‘‘Sit down first.’’
‘‘Ik Jun-ah!’’, she exclaimed impatiently, thwarting his futile attempt at stalling for time.
Ik Jun ran a hand over his face as he took a deep breath. ‘‘Yes’’, he capitulated.
Song Hwa absentmindedly dropped her bag on the table as she started to pace around the office to collect her thoughts and regain her masterful control of her emotions. Ik Jun stayed silent, forbearing, his fingers clasped as he awaited Song Hwa’s reply. Finally, she pulled up a chair and sat down facing him, composed.
‘‘Why didn’t you tell me?’’, she started simply.
‘‘Ik Sun wanted to keep it under wraps’’, he explained, but it sounded like an empty excuse even to his ears.
Song Hwa’s eyes pierced right through his front like an eagle. ‘‘Try again’’, she demanded, dissatisfied, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly.
Ik Jun closed his eyes, his thumb and index reaching up to frame the bridge of his nose as he let out a shuddery breath.
‘‘I didn’t want to trouble you with my problems, alright? You have enough going on. You all do’’, he justified. It made sense in his head; He wanted to keep them out of it so that they wouldn’t worry, about him and about Ik Sun.
Was that so bad?
Song Hwa nodded slowly, and he foolishly began to think that maybe, just maybe, it made sense to her too. But his hopeful eyes froze in their sockets the moment she spoke next.
‘‘You mean like I troubled you with my cancer scare so much that you showed up at my appointment after an all-nighter at the hospital’’, she conjectured, cornering him.
Touché.
‘‘No, that’s different, I wanted to be there, because—’’
‘‘Because you were worried about me. So why don’t I get the same luxury, Ik Jun? Why is it that you can worry and care for everyone, from Uju to Ik Sun, from me to the guys, from your patients to your staff, but no one can do the same for you? Why is it that every time something happens to you, or something bothers you, you feel the need to mask it behind goofiness and jokes?’’, she asked, manners poised and voice gentle, with glistening eyes being her only tell.
Ik Jun was silenced for a minute or two, weighing her words. ‘‘I—I don’t know’’, he stammered, genuinely clueless.
‘‘You don’t have to bear everything on your own. I want to be there for you, we all do. You don’t even have to ask. But you do have to tell us what’s going on…We’re surgeons, not mind readers’’, she said, attempting to lighten the mood.
Ik Jun looked at her fondly, his tired eyes softening at her words. In truth, he didn’t know why he closed in on himself so much, why he buried his negative emotions with such decisiveness. He pondered briefly and thought it might be the result of his self-conditioning after having to take care of Uju in a wifeless marriage, interlaced with his habit of being the much needed breath of fresh air of the group to alleviate everyone’s hurdles.
But who takes care of the jester when his bells have stopped jingling?
He took a deep breath, then buckled, telling her everything, from Ik Sun’s health issues in the past year to her secret relationship with Jun Wan, eyes trained on the floor the entire time.
But just as he finished his jumbled monologue, with Song Hwa’s lips parting in preparation for her reply, his cellphone’s ringtone reverberated, startling them both. He hastily reached for his pocket, answering his chief’s call.
‘‘Hello? Okay, I’ll be right there’’, he replied, getting up promptly.
‘‘Song Hwa-ya…I have to go, the surgeries should start soon’’, he said as he began to make a start for the door.
Song Hwa’s hand reached up before her mind caught up and held his arm in sudden trepidation at the hurried pace of the event that she had only found out about in the past hour.
‘‘Ik Jun-ah. I’ll be there when you wake up’’, she assured, eyes interlocking with his.
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she thought that if she selfishly gave him something to look forward to, his soul could find the strength to resist its demise if things went south on the operating room table.
Ik Jun smiled genuinely for the first time in what felt like forever, nodding in understanding, letting her know that the sentiment was felt and appreciated.
His hand brushed her arm in a feather-like touch, and before she knew it, he was gone.
***
The sound of the monitors started as a low hum, almost imperceptible, easily ignored, but the volume seemed to increase steadily to reach a deafening crescendo that hauled Ik Jun out of the deepest slumber.
He felt as if his eyes were sealed while he endeavoured to pull them open, as his view gradually focused from a blurry haze onto a curled up figure in the chair by his bedside.
Song Hwa.
He exhaled, partially relieved, his body losing some of its initial tension, but the echo of a name kept resounding in his head, a relentless vibrato.
Ik Sun.
He propped himself up and took in his surroundings, eyes frantic, ready to lunge carelessly out of bed, when his eyes landed on the table by his side, where his glasses lied on a piece of paper. He swiftly put them on and grabbed the note, instantly recognizing Song Hwa’s penmanship.
Ik Sun’s okay. They’re finishing up her surgery now. Your parents will be with her as soon as she’s out. Both surgeries went great.
Relief flooded him from every corner, and a swell of affection toward Song Hwa washed over him as he watched her sleep soundly, her head buried in her arms against the mattress.
She just always seemed to know what needed to be done, for him and for everyone. He felt a pang of regret at having kept this from her, knowing that the worry she grappled with at the last minute must have been infinitely multiplied.
She stirred in her sleep, as if feeling his eyes on her as her own fluttered open to meet his only a beat later.
‘‘Hey’’, he softly called, his voice husky from the long hours of sleep.
‘‘Hey’’, she echoed, beaming at him as she took him in, reassured when noting that he seemed okay. ‘‘How are you feeling?’’
‘‘A bit drowsy, but I’m good’’, he confirmed. ‘‘I read your note, thank you. So she’s okay?’’
‘‘Yeah, don’t worry. Her surgery only took an hour longer than yours. I talked with your chief; He was leaving Gyeoul to wrap things up. Everything went really well’’, she reassured, her words untangling every knot of worry and unease in Ik Jun’s chest. He closed his eyes, finally allowing himself a moment’s respite after the frightful week he had coordinating the surgeries and fretting over his sister's well-being. An intruding thought made its way into his mind, his usual self regaining its curiosity now that the dark clouds had cleared off.
‘‘Song Hwa-ya, how did you find out about this?’’, he asked, bemused.
He just had to know everything, she mused as she chortled at the speed with which he recovered his normalcy.
‘‘I knew something was up from the moment you showed up unannounced with a stack of perilla leaves. Did you think I was just going to gobble that stupid excuse up and forget about it?’’, she questioned sternly.
‘‘Yokshi. So the perilla leaves are what did me in’’, he jested, chuckling softly when she slapped his arm.
‘‘How can you joke right now? Anyway, I asked your chief and he spilled everything.’’
‘‘Yah, so the old man caved even after I made him swear to keep it a secret!?’’, he exclaimed indignantly.
‘‘Well, I can be very intimidating’’, she affirmed with a pout. She was so endearing, and thoughtful, and caring, and he wondered what he could say to convey his gratitude. But somehow, he didn’t think he had to.
His hand slid forward and reached hers, curling around it, his warmth spreading through her. His sincere and loving eyes conveyed silently what his words would have failed to do.
Ik Jun broke the comfortable silence after a minute or two, seeing Song Hwa gnaw at her lower lip, evidently deliberating on a clawing thought.
‘‘What is it?’’, he asked, casting her a knowing look.
‘‘It’s just…We should really tell the guys about the surgeries. They should know’’, she hastened to explain.
‘‘I know. We’ll tell them tomorrow’’, he promised as his hold on her tightened noticeably, as if fearing that she would get up and call them up at 4 AM to relate the whole thing then and there.
Her eyes dropped down to their intertwined hands, smiling at his ridiculous worries, her other hand reaching down to cover his in silent confirmation of her staying, for as long as she could.
‘‘And…you should have a proper talk with Jun Wan. About everything’’, she added.
He nodded, acknowledging the soundness of her advice, as he felt that familiar apprehension creep back in when he thought of finally confronting Jun Wan. But this time, he let it in instead of stamping down on it.
Maybe it was Song Hwa’s magic, but everything she said or did brought upon immeasurable relief, despite the heaviness of the topics.
‘‘Song Hwa-ya’’, he called, an undecipherable look in his eyes. ‘‘I missed you.’’
During her year’s stay in Sokcho? During the hours of surgery under general anesthesia? In the moments it took for her to wake up at his bedside?
It didn’t matter. Not anymore.
Her hand reached up to brush through his hair soothingly, barely containing her smile.
‘‘I missed you too.’’