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The mornings were growing chillier, a sign of the changing seasons that had always been an unexpected tonic to her spirit and felt reviving even now, weeks into her captivity in his hospital room. It was too breezy to open the window to catch the prickle of early sunshine bouncing off the glass, and she was afraid of what might happen if the smell of the sea made her––
“Makes you what? ” Gyeong was being extra-belligerent about everything.
“Blustering is unattractive,” Seo-ryeong told her. “On you more than most. The smell makes me sick.”
“You need to see someone about that,” Gyeong said firmly. Test, scan, treat, cure. Test, scan, treat, cure. In hospitals they only left you alone when you were actually at risk of dying. “Not that you haven’t always needed therapy––”
“Look who’s talking––”
“––but I know you won’t go,” Gyeong said, and thumped a mug of hot water mixed with honey by the bedside. It was to help Seo-ryeong’s throat recover from all the screaming. “Imagine. A conversation in which Koo Seo-ryeong doesn’t dictate the terms.”
“I’d rather die,” Seo-ryeong said, meanly, to make Gyeong’s mouth twist. “I’m so tired of being told what to do,” she complained to Yeong, when he came that evening. She’d trained the complaining note out of her voice over the years, but it made him smile, for some reason. “It’s worse than being in jail.”
He’d just come out of the shower, and turned to the window to look at his reflection in the glass. He was only half paying attention. Vain man. “Come here,” she told him, and held her hands out for the towel. “Bow your head.” She scrubbed his hair dry for him, like he was a child. They were used to showering together, and he’d even let her shave him, once or twice, a little power game as they watched each other in the mirror, waiting to see if he’d bleed. This felt new, this intimacy without the sexual charge. It was the most enjoyable thing about being trapped here.
He raised his head when she let him go, and kissed her nose, and her forehead, then planted a kiss to her scalp. She squirmed: there were bare patches where the hair was falling out, which she thought about practically every waking minute, but he held on firmly and finished petting her like she was an especially needy mutt.
“Who told you life’s about doing whatever you want?” he asked her, mock-stern. “Getting better is a discipline. There are always orders to follow, private.”
“Private––!” she said. He’d know, of course. There were the mysterious scars, the long leave of absence, from before they’d met. “If I’d joined the army out of college I’d be a colonel by now at least. A lieutenant- colonel,” she amended quickly, before he thought she was mocking his mother.
“You’d have started a war,” he told her, but she couldn’t retort because the nurse came in with her medication, and Yeong held her hand through the whole tedious exercise. He took it seriously, that Seo-ryeong, who was closer to forty than four, still had trouble swallowing pills. She marvelled that she might never have known it about him, that he was such a soft touch.
“How did a marshmallow like you survive in the army?” she asked him after the nurse was gone. She held fast to his wrist so that he wouldn’t adjust the bed frame to lie flat, signalling sleep time to her body. She didn’t like to sleep.
He smiled, which was a surprise.
“My grandma said the same thing, the night before I left for the academy,” he said. “She called me a puppy, though, not a marshmallow. She came to my room and cried, in secret.”
“Why in secret?” she asked, interested. “Oh––the family honour.”
“Something like that,” he said.
“You never wanted to do anything else?” she asked him. “With your life.”
“I can’t remember if I did,” he said, honestly.
“Train driver? Pilot?”
“I do fly––”
“Alright, alright,” she said. “Pop star? Prime minister?” He shook his head. “Prince Consort?”
“Neither of the candidates for that particular alliance are my type,” he said, unoffended.
“I always thought people like you would be rebellious,” she said. “Generation after generation after generation of tradition.” How repulsive.
“It’s not something you can explain in a therapist’s office,” he allowed.
“Then?” she asked, though her heart grew hot and wounded at the thought of Yeong in a therapist’s office. It was difficult to remember because he didn’t look like other veterans. “Did you lie about it?”
“Me? Lie?” he said, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Of course not, Miss Koo.”
“But your grandmother knew,” she said, as she sneaked her hand into his, and he brushed his lips over her knuckles. It was a warm kiss, a dry one. “She’d sent your father and uncle away, before you.”
He nodded, and said, after a pause, “She looked after my grandfather for a long time, after the communist war.”
“Admiral Jo,” she said, recalling what she knew. “Admiral Jo Cheol.” The scarred, regal old man with a limp, who appeared on TV during state functions. What a family.
“Were they very strict with you, when you were a child?”
“No,” he said, immediately. “Eun-bi and Kka-bi think so, because they get to back-chat our mother and don’t have to turn out their night lights and can eat whatever they like––they pity me when I tell them things used to be different for me.”
“They probably think you grew up in the nineteenth century,” she said, growing fond of the children. His eyes crinkled as he laughed.
“It's stuck in the past, in some ways,” he said, “the house. The twins don’t like going there, did I tell you? They think it's dark and draughty. It is an odd house for its location. My grandfather’s eldest sister had it shipped here stone by stone from Seoul––from Gyeongseong, as was.”
“Why on earth?” she said.
“The Japanese murdered my great-grandfather in the front courtyard,” he said. She’d known that, of course; that’d been in the history textbook. “She said she wouldn’t leave behind even a piece of gravel that had drunk her father’s blood.” She shuddered involuntarily, but it wasn’t out of fear. There was an odd thrill to it all: this, at least, hadn’t happened to her.
“I used to scare myself imagining I could see his blood on the flagstones,” he went on. “When I was a child.”
“That’s why your grandma cried for you,” she said. She put her other hand out to trace the line of his cheekbone, down to his mouth, and hold out her palm for a kiss. “You were a baby.”
“I wasn’t,” Yeong said. “She’s just old, now. She had to be strong for the whole family for a long time. Like grandmothers everywhere, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t know, I don’t have any,” she said. “What’s your other grandma like?”
He shook his head. “I only met her once, when I was very small. There’s only eomeonim, in your house?”
She nodded. “And my father.”
He turned to look at her.
“I like to think he’s out there, somewhere,” she says. “Waiting for me. I thought about that in the boat, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. There was no sympathy on his face, nothing unbearable, but he was intent.
“It’s not often, don’t worry,” she said. “Just sometimes.”
“What do you imagine?” Yeong asked. “That he’s alive, somewhere, and can’t meet you? Or that he’s watching you, in secret––watching over you?”
“That there’s an alternate universe,” she said. He exhaled hard.
“He’s alive there, and we live together in my house,” she told him. “He’s retired. He doesn’t have much money. But he doesn’t need it, I make more than enough for us. We go on holidays, to all sorts of places. He comes to the studio sometimes, once or twice a year: he’s popular with everyone on the team. He’s a great cook––better than eomma, if you can believe it. But we don’t have people over all that often, because we like eating together in peace, just the two of us.”
“What about your mother and sister?”
She shook her head. “They don’t belong there,” she said. “You do, though.”
“Seo-ryeong,” he said, softly. She smiled at him.
“He hates you,” she said, and he ducked his head and smiled, though it took him a moment.
“I see,” he said. “I’m your rebellion.”
“You are,” she said. “Here and there, both.”
“No one’s ever thought me unsuitable before. Not once. Not even as a joke.”
No one’s loved you like I do, she thought. “You’re an undereducated meathead,” she told him. “You work in personal security,” and he was smiling more openly now. “You’re plagued by silly girls everywhere you go.”
“That’s you!”
“My girls are smart,” she said.
“They are,” he said. “I’m the fool,” and looked at her to make his meaning clear.
“I think I might be too,” she said. “Yeong, I might be right off my rocker.”
“Yes,” he said, “there are doctors for that,” and she threw her hands up.