Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  That night my parents said they wanted to play cards. We pulled out our table and chairs onto the porch, under the starlit expanse of sky. We brought out tea and fresh sliced peaches, and from the trees there came the tentative calling of the frogs. The river was engorged on the recent rains, and it roared by as loud as we’d ever heard it. We had to raise our voices over it.

  My father’s favorite card game was a partners’ game, and I was partners with my mother, Hannah with my father. My mother and I kept winning, by a lot, and my father shouted and laughed every time a point went against them. It was such a relief to be outside, laughing and talking again.

  “Hannah,” I said, “do you remember when you were little you used to say that four was the perfect number for a family?”

  “Did I say that?” she asked. “I don’t remember.” She sounded a little stiff.

  After a while my mother said to Hannah, “Are you sure it’s all right to miss the rest of the semester?”

  “Of course,” Hannah said. “I would have come sooner if Janie had told me how sick Dad was.”

  It took a moment, but I could sense the shift in the silence, as if it everyone was suddenly paying attention.

  My father lay down a card. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  Hannah shrugged. “If I’d known, I would have come right away.”

  “Jeehyun never told you?” my mother asked.

  Hannah shrugged again.

  “I did tell her,” I said. I gripped the table.

  “You said he was fine,” Hannah said. “You said it was under control.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “You lied to me,” Hannah said. “You didn’t tell me how sick he was.”

  “You knew,” I said. “I told you everything.”

  “You told me he wasn’t that sick.”

  “I told you he wasn’t dying.”

  My father took in a sharp breath.

  “She disappeared,” I said. “She didn’t call.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Hannah said. “Unni, you lied. You kept me away.”

  “No one kept you away,” I said. “You’re the one who deserted us.”

  “Jeehyun,” my mother said, “Haejin. Stop.” But it felt good for us to be fighting for once, and I didn’t want to stop.

  “Do you see how they’re afraid of offending you?” I said. “Do you see how carefully they treat you?”

  My father reached out to Hannah and put a hand on her shoulder. Hers, not mine. “Let’s not fight,” he said. “You’re here now.”

  I kept going. “You have no idea what it was like for us while you were gone,” I said.

  “Enough,” my father said. “Jeehyun, enough.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “Daddy.”

  He didn’t respond. The moon shone on his face, and he turned away from me. My cards were still in my hand.

  Hannah spoke. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have started this,” she said, but she was talking to my father. “It’s not worth fighting over.”

  I looked at my parents, and then back at Hannah. She looked so smug, and I wanted to hit her. She didn’t get to be magnanimous, I thought. She didn’t get to win. “You knew I was lying,” I said. “You knew Mom and Dad wanted you here, when I told you in L.A. not to come. You knew the whole time we were waiting for you.”

  “Jeehyun,” my mother said sharply, “there’s no reason to ruin our first nice night in weeks.”

  “I won’t let her blame me for this.”

  “Janie,” Hannah said, and her voice was very patient, as if she’d already won. “You said they didn’t want me. You said they were done.”

  “You knew better,” I said. “Mom and Dad called you every week. Jesus, Hannah. I flew out there.”

  “And then you told me not to come,” Hannah said. “Why would you do that?”

  For a moment I just looked at her. Then I put my cards down. “Because you wanted me to,” I said. “Because you deserved it. Because you knew better and still you chose to believe it.” I looked at Hannah, at my mother, my father. “Aren’t you going to ask her?” I asked them. “Don’t you want to know how she could disappear without one word of reassurance? Don’t you want to know how she could put us through something like that?”

  My mother was silent. My father was silent.

  “Isn’t that the million-dollar question?” I asked. “The thing no one has been able to ask since she miraculously came back? Can you answer it, Hannah? Can you tell us anything that would make us understand?”

  “You told me not to come,” she said, very softly.

  “You chose to let us suffer.”

  Hannah shook her head. “I would have come,” she said. “I’m here.”

  “Yes, and you were welcomed here with open arms. But you should have crawled here on your knees and asked forgiveness when you found out Dad was sick. You should have come whether we wanted you or not, because you couldn’t bear not to be here. That’s what you should have done, Hannah. I gave you that chance, and you stayed away.”

  “Jeehyun, enough,” my father said.

  I ignored him. “You didn’t love us enough.”

  My father’s hand hit the table. “Enough,” he said. “Please stop.” His face was white, and his hand was clenched, as if he was bracing himself against some terrible pain.

  “Yubbo, don’t get excited,” my mother said. She touched his arm. Then she looked at us. “I think this game is over,” she said. “It’s time for us to go to bed.”

  Hannah was silent, and I, too, was quiet, stricken by my father’s expression. Hannah looked at no one as we cleared the table and brought in the table and chairs.

  When we had gone inside and said good night to our parents and went to our room, Hannah closed the door and stepped onto my sleeping mat. She whispered, “I have something to say to you.”

  “Please don’t step on my sleeping mat,” I said. Then I looked at her face. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go outside.”

  We sneaked out of the house together. The river was still roaring. I watched Hannah’s face from the corner of my eye. It grew darker as we stepped farther away from the house and toward the pond, and then her face was lost in shadow, and we walked on. When we reached the pond it was very still, lit by a sliver of moonlight that cut across its surface and trembled there.

  Hannah was the first to speak. “That was a great performance you gave tonight,” she said. “It was really well done. How you threw me under the bus. You’ve never done that before.”

  “You attacked first,” I said. “You cornered me.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Fuck you.”

  “No, seriously, you shouldn’t have started it,” I said, but her words stung. I felt ashamed. “And whatever code existed, you broke when you left the way you did, when you didn’t answer my phone calls begging you to call back.”

  “So you said.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want things to be better between us,” I said. “I want to move on.”

  “But you still need answers,” Hannah said. “Why I left, why I don’t love you enough, why I am the way I am.” She laughed, a short, terse laugh.

  “I do.”

  “It’s a little late for this conversation is all I want to say. It’s a little late for your curiosity.”

  I thought of her spit bubbles as a child, how they had held me hostage. I thought of life this past year, without her. I stepped toward her. “Listen, sometimes I’ve wished I could run away from everything, too.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Hannah laughed again. I could sense the tension in her laughter, in the way she held her body. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “You really are a piece of work. When you’re the one who said never to tell.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

  “I’m not pretending.”

  She turned to face me, and her eyes were red. She did no
t relax her glare, and she reminded me suddenly, strongly and completely, of my mother. “You told me not to tell anyone what happened to me, and you were my sister. I trusted you.”

  “Okay, you’re freaking me out. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “He touched me,” Hannah said. “He touched me and all of you knew it, everyone knew and all you said was be quiet, don’t talk, don’t say anything.”

  My entire body felt the shock of it. “No,” I said, with such force that I staggered forward. It was so sudden, the realization so complete: it was like hitting a wall, like the bones of my face rearranging themselves completely and forever. I knew.

  “It was Gabe,” I said. “Oh God.” My reaction was instantaneous. I began to cry in front of my sister for the first time in years. But even then I didn’t really know what he had done, what I had told my sister to hide. That he had hurt her doll? That he had touched her how? She had been clothed when I found her. She had been fine.

  I couldn’t think straight. “Hannah,” I said, “I didn’t know.”

  She shrugged. “Anyway, that’s that.”

  “What did they do? How did they touch you?”

  “It’s too late to talk about this now,” she said. “When it happened, you told me to keep quiet.”

  “I thought all they did was mess up your doll.” I rubbed my face with my hand. “Please tell me,” I said, but I was frightened. It was too much to deal with on top of everything else, too long ago to do anything about.

  I started to pace, walking up and down a small section of the dirt path.

  After a moment Hannah came to me. She reached out and grabbed my arm. “Stop it,” she said. And then, “Don’t worry.” Her voice was calm. “It was like a hundred years ago.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. My voice broke. “Tell me what I can do.”

  “Nothing.” She let go of my arm. “It’s too late.”

  I stopped pacing and faced her. I wanted to say something, but I felt what she said was true. Too many years had passed, and too much distance had accumulated between us. So we stood there in the darkness together, and I was quiet. I stood beside her and watched the moonlight skim over the water, silencing each question that was no longer my right to ask.

  19.

  For several nights after that, I slept in the living room and let Hannah have our room to herself. My parents didn’t comment on the new arrangements, and neither did Hannah. During the day, our house was quiet. Neither of my parents brought up the conversation from the card game. I wondered what they thought of what I had done.

  One day my father brought up his plans for the firefly festival in Muju again. He hadn’t talked about it for so long that I had assumed those plans were off, but when he mentioned it, we all agreed we would go. Two days before the festival was to begin, my mother and Hannah went to the grocery store together: they didn’t invite me. I stood in the kitchen grinding down carrots for my father’s juice, feeling left out. No one had spoken much to me in days, though they’d started tentatively talking to each other, and my feelings were hurt. Let everyone hate me, I thought.

  My father came to the entrance of the small kitchen and stood, watching me. I did not turn around. “I don’t want to go anymore,” I said.

  He sighed and came next to me. “I want to change our mood,” he said. “I want us to be more cheerful.”

  He smiled at me hopefully, but I didn’t smile back. I am tired of always being wrong, I thought. I am tired of always being the one to give in.

  “Jeehyun,” he said.

  “What?” I didn’t turn from the juicer. I pushed in another carrot and ground it down loudly. I pushed it all the way down to its core.

  My father waited. I turned off the juicer, wiped my hands. “What?” I said again. The roughness of my own voice startled me. “I’m making your juice.”

  “I just want to talk,” my father said. “How is your work going?”

  I turned back to the juicer and began taking it apart into its component parts. I scraped all the carrot shreds into the trash.

  “It’s going fine,” I said, and it was true. My work had actually been coming along great. “I thought you were more interested in it than you were though, I guess.”

  “I am sorry,” he said quietly, “that I haven’t been able to help you.”

  “I didn’t need your help, I just thought you could care. Just drink your juice,” I said. “I’ll clean this up.”

  “Jeehyun,” he said, taking his cup. “Wait a second, and come in the other room with me.” And he went into the living room. I followed him, and watched him seat himself stiffly. He frowned at his juice, swirled it a little, as if it were a glass of wine. He took a sip and made a face. “I can’t follow things so well anymore,” he said. “I can’t concentrate.” Absently, he picked up my notebook from the table. He opened it. Then he took another sip of his juice and looked up at me. “About your sister,” he said. “Don’t be so hard on her.”

  “I’m not the one who’s hard.” I squeezed my hands together. “Do you ever tell her to go easy on me?”

  My father shook his head and smiled. “You’re the one I can explain it to,” he said.

  “It’s not fair.”

  He tapped my notebook. “An equation with no roots has no solution,” he said.

  “No,” I said. I was tired. “It’s not my fault that we don’t have roots.” I didn’t want to fight with him while he was drinking his medicine. It was bad luck.

  My father reached forward and put his hand on my arm.

  “We have roots,” he said. “Everyone does.”

  I shrugged his hand off, but where his hand had been, my arm was still warm. “I’ll bring you the rest of your pills,” I said.

  That afternoon, my father sat at the table looking over my notebook. When I came back to check on him, he looked up and smiled. He tapped my notebook. “This is great!” he said. “Really great.” He stood up and stretched, as if looking over my work for several hours had energized him. “I could kind of follow most of it,” he said. “It was exciting. And the new sketches you’ve made of the discs intersecting in four-dimensional space are really beautiful,” he said. “If I didn’t know it was math, I’d think it was art.”

  I soaked in his approval. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the property and napping. I woke up first and took out my notebook again. I was surprised to discover that it looked different to me this time. I began to see connections I hadn’t seen before, a way to break through where I’d long been stuck. Something seemed to open up to me then: a path I might clear for myself if only I could follow it.

  That evening, I was almost cheerful. I smiled at Hannah and my mother when they returned. While my family prepared dinner, I e-mailed my advisor in Chicago and told him what progress I’d made. I worked late into the night.

  The next morning, my father slept in. It was the day before the festival, and we were preparing for the trip when he called out to my mother. She sent Hannah to see what he needed. A moment later, I heard her call, “Unni,” in a low, urgent voice. I set the silverware down in a heap on the table. I moved toward my father’s room. Before I reached it, a bad smell hit me. The first thing I saw was a heap of vomit next to my father’s mattress on the floor, and my father’s head next to it. He was on the ground, his hands on either side of his head, which was pressed sideways into the ground. He was trying to push himself up.

  “I can’t get up,” he said, panting. He looked up at us, his eyes wide and startled.

  I moved quickly toward him, looking away from the vomit, looking only at his eyes, at his head pressed awkwardly against the ground. “Sure you can get up,” I said. I reached out my hand. “You just need a little help.”

  He took my hand in his, and I pulled. But he just lay there, on his side. Nothing happened. There was no strength in his arms. I tugged again. He moaned.

  “Should we call Mom?” Hannah said. “Are you sure we
should move him?”

  He turned his head to look at us. His eyes were very wide. “Let me get up,” he said. “I don’t want your mother to see me like this.”

  “Get behind him,” I instructed my sister. “Try to lift him from the middle.”

  So we all pulled as hard as we could, and then as he was rising, Hannah braced herself, scrambled for footing, and slipped on the heap of vomit by my father’s pillow. She went down with a thud, and my father, wobbling, clutched at my hand for one breathless moment, then wavered and fell.

  He fell forward toward me, and horrified, I stepped back. I will never understand how I did not catch him when he reached his arms out to me, how I did not step toward him, or beneath him, how I did nothing to break his fall, but stepped away.

  For one terrible moment, I thought he would hit his head on the floor, but he fell on the mattress, his body folding beneath him like a marionette bending at the joints. As I knelt down to help him again, he began to tremble.

  “Help me,” I cried to Hannah, who was still on the floor.

  I knelt down. I turned him over so he wasn’t lying on his face, and then he lay crumpled on his side, twitching, his eyes unfocused.

  I cried for my mother then, yelling her name in a panic like I was a child. There was a clatter in the kitchen, then her footsteps running toward us. She pushed me aside as she entered, and went straight to my father, gathering him up in her arms.

  “Call an ambulance,” she cried. “Call your uncle. Do something!” But I just stood there. I could not move. I could not take my eyes off him. I had let him fall. I had let him down, and I still could not believe what was happening.

  It was Hannah who went to the phone and called my uncle. I could hear her speaking her frantic, awkward Korean from my parents’ bedroom as I watched my mother rock my father in her arms.

  We drove to the hospital—my father strapped in beside my mother, his seat reclined all the way back, almost to my lap. Twenty minutes into that drive, another car turned unexpectedly in front of us from a small dirt road. My mother swerved to avoid it, and Hannah and I reached out simultaneously for my father’s shoulder. Our car spun halfway and stopped, and we sat there, stunned and disoriented. It was so sunny outside, the road ahead of us so clear. Then my mother turned the car in the right direction and kept going.