Instead of putting the receiver back on the phone, he leaves it on the bed beside me, picks up the scissors again, and opens the blades. HOLD STILL. I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.
Faye nods as if she can hurry him up by moving her jaw up and down, and she even smiles a cramped smile. “Me too,” she says. “My hands hurt too.” As he slices through the tape around my wrists, part of it sticks, and he jerks the blades up. I keep it taut by keeping my wrists low. The tip of the scissors clips the inside of my wrist, and I react with a shout louder than I intended.
He drops the scissors as I pull my hands free and rub the cut. It’s not even bleeding, but it stings. WHY DID YOU MOVE? ARE YOU OKAY?
I jerk away from his hands, which are all over my wrists and my waist, patting me as if to make sure I exist. I respond by recoiling from his hands, and then I stop because he’s stopped and dropped his hands to his sides and is studying me with suspicion. It seeps out of his clenched hands.
65
After the Korea Society meeting, Lloyd and I said good-bye. I went back to my dorm, which felt empty without him now. My mother called. I told her I was studying. She wanted details, but I told her I was busy. My aunt was still away. I wasn’t interested in anything else she had to say. When she asked, I told her about my classes. The lies were piling up, but I couldn’t quit school as my sister had. My mother sounded as if my success in school cheered her up. She said, “I’m so proud of you, Yoona. I think about how hard you’re studying, and it makes my day better. I can’t describe how, but it just does.”
I called John Koh, but though he remembered me from the tour, he didn’t know anything about the car accident outside Seoul that had killed you and hurt Lloyd. He said he had returned to the United States the day after the tour ended. Instead of going to my classes, I went to the library and read accounts of what was happening in Korea. A librarian in the tech center handed me microfiche and said that someday soon we could go to a computer and read the news, the very latest news, with no delay. She called it the “Internet,” and she showed me how to send an e-mail to someone on the other side of the world. But I didn’t know anyone who knew about e-mail in Korea.
Serena found me in the library that afternoon.
“Did Lloyd break up with you or something?” she said.
“He was never my boyfriend,” I answered without looking up.
“Did you forget that Aloe Moon and I are going to New York, and you’re coming with us? A car is coming to take us to the airport in an hour. Hurry up.”
I’d forgotten about it after Lloyd had dismissed the idea, but I didn’t admit it. But now it came back—the possibility that I could talk to a journalist who could help me find you. I promised to meet her in her room and went off to pack a bag.
In New York, Serena, her cello, and I were driven in a limousine to a tall building in midtown. A pair of interns, a young woman and a young man, met us at the entrance, got us cleared by security in the lobby, and escorted us to the seventh floor. Serena and Aloe Moon disappeared into a studio, and the male intern led me to a room with a large window so I could see them perform and then talk to a man with a headset on. They gave Serena headphones too. She was in a room that had thick wires hanging in coils from the ceiling and large microphones suspended from the wires. The room I was in had men at sloped desks with levers and buttons. The intern told me to take a seat in the back and then sat next to me. We could hear Serena and the radio personality chatting it up. I was impressed by how comfortable she sounded, how smoothly she answered his questions about her life. Everyone was Korean and they spoke in Korean. I asked the intern in Korean how much contact they had with their counterparts in Seoul. He looked surprised. “All the time. Our listeners are in Korea.”
“Would you know who I could speak to about getting news from Korea? I need to find out about a car accident that took place outside of Seoul in August.”
The intern studied me warily—he seemed prepared to work with Serena’s people, but he looked as if he was starting to realize my presence was unrelated.
“Who are you again?”
“It doesn’t matter. A friend was in an accident, I just want more information about it. I was here, and it was in Korea, so I don’t know how to find out what happened exactly.”
“System isn’t digital yet. When it is, it will be easy to access stuff like that.”
“August twenty-first, eight p.m., Seoul. Large explosion, car fire. Whether it happened the way I heard it did or not, I need the official report, and maybe if there was media coverage, or maybe if someone like a journalist could investigate it for us.”
A woman with a walkie-talkie in her hand came over to him and whispered something in his ear. He got up without a word to me and returned with a cup of coffee, which he handed to her. He didn’t sit back down next to me, but instead moved over to the other intern, who was writing in a notebook. There wasn’t much space in that engineering room, and it was dark. I waited to talk to him again, but then the interview was over, and a woman ushered me out, and I was left standing in the hallway. It wasn’t much longer before Serena was released from her obligations and found me. She took one look at my face and asked me what was wrong. I told her about you and the intern’s words.
“He’s only an intern. What does he know?” she said.
“But what if Lloyd’s right? What if Jaesung is alive?”
“He’s dead, Yoona. You’re seriously dreaming if you won’t accept it.” Serena gave me such a pitying look I regretted saying as much as I had.
“Forget it,” I said.
She wrinkled her nose as if she were about to sneeze, but then didn’t. “Listen, we’re going to miss our flight. Come on, something is weird about your friend Lloyd. Something’s wrong with him.”
“You just don’t like him,” I said as she turned and pressed the elevator button. I didn’t offer to help her maneuver Aloe Moon even as she held him out toward me.
“Monica Aronsteen had a stalker who had the same look in his eye. She had to get an order of protection against him. He used to sit way in the last row of the concert hall and just watch for hours.” She shuddered.
“Lloyd isn’t like that.”
“Whatever. Look, I’ll ask my father to look into it. He went to school with someone at the Chosun Ilbo. He’d do anything for my dad,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m sorry about your friend. You should have asked me.”
“But I did. I did ask you,” I said.
“No, you asked about how I called Korea.”
I couldn’t tell her she was wrong or that she didn’t listen well, or how I didn’t know what to think. She was right, but I didn’t trust her to remember to ask her father. She was already talking about frozen hot chocolate at some restaurant near Bloomingdale’s. I followed her into the elevator when it arrived.
“Come on,” she said. “You can’t mourn Jaesung forever. The sooner you accept it, the better.”