A Small Revolution Read online

  “What about organizing around politics, like they’re doing for the antiapartheid protests in South Africa?” Lloyd cupped his hands and shouted.

  Heads turned in our direction. People stared. I whispered low at him, “Let’s talk to him privately.”

  Lloyd turned away from me and held his fingers to his lips as people coughed uncomfortably, cleared their throats.

  “Always drama at the Korea Society, am I right?” Thomas said, and everyone laughed. “Thanks to Youn Lim for organizing tonight’s meeting. And over there is Z-MC, providing us with great music,” Thomas continued, giving a single wag of his finger over his head. And with that, a boy with large headphones at a record player and speakers in the far corner raised one hand to everyone and started to spin some tunes with his other.

  “Come on.” Lloyd took my arm and pulled me out of the crowd toward the door. He had a scowl on his face and was wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “There’s nothing here but a party,” Lloyd said and kept walking, pulling me along, refusing to let me go. It was the first time I felt helpless against him. Outside, he released me and kicked the base of a sculpture. We stood under a spotlight. Students walked past us.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” I said and held my arm where he’d grabbed me.

  He rushed over and put his arms around me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know. That was wrong. I know. I’ve got to get out of here. If I don’t, I’m going to do something I regret, I know I will. It’s the accident. It’s made me like this. I don’t want to be like this. Yoona, say you forgive me. Please. Say it. Please?”

  I looked into his face. I knew what he was feeling, I told myself. I felt it too—the helplessness and despair. We were no closer to finding you than we had been two weeks ago. This place, this campus where life wasn’t quite real life but something like a circus. Something false. And you were out there suffering. What, I didn’t want to imagine.

  “You can call Korea from your house phone if you go back to New York,” I said.

  “My mom gave me hell over the phone bill last time, but if she kicks me out again, I’ll just come back here.” He shrugged.

  “Your mom kicked you out?”

  “That’s why I came here. I was calling Korea constantly, trying to find Tongsu Cho, and I was close too. I had to know, you know?”

  “Did she really kick you out? Like, where would you have gone if you couldn’t come here?”

  “I’ve got a car, so no big deal.” He gave me a small smile.

  “She’s awful.”

  “Yeah, well, my stepmother, you know, fits the stepmother stereotype. There’s always one, you know.”

  “Well, come back here if she does that, promise?”

  “That’s a promise, and then I’ll fall apart again.”

  “I feel it too, like there’s nothing we can do, but we have to do something.”

  He nodded. “I’ll try to call Korea again when I get home. I’ll be in touch. Go study.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Go, I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything.”

  “Promise?”

  “You bet.”

  He reached over and gave me a hug, and I squeezed him back and turned so he wouldn’t see that I was on the verge of crying. He was abandoning us, you and me.

  That night on campus after the Korea Society meeting, Lloyd got back into his little red car and promised to call. And even though I felt we’d failed you, I let him go.

  63

  You used to say we make our own luck. But you believed in curses too.

  64

  No one comes through that door after Daiyu leaves. I can feel Heather’s and Faye’s nervousness increase. Staring at the door isn’t going to make it open for them. Lloyd stands at the window, the handgun’s muzzle holding back the curtain, allowing a sliver of light to fall on the floor, a fraction of a view for him of the parking lot.

  “Can you see Daiyu?” I call over to him.

  HE FUCKING LIED TO ME.

  I try to stay calm even though Lloyd still sounds angry. He let Daiyu go. That means something. He’s going to let us all go soon. He has to. “Who do you mean?” I ask as if we’re talking about someone he’s read about in the news.

  He answers, IT’S A TRICK. He’s still studying what’s happening outside, but this is a conversation I can work with. There are sounds of men shouting and applause. TWO MEN ON EACH SIDE OF HER WHEN SHE WALKED OUT OF THE BUILDING. HE SAID NO ONE WAS IN THE BUILDING.

  “He said no one was in the hallway,” I said.

  YOU’RE LYING.

  “I heard it too. You said hall, and he said hall,” Faye says.

  “Me too,” Heather adds, but her face is still turned to the door.

  “You’re being paranoid, Lloyd. Maybe I should tell Sax to hurry up with the car. I’ll have to go to the bathroom soon,” I say.

  Lloyd releases the curtain and turns to me. GO AHEAD, CALL.

  “With my hands like this?” I make an effort to laugh at the ridiculousness of my predicament.

  STOP LAUGHING AT ME.

  “Laughing? I’m not laughing at you. Lloyd, I was just talking about my hands being—”

  He grabs the phone and thrusts it up to my face. TALK.

  “You won’t show me the proof you have. You say you care about this baby—”

  TALK.

  “Tape is too tight. How will I have this baby you say you care about if I lose circulation in my hands?”

  FINE.

  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.”

  At the airport we were early to the boarding gate, and I left Serena without telling her where I was going. I called Lloyd on a pay phone across the hall. I could still see Serena, and she looked at me curiously. A woman answered and made me wait awhile before I heard Lloyd’s voice. “I knew it was you. Had a feeling. What do you mean you’re in New York?” he said.

  “We’re on the same wavelength again. I’m here! Well, I’m at JFK, but I came here with Serena for her interview. Who was that? Have you found Tongsu Cho?”

  “My mom—she answers all calls and takes the phone with her when she leaves. Can you believe it? Wait, JFK? I’ll come get you.”

  “Flight’s boarding soon. Tell me about Tongsu Cho.”

  “It’s useless.”

  “Don’t say that. Did you call?”

  “Can’t believe my dad is going along with her. They control everything. You should see the look on her face when she told me I had a phone call.” He laughed. “She’s listening in right now, I bet.”

  “So buy another phone and plug it in when they’re gone.”

  “Hah! Don’t say that too loud. She’d love that. That way, they’ll never give me back my passport, and this time when they kick me out, it’ll be for good. What’s going on at school? How are you?”

  “What happened to your passport?”

  “Yeah, that one’s my dad’s idea. He thinks I’ll try to run away to Korea. With what money, I don’t know what he thinks. I did take his credit card a few times, so maybe he has reason to doubt me. I thought about sending a telegram to the tour to ask about Tongsu. You sound different, how come?”

  “That’s good—try that. How different? Do you know where he keeps the passport?”

  “In the safe in the store. You sound really close. I’m sorry I haven’t called. Are you mad? I promise I’m working on finding Jaesung. It’s all I think about. The phone situation sucks. Hey, we have to fly to North Dakota and convince them there’s something wrong with the story they were told,” Lloyd said.

  “They won’t believe us.” I remembered your uncle’s voice. “We don’t have any evidence.”

  “I can explain, if they give me a chance, face to face. They’ll believe me.”

  “I believed you.”

  “Exactly. Let me pick you up. We should have thought of this earlier, and you could have come back with me.”

  “We’ve got to convince Jaesung’s parents he’s alive.” I saw Serena wave to me near the gate. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “We’re running out of time,” Lloyd said.

  I hung up and hurried to board the plane.

  66

  YOU CAN’T STAND ME.

  I have to tell the truth. I remember my mother knew this when my father raged. I stammer, “It’s this whole thing, this thing you’re doing right here, Lloyd. I was wrong not to tell you about the pregnancy. Honestly, I still can’t accept that it’s real. It’s not real to me, do you understand? The whole thing, my body, everything about me right now, the way you touched me—if anyone touches me, it makes my skin crawl.”

  BUT IT’S JAESUNG’S BABY. YOU SAID YOU LOVE HIM. DOESN’T IT MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU? DON’T YOU LOVE ANYONE BUT YOURSELF?

  “I did, but when I heard—look, you don’t know what it’s like. I feel like my body has been taken over. It’s not mine, but it is mine, and I want it back. I’m eighteen, Lloyd.”

  BUT YOU’RE THE MOTHER OF HIS CHILD. There’s a plaint
ive tone to his voice. I would have thought this once, idealized it, maybe, but not now.

  The phone rings, and Lloyd answers it, turning his back to me. Heather inches forward, and the mattress creaks, but Lloyd doesn’t notice. He’s busy listening to whoever is on the phone, and holds it close to his ear so we can’t hear.

  NO. He slams the phone back into its cradle and spins around to us. Heather slumps, returning to her position. Faye moves her shoulder in front of Heather’s shoulder as if to keep her in place.

  Lloyd rubs the side of the gun against his forehead like a washcloth and looks at me. A glimpse of my old friend Lloyd is in his eyes. I appeal to it.

  “I don’t want to be anyone’s mother.”

  SO WHAT? WHY DOES IT MATTER WHAT YOU WANT? He hits his face with the gun. He seems to be fighting a part of himself.

  I hold out my hand to him. “Lloyd, let’s talk about this without the police outside, without Faye and Heather. We’ll figure out what to do. We’ll go home. You’ll come with me to Lakeburg, and we’ll figure out what to do. If you want me to keep the baby, we’ll talk about it.”

  YOU’RE LYING.

  “I’m serious. I’m sorry, I see now why you had to bring Daiyu here, you had to get Heather and Faye in here, to get me to listen to you. I see you had no choice.”

  YOU DIDN’T GIVE ME A CHOICE. YOU SAID YOU WERE GOING HOME TO YOUR PARENTS’ HOUSE. YOU SAID THAT TO ME, DIDN’T YOU, IN THE QUAD? YOU SAID, ‘LLOYD, I’M NOT GOING TO THE CLINIC, I’M GOING TO LAKEBURG.’

  His voice has taken on a screech as if he’s in pain. I WAS ALL ALONE. I DID WHAT I HAD TO DO.