Chapter 159: The reason was a name
Nico
The phone was cold in my hand, or maybe my hand had gone cold. I could not tell anymore.
I answered it standing in the corner of Dami’s bedroom with a towel still around my hips. "Mum?"
"Seo-jun-ah."
"What happened?"
Behind me, the stool scraped against the floor as Alaric stood up. I did not turn around.
"It is your grandfather." She was crying and trying not to let me hear it. "He fell this morning. The doctors say his body is giving up. They do not think he has more than a few days." She took a shaky breath. "Please come home."
I had not spoken to him in years. I had walked out of that house with one suitcase and a promise to myself that I would never go back through those gates.
"I will come," I said. "Tonight."
She hung up.
I kept holding the phone to my ear until Alaric took it gently out of my hand and set it down on the armchair.
"Nico." He stepped in front of me so I had to look at him. "Talk to me."
"My grandfather is dying. I have to go to Seoul."
He nodded slowly. "Is he going to be okay?"
I only shrugged. I did not know for certain, but I had heard the way my mother’s voice shook, and I knew the answer was no.
"Okay," Alaric said. "Get dressed. I will call a car to take you to the private terminal."
"Alaric, I am sorry. We only just..."
"Do not." He put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled my forehead down against his. "Do not apologize to me for this. Just promise you will not go quiet on me again."
"I promise."
"Say it properly."
"I promise I will call you," I said. "Every day."
"Better."
I got dressed too fast. I put my shirt on inside out, and Alaric turned it the right way without saying anything, then buttoned it for me because my fingers would not work. When he reached the top button, he stopped and looked at my wrist. Then he walked back to the vanity.
He came back with his watch.
"What are you doing?"
"Lending it to you." He fastened it around my wrist. It was heavier than mine and sat a little loose. "You give it back to me in Langose. In person. That way you have to come back."
"I was always coming back."
"Now you have to," he said, and he kissed me once, hard, at the door.
I called Dorothy from the car.
"Nico? Do you have any idea what time it is..."
"Clear my schedule for four days," I said. "Cancel the simulator sessions, move the media obligations, and tell the crew I need the jet ready for Incheon tonight."
"Incheon? The Canadian Grand Prix is next week. The team is going to lose their minds."
"My grandfather is dying." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to. "I will be in Langose two days before practice. I will not miss the race."
She was quiet for a moment. "I will call the crew. Let me know if you want me to meet you there."
"Alright," I said, and ended the call.
****
I did not sleep on the plane. I sat in the dark with the window shade up and watched nothing go by for hours, and every hour the knot in my stomach pulled a little tighter.
Every so often I turned Alaric’s watch around on my wrist just to feel the weight of it. The second hand kept moving. It was stupid how much that helped.
Going home meant the house. It meant the long hallway on the second floor, the room at the end of it, and my uncle Geum Ho.
I had spent most of my life trying not to think about him. For years I believed what he did to me in that house was my fault. I thought there was something in me that had invited it, something dirty that could never be washed off, and I carried that into every locker room and every hotel room and every bed I ever shared.
Then Japan happened. At my grandmother’s remembrance, with the whole family gathered under one roof, it all came out, and suddenly everyone knew. My mother. Uncle Anderson. All of them. Alaric learned it that same night.
But my grandfather had not needed Japan to find out. He had always known.
I still remember the shadow of his feet stopping outside my bedroom door. I remember holding my breath and praying the handle would turn. It never did. His footsteps moved on down the hall, and that was the night I learned nobody in that house was coming for me.
Now he was dying and the reason I was rushing to meet him was to let him know that what he did to me all those years was his karma.
By the time we landed at Incheon, I felt nothing at all.
The family car was waiting. I did not speak to the driver. Seoul went past the window in blurs of neon and rain, and then the gates of the estate opened for us the way they always had, slow and silent, like the house had been expecting me.
My mother was at the door before I reached it. She threw her arms around my neck and held on.
"Seo-jun," she whispered into my collar.
"I am here, Mum." I held her tighter than I meant to. She felt smaller than I remembered. She was the only reason I had come.
"It is good to see you, Nico."
My uncle Anderson stood at the bottom of the staircase with his tie pulled loose and dark circles under his eyes. He gave me a tired nod.
"Uncle Anderson."
"He is awake," he said quietly. "He has been asking for you all morning. He wants to speak to you alone."
I wanted to turn around, get back on the jet, and fly straight back to Alaric. Instead I squeezed my mother’s hand, let go, and went upstairs.
The master suite smelled of antiseptic and old paper. The bed was the same enormous four-poster I remembered from childhood, but the man in it had shrunk. His skin looked thin enough to tear.
An oxygen tube ran under his nose, and a monitor beside him beeped steadily in the quiet.
He turned his head when I came in. His eyes were clouded now, but they still found me.
"Seo-jun."
"Grandfather." I would not call him Harabeoji. I had not called him that since I was a boy.
He lifted a shaking hand toward me. I kept mine in my jacket pockets so he would not see that they were shaking too.
"You came," he said. "I thought you would ignore the call."
"I came for my mother. Not for you."
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were wet.
"I know what you think of me," he rasped. "I have carried it for a long time. What Geum Ho did to you... I should have stopped it."
"But you did not."
"I could not." His fingers twisted weakly in the sheet. "If anyone had found out, it would have destroyed us. Our name. Everything this family built. I thought if no one spoke of it, it would pass."
Everyone had known since Japan that he knew. But knowing it was different from hearing him say it to my face, lying in that bed and explaining it to me like it had been a business decision. I had imagined this moment a thousand times, and in every version I stayed calm.
"Our name." It came out of me like something tearing. "Do you know what I thought I was? I thought I was ruined. I thought I was disgusting. I could not look at myself in a mirror for years. I was a child, and I believed it was my fault, because the one man in this house who could have stopped it walked past my door every night, and I thought he must have had a reason." I laughed, and it sounded horrible. "And the reason was a name."
The monitor started beeping faster. I did not care.
"And my father." My voice cracked straight down the middle. "My father found out what his brother was doing to his son, and he could not live with it. He killed himself because of what happened in this house. You knew that too. You knew, and you stood at his funeral and let everyone believe whatever was easiest. You buried the reason with him and you let my mother grieve without the truth. You protected Geum Ho and you protected that name, and you let me grow up thinking I was the dirty secret, when the secret was you."
"Seo-jun, I am sorry." He was weeping now, openly, his chest heaving under the sheets. "I was a coward. I was so wrong. Please."
I looked at him for a long time. I had wanted this. I had wanted him to beg. I thought it would feel like something breaking open inside me, like light coming in.
It felt like nothing.
"You want me to forgive you so you can die lighter," I said quietly. "I carried this for you my whole life. I am not carrying it anymore. Keep it. This is your karma grandfather and you deserve everything."