Song Hye-Ok stepped off the elevator onto the twenty-eighth floor and heaved her bags into the crook of her left arm. It was nearing 10:00 A.M. and, it being summer, she expected the boys to be lazing in front of the television watching cartoons just as they had done when they were little. She planned to make them a healthy breakfast, one they probably hadn’t eaten since her last visit, and then she would do some cleaning around the apartment.

“Is that Shin-Hyuk’s mother?”

Hye-Ok turned. Little Eun-Mi’s grandmother walked towards her down the apartment building’s long hallway. The old woman wore voluminous house-pants and a creamy tunic that hung loose over her bird-like frame. With a bag of recycling balanced on her hip, she paused at the elevator, holding the door open with her free hand.

“Good morning halmeoni!” Hye-Ok smiled brightly. “How have my boys been? Have they been behaving themselves?”

The old woman studied Hye-Ok for a moment. “It’s rather strange,” she said and then nodded toward the apartment door. “Are you just now going inside?”

“Yes, I was gone this week visiting my sister-in-law in Busan. I’ve brought the boys some side dishes. And you know how boys are,” she laughed, “the laundry probably hasn’t been done all week.”

“They are good boys, you know,” the old woman waved Hye-Ok on. “Don’t be too hard on them.” She stepped into the elevator, and the door rumbled closed behind her.

Hye-Ok thought the grandmother’s comment strange, but she shrugged it off. She was too happy to worry over on any petty mayhem the boys might have gotten themselves into. They were both alive and well, and after the nervous breakdown she’d had the Sunday night before when her Hawk had called to say that Seung-Bae had drowned, she was willing to forgive them anything for simply being healthy. Though Seung-Bae wasn’t her own son, she’d helped care for him since his birth. His mother, Jin-Ah, had been the closest thing Hye-Ok had to a birth sister. She considered Seung-Bae no less than her nephew, and the thought of losing him was unbearable. But, thankfully, he was home, safe and sound.

She pushed her way into the apartment and, with a satisfied sigh, stepped out of her shoes and slid into a pair of soft house slippers. A pair of girl’s, yellow canvas shoes stood out at the end of the long row of sneakers. She examined them for a moment. “Probably Eun-Mi’s,” she reasoned, and then headed to the dining room table where she deposited her cargo.

“Seung-Bae-ah! Shin-Hyuk-ah! Its Eomma!” she called out, but there was no answer. This surprised her. Hawk had always been an early riser; Seung-Bae was the one who had to be prodded to get out of bed.

“Shin-Hyuk-ah?” she called again.

She made her way down the hallway and peeked inside her son’s bedroom. The room was empty, so she entered and made a quick inventory. Hawk was meticulous about his space, everything was tidy and organized, even the bed was neatly made. Only the fish tank appeared out of sorts. The water inside was clear and still, not a single goldfish could be seen. “That’s strange,” she tapped on the glass. “What happened to you little ones?”

Hye-Ok pushed up her sleeves and headed back towards the kitchen, ready to stock the boy’s refrigerator with the plastic containers of radish kimchi and other side dishes she’d prepared for them the night before. But when she made her way around the wide island and into the kitchen itself, she froze in horror. The kitchen had been hit by a hurricane. Plastic wrappings, melon rinds, and empty condiment bottles littered the countertops, and the floor was strewn with food wrappers, bits of ravaged cardboard food boxes, and other debris.

“Yang Shin-Hyuk!” Hye-Ok cried, wondering if the boys had hosted some kind of wild a party the night before. She stormed to the living room, certain she’d find further evidence, but the rest of the house appeared to be in order. Suddenly, a horrible suspicion dawned. She hurried to the staircase and made her way up to the second floor.

The apartment’s master bedroom was silent and gloomy, the drapes pulled closed to shut out the light. She hadn’t been in Jin-Ah’s room since the funeral because Seung-Bae forbade anyone from entering, even to clean the growing layer of dust. But she knew from Hawk that he came in here occasionally and sat in the dark, sometimes for hours.

She stepped inside. The room appeared exactly as she remembered it. Nothing had been disturbed. “Seung-Bae-ah?” she called out quietly. There was no response, so she moved to the foot of the bed and examined the familiar the portrait above it.

“Jin-Ah,” she sighed.

It had been years since she’d seen it, yet the portrait looked so vital, as if her best friend were standing right in front of her. “You bad thing,” Hye-Ok said sadly. “No matter what, no matter how unbearable it was, you should have lived for his sake.” The picture smiled serenely back at her, and suddenly Hye-Ok felt angry.

In the end, the weight of Jin-Ah’s suicide had been Hye-Ok’s to bear. She had been the one to leave dinner to burn on the stove when the call came. She had been the one to find Seung-Bae clinging to the body. She had been the one to comfort the boy through the traumatic aftermath. She had been the one to arrange the funeral. She had even been the one to hold the remainder of Seung-Bae’s world together when his father tried to send him off to boarding school. She’d fought to keep him close, to raise him the way she knew Jin-Ah would have wanted, with sincerity and affection. He was so much like Jin-Ah, his temperament fragile and introspective. Hye-Ok knew that Seung-Bae’s father, Myung-Jung, would have neglected him, maybe even ruined him. Just like he’d ruined Jin-Ah, the delicate and precious friend who was the closest thing she had to a younger sister.

An ache welled up in her chest, and Hye-Ok turned away. Her limbs felt leaden, as if her age had crept up and suddenly lay heavily over her. She sighed again and sat down on the cushioned bench facing the dressing table.

Despite the years, she could still remember the first day she’d laid eyes on Jin-Ah. Hye-Ok had been nine years old then – a sturdy, freckled wild-child whom the orphanage caretakers scolded constantly for unladylike behavior.  But Hye-Ok had known early on that timidity had no place in her life. If she wanted to survive, she had to be strong and grab onto what she wanted. She had to be better and faster and smarter than everyone else, even the boys. She had no memory of a mother or father; the cold, dingy ceiling of the institution’s sleeping room was the face she had woken up to every day of her childhood. That is, until Jin-Ah arrived.

Hye-Ok reached out to touch the pretty cosmetic bottles littering the surface of the vanity. Jin-Ah had always been so careful about her appearance. Especially when she first became sick and began losing weight, and Myung-Jung began spending more and more nights away from home. Hye-Ok slid open the vanity’s center drawer and ran her fingertips over the objects inside: old birthday cards, pale pink jewelry boxes and neatly folded silk scarves. She lifted a white one and something cold and hard slipped out into her lap. A necklace.

“Omo, I’d forgotten about this,” Hye-Ok smiled to herself.

While Hye-Ok had arrived at the Gimhae village orphanage as a baby, Jin-Ah had been four when her mother abandoned her at a village train station. Being five years older, Hye-Ok took on the role of big sister, and she nursed Jin-Ah through the misery and tears. She taught her to run and to laugh – and to forget. She even gave Jin-Ah her prized possession, a necklace that was the only piece of her birth mother that Hye-Ok had. She gave it to Jin-Ah to prove that they would always be sisters. She gave it to help Jin-Ah be strong. But … Jin-Ah didn’t need that strength any more.

Hye-Ok slipped the necklace into her pocket.

And then, unexpectedly, she heard a sound – the eerie ring of water dripping into itself and echoing off porcelain tile.

She rose from the bench and made her way across the bedroom to the dressing room. One wardrobe door had been left open, and Hye-Ok caught the lingering scent of Jin-Ah’s perfume drifting from the silk blouses hanging inside. Beyond the dressing room lay the master bath. The drip came from the bathtub’s faucet.

“Seung-Bae-ah?”

She stepped closer. The faucet dripped again. Over the rim of ivory porcelain, she could see a ripple travel the water’s surface. Small streams overflowed the tub’s edge. They spilled and pooled onto the tile floor.

Hye-Ok began to tremble.

“Jin-Ah?” she breathed. The name simply slipped out. Hye-Ok’s teeth clenched against a threatening chatter. She stepped closer.

A body lay submerged beneath the water’s surface. A girl’s body, curled in a fetal position. Motionless. Lifeless.

At first she was too terrified to react. Her brain registered the pale features of a red-headed wraith, but her muscles were still awaiting instruction, so Hye-Ok stood fast, gaping and shaking.

As the seconds ticked into minutes, a horrific realization came over Hye-Ok. The girl beneath the water wasn’t an illusion. She was real, and she was dead. With this frightful insight came the ability to scream, which she did in one breath-filled wail. Hye-Ok stumbled away, grabbing at empty air until her hands found the support of a towel rack.

She had just gathered her wits enough to recognize that she ought to call the police when the girl’s eyes popped open. Like a creature from a horror movie, the girl rose sinuously, dripping from the water that flowed off her body and out her nose and mouth. Her thin, white dress clung to her skin, and her arms hung loosely at her sides. She stared back at Hye-Ok blankly, looking every inch the embodiment of a crimson-headed ghost.

But Hye-Ok was past the terror of superstition; she now concluded that either one of the boys was playing a cruel trick on her, or this foreign intruder was up to no good. Either way, there was only one solution.

Hye-Ok charged forward and slapped at the foolish girl’s head and back, raving in indecipherable screeches as she chased the trespasser out of the bathroom, down the stairs, out of the apartment, into the elevator, and out into the building’s lobby.

“Get out!” Hye-Ok screamed. She bounced on her toes, swatting the air as she raged, then she shoved the wicked red-head across the marble tile until the girl’s shoulder collided with the glass of a lobby door.  “You … you get out of here, and don’t ever let me catch you here again!”

The girl gaped back, mute and anesthetized.

“Go on! Get out!”

The girl turned and, pushing her way outside, fled.