case 02

chapter 19: but i was alone

The quiet, mechanical ringtone resonated through the empty apartment in non-committal intervals. With every pause, Irene held her breath, only to exhale defeatedly at the next, inevitable sound. The cycle of sporadic rings and stops continued, aggravating the jitters in her feet.

Her eyes flitted to the seat across her. It had been empty for weeks, perhaps months. She couldn’t remember the last time someone sat there. Wendy or Seulgi, maybe. Not J–

The ringing stopped. Irene’s heart fell to her stomach.

Then, there was a crackle of noise. Irene sat up straight, the faint semblance of hope trickling through her.

“Rene-noona?”

Irene’s eyes blackened. It wasn’t Johnny. “Taeyong?” she murmured. “Is Johnny there?”

“Oh, uhm–“ She sensed the hesitation of his voice. “Johnny left his phone in the car, so I just retrieved it for him. He’s negotiating with our clients right now. I’ll get him to call you back?”

There was a cacophony of discordant background sounds, led by what seemed like the loud roars of drunken men and Taeyong’s pointless lies. Irene in a breath.

“It’s alright,” she replied, voice strained. “Just make sure he gets back safe.”

“Will do, noona.”

The line cut. Irene’s phone clattered to the ground in a resounding thud. Her gaze was back on the chair, which seemed emptier than it ever was.

It shouldn’t have been empty. He should’ve been there–

Irene rose to her feet, grabbing the plate of roast chicken that had sat forlornly at the center of the table. Striding to the kitchen, she flung it into the sink, shattering the ceramic plate into pieces. She stared at the broken parts and slowly sank to the ground.

A loud sob escaped her lips as tears trickled down her cheeks. One sob became two, two became three, and soon Irene couldn't hear her voice.

Johnny realized he had been to Changmin’s only once – that one time he had gotten roaring drunk and somehow winded up on Changmin’s couch. Even then, he hadn’t taken a good look around. People only really noticed the things they were looking for.

But Johnny had always believed it was different when someone wasn’t really looking for anything. He would notice everything. Like the myriad of frames littered on all the empty surfaces, commemorating the many points of the family’s memories. Like the poorly-painted artworks mounted on walls and jarringly colorful ceramics – probably made by Changmin’s three children and insistently displayed by a proud Victoria. Like the scrawls and scratches at the kitchen doorway, marking the changing heights of the children over the years. They were all Changmin and Victoria’s labors of love, which were about to crumble into dust in a matter of weeks.

Victoria set two teacups in front of them. Seulgi could smell the tea – Junshan Yinzhen, probably a part of Hunan, perhaps even Changsha. Something was prodding at her ribs, and she swallowed quietly.

“They’re not here – the kids,” Victoria said, eyeing the unsettled looks on Johnny and Seulgi’s faces. “They started living together near their college at the start of this year when our youngest started his freshman year. No one’s around these days.”

Johnny nodded. He picked up his teacup and recoiled as the scalding tea burnt the tip of his tongue. It was a ferocious shock of sorts, as though he hadn’t had enough over the past weeks. He set his cup down and then exchanged looks with Seulgi, who seemed to be of the same mind.

“Victoria-unnie,” Seulgi started, “we–“

“–Want to ask why I’m divorcing Changmin, right?” Victoria finished her sentence. Seulgi had an expression of steel, probably cultivated by Changmin throughout the years, but Victoria could see the uneasy look in her eyes.

Victoria exhaled slowly. “It’s a long story.”

They had met in college, at the campus printing office. A driven, young law student accidentally swapped his notes on legal theory with a stack of musical sheets. The owner of those sheets –a beautiful exchange student– came knocking on the door of his lecture hall before his class had started to deliver it back to him, catching him completely off-guard. When he had snapped out of his trance, he managed to chase her down the corridor, asking her how she had found him.

“You wrote your name and class,” she had smiled back, in heavily accented Korean. She disappeared into the throngs of passing college students before he could get hers. Then, he realized that she’d failed to collect her own sheets from him, and that she too, had inadvertently written all her details on them.

The next day, he showed up at her dance studio. At her widened eyes, he smirked. “You wrote your name, class, and perhaps fifty lines of personal details,” he had chuckled. “Not scared of identity theft?”

Victoria remembered her heart pounding as she replied: “Well, you’re not here to steal my identity, are you, Shim Changmin?”

They had laughed. One thing led to another, and they were hanging out together after their classes, racing across the different ends of campus to spend lunch breaks together. He taught her Korean, and she taught him Mandarin, though, for someone so incredibly smart, he was dreadful at languages. He showed her around Seoul, and she promised one day, she would show him around Qingdao – the glimmering streets, the river across the city, the dance studio that she had grown up in. But he looked at her in a way that made her feel like home wasn’t too far away, and for a moment, she thought that was what love was supposed to feel like.

She was supposed to return to Qingdao at the end of the semester. She had been worrying about it for weeks, but they had talked about long distance. They thought that they would get through it, like the couples in all the books. But they didn’t have to. At least, not in the way they had initially expected.

For some reason, she decided to do a health check-up in Seoul a week prior to her return flight. It was a strange decision, because she could’ve easily gotten one back in Qingdao, where they already had most of her medical records. Luckily, she didn’t.

She was two months pregnant.

“Don’t go,” Changmin had said, gripping her hands. “I’ll take care of you.”

He had that look in his eyes again – the look that made her feel like she could give her whole world to him, that he could become her world. At twenty, Victoria was too young to know the world was bigger than a man in love. So, she made a call to her parents, and told them she wasn’t going back.

One year away became five, ten, twenty – and then Victoria stopped counting. Somewhere down the line, the look in Changmin’s eyes faded, and he started speaking in a language she couldn’t understand. The walls were closing, and in a space as empty as hers, Victoria couldn't breathe.

In between the lonely afternoons and prolonged silences, Victoria told herself that she had a beautiful house, a wardrobe b with beautiful dresses, and three beautiful, irreplaceable children. She should’ve been happy.

But when she closed her eyes, she heard the noise of the Qingdao streets, the running river, the metronome in the dance studio. She heard her parents, who asked her if her young, nineteen-year-old self was really ready to leave home for a place she’d never known. She wondered why she didn’t listen.

So, she started going home more often, with her weeklong stays turning into months. She found a dance studio near her kids’ college, and though she was out of shape she knew her muscles would eventually find her memories. She thought she could make do. She thought she had to. Her children needed a mother, and Changmin needed a wife. Qingdao didn’t need a resident who chose to leave, and the world didn’t need a dancer who forgot how to dance.

But–

Seulgi’s grip tightened against the porcelain her cup. Victoria sat in silence, eyes diverted a way. There was a ‘but’ – there had to be one, or else Seulgi and Johnny wouldn’t be there.

Victoria drew her breath. “Two weeks ago, one of the dance instructors got into a car accident and passed away. I didn’t know her very well, but she’d taught a few of the classes I’d gone for. She was in her late thirties, probably – a ballet dancer obsessed with Russian ballet.”

“At the funeral, it was revealed that she’d been saving up to continue her ballet studies in Russia. She wasn’t able to go when she was younger because of family issues, debt and just a general lack of courage. And she passed just weeks before her flight.”

Victoria started to quiver. Tears welled up in her eyes as she fixed her gaze on Johnny and Seulgi. “I know I’m being selfish. But, I’m forty-five this year. Forty-five. In another five years, I’ll be fifty. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have to dance… How much longer I’ll have to live. When the day comes that my life flashes before my eyes, I want to think that I’ve done everything that I’ve wanted to do.”

Seulgi heard the croak of Johnny clearing his throat. He kept his eyes trained away, but Seulgi already knew – if he wasn’t convinced weeks ago, now he was.

Seulgi shrunk into the wool of her scarf, feeling the gusts of cold wind bluster by. It was a strange time of the year to be strolling out in the open, but Johnny had been adamant on paying their alma mater a visit.

It had been a while since she had been back. Mostly due to circumstance – the unforgiving law school curriculum was a test of a student’s endurance for the even more unforgiving industry. In her first few years as a trainee lawyer, she barely had time to sleep, much less to reminisce. Years passed, and soon she thought she’d be much too old to appear in a place mostly filled with kids at the prime of their youth.

Winter served as a great camouflage. The padded coats, scarves and beanies hid their ages away from the passing students. Not that they would notice, anyway – their noses were so deep into their books that Seulgi could barely even see their heads. Outside the hall where she usually had her moot court sessions, a bunch of students in thin black suits shivered as they recited their lines, taking the whole concept of rain or shine to a whole new level.

Johnny followed her line of sight, chuckling softly. “Gosh, they’re insane,” he remarked.

Seulgi laughed and turned to him. “You used to hate mock trials, didn’t you?”

“That’s because the professors always pitted me against you,” he replied, leaning towards her. “You know how hard is to be the defense counsel when there’s you playing the prosecutor and asking for capital punishment? I’d be lucky if the eventual verdict was life imprisonment.”

“That’s way too dark.” Seulgi shook her head.

“It is, isn’t it?” Johnny stifled a chuckle. “I was always meant for corporate, and you for the prosecution.” He took one more look at the kids, who were still determinedly braving the cold while perfecting their arguments. “And I thought I’d never have to be pitted against you again.”