Homecoming From Hell

It's been about two months since her dad has come home. So, it's been two months since Hyun has seen Chanyeol. Flowers are sprouting in the dark corners of her heart and she has no one to share it with because May is exam season. Hyun shouldn’t feel disappointed; she predicted this.

Sure, Chanyeol sends the occasional text that says something like ‘good morning’ with a big smiley face. But, a cheesy text doesn’t come close to hearing his voice or seeing his face which Hyun misses more than she thought she would. Their almost relationship is coming to a slow, terrible end before it ever really started. Hyun couldn't imagine her life getting anymore bitter until Sunday comes around. She's lying in bed and sketching nothing spectacular when her dad comes into her room. 

“Lala.” He doesn’t even bother knocking. His “#1 pops” apron is wrinkled and only hanging onto his body because of the neck strap. The strings around his waist aren’t tied. He looks more tired than Hyun remembers ever seeing him.

“We have a guest," he says. His expression is unreadable. Hyun has the strangest feeling that her dad looks like a ghost, or, at least like he’s seen a ghost. The lines around his eyebrows are creased more deeply than usual.

“What guest?” Hyun asks, capping her pen and sitting up. Her eyes are still trained on her dad’s, trying to put together a puzzle where the pieces fit somewhat but not exactly.

“I think you should see for yourself.” Her dad’s chest stutters visibly. Hyun gets up and follows her dad out into the hallway. White light from the sun spills through the open blinds, illuminating the living room as they walk down the stairs. The second floor seems dark in comparison. Hyun follows closely behind, hardly believing that she actually has to squint because, damn, it’s bright. 

“Crap.” Her dad trips over a step, and Hyun catches the crook of his elbow just in time before he goes tumbling down the rest of the steps. Her dad looks back up at Hyun seeming abashed and confused. He smiles gently.

“Thanks, pumpkin," he says with a wry smile.

“Dad, are you okay?” She's actually getting worried now.

“Fine, fine. Just-” He doesn’t finish the rest, just pats Hyun’s hand so she can let go. She does. They reach the landing of the stairs. Just a few steps are left before reaching the living room. Her dad advances on but Hyun stays put. 

A woman is sitting on the couch in front of the television. Her long, black hair is pressed and shining in the midday sun. She’s tanner than Hyun remembers, though. And she’s less luminescent. Her eyes aren’t glowing red, either. Just a clear brown. Almost as if she's actually apart of their world. The only odd bit is that she is sitting in their living room and not dancing into the ocean like she’s seen so many times over. The words sit on the tip of her tongue, not daring to slip out. 

She doesn’t want you.

Then, why is she here?

The woman notices her standing there. She smiles meekly. She flashes her dad a careful, apologetic look before standing and walking up to Hyun. The teen finds her legs moving without her brain telling them to. She’s also shorter than Hyun remembers. The top of her head is level with Hyun’s chin. 

“Lahyun.” The woman’s eyes are full of scary emotion. What if Hyun’s eyes are like that, too?

If she doesn’t want me, why is she here?

“I missed you,” her voice cracks on the words, and her lips are trembling. The teen nods solemnly.

“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. You’ve gotten so big, my pretty girl.”

Hyun nods again, flinching internally. Then they just stare at each other. Hyun wonders where her mother has been all these years to just show up now, out of blue, with this expectant look on her face like she’s supposed to jump into her arms and pick up where they left off. Who does she think she is?

She never wanted you.

“You left,” Hyun says, anger rising in the pit of her stomach the same way it rises in her voice, unconscious but powerful all the same. “You snuck away in the middle of the night and...just left. You didn’t call, or even write.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. Hyun is blind to the regret in the woman’s voice as her own gets louder and less stable. 

“It’s been well over ten years. I always thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was a crappy daughter and that’s why you didn’t want to stay. Why are you even back?” she chokes out the words around the sobs rattling in her throbbing chest. Her face is hot and her eyes are blurry from the unshed tears and everything hurts but she can’t think of a way to express herself. 

“Hyun…”

Skinny arms wrap around her middle and take hold. Hyun doesn’t want some stranger touching her like this. 

“Hyun.” The woman's voice sounds pathetic, even to her own ears.

And just like that, as if an arctic wave crashes against her senses, she wrangles herself out of the woman’s grip and steps back. Her chest is still heaving and her eyes are wet, red, and trained directly on hers. She shakes her head.

“Why did you leave?”

“Hyun, please.” The woman begs. It makes the anger burn hotter in Hyun. Where the hell does this stranger get the audacity to beg Hyun for anything? 

“I waited for 10 years.” Hyun is damn near raging at this point. "You slipped off like a bandit in the night and never came back. News flash, the grace period for forgiveness has passed. You can go back to your other family now. You're very much unwanted here."

“Hyun.” Her dad’s voice catches her off-guard, uncharacteristically strict. “Just sit and hear her out.”

“But, dad-” she immediately protests.

“Lala, please."

Hyun freezes, is nearly shaking when she walks past her to the couch and sits, palms cupping her knees and spine rigid. The woman’s small feet somehow produce a hollow thump on the hardwood. The teen startles when the woman sits next to her. Her dad stays standing next to the blank television. He’s crossing his arms and staring off somewhere. Why doesn’t he look angry? She left them. She just up and left and never took the time to write or-

“I’m sorry.” The woman places her hand on Hyun’s arm, ducking her head to catch Hyun’s eyes. She glares at the woman. She does so unconsciously even if she isn’t apologetic in the slightest for it. The woman is looking at Hyun and she’s looking at her back. She can’t help but draw out the features of her face that she’s seen in herself in the mirror, frustrated to find that half of her physiognomical makeup is strange and unfamiliar to her. Her chest hurts now. She needs to cry again, but she won’t.

“I couldn’t take being here anymore. I had problems that I needed to sort out before I could raise two children,” she says, straight-faced and in severe contrast with Hyun who feels like she’s just been run over by a freight train. The remnants of her frown evaporate into the air.

“I didn’t want you to see me go through that.” Hyun is fully aware of the pressure, how it shifts from her hand to her forearm. She would've looked down if the fresh tears glittering in the woman’s eyes didn’t have her warped. Hyun frowns deeply. Her anger is competing with her compassion. 

The battle is dizzying.

“It’s mostly under control now," the woman says.

Hyun should be happy. Right?

“That’s good,” Hyun finally says, hesitating over the final word.

“Yeah.” The woman sighs. “I’m better now. I missed you so, so much.”

The woman hugs her. Hyun looks over at her dad, who’s gone teary-eyed by now. The teen picks up her hands, stares at them for a solid minute, and then wraps them tentatively around the woman’s waist, fingertips touching. She’s so small, too small.

It’s strange.

It’s strange the sensation she feels when this woman hugs her like she’s known her for her entire life when nothing can be farther from the truth. Maybe she should hate her. Maybe she does hate her. Maybe she has the right to ignore her until she leaves and never comes back. Or, are they worse than enemies who at least are obligated to feel something because of the other? 

Are they strangers?

Biology says that Hyun is a piece of this woman, her apple if you will. An apple that has rolled far away from the tree and taken root in another orchard. 

“I missed you.” The woman squeezes her tighter. Hyun sits there.

“I love you," the woman says.

What is she supposed to say?

“Uhm…”

Smooth.

The woman pulls back and stares at her closely. She looks like every nightmare Hyun has ever had. Except, the difference? She’s awake this time. The fuzzy edges unconsciousness provides are missing. She’s too sober to be dealing with this. This can’t be real. Her mother is a faraway lady dancing in faraway seas, her hair blowing wild around her thin, pixie-like face. She would pinch herself to check, if only this woman--her mother, weren’t gripping her hands for dear life and making her feel like some sort of artifact freshly picked off a shelf and dusted off after years of idleness. It isn’t nostalgia, but something more bitter that she can’t control.

“I’m going to, uh-” Hyun stands, disconnecting their hands and backing toward the stairs. She raises her hands in an effort to make coherent sentences. Unfortunately, everything coherent fails her and she ends up turning away and briskly walking, nearly running, up to her room. She just barely has enough energy to close the door and make it to her bed. 

“What the hell?” Hyun breathes shallowly into her pillow and bites her lip, daring for a sob to come out. None does. She’s happy to share this bit of information. Though, she’s very unhappy to share that the reason she doesn’t cry is that she’s so frustrated that anger translates to fear to sadness to confusion so quickly that her body is conflicted.

Her body's clock ticks the wrong way. It could be hours and minutes that have passed when her dad comes in. She surfaces from her haze for long enough to feel his presence. He doesn't say anything. What is there to say?

He leaves.

It’s possible that she sleeps because one moment she’s tired all over, and the next she’s rolling over on her bed. The screen on her phone tells her that’s it’s 7.39 pm. Hyun has no other choice but to sit upright and think straight. She stands up and takes a moment to stretch the kinks out of her body before walking over to her desk, turning on the lamp. She pulls her pad and a pen out of the drawer and flips to a fresh page. They’re all yellowed at this point because she’s had it since she was fourteen. She puts ink to paper and sits there, bleeding a black hole through the first paper and well into the one behind it. Her mind is overrun with images of rainy nights and twirling pixies and why can’t she keep herself from going insane? Her body is a maze of tension coiled so tight she nearly pops several blood vessels when her door opens.

“Hyun?” Her mother’s voice is haggard. She may have been crying. 

“Yes?” Hyun doesn’t turn around.

“Sweetie?”

Hyun takes a deep breath and turns around, meeting eyes with her in the semi-dark. Is her face glowing, or has Hyun really, truly lost it? 

“Yes?” She snaps, bitter.

“I’m sorry,” her mother says.

“Don’t be.” Hyun turns around again. She picks up her pen and scribbles mindlessly. is closing up on her as the tears she refused are finally dawning.

“I never wanted to leave you and your brother,” she says. Hyun nods. She gets hung up on the ‘you and your brother’ for a while. So, she wanted to leave in the first place, just not Hyun and Kyungsoo. But why? 

She doesn’t say anything. 

Her mother keeps talking.

“I tried so hard to get better. For you. For Kyungsoo. For all of us.”

Her voice trembles and Hyun’s hands start to shake. Her chest is warm as well. She doesn’t want to do this. Not right now. Not ever. 

“I never stopped thinking about you. Not for one second. Not for even half that. I missed you every day. I savored every picture and every video your dad sent me. I missed you until I couldn’t breathe.”

“Stop, please.” Hyun throws down the pen, shoves her pad aside, and lumbers across the room to her bed. 

“I always loved you. I still do.”

“I’m going to bed now.” Hyun gets under the covers and lies her head down on the pillow, twisting to face the wall. 

Her mother doesn’t leave. She keeps talking. 

“I told myself that you were doing well. That’s the only way I could keep myself away and healthy. I told myself that you were doing well and that if I called it would ruin things for all of us. I could only live with myself if you were doing well, sweetie. I didn’t mean-”

A surge of powerful anger shocks her out of her own thoughts. Hyun sits up and throws the covers off her legs. 

“What didn’t you mean to do? To sneak off in the middle of the night?” Her breathing picks up.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you. Or your brother. It would have been hard for all of us.” Her mother steps closer.

“You’re right,” Hyun says, infuriated. “It was hard. It was so hard at first that I stopped living after that. The kids hated me after I started hating myself. I scraped my knee all the way to the bone when a boy pushed me off the swing onto concrete and no one bothered to tell the teacher. Did you know that?”

“No, no. I-” she stutters.

“Of course you wouldn’t know that. Because you weren’t there. I’ve been homeschooled since the third grade. I thought you hated me, so I hated me, and everyone else did too. You screwed me over.”

Dammit, she’s crying now. 

“Honey, please-”

“It would have been better if you left?” Hyun scoffs and roughly wipes a tear from her cheek. She doesn’t even care at this point. “That’s a coward’s excuse. We could have...I could have grown up with a mom. We could have helped you through whatever you were going through. You weren’t being some hero when you abandoned your family without so much as calling or sending a dumb letter. You were being selfish. How am I supposed to forgive you?”

Her mother just stands there for a minute. Hyun can’t see her entire expression as shadows paint it an ugly shade of indifference. She eventually is too tired to even sit up, so she lies back down and squeezes her eyes shut. The door closes soon after. She hates herself a little because she’s alone again, and it’s her fault this time.

Hyun almost laughs when she stirs some time during the night. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not on a normal night, and definitely not on a night like tonight. She lies in bed with her phone pressed to her chest and thinks about who she has to call before she implodes. Her very first course of action is to calculate what time it is in California. Since it’s 2.27 am here, it should be around morning there.

Hyun is happy that she’s right when he picks up the phone after only two rings, sounding as fresh and awake as the morning dew.

“What’s up, baby sister?” A smile is in his voice. Hyun coughs to clear as sour emotions threaten to impede what she is trying to do. She takes a second to contemplate how she should say it. She is still struggling to understand, so the long-winded version she could give him is still tumbling around in her head, stubborn and difficult.  Her next thought is to rip it off like a band-aid.

“She came back,” Hyun says vaguely. 

“She?” Kyungsoo says. “Who’s she?”

“Mom, Soo. She...she’s back.” is tight again.

There is a long pause. 

Kyungsoo is still there because Hyun can hear his suddenly ragged breathing. He just isn’t saying anything. When he finally does, it comes out in a rough tone. “What about dad?”

“He seems completely fine with it,” Hyun says frustratedly. “Like, he doesn’t look mad or anything. She left us and he was as cool as a cucumber. I didn't understand it. I still don’t.”

“Tell you what,” Kyungsoo says. “We have a break soon, in about a month. Hang in there until I get there. I’ll call dad as well.”

Hyun’s voice drops without her being conscious of it. “You will? What about-”

“This is everyone’s business. I don’t have that leisure anymore. I’ll talk to him. All you have to do is be strong until I’m there. Can you do that for me, squirt?”

“It’s going to be hard,” Hyun admits sadly.

“Paint, read, listen to some music. Do all of the things you like. Before you know it, a month will have gone by and I’ll be home. Okay?”

“Okay.”