Off Leash

It was about sixteen hours before her first day of work when Jeong-ae came home. The Jeju sun had apparently been strong, because her face was slightly sunburned. She opened the door of the annex wearing the raffia hat Se-bin had bought her, and a short-sleeved dress Se-bin had also bought her, looking for all the world like the lady of some wealthy household — a strangely incongruous image against the cramped container annex.

"Hae-soo, honey, Mom saw dolphins this time! They're so curious, they kept swimming right up close to the yacht — it was just amazing. Look at this one, they say it's a baby. That's the mama dolphin, swimming right beside it, glued to its side."

Still riding the afterglow of her trip, Jeong-ae opened her phone album and held it out to Hae-soo. Photos and videos — easily five hundred of them by any estimate — unspooled one after another before her eyes. No matter how fast her fingers scrolled, there seemed to be no end.

Half of them, it seemed, had been taken with Se-bin. There were selfies, and there were shots that looked like they'd been taken with the help of some stranger's hands.

"This one's some arboretum — you wouldn't believe how big it was. My legs hurt so much we couldn't even see all of it. Oh, and they say the camellias are gorgeous in winter, so we agreed to go back when it gets cold. You should come with us too, Hae-soo, if you have time."

"Mm-hm."

Hae-soo nodded absently and looked down at the rectangular device. On the screen, Jeong-ae and Se-bin stood arm in arm against a backdrop of pale blue hydrangeas. They were wearing identical hats, and their wide, beaming faces looked somehow alike. Eyes, nose, mouth — dissect them one by one and they had nothing in common, and yet.

"...Anyone who saw that would think you were a mother and daughter who actually get along."

"Right? They all kept asking if I'd come out here to play with my daughter."

Jeong-ae laughed and agreed to the remark Hae-soo had let slip without thinking. Hae-soo glanced briefly at her mother, who was unpacking her suitcase.

"So what did you say?"

"What was there to say? I just said, 'Yes, she's my daughter.'"

She said it so casually that Hae-soo couldn't very well snap back at her — the daughter is me, you know. Still, there was no helping the sourness churning in her gut, and the hand that set the phone down was just a little less than gracious.

Oh. This phone was a gift from Park Se-bin, too.

Hae-soo watched, with newly wary eyes, as the objects at Jeong-ae's fingertips found their places one by one, stacked neatly in their spots.

A handbag with a designer logo in crisp relief. A wispy silk blouse. An eye cream purportedly containing some kind of caviar extract, over seven hundred thousand won a bottle.

All of it had been given to Jeong-ae by Se-bin. The coffin-sized prefab house was stuffed with such expensive things. Gifts given for her birthday, given with an apology for snapping at her, given because she was in a good mood and felt like shopping, given because a refund was too much hassle...

Then Hae-soo's eye fell on the two supplement bottles sitting on the desk. One purple, one pink. Both marketed for menopausal women, but their prices were triple the other's difference.

The pink one was the one Hae-soo had bought — the cheaper of the two. Worried about her mother tossing and turning sleepless night after night, she had compared and researched and agonized online before placing the order.

Three days later, Jeong-ae had walked in carrying a purple shopping bag. Even the packaging — wrapped in gold leaf as if to trumpet its premium line — had been blindingly glamorous. It boasted the highest price tag of any similar product on the market.

A nearly empty purple box, and a pink box still brimming full.

It must be the difference in efficacy. It has deer antler in it, and something like baeksuo, ground up in generous amounts...

Well, at least her mother was now sleeping soundly, so that was a good thing. Hae-soo pushed down the sinking feeling in her chest and called out to Jeong-ae.

"Mom."

"Mm? What is it?"

"When I graduate and get a job, we're moving out of here then, right?"

"Of course. I'll just laze around the house, living high on the hog off the money my pretty daughter brings home. What else?"

Jeong-ae said it without so much as turning around, hanging clothes on the rack. The breezy, chuckling way she said it made it clear she wasn't taking Hae-soo's words particularly seriously.

"I'm not joking, Mom."

Hae-soo crawled across the floor to Jeong-ae and pulled at her wrinkled hand. On those rough fingers, never dry a day in their life, gleamed the gold ring Se-bin had bought to celebrate Jeong-ae's fortieth birthday. She pretended not to see it and pulled her mother down to sit.

"I mean it. I'm being completely serious."

"What's gotten into you today? Are you nervous because it's your first day at work tomorrow?"

"It's not that. I just don't want to watch you suffer anymore, Mom. Like you said, I can bring home the money and you can just relax and take it easy. On days you don't feel like cooking, order in. On days you don't feel like cleaning, put it off a day or two. No — actually, I can do the cleaning. So..."

"Aigoo, my pretty girl. Just hearing you say it is a gift."

"Ugh, seriously. I told you, it's not a joke."

"Okay, okay. That'd be nice for me, wouldn't it? Just — no nagging me later, telling me to stop lounging around and go out and earn money. Deal?"

"Never. I promise, never."

Jeong-ae stroked Hae-soo's head tenderly as she spoke with such resolve. The smile seeping across her generous face carried a thread of regret for her own lost youth.

"Sweetheart, it's lovely that you think of your mom, but don't push yourself too hard. Don't grow up too fast either. If you do, Mom will feel too guilty, and it'll break my heart."

"What are you even saying? What on earth do you have to feel guilty about, to me?"

As if words couldn't hold everything she felt, Jeong-ae simply smiled in silence. If she thought back to the day she'd held her newborn — wailing, tiny fists clenched tight — against her chest, even now her vision went blurry.

A child born under an unlucky star. They say a mouth always finds food, but how on earth was she supposed to raise this little scrap of blood and bone on her own? If she could only take it back inside her body — no, if only it had never existed at all — she felt she could have sold her very soul.

Hae-soo had been born after her father's death. Five months after the man called her husband died in an accident, the child had announced its existence from inside the womb. By then it had grown too large to be removed.

Looking back now, Jeong-ae had truly had no eye for men. She'd fallen for a pretty-faced loafer who liked his liquor and his women, and at the tender age of twenty had set up housekeeping in a basement room no bigger than a closet. The first year, she'd been so happy it felt like the whole world belonged to her. Perhaps that was God's mercy, a grace period before the long ordeal ahead.

The man who'd once stayed out a night or two a month, claiming work, eventually came home only once or twice a month. She knew he was carrying on with another woman out there, but she loved him, so she endured it. He'll come to his senses someday. When he's a bent-backed old man, we'll see who laughs last. She'd waited and watched, biding her time through years of solitude.

What waited at the end of it was a corpse — run over by a car while drunkenly jaywalking — and the debts the corpse had left behind in her name.

Jeong-ae was stripped of even her meager deposit by creditors and thrown out onto the street with nothing. Raised without schooling, she did whatever work came her way as long as it kept her fed.

First she stuffed sausage casings at one end of a market. Then she cleaned at an inn. A customer's introduction got her a job at a sock factory. Then one day, without warning, she collapsed in a spurt of blood from her nose. When she opened her eyes in the hospital, the doctor was clicking his tongue, asking how a pregnant woman could be so careless.

She was more than seven months along, and she hadn't known a thing.

Had she simply wanted to survive? The baby had curled itself up like a snail, its body absurdly small for the number of weeks. No fetal movement, no swelling belly. The way she'd sometimes gagged while scrubbing pig intestines raw — that, in hindsight, had been morning sickness.

So that's why my period stopped.

Jeong-ae realized it too late. The world went black before her eyes. While she could only beat her chest, wondering what to do, the child that had finally announced itself to its mother grew at a furious pace. Her belly swelled by the day. Less than two months after learning she was pregnant, her water broke and she was loaded into an ambulance.

At the hospital where she arrived, Jeong-ae met Chairman Park and his wife — and Se-bin. She was being discharged, clutching the newborn swaddled in a blanket, sobbing hoarsely like a lost child.

As she passed through the hospital doors, a gaunt new mother came toward her, supported by her husband's arm. At the voices asking what was wrong, whether she was hurt, her tears poured down like rain. Jeong-ae, her throat choked, poured out her situation in words that made no sense — she just wanted to unburden her desperate reality onto someone, anyone. She wanted comfort.

'Would you like to come stay with us?'

The woman who'd reached out her hand, her face full of compassion. That was Se-bin's birth mother. The benefactor of a lifetime — the one great blessing in Oh Jeong-ae's ill-fated life. Jeong-ae laid down her life of drifting like a wayside weed and began living as a dependent in a house like a palace. Here she paid off every last debt, and raised that tiny infant into a grown woman.

And yet, looking back now, it was as if the child had raised herself. On the bare minimum of nourishment needed to survive, Hae-soo had grown into a child-adult who could handle everything on her own, briskly and without complaint.

That was what Jeong-ae could never forgive herself for.

Sometimes it made her so ashamed she'd rather turn her face away.

"I know how hard you've worked, Mom. Just hold on a little longer. I swear I'll give you the good life."

Toward Jeong-ae, smiling bitterly at the thorn-studded memories, Hae-soo held out her pinky finger, steady and unwavering.

"Pinky promise."

Even as she thought she hardly deserved to receive so much love, Jeong-ae silently hooked her own finger through her daughter's.

"That's right. It's a promise."

The hand that had once been small as a fiddlehead had, before she knew it, grown as sturdy as a tree root. For a long moment, Jeong-ae felt a quiet ache of sorrow.