Sizzle Pie had other plans for me. As if in observance of some kind of sadistic hazing ritual, the restaurant threw me onto the weekend night shift to break me in. I started at ten p.m. and clocked out at six in the morning. At two, when all the bars let out downtown, a horde of drunken college students flooded in for slices and the entire shift was a scramble of throwing slice pies and heaving large, wooden paddles in and out of hot ovens until four in the morning, when the restaurant finally closed. Two hours later, having scoured a day’s worth of flour from every cranny of the kitchen, I was finally released to the dawn.

Afterward, Peter would pick me up. On the nights I worked, he stayed up at home translating documents from French to English, freelance work he’d found on Craigslist. I’d crawl into the passenger seat, every bone in my body aching, burns all over my arms, a centimeter of flour adhered to my contact lenses, and between bites of a leftover pepperoni slice, he’d beg me to quit.

“The money’s just not worth it,” he said.

It wasn’t about the money. I wanted to stay as busy as possible. I wanted to work my body as hard as it could go so there was no time to feel sorry for myself, to bind myself to a routine that would keep me grounded in the last remaining months before Peter and I left Eugene for good. Maybe I was punishing myself for my failures as a caretaker, or maybe I was just afraid of what would happen if I slowed down.

When I wasn’t at work, preparing meals at home, or packing up the house, I would go to the little cottage at the bottom of the property to write songs. I wrote about Julia, and how confused she was, sniffing and pacing outside my mother’s bedroom, about running on the treadmill and sleeping in hospital beds, about wearing my mother’s wedding ring and the isolation of the woods. They were conversations I wanted to have with people but couldn’t. They were attempts to unpack the past six months, when everything I’d once thought I knew for certain about my life had been undone.

When they were finished, I asked Nick, who was back and forth between Eugene and Portland, if he’d play some guitar on them. We’d remained good friends after high school and he was enthusiastic about helping me with the album. Nick introduced me to Colin, a pansexual Alaskan transplant with a rifle collection who played drums and had a bedroom studio in town where we could record. With Peter on bass, the four of us recorded a nine-track album in two weeks. I called it Psychopomp.

By late February, most of the house had been packed into boxes. March would mark ten months of captivity and it was time to move on with our lives. Peter and I set our sights on New York, where we planned to hunker down with a couple of 9-to-5s and finally commit to the transition to normal adulthood. But before consigning ourselves to limited vacation days in exchange for corporate insurance, we’d have a proper kiss-off. With our wedding money, Peter and I planned a belated honeymoon in Korea. We’d visit Seoul and Busan, and make up for my family’s lost trip to Jeju Island before heading back to the East Coast to start the job hunt.

On Kakao, much aided by Google Translate, I tried my best in short English sentences and patchwork Korean to convey to Nami that Peter and I were planning to visit. Nami wrote her replies in Korean and sent them to Seong Young or Esther, Emo Boo’s daughter, to translate them into English, copying-and-pasting them back to me, insisting we stay in the guest room at her apartment.

I was hesitant to take her up on the offer. I’d wanted to connect with Nami since she left Eugene, but navigating our language gap was extremely challenging. The nuances of the feelings I so desperately wanted to communicate felt impossible to express. More than anything, I didn’t want to intrude. For the past four years Nami and Emo Boo’s apartment had served as a revolving door for dying guests. Now that my mother had passed away, the last thing I wanted was to be a reminder of dark times, a burden that Nami felt the need to shoulder.

I often thought of her while going through old letters and photographs among my mother’s things, and I struggled to decide whether I should share them with her or shield her from them. The photographs made me feel closer to my mother. The ones she inherited after Eunmi died were still new to me. It was thrilling to see her as a child, with her short hair, wearing sneakers, in sepia, to see the three sisters as children, my grandparents young and attractive.

But I wondered if for Nami it would be different. A candid color photograph taken in some type of banquet hall showed the three sisters lined up oldest to youngest, dancing the conga with their parents. They were dressed up as if for a wedding. Elegant patterned wallpaper and matching drapes hung in the background. My grandfather led the line with a white tie and a fashionable tan suit. Halmoni, dressed in a pink blazer, held on to his waist from behind. Nami was in the center, eyes closed, mid-laugh, holding on to her mother’s hips. She faced the camera, unaware of its presence, wearing oversized pearl earrings and a bright turquoise dress. My mother was behind her, her hair in a puffy perm with bangs, looking ever so stylish in a black tuxedo. Eunmi, the caboose, dressed modestly in a dark blue patterned dress with flowers. All of them were facing forward, captured in profile. It was the only photograph I’d ever seen where Halmoni was smiling.

They were all ghosts now. Only the center remained. I tried to observe the photograph from Nami’s vantage, imagining their bodies slowly fading from the frame in a postproduction dissolve, like in the movies where a character goes back in time and changes the circumstances of their present.

My mother once told me about a time when Nami went to see a fortune-teller. She was told she was like a giving tree. Her destiny was to shelter and to nurture, to stand calm and tall and shade whomever lay beneath, but at her base, there would always be a little axe, slowly striking at her trunk, slowly wearing her away.

All I could think of now was, Am I the little axe? Nami deserved space and privacy and a quiet, calm household. I was reluctant to intrude on that, but I also felt like she was the only person left who could understand how I really felt.

* * *

—

IN LATE MARCH, just a few days before my twenty-sixth birthday, my father took Peter and me to the airport. We hugged goodbye, full of mixed emotions. Our departure brought the first chapter of our mourning to a close, and as much as my father and I worried about each other getting on with life, attempting to pick up the pieces, we were equally relieved to be rid of each other.

It was Peter’s first time visiting Asia and I was excited for him to experience the pilgrimage I’d grown up making every other year. My mother and I always flew Korean Air to Seoul. She would grab a Korean newspaper, neatly pressed from the stacks set out at the end of the jet bridge, and buckle in, excited to scan the familiar text to which she hardly had any access at home. The flight attendants, all beautiful Korean women with long black hair and perfectly smooth, milky complexions, would take their final turns up and down the aisles and bit by bit, as on the pilgrimage to H Mart, the transient space we moved through acquired contour and color, the impression of our destination engendered long before our final descent as if produced by the pressurized cabin.