Lifeguard Jeon

° O N E °

The summer my parents were getting divorced in Gwangju, I was banished. Like a child hitting the piñata, I felt bind-folded, spun in circles, then pushed to tumble off to hit the flying piñata.

I remember the airport. The sound of the airplane engines. The smell of gasoline. I headed for the plane with my luggage, sketchbooks, art supplies, Damon (my worn white teddy bear), and a sandwich, in case I didn't like plane food.

Before I boarded I looked up at the blue sky.

"Good-bye," I whispered. Then I waited. Would a cloud move or the sun shift? All I wanted was a sign, the smallest change, invisible to everyone  but me. Something I could hold onto.

But there was nothing.

I fastened  my seat belt and pulled it tight. We took off and I pressed my head against the seat, feeling the rush as the plane went faster until it pitched up into the air, as if turned weightless. I reached up to the necklace around my neck and closed my hand around the charm from my best friend, Jieun or her nickname (IU), gave me before I left.

"Arrive the same, leave different," the charm engraved.

Would it turn out that way?

° ° ° ° ° °

Two hours and ten minutes later with one stop, I arrived to another city.

Cousin Irene was waiting for me at the airport.

"Suzy-ah!" she said, hugging me.

I gave her a half smile and brought my bag into the trunk of her car. She rolled the windows, and we took off to her large old beach house near the water. She took my hand and I followed her upstairs to an dark attic bedroom. Dark until she opened the white wooden shutters.

"Ta-da!" she sang.

Sunlight lit the room in a blink of an eye.

I stepped to the window. Ocean everywhere with no beginning or end. A view like that stays in your head. It puts your life into perspective.

"So surreal," I awed.

For hours at a time that summer, I would sit on my window seat hypnotized by the waves, imagining the world hiding from the surface and wondering how I, a flicker of life, fit into the large universe before me.

My whole world would change after that summer. My parents were living together when I left. When I get back, they'll be apart.

"You'll come back to two homes instead of one," Eomma tried. But a positive twist couldn't convince me I'd be gaining something, instead of losing everything. I have friends whose parents are divorced. They need calendars to tell them where to sleep and checklists to track down their stuff.

And then there were the holidays. Where would I go for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years? How could I celebrate? Who wanted to go back and forth between new homes, no homes? Who wanted to live with sad, single parents looking to start over?

What I wanted was for everything to stop and go back. I wanted to live in before, not after.

But no one asked me what I wanted.

I try not to think of that now. Everything is different in Busan. I guess that was the point of sending me.

Cousin Irene's beach house was built about hundred of years ago, and when the wind blew it groaned like an old person getting out of an old chair. One night when it was stormy and it sounded like an battlefield in the sky, I heard strange whispering coming form upstairs. Was I imagining things?

In Gwangju we have thunder storms and and snowy weathers and even roaches as big as rats. But one thing we never had, in our house, at least, was ghosts.

"Is your house haunted?" I asked Irene, pretending to joke.

She takes off her glasses and looks up from her reading. "Oh sure," she waves me off.

° ° ° ° °

My bedroom was blue-and-white wallpaper and a double bed with a curvy white headboard and covers so soft. Beach scenery framed around the room. But the best thing about the room is the bay window filled with pillows where I like to sit and watch the ocean.

I don't mind being away from home, I decide right then. I don't mind missing college camps and being all alone. In some ways I like it better, because no one will ask me questions I don't want to answer.

° ° ° ° °

Irene has a dog named Joy, who's very curious about the new person in his house. She's part retriever and part something else. Like a dog detective, Joy sniffs at my pants, and then at my hair when I bend down to pet her.

"Am I okay?"

Her answer is to sniff and keep sniffing, instantly putting together a scent impression of me, the doggy equivalent of a police officer.

Joy is around four years old, Irene told me. She found her walking near the ocean one day, and she wasn't wearing a collar. When Irene took her to the vet, she didn't have a microchip to tell them where home was. Even though she was a stray, she looked well fed and she must have been well cared for because she wasn't easily scared in any way.

"It just seemed like the natural thing to bring her home and start the next chapter of her life and mine together," Irene had said. She already had three stray cats - Seulgi, Wendy, and Yeri, a hamster, two turtles, and a canary, so one more animal wouldn't make a difference.

Irene is like that. Nothing is a big deal to her - not stray dogs or cats, not ghosts, not divorces, and especially not homeless kids. And that's good because I honestly don't think I could survive five minutes in her house if I felt that she pitied me or anything.