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The yellow lamplight from the living room spilling through the long windows is now a familiar sight to Baek Sa eon. He can also call it a blessing.
Some nights, the lights are off, but he doesn't know yet of panic. Some nights, illuminated by fake sunlight, she paces back and forth the length of their house, hands always moving in words he doesn't understand. Some nights, she's dancing to a melody he can't hear and he learns of the lightness in her sway and can't quite imagine the smile on her face that replaces the words she can't sing. (Those nights, he sits in his car, watching her twirl in and out of view, until she tires herself out dancing.)
It has been twenty and some years of searching for the shadows of her movements within the yellow light, associating them with ‘it’s okay’; of wondering what her voice will sound like saying to him, “It’s okay now.” “It’s okay.” But for now, it is just his own voice in his head, repeating, as if learning, as if convincing, those two words.
The 9 pm news on the AM radio he always has open stutters as he drives down into the basement parking. Neither ‘Baek Sa eon’, nor the prime minister’s name, was uttered even once for neither good nor bad news; that means, it has been a good day.
The GPS informs him, just before he cuts the engine, “Now we have arrived to: our home.”
He sits with those words for a while in the sudden silence of a rapidly cooling car, five floors underneath the room where he actually wants to be but not like this. Not with the weight of the day still in his heavy breaths and stiff shoulders. The more he delays the inevitability of home, the more the lack of heating, the lack of noise oppress.
It is nearly 10 pm, almost half a work day later than a normal husband should be home by. He sheds his coat, his jacket, loosens his tie, as the elevator goes up, up, to this destination. He hopes that the door’s unlocking chime won’t wake her up, pushes away the hope that it will notify her of his eager arrival so she might come out of her room, or turn as he enters to look at him.
He finds Hee joo, not for the first time, asleep on the couch. The TV is on the cooking show that airs after the 9 pm news, but muted, which means she was waiting up for him, nothing more.
He doesn’t know why she does and he doesn’t want to come up with more refutable reasons why she shouldn’t. It’s been a long decent day, so he quietly settles himself on the other end of the couch to allow himself a moment of doing nothing but sit with the sounds of her sleep.
And when she shifts to get more comfortable, toes accidentally touching his thigh—that brief connection and the consequent moment—she lets out a disoriented ‘hnnh’ and a little gasp and an accepting sigh on an exhale as she relaxes back into sleep, as though his presence by her foot is a normal occurrence.
They could pass, if they were to have what he assumes of an ordinary home life, as a couple that watches the news together every night and then the cooking show that makes easy recipes that are in fact quite difficult, but he would attempt to cook for her anyway and she’ll eat the meals at the table with him with many, many complaints. He wishes to listen to them all and to make her laugh, not just amuse her, and to hear her open laughter.
But the reality is this: she goes to sleep on the couch alone and he sneaks in this moment with her.
He lowers his hand, gentle as a snowflake’s touchdown, onto her ankle to take the edge of her knit trousers between his fingers. Outside the snow falls equally silently, beautifully, and in this home that holds his wife, he is warm.