Page 62 of The Way Back Home

More smoke, pouring from the hallway that leads to her bedroom. The fire hasn’t reached this part of the building yet but the smoke has colonized every corner, hanging low. I push through, stumbling, my eyes streaming so bad I can barely keep them open. The heat is pressing in on all sides.

Her bedroom door. I find it with my shoulder, slam into it, and it gives. I tumble into the room.

She’s on the floor beside her sleeping mat, crumpled, her body curled on its side. Not moving. My heart hammers as I drop to my knees beside her, press my fingers to her neck, feel the faint flutter of a pulse.

“Okay,” I gasp, coughing. “Okay. I got you.”

I get her arm over my shoulders. She’s small and light, but my own body isn’t cooperating. My arms shake. My lungs are screaming for clean air and instead I’m pulling in mouthful after mouthful of poison. I manage to get her upright, one arm locked around her waist, her weight sagging against my side.

“Come on, Halme. Stay with me.”

She stirs, makes a choked sound. I start moving back through the door, into the hallway, the smoke so dense now I can’t see the walls. I feel my way with one hand, the other gripping Mrs. Nam. My palm touches the wall connecting to the store and it’s hot, burning, I jerk my hand back with a hiss and keep going. Through the connecting door. The store is worse than when I left it, the flames have spread to the second row of shelves, the ceiling tiles are sagging, dripping molten plastic. I duck low, pulling Mrs. Nam with me, and move for the shattered front window.

Glass crunches under my shoes. I can see the streetlight through the smoke, a pale beacon. I aim for it, dragging us both through the broken frame, and then we’re out onto the street, the night air rushing over us, cool and startling, and I stagger across the street until my legs decide they’re done and I drop.

We end up on the curb, both of us coughing, heaving. Mrs. Nam is awake now, her body racked with deep, wet coughs, her small hand gripping my sleeve. I wheeze, trying to pull in a full breath and can’t, my lungs feel singed from the inside, like someone took a blowtorch to the lining and left it smoldering. Every inhale burns. Every exhale tastes like ash.

I hear Mrs. Nam’s thin voice, shaking, calling Ryowoon’s name between coughs. I force my head up, my streaming eyes searching.

Ryowoon is at the side of the building, a garden hose in his hands that he must’ve ripped from the neighbor’s yard. He’s spraying the wall where the flames are trying to climb to the second story, the water hissing and steaming where it hits. His body is lit up in the firelight, his jaw set, his feet planted. He doesn’t back up. The flames surge and he braces and aims the stream and holds.

I want to stand. Want to get up and help him, grab another hose, throw water, do something, anything. My legs won’t move. My chest is caving in on itself, each breath a wet rattling sound that doesn’t bring in enough air. I cough and taste metal at the back of my throat.

Mrs. Nam clutches at my arm, her voice cracking as she calls out for Ryowoon to come away, to leave it, that it’s not worth it. But he doesn’t hear her or doesn’t listen. He dives at the flames where they’ve crept around the corner toward the front, driving them back with the hose, his shirt soaked through, steam rising off his arms.

People start to appear. Lights flicker on down the street, doors bang open. Voices, shouts. A man I recognize as Mr. Goh from three houses down comes running in his undershirt and sandals. Then more of them, neighbors roused by the smoke and the noise, stumbling out into the dark in their pajamas. Men rush forward. Someone produces another hose. Someone else starts hauling buckets.

I watch from the curb, flat on my back, staring up at the smoke pouring across the stars. My chest rattles with each breath. Mrs. Nam’s hand is still gripping my sleeve and I can feel her trembling beside me.

All I can remember is trying to breathe, and then eventually it just fades out.

I wake up to whitewashed walls and the antiseptic smell of hospital. My mom’s face hovers above me, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, her hand squeezing mine so tight it hurts.

“You’re awake,” she breathes, and then immediately her expression shifts from relief to fury. “You crazy child, what were you thinking? Running into a burning building—”

“Where’s Ryowoon?” I gasp in a sandpapery voice.

“He’s fine, he’s—”

“Where is he?”

“Next door.” She smooths my hair back from my forehead, her hand shaking. “You’re both idiots. Matched pair of absolute idiots.” Her voice cracks and she bends down, pressing her forehead to mine. “Brave, though. So brave. You saved her life, Seyeon.”

The relief makes me close my eyes against it. I remember Mrs. Nam’s small body crumpled on the floor, the pulse fluttering under my fingers. “The store?”

“It made it. Ryowoon got the fire under control before it could spread too far. The neighbors helped with the rest.” She pulls back, looking at me with an expression equal parts pride and devastation. “But not without a price.”

She’s still talking when the door slides open and Ryowoon slouches in, one arm wrapped in bandages from wrist to elbow, grinning victoriously.

“Look who’s awake.”

They keep me for days. Smoke inhalation, they say, from prolonged exposure. My lungs took a beating and they want to monitor me, make sure there’s no lasting damage beyond what they can already see. One of my palms is bandaged where I touched the wall getting Mrs. Nam out, blistered and raw underneath the gauze. A few cuts from climbing through the broken window. Nothing that won’t heal.

Ryowoon’s left arm got the worst of it. Burns all down his forearm from fighting the flames, the skin angry and weeping under the bandages. It takes weeks to heal properly and when it does it leaves behind a collection of shiny scars, pale against his skin, twisting from his wrist halfway to his elbow.

“More for the collection,” he says.

Mrs. Nam comes by every day. She had minor smoke inhalation, they tell her, nothing serious. She cries when she sees us, clutches our hands, calls us her boys, her brave foolish boys. The fire inspector comes by too, explains that the old space heater in her bedroom had faulty wiring, that she’d turned it on for the first time that season and it sparked within minutes. They tell her she was incredibly lucky. That if we hadn’t walked by at that exact moment, if we’d been even ten minutes later, she wouldn’t have made it.