Page 104 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 5-8
Jun stared at his phone for a long moment, then raised his eyes to meet those of Mi Hi and the others. “Well, fuck.”
An hour later, Yun called back. Stopping the sale wasn’t as simple as just saying no. Now there was an investigation. Officials wanted to speak to Jun. Requests had been put in for paperwork. Jun gritted his teeth and answered what he could, Yun staying with him on the line. When Yun let him go, Damian called.
“Your father’s in custody. They arrested him for identity fraud at customs, coming back from the Caribbean.”
Jun braced himself with his hand on the nearest wall. “He’s arrested.” He needed to say it out loud to make it feel real. But it didn’t. It wasn’t. His head buzzed, and his limbs felt like they belonged to someone else.
“They found his South Korean papers on him when he was stopped. Pearsen gave them everything they needed. So now it’s being investigated.”
Jun closed his eyes. “Is this good news or bad news?”
“It’s good. It means we’re one step closer to reclaiming your identity and figuring out what he did with it.”
Everything was happening all at once.
“Isn’t it suspicious, the attempted sale and my father getting arrested all at once?”
“Not really. It seems they spooked and started making moves. We were just one step ahead of them. When crooks try to cover their tracks, that’s when they often get caught.”
Jun steadied himself with a breath. Damian made sense. He was going to have to trust that. He did trust it. It was just a lot. How had they gotten to this point, when what felt like only days ago, there had been attempts to arrest him for murder? Or perhaps that was still a thing working its way through the system.
“I want to be with you.”
“I can have someone drive you back. Right now.”
Jun shivered. “Yes. That. I want that.”
His father had been this mirage for so long, a shadow over his life, something not quite real, a promise never kept. Even researching with Alice, it had all been static, historical artifacts on a screen. Nothing present, nothing he had to deal with personally, at least not then. Now it felt frighteningly real. He was that nine-year-old boy again, watching his life being torn up in this strange adult's hands. He pressed his forehead against the wall, trying to catch his breath.
Jun
Jun went up to his window seat on the third floor and wrote lyrics, thinking about the night before.
When he couldn’t write anymore, he went searching for his computer and typed in his mother’s name on a whim.
There wasn’t much to find. Records of her as a grad student came up, some of her US publications. He saved them to his files and copied a picture of her, his hand on the Buddha hanging in the pouch on his neck. Everything he could find about her ended the same month she had taken him to South Korea. Searching Chinese sites brought up little.
Where did you go, Mama?
He stared at the picture of her from her university days. She looked exactly how he remembered her. Long black hair pulled up behind her head in a French twist, light-maroon lipstick, and green eyeshadow on an oval-shaped face. Her eyes were laughing.
Would you have still left if you had known?
Using childhood memories, he tried to use the online maps to find their apartment the way Alice had taught him. He remembered the grocery store and his school. Piecing together memories, he drew a rough map on the back side of one of his pages of lyrics. His elementary school, their apartment, the park, the bus stop, the dance school, the theater where he’d first had an acting part, singing and dancing in a musical. Some things he remembered, like the name of his dance studio; other things he couldn’t recall, like the name of the theater, but he did know the name of the play he’d been in and the name of the director.
Collin appeared above him. “What are you doing?”
“Piecing together what I remember from before, when I lived in Seattle with my mom.”
Collin crouched down, studying Jun’s rough map. “You have a good memory.”
“Afterwards, when I was with Bak and felt alone, I’d try to remember everything. When I still thought my mom might come back for me. I didn’t want to forget so that I could make everything go back to how it used to be.”
“Nothing goes back to the way it was before.” Collin’s fingers caressed the paper. “But these look like good memories.”
Jun nodded. “They are.”
“You should send this to Pearsen and Alice.”
