Once the Shore Read Free Page B

shortened their stay on the island lest the incident provoke anti-American sentiment, which was developing on the mainland. A group of college students had formed a rally in front of the walls of a U.S. Army base outside of Seoul. There had been a skirmish at a bar involving a G.I. and a teenager. Jeeps had been vandalized with words painted on the windshields: Go Home.
    But she would not. Now that Jim had mentioned the caves. Afterward, perhaps. Or maybe she would stay. It felt very possible to do so.
    During a furlough, her husband and a friend joined a fishing crew and sailed to this island. They spent the day swimming and walking along the beach. In the distance their ship, a sentinel in the shape of a fingertip. There were no other reminders of what they would soon return to. Not even the distant roar of fighter jets. On that morning it was as if the war had paused for a day
and while the fishermen rounded the island her husband collected coral and urchin shells, took photographs of the hills and the forests inland, and chased crabs.
    There, on that coast, he found a cave. A wide mouth that drank shallow seawater at low tide, its walls as tall as the entrance to a fortress within the earth. He waded in. Not too far for it was dark. Far enough so that he could still see his own hands, sunlight concentrated into the shape of an egg behind him. He picked up a stone. And against the right wall, he inscribed his initials and hers and drew a heart around it.
    There it would remain for the rest of their days, he told her. On an island at the opposite end of the world he knew was waiting after all this. Four letters and the shape of a heart etched in stone.
    The first few times he told this story she believed him. And loved him for it, pressing her cheek down against his chest without speaking. They were in their thirties then and life seemed as they imagined, living in a town in upstate New York with enough fields to walk across in the evenings. Her letters to him during the war had gone unanswered. He had never received them, he said. But it didn’t matter anymore. Because he had written against the wall of a cave. To her. Somehow, though she couldn’t explain why, that was worth more than a lifetime of correspondences.
    But when she asked him one day to see the photographs of the island, he hesitated. He lost the camera, he said. Stolen by
a little Korean boy. And as the years progressed his story began to change. Not dramatically, but enough to make her pause, repeat the story in her mind. It wasn’t a fishing boat. It was a small motorboat. Three friends instead of one. They were AWOL. It wasn’t a stone but a shard of coral. And the more the story changed the more she wasn’t sure herself what she heard on that first night.
    He was getting older. Age transformed memory. That was what she told herself. And why say such a thing if it never happened? It was her inability to answer this that allowed her to forgive him. She wasn’t angry. No. Just puzzled.
    Later, she would find in a drawer a stack of photographs. Men beside a fighter jet spray-painted with the words: Eat This MiG . A group of young girls smiling shyly. Another girl bending over as her husband pointed a pistol at her rear. And one of the sea, flat and emerald, and set against the horizon a wide island with a mountain at its center.
    She rushed outside to where he was changing a tire, her duster in one hand with feathers the colors of a rainbow, saying, “Is this it? Is this it?” until he snatched the photograph and told her to never go through his possessions again.
    It was only in the evening, in bed, that he nodded, said, “Yes, yes, that was the island. That was it, baby. That was where I wrote to you.” He pulled her shoulders to him and she felt a quickening and shut her eyes and imagined herself folding, refolding, growing smaller, and then she turned away
from him, pretended to sleep, and felt as though she were sinking.
    So when Jim answered