Snowed In with the K-Pop Idol

Part One — Snowed In

Hannah · December 12, night · Twelve nights until Christmas Eve

There were three places to sign.

Hannah Bennett sat at the kitchen table and counted the boxes marked in yellow highlighter, one at a time. Buyer: Summit Ridge Resort. Seller: Hannah S. Bennett. Property: 14 Maple Hollow Road, Hollybrook, Vermont. Sixteen acres, one building, six guest rooms, one crooked staircase.

The staircase wasn’t in the paperwork. Hannah had added that herself. In her head.

Her father had built this table out of maple. One corner still carried the H she had dug into it with a fork when she was seven, and the round stain in the middle was where her mother, one Thanksgiving, had set down a hot pot without a trivet. The papers lay squared up on top of that stain. The barley tea beside them had gone cold and grown a thin skin, and the kitchen smelled faintly of radiator iron and the toast she had burned at noon.

The wall clock passed eleven. Outside the window it was neither white nor black. The snow was coming down so thick that the night looked packed with gray cotton. The radio had been saying the same thing all evening. Nor’easter. Two inches an hour. I-89 closed along the whole northern stretch. Avoid all unnecessary travel.

No one was going to travel unnecessarily. Hollybrook was that kind of town. When it snowed, people stayed home, and the next morning they gathered at Pete’s General Store to argue over whose roof had taken the most.

She uncapped the pen.

Acceptance deadline, December 26, noon.

She didn’t have to sign yet. “Take your time, Hannah,” Grant had said. “Get it to me after Christmas, that’s fine.” She knew that was kindness. She also knew the kindness was a lot more frightening than the bank. The bank sent past-due notices. Grant brought cookies.

She capped the pen.

Getting up to turn off the porch light was just habit.

Hannah was always the last person in this house to turn off a light. The upstairs hall, the lamp at the foot of the stairs, the small one by the living room fireplace. And last of all, the porch.

She stopped for a second with her hand on the switch.

You don’t turn off the porch light on a snowy night, Hanna-ya.

Her mother’s voice. In memory her mother always spoke from the direction of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel, half in Korean and half in English.

Nobody gets left outside. Not on a snowy night.

Even after her mother died, two Decembers ago, Hannah had kept the rule. Not because she wanted to, but because it felt as though something would end the moment she turned it off. For two years, on every snowy night, the porch light had stayed on. And for two years, no one had seen that light and come.

You can turn it off tonight.

The house would be gone soon anyway.

Her finger had just started to press down.

Knock, knock.

Hannah took her hand off the switch.

The wind, she thought. Or a slab of snow sliding off the roof. This house had gone up in the 1890s and made every sound there was in winter. The stairs creaked on their own, and the radiators wailed all night as if someone were in there with a hammer.

Knock, knock, knock.

That one was unmistakable. A human hand, and a very weak one, rapping with a single knuckle.

She drew her father’s old baseball bat out of the umbrella stand by the door. Then she opened up.

The snow came in first.

Flakes driving in sideways poured over the threshold, glittering in the yellow of the porch light. In the middle of all that glitter stood a man.

He was tall. He was wet. More precisely, he was wet and well on his way to frozen. Something close to icicles hung from the ends of his hair. Snow had whitened his eyelashes. His lips were purple.

His clothes made no sense. No coat. No gloves, no hat. Instead he was wearing a silver jacket, a silver that caught the porch light and flashed like a mirror. Halloween had ended two months ago.

Stage costume?

That was the first thing that came to her. The second was that this person was about to die.

The man opened his mouth. No sound came out. He tried again, and this time a tiny breeze of a noise leaked through.

“…room.”

It was a whisper. Words made entirely of air, by someone who had no voice to make them with.

“Do you have… a room?”

Hannah lowered the bat.

“Get in here. Quick.”

He got one foot over the threshold. It folded under him.

By the time she reached out he was already tipping. All that height came down toward the hall table. She caught him by the shoulders, but the ice-cold jacket slid through her hands, and his elbow swept across the tabletop.

Crash.

Hannah knew that sound. She knew it without looking.

It was the snow globe.

It took her five minutes to drag him as far as the living room.

Hannah was five foot six, and for the two years her mother was sick, she had been the one who moved her, alone, from bed to wheelchair and from wheelchair to tub. She knew how to handle a person’s weight. This man was simply much heavier than her mother, and much longer.

She got her arms under his and locked her hands across his chest and pulled, walking backward. The heels of his wet sneakers followed along the wood floor, drawing two lines of water behind them. In the last month, her mother had weighed under ninety pounds. She had come up so easily every time Hannah lifted her that the lightness had frightened her more than any diagnosis. And now, hauling this stranger whose weight felt like it would break her back, she found herself, absurdly, relieved. Someone this heavy didn’t seem like someone who could die easily.

She laid him on the rug in front of the fireplace, added two more logs, and worked the bellows. When she tried to pull down the zipper on the wet jacket, her fingers shook badly. It wasn’t from the cold.

Pull it together, Hannah.

Under the jacket he wore only a black turtleneck, and that was soaked too. She ran up to the linen closet on the second floor and came back down hugging four blankets and a stack of towels, grabbing the hair dryer from the bathroom on the way. She cut the wet turtleneck off him with scissors, muttering an apology. She wrapped him in the blankets. She tucked hot water bottles into his armpits and against the sides of his neck. It was the order she had learned volunteering with the ski patrol in high school. Don’t rub. No alcohol. Warm them slowly.

As she was draping the silver jacket over the chair by the fire, something fell out of the pocket.

A phone, its screen black. When she held down the power button, a red battery icon blinked once and went out. And a small piece of black plastic, shaped to fit in an ear. A hearing aid, she thought, but it was too glossy for that, its lines too sleek. On the back, tiny silver numerals had been engraved. 02.

No wallet. No ID, no car keys. Which meant that in this weather, at this hour, with no coat, he had come up the hill to this house on foot. From the Hollybrook turnoff to the top of Maple Hollow Road was a twenty-minute walk. On a clear day.

Slid off the road and put his car in a ditch?

Or ran away from someone.

She decided not to think the second thought. She put the phone and the black piece back in the jacket pocket. They were someone else’s things. There was nothing her mother had hated more than people touching a guest’s belongings. A bag is that person’s house, Hanna-ya. You don’t go walking into someone’s house uninvited.

She set the hair dryer on low and thawed the ice in his hair. The ends of the black strands had gone slightly brown, as if a dye job were fading. Three piercing holes in one ear. Carefully kept fingernails. Those weren’t hands that did manual labor.

What did he do for a living?

Hannah shook her head. It didn’t matter. Right now he was just a person who had seen a porch light on a snowy night and come to it.

His eyelids fluttered.

“Hey. Can you hear me?”

Instead of answering, his lips moved. No sound.

“What’s your name?”

His lips moved again. She put her ear close to his mouth. Cold breath brushed the rim of it. It wasn’t anything she could make out. It didn’t sound like English.

Korean?

She lifted her head and looked at his face again, the color seeping back into it little by little in the firelight. East Asian. Late twenties or so. And — this was much too ridiculous a thing to be thinking under the circumstances — excessively good-looking. Like a watch model in a magazine ad. The kind of good-looking that makes a person tired.

Enough. He’s a hypothermia patient.

She picked up her phone. 911. One bar, then none. One bar again. Cell phones always did this during a Hollybrook blizzard. The landline was in the kitchen.

She would need the flashlight. The power might go. She opened the bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet, the one her mother had called the emergency drawer. Flashlight, candles, matches, rubber bands, half-burned birthday candles.

And under the flashlight, a folded sheet of paper.

Hannah knew the handwriting at once. It was her mother’s. Even in English, her mother had written the way she wrote Korean, pressing every letter hard into the page.

Across the top it said:

Grace’s Christmas List — 우리 집 크리스마스 목록

1. Cut down a real tree yourself.

2. Hot chocolate by the fire. Three marshmallows, always.

3. Make a wish at the town tree lighting.

Hannah read that far and no further. Under the thumb that held the paper, she could feel the grooves the ballpoint had left, like braille. What chair had her mother been sitting in when she wrote these words? The moment she wondered, something pulled tight and sore just under her breastbone, the way a muscle does when you suddenly use it after a long time. For two years she had practiced taking only the flashlight whenever she opened this drawer, and until now that trick had never once failed her.

She folded the paper back up, returned it to its place, and shut the drawer. The click was much too loud.

Not now.

Without the flashlight, she picked up the receiver of the kitchen landline. There was a dial tone. She pressed 9.

Then, from the living room, came the sound of a blanket shifting.

The man’s eyes were open.

The firelight wavered inside them. He looked at the ceiling, at the fireplace, at Hannah standing in the doorway with the receiver in her hand. A hand reached out from under the blankets.

She put the receiver down and went to him. She knelt.

“It’s okay. I’m calling an ambulance. The road’s closed so it might take a while, but the fire station’s right in town, so—”

Cold fingers closed around her wrist.

There was no strength in that hand. She could have shaken it off whenever she liked. But she didn’t, because it was trembling, and not only from the cold. It was the hand of someone terrified. In those last few weeks, her mother had held her wrist exactly like that, every night.

His lips moved. English this time. The soundless whisper pushed the air out one word at a time, with effort.

“Don’t…”

Hannah stopped breathing.

“…call anyone.”

His eyes closed again.

The fingers around her wrist did not let go.

Over by the front door, the wind knocked at the crack. Under the hall table lay scattered glass and a tiny model of a house. The snow globe her mother had ordered for her when she was ten, made to look exactly like this place. Red door, wide porch, right down to the crooked stairs.

The porch light was on.

She had forgotten to turn it off.

Gyeoul · December 13, before dawn · Eleven nights until Christmas Eve

A wooden beam ran across the ceiling.

Yoon Gyeoul lay there studying it for a while. It was thick and black, real wood, with axe marks still showing here and there. Hotel ceilings were always white. Suite or business hotel, Montreal or Chicago or Seoul. White and flat, with a sprinkler set exactly in the middle. For the past eight years he had fallen asleep and woken up under hundreds of ceilings like that.

This wasn’t one of them.

When he shifted, the blankets rustled. Four of them. One plaid, one hand-knit, the other two heavy wool. A water bottle, gone lukewarm, was wedged against the side of his neck. The logs in the fireplace had nearly burned through, leaving only red coals. The smell of woodsmoke, and faintly, cinnamon.

In the armchair next to the sofa, a woman was asleep.

His memory came back in reverse.

The porch. A yellow light. A woman holding a baseball bat. The door, before it opened. Before that, snow. Nothing but snow. Up to his ankles, then up to his knees. Snow hitting him in the face. Before that, a road. A two-lane road without a single streetlight. Before that—

The rest stop.

The Montreal show had started at six in the evening, moved up two hours because of the blizzard forecast. Gyeoul had lip-synced seven of the sixteen songs. The company had picked the number. Every song with a high note played his recorded voice while he matched his mouth to it. The other nine he sang for real. Or rather, half pretended to sing for real and half actually did.

The ENT in Toronto had spoken slowly, in English. It’s a vocal cord hemorrhage. No phonation for at least two weeks. Don’t talk. Avoid whispering as much as you can. If you sing now, there is a chance of permanent damage.

The company staffer interpreting for him had put all of it into Korean and left out the word “permanent.”

Gyeoul understood English. He had been learning it since he was seventeen, and six tours had hammered it into him. He had heard “permanent.” He had said nothing. He couldn’t. They’d told him not to talk.

After the show came the bus, running all night to Boston. They had to get through Vermont before the blizzard caught up, he’d been told. With no time to change, he got on the bus still wearing the silver jacket from the encore. One in-ear monitor was still in his ear. Member number 02. Jaeha-hyung, the leader, was 01, and he was 02.

Around ten, the bus pulled into a highway rest stop. Go use the bathroom, they said. Twenty minutes.

Instead of the bathroom, Gyeoul walked around to the back of the building. He wanted to breathe. The air on the bus was always warm and heavy, somebody’s cologne mixed with the smell of cup ramen. The sound of his manager, Junho-hyung, up front on the phone, juggling next week’s schedule. The sound of Sunwoo, the youngest, pulling out an earbud to ask, “Hyung, are you okay?” Gyeoul had nodded. He always did. Nodding didn’t take a voice.

Behind the rest stop it was dark, and the snow was pouring down without a sound. Under the parking lot lights the flakes spun around as if they were dancing. Gyeoul watched them and thought:

Twelve days from now, it’s my birthday.

The night of December 24, Metropolitan Arena, New York. Tour finale and “Noel Birthday Concert” in one. At the stroke of midnight, twenty thousand people would wave amber light sticks and sing “Happy Birthday.” Then, from the center of the stage, he would sing “First Snow.” Same as every year. Eight Christmases and eight birthdays since his debut at nineteen, and “First Snow” every single year since he was twenty-three.

This year he had no voice.

The company already had a plan. The high parts of “First Snow” would come from the recording. Keep the talking short. Make the cake-cutting long.

Behind the rest stop, Gyeoul took one step. Then one more.

He hadn’t meant to run away. Honestly. He only wanted to walk for a while. Somewhere no one was looking at him, somewhere he didn’t have to sing anything, for five minutes.

Five minutes turned into ten. The lights of the rest stop shrank behind him. The flakes got fatter. When he tried to turn back, he couldn’t tell which way he had come. His footprints had already been erased. He took out his phone. Four percent battery. Just as he went to call Junho-hyung, the screen died. The cold had gotten to it.

He found out later that the bus had pulled out right around then. Junho-hyung thought he had gotten into Van 2, and the staff in Van 2 thought he was on the bus.

Gyeoul walked for an hour. Maybe more. He followed a two-lane road and passed a sign. Hollybrook, 2 mi. After that, uphill.

For the first twenty minutes his ears hurt. After that they didn’t. His brain knew that not hurting was worse, but it was no longer doing a good job of getting orders through to his legs. The silver fabric that shone like a mirror under stage lights did nothing whatsoever against the wind, and it clung wet to his back. Inside his pockets, his fingers were slowly turning into someone else’s fingers.

Once, something like a car’s headlights went by in the distance. He opened his mouth to shout. A noise like torn wind started up his throat and quit halfway, and he tasted blood. The throat that had brought twenty thousand people to their feet could not manage a single “Hey, over here.” It made him laugh. He actually did laugh, a little.

Then the laugh stopped, because he had started to wonder what the headline would be if he went down right here. The company would put out a memorial album, and the fans would light amber candles. And in a tiny shop in Nampo-dong, Busan, his mother, stirring a pan of tteokbokki, would look up at the television on the wall. When his thoughts reached that scene, his foot pulled itself out of the snow again. Then the other one.

At the top of the hill, beyond the blowing snow, a single yellow dot.

It was a porch light.

The woman in the armchair stirred.

Gyeoul held his breath and watched her. Her features were half Asian, half white. Shoulder-length black hair, carelessly twisted up and now half fallen down. Her plaid flannel shirt, a man’s by the look of it, was much too big for her. The corners of her mouth were tight. It was the face of someone holding something up, even in her sleep.

She didn’t know who he was.

Last night, as he remembered it, her eyes had held nothing. No shock, no swallowed scream, no hand sneaking a phone out of a pocket. She hadn’t seen “Noel.” She had seen a hypothermia patient. A wet man, a collapsed stranger, a body that needed saving.

Under the blankets, Gyeoul slowly smiled.

Eight years. It had been eight years since anyone looked at him as if seeing him for the first time.

Five in the morning. The window was turning a deep blue.

Gyeoul wrapped one of the blankets around himself like a cape and went to the kitchen. The wood floor was cold under his bare feet. The kitchen was big, old, and clean. Copper pots hung on the wall. One of the refrigerator magnets was in Korean. Jagalchi Market, Busan. He stopped in front of it. That was twenty minutes by bus from his mother’s shop.

A landline hung on the wall. Beige, with a curly cord. A genuine old-fashioned telephone.

He knew the number by heart. Junho-hyung’s number hadn’t changed since their trainee days. If he changed it, Junho-hyung liked to say, the kids wouldn’t be able to find him.

An international call. One more thing he owed this house. It rang twice before someone picked up.

“Hello? Who is this?”

Junho-hyung sounded hoarse, like someone who hadn’t slept a minute all night.

Gyeoul put the receiver right up against his mouth and whispered, in Korean.

“…Hyung. It’s me.”

The line went quiet. Then it exploded.

“Gyeoul-ah? Gyeoul, is that you? Where are you? Do you have any idea how many hours— I was this close to calling the police, you know that? Jaeha talked me into waiting till morning. Where are you? I’ll come get you right—”

“Hyung.”

A whisper couldn’t beat a shout, so Gyeoul waited until Junho-hyung stopped to catch his breath.

“…Don’t talk. Your throat. All right, all right, just tell me where—”

“I’m safe.”

“That’s not what I asked. Where are you?”

Gyeoul looked out the kitchen window. A hill buried in snow, a sky growing bright and blue, the faint shape of one church steeple down below. He’d seen the name of the town on the sign.

“I’ll be there on the Eve.”

“What?”

“The twenty-fourth. New York. I’ll be there. I promise.” He was out of breath. Whispering used more air than you’d think. “Until then… don’t look for me.”

“Gyeoul-ah, do you have any idea what you’re saying—”

“Hyung. The doctor said two weeks. You heard him too.”

Silence. A long, heavy one. In it Gyeoul could see Junho-hyung’s face, eyes shut, a hand pressed to his forehead. He had heard the word “permanent.” He’d been sitting right next to the interpreter.

“…Call me every day,” Junho-hyung said at last. “Every single day. You miss one, and that’s the day I go to the police.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll handle the company. Resting for health reasons. That’s all they get.”

“Thank you, hyung.”

“Don’t you thank me, you little shit. You scared me to death.”

As he hung up the receiver, Gyeoul sensed someone behind him.