“My hair’s a mess and everything’s a wreck!”
Even so, she laughed.
“What are you talking about? You look beautiful.”
Whenever she laughed, her small, plump lips would narrow, forming a little hollow inside her smiling lips. She was like that when he first met her at eleven years old.
Tarim kept pressing the shutter button, following her to the sea.
“Only you get to see the photos!”
“Why? Other people can’t?”
“It’s embarrassing.”
Bare feet stepping on wet sand, round little toes.
He once told her, “Your toes are cute,” and she, the eleven-year-old girl, had muttered the same thing back then—“That’s embarrassing…” in a tiny voice.
The girl he met after transferring schools, named Mu-ru, was always quiet. Classmates whispered that she hadn’t always been like that.
“Actually, Mu-ru used to…”
She used to be great at ball games, good at running, and always led her group of friends. Until that incident.
The eleven-year-old girl who was playing near the Bibari well vanished without a trace and then returned unexpectedly. The kidnapper was never caught, and Ju Mu-ru changed—or so customers at her mother’s pharmacy said. The once bright, polite child had become dull and vacant. She neither cried nor laughed anymore.
Still, Park Tarim followed Mu-ru around. Behind them trailed Koo Baek-mo, a boy with a hearing disability who couldn’t play with other kids—always about twenty steps behind.
An adopted child and a once-kidnapped child.
They stuck together for a semester. Mu-ru only smiled when she was with Tarim. Because they didn’t yet know the word love…
“…I asked you to marry me, didn’t I.”
Tarim mumbled blankly, pulling his eye away from the camera lens.
“It’s cold!”
Mu-ru shouted as she stepped into the water.
Back at the car, Tarim pulled a shopping bag from the trunk that had held his camera gear.
After Mu-ru had finished wiping her feet with wet tissues and turned around, she saw the shopping bag swinging before her.
“What’s this?”
“A present.”
Inside the bag was a black camera and ten rolls of film.
“Actually, it’s not a gift.”
The compact vintage camera had the words LEICA M6 engraved on the front. It was an old Leica film camera.
“I’m just letting you borrow it.”
“Huh?”
“Because you gave it to me first.”
Mu-ru asked, surprised.
“Me?”
“Yeah. On the day you moved away. I kept crying, and you gave it to me.”
“I… gave you a camera?”
No matter how she tried to make sense of it, it didn’t fit. There was no way eleven-year-old Mu-ru would’ve had such a fancy camera. Even now, at twenty-eight, she didn’t know how to load film.
“Remember when I first told you I became a photographer thanks to you?”
“Yeah, I remember. I didn’t know what you meant, but… yeah.”
“I started taking pictures because of this. I practiced endlessly with roll after roll until I got it right.”
Her father in Gangneung never had an interest in photography. Not even phone cameras, let alone film ones.
So was it her mother’s camera?
And she just gave it away to her first crush?
“I’ll teach you how to use it. While I’m working, try taking a few shots.”
“Wow… Past me must’ve really liked you.”
“Haha. Because she gave me an expensive camera?”
“Isn’t this basically a wedding dowry?”
They both laughed together.
Tarim was just about to head out to the photoshoot location. He started the car and pressed on the gas. Mu-ru, still smiling as she examined the camera, suddenly asked:
“You can’t use the leather strap anymore, right? It’s too old?”
“No, I kept it in good condition, so at home—”
They both froze.
It was simultaneous. He naturally started to talk about the leather strap’s whereabouts, and she realized that was impossible.
Mu-ru gasped as the realization hit her.
“Wait—what did I just say? What…?”
Tarim pressed down on the pedal, calmly merging onto the road.
“It’s okay, Mu-ru.”
She looked down at the little hole for the camera strap. She remembered the strap that used to hang there.
“Take your time. Slowly.”
A deep brown leather strap. The kind made to wear the camera around the neck. It had once been attached, long ago.
The mudflat was wider than expected, and the shooting team was larger than she imagined. Instead of a sandy beach, they were shooting a summer swimsuit pictorial in the mudflats for a more unique vibe.
Makeup team, styling, lighting, and assistants were all stationed near the water.
From the parking lot where Mu-ru stood, the people looked barely finger-sized.
She snapped a photo of a wooden log stuck in the mud with the Leica and stood up. The team had moved closer.
She was embarrassed to be just a visitor and had been hiding. She had just now stepped out of the car.
Even from a distance, Park Tarim stood out with his head above the rest. His pants were rolled above his knees, and he bent repeatedly behind a large tripod.
The swimsuits supposedly trending this summer weren’t even visible from afar. Though it was spring, shooting outdoors in bikinis seemed tough. Yet the tall, slender models gracefully walked through the sinking mud, posing.
She had believed him when he said the photoshoot was his “side job” and that his main work was something else. She hadn’t expected the “side job” to be this massive.
Seeing it now, he seemed like someone who belonged to a distant world.
Come to think of it, she’d never shown much interest in Tarim’s job. Her own situation hadn’t left room for curiosity, but she still felt cold-hearted compared to how much attention he gave her.
She sipped on the iced Americano she bought from the food truck and sat on the edge of the parking lot curb. The camera rested quietly on her lap.
Just like when she remembered the two cartons of milk from the bathhouse, or Tarim flipping pancakes, the leather strap flashed in her mind—along with its smoky, aged leather scent.
She thought of a Conan Doyle story she had read as a child. The Speckled Band—the first Sherlock Holmes story she ever read.
Two sisters, trapped in their stepfather’s mansion, waiting for death. Before she died, Julia left a testimony to her sister.
“Helen—it was the band! The speckled band!”
The story had scared her so much that she slept with her father for days afterward. It was not long after they’d moved to Gangneung.
Her life before Gangneung was blurry, but her life in Gangneung was strangely vivid.
She had felt embarrassed speaking her Jun-san dialect among kids who used the Gangwon dialect. Having her father as a teacher at her elementary school through grades four and five also weighed on her.
She remembered herself as a quiet and reserved child.
She made more friends in middle school, and in high school, she often went out to town with them. Still, she couldn’t give up her habit of hiding away in libraries—because that never appeared there.
…The ghost.
The ghost that stubbornly followed her, always taking her form, along with her memory loss.
Julia died after seeing the speckled band, but Ju Mu-ru didn’t die from seeing the ghost.
She finished her coffee and looked around for a trash can. Not finding one nearby, she walked around the parking lot and ended up near the roadside.
She threw the disposable cup into a large trash bin near the entrance. As she turned back—
Her eyes locked on something in the bushes across the two-lane road.
A child was standing there.
A girl.
Ten, maybe eleven years old. She had a bob haircut that fluttered near her neck and wore a yellow dress, standing silently at the edge of the overgrown grass, staring at Mu-ru.
A yellow dress embroidered with tulips along the hem, black shoes, and black eyes quietly watching her.
A dark brown strap crossed diagonally across the girl’s chest, holding a black camera.
When the corners of the girl’s lips curved slightly, Mu-ru recognized her.
That deep, dimpled smile between the eyes and cheeks—
It was a young Mu-ru.
She ran across the road before she even realized it. Nothing but the yellow dress and the leather strap registered in her mind. She felt nothing beneath her feet as she sprinted.
SCREEEEEECH!
The deafening sound of a truck braking tore through the air—and the girl vanished like she had been yanked away.
Mu-ru froze in front of the truck that had stopped just in time. The angry driver shouted at her,
“MU-RU!”
Tarim’s voice roared from the beach.
He left everything behind and came running from the mudflat.
“…I-I’m so sorry. I… I wasn’t thinking…”
Mu-ru bowed repeatedly as the driver grumbled and drove off.
The entire crew had turned to look her way.
