I Wanted Her to Be Free
A stupid question slipped out of me before I could stop it.
"Director Hong sent over the script? Does that mean I don't have to audition?"
"Audition, my foot! If anything, the director said he absolutely has to work with you. Heard he even rewrote the scenario off the inspiration he got from watching you act."
"Really? I get to play Cheon-young?"
"You better believe it! Aigoo, that happy about it? Look at that face—lit right up."
Clutching the script like a dazed fool, I made Gwon Du-il confirm it again and again. The adults watched me with fond, satisfied smiles. I barely noticed. What mattered was that this script had come to me.
Before the regression, Director Hong Il-beom had said it in passing: he should have met me sooner. If he had, he could have made a more perfect Cheon-young. He had never stopped regretting the girl he had written out of the first film.
Joseon Secret Royal Inspector was his first series, and the work he had poured more of himself into than any other—enough that he had wanted to reshoot a picture already finished. The first installment of that series had gone through hell when the lead actor's crimes came to light mid-shoot and they had to recast, and the second had collapsed before filming even began.
Director Hong Il-beom must have been in considerable agony himself, and still he had blamed himself for failing to stop what happened to me. He had tried more than once to persuade me to act again—whenever I was ready, he said.
I had refused him every time. But—
Not this time.
Now I could act as much as I wanted. Now I could repay every kindness I had received. I could play the Cheon-young he had regretted so deeply.
I had only been thinking of the roles I had played in my previous life, but Cheon-young made me greedy in a way those hadn't. So this is what they call hunger for a role?
"You really landed a wonderful project."
"Yeah. I'm going to work so hard."
Mom smiled and stroked my hair. I felt as if I could do anything.
A face like that on Su-a—smiling so brightly—was something Lee Ga-hee had not seen in a very long time. The child smiled often enough, but Ga-hee knew most of those smiles were social ones.
She had heard of this Director Hong Il-beom herself. Gwon Du-il had recommended him with total confidence, and Su-a wanted the part so badly. Until then, Ga-hee had had no particular reason to object.
"...This story is a little..."
The mistake had been waiting until they got home to read the script.
The Cheon-young Su-a would play was a fake shaman. She was being used by another character, yes—but she still invented spiritual powers she did not have, and used them to beguile people.
A fake shaman. In other words—
A cultist.
"Su-a!"
She hadn't meant to shout that loud. The child came running at the scream-like call, and that innocent face—as if she knew nothing at all—sent a strange chill through Ga-hee.
"You—this. This..."
The moment Su-a saw the script in Lee Ga-hee's hands, she seemed to understand. She approached with a calm face, took the script, set it aside, and clasped Ga-hee's hands—hands that had gone cold in the span of a breath.
Lee Ga-hee could not understand it. Why she had chosen a script like this. How she could be so unbothered. Whether she truly intended to play a cultist.
She herself was still in this much pain. Had her daughter—so much younger—already forgotten that time? Overcome it?
"Mom. Cheon-young... she's a lot like me, isn't she?"
Holding both of her hands tight, Su-a whispered—just as she had in the days when the space beneath a thick blanket had been their only sanctuary.
"Even surrounded by gold and jewels, none of it was mine. I couldn't eat a single thing I wanted, couldn't wear a single thing I chose. There was one person who could comfort me—but all we could do was endure that hell."
"..."
"That's why I wanted to play Cheon-young. I wanted her to become free, the way I am. I wanted to act out Cheon-young becoming free."
Because they still were not completely free. At Su-a's words, tears finally welled in Lee Ga-hee's eyes.
Lee Ga-hee's husband—Lee Su-a's biological father—had been a man consumed by a cult. He had seduced Ga-hee when she was exhausted by conflict with her German adoptive parents and by the loneliness of life in a foreign country, gotten her pregnant before marriage, and brought her to Korea. Through it all he had stood by while she was disowned by the family that had adopted her, steering her instead to depend on him alone.
With nowhere left to go, Lee Ga-hee had arrived—belly swelling by the day—at the den of a cult.
"Su-a, are you really all right? Mom's still... a little like this. You say you're fine, and it's only me who's still..."
She could not, in front of her daughter, say that she was still afraid, still struggling. This was a child who had been born and raised in that deranged place and had still grown up this straight. A child who had been forced to become grown-up because her mother could not be relied upon.
Lee Ga-hee had felt an enormous debt toward the change in Su-a that had begun several months ago. It had seemed as if the child had hurried into adulthood for the sake of an adult who could not properly support her. The more Su-a accomplished, the more Ga-hee told herself she had to become the sturdy adult holding her up from behind.
But becoming an adult was still hard. Even as a guardian with a child of her own.
"Mom. That isn't your fault."
Su-a said exactly what Ga-hee needed to hear, as if she had seen straight through her.
"I just got lucky and got through it a little earlier, that's all. It isn't because you didn't try hard enough, or because you aren't capable enough. It's more like a constitution. Like some people feel the cold more, or the heat."
"Lucky...?"
"Of course I was lucky. I happened to be born in a place like that—but I was born as your daughter, and we escaped together, and we're doing all right. I was lucky."
She said it with such a straight face that Ga-hee almost found herself thinking, Well, maybe? Su-a stretched up on her toes and wiped Ga-hee's tears away.
"Anyway. I have a pace that fits me, and you have a pace that fits you. You don't have to match mine. You'll run yourself into the ground, you know?"
"Then... if Mom told you not to do that movie, you wouldn't do it?"
The moment the question left her, Lee Ga-hee wanted to bite her own tongue. How childish could she be? Besides, Su-a had already given her the answer.
Just as Lee Ga-hee did not need to match Lee Su-a's pace, Lee Su-a did not need to match Lee Ga-hee's.
"If you really wanted that, I might."
She said it even though she had to know Ga-hee had already changed her mind. Every so often she turned mischievous like this, like a little rascal.
"If it gets hard, turning back isn't a bad thing either. You just can't stop running, and you can't forget the destination."
And then she would speak like someone who had already seen through the world, and Lee Ga-hee would feel, all over again, that her daughter was truly a genius. The kind who had a clear answer for every question, who had room to spare even when things did not go to plan, who never doubted herself.
"And what's the destination you have in mind?"
Lee Su-a answered as if she had been waiting for the question—easy, certain, as though it were a plan she had laid a very long time ago.
Lee Ga-hee pulled Su-a into a tight embrace. She did not know what expression to make, so she hid it the only way she could.
She did not know how a child like this had been born from her and that man. Gratitude and happiness she did not know where to put filled her, and still a corner of her chest ran cold.
There had been only one reason Su-a's biological father had approached her. To make a new body for the aging cult leader.
She had been subjected to absurd shamanic rites for the entire pregnancy, and the cult leader had watched even the birth.
Su-a was a child born that way. And so Lee Ga-hee sometimes—only sometimes—found herself questioning Su-a's genius.
That's going too far.
Su-a was extraordinarily intelligent and sharp, but she was an ordinary child. She had to be.
When she tightened her arms around the girl, a laugh burst out.
"I can't breathe~"
"If you want to do that movie, do it."
"Yay!"
"But if it gets even a little hard, you tell Mom or the boss. No speeding."
Su-a, who had buried her face in Ga-hee's chest, lifted her head. She met her eyes, studied Ga-hee's expression for a brief moment, and then broke into a wide smile.
"Okay!"
There was not the slightest hint of performance in that smile, and Lee Ga-hee would have to suffer the guilt of it for some time after.
I had made a mistake.
I had overlooked the fact that Mom was still in the middle of her trauma. I had gotten far too excited about receiving Director Hong Il-beom's script.
And I overcame it more than ten years ago.
Escaping trauma required professional treatment, but recommending a hospital visit right now was difficult. There might be cultists among the doctors.
I would have liked it to be an excessive worry. The problem was that there really were doctors who believed in the cult. Thinking of the physicians who had come for house calls when we lived in that den, I had never seen fanatics quite like them.
I'd had to get the vaccinations I should have received as an infant after we escaped, and it had been miserable.
Anyway, when you didn't know who was a cultist or where they lived, forcing Mom into treatment was too much. And even if you got her to a hospital that way, she wouldn't actually get better.
Put the other way around, it meant that once we were completely free of the cult, Mom's trauma would recover quickly too. The way mine had, before the regression.