An Eternity of Dead Sun (An Eternity of Eclipse Novel Book 2) (19 page)

“I wasn’t sure at first,” he admitted, lowering his eyes to my wrist, “but when I saw your gold bangles, I knew it couldn’t be any other child.” He brought his eyes back up to me. “What brought you back after all these years, Grace?”

“I’ve been running away for so long,” I said slowly, seeing no point in further pretending that I wasn’t Grace Hwang. “It’s time that I came back to my roots.” I looked at him, never feeling more vulnerable now that I was with someone from my past—someone who knew exactly who I was. “Do you believe I killed them?” I asked unexpectedly, my eyes unblinking. I didn’t know why I asked it and what I hoped to hear. The question came out faster than I could’ve stopped it.

“No,” he answered without faltering. His voice teemed with lament and sincerity. “I don’t believe you killed them, Grace. Not you.”

The answer was simple, unwavering, and honest.

I smiled gratefully at him.

Hearing him say that gave me hope. A piece of my soul was stolen that night, but prior to that, it was still intact. If he trusted that the Grace Hwang prior to that night was human enough to not kill her family, then there was hope for my future after all.

“Thank you, Father,” I said, genuinely meaning it. With the best acting skills I could muster up, I feigned a smile that gave no hint that I was actually the murderer. “It’s liberating to not have someone blame me for a crime that I did not commit.”

He nodded, his expression pained. “Where have you been, Grace?”

“I was released from the psychiatric hospital when I was fifteen. From then on I kept a low profile and lived as normally as I could. I have friends who believe that my family is still alive in Busan. I’m too afraid of them alienating me and judging me if they knew the truth, so I lied.” My lower lip trembled in fear. “I’ve been hiding from this place but”—I looked at Eclipse—“Eclipse here has convinced me that in order to move on with my future, I have to reconcile with my past.”

Father Baek nodded empathetically. “Do you remember anything from that night?”

“Nothing,” I admitted with a frustrated expression. “All I remember is waking up beneath the bed and finding out that everyone was dead.” I expelled a shaky breath. “It took a lot for me to come here, to overcome all my fears about this place. I’ve been hiding from my past for a long time, but I don’t want to live that way anymore. I want to learn more about my family in order to move on.” I peered at him in a pleading manner. “I need your help, Father. I know that you were close to my family. I need you to help answer some questions I have about them.”

Father Baek swallowed tightly. “I will help the best I can.”

I took out my brother’s diary and proceeded with the reason we came to this church. “When we went back to the house, we stumbled upon my brother’s diary. In one of the entries, it says,
‘Mom, Dad, and my sister won’t stop crying. I can’t stop crying either. My heart hurts. She died today. My baby sister died today.’
Then, in another pen color, he wrote
, ‘Thank you, God. She’s okay again.’
” I peered at him with inquisitive eyes. “Do you know what he meant by that?”

Silence collapsed over Father Baek as he digested those words.

As if to provoke him, Eclipse asked something that was sure to rile Father Baek up. “Did her parents try to kill her?”

“No!” Father Baek answered at once, stunned that Eclipse could ask such an awful thing. “Of course not.”

Seeing that he had Father Baek right where we wanted him, Eclipse kept provoking him to get him to talk—to get him to finally tell us what we needed to know. “Were they in a cult or something?”

“No!” he breathed out again. “No, not Sang and Susi.” He turned to me, fearful that I would have the wrong perception of my parents. “Your parents would never do anything to hurt you.”

“What did my brother mean then?” I demanded, capitalizing on the passageway that Eclipse had paved for me. I felt horrible that we were goading Father Baek like this, interrogating him like he was a criminal. Nevertheless, this was far better than the alternative, which was to physically torture him until he cracked.

Father Baek hesitated for a moment. Then, as if reconciling with the internal battle inside him, he exhaled a weary sigh. Reluctant as he may be about disclosing anything of this magnitude, Father Baek was also a reasonable man. This was my past, and if I deemed it necessary to be informed about it, then his reluctance would have to take a backseat to my needs.

With a deep inhalation to calm his nerves, Father Baek finally disclosed the truth about my family’s past.

“They had a miscarriage six months into their pregnancy,” he began, and I could feel icy fear course into my body as he spoke. “As a result of this, they fell into depression—your entire family did. Susi was devastated. She was here every single day, praying to God for help, for such a tragedy to have never occurred. Sang, Faith, and Christian would kneel here, crying on the floor everyday and begging for a miracle that would help bring their family back together. Then, one day, a miracle occurred. Susi was pregnant again.” He looked at the bible in my hands. “That was what Christian meant. His baby sister died, but when Susi became pregnant with you, as a child, he only understood it as his baby sister being okay again.”

“There’s something else,” Eclipse prompted, his eyes assessing Father Baek’s face.

I appraised him. I could also see that Father Baek was hiding something from me.

On impulse, I asked, “How was I born?”

“She wasn’t born in a hospital,” Eclipse gently provided to help Father Baek along. Although Eclipse was relentless, he was also respectful with Father Baek. It was clear that he had grown to like and admire Father Baek. The last thing he wanted to do was intimidate him.

Father Baek nodded in concurrence. “She came early. Susi and Sang were at the church with Christian and Faith. They were on their way out of town when a storm hit and left them stranded. They stopped by the church because they were close by and decided to wait out the storm here. But then, something incredibly unexpected happened: Grace came before her due date.” His eyes feathered over me. “You were coming and your parents couldn’t leave for the hospital because the roads were too dangerous. Luckily, we had a nun with us who knew how to help deliver a baby. After several tumultuous hours of panic and fear for the simple fact that you were a premature baby, you finally came into the world, miraculously safe and healthy.”

“How bad was the storm that night?” Eclipse inquired abruptly, his attention on the stained glass windows where water was whipping across the glass.

“Really bad,” Father Baek replied, observing the current storm outside. “Roads were covered with snow, electricity was out, and everything was chaotic. It was a thousand times worse than tonight.”

Eclipse paled slightly. “But after she was born?”

“The world stopped, as if to watch in silence.” Amazement swelled in his recollection. “It was the strangest thing. Grace was born and the storm stopped. Everything fell into a quiet hush and Grace never once cried. She was just a healthy, quiet, and peaceful baby.”

“Why do you keep saying that a miracle happened?” I couldn’t help but ask. None of this made sense to me. “My parents had a miscarriage and my mother was pregnant with me afterwards, but it happens all the time. Babies are also born before their due dates all the time. It’s miraculous, yes, but not rare.”

“You don’t understand,” Father Baek told me carefully, staring intently into my eyes. “Your mother had a miscarriage on the sixth month of her pregnancy, she was pregnant with you thirteen weeks later, and she gave birth to you thirteen days afterwards.”

My heart stopped in its beat.

The world seemed to have gotten louder, yet all I could hear was the resounding silence in my mystified mind. I gaped at Eclipse, whose eyes were huge with disbelief. Baffled, I returned my shocked gaze to Father Baek. It took me several long seconds before I could muster anything out.

“Sh-she gave birth to me thirteen days
after
she found out she was pregnant with me?”

“That was why they named you ‘Grace,’” he confirmed. “To them, you were a gift from God. A miracle in every sense of the word.”

I was thunderstruck.

I did not anticipate discovering something this astounding.

“No one else knew about this?” I breathed out, barely able to preserve my composure.

He shook his head. “Only the few of us who were there during your birth knows.”

I clutched onto my brother’s diary, holding the bible close to my stomach for the longest time. My mind ran over my family’s death, my involvement in it, and my ultimate entrance into this world. How could anyone have mistaken someone like me to be a miracle?  

I couldn’t help but vocalize my thoughts to Father Baek. “I guess I’m not such a miracle after all, right, Father?”

“What happened that night, Grace?” I could tell by his expression that Father Baek was aware I knew something. He knew that I wasn’t as clueless as I made myself out to be. There was a mixture of apprehension and hope in his eyes. Hope that I would give him the answer that he had always believed in, an answer that would fully exonerate me from their deaths.

I gave him what he wanted—a fabricated truth.

“Someone broke into our home, Father,” I started in a hollow voice.

A better person would break down and confess the truth. Sadly, I wasn’t a good person. I was a desperate girl who had been exiled her entire life. Now, for the first time, someone who actually knew me believed that I was a good person. And I couldn’t let him down. I had to lie to protect the one remaining bond I had left to my family.

“Someone broke in and killed each and every one of them. After he was done, he came and handed the gun and the knife to me. He told me that he wouldn’t hurt me if I hid under that bed and didn’t come out until he left. So I waited there, crying because I could see my father lying on the ground beside me. Blood was pooling around him as I felt the bed above me moisten with my mother’s blood. I continued to hide there, crying until I was so exhausted that I fell asleep. When I woke up, the cops were already there and they had already found me guilty. They told me that I was crazy and no matter how much I tried to tell them that I didn’t kill my family, they wouldn’t believe me. When they were interrogating me, one officer got really angry and began to choke me.”

Father Baek suppressed a gasp of horror as I went on.

“The trial went on for months. My own lawyers asked for leniency because even they thought I was crazy. I
had
to be crazy to kill my family in cold blood. They eventually hauled me off to a mental hospital and kept me there for about a decade. It was only when I began to lie and confess to them that I felt guilty for killing my family that they finally released me.”

I watched tears form in his aggrieved eyes, knowing that I would burn in Hell for lying to such a good man. I was wrong, but in my mind, I had done far worse. I simply didn’t want him to judge me. I didn’t want him to think any less of me.

Hands trembling with anguish, Father Baek cupped a hand to my cheek as only a father could for a child he had failed. “I am so sorry that all of this happened to you, Grace. I’m so sorry . . .”

I nodded because in truth, I felt sorry for myself too. To anyone else, they would see me as a miracle because of how I was born. For myself, all I saw was a curse—a calamity. It wasn’t God who brought me back to my family. Something evil killed me, brought me back to life, and created me to be whatever I was now.

I stared at Eclipse through the corner of my eye as I continued to speak with Father Baek. I couldn’t discuss it with him then, but I knew from the disconcertedness on Eclipse’s visage that there was something about my birth that was disturbing to him.

If seeing Eclipse—the very spawn of Satan—this bewildered about your birth doesn’t give you chills, then I don’t know what would.

●●●

“Thank you for everything, Father. You’ve been very kind to us,” I said to him the next morning, standing with him on the steps of the cathedral with Eclipse beside me.

After our talk last night, the three of us stayed up late and continued to talk about our lives. I updated Father Baek about what I had been up to since I was released from the psychiatric hospital and I told him about OinkOink and how much I missed the puppy. Eclipse went on to tell Father Baek about his problematic relationship with his brothers and his estranged relationship with his father. It was heartfelt without having to be completely informational. Though in the back of my mind, I couldn’t stop thinking about everything he shared with us, it was liberating to speak with Father Baek nonetheless. There was this bond that I created with him—something that I had only formed with Eclipse—and it was one that I appreciated. In Eclipse, I found my first possible friend, and in Father Baek, I truly believed I found my first possible family.

“Come visit again,” he whispered as I gave him a big hug.

“We will,” I murmured, feeling as if I was hugging my father for the first time.

“Thank you for putting up with us, Pops,” Eclipse said sincerely, giving Father Baek a handshake and then a one-arm hug. There was genuine admiration in Eclipse’s eyes, and I knew it was because he and Father Baek continued to have conversations about their philosophical views on life, even after I fell asleep on the pew. They had gotten so comfortable around one another that Eclipse even gave Father Baek an endearing nickname: Pops. I kept thinking “popcorn” whenever I heard it, but no one ever said that Eclipse was awesome with giving out nicknames. “Especially last night when I wouldn’t stop venting about my brothers and my good-for-nothing father.”