Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [37]
He unconsciously sticks his hands in the pockets of his slacks, like his sister. The maple leaves pasted by the door handles stayed with the family in that house after Full Moon Harvest was over. They stayed through winter and snow; they stayed until new maple leaves sprouted in the spring.
Mom’s disappearance was triggering events in his memory, moments, like the maple-leaf doors, he thought he’d forgotten about.
Yokchon-dong isn’t the old Yokchon-dong he remembers. When he first bought a house in Seoul, it was a neighborhood of many alleys and houses, but now it’s crowded with towering high-rise apartment buildings and clothing stores. He and his sister walk back and forth twice, both in front of and behind the apartment buildings, unable to find Sobu Market, which was in the heart of Yokchon-dong back then. Finally, they ask a passing student where the market is, and it turns out it’s in the opposite direction from where they thought it’d be. A big box store has now replaced the telephone booth that he used to walk by every day. He can’t find the yarn store where his wife used to take knitting classes, wanting to make sweaters for their newborn daughter.
“I think it’s over there, brother!”
Sobu Market, which he remembers as being next to a large road, is buried between new boulevards, and he can’t see the signs very well.
“He said it was in front of Sobu Market.…” His sister runs toward the entrance and turns around to look at the stores. “There it is!”
He looks where his sister is pointing and sees the sign that says “Sobu Pharmacy,” sandwiched between a snack bar and an Internet café. The bespectacled pharmacist, who is in his mid-fifties, looks up as he and his sister enter. When his sister asks, “You called about the flyer your son had brought you?” the pharmacist takes his glasses off.
“How did your mother happen to go missing?”
This is the most awkward—and frequent—question people have asked since Mom went missing. It’s always asked with a mixture of curiosity and judgment. At first they would explain in detail, “Well, you see, she was at the Seoul Station subway …,” but now they simply reply, “It just happened,” and assume sorrowful expressions. That is the only way they can get past the question.
“Does she have dementia?”
His sister doesn’t reply, so he denies it.
“But how can you be like this when you’re trying to find her? I called a while ago, and you’re only here now?” the pharmacist asks reproachfully, as if they could have been reunited with Mom if they had arrived earlier.
“When did you see her? Does this look like our mom?” His sister pulls out the flyer and points.
The pharmacist says he saw her six days ago. He lives on the third floor of the building, he explains, and he came down at dawn to open the pharmacy’s shutters and saw an old woman sleeping by the garbage cans in front of the snack bar next door. He tells them she was wearing blue plastic sandals. He says she’d walked so much that there was a deep cut on her foot, almost to the point of revealing bone. Her wound had become infected and reinfected, so much so that there was almost nothing that could be done.
“As a pharmacist, I couldn’t just leave her alone when I saw that gash. I thought at the very least it should be disinfected, so I went inside and brought out some disinfectant and cotton balls, and she woke up. Even though a stranger was touching her foot, she stayed still, completely still—weak. With that kind of cut, it’s normal to scream when it’s being treated, but she didn’t react at all. Surprised me. The infection was so severe, pus kept oozing out. The smell was really awful,