Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [38]
His sister is silent, so he denies it.
“I asked her, ‘Where do you live? Do you know someone who can come get you? If you know someone’s number, I’ll call for you.’ But she sat still. Just blinking her eyes. I couldn’t do anything, so I went inside and called the police, and when I came out she was gone. It was strange. I was inside for only a few minutes, and she was already gone.”
“Our mom wasn’t wearing blue plastic sandals,” says Chi-hon. “She was wearing beige sandals. Are you sure they were blue plastic ones?”
“Yes. She was wearing a light-blue shirt, and over it a top that was either white or beige, it was so dirty I couldn’t tell. Her skirt was something that might’ve been white once—but that got dirty enough to become beige. It was pleated. Her calves were bloody. They were … well, they were ravaged by mosquito bites.”
Except for the blue plastic sandals, that’s the outfit Mom was wearing when she went missing.
“Mom’s wearing a hanbok here. Her hair is completely different…. She’s really made up in this picture, but she didn’t look like this when she went missing. What made you think of our mother when you saw that lady?” His sister seems to hope it wasn’t Mom; the woman the pharmacist saw was so pathetic.
“This is the same woman. Her eyes are the same. I herded cows when I was young, so I’ve seen eyes like hers, earnest and gentle. I recognized her even though she looked different, because those eyes were the same.”
His sister collapses into a chair.
“Did the police come?”
“I called them right back, told them they didn’t have to come. Like I told you, she was already gone.”
· · ·
He and his sister leave the pharmacy and split up, agreeing to meet at the playground of one of the new apartment complexes in two hours. As the wind picks up, he searches the dimly lit streets around the new apartment buildings that have taken the place of the houses from when he lived here, and his sister looks near Sobu Market, where a few old alleys remain. Because of the pharmacist’s story that the woman who might be Mom was eating sushi rolls out of the trash next to the snack bar, he looks carefully at all of the garbage cans near the buildings. He also searches near the recycling bins. He wonders where the house he used to live in could be. It was the second-to-last house in the longest alley in the neighborhood. The alley was so long and dark that when he came home late from work he felt compelled to keep looking behind him before he reached the gate.
His sister is waiting for him on the wooden bench at the playground. She sees his slumped shoulders and slow footsteps and gets up. Because it’s late at night, there are no children on the playground, only a handful of old folks sitting around, having come out for a walk.
Did Mom come here to that house?
The first time Mom came to visit here, she got off the train holding a nickel kettle as big as a steamer filled with red-bean porridge. He didn’t have a car, and when he took the kettle from her and snapped, “Why did you bring this heavy thing?” Mom just kept smiling. As soon as they turned into the alley, she gestured at a house and asked, “Is this it?” When they walked past it, she pointed at the next house and asked, “Is that it?” She grinned wider when, at last, he stopped in front of his house and announced, “This is it.” Mom looked as excited as a young girl