Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [41]
I want to read to children who cannot see.
I want to learn Chinese.
If I earn a lot of money, I want to own a small theater.
I want to go to the South Pole.
I want to go on a pilgrimage to Santiago.
Underneath were thirty more sentences starting with “I.”
“What is this?”
“Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote down what I wanted to do with my life, other than writing. Just for fun. The things I wanted to do in the next ten years. But I didn’t plan on doing anything with Mom. I didn’t realize that while I was writing it. But now, when I look at it after Mom’s gone missing …”
He is drunk. He gets off the elevator and presses the doorbell. No response. He takes his keys out of his pocket and, weaving about, unlocks the door. After he parted with his sister, he went to two more bars. Whenever the image of the woman wearing blue plastic sandals, the woman who could be Mom, the woman who had walked so much that the sandals dug deep into her foot, practically revealing the bones, danced in front of his eyes, he downed another drink.
The light is on in the living room, which is quiet. The statue of Mary that Mom brought watches him. Stumbling, he heads for his bedroom, but pauses to quietly push open the door to his daughter’s room, where Father is staying. He can see Father sleeping on his side, on a mat on the floor next to his daughter’s bed. He goes inside and pulls up the blanket his father had pushed off in his sleep, and comes back out, gently closing the door behind him. In the kitchen, he pours himself a glass of water from the carafe on the table, and looks around him as he drinks it. Nothing has changed. The hum of the refrigerator is the same, and so is the sink piled with dishes his wife has left undone; she always puts off doing the dishes. He hangs his head, then ventures into his room and looks down at his sleeping wife. A necklace glints at her throat. He grabs the blankets covering her and yanks them off. She sits up, rubbing her eyes.
“When did you get home?” She sighs at his roughness, which contains a silent scolding: How can you sleep! Ever since Mom disappeared, he has started to take things out on everyone. He gets angrier when he comes home. When his brother called to see how the search was going, he answered a few questions but then erupted, “Don’t you have anything to tell me? What the hell are you doing?” When Father announced that he would return home because there was nothing he could do here in Seoul, he yelled, “And what are you going to do in the country?” In the morning, Hyong-chol would leave without glancing at the breakfast his wife made him.
“Have you been drinking?” His wife wrests the blankets from his grip and straightens them.
“How can you sleep?” He says it out loud now.
His wife smooths her nightgown.
“I said, how can you sleep!”
“What am I supposed to do, then?” his wife yells back.
“It’s your fault!” His voice is slurred. Even he knows that this is a stretch.
“Why is it my fault?”
“You should have gone to meet them!”
“I told you I was going to bring food to Chin.”
“Why did you have to go right then? My parents were coming up from the country so we could celebrate their birthdays!”
“Father said he could find his way! And we’re not the only family in the city. And they wanted to go to your brother’s that day. And your sisters are here, too. Your parents don’t always have to stay at our place, and there’s no rule that I have to be the one to go meet them! I hadn’t gone to see Chin in two weeks, and she had nothing to eat, so how could I not go see her? I’m tired, too, going to take care of Chin and everything. And she’s studying for her exam—do you even know how important this test is to her?”
“How long are you going to go on bringing food to a grown child, who doesn’t even stop by when her grandmother is missing?”
“What would she do if