Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [55]
“Are you home?”
Your eyes fly open at your sister’s voice. For a second, you think you hear your wife’s voice, even though you know full well that only your sister would come to your house this early in the morning.
“I’m coming in,” she says, and opens your bedroom door. Your sister is holding a tray laden with a bowl of rice and side dishes, covered in a white cloth. She places the tray on the floor at one end of the room and looks at you. She lived here with you until forty years ago, when she built a house by the new road, and ever since, she would get up at dawn, smoke a cigarette, smooth her hair and secure it with a hairpin, and come to your house. Your sister would walk around your house in the dawn light, and then go home. Your wife always heard your sister’s footsteps, quietly circling the house, from the front yard to the side yard to the back yard. Your sister’s footsteps were the sound that woke your wife. Your wife would grunt and turn over and mutter, “She’s back,” and get up. Your sister just circled your house and went home—perhaps she was checking to make sure that your house had remained intact overnight. When she was young, she lost two older brothers at the same time, and parents within two days of each other; during the war, she almost lost you. After she married, her husband came to live in your village, instead of your sister’s going to live in her in-laws’ village. The wound of losing her young husband in a house fire soon after was rooted deeply in your sister, and had grown into a large tree, one that couldn’t be chopped down.
“Didn’t you even bother to sleep on your mat?” Your sister’s eyes, which used to be unfaltering and fierce when she was a young, childless widow, now look tired. Her hair, brushed neatly and secured with a hairpin, is completely white. She’s eight years older than you, but her posture is straighter. She sits next to you, pulls out a cigarette, and puts it between her lips.
“Didn’t you quit smoking?” you ask.
Without answering, your sister uses a lighter printed with the name of a bar in town and puffs on her cigarette. “The dog is at my house. You can bring it back if you want.”
“Leave it there for now. I think I need to go back to Seoul.”
“What are you going to do there?”
You don’t reply.
“Why did you come back by yourself? You should have found her and brought her back!”
“I thought she might be waiting here.”
“If she was, I would call you right away, wouldn’t I?”
You’re silent.
“How can you be like this, you useless human being! How can a husband lose his wife! How could you come back here like this, when that poor woman is out there somewhere?”
You gaze at your white-haired sister. You’ve never heard her talk about your wife in this way. Your sister always clucked her tongue disapprovingly at your wife. She nagged your wife for not getting pregnant till two years after your wedding, but when your wife had Hyong-chol, your sister was dismissive, saying, “It’s not like she’s done something nobody’s ever done before.” She lived with your family during the years when your wife had to pound grain in the wooden mortar for every meal, and she never once took over the mortar. But, then again, she helped take care of your wife after she gave birth.
“I wanted to tell her some things before I died. But who am I going to tell, since she’s not here?” your sister says.
“What were you going to say?”
“It’s not