Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [56]
“Are you talking about how mean you were to her?”
“Did she tell you I was mean to her?”
You just look at your sister, not even laughing. Are you saying you weren’t? Everyone knew that your sister acted more like your wife’s mother-in-law than her sister-in-law. Everyone thought so. Your sister hated hearing that. She would say that was how it had to be, since there was no elder in the family. And that might have been the case.
Your sister slips out another cigarette from her cigarette case and slides it in her mouth. You light it for her. Your wife’s disappearance must have pushed your sister to take up smoking again. It was hard for you to think of your sister without a cigarette in her mouth. The first thing she did when she woke up every morning was to feel around for a cigarette, and all day long she looked for cigarettes before she did anything, before she had to go somewhere, before she ate, before she went to bed. You thought she smoked too much, but you never told her to quit. Actually, you couldn’t tell her. When you saw her right after her husband died in the fire, she was staring at the house that had burned down, smoking. She was sitting there, smoking one cigarette after another, neither crying nor laughing. She smoked instead of eating or sleeping. Three months after the fire, you could smell cigarettes on her before you went near her, the tobacco seeped into her fingers.
“I won’t live long now,” your sister has said since the day she turned fifty. “All these years, I thought my lot in life was especially … especially harsh and sad. What do I have? No child, nothing. When our brothers were dying, I thought I should have died instead of them; but after our parents died, I could see you and Kyun, even though I was in shock. It seemed we were alone in the world. And then, since my husband died in the fire before I had a chance to grow fond of him … you’re not only my brother, you’re also my child. My child and my love …”
That would have been true.
Otherwise, when you were bedridden, half paralyzed from a stroke in your middle age, she couldn’t have wandered the fields to harvest dew for a year, through spring, summer, fall, having heard that you would be cured if you drank a bowlful of dawn dew every day. To get a bowl of dew before the sun rose, your sister woke up in the middle of the night and waited for the day to break. Around that time, your wife stopped complaining about your sister and started treating her with respect, as if she were indeed her mother-in-law. Your wife, with an awed look on her face, would say, “I don’t think I could do that much for you!”
“I wanted to say to her that I was sorry about three things before I died,” your sister continues.
“What did you want to say?”
“That I was sorry about Kyun … and about the time I screamed at her for chopping down the apricot tree … and about not getting her medicine when she had stomach problems …”
Kyun. You don’t reply.
Your sister gets up and points at the tray covered with the white cloth. “There’s some food for you; eat it when you’re hungry. Do you want it now?”
“No, I’m not hungry yet. I’ve just woken up.” You stand, too.
You follow your sister as she walks around your house. Without your wife’s caring hands, the place is covered in dust. Your sister wipes the dust off the jar lids as she walks by the back yard.
“Do you think Kyun went to heaven?” she asks suddenly.
“Why are you talking about him?”
“Kyun must be looking for her, too. I see him in my dreams all of a sudden. I wonder how he would have turned out if he’d lived.”
“What do you mean, how he would have turned out? He’d be old, like you and me.…”
When your seventeen-year-old wife married twenty-year-old you, your little brother Kyun was in the sixth grade. A smart child, he stood out among his peers: he was sharp and outgoing and handsome and got good grades. When people passed Kyun, they turned around to take another look, wondering which lucky family had him as a son. But he couldn’t go on to middle school because of your financial straits,