Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [60]
One night a few months ago, your wife shook you awake. “Do you think Kyun wouldn’t have done it if we’d sent him to school?” Then she whispered, almost to herself, “When I got married, Kyun was the nicest to me.… I was his sister-in-law, but I couldn’t even send him to middle school, even though he wanted it so badly. I don’t think he’s been able to go to heaven yet.”
You grunted and turned over, but your wife kept talking. “Why were you like that? Why didn’t you send him to school? Didn’t you feel bad for him when he was crying like that, wanting to go to school? He said he would find a way to continue if we just enrolled him.”
You didn’t want to talk to anyone about Kyun. Kyun was a scar upon your soul, too. Although the apricot tree was gone, you remembered clearly where he had died. You knew that your wife stared at that place sometimes. You didn’t want to pick at your wound. There were worse things in life.
You clear your throat a few times.
Only after your wife went missing did you think that you should have spent some time that night talking candidly about Kyun with your wife. Kyun remained in your wife’s heart as it grew emptier. In the middle of the night your wife would suddenly run out to the bathroom and crouch next to the toilet. She would put her hands out as if she were pushing someone away and scream, “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me!” If you asked whether she’d had a nightmare, she would blink and stare at you blankly, as if she had forgotten what she was doing. That happened more and more frequently.
· · ·
Why didn’t you think about the fact that your wife had to keep going to the police station about Kyun? That she was rumored to have killed him? Why is it only now that you realize Kyun might have something to do with your wife’s headaches? You should have listened to your wife, at least once. You should have let her say what she wanted to. The years of silence, after you had blamed it on her and didn’t even let her talk about it—that pressure might have pushed your wife toward her pain. More and more frequently, you found your wife standing somewhere, lost. She would say, “I can’t remember what I was going to do.” Even though the headaches were sometimes so bad she could barely walk, she refused to go to the hospital. She insisted that you not tell the children about her headaches. “What’s the point of telling them? They’re busy.”
When they did find out about them, she covered them up, saying, “I had one yesterday, but now I’m fine!” Once, she was sitting up in the middle of the night, and when you made a noise her face turned stone cold and she asked, “Why did you stay with me all these years?” Still, she continued to make sauces and pick wild Japanese plums to make plum juice. On Sundays, she rode on the back of your motorcycle to go to church, and sometimes she suggested going out to eat, saying she wanted to eat food someone else had cooked, at a place that served a lot of panchan. The family discussed consolidating all of the many ancestral rites into one day, but she said that she would do so when the time came for Hyong-chol’s wife to take over the rites. Since she’d done the rites her whole life, she would continue to do them individually while she was alive. Unlike before, however, your wife would forget something for the ancestral-rite table and have to go to town four or five times. You just assumed that this was something that could happen to anyone.
The phone rings at