Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [81]
EPILOGUE
Rosewood Rosary
IT’S BEEN NINE MONTHS since Mom went missing.
You’re in Italy now. Sitting on the marble stairs overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, you’re looking at the obelisk from Egypt. The guide, sweat beaded on his forehead, shouts, “Come this way,” and directs people in your tour group to the bottom of the stairs, where there is shade, near the large pinecones. “We are not allowed to speak in the museums or the basilica, so I’ll tell you about the important things in the museum before we go in. I’ll distribute earphones, so please listen.”
You take the earphones, but you don’t put them in your ears. The guide continues: “If you don’t hear anything in the earphones, it means you’re too far away from me. There will be so many people that I won’t be able to look out for each and every one of you. I can guide you properly only when you’re near me, where you can hear my voice.”
You head for the bathroom with the earphones dangling around your neck. People in your group stare at you as you stride into the bathroom. You wash your hands at the sink, and when you open your purse to take out your handkerchief to wipe your hands, your gaze stops at your sister’s letter crumpled inside. It’s the letter you took out of your mailbox at your apartment three days ago, as you were leaving Seoul with Yu-bin. Holding your suitcase in one hand, standing outside your door, you read your sister’s name written on the envelope. It was the first time you’d received a letter from your sister. And it was a handwritten letter, not just an e-mail. You wondered if you should open it, but you just stuffed it into your purse. Perhaps you thought that if you read it you would not be able to get on the plane with Yu-bin.
You come out of the bathroom and sit down with the group. Instead of putting the earphones in your ears, however, you take out your sister’s letter, hold it for a moment, then rip the envelope open.
Sister.
When I went to Mom’s soon after coming back from America, she gave me a young persimmon tree that came up to my knees. It was when I went to get the things I’d left there. Mom was crumpled in the storage area next to the shed, where my cooktop stove and fridge and table were stored. She was lying there, her limbs limp. The neighborhood cats that Mom fed were sitting around her. When I shook her, she managed to open her eyes, as if she were waking up, and looked at me and smiled. She said, “You’re here, my baby daughter!” Mom told me she was fine. Now I see that she had lost consciousness, but she insisted that she was fine, that she was in the storage shed to feed the cats. Mom had kept everything I left there when I went to America. Even the rubber gloves I told her to use as I was leaving. She said that she almost used the portable gas range during one ancestral rite but then didn’t. “Why not?” I asked, and she said, “So I could give everything back to you the way you left it when you came home.”
When I finished loading all the things onto the truck, Mom came over with the persimmon tree from behind the house, where she kept all the condiment jars. She looked embarrassed. The roots of the tree were wrapped in dirt and plastic. She had bought it for the yard at our new place. It was so small that I wondered when it would start bearing fruit. Honestly, I didn’t want to bring it back. We were going to live in a house with a yard, but we