Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [85]
“What’s so scary about this?” your father must have heard you muttering.
“Haven’t you ever been scared?” Mom glanced at Father and continued in a low voice: “Your father says that I do that sometimes, too. He says when he wakes up in the middle of the night and I’m not there and he looks for me, I’m hiding in the shed, or behind the well, waving my hands in front of me, and saying, ‘Don’t do that to me.’ He says he finds me shivering.”
“You, Mom?”
“I don’t remember doing that. Your father says he had to take me in and lay me down and give me some water, and finally I’d fall asleep. If I’m like that, I’m sure your Father’s afraid, too.”
“Afraid of what?”
Mom mumbled faintly, “I think it was scary just to live day by day. The scariest thing was when there was nothing left in the rice jar. When I thought I had to let you children go hungry … my lips were dry with dread. There were days like that.”
Father never told you or anyone else in the family that Mom acted that way sometimes. When you called him after Mom went missing, he brought up random old stories to delay the end of your conversation, but he never told you that Mom had gone to hide somewhere in the middle of the night, while she was sleeping.
You look at your watch. It’s ten in the morning. Is Yu-bin up? Has he had breakfast?
· · ·
Today you woke up at six in the morning in an old hotel facing Termini Station. After Mom went missing, a heavy despair weighed down your body and your heart, as if you were sinking in water. You made to rise from the bed, and Yu-bin, who was sleeping with his back to you, turned around and tried to embrace you. You took his arm and rested it gently on the bed. Rejected, he put his arm on his forehead and said, “You should sleep a little more.”
“I can’t sleep.”
He moved his arm and turned over. You gazed at his stubborn back, then reached out and stroked it—your boyfriend’s back, which you haven’t been able to embrace warmly since Mom went missing.
Your family, who were all exhausted from looking for Mom, would often sink into silence when you were together. And then you would all act out. One of you would kick the door open to leave, or pour soju into a large beer mug and gulp it down. Pushing away the memories of Mom that were sprouting up all around you, you all thought one thing: If only Mom were here. If only Mom would say one more time from the other end of the phone, “It’s me!” Mom always said, “It’s me!” After she went missing, your family couldn’t maintain any sort of conversation for more than ten minutes. The question Where is Mom now? trickled in between whatever thoughts you had, making you anxious.
“I think I want to be by myself today,” you ventured.
“What are you going to do by yourself?” he asked, still facing the other way.
“I want to go to St. Peter’s Basilica. Yesterday, while I was waiting for you in the lobby, I signed up for the Vatican tour. I have to get ready and go. They said we were leaving at seven-twenty from the lobby. They said that the line gets so long that if we don’t get there by nine, it will take more than two hours to get inside.”
“You can go with me tomorrow.”
“We’re in Rome. There are so many other places I can go with you.”
You washed your face quietly, so as to not disturb him. You wanted to wash your hair, but you thought the sound of the water would be too loud, so you just tied your hair back, looking at your reflection in the mirror. When you emerged from the bathroom after getting dressed, you said, as if you just remembered, “Thanks for bringing me here.”
He pulled the sheet over his face. You knew that he was being as patient as he could possibly be. He introduced you as his wife to people you met here. You would probably be his wife by now, if Mom had been found. After his morning seminar, you two were supposed to have lunch with a few other couples. If he went to lunch by himself, the others would ask him where his wife was. You glanced at your boyfriend, the sheet still pulled over his head, and