Please Look After Mom (15 page)

You let Hong Tae-hee in. Supposed to read her a book? To your wife? You have never heard your wife mention Hope House or Hong Tae-hee. Hong Tae-hee calls out for your wife as soon as she sets foot inside the gate, as if she can’t believe that your wife is really missing. When there’s no response, Tae-hee’s expression grows cautious. “Did she leave home?”

“No, she’s missing.”

“What?”

“She went missing in Seoul.”

“Really?” Tae-hee’s eyes grow wide. She tells you that, for more than ten years, your wife came to Hope House and bathed the children and did the laundry and tended the garden in the yard.

Your wife?

Tae-hee says that your wife is highly respected and that she
donates 450,000 won a month to Hope House. She explains that your wife has always donated this amount.

Four hundred fifty thousand a month?

Every month, your children in Seoul would pool together six hundred thousand won and send it to your wife. They seemed to think that two people could survive on that amount in the countryside. It wasn’t a small sum. At first, your wife shared this money with you, but at some point she said she would take the entire amount. You wondered where this came from all of a sudden, but your wife asked you not to question how she was using the money. She said she had the right to use the money, since she was the one who had raised all the children. It seemed that she had thought about it for a long time. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have said, “I feel that I have the right to use the money.” That wasn’t the kind of thing your wife would say. It sounded like something from a television drama. Your wife would have practiced that sentence by herself for a few days, into the air.

One Parents’ Day in May, years ago, none of the children called. Your wife went to the stationery store in town and bought two carnation buds, each tied to a ribbon that said “Thank you for giving me life and raising me.” She found you standing by the new road and urged you to come home. “What if someone sees us?” You followed her home. She persuaded you to come inside and lock the door, then pinned a carnation to the front of your jacket. “What would people say if we went around without a flower pinned to our clothes, when everyone knows how many children we have? That’s why I bought these.” Your wife fastened a flower on her clothes, too. The flower kept drooping, so she repinned it twice. You took
off the flower as soon as you left the house again, but your wife went around the whole day with the flower on her chest.

The next day, she took to her bed, ill. She tossed and turned for a few nights, then sat up abruptly and asked you to transfer three majigi of land to her name. You asked her why, and she said it was because her life was pointless. She felt useless now that all the children had gone their separate ways. When you explained that all of your land is her land, too, and that if only three majigi were transferred to Park So-nyo she would lose out, because this would make it clear that the rest was yours, she looked disappointed and said, “I guess that’s true.”

But she was firm when she announced that she wanted all of the children’s money. You didn’t feel like going against her when she was like that; you thought you would get into a big fight if you did. You agreed on one condition: she could take all the money, but she couldn’t come to you for more. Your wife said that would be fine. It didn’t seem she was buying clothes or doing anything in particular with the money, but when you took a peek at the account books, 450,000 won was taken out of the bank account on the same day every month, in one lump sum. If the money came late, she called Chi-hon, who was in charge of collecting it from her siblings and sending it, to remind her to send the money. This, too, was unlike your wife. You didn’t ask her what she was doing with it, because you promised you wouldn’t, but you thought she was taking the 450,000 won every month to put in a savings account, to create purpose in her life again. You once searched for a savings-account passbook, but you never found one. If Hong Tae-hee is right, your wife had been donating 450,000
won a month to Hope House in Namsan-dong. You feel bludgeoned by your wife.

Hong Tae-hee tells you that it’s really the kids who are waiting for your wife, more than she is. She tells you about a boy named Kyun, says that your wife practically became the boy’s mother, that he was especially saddened that your wife had suddenly stopped coming to the orphanage. She says he was abandoned at the orphanage before he was six months old without even a name, but that your wife had named him Kyun.

“Did you say Kyun?”

“Yes, Kyun.”

She says that Kyun is going to start middle school next year; your wife has promised to buy him a book bag and a uniform when he does. Kyun. A chill comes over your heart. You listen quietly to Hong Tae-hee’s story. You can’t believe you didn’t know that your wife has been going to the orphanage for more than a decade. You wonder whether your missing wife could be the same woman Hong Tae-hee is talking about. When did she go to Hope House? Why didn’t she say anything to you? You gaze at your wife’s picture in Hong Tae-hee’s newspaper ad and go into your room. From a photo album buried deep in a drawer, you peel off a picture of your wife. Your daughter and wife are standing at the pier on a beach, clutching their clothes, which are blowing astray in the wind. You push the picture toward Tae-hee. “Is this the person you’re talking about?”

“Oh, it’s Auntie!” Tae-hee calls out happily, as if your wife is standing in front of her. Your wife, her brow furrowed against the sun, is looking at you.

“You said you were supposed to read to her? What do you mean?”

“She did all the difficult work at Hope House. She particularly enjoyed bathing the children. She was so efficient that, after she came to visit, the whole orphanage would be sparkling clean. When I asked her what I could do to thank her, she said there was nothing, but one day she brought in a book and asked me to read it to her for an hour each time. She said it was a book she liked but that she couldn’t read anymore, because of her bad eyesight.”

You are quiet.

“It’s this book.”

You stare at the book Hong Tae-hee takes out of her bag. Your daughter’s book.

“The author is from this area. I heard she went to elementary and middle school here. I think that’s why Auntie likes this author. The last book I read her was by this author, too.”

You take your daughter’s book,
To Complete Love
. So your wife had wanted to read her daughter’s novel. Your wife had never told you as much. You had never even thought of reading your wife your daughter’s books. Does anyone else in the family know that your wife can’t read? You remember how your wife looked hurt, as if you had insulted her, the day you found out that she didn’t know how to read. Your wife believed that you did everything you did because you looked down on her, because of her illiteracy—leaving home when you were younger, yelling at her at times, rudely replying to her questions, “Why do you want to know?” That wasn’t why you did those things, but the more you denied it, the more she believed it to be true. You wonder if you did look down on her, unconsciously, as she insisted you did. You had no idea
that a stranger was reading your daughter’s novel to your wife. How hard your wife must have worked to hide from this young woman the fact that she didn’t know how to read. Your wife, wanting so badly to read your daughter’s novel, couldn’t tell this young woman that the author was her daughter, but blamed her bad eyes and asked her to read it out loud. Your eyes sting. How was your wife able to restrain herself from bragging about her daughter to this young woman?

“Such a bad person.”

“I’m sorry?” Hong Tae-hee stares at you, her eyes round, surprised.

If she wanted to read it that badly, she should have asked me to read it to her
. You rub your dry, rough face with your hands. If your wife had asked you to read her the novel, would you have read it to her? Before she went missing, you spent your days without thinking about her. When you did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore her. Habit can be a frightening thing. You spoke politely with others, but your words turned sullen toward your wife. Sometimes you even cursed at her. You acted as if it had been decreed that you couldn’t speak politely to your wife. That’s what you did.

   “I’m home,” you mumble to the empty house, after Hong Tae-hee leaves.

All you wanted in life was to leave this house—when you were young, after you were married, and even after you had children. The isolation you felt when it struck you that you would spend your entire life in this house, in this dull town
stuck to the south of the country, in the place of your birth—when that happened, you left home without a word and wandered the country. And when ancestral rites came around, you returned home, as if following genetic orders. Then you left again, and only crawled back when you became ill. One day, after you recovered from some illness, you learned to ride a motorcycle. You left home again, with a woman who was not your wife on the back. There were times when you thought you would never return. You wanted to forge a different life and forget about this house and set out on your own. But you couldn’t last more than three seasons away.

When the unfamiliar things away from home became commonplace, the things your wife grew and raised hovered before your eyes. Puppies, chickens, potatoes that kept coming out when they were dug up … and your children.

   Before you lost sight of your wife on the Seoul Station subway platform, she was merely your children’s mother to you. She was like a steadfast tree, until you found yourself in a situation where you might not ever see her again—a tree that wouldn’t go away unless it was chopped down or pulled out. After your children’s mother went missing, you realized that it was your wife who was missing.
Your wife, whom you’d forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her.

It’s only now that you clearly see the condition your wife was in for the past two or three years. She had sunk into numbness,
would find herself not remembering a thing. Sometimes she would be sitting by a very familiar road in town, unable to find her way home. She would look at a pot or a jar she’d used for fifty years, her eyes wondering, What is this for? She became careless with the housekeeping, with strands of hair all over the house, not swept away. There were times when she couldn’t follow the plot of a television drama that she watched every day. She forgot the song she used to sing for decades, the one that started with “If you ask me what love is …” Sometimes your wife seemed not to remember who you were. Maybe even who she was.

   But that wasn’t how it was the whole time.

   Your wife would remember some tiny detail, as if she’d recovered something from ever-evaporating water. One day she mentioned how you had once wrapped some money in newspaper and stuck the bundle on the doorjamb before you left home. She told you that, even though she hadn’t said it then, she was grateful you’d left those bills for her. She said she didn’t know how she would have survived if she hadn’t discovered that newspaper-wrapped money. Another time, your wife reminded you that you needed to have a new family picture taken, because the most recent portrait didn’t include your younger daughter’s third baby, who was born in America.

   Only now do you realize, painfully, that you turned a blind eye to your wife’s confusion.

   When your wife’s headaches made her unconscious, you thought she was sleeping. You wished she wouldn’t lie down
with a cloth wrapped around her head and sleep wherever she wanted to. When she was flustered, unable to open the door, you actually told her to look where she was going. Having never thought that you had to take care of your wife, you couldn’t understand that your wife’s sense of time had become jumbled. When your wife prepared slop and poured it in the trough in the empty pigpen and sat next to it, calling the name of the pig you had raised when you were young, saying, “This time, have three piglets, not just one—that would be so nice,” you thought she was joking. A long time ago, that pig had had a litter of three piglets. Your wife had sold them to buy Hyong-chol a bicycle.