I want to read to children who cannot see.
I want to learn Chinese.
If I earn a lot of money, I want to own a small theater.
I want to go to the South Pole.
I want to go on a pilgrimage to Santiago.
Underneath were thirty more sentences starting with “I.”
“What is this?”
“Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote down what I wanted to do with my life, other than writing. Just for fun. The things I wanted to do in the next ten years. But I didn’t plan on doing anything with Mom. I didn’t realize that while I was writing it. But now, when I look at it after Mom’s gone missing …”
He is drunk. He gets off the elevator and presses the doorbell. No response. He takes his keys out of his pocket and, weaving about, unlocks the door. After he parted with his sister, he went to two more bars. Whenever the image of the woman wearing blue plastic sandals, the woman who could be Mom, the woman who had walked so much that the sandals dug deep into her foot, practically revealing the bones, danced in front of his eyes, he downed another drink.
The light is on in the living room, which is quiet. The statue of Mary that Mom brought watches him. Stumbling, he heads for his bedroom, but pauses to quietly push open the door to his daughter’s room, where Father is staying. He can see Father sleeping on his side, on a mat on the floor next to his daughter’s bed. He goes inside and pulls up the blanket his father had pushed off in his sleep, and comes back out, gently closing the door behind him. In the kitchen, he pours himself a glass of water from the carafe on the table, and looks around him as he drinks it. Nothing has changed. The hum of the refrigerator is the same, and so is the sink piled with dishes his wife has left undone; she always puts off doing the dishes. He hangs his head, then ventures into his room and looks down at his sleeping wife. A necklace glints at her throat. He grabs the blankets covering her and yanks them off. She sits up, rubbing her eyes.
“When did you get home?” She sighs at his roughness, which contains a silent scolding: How can you sleep! Ever since Mom disappeared, he has started to take things out on everyone. He gets angrier when he comes home. When his brother called to see how the search was going, he answered a few questions but then erupted, “Don’t you have anything to tell me? What the hell are you doing?” When Father announced that he would return home because there was nothing he could do here in Seoul, he yelled, “And what are you going to do in the country?” In the morning, Hyong-chol would leave without glancing at the breakfast his wife made him.
“Have you been drinking?” His wife wrests the blankets from his grip and straightens them.
“How can you sleep?” He says it out loud now.
His wife smooths her nightgown.
“I said, how can you sleep!”
“What am I supposed to do, then?” his wife yells back.
“It’s your fault!” His voice is slurred. Even he knows that this is a stretch.
“Why is it my fault?”
“You should have gone to meet them!”
“I told you I was going to bring food to Chin.”
“Why did you have to go right then? My parents were coming up from the country so we could celebrate their birthdays!”
“Father said he could find his way! And we’re not the only family in the city. And they wanted to go to your brother’s that day. And your sisters are here, too. Your parents don’t always have to stay at our place, and there’s no rule that I have to be the one to go meet them! I hadn’t gone to see Chin in two weeks, and she had nothing to eat, so how could I not go see her? I’m tired, too, going to take care of Chin and everything. And she’s studying for her exam—do you even know how important this test is to her?”
“How long are you going to go on bringing food to a grown child, who doesn’t even stop by when her grandmother is missing?”
“What would she do if she came? I told her not to come. We searched everywhere. What can we do when even the police can’t find her? Do we go from door to door and ring the bells and ask, Is our mother here? What can Chin do when even the adults can’t do anything? A student has to go to school. Do we all just stop doing what we do because Mother isn’t here?”
“She’s missing, not ‘isn’t here.’ ”
“So what do you want me to do? You yourself go to work!”
“What?” He picks up a golf club from a corner and is about to hurl it across the room.
“Hyong-chol!” Father is standing at the open door. Hyong-chol puts down the golf club. Father had come to Seoul for his birthday to make it more convenient for his children. If they’d celebrated his birthday, as planned, Mom would have said, “This is celebrating my birthday, too,” sitting at the table in the traditional full-course Korean restaurant where his wife, weeks before, had made a reservation. But with Mom missing, Father’s birthday went by without any celebration, and Aunt took charge of the summer ancestral rites.
He follows Father out.
“It’s all my fault,” Father says, turning around at his granddaughter’s bedroom door.
Hyong-chol is silent.
“Don’t fight. I know what you’re feeling. But fighting doesn’t help anything. Your mom met me and had a hard life. But she is a kind person. So I’m sure she’s at least alive. And if she’s alive, we’ll hear something.”
Hyong-chol stays silent.
“I want to go home now.” Father stares at him for a while, then enters the room. Looking at the closed door, Hyong-chol bites his lip, and heat flares in his chest. He rubs his chest with his hands. He’s about to rub his face with his hands, as is his habit, but stops. He can feel Mom’s gentle touch. Mom hated it when he rubbed his hands or slouched. If he did that in front of her, she immediately straightened his hands and shoulders. If he was about to duck his head, Mom slapped him on the back, telling him, “A man has to be dignified.” He never became a prosecutor. Mom always called it his dream, but he hadn’t understood that it had been Mom’s dream, too. He only thought of it as a youthful wish that couldn’t be achieved; it never occurred to him that he had deflated Mom’s aspirations as well. He realizes that Mom has lived her entire life believing that she was the one who held him back from his dream. I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t keep my promise. His heart brims with the desire to do nothing but look after Mom when she’s found. But he has already lost that chance.
He crumples to his knees on the living-room floor.
3
I’m Home
A YOUNG WOMAN is peeking in, standing in front of the firmly closed blue gate.
“Who are you?” When you clear your throat from behind her, the young woman turns around. She has a smooth forehead and hair tied neatly back, and her eyes shine in delight.
“Hello!” she says.
You just stare at her, and she smiles. “This is Auntie Park So-nyo’s house, right?”
The nameplate of the long-empty house has only your name engraved on it. “Auntie Park So-nyo”—it’s been a long time since you heard someone call your wife Auntie, not Grandma.
“What is it?”
“Isn’t she home?”
You are quiet.
“Is she really missing?”
You gaze at the young woman. “Who are you?”
“Oh, I’m Hong Tae-hee, from Hope House in Namsan-dong.”
Hong Tae-hee? Hope House?
“It’s an orphanage. I was worried because she hadn’t stopped by in so long, and I came across this.” The woman shows you the newspaper ad your son created. “I’ve come by a couple of times, wondering what happened, but the gate was always locked. I thought I would have to go away empty-handed today, too.… I just wanted to hear what happened. I was supposed to read her a book.…”
You pick up the rock in front of the gate, take the key out from its hiding place, and unlock the gate. Pushing open the gate of the long-vacant house, you look in, hopeful. But it’s silent inside.
You let Hong Tae-hee in. Supposed to rea
d 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 yo
ur 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.