Oghi opened his eyes to a faint glimpse of white clothing. He heard his name: “Oghi. Oghi.” The voice was soft, kind. Eight days had passed since his emergency surgery, eight days during which he had slipped in and out of consciousness.
There had been a car accident. The moment of impact had felt like someone hitting him very hard with something. Not with a blunt wooden instrument but, rather, with something sharp and metal. A chisel or a claw hammer, perhaps. Both legs, several ribs, and his collarbone were broken. Face mangled, teeth shattered. Oghi’s body, to put it simply, had been reduced to shreds. He struggled to talk through a fractured jaw.
“My wife?”
The nurse didn’t answer. Oghi’s words had not made it out of his mouth. His jaw trembled precariously, a flag in the wind. The nurse’s eyes practically bored through his lips in her effort to make out what he was saying, but she could not understand him. Oghi gave up. Tears spilled from his eyes. The same eyes that had spilled blood in the accident, that used to smile, crinkling like thin paper at the corners, every time he looked at his wife.
Oghi clung to life thanks to his I.V. drip. The breathing tube came out eventually, but he could manage only a liquid diet. When he was ready, he started physical therapy. The doctor had told him that it would take a long time for the feeling in his legs to come back, but Oghi proved diligent. He grabbed on to the parallel bars and hoisted himself up with both arms while the therapist assisted. Didn’t even dream of moving his feet. He held on to the bars for as long as he could, numb legs dangling like a rag doll’s.
His face was a waffle that had stuck to the iron—at least, that was how his wife would have described it. While laughing loudly, of course. But no one joked about Oghi’s face. Sometimes, in the hospital corridors, children stared too long and too hard, their eyes filled with pure fear. They were so inconsiderate, so uncomprehending. The children’s parents or caregivers did their best to make the kids look away. “It’s not nice to stare,” they admonished in hushed voices.
The accident had happened while Oghi was speeding. Of course, everyone sped on the highway, so it couldn’t be said that this was the sole reason, and Oghi had always been a patient driver. He didn’t care if other cars passed him, and he was good about yielding to big trucks and semis.
The police and the insurance company had reviewed the black box, the See-All, that was installed in Oghi’s car. He and his wife used to joke about the name whenever they went for a drive. See-Less, See-None, See-Some, See-You . . . His wife often said that she liked the name See-Me best, but on the day of the accident she had said nothing. The police and the insurance company had decided that Oghi was very much at fault.
The car had been speeding when it suddenly lurched forward, as happens in cases of unintended acceleration. The steering wheel was jerked hard in an attempt to avoid the car in front, but it was too late. The impact was tremendous. The airbag burst, engulfing Oghi in an unfamiliar chemical odor. The moment he understood what was happening, his face grew very hot and his body shook this way and that as he and the car rolled downhill.
Oghi thought he was all but dead. A sense of simultaneous despair and relief enveloped him. How can it be over already? he wondered. He was sure that at any moment he would float up out of his body and look down at himself, slumped over, bleeding, face planted in the airbag. He thought that he’d see his wife, who had been thrown from the car and had rolled all the way to the bottom of the hill. But he was as unmoving as a piece of rebar. His own agonizing weight was what told him that he was still alive. He realized then that he’d just been through something strange and terrible, and that his wife was almost certainly the one who was looking down at him.
Almost six months went by before he was able to go home. The town house he had shared with his wife had a garden, healthy and lush, with a lawn that had to be mowed at least twice a month. Oghi dreamed frequently: in his dreams, the underbrush had grown up over his crumbling house; weeds and brambles crept up the walls. He couldn’t imagine that happening for real, though. Not in his wife’s garden. She had loved gardening. The same old curtains had hung in their windows year-round, but she was particular about the garden, a fact that was readily apparent to anyone who happened by. The plot wasn’t big, but every season had its charm, its own color palette—marigold, chrysanthemum, lavender—anchored always around roses, and the summers were especially beautiful. It had taken Oghi a long time to realize that his wife’s attachment to the garden was due to her dislike of standing out. A neglected garden would have drawn more attention, so she had weeded and planted and pruned.
The garden was not as far gone as he’d feared. His mother-in-law had managed to look after it, more or less, even while grieving. She’d cleaned the house out as well. Of his wife’s things, that is, most of which she’d taken to her own house.
Some things were left untouched. The jewelry he’d given his wife when they were first married. The necklace she sometimes wore. His mother-in-law said that taking those things would have been like taking cash. She was fastidious, especially when it came to money. She did not want her actions to be misconstrued. She waited until the hospital people had left to show him the box of jewelry she’d collected from the house. He couldn’t tell which of the items were ones he’d given to his wife and which were from other people.
It seemed as if his mother-in-law was trying to tell him something. She was slow to put away the box. Oghi struggled to ask her what was wrong, and, in an almost apologetic voice, she said, “About this one . . .” She held up a ring with a blue stone. It wasn’t much. The stone was tiny. “Can I keep just this one? She wore it every day.”
She added that his wife had been wearing it on the day of the accident. Oghi had never seen the ring before.
It was late evening before Oghi was finally alone in his room. He ran his eyes over every inch of the space as if he were saying hello to it. It had taken so long for him to be able to lie down in his familiar bed. When he was first wheeled up to the front door, on a gurney, his mother-in-law had come out and clasped his hand and wept. She’d sobbed gently at first, but after a while she was bawling loudly, like a child. She wasn’t crying over how fortunate it was that Oghi was at least well enough to come home. Nor was she crying over his broken body. She was crying over her dead daughter. She had wept for a long time, all the while blocking the gurney from coming inside. Oghi knew that his mother-in-law was worried about him. He also knew that she blamed him. He was the reason that her one and only child was gone.
Before Oghi and his wife got married, her parents had been hostile toward him. His own parents had died when he was twenty. His mother-in-law had reproached his wife more than once for getting engaged to an orphan. The few times she had met Oghi in person, she hadn’t hidden her displeasure. He hadn’t forgotten what his mother-in-law had said to him shortly before the wedding. His wife had told him not to let it get to him, but Oghi hadn’t managed to do that. His mother-in-law had told him not to think less of himself just because he had no parents. She’d said this not to console him but to criticize him for stubbornly insisting that he and his wife get a place of their own, instead of living under her roof. But their relationship had improved after the wedding. His mother-in-law had even remarked sometimes that it was fortunate that he had no parents.
A woman Oghi had never seen before had finally pulled his weeping mother-in-law aside so that the gurney could pass. She was the live-in caregiver who had been hired to look after Oghi. She had moved into the small room by the front door. The interview, the wage negotiation, the decision to have her stay there, and the provision of a cot and a simple clothing rack had all been handled by his mother-in-law. After all, as his mother-in-law put it, she was the only family Oghi had left.
His mother-in-law came back a few days later. This time she didn’t cry. She seemed to have realized that no amount of crying would change the fact that only Oghi, with his split waffle of a face, had survived and her daughter was never coming back. Someone was with her. A pastor. The pastor held Oghi’s hand in his sweaty palms. Oghi was unable to resist. Several church members who had come with the pastor stood around the bed and watched. When the pastor began to pray, they all closed their eyes. Oghi rolled his. He wanted to tell the pastor to let go of his hand, but his still healing jaw could only quiver a little. The pastor’s prayer was ad-libbed, and its length, its detail, and its earnestness surprised Oghi. But, more than that, he was surprised to see the pastor cry. He’d never met this pastor before in his life.
The pastor said that Oghi’s wife had gone to his church with her parents when she was in high school, which meant that it had been more than twenty years since the pastor had last seen her, yet he prayed and memorialized her as if he knew her well. He lamented and blessed Oghi’s wife, saying that she had returned to the Good Lord’s breast and was no doubt making up now for her years of not going to church. When the pastor referred to Oghi’s wife as a young lamb and said that God had called her home, Oghi’s mother-in-law burst into tears. Oghi couldn’t quite make out the rest of the prayer over the sound of her loud weeping, but when the prayer ended she stopped crying and said amen along with the others. Then, still flanking his bed, they all sang a hymn and read briefly but reverentially from the Bible.
The pastor kept reaching out to Oghi, saying that God would be with him. Oghi preferred to be alone. If he had to have someone with him, he’d just as soon it was the caregiver. She never meddled. He always had to summon her several times before she finally poked her head in the door. The pastor promised Oghi’s mother-in-law that he would visit regularly until Oghi agreed to be baptized, and then, finally, he left.
Alone at last, Oghi practiced speaking with his creaky hinge of a voice. His jaw hurt, he couldn’t stop drooling, and his pronunciation was off. Still, he thought he was at least intelligible, but when he asked the caregiver to do something that she didn’t want to do she pretended not to understand, and before he could even get the words out to his mother-in-law she was already saying that she’d take care of it and not to wear himself out trying to talk.
His jaw hurt less than before. It was still difficult to chew, so his meals were bland and unchallenging, but at least that was better than consuming all his nutrients through a tube. His sluggish digestive system would eventually recover. When he was discharged from the hospital, the doctor had said that his prognosis was good. If he kept up the physical therapy, the doctor said, even if they had to resort to prostheses, he would eventually be able to walk with a cane, and, thus, he should take heart. Take heart, indeed. The doctor had essentially informed Oghi that, no matter how hard he tried, the best he could hope for was prostheses and a cane. He’d thought that with his muscles atrophying he would lose weight, but that didn’t happen. His lower half, which was still paralyzed, had withered, but his upper body kept getting fatter. Because of that, it would be even longer before he could get around by himself.
When he asked for a mirror, the caregiver looked at him quizzically. Then, as if understanding why, she grinned and fetched one for him. Oghi had no idea what she thought she knew. He looked at his swollen face and his crushed jaw, which now canted to the right. It was hard for him to make out his face beneath the many thin, papery layers of scar tissue. on his skull, patches of coarse hair had grown in. He’d never had hair this short, except maybe when he was a newborn, and now he would never be able to regrow a full head of hair. He was just over forty, but his only hope was of one day being able to go to the bathroom on his own whenever he wanted. He would live a life in which he couldn’t bathe himself or drink alcohol or teach classes. Perhaps forever. Nevertheless, his mother-in-law sighed every now and then and said how fortunate he was to be alive. She had no idea how much Oghi envied his wife.
The caregiver was rude. She pulled Oghi’s pants down roughly, yanked out his catheter tube, and went to empty the urine bottle, the tube swinging from her hand. Leaving Oghi’s lower body exposed, of course. one day, Oghi caught her laughing at the sight of his darkened, shrivelled penis. Embarrassed, he squeezed his thighs together, but she slipped her hand between them, spread his legs easily, and plucked out the tube in one smooth motion. The caregiver was a little older than Oghi. She was heavyset, with tightly permed hair, and she spoke with some regional accent. She was strong enough to lift Oghi and set him on the toilet without any trouble, and her muscular arms were covered in dark spots from too much sun.
But Oghi did not fire her. She was vulgar and unsophisticated, and at night she was too busy sleeping to pay any attention to Oghi as he moaned in pain, and at mealtimes she fed him cold, watery rice porridge, but she often leaned over him with wet hair, so he could smell her shampoo, and, when her shirt gaped open, he could see her breasts. Sometimes, she leaned farther and her breasts brushed against him. She’d birthed four children, and her breasts sagged accordingly. And yet one day Oghi’s penis shot straight up. The caregiver’s face turned red, but she was soon cackling. Even after she had returned to her own room, the sound of her laughter was clearly audible to Oghi.
Oghi’s mother-in-law was the one who fired her. At first she nonchalantly pointed out the caregiver’s bad habits. For instance, the caregiver was hiding a bottle of whiskey in her closet—the very same whiskey that Oghi had brought back from a business trip to England—and it was now more than half empty. She must have been drinking it only very late at night, because Oghi never smelled alcohol on her breath. Then his mother-in-law noticed a familiar-looking ring on the caregiver’s hand. She said that it was one of Oghi’s wife’s rings. He heard the caregiver defending herself. This made his mother-in-law even angrier. She immediately ransacked the caregiver’s room and began throwing around items that she found inappropriate. She called the caregiver a whore, a thief. The caregiver started screaming. She said that she was falsely accused, that the ring had been given to her by “that cripple.” She pulled the mother-in-law by the hand into Oghi’s room to prove it. Oghi shook his quivering jaw left and right. The caregiver shrieked at neither of them in particular that it wasn’t right to treat people this way. Oghi lay there on the bed and listened to the two women. What shocked him more than the caregiver’s calling him a cripple was hearing his mother-in-law echo the word when she yelled at the caregiver that her life would never amount to anything more than wiping the asses of cripples.
Oghi had never seen this side of his mother-in-law. She was hysterical. It was as if she’d peeled off her once cultured, refined, and exceedingly polite façade, exposing beneath it an ignorant, boorish old woman. Even after the caregiver had packed her bags and left, hurling curses the whole time, Oghi’s mother-in-law was still ranting: “What a rude woman . . . No manners at all . . . Nothing but lies every time she opens her mouth, and a wino to boot . . . No wonder all she can do is wipe the asses of cripples.” And on and on.
He ought to have sympathized with his mother-in-law. She’d lost her husband, a tender, considerate man, a few years earlier, and now she’d lost her only child. But he didn’t. His wife had been just like her. His wife had sometimes behaved as if she were about to have a nervous breakdown. She used to accuse Oghi of acting suspiciously, and when he tried to defend himself she’d get angry and claim that he was just making excuses. Then she’d try to gloss over it by saying that she was premenstrual, or on edge because of a crank call the night before. His wife had inherited her height from her mother. She had also inherited her thick dark hair and full eyebrows, though her complexion was fairer than her mother’s—Oghi’s mother-in-law was like a rosy-cheeked lumberjack next to his pale, anemic wife. But, had his wife survived and endured the passage of time, she would have turned out exactly like her mother.
After the caregiver was fired, Oghi’s mother-in-law decided to take over for the time being. She looked down at him as he lay on the bed and let out a sigh. “So hard to find good help. I guess I’ll have a lot of work on my hands until we find someone we can trust. It’s awful to grow old and outlive your children. This must be my punishment for something.”
His mother-in-law did not move into the caregiver’s room. That room was reserved for the new caregiver, whom they would surely hire any day now. Instead, she slept in Oghi’s wife’s room. There was no bed, but all his wife’s things were in there. Oghi had no idea what his mother-in-law did in that room. The door was always open, but he had no way of getting inside. Nevertheless, he could remember the room in perfect detail. In the old days, he used to go in from time to time; he would walk up behind his wife where she sat and rest a hand on her shoulder.
His wife had spent most of her time at home in that room. one wall was lined with bookcases crammed with books. In the middle of the room was the desk that his wife had made multiple trips to Itaewon to find. Against another wall was a display case that she’d bought from an antique shop, and on top of it was a row of framed photographs. There were fewer photographs of Oghi and his wife than there were of people unrelated to them: foreign women who looked beautiful but headstrong. When he had asked his wife about them, she’d got excited and explained who the women in the pictures were. one was a writer who had committed suicide; another was a dancer who had died of some disease. A cosmetics model, a famous journalist. Some of the women Oghi recognized and others he didn’t. He figured out right away what they had in common. They were all successful women—women who had succeeded to the point of having influence on a perfect stranger.
Oghi’s mother-in-law looked after him. She brought him his meals. Afterward, she gave him six pills. Three times a day, she emptied his urine bottle, and, periodically, she laundered his clothes and his sheets. The caregiver had done all of this with bare hands, but his mother-in-law wore gloves. She went to great pains to avoid touching anything that Oghi had touched, as if he were infected with some terrible contagious disease. Even when picking up his water glass, she put on a disposable plastic glove or placed a dishrag over it first.
Oghi was getting better. Before, all he’d been able to do was lie in bed and urinate through the tube inserted into his penis, but now he was doing whatever it took to get to the bathroom and empty his urine bottle on his own. He did not wish to entrust the lower half of his body to his mother-in-law. He asked her to place a mattress on the floor next to the bed so that he could roll himself off the bed and crawl over to the bathroom. She called the church deacon, who lived next door, to help, but looked unhappy about it the whole time. Eventually, Oghi just moved to the mattress on the floor so that there was no need to roll himself off the bed. This would have been unfathomable if the caregiver had still been working there.
His mother-in-law went out a lot. Mostly to church, but sometimes to the supermarket or the bank or the insurance office. When that happened, Oghi crawled slowly out to the living room. With the caregiver’s help, he had sat upright in a wheelchair for brief periods, but his mother-in-law had pointed out the dangers of this and got rid of it. There were many doorsills in the house, she said, and if the wheels caught on one of them he would tip forward onto his face and whatever intact nerve endings he had left would wind up paralyzed.
The first time Oghi tried to use the phone in the living room, he got a taste of pure frustration. He’d experienced constant minor frustrations ever since the accident, but he was truly distressed to find that he was unable even to correctly say the name of the person he was calling. A halting sound, like nails on a chalkboard, kept issuing from his throat, followed very belatedly and abruptly by something approaching coherence.
Oghi hesitated before asking the person on the other end of the line to visit him. In fact, he had been debating for a long time whether to make this call. He’d had occasional visitors while in the hospital. Old friends from college, colleagues from the university where he taught. This woman had shown up with one of those groups. Oghi had been too embarrassed and angry to speak to her at the time. Because of the accident, he had failed to keep a date with her. She had left his hospital room with the others and never returned.
“Where am I supposed to go?” she asked now.
He was hurt. Couldn’t she figure that much out on her own? She could easily have got his home address from the school, and it wouldn’t be that hard to convince others to come, too. He didn’t answer. His mother-in-law walked in just then, carrying a plastic bag from the supermarket. Startled, Oghi hung up. He smiled awkwardly and thanked his mother-in-law for going to so much trouble for him, and in such warm weather. She set the groceries down hard and unwound her scarf, which gave off a puff of the chilly air outside.
Oghi turned his back on his mother-in-law and slowly crawled to his room. He pretended not to notice when she picked up the phone and pressed a single button, most likely the redial button. Later, when she was out of the house again, he came back to the living room and discovered that the line was dead. This made him a little sad, but when he considered the chances of the phone’s ever ringing anyway, the sadness went away.
Before the accident, Oghi had been very busy. Busy with teaching, of course, but also with trying to publish the inaugural issue of an environmental-alternatives magazine. There were many people he had to meet, from investors to potential writers. Oghi would tell his wife that a meeting would go until nine, and then he’d come home after midnight. He’d promise her that they’d spend the weekend together, but unforeseen appointments kept cropping up.
When he did finally come home, his wife was always in her own room with the lights off, sitting in her desk chair with her legs curled under her. Oghi thought that his wife did this on purpose—that she went into her room just for show, the moment she saw his headlights. She’d slip back into bed after Oghi fell asleep. In the morning, Oghi would get ready for work quietly, so as not to wake her.
He often used to go out drinking with friends, chewed over old memories with them, sang karaoke in bars that employed pretty young “hostesses,” took off on long drives. Now he did none of that. The only people he saw, other than his mother-in-law, were the physical therapist who came to the house once a week and the pastor, who came to pray over him every two weeks.
The physical therapist handled Oghi’s body with a soft, practiced touch. once, while listening to the therapist’s gentle commands to raise his hand, take a deep breath, relax his muscles, Oghi burst into tears. The therapist said, “It’ll be O.K.,” and continued to massage him. What he said wasn’t true, but it calmed Oghi down. After the session, Oghi confided everything to the therapist through his rattling jaw: his days of misery, his days of hopelessness, and his days devoid of even that. The therapist responded to some of it with silence and some of it with noncommittal platitudes. Eventually, Oghi’s mother-in-law barged into the room, complaining that the therapy session was dragging on too long. The therapist quietly packed up his equipment and left. After he was gone, Oghi’s mother-in-law criticized the therapist. That money-grubber, just sitting there, letting his mind wander, not even pretending to work. The therapist was paid by the hour. The longer Oghi talked, the more overtime he received.
Each time the pastor came to visit, Oghi’s mother-in-law handed him a thick offering envelope. It was clear that this money came out of Oghi’s accounts. one of Oghi’s firm resolutions had been never, ever to give money to a religious organization. In the past, he’d sponsored several children through international charities, like Save the Children and UNICEF. When it was discovered that one of the other organizations he’d contributed to was embezzling donations, he’d questioned the usefulness of indirect philanthropy, but it hadn’t stopped him from donating. So the idea of giving money to a pastor who was not poor, who hadn’t been prevented from learning to read or forced to labor on a coffee plantation since childhood, struck Oghi as a terrible waste. But that week, as the pastor leaned down to clasp Oghi’s hands, Oghi struggled to whisper the words he’d been practicing: “Please get me out of here.” The pastor raised his head, looked around quietly, and chuckled at Oghi’s mother-in-law, who had at just that moment stepped into the room.
“Seems our brother is eager to get outside and enjoy some fresh air.”
His mother-in-law nodded and said in a timid, embarrassed-sounding voice, “Why, of course, we all want that for him.”
The pastor prayed longer than ever, read from the Bible, and sang a hymn with the congregants who had come with him, and then they all left.
When he was alone, Oghi parted the curtain and peeked outside. Sitting with his back angled against the cold wall and gazing out the window was his way of getting out of the house. When his mother-in-law was at home, she spent her time either in his wife’s room or in the garden. Initially, all she’d done was trim back a few of the more overgrown branches. But, gradually, she had been making her way along the fence and farther into the center.
Sometimes, when he saw her out there, Oghi felt a chill run through him. He didn’t know why at first, but after a while he understood. She wasn’t so much caring for the plants as inspecting them. The first thing she did was uproot them. Some were dead, but others were just waiting for spring. After uprooting one, she would peer into the hole it had left. Then she would dig a little deeper and crouch down to inspect again. Did she think that there was something there besides pebbles and tiny rootlets? She examined each hole in turn, as if looking for something, and when there was nothing to be found she plopped the uprooted plant back into its hole.
At some point, she began digging a hole in the remotest corner of the garden, which Oghi could see only when he pressed his face right up against the glass. It was winter, and the ground was hard and the shovel heavy, so it was not easy work. But even the hardest ground will give if it is struck in the same place over and over, and so, little by little, his mother-in-law was able to dig up the dirt. The hole she’d dug was deep enough only to plant a small sapling. Oghi’s wife would have been able to tell from the size of the hole alone the type of sapling or plant intended for it, but he had no idea. on days when the physical therapist or the pastor was expected, his mother-in-law covered up the hole with a tarpaulin.
Was she planning to dig up the entire garden? Was she searching for something hidden there? Oghi wondered these things when he saw his mother-in-law staring far more intently into the holes in the ground than at the plants. Did it have something to do with his wife? She was always writing things down and, in her room, she had left many notebooks filled with what looked to Oghi like meaningless scribbles. When Oghi tried to imagine the answers to his questions, the chill returned.
His mood grew more and more bitter. It was hard for him to imagine a future with his useless legs and his monstrous face covered in regenerated skin. The people who had come to see him in the beginning had all disappeared. They would come again if he asked them to, but friendship was impossible. He was the object of their pity now, and they had to watch what they said around him. When he thought about how his visitors had exchanged a few token formalities with him before rushing out the door, he felt a surge of nausea.
The day that the hole in the garden was big enough to bury a safe, Oghi’s mother-in-law came into his room and stood next to his mattress, brushing the dirt from her hands. He had to close his eyes to keep the dirt from falling into them.
“You have to turn the soil over if you want to be able to plant in the spring,” she said. “Otherwise, it’ll all die.”
She seemed to know that Oghi had been watching her in the garden. He nodded. He knew nothing about gardening.
“But those plants aren’t the real problem.”
Oghi nodded again. The biggest problem after the accident was, as always, Oghi. His recovery, that is.
“I’m talking about money. It’s time we settled some accounts.”
She went into the living room. Oghi waited. A long time passed, but she did not come back. Maybe she was telling him to do his own math. Oghi found it disconcerting that he had to keep feigning ignorance, despite his suspicion that she was up to something. After that day, she kept bringing up money and then dropping the subject again. It was as if she was giving Oghi time to come to his own objective understanding of his situation.
She brought it up the day that he went to the hospital in an ambulance for his regular checkup. Since he never knew when she’d have a sudden change of mood and stop talking, he put up with her griping afterward about what the doctor had said. The doctor had told him that he would have to undergo skin transplants and dental treatment, in tandem with his muscular treatments. That was the only way that Oghi would regain the ability to speak properly—without the uncontrollable drooling and the rattling jaw—and get out of the house without disgusting everyone. Naturally, the doctor had said “the way you used to,” instead of “without disgusting everyone.”
“I’m guessing that in your current state you’ll live at least another twenty years,” the doctor added.
Oghi’s mother-in-law’s eyes had swept up and down Oghi’s body. Twenty years would take him nowhere near the average life span, and yet at that moment it yawned forward like an eternity.
“That’s a long time! A really long time—twenty years!” His mother-in-law seemed to feel the same way that he did about it. “No guarantee I’ll live to see the end of it,” she added.
That wasn’t true. She looked healthy. Healthier than Oghi. At least she could pee comfortably.
“I’ve added up the nursing bills, household utilities, hospital visits, and so on, and calculated your minimum cost of living for a month,” she told him when they got home. “While other people can expect their wages to go up every year, we no longer have that luxury. And I didn’t take into account things like inflation or whether loan interest rates will go up. . . . Even without all that, your monthly expenses are a whopping—” She stuck a calculator right in front of his eyes. “See that? If you see it, say you see it.”
Oghi looked at his mother-in-law. She was holding the calculator so close to his eyes that he couldn’t read the numbers. She glared. It seemed that she had no intention of moving the calculator until she got a response. Helplessly, he nodded.
“But what’s more important is not how much we are spending but how much we can spend. To know that, I have to know how much we have in total.”
She kept saying “we.” Even though she clearly meant Oghi’s assets.
“I added up the value of the house and the savings accounts that are in your and my daughter’s names. It’s not much. You owe too much on the house. At this point, you’d be better off selling the house to pay off the loan, especially when you consider how much interest you’re paying. I really think that would be best. I also added in your pension.”
There was something she didn’t know. He had not retired. The school had given him sick leave. Unless he filed for retirement, he wouldn’t lose his job. The dean had assured him of that when he visited Oghi in the hospital. The dean had told him to hurry up and get better and come back to work. He had said that Oghi could teach again as soon as his body healed. That as long as he could get around in a wheelchair and talk without drooling, he could teach. At a time when so many people were being forced into early retirement, Oghi had a job that he could keep for the rest of his life, even if all he could do for now was lie in bed. He had felt very moved by the dean’s encouragement.
“Oh, by the way.” His mother-in-law paused on her way out the door, as if something had belatedly occurred to her. “About your school. I submitted your resignation. It’s simply going to take too long for you to make a full recovery.”
She slammed the door behind her. Oghi was relieved that he was already flat on his back and could not fall any farther. He had just lost the only place he could return to. No, he hadn’t just lost it. He had lost it in the accident. Perhaps even before that. It was hard to gauge, but maybe he’d been going along all this time oblivious of the fact that he’d lost everything long ago.
His wife had known. She’d known how close he was to losing everything. She’d blamed herself for it. She had been so angry that Oghi didn’t think he could ever change her mind. She had pushed him. She had made him risk danger and charge at fate. And she had been right. Except for one thing. It was not her fault. Oghi had brought it all upon himself. Because of that, everything that Oghi had believed was his no longer was. And all he had left was this useless, tattered body and the mattress it lay on.
Life in the care of his mother-in-law continued. She brought him rice porridge and slowly increased the number of pills that he took after eating. Instead of going to the bank or to the insurance office, she went to the florist and the flower market. She complained that she had no money, but she kept bringing home plants, which all looked the same to Oghi. He assumed that she intended to plant them in the soil she’d dug up. The garden also began filling up with trees that were already sizable, their roots covered in balls of dirt.
When the physical therapist, whose visits had become few and far between, saw the garden, he was astonished. “Did you plow up the entire garden? All by yourself?” he asked Oghi’s mother-in-law.
“It was my daughter’s favorite place. Come spring, it has to bloom,” she said.
Oghi waited for the physical therapist to come into his room, then he pulled out the pills that he’d hidden under his pillow. “Look at this. This is what she has me taking. Eight pills at a time. Isn’t it too much?”
The therapist looked surprised.
“That is a lot. I tell you, it’s a real problem these days. A while back I had pink eye and went to the eye doctor for it. All I had was a little mucus, but he had me taking six pills at a time. First time I ever got full from taking pills.”
The therapist laughed as if it were some big joke. Oghi lowered his voice, but the therapist couldn’t understand his croaking. He had no choice but to speak a little louder.
“They make me so drowsy, I can’t take it.”
“You need your rest. That’s the only way to beat the pain.”
“Do they really help?”
“Of course. It’s much better to take them than to hold on to them like this.”
Oghi gave up trying to convince him and instead asked the therapist to take him to the hospital. The therapist said he would finish the day’s session first and rolled Oghi over. As he lay on his stomach, Oghi told the therapist all about what his mother-in-law was up to. The therapist didn’t react, but Oghi could tell that the man was shocked. The proof was in his heavy silence. Oghi didn’t realize until the therapist rolled him back over that he had interpreted Oghi’s words as simple moans of pain. Nor that his mother-in-law had opened the door and was watching them.
“You sure are groaning a lot. Is the pain worse today?” the therapist asked when he noticed Oghi’s mother-in-law standing there.
Oghi said that it was. It really did sound as if he were groaning when his jaw swung unnaturally like that.
When the session ended, the therapist said goodbye with a touch more kindness than usual and urged him to get better soon. Oghi wondered if that was some sort of signal, if perhaps the man had understood him after all, but when he heard the therapist and his mother-in-law talking, he realized that it was goodbye for good.
After the therapist left, his mother-in-law went back out to the garden. Oghi opened the curtain and watched her amid the unplanted trees. The trees, bare of any leaf or flower, balanced on their dirt-covered roots. The holes for the saplings looked dark and deep. Most of the holes were the right size for saplings, but the hole in the remotest corner of the garden was especially big and deep. He didn’t see anything that looked big enough for it.
His mother-in-law held up a sapling and started to remove the plastic that covered its roots but then stopped and looked over at Oghi’s window. She stared at him for a long time. His gut told him that his mother-in-law knew what had happened that day in the car. Come to think of it, she had never once mentioned the day of the accident to him. She had never even asked about it. His mother-in-law turned her cold gaze back to the plant. To put his crazy thoughts to rest, Oghi told himself that she just really liked plants. He could not think why that might be. ♦
(Translated, from the Korean, by Sora Kim-Russell.)