Final Farewell (2)
How long had she cried? Exhausted by tears that would no longer come, she closed her eyes. The hospital room, left to her alone, was bitterly cold.
Professor Hwang came in carrying a small box. He adjusted the bed to lay her back down, then set the box right beside her face.
"…What's all this?"
"…Hmm. Check it later, once you've settled a little."
With a wry smile, Professor Hwang told her not to hesitate to press the call button if anything felt wrong with her body, then left the room again.
"Ugh… nnngh…"
Gritting her teeth through the pain still lingering after the surgery, she pushed herself upright. She wasn't short of breath the way she usually was. Breathing had never felt this easy.
Click.
She opened the lid of the box. Inside were Soyun's keepsakes. A few notebooks and a phone. Photos the two of them had taken together. And, right on top, a letter. Pushing back the tears welling up again, she picked it up.
To Ayeon!
The words written large across the very center of the white envelope. Her handwriting was so beautiful. Even the exclamation mark at the end. I'm a total scribbler. I envy you, Soyun.
She opened the cold envelope and found warm pink stationery inside.
Hi! Little sister!
Hi, Jin Soyun.
Um… by the time you read this, I'll already be gone, right?
…Yeah.
You're not crying right now, are you?!
I'm not crying.
But now that I think about it, our little sister would still be cute even if she cried! So maybe it's okay to cry.
I'm not cute at all.
Um, I thought so hard about what to write, but nothing's really coming to me! I think I'd have more to say if my little sister were right here next to me!
Aren't you the cute one, Soyun?
Anyway, um…. What should I write. Um, first of all! I miss you. My little sister.
I miss you too.
Oh, right! At my funeral, you have to smile for me!
You're not supposed to smile at a funeral, you dummy, Soyun.
And also! Our dad's probably going to be really, really sad. Comfort him for me a little?
…I'm not sure I can, but I'll try.
Ah, right. Want me to tell you a secret? Don't get mad if it's boring, okay?
What is it? Just say it. I'll decide after I hear it.
Actually, I didn't have any friends? My little sister was my first friend!
…Why would that be? What's wrong with you?
I wanted to get close to them, but all the kids avoided me… Was it because I was too loud?
You're not that loud, Soyun.
Nobody in class ever listened to me all the way through, but my little sister listened to everything I said! I was so happy then, you know?
I can still listen to everything.
So, anyway, um. I think I was really happy! The teachers are all busy, you know. And I couldn't go outside. It got a little stifling.
I was sick too, but I was happy.
What else should I write…. Trying to put it down on paper and it just won't come out!
Anything is fine.
I miss you.
Me too.
I love you.
Yeah.
Drip. Drip.
She wiped away the tears that had broken free again. She couldn't let them fall on the stationery.
"Ah… aaah…"
The notebooks Soyun had started writing in the moment she came back from the hospice ward.
The photos they'd taken whenever they had a spare second, sharing the same bed.
The drawings she'd made next to Ayeon's terrible ones.
All of it.
These ordinary little things.
So few of them that they all fit inside this small box.
"Is this… everything?"
That these were the last things you left behind.
That you really weren't in this world anymore.
That she had to go on living without you now.
It was so terrifying. Had you been terrified too?
But I'm going to live. I will.
Even so, I'm going to live.
See you later, Jin Soyun.
Just wait a hundred years for me.
We promised, after all.
Don't you forget either.
Preparations for Soyun's funeral moved slowly. It couldn't be helped, if they wanted Ayeon to attend. Simultaneous heart and lung transplants were major surgery. She would need at least two weeks in intensive care, then another two weeks or so in a regular room while they monitored her progress.
"Welcome, Professor Hwang."
"Good morning again. Have you finished eating?"
"Yes… What about you, Professor Hwang?"
"Me? Well."
"You haven't, have you? You always tell me not to skip meals."
"Ahem. I've been a bit busy…"
"Is something wrong? You don't look well."
"That… are you all right?"
"Even if I'm not, I have to be, don't I?"
At Ayeon's answer, Professor Hwang sighed inwardly. Her physical condition had improved dramatically. Originally there hadn't been major problems with her other organs; her heart had simply grown so massively enlarged that her lungs had started failing along with it.
After the transplant, it was true that her body was getting better. Even now there wasn't a single sign of rejection. She was well enough that they could have moved her to a general ward immediately.
But is she really all right?
Professor Hwang thought back over the past days. Seven months. In seven months he had never once seen a face that could be called an expression. And now that her body was a little better, she was smiling like that—bright and cheerful?
Professor Lee said she would need some time for now, but…
She was a post-transplant patient. After major surgery that had required a heart-lung machine, the body was still damaged, so medication had to be handled with extreme caution.
Using drugs was tricky for the time being, so Professor Lee had said to just leave her as she wished—but Professor Hwang couldn't shake a lingering unease.
"Professor Hwang, is there anything else you wanted to say?"
"Ah, no. Get some rest."
"Yes. Please take care on your way out. Hang in there today too."
"…"
It was a picture-perfect smile. And yet somewhere, somehow, wasn't it deeply unsettling?
"Excuse me—may I ask you something?"
"Oh? Professor Hwang? What brings you here? We don't have any critical patients right now."
Professor Hwang headed for the nurses' station. CSICU—the cardiothoracic surgical intensive care unit. As a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon he came here often enough that he was a familiar face.
The nurses looked puzzled but welcomed his visit all the same. He was nearly sixty and still a passionate physician, someone who was completely sincere about his patients.
He was old-fashioned enough to use casual speech with the nurses, but with an age gap of twenty years or more that was hardly worth taking offense at. More importantly, he never spoke to them in a commanding tone and never meddled in nursing territory.
Rumor had it he had quite a temper in the OR—but most surgeons did when they were operating. Even more so for cardiothoracic surgeons, who had to take lives into their hands as routinely as eating a meal.
Considering there had been a professor who'd once flung a scalpel and injured a resident when anesthesiology told him to stop the procedure, Professor Hwang was a good doctor.
From the perspective of ward nurses like them—not OR nurses—he made his rounds diligently, came running the moment he was called, and his skill needed no comment. There wasn't a single fault to find with him.
"I wanted to ask a few things about patient Seol Ayeon, if that's all right? Share these among yourselves, and if there are any left, save them for the next shift."
"Wow, thank you! Patient Seol Ayeon? Why do you ask?"
The wisdom of workplace life: when you needed a favor, it went much better with snacks than empty hands. Professor Hwang handed the head nurse a generous pack of cream puffs he'd bought at the rooftop café.
"Well… it's a little hard to put into words specifically…. I'm not stationed here around the clock. Watching over patients continuously is your domain as nurses. I just wondered if you'd noticed anything odd while looking after her… that's what I came to ask."
"Uh… we rotate nursing duties, so we all go into the rooms. Something odd?"
"Yes, anything at all. Whether you've ever felt some kind of dissonance around her."
"Dissonance? Hmm? If anything, Ayeon is a total angel…"
"Hm?"
"Ah—with her hair color and all. You know how nurses give patients nicknames among ourselves? Ayeon is an angel. An angel."
"The PICU kids called her a doll, but even if she looks like a doll, she's closer to an angel, don't you think? We call her Angel."
"Hmm. Is that so? An angel?"
"You have no idea how adorable she is. Her personality is incredibly gentle too. When I was drawing blood I couldn't find a vein and missed twice, and she just smiled and said it was fine, take my time—and comforted me. Wow. I thought my heart was going to stop. She's a complete angel!"
"Kids are usually the hardest for blood draws, and she never once complains—she really is an angel, isn't she? Doesn't even cry. We mostly deal with adult patients, so pediatric draws are tough and we do make mistakes sometimes… but newbie. Are you telling that story like it's something to brag about?"
"Ah… I'm sorry, Head Nurse."
"Tsk. If you make a mistake, you apologize. Did you apologize to Ayeon?"
"Of course I did! I'm sorry…."
"That's enough of the side chat. So—has she ever done anything problematic? Anything different from when she first arrived?"
"Well…. If I had to pick something, most kids her age who recover that much get restless and come out of the room to make trouble, but she's never done that even once. I've had to stop that kind of thing a few times working here, but Ayeon always just sits quietly."
"She does get sad looking at Soyun's keepsakes… but that seems only natural."
"I really don't know what to say. Honestly, I wish all our patients were like Ayeon."
"…Is that so?"
What on earth is it?
Professor Hwang couldn't erase the strange sense of unease. Clearly—clearly something was off. But what exactly had he sensed?
"If anything's different from the beginning, it's just that you can see her condition getting better by the day?"
"Oh, that's right. At first I understood why they called her a doll. Eventually we changed the nickname to Angel, though."
"…Tell me more."
"On the first day, even if you talked to her she didn't answer."
"Actually I botched a blood draw on the first day too, and back then she just sat there expressionless and didn't say a word."
"Hey, newbie. You're working with me for a while. This won't do. How many times have you messed up blood draws?"
"What?"
"What, you have a problem with that?"
"Ah, no…. I'm sorry, Head Nurse…."
"You can see her condition improving with your own eyes, huh…. Well. Thank you, everyone. I'll be going. If there's ever a critical patient, call me if you need to. The on-call is a second-year, so I'm a bit uneasy."
"Yes! Thank you, we'll enjoy these, Professor Hwang!"
"Right. I'll be off, then."