The Only Child

by Mi-ae Seo

  “Do you . . . have more work to do?” he whispered in her ear.

  Seonkyeong shook her head, took his hand in hers, and got up from her chair. She put the interview file and the recorder away in a drawer, and turned off the light in the study.

  They were about to enter the bedroom, when they heard a scream from the second floor.

  He dropped her hand and ran upstairs. Seonkyeong rushed after him, wondering what was going on.

  Hayeong was sitting up in bed, crying, and threw her arms around his neck when he went in. He hugged her and patted her on the back.

  “What’s the matter? Did you have a bad dream?” he asked.

  “Dad, I’m scared. Don’t go. Don’t go,” the child said.

  “All right. I’m not going anywhere, so don’t worry and go back to sleep.”

  He went on patting her, and she quieted down.

  Seonkyeong’s and Jaeseong’s eyes met, with the child in between. She could sense how awkward he was feeling. She gave a light sigh, and forced a smile.

  “I’ll be downstairs. Come down when she’s asleep,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Out in the hall, she felt empty inside somehow.

  She was about to head to the stairs when she heard the two whispering to each other. The child seemed completely awake now. She wondered what they were talking about, but she didn’t want to be in their way, so she quietly made her way downstairs.

  She didn’t feel like reading, so she headed straight to the bedroom. She turned off the lights, save for the little lamp, and turned in to bed. She lay restless for quite some time, listening for his footsteps, but they never came.

  Then she fell asleep without realizing it, and when she opened her eyes it was morning.

  No one was at her side.

  THERE WAS NO TELLING what Jaeseong had said to her the night before, but Hayeong’s attitude had softened considerably. Breakfast was curry from the day before. Seonkyeong scooped up some plain white rice in a bowl just for Hayeong.

  Without picking up her spoon, Hayeong sat staring at the bowl of rice in front of her.

  “What’s wrong? Is it too much?” Seonkyeong asked.

  “I . . . want some curry, too,” Hayeong said, her voice barely audible.

  Hearing the words, Seonkyeong glanced at Jaeseong. He gave her a furtive wink. It seemed that he had said something to Hayeong about the curry.

  Seonkyeong took the bowl of rice, put the rice on a plate and poured curry over it, and set the plate down in front of Hayeong. It felt strange somehow to watch Hayeong take a careful bite of the curry.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” Jaeseong said, and Hayeong nodded, shyly avoiding Seonkyeong’s gaze.

  “I asked her, and it turns out that she’s never had curry before,” he said to Seonkyeong.

  Seonkyeong saw now why Hayeong had hesitated the night before, with the plate of curry in front of her. She felt bad for the misunderstanding. On the other hand, she found it odd that the child had never had curry before. What had her mother cooked for her?

  Jaeseong seemed touched by their sitting down at the table and having breakfast together, something that was just a part of everyday life for many families. He sat there gaping at Hayeong as she ate, and whenever his eyes met Seonkyeong’s, he took his eyes off the child and smiled sheepishly. He pushed the side dishes closer to Hayeong, urging her to eat more.

  “Here, try this. Vegetables make you healthy,” he said, making the child more and more uncomfortable with each comment, which he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Don’t push her, let her eat in peace. You need to finish eating and get ready for work. You’re going to be late,” Seonkyeong said.

  “Huh? Oh . . . am I bothering you?” he asked Hayeong. She shook her head, but kept her eyes down, focusing on the food.

  “See? She doesn’t mind. You’re worried about nothing,” he said, sounding like a child himself.

  Seonkyeong said no more, not wanting to nag. He kept on fussing over the child, then saw the time and rushed to his feet.

  “Hayeong, you’ll be all right by yourself?” he asked.

  Hayeong barely nodded.

  “She needs to change schools, and there’s probably a lot of other things to be taken care of as well. Thank you, darling,” he said to Seonkyeong.

  “Sure, don’t worry about it. I’ll see you later,” Seonkyeong said, seeing him off, and returned to the kitchen.

  Hayeong finished the rest of her food, and got up to put her plate away.

  “It’s all right, you can just leave it. I’ll put them away after I’m finished,” Seonkyeong said.

  Hayeong sat back down and waited for Seonkyeong to finish eating. For a moment, there was only the sound of utensils clinking against the dishes. As she ate, she noticed that Hayeong was staring intently at her.

  “What is it?” Seonkyeong asked.

  “My dad told me” was Hayeong’s reply.

  “Told you what?”

  “That you don’t have a mom, either.”

  It had been twenty years already since her mother passed away. She had never thought, however, that she didn’t have a mother.

  “She’s just not with me now. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have a mom,” she said.

  “How did your mom die?”

  “It’s better to say ‘passed away.’ She passed away through a car accident.”

  “Does your mom come to you in your dreams, too?”

  The child must have dreams about her mother from time to time. Seonkyeong envied her. She had never had a dream about her mother since her death. She missed her so much that she wanted to see her, if only in her dreams, but her wish had never come true.

  “So you see your mom in your dreams,” she said.

  “Yes. I get so scared,” said the child, shivering. The look on her face startled Seonkyeong, and she remembered what Jaeseong had said the night before.

  The day she killed herself, the woman had pushed her child down from the second floor, making her break a leg.

  Seonkyeong wondered what kind of person she had been. It didn’t matter that she had been in deep despair. How could she do that to her own child, and then kill herself?

  “Are you afraid of . . . your mom?” Seonkyeong asked with caution.

  Hayeong shut her mouth. Her face stiffened as it had the day before, and she looked at Seonkyeong with cold eyes.

  “I . . . don’t want to talk about her,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked,” Seonkyeong said.

  Looking at Hayeong, Seonkyeong fell into thought.

  The child seemed to miss her mother a lot, given the way she had blamed Seonkyeong the day before, but now she seemed afraid of her mother. She talked about her, but then clammed up when asked questions about her. She seemed to have mixed feelings about her mother—she both missed her and resented her.

  Seonkyeong could guess how Hayeong’s mother must have acted around her. She must have been very unstable, to use her child in an attempt to win her husband back after the divorce. Hayeong must have lived in fear and anxiety, always trying to see what kind of mood her mother was in. Living with a mother who could explode any minute must have been overwhelming for little Hayeong.

  “It’s okay because they’re only dreams . . . because she’s dead,” Hayeong said, gazing into the distance with cold eyes. They were much too cold to be the eyes of a child. Seonkyeong felt a chill at the back of her neck.

  Her mother must have tormented her so much, for her to say such a thing. It had been only a day, but Seonkyeong could feel how difficult Hayeong’s life must have been. What the child needed now was to forget the difficult times and regain stability. Living a new life with her father, she would forget those painful days and her hatred of her mother.

  “Now, what shall we do today? Shall we go shopping?” Seonkyeong asked in a cheerful voice, to change Hayeong’s mood. At her words, Hayeong turned her head to look at Seonkyeong and
nodded, smiling for the first time. The cold expression on her face had turned into one that was childlike.

  13.

  DIRECTOR HAN CALLED BEFORE SEONKYEONG’S SECOND interview with Yi Byeongdo.

  She had meant to call him after her visit to the prison, but she’d been so preoccupied with Hayeong that she had forgotten.

  He asked her about the interview, and she told him about the ridiculously short time she’d been given and about Yi Byeongdo’s attitude. The director said that anyone who interviewed a criminal for the first time was bound to get tangled up in a power struggle with him, and advised her not to let him drag her into one. He also asked if there was anything else that had made her uncomfortable, so she told him that the people at the prison security department hadn’t seemed too happy with the conducting of the interviews.

  After listening to Seonkyeong, the director said that he would ask for cooperation from the national police agency and the prosecution through an advisory body, and that she should let him know if there was anything she needed at any time.

  The phone call made Seonkyeong realize once again that there was a lot of attention focused on these interviews. It seemed that the police, as well as the director, were waiting for a clue that would help solve the cold case. They would throw questions at her after each interview. Seonkyeong had a headache from these thoughts swirling around in her head.

  Naturally, she didn’t feel at ease as she went to see Yi Byeongdo again three days later.

  He must have sensed that from her, since he was more cooperative than he had been during the previous interview. To get it over with, Seonkyeong handed him the questionnaire she received at a seminar. But he just stared at her, without so much as moving a finger. She decided to take the bull by the horns, to avoid a power struggle, as the director had advised, and not wanting the interview to be an ordeal.

  “Are you going to make it difficult again?” she blurted out, her palm on her forehead, not hiding her irritation.

  Without a word, Yi Byeongdo reached his hands out toward her.

  Seonkyeong looked at him in silence.

  “Didn’t I tell you to bring me a big, ripe apple? I think I can ask for that much, for telling you my story—don’t you think?” he said, sounding as if he meant it.

  Seonkyeong, who had stopped by the market before coming to the prison, took out an apple from her bag and handed it to him. He reached out his cuffed hands and took the apple.

  He lifted it into the air and studied it for a moment, like a sommelier raising a wineglass and observing the color of the wine. The apple was big, a whole handful, just as he had wanted.

  “This one’s been in storage. Well, I guess it’s too early for freshly harvested apples,” he said, and bit into it without reserve. It seemed that he hadn’t had an apple in a long time—he closed his eyes, slowly moving his chin as he savored the taste. He tilted his head back, enjoying the apple, then began to take big, crunchy bites. He finished it off in an instant, as if he had been starving for a long time. He even ate the skin and the seeds, and only the juice from the apple remained on his hand. His mouth was wet all around with the juice. Seonkyeong recalled what the investigators had said.

  Focus. He focused his attention completely, even when it came to eating an apple. Seonkyeong could almost see him in the act of committing one of his murders. He smiled, looking at her with satisfaction.

  “I can tell what kind of person you are, from the apple you picked out,” he said.

  His eyes looked playful for a second as he watched her, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. As the security manager had said, he was enjoying this. The moment she said anything in reply, he would seize control of the situation.

  As Seonkyeong hesitated, he went on speaking.

  “Did you know that apples aren’t as sweet when they’re big? They have to be the right size to be good,” he said.

  “I’ll get you a smaller one next time,” Seonkyeong said.

  “No, I like big apples. I’ve always eaten big ones.”

  His gaze was roaming somewhere over Seonkyeong’s shoulders. The apple, it seemed, meant something more than just a fruit to him. The look on his face was not one of satisfaction after eating an apple, but that of someone recalling some distant memory of an apple.

  Seonkyeong quickly handed him the questionnaire. He seemed pleased with the apple he had just eaten, and calmly filled out the questionnaire like an obedient student.

  The questionnaire consisted of basic questions whose answers would be used for various materials, such as criminal statistics. Providing one’s age, native province, academic background, occupation, address, age at the time of the first offense, and so on didn’t require much thought. It didn’t mean, though, that the information wasn’t important. The interview would be based on such fundamental facts.

  Answering the questions without hesitation, he handed the questionnaire back to Seonkyeong. With the paper before her, she began to ask the real questions.

  “We talked about our first memories last time, didn’t we?” she began.

  “Red shoes,” he said, repeating what Seonkyeong had said.

  “Yes, my mother bought them for me. Should we start with the memories of our mothers, then?”

  “Did you like those red shoes?”

  “I must have liked them a lot, since I still remember them.”

  “Or maybe you remember them because your mom got you a color you don’t even like.”

  Looking at him, Seonkyeong tried to see if there could be an ulterior motive to his words.

  “I have both good and bad memories of my mother, of course. But luckily, I have more good ones than bad. How about you? What kind of memories do you have about your mother?” she asked.

  Yi Byeongdo, who had looked as if he would start humming just a moment before, stiffened up. But then he smiled, and began to talk.

  “My mother . . . I haven’t thought about her in a long time. I don’t remember her very well, actually. I never saw her after she left home, when I was seventeen or eighteen.”

  “She left home for good?”

  He made no reply.

  “Do you remember the reason why?” Seonkyeong probed.

  “The reason? Oh, you mean the reason why she left home. No, I never thought about the reason.”

  Yi Byeongdo seemed to be tracing back his memories, so Seonkyeong quietly waited for him to go on speaking.

  “The reason why she left home . . . could have been the cat. The cat that used to come to our house. It was black, with yellow eyes. My mom loved that cat. She even bought cans of food to feed the cat. When she left home, it stopped coming. It must have known she was gone.”

  “What does the cat have to do with your mother leaving home?”

  “I’m just saying . . . that the cat never came back after that.”

  His words didn’t add up. He was saying that his mother, who loved cats, left home because of a cat. Why was he saying something that didn’t make any logical sense? Studying his face closely, she noticed something interesting.

  Whenever Yi Byeongdo said the word “cat,” his eyes narrowed. It was clear that “cat” stimulated his memory more than “mother.” Seonkyeong didn’t know what they had to do with each other, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about his mother leaving home.

  “Do you have any other memories of your mother?” she asked.

  He looked up at her, then looked away. Frowning, he searched his memory; he bit his lip, as if he didn’t want to talk, but then began.

  “I don’t remember very well because it was so long ago, but I do recall a few things. I slipped in the tub once and drank some water, and she scooped me out and performed CPR on me; when she was feeling good, she sang to me. She sang beautifully. Whenever she sang, I ended up closing my eyes and falling asleep without even realizing it.”

  Song. She remembered the song he had sung the last time.

  His very first memory.

  It must have been t
he song his mother sang to him. A little speck of light had shone through the darkness. Seonkyeong decided that she would follow the little light.

  “Was it the song you sang to me the last time?” she asked.

  Startled, he stared at her, and nodded.

  “I don’t remember her face, but I . . . do recall that song sometimes,” he said.

  His mother left home when he was seventeen. He must remember her face.

  He was lying. He had no reason to lie, and yet he was saying that he didn’t remember his mother’s face. He didn’t remember his mother’s face, but he remembered the color of the cat she’d looked after, even the color of its eyes.

  Or perhaps he wasn’t lying. It could be that he really didn’t remember her face. Why was his brain, then, trying to erase her face? The fact that his memory was distorted meant that a key lay there.

  Seonkyeong wrote down the words, “mother,” “song,” “leaving home,” and “cat,” and asked him another question.

  “Don’t you miss her? Haven’t you ever looked for her?”

  “I don’t miss her, and I don’t want to look for her.”

  Seonkyeong looked at him inquiringly.

  “She was the same way. She never looked for me, and she never missed me,” he mumbled, staring off into space as if his mother were standing before his eyes. His eyes and lips were smiling, but only to mask his anger. The string on the mask was so near to breaking that it looked as if the mask would drop any minute. No, it was already broken on one side, starting to reveal his real face.

  “‘You’re a filthy bastard. You should never have been born into this world. You’re cursed.’ These are the words my mom said to me ever since I was born. You’ve never heard such words in your life, have you?” Yi Byeongdo asked, looking earnestly at Seonkyeong.

  She looked straight into his eyes for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Those were the only things I ever heard growing up. To her, I was . . . Do you think that, too? Am I such an awful monster?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “No, it’s important. It’s . . . very important!”