Maybe that was when I arrived outside our flat. I would have been in that zombie state I went into right before a seizure. That had to be when Mother fell, moaning my name – the moment I remembered like something out of a dream. I would have run in through the front door. She would have collapsed already, and the intruder would have advanced on me with the knife. For a moment I imagined myself fighting with him. It would have been hard for a single man to subdue me. He would have run up the stairs to escape via the steel door on the roof deck, but I would have caught him. Then what?
I didn’t remember anything that would support any of this. In my mind, nothing remained from the hours after midnight. It still made sense, though. If I’d had a seizure after fighting the thief off, if I’d fallen into a deep sleep after managing to crawl into bed, it was possible I wouldn’t remember those events. So what now? I needed to report it. I had to report it.
I crawled to the living room table and yanked the phone off the hook. Who should I call? An ambulance? The police? My fingers kept slipping off the buttons. Numbers bounced and danced in front of my eyes. It took so long for me to punch them out that I was automatically sent to directory assistance. A grunt leaked out of my throat. I rubbed my palms on my thighs and started over. 1. 1. 2. Carefully, digit by digit, I dialled the emergency number. I went over what I would say. Then I raised my head and froze. I saw in the glass doors leading to the balcony the man I’d caught sight of when I first got out of bed – the man covered in red. The line was ringing. I looked back at Mother. I suddenly realised what the police would see. A dead woman with her throat cut, lying in a pool of blood next to her dazed, bloodied son.
‘Incheon Police Department. How may I help —’
I hung up. What would I say to them? That when I woke up, Mother was dead; that it looked like an intruder had killed her; that for some reason both my room and I were covered in blood, but please believe me when I say I didn’t do it? Would they believe me? The voice in my head said, You might as well tell them that she cut her own throat.
For me to prove that there had been an intruder, there had to be one of two things: the intruder himself, or his body. The only traces of him were on the stairs and the landing. If he had been injured in our fight, he would still be in the flat somewhere. Or if he had hidden and died overnight, his body would be here. Then everything would make sense: why I woke up covered in blood, why there was so much blood on the landing and in the living room, why I couldn’t remember what happened after midnight, and all the rest.
I returned the phone to its cradle. Blood pounded through my veins. My thoughts began to advance rapidly. My hands and feet twitched. My neural circuits whirred. I thought of all the hiding places in the flat. It would be somewhere warm where he could lie down, somewhere hidden where he couldn’t be found easily. There were at least ten places that met those criteria.
I stood up and tiptoed to Mother’s bedroom door, holding my breath. I turned the handle, kicked the door open and rushed in.
The room was pristine. Nothing looked out of the ordinary: there was no blood, no footprints, no evidence of a fight. The double curtains hanging over the glass balcony doors were closed tightly. The bed didn’t look like it had been slept in. The pillows were propped neatly against the headboard and the white wool blanket was taut and smooth. The lamp and clock were in their usual spots on the bedside table and the square cushions stood primly on the couch by the foot of the bed. It was orderly, the way it always looked after Mother straightened her room upon waking.
The only thing that was even a little bit disturbed was the writing desk. A single ballpoint pen was on the edge, and the tall leather chair had been pushed back. A brown blanket, still neatly folded, was on the floor below, as though it had slid off the arm of the chair.
I leapt over the bed and yanked open the curtains. Nothing. No one behind the curtains or outside on the balcony. I opened each of the built-in cupboards. The first had pillows, cushions and curtains; the middle one contained enough sheets and blankets to outfit at least ten groups of students on a school trip, and in the third were boxes holding small belongings. I opened the door to her dressing room, which led to the study and to Hae-jin’s room, and turned on the light. It was the same as the bedroom. The obsessively clean white marble floor shone like an ice rink, the obsessively neat dressing table had jars and tubes lined up in a neat row, the obsessively organised drawers had clothes stacked precisely on top of one another, and the obsessively orderly wardrobe had garments painstakingly separated by season and sheathed in individual bags. There was no hint of the thief. The bathroom was much the same. The floor was dry and spotless and the light scent of shampoo perfumed the clean air.
I opened the door to the study, which held some of Father’s old belongings and Mother’s books. It looked the same as it always did. I went back out through the living room and walked into the kitchen. That, too, was clean. No footprints or blood anywhere. The blood was only around Mother’s body. If that was where she had been killed, everything nearby should have been sprayed with blood.
I looked around the rest of the flat. The balcony behind the kitchen, Hae-jin’s bedroom and bathroom. Everything appeared normal. On my way out of Hae-jin’s room, I glanced around one last time at his bed, television, wardrobe and desk, his workout gear hanging on his chair.
Outside of work obligations or travel, Hae-jin always came home to sleep, even on nights he went out, even though Mother didn’t insist. But last night… last night of all nights, he’d stayed out. Then he’d called me around the time I usually woke up to ask if everything was all right. As if he’d known something was up. To lure me downstairs, perhaps.
A script wrote itself instantly in my mind. Hae-jin comes home after I fall asleep post-seizure. For some unknown reason, he attacks Mother. Mother flees, but he catches her and kills her. He comes upstairs, tracking footprints and blood all over the place, and covers me with blood to frame me for the crime. Then he saunters out of the flat.
I quickly backed away from that thought, and as I closed the door to his room, I put it out of my head for good. That wasn’t possible. It was insane. I knew Hae-jin. We’d lived in the same flat for ten years. It was more likely that Mother would kill him; that was the kind of person Kim Hae-jin was. The most rebellious thing he had done in his entire life was to go and see an adult-rated move before graduating from middle school. But even then, he’d asked Mother to come along as a guardian, and invited me too.
I slid open the door to the entrance foyer. Four pairs of shoes were in a neat row: Mother’s slippers, Hae-jin’s slippers, Mother’s white trainers, and my wet, muddy black running shoes. I never left those shoes by the front door. I hid them in the ceiling of my bathroom and retrieved them only when I went out through the door to the roof. If I’d come home via the roof the way I usually did, there was no way they would be here. So I had come in through the front door last night.
Strangely, Mother’s trainers were also wet. Not just damp, but soaked. I tried to remember what had happened when I came back last night after the party. When I was struggling to unlock the door, Mother had come out wearing those trainers. Were they wet? I couldn’t remember, but Mother wasn’t the kind of person who would shove her feet into wet shoes. That meant she had gone out again afterwards. But she couldn’t have taken the car. She must have run around in the rain like I had. It was the only way her shoes could be this wet.
I closed the door and turned around. I noticed a black Gore-Tex jacket and quilted vest crumpled in the corner. I’d been wearing those last night over my sweater. Why were they here?
Maybe this was what happened: I ran through the front door, hearing Mother’s scream. I discovered her collapsed in a pool of blood in front of the kitchen. I took off my wet jacket and vest and placed them carefully by the entrance foyer door, then came inside. That made no sense. That made the least sense of all the things that had made no sense since I’d woken up this morning.
I w
as picking up the jacket and vest when I heard ‘Hakuna Matata’, the song from The Lion King. Mother had recently changed her ringtone. It sounded like it was coming from the living room.
I rushed in, jacket and vest still in hand, and spotted her phone on the edge of the coffee table. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d called the police. She often left it there. An unexpected name was on the screen: Hye-won. Why was Auntie calling so early?
It rang half a dozen times. Then the cordless began to ring. Auntie again. It was 6.54. Hae-jin and Auntie were doing the same thing, separated only by an hour and a half. A thought popped into my head. Did Mother call Auntie last night, too?
I picked up Mother’s mobile. I knew as much about her as she did about me, so I was able to unlock her phone. According to the call list, she had rung Hae-jin at 1.30 a.m., but they hadn’t talked. She’d called Auntie at 1.31 a.m., and they had spoken for three minutes. So she had been alive at least until 1.34 a.m.
I thought back to last night, back to the point in time where my memory was the clearest. At midnight, I had been at the pedestrian crossing by the sea wall where I’d seen the woman getting off the last Ansan-bound bus. That crossing was about two kilometres from home. It would have taken me twenty minutes if I’d walked, fifteen if I’d alternated between running and walking, and ten if I’d run the whole way. I remembered running; if I’d run the entire way home, I would have entered our building around 12.10 a.m. and would have been at the front door of the flat by 12.15. Even if I’d walked up the stairs, which I didn’t remember doing, it would have been before 12.30 a.m.
So I’d walked into the living room around 12.30 a.m., and Mother had died after 1.34 a.m. between the living room and the kitchen.
My brain felt tangled. It was impossible to figure out what had happened. The intruder disappeared from my conjectures. Maybe I’d missed something important, something that would tie all of this together.
With my jacket and vest and Mother’s mobile still in my hands, I turned towards Mother herself, lying neatly in the pool of blood, looking as if she were asleep. For the first time I noticed something unnatural about the way she was positioned. A person who bleeds out from a massive wound to the throat wouldn’t have time to rake her hair forward to cover her face and place her hands carefully on her chest before dying.
I went over to her. I now noticed things that hadn’t registered before. It looked as though a big, heavy object had been dragged down the stairs, smearing the blood. An object like Mother’s body. Next to the smears were footprints heading both up and down. Someone had murdered Mother on the landing and dragged her down to arrange her like this.
But why? Who had done this? If not an intruder or Hae-jin, the only other possibility… I looked at Mother, terrified, and shook my head. I remembered what my mind had thrown up earlier: You might as well tell them that she cut her own throat.
That could have happened, I thought. For some reason she cuts her own throat on the landing, and for some reason I can’t stop her. Because I’m about to have a seizure. She collapses and tumbles down the stairs. I come downstairs and move her to where she is now, which is probably the bare minimum I can do before my seizure takes over. Maybe I put her in a sleeping position, since I’m dazed and unable to think, then bid her goodnight like I do every night.
I felt a glimmer of hope. If I could figure out why she cut her own throat and why I couldn’t stop her, I could call the police without worrying about becoming a suspect. I could figure it out. Or at least I could make it make sense. I had always had a gift for reshaping a scene to make it comprehensible, though Mother disparaged this skill, calling it ‘lying’.
I ran up the stairs, taking care not to step in the blood or footprints. The blood on the landing was beginning to congeal. The footprints were disorderly, stamped in every direction. Someone had paced around in confusion.
‘Yu-jin,’ Mother called from somewhere in my memory, in a low voice, suppressing emotion, the kind that forced a response. I stopped and looked over at the solid wood-panelled wall, now stained deep purple. I could see myself leaning back against it, cornered. I stopped breathing.
‘Where were you?’
When was this memory from? Last night? When I came back from the sea wall? A faint light flickered at the bottom of my muddy consciousness, but when I blinked, my own ghostly form against the wall disappeared. Mother’s voice vanished, too.
I continued up the stairs and followed the dried footprints along the marble floor of the hallway. Even though I placed my heels purposefully, I felt as if I were slipping and sliding. I turned the bloody door handle of my own room, walked inside, and stood at the foot of my bed.
‘Stop right there.’ Mother’s voice came again.
I stood next to the footprints; they were the same size as my feet. I looked cautiously around the room, at the sliding door still open a crack, the blinds pushed to one side, the light on the pergola blinking in the fog, the neat desk, the chair draped with the comfortable clothes I wore at home, the cordless phone on my bedside table, the pillow and blankets drenched in blood. Mother’s mobile slid out of my hand and fell to the floor. All the clues were pointing to one person. The ‘intruder’, the ‘murderer’, was me.
I perched stiffly on the edge of my bed. Why would I have done it? I came home around 12.30 a.m. last night. If I’d bumped into her then, she probably held me hostage for a long time, pressing to find out what I had been doing. She would have figured out that I was on the verge of having a seizure, and she would have realised I wasn’t taking my meds. Her speciality, gentle scolding, would have begun. But that still didn’t explain why I would have killed her. How many mothers would still be alive if their sons murdered them when they got caught doing something they shouldn’t?
I slumped over. Nobody would side with me. I needed someone who would believe me, no matter what anyone said, no matter what kind of evidence they could dig up. I looked down at the black Gore-Tex jacket, the words Private Lesson embossed on the back in blue. Would he believe me? Would he help me?
It was August, the day after I’d taken the exam to enter law school. I’d taken a Mokpo-bound train at Hae-jin’s invitation. Since May, he had been part of a crew filming on an isolated island called Imja in Sinan County. Lonely and bored, he had called nearly every day to see what was going on. If he’d had something to drink, he’d call once an hour and ask, ‘What’s up?’ Each time, he insisted that I should come for a visit after my exams. ‘I want to show you something.’
‘What is it?’
‘You’ll see when you get here.’
I didn’t take him seriously. Everything annoyed me at the time, because I had the worst headaches and all I was doing was studying; I didn’t have time to even think about Imja Island. More than anything, I didn’t want Mother on my back. Though I was twenty-five, I’d never travelled alone, not even backpacking or going abroad to learn a foreign language like everyone else. Mother went so far as to ensure that I went to work at the local government office instead of letting me escape for military service. All for the same reason that my curfew was 9 p.m. – to prevent my having a seizure out in the world all by myself.
I was at the dining table when Hae-jin called. ‘Tomorrow’s the last day of shooting,’ he said. ‘You have to come. You can stay over one night, and then we’ll go home together.’
I hesitated and glanced at Mother.
Even though he couldn’t see me, he understood instantly. He asked me to put Mother on the line. ‘Let me try.’
Hae-jin was persuasive. Mother listened without protesting, then said, ‘All right.’ She didn’t stop her nagging, though. Don’t forget to take your medicine, don’t drink, don’t get in people’s way… On the way to Gwangmyeong station, she added, ‘Don’t go into the deep water,’ as if she’d completely forgotten that I’d once been a competitive swimmer.
Everything was fine all the way to Mokpo and on the intercity bus to Sinan. The symptoms started when the ferry
left Jeomam Quay. For the twenty minutes it took to get to Imja Island, I was surrounded by a strong metallic scent, and I hallucinated that the sun was literally burning my eyes. I couldn’t tell if I was about to have a seizure or not; maybe I was just getting sunstroke.
If I had been taking my meds, it would have been obvious. But I’d stopped taking them two days before the exam, for the first time since the episode I’d had when I was fifteen. I was going to start taking them again the night after my exams, but I changed my mind when Hae-jin called. I decided I would wait until I returned home from Imja Island. What’s two more days? I thought. I wanted to revel in my true self, freed from my usual constraints.
But by the time we docked at Imja Island, my hallucinations were so severe that I could barely keep my eyes open. I got in a cab, the metallic smell permeating everything around me. Sweat was running down my back, but I was freezing. I now understood that I was going to have a seizure but I was too far away to go back home. I had to get to Hae-jin’s place as fast as possible. I told the driver to rush to Hauri Harbour.
‘Let’s give it a go,’ the driver said.
I felt that I was drifting in and out of consciousness as the car flew along the roads.
‘Excuse me.’ The driver had turned around in his seat and was shaking my knee. ‘We’re here.’
I opened my eyes. We were at the harbour. I managed to pay and get out of the cab. I didn’t have to go far; this was where they were shooting. Two men were running along the top of the tetrapod-covered sea wall as the camera followed them, a large truck spewing water over the actors. People were huddled around monitors. Villagers had gathered around the perimeter of the shoot to watch. I stopped about ten metres away. I needed to lie down, but I couldn’t move. Hot white light trapped me. The world disappeared. The last thing I heard was Hae-jin yelling, ‘Yu-jin!’
The Good Son Page 3