My throat tightened when I looked down at her now. I glanced at my hand, still holding the razor I’d found beside my bed. My bones felt as though they were contracting. I raised my head. It’s you. You’re the murderer. It’s you.
My pulse quickened. Despair burned in the pit of my stomach and surged up my oesophagus. Grunts burst out of my mouth. Soon they turned into laughter that echoed throughout the blood-soaked flat. Something trickled down my cheek and dripped off my chin. Sweat? Blood? Tears? I was a murderer. I’d killed my own mother. After all that panic and anxiety and effort, this was the fucking truth I’d unearthed.
Wait. Wait. Look down, my mind said. I saw myself from above, a madman kneeling over his mother’s body, rocking back and forth in laughter. I turned my head to the side. My dead mother greeted me with troubled, glistening eyes, asking, What’s so funny? just the way she did ten years ago in the Dongsung-dong cinema.
‘How dare you… how dare you take your father’s…’
I looked down at the razor in my hand. Father’s initials bothered me. I remembered how her black pupils had widened in an instant, how her eyes had bulged, how the anger had radiated from her. All because of that? Just because I had dared to take my father’s razor?
‘You… You, Yu-jin… You don’t deserve to live.’
How did taking Father’s razor merit death? Why would that make her decide I should kill myself? Was that really why she had held the razor to my throat? In the end, it was her life that had been cut short. But now my life was effectively ruined too, and all because of a dead man’s razor? I shook my head. That would be akin to finding a rat in the house and killing it with an intercontinental ballistic missile. If I had hidden the razor before Mother yanked it out of my pocket, if I had been able to tuck it into my palm or my sleeve, could this have been avoided?
I shook my head again. It was too late now. I couldn’t turn back time and change life’s trajectory. The only thing I could do was consider what had happened from a different angle. What could explain all of this? I shook my head a third time. I couldn’t begin to guess. The whole thing was so surreal. I glared into Mother’s eyes, my fingers twitching on the razor. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Explain yourself, instead of just lying there! How does it feel? Controlling your son’s life for twenty-five years before finally destroying it completely?
The clock began to chime. I counted to eight. The gears in my head shifted and reality slid into focus. Bottomless fear returned. My gaze circled the house clockwise, like an electron in a magnetic field. The kitchen, the stairs, the door to Hae-jin’s room, the key cabinet in the corner, the clock… The clock. It had chimed last night. Once, twice, three times.
I stopped breathing. I’d left the sea wall at midnight, but I’d gone up to my room at 3 a.m.
It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes from when Mother caught me in the stairwell outside to when I headed up to my room. That meant I’d arrived home around 2.30 a.m. How did it take me two and a half hours to get home? The hair on my arms stood on end. Now I understood something. That was why Mother was able to call Hae-jin and Auntie around 1.30 a.m. But what was I doing from midnight to 2.30? Where had I been?
‘Mum, tomorrow. I’ll tell you everything in the morning.’ My voice leapt out from my memory.
‘Tell me what?’
What was I going to tell her in the morning? Now that it was morning, I had nothing to say. But what had happened? I was feeling great until midnight, when I started smelling blood. Did I have a seizure in the street, or by a construction site? That would explain why my trainers were muddy. But why was Mother awake when I came home? Why did she search my pockets as soon as I stepped into the flat? And why didn’t I rebuff her over-the-top interrogation? Questions brought on more questions until I arrived back at the fundamental mystery. Why was Mother acting so crazy last night? Was it really all because of the razor?
It was clear what had happened, but the reason behind it all was still in hiding. The fucked-up truths I had managed to unearth so far were only the half of it.
The back of my eyes began to throb. I wanted to lie down. A part of my mind was agitated, telling me that instead of trying to fix this mess, it would be easier to give up and go to prison. Then I remembered: Hae-jin would be on his way back soon; I was expecting him around 11 a.m.
That gave me three hours. Would I be able to get to the bottom of things by then? A voice in my mind advised the following: Hae-jin should walk into a home, not a murder scene. First, I needed to clear up; then, once I’d figured out why everything had gone down the way it had, I would be able to make the decision – confess or flee? – that vexed murderers the world over. I put the razor on a side table and went into Mother’s bedroom.
Some things never changed. Mother’s room was one of those things. It looked the same now as it had in our Bangbae-dong house when Father and Yu-min were alive, and in the commercial building in Incheon where we lived for fifteen years after they died. The furniture and its arrangement were identical. The oldest piece was the writing desk, which Mother had had since she was a girl.
I stopped next to it and looked at the statue of the Virgin Mary. It was a combative figure; belying the moniker Our Lady of Mercy, her bare foot was stepping on the neck of a snake. Next to it were a small clock, a ceramic cup with pens and pencils in it, and two books Mother had taken from the study.
Even after she left her job, Mother spent a lot of time at this desk, reading, writing and praying. She’d probably sat here last night, too. The pen was on the edge of the desk; maybe she had been writing. She must have pushed the chair back and not noticed that the brown blanket had fallen to the ground when she rushed out.
The blanket from under the chair was a little too small, so I opened the linen closet and took out a dark blue one that was several times larger, with the thickness of a bath towel.
Outside the bedroom, I spread the blanket out.
What are you going to do to me? asked Mother’s eyes, black and damp like rocks on a riverbed. I wanted to flee, but I couldn’t turn away from her gaze. My body was frozen. She continued to berate me. Don’t you have any other thoughts beyond how you should bury me? Don’t you feel anything? Don’t you understand this is different from spilling coffee?
I know that! I thought. Of course I know that. Please stop. Say something useful. Tell me why you wanted to kill me, or something that could help me figure out why; give me a hint at least. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I tried to focus on the tasks at hand and the order in which I needed to perform them, so I could do them efficiently and mechanically.
I ripped my gaze away from hers and fixed it on her chest. I swiped aside the congealed mass of blood so that I wouldn’t slip, and sat with a knee next to Mother’s shoulder. Other than the fact that her eyes were open and glaring, she looked exactly the way she did when she was sleeping. Maybe that was why I’d said goodnight to her?
I thought of a day, not long after Father and Yu-min died, when we were still living in the Bangbae-dong house. It must have been a Saturday, since I wasn’t at school and Mother wasn’t at church. She cleaned all day. In the evening she went into Yu-min’s room with a bottle of liquor. She didn’t come out for hours. Through the closed door I heard her weeping. From time to time I heard her mumbling.
I lay on my stomach on my bed, my eyes closed, swimming in an imaginary pool. In my daydream, I’d just overtaken the future of Korean swimming, who had started training when he was three. I believed I could beat him, even though I had only been swimming for two years. I hit the touchpad just before he did, then heard something crash in Yu-min’s room across the way. I paused and cocked my head. It was quiet. But I got up anyway, because I thought I knew what had made that sound.
I was right. The bottle had shattered. Mother was lying down, holding her bloody wrist. The family photo album, her indoor slippers and several hairpins were strewn about the room, and there was blood on Yu-min’s be
d and desk.
‘Mum!’
Mother opened her eyes before closing them again. I ran downstairs to call the emergency number. ‘My mum’s collapsed!’
I sat on the edge of the couch in the living room, waiting for the paramedics to arrive, ready to open the door as soon as the bell rang. I was wearing a jacket – I had hesitated only for a moment before sliding my new Rubik’s cube into my pocket – and I’d remembered to take Mother’s wallet out of her handbag.
The nurse at the hospital asked me all kinds of questions. ‘When did you find her like this?’ ‘Where is your father?’ ‘No other adults?’
There was Auntie, of course, but I shook my head. Even then I didn’t like that woman. ‘Just me and Mum. It’s just the two of us.’
Mother woke up around dawn. I must have solved the Rubik’s cube at least thirty times by then. She asked to be discharged immediately. The nurse tried to stop her, but she got out of bed, tottered out of the hospital barefoot and dishevelled, and hailed a cab. She didn’t give me a backward glance as I clambered in after her. At home, she went straight to bed without bothering to shower. Her head landed on her pillow and her bandage-wrapped wrist dangled off the edge of the bed. I moved to leave the bedroom, then came back to her side: I’d remembered the nurse’s instruction to make sure her hand was higher than her chest.
I placed it on her chest and she opened her eyes. I pulled a blanket over her. The tip of her nose was red. Her eyes, staring up at the ceiling, filled with tears. I felt disappointed. I’d thought she’d say ‘thank you,’ or ‘you saved my life’. I didn’t think she would cry. Shouldn’t I be praised in this situation? Maybe she had forgotten all that I’d done. ‘I thought you’d died,’ I reminded her. ‘I was so scared. Don’t do that again, okay?’
Mother’s lips moved. I stood there, waiting for her to say something. She clenched her jaw. A blue vein fluttered under her chin. It was as if she could barely restrain herself from hitting me. What had I done wrong? My mind advised me to get out of there. I backed away and paused in the doorway. ‘Goodnight.’
That was the first time I strategically said goodnight to defuse her anger. Afterwards, I used it often when I needed to calm her down, when I wanted to stop talking to her, when I’d done something I didn’t want her to find out about. I said goodnight to her instead of telling her to stop harassing me, to stop interfering. Maybe last night I meant to say: Wait here, I’ll take care of all of this later.
Now I slid my arms under her and stood up. I swayed. She was heavy. How could she be so heavy when she was the size of a school-age child? Her head flopped against her chest, her bent elbows jabbed me in the stomach, and blood clots fell off her body like bird shit. I took a step towards the blanket but slipped on the blood. I had to practically throw her down.
I crouched and caught my breath. My legs were shaking, even though all I’d done was move a body barely half my weight about a metre. Just last week, as we’d spring-cleaned the flat, Mother had told me that ants could pick things up that were fifty times heavier than themselves, and bees three hundred times heavier. She’d pointed at the fridge as she told me that. Hae-jin would have moved it before she even had to ask, but I was the only one at home. I’d started to walk away from her, pretending not to hear as she said, ‘So a man who is a hundred and eighty-four centimetres tall and weighs seventy-eight kilograms should be able to pull a nine-ton trailer,’ but this dazzling feat of mental arithmetic stopped me in my tracks and forced me to move the fridge to the side. None of her talents were useful to her now, though; all she could do was lie on the old blanket. I suppose that’s what happens when you die.
I closed her eyelids. I pressed down on her bent arm and straightened her neck, hearing the bones crunch. I forced her chin up to close her mouth, nearly breaking her teeth. I pulled down the hem of her nightgown, which had ridden up her thighs.
It was the nightgown I’d bought for her fifty-first birthday last spring, I realised. She didn’t like it. She was annoyed that I’d bought her a ‘granny nightgown’. I never saw her wear it, so I’d assumed she’d thrown it out. I’d even forgotten that I’d given it to her. What was she doing, wearing this nightgown last night?
I spotted something in the front pocket. Something small and long, like a lighter. Her car key. That was strange. She didn’t leave her things just anywhere. The key should have been in her desk drawer. And in this nightgown, of all places? She wouldn’t have gone out in a nightgown, even in the middle of the night.
I placed the key on the counter and wrapped her body up in the blanket. A rope would keep the blanket from falling open, but I didn’t feel like going to find one; why waste time and leave bloody footprints everywhere? Just dealing with the existing bloodstains was plenty.
I slid my arms beneath her body again, drew in a deep breath and stood up. My heart rate spiked and the veins in my forehead bulged. Her body had somehow become even heavier. I moved carefully towards the stairs, avoiding the puddles of blood on the floor, one foot at a time, as though walking on a frozen lake. I stepped onto the first stair and the world quieted. I took another step and sound fell away completely. I started sweating and grew dizzy. My feet squelched. Sticky, slippery clumps of blood oozed between my toes. Mother’s voice echoed endlessly in my head. ‘Yu-jin.’ Low and trembling. I stepped onto the fourth stair. ‘Yu-jin!’ A sharp, stabbing scream. The fifth stair. ‘Yu-jin…’ Her voice pulled my shoulders down. My feet seemed to sink into the stairs. I pulled them up slowly, step by step.
I stopped for a moment on the landing and leant against the wall to take a breath, but my arm slipped on the blood smears. I gasped. Mother’s voice vanished. Her weight vanished as well.
When I collected myself, I was sitting in a puddle of blood. Mother was lying between my legs, the blanket open. I felt faint. I couldn’t believe I had to wrap her up again, pick her up and climb the remaining steps. I wanted to lie down. I might have given up and done just that if a shout hadn’t rung out from my mind to remind me that Hae-jin was due home soon.
I got up. I threw the blanket around Mother and lifted her from between my legs. I went up the rest of the stairs and reached the sliding doors leading to the roof, thinking all the time about Hae-jin’s imminent arrival. I managed to slide it open and went out onto the deck. The sharp marine wind greeted us. Seagulls cried in the fog. The pergola swing shrieked in the wind. We’d brought the old swing with us from Bangbae-dong. Mother liked to take breaks on it while she gardened. She would pretend to drink tea and spy on me in my room.
I walked along the paving stones to the pergola and laid her down on the swing. Also under the pergola were two benches, a table with room for eight, and a barbecue. Mother had designed the table herself. If you pushed the top of it, it slid open to reveal a deep storage space, where she kept all the things she used up here: a blue tarpaulin, clear plastic sheeting, a bag of fertiliser, a hoe, pruning shears, a trowel, a saw, empty planters and small pots, a coiled rubber hose.
I took everything out and spread a sheet of plastic in the empty space. I picked Mother up and placed her inside. I felt suddenly lost. I didn’t remember a thing from when Father and Yu-min were buried. Mother had told me that I’d slept until the day the coffins were interred. Even if I did remember, what would it matter?
I didn’t think Mother would want me to mark her death in any way; she would probably just ask why I was trying to make it better when I was the one who’d caused it all. I pulled the tarpaulin over her body and started shoving everything else back inside. I put the pots and planters by her feet and the fertiliser and hose near her head. I picked up the saw.
‘I should have done away with you,’ I heard her say.
My face burned.
‘We should have died back then. You and me both.’
What did she mean? I never knew she’d hated me so much that she would want to kill me, her own son. I didn’t realise she’d pretended to love someone she hated so much. My blood boiled wit
h rage. I tossed the saw in, shoved the tabletop back into place and stalked away from the pergola without a backward glance. I didn’t want to pull out my dead mother and shake her to bits; Hae-jin was on his way home and I didn’t have much time.
I slammed the sliding doors shut. Quiet rolled over me like storm clouds. I couldn’t hear Mother’s voice any longer. I shut off those thoughts. I had to focus on the things I needed to do. I’d wanted to open the windows, but I changed my mind. The wintry wind would flood into the flat, which would neutralise the smell, but small, light objects might fall onto the floor and be dragged around. Then the whole place would be covered with new bloody traces.
I decided to wipe up the blood first. I took off my blood-caked sweater and trousers. Naked, I went into the kitchen and found red rubber gloves. I took rubbish bags and clean rags out from under the sink, along with bleach and two buckets. I found a plastic broom, dustpan, mop and steam cleaner and gathered them by the island. Then I began to clean with military precision. I swept the blood puddle Mother had been lying in into the dustpan, poured it into a bucket and flushed it down the toilet in Mother’s bathroom. I flushed the puddle on the landing down as well. Then I began to mop. The upstairs hallway and living room floor were marble and cleaned easily, but the wooden stairs were a problem. They were laminated, so most of the blood came off, but some of it had seeped between the cracks and wouldn’t budge. I didn’t know how to get rid of it, and I didn’t have the time to figure it out. I moved on, hoping that Hae-jin and his eagle eye wouldn’t notice it.
Once the floors were clean, I put on slippers so that my crusty feet wouldn’t make new prints. I cleaned the walls and the banister, scrubbed everything on the second floor, and finally went over the whole lot with the steam cleaner.
The Good Son Page 6