By the time I’d finished, it was 10.30. I leant the steam cleaner against the wall and straightened up. I threw the mop pad, rags, slippers and rubber gloves into the bin bag, then shoved the broom, dustpan and mop into a bucket with my clothes and placed it all in my room. The razor and Mother’s car key went into my desk. Finally, I opened all the windows. The windows at the back, the kitchen window, all of them. Sharp, cold wind careened into the living room.
Outside the front door, a soulless female voice declared, ‘The door is opening.’ It was the lift. The only person who would get out on our floor was Hae-jin; the flat opposite ours was still empty, and non-residents had to be buzzed in to get past the main doors of the building. I looked at the clock: 10.55.
The keypad on the front door lock beeped. I looked around quickly. I hadn’t tidied Mother’s room or mine. Bloodstains remained on the roof deck. And I was naked and covered in blood. In less than five seconds, Hae-jin would open the door and walk in.
I dragged the steam cleaner behind me as I ran into Mother’s bedroom and closed the door. I heard the entrance foyer door sliding open. I heard footsteps entering the living room. Silence. Hae-jin was probably standing by the stairs, looking confused. He’d gone all the way to Yeongjong Island to pick up a mobile phone that wasn’t there, the person who’d sent him on a fool’s errand was nowhere to be seen, all the windows were wide open, and the smell of bleach was lingering in the air. Maybe he could even detect the tang of blood. Damn. I should have aired the place before doing anything else.
‘Yu-jin?’
II
WHO AM I?
It was February, at dawn, ten years ago. We were in the car on our way to swimming practice when Hae-jin called.
Mother pressed the speaker button. His voice was teary and trembling. ‘It’s Hae-jin.’
Something must have happened.
‘Where are you?’ Mother asked. She seemed to know what was going on, since she hadn’t asked what was wrong.
‘I’m at Yonghyon Hospital,’ Hae-jin said. ‘Grandfather… he just passed away.’ The doctor had asked for a guardian who would handle the next steps, and he couldn’t think of anyone else.
Mother opened her mouth, then stopped. She didn’t usually choose her words this carefully. She always knew what to say before she opened her mouth. I was growing frustrated. Why wasn’t she answering? All she had to say was that she was on her way.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ I murmured.
She glanced at me as if to make sure it was okay to skip practice.
I nodded.
She turned on her hazards, crossed two lanes and made a U-turn at breakneck speed. ‘We’ll be there in five minutes,’ she said.
Hae-jin’s grandfather was on a gurney, covered by a white sheet. Hae-jin sat beside him, looking down at his feet. He was dazed and limp. He didn’t notice us even when we were right in front of him.
‘Hae-jin,’ Mother said.
His shoulders stiffened and he looked up, his eyes unfocused. Could he even see us? He didn’t say, ‘You’re here,’ as I’d expected; instead he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Mother opened her arms without a word and embraced him, gently patting his back. I stood to the side. Mother had deep frown lines on her forehead, her nose and cheeks were turning red, and she swallowed hard. Her expression was complicated and unfamiliar. Was she sad? Was she feeling his pain? Or was it that she understood what he was going through? Was she showing him that he didn’t have to worry, she would take care of everything? Was it all of the above? Or none of them?
Hae-jin, for one, seemed to understand what her gentle pats conveyed. He let out a noise through his clenched lips, and as he raised his arms hesitantly to hug Mother back, the sound turned into keening. Though she was nearly a foot shorter than him, he buried his face in her shoulder and wailed.
Although I could sense how sad Hae-jin was – my ears were ringing with his sobs – I didn’t feel anything. Mother was crying, the nurse’s eyes were turning red, but I stood there alone, shielded from emotion. I wasn’t able to say anything reassuring to him.
Mother talked to me about the adoption three days after the funeral. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, after she reminded me that Hae-jin didn’t have any relatives and didn’t want to go to an orphanage, that he and I got along well, and that we had a spare room at our place. ‘What do you think?’ wasn’t a request to hear my thoughts; it meant ‘You don’t have a problem with it, do you?’ Even if I did have a problem, I knew she wasn’t interested in hearing about it. But in this case, I really didn’t have any objections. As Mother had said, Hae-jin was my friend, and she had enough money to support two teenagers.
Two days later, on our way to early-morning practice again, Mother announced, ‘Hae-jin’s coming home today.’
At the time, we were living in a five-storey commercial building in Yonghyeon-dong, Incheon. Mother owned our flat; the entire fifth floor was our home. The bedroom in the hallway was reserved for my dead brother. Mother had furnished the room with his furniture, his books, and even the curtains from his room in the Bangbae-dong house. Every time I went in or out of the flat, I walked past that room. I always considered it Yu-min’s. Maybe that was why I was shocked when I came home later in the day to find that no trace of Yu-min was left in it. Instead of curtains, it had double blinds, and there was new furniture, a white coverlet on the bed, a home cinema system, and a City of God poster on the wall.
I looked at the room, amazed. It was clear that everything had been carefully thought through. It felt as if it had been dreamed about and planned over a long period of time. The colours, the furniture, and the arrangement of the room were different from before, but none of it seemed out of character; it was exactly to Mother’s taste, except for the poster. This was the kind of room she would have put together for Yu-min if he were still alive and now a teenager.
When had she begun thinking about doing this? I was genuinely curious. When she first met Hae-jin? Or when we went to see City of God? Or was it when we were in the hospital last week? I never knew what Mother was really thinking about anything, but I had never been as confused as I was that day. I hadn’t realised she would switch her allegiance so swiftly. I hadn’t known that two days after mentioning the adoption, everything would be ready. Hae-jin had taken Yu-min’s place in Mother’s heart. He didn’t even have to change his last name; like Mother, he was a descendant of the Kimhae Kims. That was how he became her firstborn son. Later, I realised that I was the only one with a different last name – my father’s.
‘Yu-jin,’ Mother called from the front door. She had returned with Hae-jin.
‘Hey, Yu-jin,’ Hae-jin said. His voice suggested to me that he would come further into the flat only if I answered.
I went out. He was standing by the front door, his shoes still on, a bag and suitcase next to him.
‘I’m here,’ he said, sounding uncomfortable and shy. His cheeks were turning red, as though he had just revealed a secret. Mother stood behind him, watching me, looking a little tense.
I had to clear the air and say it. I faced Hae-jin. ‘I’m not going to call you hyeong.’ However Mother felt about it, the only person I could call ‘elder brother’ was Yu-min.
Hae-jin took it well. He nodded, still looking uncomfortable, and stepped into the living room.
That was how the three of us became a family. The portrait now hanging in the living room was taken that day in a nearby photo studio to celebrate.
‘Are they twins? They’re practically identical,’ the photographer had said. And for the last ten years, we really had lived like twins, peacefully coexisting despite trivial conflicts, the way all siblings did. That was our relationship even until just yesterday.
Would it still be possible after all this? Even though Mother was lying on the roof and the murderer, namely me, was hiding in her bedroom, covered in blood? I thought of Mother embracing the orphaned Hae-jin ten years ago. Maybe now I could identify t
he chill pressing down on my throat. Maybe it was loneliness.
I heard Hae-jin running up the stairs, rat-tat-tat like gunfire.
‘Hey, Hae-jin!’ I called. ‘I’m in Mother’s room.’
His footsteps continued upwards. Maybe my voice was too soft.
‘Hae-jin!’ I yelled, feeling panicked. ‘In Mother’s room!’ I was shouting loud enough for the whole neighbourhood to hear me.
Hae-jin stopped. ‘Huh? What?’
I yelled even louder. ‘Mother’s room, I said!’
‘With Mother?’
Shit. I hadn’t thought about how to explain Mother’s absence.
‘By myself!’ No answer. No movement, either. The soles of my feet itched. I wanted to run up, grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him back downstairs. ‘Come quick!’
I wasn’t worried that he’d go into my room or onto the roof. He wouldn’t do that. Hae-jin would never invade someone else’s privacy. Whether physically or verbally, he only moved within the limits granted by the other person. Even if he saw a girl drowning, he’d ask her if he could please grab her by the hand to save her – not that that would ever happen, because he sank like a brick in water, and was afraid of it, too. What concerned me was where he was standing. The door to my bedroom was closed, walls enclosed either side of the stairs, and there was no window on the landing. He was in a passageway with no air circulation. It must reek of blood and bleach. I had to get him off that staircase.
I screamed as though I needed his immediate assistance. ‘I’m cleaning, hurry up!’
Finally, he moved. One step, then another, then a smattering of steps. When he neared the door to Mother’s room, I realised it wasn’t locked. Shit. I reached over and locked it at the same time as Hae-jin tried to open it. I must have been a tenth of a second faster. The lock clicked.
‘What the hell?’ Hae-jin’s voice shot up. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ll be right out,’ I said. ‘You go do your thing for a bit.’
‘What the fuck? First you scream at me to get down here, and now you want me to wait outside?’
‘I just took off my clothes. I’m hopping in the shower.’
‘So?’
I didn’t answer. It was best not to say anything at all, since there was no explanation for my behaviour.
‘Why are you taking a shower down here anyway?’
‘Mine’s broken.’
‘Oh. Where’s Mother?’
‘She’s gone on a church retreat.’ It would be so nice if that really were the case; then I wouldn’t need to worry about anything or stress out about how Hae-jin was going to react to what had happened.
‘That’s so last-minute. She didn’t say anything about it when she called,’ he mumbled.
I was completely over this. I hated having to carefully choose every single word that left my mouth. ‘I only found out when I came downstairs this morning. There was a note on the fridge.’
‘Oh,’ Hae-jin said, sounding suddenly reassured. Did he know something I didn’t? ‘Why are all the windows open?’
‘I cleaned the whole place. Mum left a note saying I should have everything sparkling by the time she came back.’
He banged on the door. ‘Open up. It’s ridiculous, trying to talk through this.’
There was a key to every room in the house in the key cabinet in the hall. Hae-jin could fetch the key to Mother’s room if he wanted to. I just hoped he wouldn’t. ‘Give me a second, will you?’ To cover up my audible irritation, I quickly added, ‘Don’t close the windows. Otherwise the place’ll stink of bleach.’
‘Then why the hell did you use bleach? There are a ton of cleaning products in the laundry room. I guess you have no idea, since you’ve never cleaned anything.’
I nibbled on the inside of my lip. Just give me a break.
‘By the way, I couldn’t find your mobile at Kkosil’s.’
Damn. He wouldn’t let up.
‘Maybe you left it somewhere else. Did you stop at Yongi’s on your way home?’
I didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh… actually, I found it in my room.’
A brief silence. I could practically hear the lecture about to erupt from his mouth.
‘I literally just saw that it had fallen between my bed and the bedside table.’
Hae-jin finally snapped. ‘Seriously? Why didn’t you call me, then?’
I didn’t answer. Keeping him mad was easier than trying to explain. Hae-jin didn’t fight or argue; if he was really angry, he gave the other person the cold shoulder until he was ready to forgive them. What I needed right now was for him to refuse to speak to me. I needed to avoid a confrontation until I finished taking care of everything.
I stood behind the door, my ear plastered against it, waiting for him to move away. Thankfully it didn’t take long. I heard him closing the windows. Had he forgotten that I’d asked him to keep them open? Or was he just doing it to show me how pissed off he was?
A few minutes later, I heard the door of his room open, then close. Finally! He would place his bag on his desk, change into comfortable clothes, then come back out into the living room. It wouldn’t take him more than a minute, but that was enough time for me to dash upstairs. I opened the door. All I needed was half an hour to clean my room and have a shower. I could grab the key from the cabinet, lock Mother’s room, and clean that when I had a chance.
I hadn’t expected Hae-jin to come out of his room without changing. His door was flung open as soon as I slid a foot out, and I was forced to retreat. I heard him head towards the kitchen. Something rattled, maybe a dish or a cup. Was he making coffee? Was he making himself another ramen? Either way, it didn’t look like he was going back into his room any time soon. I had to change my plans.
I relocked the door quietly and took off the pad from under the steam cleaner. I erased my footprints and fingerprints methodically, going from the bedroom door to the bathroom. It was deathly quiet outside. It was making me nervous. But there was nothing I could do. I turned on the shower and stepped inside. I used half the shampoo in the bottle to wash my hair, soaped and rinsed my body four or five times and used Mother’s toothbrush to scrub the blood from under my fingernails. From time to time I turned off the water to listen for Hae-jin’s movements. Still no sound. I was so nervous that I wanted to rip my ears off my head.
After I’d finished showering, I lifted my left arm in front of the mirror and discovered Mother’s parting gift. A large dark bruise stretched from under my arm, past my armpit, to my chest. Small teeth marks were printed in my armpit. Pain suddenly crashed over me, the nightmare of last night vivid again. I shuddered and lowered my arm.
With the damp towel hanging around my shoulders, I went to the writing desk. The clock indicated 11.40. Hae-jin had been home for forty-five minutes. He could have made another ramen, eaten it, finished the remaining broth with a bowl of rice, done the laundry and drunk a cup of coffee in that time. There was still no sound from outside. I went to the door and put my ear to it. I finally heard something. Not words, really, but staccato sounds. Hae-jin must be channel-surfing. He must have been waiting for me all this time, lying on the couch.
Did he have something to say to me? Did he detect that something was off? Had he seen something I’d neglected to scrub away? Suddenly, laughter rang out from the TV. Hae-jin snickered along. Maybe he wasn’t waiting for me to come out after all.
I returned to the writing desk. Before I left Mother’s room, I needed to find something to wrap the cleaning pad in; it had turned dark brown with blood. I opened the first drawer and dug around. Writing implements and stationery. The second drawer held Mother’s red wallet and a thick black journal, the kind with rings so you could insert additional pages. I’d never seen it before. I glanced at the pen on the edge of the desk. Perhaps Mother was writing in the journal at her desk, then stood up in a rush and shoved it into the drawer. I lifted the cover, curious to see if I was right.
The first page was l
abelled ‘December’. Underneath were three entries.
Tuesday 6 December
He’s not in his room. He’s started going out through the roof again. It’s the first time in a month.
Wednesday 7 December
Second day in a row. I was waiting but I missed him.
Friday 9 December
I don’t know where he went. I looked for him until 2 a.m. but I couldn’t find him. I know I saw him. I’m cold and scared and terrified. Now
The line cut off there. Below was a completely different sentence: Hello is barking. He’s back.
The ‘he’ she was referring to must be the same ‘he’ she had caught outside the front door last night. If she’d gone around looking for me until two in the morning, that meant she’d called Auntie and Hae-jin while she was out. She would have got drenched in the rain. That would explain why her shoes had been wet. But was she really roaming the neighbourhood, in the rain, in the middle of the night?
She wouldn’t have done that. At least not on foot. Much of Gundo was still under construction, and more than half of the existing flats in our district remained empty. The road along Dongjin River, which marked the boundary between Districts One and Two, was always deserted and dreary, like the road into a cemetery. People didn’t like to walk down there by themselves. Most residents didn’t come out of their homes after nightfall.
I didn’t believe Mother had been out wandering alone until two in the morning last night. She could have been driving around, but then why would her shoes have been wet? And why would she go searching for me anyway? Why not wait for me at home?
Hae-jin was whistling off-key. It sounded like he was going towards his room. I heard his door open, then close. This was my chance. I slipped Mother’s journal under my arm, pushed the chair in and wrapped the steam cleaner pad in my wet towel. Before opening the bedroom door, I listened again for any noise outside. Still quiet. I poked my head out. Nothing.
The Good Son Page 7