The Good Son

by You-Jeong Jeong

  Hye-won always said the biggest difference between Yu-min and Yu-jin was the way they interacted with other people. Yu-min was interested in relationships with everyone he met, while Yu-jin focused all of his attention on himself, assessing people through one method only – is that person useful or harmful to me?

  There were only a few pages left, but I needed a break. I went downstairs and took the clothes out of the washer-dryer, then loaded the sheets and blankets in and set it going again. I went into the kitchen, suddenly hungry, and put the clothes on the counter. I’d only eaten a sugar pancake from Yongi’s last night. Hae-jin’s seaweed soup was still on the stove. While I waited for it to heat up, I set the table with chopsticks and rummaged in the fridge for side dishes. My head was ringing with the words Auntie had supposedly said sixteen years ago.

  It would take something special to make Yu-jin’s pulse quicken. I’m afraid because I don’t know what that might be.

  Auntie’s words didn’t leave my head even when I went into the shower, toothbrush in my mouth. Something special. How did she know that when even I hadn’t known it until just now? Did she medicate me to suppress my nature, which craved that special something? Then that meant Mother knew before Auntie did, since she was the one who took me to her in the first place. Why did she take me there? Nothing I’d read so far had offered a clue.

  I came out of my bathroom and sat at the desk without putting any clothes on. I felt hot and feverish, like I was burning up. I opened my phone and searched online for any additional news about the body that was discovered last night.

  There it was. An article suggested that the killer was a young, strong, clean-cut man. What did clean-cut mean, anyway? That he looked innocent enough that women wouldn’t be wary of him? Or did it mean good-looking? And what was the standard of ‘young’? Forties was young relative to fifties, but thirties was younger than forties, while teens and twenties even more so. But it probably meant the killer was in his twenties. The strong part I understood, since he’d have to be strong to subdue the girl and kill her.

  I searched ‘population of Gundo, Incheon’. Twenty-four thousand three hundred and forty-three, combining Districts One and Two. How many of them were strong, clean-cut men in their twenties? Whether the number was a hundred or a thousand, I would likely become a focus of their investigation. The police might return tomorrow morning, since both Hae-jin and I fitted the profile and lived nearby. And I wouldn’t be able to stop them. The only thing I could do was to wait for them while I did what I needed to. I turned to the next page of the journal.

  Friday 12 May

  I went to see my sister at the Future Paediatric Clinic in Incheon. It was larger than I expected. Six departments and six specialists. Of them, Hye-won is the most popular. When I asked to see her, I was told I would have to wait for a long time. I ignored the nurse, who recommended a different doctor, and waited.

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stand that I would be facing her. Not because of pride, but fear. I was afraid that the warning she had given me three years ago was right.

  That summer, I was still at the publishing company and Yu-jin was six. Hye-won was a resident specialising in youth behavioural disorders at Yonsei University Hospital. One Friday, we were supposed to meet up in the evening. Something came up at work right before I was going to leave, and I was running late. Then a downpour created a traffic jam. Hye-won got out on time for once. She picked the boys up from the art studio and they were waiting for me in the restaurant.

  I rushed inside and saw Hye-won sitting at a table by herself, looking at something. The kids were in the playroom, Yu-min diving into a pool of balls with other kids and Yu-jin sitting against the wall, playing with his Rubik’s cube. I sat across from Hye-won, and she showed me what she’d been looking at. A piece of paper ripped out of a notebook. It was crumpled, so I smoothed it out and saw what had been drawn with coloured pencil. A girl’s head, topped with a crown, was pierced on the tip of an open umbrella. She had a dark grey face, the mouth drawn with an X, two circles for eyes and long black hair that trickled down onto the umbrella-like strands of seaweed. Water was dripping down the handle, and above the umbrella was a storm cloud.

  Hye-won said Yu-jin had drawn it. She asked me if I’d seen him draw anything like this before. I’d never seen anything even remotely similar. In all honesty I hadn’t looked very carefully at Yu-jin’s sketchbook or picture diary, let alone his scribbles in a notebook; I wouldn’t have been able to describe my six-year-old’s artistic style. It might sound like an excuse, but I was so busy and Yu-jin wasn’t a boy who needed a lot of attention. He did everything on his own as soon as he could.

  What’s the problem? I asked. I could hear how pointed my tone was. I wanted to tell her to stop psychoanalysing a six-year-old’s scribbles or criticising his morality. Maybe this was the first indication of a genius artist who would take the world by storm. Didn’t Jean-Michel Basquiat make strange scribbles in the streets?

  Hye-won explained that the children were just coming out when she pulled up to the art studio. Yu-min had run out calling, ‘Auntie!’ then Yu-jin and a girl wearing a white dress came out together under a plastic umbrella. She was a pretty little girl, and from the way the umbrella was tilted towards her and the way Yu-jin was smiling and looking into her eyes, they looked like they were good friends.

  It had taken them a while to get to the restaurant because of traffic. Yu-jin was in the back seat, drawing with his coloured pencils and ignoring Yu-min, who was addressing him from the front seat. He stopped sketching only when Hye-won parked. He laid the notebook in his lap and put his pencils back in his bag. Yu-min stretched out towards the notebook, but Yu-jin snatched it away and Yu-min accidentally tore the piece of paper out. Yu-jin glared at his brother.

  Hye-won confiscated the piece of paper so that she could give it back to Yu-jin. That was when she saw the picture. The girl in the picture was his little friend from earlier; she had also had long hair and a crown headband. Hye-won asked if that was indeed his friend, but neither boy answered. Yu-jin asked for his picture back and Yu-min was deflated and silent in the front seat. She said that even when they went inside, he kept looking apologetically at his younger brother.

  Hye-won said she had spoken to Yu-min privately, and that he had told her it wasn’t the first time Yu-jin had drawn a picture like that. When he liked a girl he drew her in similar ways and put the drawing in the girl’s bag or desk. One girl who’d received this unwanted gift had cried and made a scene, but the teacher couldn’t figure out who’d done it.

  She suggested we run some tests, that there might be something seriously wrong with Yu-jin. My face burned. I felt like a stranger had slapped me in the middle of the street. I became argumentative. Had she asked Yu-jin about it? Had she given him a chance to explain? She nodded. When she asked him, Why did you draw this? he said, Because it’s fun. He didn’t elaborate on whether it was fun to draw the picture or scare the girl and make her cry.

  What did that have to do with anything? A child could imagine something that could shock an adult, and he could draw from his imagination and play around. I reminded her of that. I reminded her that Yu-jin wasn’t sixteen but only six. Hye-won retorted that if he was sixteen they wouldn’t need to run any tests, that he would already be in a youth detention centre for sending threatening pictures. She said Yu-jin knew exactly what he was doing. She said the fact that I’d never seen him draw anything like this was proof that he knew it was something to hide. She pointed out that he’d never been caught even though he’d done something similar several times. She said he was meticulous.

  I was so angry that I felt dizzy. I couldn’t believe she was saying he was a troubled child. But she didn’t back down. She pointed at the girl’s head in the drawing and said it wasn’t about the girl. She said it was about me. That for boys his age, all girls were the embodiment of their mother. That if a child cut off his mother’s head and speared it on an um
brella, it indicated a serious problem. She said she was just asking questions; why was I getting so angry?

  I grabbed the boys and left the restaurant. I thought I’d get physical with her if I stayed any longer. We were never sisters so much as competitors. She was less than a year younger than me, so we always wore the same clothes and read the same books. She was always first in the class but she couldn’t stand it if I won an award in a writing contest. Even though people told her all the time that she was smart, she couldn’t handle it if someone occasionally complimented me on being intelligent. She wrote her name in large letters in my beloved collection of world literature and scribbled her name on an award I got. She even stole my book report once and submitted it as her own. Even after we became adults and lived our own lives, there was always tension between us. It wasn’t that we weren’t close. We were always engaged in a power struggle. That was why Min-seok sometimes complained that she looked down on him.

  I stopped speaking to her after the incident in the restaurant. I heard she left the university and opened her own clinic, but I didn’t get in touch. I tried my best to avoid her during holidays or at Dad’s birthday. She never tried to reach out either. We met again a month ago, after they died.

  As we left the funeral home, she told me to come by if I needed any help. She isn’t someone to just say something to be polite. She would only say, Let’s have lunch sometime if she definitely wanted to eat with that person. So telling me to come by was an indication that she wanted to help in some way. Maybe seeing her sister like this after three years of silence was so sad that it swept away all the previous emotions. Maybe she knew I’d have to bring Yu-jin in the near future. In either case, her assistance was a matter of urgency for me as time went on, my only hope.

  When the nurse finally called me through, Hye-won didn’t seem surprised to see me; she didn’t ask what I was doing there or how I was. It would have been easier to bring it up if she’d said anything at all, but she just sat there staring at me. So I had to say it. I reminded her of a doctor’s vow before I told her anything, the oath to keep a patient’s secrets.

  She didn’t answer right away. I could tell she was annoyed that I was asking for help, but I could also sense that she was curious about what was going on. I waited. I needed her promise; I couldn’t tell her without it. I sipped the water the nurse had given me. Hye-won finally opened her mouth when I was nearly done with the glass. I promise. I suddenly went mute. The speech I’d prepared over the last several days became a knot in my head. Where should I start? Should I start from the night before That Day?

  I tried to move my tongue clearly, to speak calmly, to lay out the events in order. She didn’t speak even when I finished. She didn’t even change her expression. It seemed to me that she hadn’t blinked once. What do you want from me? she asked coolly.

  I wanted tests. I wanted those tests she’d suggested three years ago. I could forgive Yu-jin if there was no cause and effect between the ‘serious problem’ she was worried about then and That Day, if it had all just been a terrible accident. I could stop hating him. I could stop being frightened of him. I could live my life with him somehow.

  Hye-won asked me the question I’d been dreading the most. What will you do if I’m right? Will you handle it with common sense? I sat there twisting my poor fingers. Please, Hye-won, I said, tears filling my eyes. I looked down at my lap as I cried, the way I’d always done since we were girls. She sighed, glared at me and said she would help.

  She said the tests would be spread out over a few days. First there would be basic psychometric tests at her clinic, then she would refer us for a comprehensive test at the neuroscience lab at Yonsei University. I hesitated at the word ‘refer’ but I trusted she would keep her promise. She didn’t make promises easily, but once she did, she always kept them.

  My eyes stung. I leant back against my chair. I pressed my palms into my eyes and thought about the heads of little girls. I couldn’t remember drawing anything like that. But that wasn’t why I was taken to Auntie; Mother had become afraid of me only three years after I had supposedly killed her in my artistic imagination. What was That Day she kept referring to?

  I realised I had skipped an entry. I flipped forward, wondering if she had written about That Day.

  Friday 19 May

  The last week has been an eternity. I thought I was going to suffocate to death. This morning, when I saw myself in the mirror near the front door on my way out, I thought I looked like a corpse. My skin was sallow, and the circles under my eyes made me look like I had been punched. I looked insane. I wondered briefly if I should put some make-up on but went straight to the clinic. I didn’t have the energy to care.

  When I arrived, Hye-won glanced at me and shook her head. She looked at her chart. As I sat in front of her, she dragged out the inevitable, flipping through the test results. I felt like I was waiting for my own execution. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted, but I kept talking to the Virgin Mary in my head.

  Hye-won said the results weren’t what she’d expected, not because she was wrong, but because they were so extreme. I balled my hands into fists then spread them out and put them in my lap. I was starting to sweat. This was the first time she and the specialists at the university had encountered a case like this. That might have been why the results were late; she said they’d talked it over and over, in case they’d misjudged or missed something.

  Yu-jin didn’t have any congenital brain deformities. He was stunningly intelligent and he was more self-possessed than other kids his age. He’d failed the tests that had been set to display emotional empathy and understanding of morality, and they had found it hard to get him engaged or excited about things – much more so than the average child. That meant that it would take something special to make his pulse quicken.

  Hye-won said she was afraid because she didn’t know what that might be. At first she thought he had a juvenile form of conduct disorder and ordered some tests for that, but that wasn’t it. After discussing it with her colleagues, and doing some MRI scans, they’d determined a potential dysfunction to his amygdala, the core fear system in the human brain. I asked her what this meant in language I could understand.

  She said this was off the record, and she wouldn’t speak to an ordinary client like this, but he was essentially a danger to others. I couldn’t believe it, but she repeated it again. ‘Yu-jin is a danger to others. The worst kind of psychopath.’

  Psychopath? This silly word was what had made my life what it had been over the last sixteen years? This was the absurd diagnosis that had been affecting me all these years? I felt frozen. All the thoughts that had been circling had stopped. I took my eyes off the journal. The entry continued but I didn’t want to read any more of it. I felt as removed from it as though I was meeting a whole different set of characters, in a completely different world from my own. It was almost as if this was a serious problem only for another person and it had nothing to do with me.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ I heard Mother say from behind me. I stood and moved over to the sliding door. She was swaying back and forth on the swing. The sky was darkening over the pergola roof. ‘Why don’t you read the rest?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘You must be curious about That Day.’

  I wasn’t. I was curious about something else. Why had she continued to stand by me, even going to her estranged sister and begging her for help? If she was so afraid of me, why didn’t she just tie a leash around my neck and lock me in a basement? Then I wouldn’t have become a killer and she would still be alive.

  ‘Yu-jin.’ It wasn’t Mother this time. This time it was coming from the hallway. I turned around. ‘Are you in there?’ Someone was knocking on my door. The handle turned. I glanced at the clock. 1.48 p.m. The journal was open on my desk. Of course the door wasn’t locked. Why would I lock it when I was home alone? I realised I was naked when the door swung open to reveal Auntie standing there.
‘What are you doing?’ she said, almost smiling.

  This was unexpected. I’d thought she would come over at some point, but I hadn’t realised it would be now. I hadn’t thought she’d burst into my room without being asked. Even Mother never came charging in like this. I looked down at my naked body. The skin across my stomach tightened and my thigh muscles hardened. All of my focus was on Auntie. My enemy was here.

  ‘This is a surprise,’ I said, stepping in front of the desk. I pressed my thigh against the edge of the desk and stood with my legs open.

  Auntie’s smile vanished. She spun around, making a guttural noise. The layers of necklaces around her neck spun with her, clattering. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked. She didn’t sound panicked, but she didn’t sound ecstatic either. I wanted to tell her not to be embarrassed, as she’d held me and watched me since my dick was the size of a thumb. What could be so scary now that I’d grown a little and so had my manhood?

  I looked at Auntie’s round behind, clad in jeans. It was the only soft part on her bony body. It reminded me of a soccer ball in the middle of a field. I always wanted to kick it. How had she got in here anyway? I didn’t have to think for very long. Hae-jin. When he left the house yesterday, he must have stopped at the clinic to give her the key card for the front door and the combination for the flat.

  ‘That’s what I’d like to ask you,’ I retorted. ‘What are you doing standing there like that?’

  Auntie, still facing away, crossed her arms, relaxing her shoulders. ‘Put on your clothes, would you? I can’t talk to you when you’re naked.’ She sounded like she could wait a thousand years until I put my clothes on.