The Good Son

by You-Jeong Jeong

  I turned on the tap and used the hose to wash the floor. I rubbed my tired eyes. I collected the remains of Auntie’s mobile phone. By the time I took off my blood-spattered clothes and stepped into the shower, my body was so cold and stiff that I couldn’t even reach for the shampoo. I had to spend ten minutes under the hot water before I could flex my fingers. I showered, washed the razor and put it away in my desk drawer, then went downstairs to put the bloody clothes in the washer-dryer. I folded up the blanket I’d washed earlier and put it back in Mother’s linen cupboard.

  Next, I put on disposable plastic gloves to deal with Auntie’s traces. I used a wet wipe to erase my fingerprints on her phone, then put it back together, and slid it into her handbag. I wrapped her padded coat around her handbag and shoes and hid it in a small suitcase in Mother’s dressing room. I tidied Mother’s bed, pulling the sheets and blankets taut. I wondered whether I should switch mattresses again. If Auntie hadn’t said anything to Hae-jin, he wouldn’t look, would he? Honestly, I didn’t even want to think about dragging the heavy mattresses up and down the stairs again.

  By this point, I was able to move only because my brain was ordering me to. I was so tired that I was nearly comatose. I couldn’t really remember how I cleaned up the last bit. Did I take my clothes out of the washer-dryer? Did I lock Mother’s bedroom door? Did I put the keys back in the cabinet? It was impossible to stay up until Hae-jin came home; I was already half asleep as I climbed the stairs.

  Was Hae-jin home now? He’d said he would be back last night. But how had he got into the building? I hadn’t had a chance to go through Auntie’s handbag last night, and I didn’t believe her story about following someone in. If he’d given her his entry card, as I suspected, he would have had to ring me from downstairs. I didn’t remember buzzing him in. Maybe he’d asked someone else, or called Hello’s owner. Maybe he’d come upstairs to my room because he was so pissed off at me for not taking that DVD to Yongi’s, but had seen me asleep and gone back down. Had he gone straight to bed?

  I was suddenly starving. I headed downstairs to check on the things that were nagging at me. I’d also eat something. Yesterday I had felt heavy and clumsy, but today I was feeling much better. Nothing had been solved and I hadn’t decided what to do, but I felt quietly optimistic that everything would turn out the way it should. Anything was possible if I wanted it enough.

  It was quiet downstairs. I could hear conversation from Hae-jin’s room; he was probably watching a film or working on some footage he’d taken yesterday. Mother’s door was locked. The keys were in their place. In the kitchen I smelled the delicious scent of bean-paste soup; Hae-jin must have made lunch. A small earthenware pot was on the stove. I went to the laundry room and opened the washer-dryer. My clothes were gone. I went back into the kitchen. Did I dry them last night? Did I take them out and bring them to my room?

  ‘You’re up,’ said Hae-jin, standing at the entrance to the kitchen.

  I stopped next to the sink. ‘When did you get home?’

  ‘Maybe around ten thirty? You were already asleep.’ He went to the stove and turned it on. ‘You didn’t budge even when I came in to check on you.’

  As I’d suspected. What had my room looked like? Was there anything lying around that shouldn’t have been?

  ‘Will you take out the side dishes?’ he asked. ‘Let’s eat. I thought I was going to die of hunger. I was waiting for you to wake up.’

  ‘You go ahead. I’ll eat later. I don’t feel hungry right now.’

  Hae-jin was about to wipe the table clean with a cloth, but he paused. ‘You’re not hungry?’

  I was. But I wanted to avoid a long conversation even more than I wanted to eat. ‘I came down because I washed some clothes yesterday. They’re not there, though. Did you take them out?’

  ‘I found them on the counter here and hung them to dry on the balcony. Since there were just a few, it seemed a waste to run the dryer.’

  I nodded.

  Hae-jin asked the question I least wanted to answer. ‘Have you heard from Mother?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  He cocked his head. ‘Still? Do you think something’d happened? Like a car accident or —’

  ‘If there was an accident, we would have got a call, don’t you think? She left her car here, too.’

  Hae-jin’s gaze followed me, perplexed. ‘She’s never been unreachable for so long.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll call today. Or come home.’ I walked out of the kitchen.

  ‘Did Auntie say if she’d called her, at least?’

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t ask her.’

  Hae-jin kept asking questions. ‘So Auntie came round yesterday? I saw the cake in the fridge. What time did she leave?’

  I stopped in front of the stairs and turned to look at him.

  ‘It’s just I can’t get in touch with her either. Her mobile’s turned off and she wasn’t answering her home phone.’

  Since when did they talk on the phone like that? ‘Why do you need her anyway?’ I snapped. ‘To get your key card back?’

  ‘What?’ Hae-jin came out and stood facing me.

  ‘She called you two days ago, so you went to her clinic. To give her the key.’

  ‘Who told you that? Did she say that?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Don’t make assumptions. You always talk as if you know what’s going on, but you don’t. She did call me, but I didn’t go to the clinic. She was asking me all kinds of things, like did I see Mother leave, was I home yesterday. Then I mentioned that you’d passed your exam, and she said she wanted to throw you a little surprise party. She asked me for the code to the front door, so I told her. She told me not to tell you, that it was a surprise.’

  ‘So that was why you asked me to run that errand?’

  ‘You didn’t know? Didn’t she say anything?’ Hae-jin suddenly looked flustered.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to fool you. Honestly. She said you were watching TV in the living room, which made it impossible for her to set everything up. I said I’d get you to leave for a little bit. I thought she was going to plan something fun. I felt bad I wasn’t able to celebrate with you. I just thought Auntie was taking care of it since Mother wasn’t home. I did think she was overdoing it, but still…’

  She did overdo it, I thought. She ran around like an insane bitch. She held me and Mother hostage for sixteen years and did whatever she wanted with us. I needed to find out exactly why she’d done that. I needed to go up to my room.

  ‘But when I got home, I saw that the cake was still in the fridge. The box wasn’t even open. I know you don’t like Auntie, so… I was actually a little worried. I wondered if you’d had a fight, but you were sleeping. So I called Auntie, but she didn’t pick up. It’s weird, isn’t it? Auntie going incommunicado when we still can’t reach Mother?’

  The family cemetery on the roof came into my mind. I didn’t know what to say. ‘I don’t know. Maybe Mum wanted to go somewhere without telling us.’

  ‘What about Auntie? She wanted to go somewhere at the same time?’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’ I snapped again. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

  Hae-jin stared at me with his mouth open. ‘I don’t want you to do anything about it. I’m just worried. I want us to think about it.’

  ‘I’ll think about it starting from now.’ I turned around and went upstairs.

  Hae-jin didn’t say anything; he just watched me go.

  I slammed the door behind me so that he wouldn’t disturb me for a while and sat at my desk. I was running out of time. I had reached the end of the road. Tonight would be the critical point. I just had to do what I could until then. I had to decide what to do. And I had to act quickly once I made my decision. But I still felt as if I were perched on a slide leading straight to hell. I opened my drawer to take out the journal again.

  Psychopath. The inside of my head went blank with shock and
Yu-jin’s eyes from That Day flashed before me. The way they were when he turned to look at me as I called his name in front of the bell tower. His pupils were dilated, like an excited beast’s. They shimmered, flickering with something like flames.

  Hye-won said that psychopaths understood the world differently from normal people. She said they didn’t have any fear, they didn’t get nervous, they didn’t feel guilt, and they couldn’t empathise with others. But what they could do was read other people’s emotions and use them. She told me that was just how he was born.

  I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I almost screamed at her. There was no way that this could be true. Why my child? Hye-won said That Day wasn’t an accident. That it was the first harmful thing Yu-jin had done. That if we ignored it, it could be repeated at any time. She said I had to go to the police and tell them the truth, and that he would need to be isolated while they intervened medically.

  Isolation. I gripped my hands together in my lap, forcing myself to remain seated. I couldn’t repeat the mistake I had made three years ago, but I couldn’t tell the truth either. No matter what Yu-jin is, he’s my son. He’s my responsibility, and I have to protect him. I have to find a way to help him live a normal life.

  I begged Hye-won, saying I would do anything. I would make it my life’s goal to be responsible for him. I would take care of him to the end. I’d live longer than him to make sure that happened. I wanted to show her how much I meant it. I wanted to cut my chest open and take out my heart if that would convince her.

  Hye-won gave in on one condition: that I didn’t hide anything about Yu-jin from her. She said treatment would take a long time, maybe even his whole life. She would try everything from medication to individual therapy to hypnosis to cognitive treatment to group therapy but she couldn’t guarantee that any of it would work. Even if it did work and everything looked fine, he would have to be over forty before we could relax; she said statistically these tendencies lessened a little bit in middle age.

  The point of the treatments wouldn’t be to nurture ethical concepts. She said that would be impossible. No matter how much we taught him that something was bad, he wouldn’t comprehend it. We had to show him how to calculate profit and loss from every situation, and I had to stick to that attitude.

  I started to shake. I’d got a promise out of her but I didn’t know what to do. I was scared. I felt hopeless. Could I do all of that? Could I forget what had happened? Could I love him as I used to? I was overcome by fear, which was larger than the despair I felt.

  I glared at the last sentence. It wasn’t just Mother who was afraid; I was scared to turn the page. I couldn’t believe I was afraid of something after everything had gone to shit like this. But I couldn’t stop now. You couldn’t leave a boat in the middle of the Pacific because you felt queasy, could you?

  Sunday 30 April

  Yu-jin is sleeping peacefully, deeply. I still can’t sleep. It’s been two weeks. I left my job. I spend nearly all day at home. I don’t do anything other than go to the market, make food for Yu-jin, and lay his clothes out for him. I don’t clean or wash or answer the phone. I don’t see anyone.

  After the funeral, Min-seok’s parents went straight back to the Philippines. I haven’t seen Hye-won since then either. I spend time sitting in Yu-min’s room. I keep thinking about the sixteenth of April. What if we hadn’t gone on that trip? Would we have been able to live a normal, happy life?

  It was our first family trip in three years, a celebration of our eleventh wedding anniversary. I was looking forward to it. We had to take an hour-long ferry after a four-hour drive but I wasn’t tired. Everything was going well for us. Min-seok’s business was growing, and I’d just been promoted to head of European literature at my publisher’s. People always wondered how I could bring up two boys who were only a year apart and work full-time, but it wasn’t as difficult as they imagined. The boys were growing up according to their own personalities. I thought of them as colours. Bright, warm, impatient and sloppy Yu-min was orange; calm, polite Yu-jin was a slightly cold blue.

  Yu-min ran around the deck, making his father nervous, and Yu-jin sat in the cabin as the ferry heaved, looking silently at the sea. He finally opened his mouth when we got closer to our destination. ‘What’s the island called?’

  Tan Island had become popular because of its rock formations and awe-inspiring cliffs. Holiday homes and restaurants were slowly being established, making it a new tourist destination. It was still isolated, though, and retained a primal aura, with rocky islets jutting out of the murky sea, steep cliffs and windbreaker trees surrounding the island, birds flying through the breeze and white petals scattering like snow from the crab apple trees.

  We were staying at a wooden lodge built at the top of a small U-shaped cliff. It was just us there, even though it was the weekend. Maybe because it wasn’t peak season yet. It was situated at the end of a road where there were no other lodges or restaurants or even a village. All you could see was the muddy water below and the cliffs thick with pine trees. All you could hear was the crashing of waves, the cries of seagulls and a bell clanging from a bell tower.

  The lodge and the bell tower were on either end of the cliff. They were about the same height and faced each other. You could see clearly across, from one to the other, as if looking into the living room of a flat across the street. The bell tower was very old, and next to it was a church with a nearly collapsed roof and a ruined outer wall. The manager of the lodge told us there was also an abandoned village somewhere amid the forest, further back from the cliff.

  In the afternoon, the sea retreated from the small space created inside the U shape of the cliff. Below was a long, narrow beach covered with grey pebbles and rocks. We went down and dug for clams and conch. We brought back a lot, enough for dinner. Min-seok took the boys to look at the bell tower on the other side of the cliff, and I laid the terrace table for dinner.

  As the sun set, the four of us sat around the table, Yu-min next to me and Yu-jin next to Min-seok. We celebrated the last eleven years of fighting and making up and keeping things going. We high-fived, laughing that we should try for fifty years more. We were loud and happy. It was a good place to be loud; the entire ocean was just for us. A half-moon hung in the night sky, and a gentle westerly wind was blowing. The boys, sitting amid the scene, glowed. Min-seok was tender with me. I got drunk. Later, I fell into a deep sleep for the first time in a while.

  The bell woke me. It wasn’t a gentle ringing in the wind. It sounded like someone was yanking on the cord with all their might, making the bell clang in a rushed and careless way that sounded like my older son’s feet when he got excited. Maybe that was why, still half asleep, I called out to Yu-jin, Make your brother stop. He didn’t answer, and the bell rang faster and louder.

  My eyes flew open. Intuition pushed drowsiness away as I ran out onto the terrace. The sun was rising and I could see someone ringing the bell across the way. By now, the ocean had risen halfway up the cliff. The bell tower, tilting towards the ocean, looked even more precarious than it had done yesterday. I could make out the person leaning on the railing, yelling, ringing the bell – his outline was unmistakable to me. It was Yu-min, my elder son.

  I felt faint. I thought my eyes would pop out of my skull. My hair was standing on end. Why was he up there? He was a curious child, but not one to put himself in danger. Why was he ringing the bell like that? I went to shout: Yu-min, come down! Come down. But strangely, the word that came out was ‘Yu-jin!’

  Surprised by my scream, Min-seok ran out of our room in his underwear. Yu-jin appeared in that instant on the bell tower. I immediately recognised his silhouette too. He bounded up to his older brother as though he had heard me. It was a miracle. A flash of relief. Yu-jin would stop him.

  But in the next moment, Yu-jin began punching Yu-min. Then he raised a leg and kicked him in the chest. That one kick was enough. Yu-min screamed and plunged from the bell tower. His slim body drew an arc and dis
appeared below the cliff. I froze. I couldn’t breathe, as though my throat had been cut.

  Min-seok dashed out of the lodge, calling for Yu-min. I hurried after him along the forest path. Before I realised it, I had twisted my ankle and tripped and fallen. I also realised my feet were bare and bloody. I got up and hobbled on, panting, chanting like a crazy person: Yu-min is fine. Even if he isn’t right now, Min-seok will make sure he is fine. When I get there, the three of them will be standing side by side in front of the tower, waiting for me.

  The forest, thick with pine trees, felt long and endless, and it seemed I would never reach the tower. When I finally got there, Yu-jin was the only one I could see. He was leaning against the railing and looking down at the ocean without moving. I stopped running. Where was Min-seok? Why was it so quiet? What had happened? My body was shaking and I said weepily, ‘Yu-jin…’

  He looked down at me. His face was covered in blood. His pupils were big and black. I thought I saw flames in them.

  I ran to the edge of the cliff, hoping against hope. The water had come up higher. Yu-min was nowhere to be seen. Min-seok was thrashing in the waves alone, pulled under, then thrust above the surface.

  My ears buzzed. The moment when Yu-jin had thrown his first punch at his older brother, when he’d kicked him into the ocean – the scenes flashed past my eyes. I needed to call for help but I couldn’t open my mouth. My vocal cords strained but nothing came out. I watched stiffly as the waves pulled Min-seok up to the crest and threw him several hundred metres further out. I watched the ocean as it held him in its mouth and took him away.