The Good Son

by You-Jeong Jeong

  There is a stretch of time I can’t remember: between my standing there and somehow being able to alert the lodge manager. The marine police arrived and rounded up the villagers to get fishing boats on the water. The fishing boats roared between the cliffs, people shouting onboard. The manager suggested we wait back at the lodge, but I didn’t move from the edge of the cliff. I thought Min-seok would suddenly appear, dripping wet, holding Yu-min under one arm. If my mind had been sound, I would have realised that it would be impossible for him, let alone Yu-min, to survive the sea during high tide, even if he had been a national swimming champion.

  That afternoon, they returned two hours apart as corpses. The villagers found Min-seok and the marine police found Yu-min. The lodge manager called my father-in-law, who flew in from Cebu and took over. My mother-in-law keened and fainted when she arrived and had to be taken to hospital.

  I just sat there, dazed. The police came and the reporters came, but I didn’t answer any questions. Yu-jin didn’t do anything either. After the incident he slept for twenty-four hours straight, a deep sleep closer to a coma. He didn’t go to the bathroom, he didn’t eat. He didn’t open his eyes even when I shook him.

  Hye-won came down late after hearing the news. She said Yu-jin was in shock, that it was too much for him to have seen his brother and father die in front of his eyes. I was frozen and couldn’t tell her anything about his part in it. She said that I should leave him alone until he woke up on his own, that I shouldn’t force him awake.

  I couldn’t accept that. I didn’t feel like watching him sleep angelically. I wanted to wake him up and ask, Why did you do that? Why did you do that? After Hye-won left, something in me snapped and I grabbed the front of his shirt and shook him. I wanted to drag him outside and throw him into the ocean. He opened his eyes as though he sensed it. His big black pupils probed mine hesitantly. He whispered, ‘Mum, I love you,’ in a small, low voice, like an abandoned baby bird. I understood. It wasn’t I love you, it was Mum, don’t abandon me. I stopped breathing. My heart sank and my rage turned to confusion. I felt the curse of the ties of blood, and somewhere among the fury, and losing my mind, I realised anew how much I loved him. I suspected I would never be able to forgive him. I would live the rest of my life in guilt and fear. But I realised who I was. I was Yu-jin’s mother. He was my child. That’s a fact that can’t be erased no matter what. I felt paralysed with feelings and tried for weeks to push everything away.

  On the day of the funeral, Yu-jin woke up on his own. The coffins were to go to the cemetery that morning. As always, he moved quietly and discreetly. He ate the food he was served and changed into the mourning clothes I handed him. As the chief mourner, he carried his father’s portrait and climbed on the bus to the crematorium without a word. He didn’t look sad, exactly. Neither did he look regretful. He sat there, his chin resting on the portrait frame, looking out of the window.

  I watched him all day long. I had questions for him – questions I had pushed away but could no longer hold back. Had I seen correctly? Why had he done that? I didn’t have a chance until we got to the crematorium. There were too many people around. Once the funeral was over, we were alone, just the two of us, on a park bench. Yet still nothing came out of my mouth. I was afraid to hear the truth. I was scared of myself: if I confirmed that I had indeed seen what I thought I had, I felt I would have to kill my own boy.

  That same day, the police came to see us with questions. I began to shake, so I pressed my hands on my knees, hoping they wouldn’t be able to tell. Yu-jin looked calmly at the officers. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling. His eyes didn’t betray fear, anxiety or guilt. He was so expressionless that it blew me away. Was he always like this? Was he always this indifferent and brazen? How had I not realised this before? It was like I was looking at him for the first time.

  The police officers asked why the boys had gone all the way to the bell tower. Yu-jin explained that they were playing a survival game while their parents were sleeping. His brother had arrived first and rung the bell, but while he was ringing the bell, the cord snapped and he slipped and fell into the water. Yu-jin had stretched out to grab him, but he was too late.

  That whole time, he was calm. He didn’t look away or stutter once. Sometimes he took a moment to think before he spoke. I started to doubt myself. Maybe I hadn’t seen what had really happened. Yu-jin said he’d reached out. He’d stepped forward to grab his falling brother. I thought of the scene looping through my head. The more I thought about it, the more I realised a simple truth. Yu-jin, a mere nine years old, was calmly lying to the police.

  I was no better. When asked who had first discovered what had happened, I automatically lied and said it was Min-seok. I said I had been asleep. They asked if I had seen anything. I looked at Yu-jin, who was sitting beside me. I was met with those eyes, the eyes I had seen in front of the bell tower, with the dark open pupils and a strange glow inside. I felt like screaming. For the first time, I realised how many thoughts could be mixed up in someone’s head – the awareness that Yu-jin was all I had left, the criticism that would pour down on me, Yu-jin’s future plucked before it had a chance to bloom, doubt about what I had seen, uncertainty that I would be able to live with the secret I was hiding, Yu-jin’s voice whispering, Mum, I love you. I love you. I love you.

  I finally said I hadn’t seen anything. That was how we joined forces. A cowardly voice in my head tried to make me feel better. I’d just lost my husband and son, I couldn’t give up my only remaining child to the police, I wasn’t sure I could stand the shame that would come my way. More than anything else, I loved Yu-jin. He didn’t have anyone he could trust.

  Later I learned that the lodge manager had said the same thing I did. I do believe he didn’t see anything. We were the only family at the lodge, and he had only come out as I ran past the office. The incident was determined an accident.

  I am thinking about Hye-won often. Rather, I am thinking about Yu-jin’s problem that Hye-won had mentioned three years ago. Yu-jin is still my son, but he’s not the child I knew. He’s now something unfamiliar and unknowable. A fallen meteorite.

  I closed the journal and put it down. Just because something seems self-evident doesn’t mean it’s true. As Mother admitted, she wasn’t there when it happened. She didn’t know the whole story. She insisted she’d seen what happened clearly, but it wasn’t necessarily true. Maybe she believed what she wanted to believe so she could accept the outcome and reduce the weight of her own sins. After all, the tragedy began when she got drunk and fell fast asleep. How could she sacrifice me like that? Because of that she lost her life and destroyed mine. She’d committed an unforgivable crime. If she had believed me, if she’d given me a chance to explain myself, the incident could clearly have been explained as an accident. Then a nine-year-old boy wouldn’t have been labelled a psychopath who needed to be isolated from society, and she wouldn’t have had to die at the hands of that ‘danger to others’.

  Mother had never mentioned That Day in the last sixteen years. She never even mentioned Yu-min. She’d cut off all other possibilities and believed firmly that I had killed my brother. Sure, my own memories weren’t flawless. I was only nine at the time and it was a long time ago. Still, there was proof that I was right; I was the victim of the accident. I had dreamed the same thing over and over again, reliving that day the way I had experienced it as a boy.

  The dreams and the truth were different in exactly one spot: it was always night in the dreams, but the actual events had happened in the early hours of the morning. The rest was detailed and clear enough to make me wish that I could forget it all. Each moment was vivid and immediate: Yu-min’s voice, eyes, expression, actions, what I saw, thought, felt, sensed. I remembered it all. I could even remember every detail of the terrace at the lodge. It was a long, wide area with a green metal banister and there was a large outdoor table with benches attached. Over a dozen beer cans stood along the table; a champagne bottle lay on its side; c
igarette butts swam in a half-filled water bottle; clam and oyster shells were piled up, along with blackened pieces of meat and sausage; and the grill was filled with white ash. The anniversary cake, uneaten, was cut into four slices, covered entirely with black ants. A bouquet of roses fluttered in the wind, and burnt sparklers and deflated balloons were strewn about. My parents giggled drunkenly as they stumbled towards their bedroom.

  The following morning, the two sons of the drunkards sat out on the terrace, having woken in the early hours. We had nothing to do inside, but there was nothing to do out here either. Yu-min looked bored to death. He leant against the wall, playing with his BB gun, glancing at me every now and then, signalling, Should we sneak away and go and play?

  He was obsessed with survival games at the time, the way I was obsessed with swimming. Every day he went behind Mother’s back, waging fierce combat indiscriminately, at school, at the art studio, or in neighbourhood parks, with a BB gun, slingshot or water gun, with friends, acquaintances or whoever else he could find. If Father hadn’t told us yesterday that we couldn’t leave the lodge on our own, he would have dragged me to the bell tower as soon as we woke up.

  That morning, I sat on the railing, my legs dangling over, watching the ocean as it swept in and out. Mother would have been horrified if she’d seen me, because it was the easiest way to tumble off down the cliff. But that was what I liked about it – the sensation of the wind wrapping around my ankles and tugging, the tension of my body as I balanced. I liked how the waves pushed in and receded. I felt an urge to leap into the water. Yu-min wouldn’t be able to, but I could easily swim to the horizon.

  I heard the bell across the way. Dark clouds swelled from the horizon and thunder growled behind the clouds. Birds flew low through the damp fog. It was quiet otherwise. Not a single person walked up the unpaved road to the lodge. No other guests were in the surrounding area.

  ‘Yu-jin,’ Yu-min finally said. ‘Want to go and play?’

  I pretended not to hear him. Yesterday we had walked along the beach beneath us; Yu-min had been fixated on the smooth black pebbles strewn along the sand. When Mother wasn’t looking, he stuffed handfuls in his pockets. I remembered thinking that the animals in the area wouldn’t be spared once Yu-min had added these pebbles to his secret weapon, his slingshot.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he whispered. His brown eyes were wide and twinkling, indicating that he had, in his words, a killer idea.

  There was no guarantee that a killer idea for him would be a killer idea for me. I kept ignoring him. Mother and Father kept sleeping. They fought a lot yet they had produced two sons almost twelve months apart. We were in the same class in the same year in the same school. We were compared to each other in every aspect at every moment of our lives. Yu-min was superior in terms of appearance and intelligence, as Mother acknowledged. He was always a leader in class, surrounded by clamouring followers and worshippers.

  As for me, I was a loner. I didn’t need a playmate; I was used to playing by myself. Explicit rules and tacit promises were involved in playing with others, and it was easier to be alone than to try to understand or follow them. I was branded as weird everywhere I went. A child at school once called me crazy to my face. He didn’t know any better because he didn’t know who my brother was. Yu-min forced him to kneel in front of me to apologise. Yu-min was my protector and sometimes tormentor.

  ‘Watch out,’ he threatened, jumping up as though he’d shove me off the railing.

  If it were me, I wouldn’t be so obvious about it; I would just approach silently and push. I didn’t say anything, though. I calculated which would be worse: what would happen when our parents caught us, or what would happen if I refused to go along with Yu-min’s idea. I knew he wanted to play Survival. I didn’t really want to. Yu-min was better than me at everything except swimming, and survival games were the only time we were evenly matched. He had never acknowledged me as his equal, but the record spoke for itself – over dozens of games, we had each won about half the time. That was the problem, though: he was generous only when his superiority wasn’t threatened. But I didn’t want to lose on purpose; once a match began, I always wanted to win.

  ‘What do you want to play?’ I hopped off the railing. I shouldn’t have asked; at the time, I had no idea that this one question would completely derail our lives. Then again, how could I have known? I wouldn’t be human if I had.

  ‘Survival. Up to there.’ He pointed to the bell tower. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Over the years, our survival game had morphed. The winner used to be the one who took the fewest hits. Now we raced each other to a landmark via two separate routes, trying to slow the other guy down by firing at him until the BB pellets ran out.

  It wasn’t that far. The U-shaped cliff that linked the lodge with the bell tower was carpeted with pine trees, crab apple trees and grass. There were also beehives, blackened slash-and-burn fields and an old abandoned village in the forest. We’d gone there yesterday evening with Father before dinner. When we’d got to the other edge of the cliff, the red sun was halfway below the horizon, dyeing the sky a dark bloody crimson and shining a red path to the restless sea. The bell tower and the vines that covered the ruined church were glowing as though on fire. I felt that we had arrived in outer space. If I stood on that red path, the ocean would push me into another world. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

  Father had slowed down and stopped at the edge. I noticed goose bumps on his arms. He looked from the ocean to the rock formations to the sky and back again, perhaps entranced by the view. But Yu-min was transfixed by the bell tower and tore off towards it. Caught off guard, Father ran after him and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck just before he scampered up the steps. ‘You can’t go up there.’

  ‘Why not?’ Yu-min looked so innocent. ‘Can’t I ring the bell? Just once?’

  Even then I knew what he was doing, but adults often got fooled by Yu-min and his sweet expression. Father carefully explained why not, though even a two-year-old would know why. First, the bell tower was on the edge of the cliff and you could fall into the water. Second, the tower was old and dilapidated, and part of the ceiling had collapsed. ‘You boys aren’t allowed to come here by yourselves. And don’t play Survival in the forest either, okay?’

  Yu-min gave his word, but here he was, just half a day later, wanting to do the very thing he’d promised not to do. ‘The person who rings the bell first wins. The loser does the winner’s homework.’

  I met his eyes. ‘For how long?’

  ‘One month.’

  ‘How many shots? Three hundred?’

  ‘Two hundred.’

  We counted out forty plastic pellets each and loaded them into our guns. We put the remaining one hundred and sixty pellets into cartridges. We grabbed our goggles and crept out of the back door to the narrow, winding path lined with pine and crab apple trees that led to the bell tower.

  We played rock-paper-scissors and Yu-min won the right to choose his base. He chose the pine grove. It was an obvious choice, since it had tall trees from which he could launch attacks without having to reveal himself. That meant that the hill beyond the crab apple trees was my base. It was exposed and further away from the bell tower; I would have to run at top speed through the forest and the hilly terrain along the outer edge of the U-shaped curve to be in with a chance of reaching the bell tower first. It was as if he was starting with a hundred additional pellets.

  We stood side by side on the path. He stood to the right, closer to the pine trees, and I stood to the left, near the crab apple trees. I began to review the path we’d taken yesterday, thinking back to where everything was, whether there had been anything I could use as cover, where the pines ended and what the terrain was like at that point. Maybe I could use that area to fight for victory.

  ‘On your marks!’ Yu-min shouted.

  I lowered the goggles over my eyes. The world turned blue and my breathing calmed. Everything disap
peared behind my consciousness: the cloudy sky, the breezy forest, the birds flying in loopy curves, the sound of the waves, my thoughts, and finally my awareness of myself. Only the shape of Yu-min’s body remained and my low, regular heartbeat. The way to the bell tower unfolded like a map before my eyes, and the places to stop and seek cover lined up.

  ‘Go!’ I yelled.

  Instead of running, he immediately started spraying pellets at me. A pre-emptive ambush. It was a tactic I used often, though that day I’d decided not to. I wasn’t going to shoot until I got closer to the tower. I fled down the left side of the path, dashing through the crab apple trees until I stopped behind a long rock. I surveyed the damage. My goggles were cracked, my lip was split, my nose was bruised and my jaw throbbed. The smell of blood filled up my body in a flash. I was angry. I’d foreseen all kind of things; how had I not anticipated my brother imitating me? I took off the stupid goggles and hurled them against the rock. I rubbed the tip of my nose with my thumb. The spring breeze gently tickled the back of my neck, as if to soothe me.

  Of course I didn’t believe that all competition had to be fair. Winning was the goal for everyone. But I couldn’t stand it if someone else won. Then they deserved to pay for it, even if it was my brother.

  I took my shirt off and tied it around my waist, and my body sprang into gear. I ran onto the ridge of the field piled with dried corn stalks, my first stopover spot. Yu-min began firing from the opposite side. I didn’t return fire. I focused only on running until I got past the yellow water tank and fertiliser shed, behind a thick grove of trees. I ducked my head and lay on my belly behind a tree. The gunfire stopped immediately. I heard faint clicks, the sound of Yu-min refilling the magazine. He was down forty pellets.

  The next stop was the beehives. It was quite a distance, across an open meadow. I would have to focus and trust my cheetah legs. I bent over, my head ducked low, and sprinted through the pellets raining down on me. A few sailed above my head, some grazed my face, and others hit me elsewhere, but I wasn’t dealt a finishing blow. Yu-min refilled his magazine twice. He was now down to eighty pellets.