You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

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 bed 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.